The only place in the Middle East where Christians truly flourish is in the Jewish state, writes Lironne Bar Sadeh As is their unfortunate habit each Christmas, this year, too, the Anglican archbishops Justin Welby of Canterbury and Hosan Naoum of Jerusalem ascribed a “steady stream of Palestinian Christians leaving the Holy Land” to settler…
When Italy recently celebrated a state funeral for David Sassoli, the President of the European Parliament who died unexpectedly from Legionnaire’s disease on January 11, the Mass was held in Rome’s Basilica of St Mary of the Angels and attended by the President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, Prime Minister Mario Draghi, European President Ursula…
For more than 130 years, popes have considered work, the treatment of workers and the creation of jobs to be a religious and moral issue. And while Pope Francis has not written an encyclical dedicated to labour like Pope Leo XIII did in 1891 and St John Paul II did in 1981, he has ensured…
In the world of the arts, they make a distinction between persons who create an artifact, an artist, a sculptor, or a novelist, and persons who write about artists and their works. We have novelists and literary critics, artists and art critics, and both are important. Critics keep art and literature from bad form, sentimentality,…
Notebook On a June evening in 1963, as Pope John XXIII lay dying, a strange sight appeared in St Peter’s Square: the chief rabbi of Rome, with a crowd of Roman Jews, gathering with their Catholic fellow citizens to honour Pope John. During his papacy he had made several important gestures of friendship towards Judaism,…
I don’t know whether Kate Hoey intended to be offensive when she claimed – in effect – that Nationalists/Catholics were now hogging too many of the jobs and influential positions in Northern Ireland, but that was how some people interpreted it, and offence was taken. It can be analysed as a significant social commentary on…
The View Daniel and Amy McArthur are a young couple who run a bakery in Belfast. The couple are Christians and they make clear, on the bakery’s website, that their faith is part of the business mission, stating: “Our name comes from the Bible. Asher was a tribe of Israel who had many skilled bakers and created bread…
Deliberately setting out to lead a life that will have few demands placed on you is selfish, writes David Quinn Pope Francis has landed himself in hot water after suggesting that some people might selfishly prefer pets to children. He was speaking at his usual Wednesday general audience at the Vatican and was specifically discussing…
Presumably, when the prosecutors in the Vatican’s “trial of the century,” pivoting on a failed $400 million land deal in London, rang in the New Year a few days ago, like everyone else, they wished one another a happy 2022. They may have actually said “happier,” because, let’s face it, 2021 didn’t go particularly well…
by John Lavenburg Last January when Chris Charles Scott directed a documentary about five French priests that cared for the sick through the 1873 yellow fever epidemic in Shreveport, Louisiana, he never expected that it would have a spot in this year’s Cannes World Film Festival. The expectation, Mr Scott said, was a regional and…
John L. Allen Jr.
Fr Ronald Rolheiser
Mary Kenny
David Quinn