Vatican is not partisan but definitely political

Italian Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s Secretary of State, was in Moscow last week for meetings with both government officials and leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church. He held a news conference last Tuesday after seeing Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, discussing areas where the two sides agree (persecution of Christians in the Middle East) and…

African-American Catholics: ending ‘invisibility’

In the wake of Saturday’s carnage in Charlottesville, Virginia, it’s clearer than ever that American society desperately needs help on race. The Catholic Church has unique resources to deploy, but it can’t afford to allow its own African-American community and leadership to remain “invisible”, as one African-American bishop recently described it. It’s not as if…

Lessons from a life

Though it sounds terrible to say out loud, generally speaking, the death of a Catholic bishop doesn’t really rate as a news story anywhere outside his own diocese. Most bishops aren’t towering public personalities, and besides which, with more than 5,000 bishops in the world and an age profile that skews old, deaths just aren’t…

A Catholic Dunkirk – in reverse

Right now, cinemas are featuring the summer blockbuster Dunkirk, written and directed by Christopher Nolan, about the famous WWII evacuation of trapped Allied troops which most Brits regard as among their finest hours. That evacuation, in which hundreds of ordinary people joined an impromptu flotilla to bring the troops home, occasioned Winston Churchill’s famed 1940…

Gaining from an endless papal honeymoon

Right now, as Inés San Martín reports in this week’s International Analysis (facing) there’s a fascinating drama unfolding in the Diocese of Ahiara in Nigeria, where Pope Francis has thrown down one of the most authoritarian gauntlets we’ve seen any Pope fling in a long time. He’s threatened every priest of the diocese, no matter…

Get off Twitter and into the trenches

Last Saturday, Romans awoke to find a provocative image staring out from their neighbourhood newsstands. On the cover of the latest issue of the magazine Millennium, published by the daily Il Fatto Quotidiano, was a traditional depiction of St Sebastian with arrows protruding from his body, but with the head of the Pope, under the…

No one expected the Spanish inquisition

Given the way German Cardinal Gerhard Müller has become identified as the Vatican’s leading in-house sceptic about Pope Francis’ cautious opening to Communion for the divorced and civilly remarried in Amoris Laetitia, it was written in the stars that when and if Müller was ever replaced as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of…

Be careful what you wish for

Four years of Pope Francis notwithstanding, it remains generally true in Europe that the more overtly Catholic a political party is, the more likely it is to advocate a restrictive line on immigration. That’s the case with the Law and Justice party in Poland, for instance, as well as Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party in Hungary,…