Letter from Rome US President Joe Biden went before the United Nations September 21 and declared, “We are not seeking a new Cold War, or a world divided into rigid blocs.” The statement became necessary in the wake a week earlier of the new “AUKUS” pact among the US, the UK and Australia, seen precisely…

Barb Fraze As part of the listening and dialogue phase of the Australian Catholic Church’s Plenary Council, 220,000 Australians answered the question, “What do you think God is asking of us in Australia at this time?” In 2015, Australian Archbishop Mark Coleridge was asking himself something similar. Australia was in the midst of a government-mandated…

Notebook We’re all familiar with trade unions, organisations like SIPTU and ASTI, founded by workers in a particular sector, and designed to protect the rights and welfare of such workers. They play a vital role in society, and in modern times Popes have consistently made major pronouncements in their favour, most elaborately in Pope St…

Catherine Corless is greatly to be admired for her work revealing the extremely distressing facts about the Tuam Mother and Baby home, and she has now told her own story in an autobiography, Belonging. Ms Corless rebuffs the suggestion, which was included in the report of the commission on Tuam, that “it was us, society,…

The View Lack of time prevents me from doing as many talks as I once did (not to mention a worldwide pandemic.) I am not quite sure why I accepted an invitation to speak at the recent Holycross Abbey Novena but I am so glad I did. I was vaguely aware of Holycross Abbey but…

The target of halving carbon emissions in less than ten years will be enormously disruptive and expensive, writes David Quinn The Church is currently marking a month-long ‘Season of Creation’. It began on September 1, and ends on October 4. September 1 was the start date because Pope Francis has declared that day each year…

Letter from Rome There’s a famous scene in Woody Allen’s classic 1977 movie Annie Hall in which he and Diane Keaton are having separate sessions with a couples’ counsellor, and their exchanges are shown on a split screen. When the therapist asks how often they’re intimate, Allen says, “Hardly ever, maybe three times a week,”…

John Lavenburg As thousands of migrants congregate underneath the Del Rio International Bridge, the Archbishop of San Antonio says the archdiocese will help however possible, but he fears an already overwhelming situation for the border city will get worse. The number of migrants underneath the bridge grew to more than 8,000 last Thursday with some…

Junno Arocho Esteves On paper, Pope Francis’ apostolic visit to Hungary and Slovakia was pretty standard as papal trips go: outdoor Masses, meeting with dignitaries, visiting poor and marginalised populations and of course, answering questions from journalists aboard the papal flight. Nevertheless, issues such as vaccine scepticism, migration, same-sex “marriage,” and denying Communion to Catholics…