Category: Comment & Analysis

Muted reaction to papal letter hints at Catholic-Jewish strain

When I arrived on the Vatican beat more than 25 years ago, a bitter cross controversy at Auschwitz and tensions over the passion play in Oberammergau both were making global headlines. It was shortly before the release of John Cornwall’s Hitler’s Pope, reviving debates over Pius XII’s alleged “silence” on the Holocaust, as well as Pope…

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No Gloria during Lent

Fr John Harris OP The old Irish saying warns us that “you’ll never miss your mother ‘til she’s buried beneath the grave”. During Lent the Church drops the Gloria from the Mass but it returns with great gusto at Easter. Last month I wrote about the ‘Silence of God’ and how this can be a…

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Lenten literary companions

The Catholic Difference The traditional Lenten practices of intensified prayer, fasting, and almsgiving are spiritual disciplines to be followed along the six-week pilgrimage from Ash Wednesday to the Easter Triduum. As I suggested in Roman Pilgrimage: The Station Churches, that journey can be lived as a kind of annual catechumenate-for-the-already-baptized, in which we join the…

Michelle O’Neill – symbol of social change?

There’s a theory that if women ruled the world, the world would be a nicer, kinder place – and politics less confrontational. It hasn’t always been borne out by female leaders from history, who, from Catherine the Great to Margaret Thatcher have included warrior queens and steely autocrats. But now, Stormont is carrying out a…

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Giant steps needed as new D&C Bishop takes reigns

Despite enormous challenges there are many green shoots, and the process of reform and renewal is already underway, writes Michael Kelly It’s unlikely that mandarins in the Vatican pay a great deal of attention to political news coming out of Belfast, but there was a certain symmetry that Down and Connor’s new bishop was appointed…

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