On any other day, the dominant Vatican headline on March 29 would have belonged to German Jesuit Fr Hans Zollner, whose unexpected resignation from the Pope’s chief advisory body on combating sexual abuse left the broader state of Francis’s reform campaign an open question. It wasn’t just the fact that Fr Zollner resigned which raised…

Cindy Wooden   The Catholic Church formally “repudiates those concepts that fail to recognise the inherent human rights of indigenous peoples, including what has become known as the legal and political ‘doctrine of discovery’,” a Vatican statement said. Issued March 30 by the dicasteries for Culture and Education and for Promoting Integral Human Development, the…

I asked you for your prayers when last I wrote on this page. And you prayed for me. The result was remarkable. Thank you. You may remember the reason for my request — my way of coping with an invitation to preach a Lenten mission in a parish on the southwest side of Chicago. I…

I was staying with a friend in London last weekend – and so, on Sunday morning, I attended Mass at a parish church which wasn’t much known to me. It’s nearly always interesting to visit a church where one is a stranger, and I found the experience rewarding and even congenial. I wouldn’t want to…

The View Thousands of families across the country are frantic with worry as the end of March approaches and the eviction ban is lifted. Losing your home, or knowing that you may have to leave rental accommodation despite having nowhere to go must be a genuinely terrifying feeling. In this climate, with acute rental shortages and…

It seems to be a big stretch to claim that the treatment of Joanne Hayes was the result of the social power of the Church writes David Quinn The so-called ‘Kerry babies’ case has been very much back in the news again thanks of the arrest and subsequent release of two people  by gardaí investigating…

Letter from Rome Justin McLellan The people behind chatbots are asking questions of priests and ethicists rather than turning to their artificially intelligent creations. They want to know: What is consciousness? What is the nature of humanity? What is the purpose of life? According to Fr Phillip Larrey, dean of the philosophy department at the…

When the US bishops elected a centre-right prelate and protégé of an influential conservative Italian cardinal as their president last November, it was framed in much reporting and commentary as a protest vote against Pope Francis. ‘Bishops elect anti-Francis archbishop as president,’ was how the National Catholic Reporter headlined an editorial blasting the choice of Archbishop Timothy…

Notebook I learned a new word this week and it is ‘presentism’. Basically presentism is the use of present-day standards to impose judgements upon historical figures and practices in the sometimes-misguided belief that the standards of our contemporary world are morally superior. I realised that this new word names and describes a trend which I…

Is the departure of Ryan Tubridy from The Late Late Show the end of an era? Maybe the ‘end of an era’ with the LLS came some time ago. I sometimes ask people what they think of the broadcast nowadays, and the most frequent answer I get is “I hardly ever look at it these…