Letter from Rome This week I participated in a panel discussion here in Rome to present a new book by a friend and colleague, Edward Pentin, titled The Next Pope: The Leading Cardinal Candidates, to be published by Sophia Press on August 4. As I said that night, the book reflects a fairly conservative view on…

Letter from America   The late US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once famously said that everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. A Catholic equivalent might be that everyone is entitled to disagree with their bishop, but not to pretend he is not the bishop. Some years ago, whilst on…

Letter from Rome   Pope Francis is attempting to hold the nation of Italy together by appealing for political unity at a time when political opposition are threatening to sabotage Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte’s plan for gradually easing coronavirus restrictions by issuing their own decrees. Yet at some point, when this is over, the Pope…

Letter from Rome   A Polish software developer has announced a new computer game called Pope Simulator is to be released next year. The game opens with a conclave in which the player is elected Pope, and then presents various scenarios that require decisions. “Our idea assumes the possibility to use, among others, the pope’s so-called…

Letter from Rome   With Easter just days away, debate continues to swirl about how accessible churches and pastors should be on the holiest day of the Christian calendar – and whether Easter ought to be celebrated this Sunday at all. Although Italy appears to have flattened the curve of the pandemic with projections currently…

Amid the scramble to find a cure for the coronavirus and enforcing restrictive measures to try to slow down its expansion, there has been relatively little attention to the underlying factors which explain why some places have been harder hit, more quickly, than others. One emerging hypothesis is that there may be a correlation between…

Letter from Rome February 21 marked exactly one year since the anniversary of Pope Francis’ historic summit on the clerical sexual abuse crisis, which brought together presidents of the world’s bishops’ conferences to promote a global culture of transparency and accountability. Coincidentally, the milestone came as the world focuses on a very different kind of…

Catholics may feel a sense of déjà vu upon reading Querida Amazonia, Pope Francis’ 16,000-word apostolic exhortation concluding the Synod of Bishops for the Amazon. The topic has been the object of speculation and fevered expectations ever since the gathering of prelates that occasioned it concluded last October in Rome. During the summit, debate over the viri…

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…