The power tech corporations wield over expression ought to inspire debate, writes Jason Osborne The beginning of 2021 has seen a number of unprecedented events: the storming of the US capitol, and the banning of then-US president Donald Trump from all social media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok foremost among them.…
Letter from Rome St Francis of Assisi supposedly said, “Preach always, and, when necessary, use words”. In all honesty, there’s no evidence St Francis ever said anything like that – but even so, it’s a piece of advice Popes long have taken to heart. Over the centuries, Popes have always found plenty of ways to…
On the same day a top Vatican official insisted that Pope Francis’s upcoming visit to Iraq is still on the books, and that the pontiff is determined to go, the country’s health ministry issued a statement warning of a possible second wave of the Covid-19 coronavirus, which, they said, could be deadlier than the first.…
How do we search for God? It is easy to misunderstand what that means. We are forever searching for God, though mostly without knowing it. Usually, we think of our search for God as a conscious religious search, as something we do out of a spiritual side of ourselves. We tend to think of things…
Notebook Once upon a time in the Diocese of Cork, before retirement became a ‘thing’ for Church leaders, a parish priest went to his heavenly reward, aged well over 90. The bishop prevailed upon another parish priest to take over as pastor, even though this man was in his mid-seventies. And the people of the parish…
It is so welcome, and so fitting, that Pope Francis has just declared the late French geneticist Jérome Lejeune as ‘venerable’. Prof. Lejeune, who discovered the chromosome that causes Down Syndrome, was surely a saintly man, as well as a very distinguished scientist. Before he identified this chromosomal difference in 1958, the condition was called…
The View Who America’s leader is matters to people around the world. With President Joe Biden there is now a Christian gentleman in the White House, whose ambition after all the turmoil of recent times will be to do what is right, working as much as possible with others at home and abroad. If he…
It would be a failure of moral witness if the Church did not point to policies at odds with the Catholic Faith, writes David Quinn On the morning of his inauguration as president of the United States, Joe Biden attended Mass. He carries a set of rosary beads on him that belonged to his late…
Letter from Rome Among the many traditions surrounding a presidential inauguration, Catholics seem to have created one of their own, especially when it’s a Democrat: Mixed messages from the Vatican and the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. Twelve years ago, when Barack Obama was elected, Pope Benedict XVI dispatched a note of congratulations on November…
John Lavenburg Hope Border Institute executive director Dylan Corbett sees first-hand the hardship thousands of people face in Ciudad Juárez – the Mexican city opposite the border to El Paso, Texas – while they wait in limbo to pursue their asylum cases and hopefully enter the United States. Resources “It does not have the infrastructure…
John L. Allen Jr.
Fr Ronald Rolheiser
Mary Kenny
David Quinn