Perhaps because Westerners tend not to take religion terribly seriously, seeing it as a private affair on par with other hobbies such as quilting or canasta, religious persecution tends to register in the Western mind only in its most spectacular form. If a bomb goes off in a church on Easter Sunday, for instance, causing…
Catholic theology lost a giant last Monday with the death of German Fr Johann Baptist Metz, a disciple of famed Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner and the father of what was known as “new political theology”, at the age of 91. I first encountered Metz more years ago than I care to remember, when I was…
Normally speaking, when a Pope hits the road, all other Vatican operations enter a state of suspended animation. Appointments, documents and statements are held up awaiting his return, because nobody’s supposed to distract from the message he’s travelling to deliver. The fact the Vatican made an exception during Pope Francis’s November 19-26 trip to Thailand…
Letter from Rome Back in the mid-1980s, rebel Brazilian Franciscan Leonardo Boff was the enfant terrible of Latin America’s liberation theology movement, and he had a couple of celebrated run-ins with then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Vatican’s doctrinal czar under St John Paul II and the future Pope Benedict XVI. At one point, Ratzinger jokingly said…
Letter from Rome Under a Pope for whom ‘synodality’ is the buzzword par excellence, meaning broad consultation and shared decision-making, it probably should be no surprise that synods and their vicissitudes are destined to be the biggest Catholic drama over the months to come. We already know about the controversial Synod of Bishops for the Amazon…
Letter from Rome When roughly 300 Catholic leaders gather in Rome from October 6-27 to talk about the Amazon, it will be the 29th time since 1965 a Pope has convoked a Synod of Bishops. For most of that span, the body’s role could have been described in the same ironic terms Bob Dole once…
Letter from Rome Pope Francis named thirteen new cardinals on Sunday past, including 10 eligible to vote for the next pope. Arguably, nothing any Pope ever does is more consequential than appointing cardinals. Not only do they immediately become the most influential leaders in the Church, but someday they’ll also elect a new Pope…
Letter from Rome Up to this point, the ire of those who believe Cardinal George Pell is innocent of the charges of child sexual abuse brought against him in his home country has been directed largely at the Australian judiciary, most recently at a Victoria appeals court that upheld his conviction on Wednesday in…
Letter from Nigeria An embattled Catholic diocese in southeastern Nigeria facing a mounting wave of violent attacks from Islamic militias has declared “enough is enough”, demanding that “bad” members of the largely Muslim Fulani tribe be “flushed out” of the area and that local self-protection groups be armed to provide their own security. Bishop…
Letter from Mexico Recently – and, many observers would say, belatedly – the Church has awoken to the reality of anti-Christian persecution around the world. The emblematic case is the Nineveh Plains in northern Iraq, where Catholic organisations such as the Knights of Columbus and Aid to the Church in Need have meant the…