Letter from Rome When I was a precocious sophomore in high school, I once barged into the office of the Capuchin priest who was in charge of our religion curriculum to inform him that I had serious intellectual reservations about the Catholic Faith, and I found the answers being supplied in class unsatisfying. Fr Mike…
Letter from Rome Suppose that earlier this week, when plans for what eventually happened were confirmed, the Vatican Press Office had issued something like the following statement. “Pope Francis usually celebrates the Mass of the Lord’s Supper on Holy Thursday outside the Vatican with vulnerable and excluded people, expressing the Lord’s special love for them.…
Letter from Rome In the past week several intriguing news stories moved across the Vatican wire, and the mere act of listing them is likely enough to illustrate what they have in common. In the latest hearing in a Vatican sex abuse trial, an official of the former head of St Peter’s Basilica testified he’d…
Letter from Rome Catholicism is a vast, riotously diverse global institution, counting 1.3 billion members scattered in every nook and cranny of the planet. As a result, Catholic experience is a constant interplay between the universal and the local, a few basic constants refracted and lived out in a stunning myriad of different milieu. One…
Letter from Rome A n unusual sex abuse trial currently underway in the Vatican took a potentially explosive turn Wednesday, February 24 and the response may have a great deal to say about how serious the reforms launched by Pope Francis actually are. Three witnesses testified that Italian Cardinal Angelo Comastri, who was relieved of his…
Letter from Rome From the beginning, Pope Francis has been committed to financial reform of the Vatican. It was the first study commission he created, it was the first major appointment he made, and it’s been a constant of his papacy over what’s now almost eight years. Yet after all this time, Francis faces the…
Letter from Rome During the St John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI years, the Vatican had a council of cardinals from around the world who allegedly oversaw its financial affairs. Members of that body routinely complained that the information they received was incomplete, that it lacked credibility and was fundamentally untrustworthy. Two of the…
Letter from Rome A Vatican tribunal last Wednesday heard testimony from the accused party in an unusual sexual abuse case, one involving a charge that one minor abused another during their time at a pre-seminary on Vatican grounds that provides altar boys for liturgies in St Peter’s Basilica and that’s produced roughly 200 priestly vocations…
Letter from Rome In what’s being hailed as a demonstration that Pope Francis is in earnest about empowering women within ecclesiastical structures, last Friday, for the first time ever, the pontiff named a woman as the Promoter of Justice for the Appeals Court of the Vatican City State. In effect, the Promoter of Justice functions…
Letter from Rome St Francis of Assisi supposedly said, “Preach always, and, when necessary, use words”. In all honesty, there’s no evidence St Francis ever said anything like that – but even so, it’s a piece of advice Popes long have taken to heart. Over the centuries, Popes have always found plenty of ways to…