Letter from Rome In the past week several intriguing news stories moved across the Vatican wire, and the mere act of listing them is likely enough to illustrate what they have in common. In the latest hearing in a Vatican sex abuse trial, an official of the former head of St Peter’s Basilica testified he’d…
Pope Francis, his liturgy office and his communications team made very deliberate decisions over the past year with the goal of letting people experience how close the Pope was to them in their isolation and suffering. And people – tens of thousands of them – responded, praying with him and for him. As the Vatican…
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was once asked by a critic: “What are you trying to do? Why all this talk about atoms and molecules when you are speaking about Jesus Christ?” His answer: “I am trying to formulate a Christology large enough to incorporate Christ because Christ is not just an anthropological event but a…
Notebook A ‘pregnant pause’ is supposed to be one of the best tools in the armoury of a public speaker. In my 37 years of preaching, I have used it on only one occasion — on an Easter Sunday morning. It was amazingly effective. Easter Sunday is a hard day for the preacher. In Holy…
In a recent book, Frostquake, the English writer Juliet Nicolson recalls the winter of 1962-63, which was the coldest for perhaps 80 years. Everything froze, communications broke down, lights and heating went out. When the thaw came, in March of 1963, it is Ms Nicolson’s thesis that Britain – and elsewhere, too – woke to…
The View Many problems in life arise from the habitual gap between ideals and realities. The Church knows this well, as it works at the coalface trying to bring into some harmony the ideal of a Christian life and a Christian society with the realities of personal sinfulness and sometimes dire societal failings. Churches are…
The liberal view of sexual relationship is so dominant it is coming to regard any opposing views as a form of bigotry, writes David Quinn The Catholic Church places contraceptive use among acts it considers “intrinsically evil”. This is extremely strong language, rarely heard today. When Pope St Paul VI issued Humanae Vitae in 1968,…
Letter from Rome Catholicism is a vast, riotously diverse global institution, counting 1.3 billion members scattered in every nook and cranny of the planet. As a result, Catholic experience is a constant interplay between the universal and the local, a few basic constants refracted and lived out in a stunning myriad of different milieu. One…
Hours after Bolivia’s former interim president was detained and accused of promoting an alleged coup against her predecessor Evo Morales, the country’s bishops released a statement saying that “the politics of revenge” and a justice system aligned with the ruling political power “do not create confidence in the people”. “The arrest and prosecution of the…
Among people of faith, there is the notion that if you are person of deep faith you can easily renounce the things of this world, see the world for all its ephemerality, not cling to things, and die more peacefully. Not true. That is naïve, at least a lot of the time. James Hillman writes:…
John L. Allen Jr.
Fr Ronald Rolheiser
Mary Kenny
David Quinn