The Christmas story is surely one of the greatest stories ever told. It chronicles a birth from which the world records time as before or after. Moreover, it is written in a way that has inflamed the romantic imagination for 2,000 years. This hasn’t always been for the good. Beyond spawning every kind of legend…
Letter from Rome: The Pope’s answer on Paris prelate raised more questions than it answered John L. Allen Jr As the wise saying goes, “If you don’t want the answer, then don’t ask the question.” That adage doesn’t cover every situation, however, because there are also times you genuinely do want the answer, and still…
Junno Arocho Esteves Adam Piekarski, a homeless man from Lódz, Poland, never imagined that the sketches he would draw in his free time while waiting for the public showers near Bernini’s Colonnade would lead to the opportunity of a lifetime. In November, the Vatican Philatelic and Numismatic Office announced that its 2021 set of commemorative…
Notebook Recently I went to the United States to visit some people and to spend a bit of time with my aunt who lives in Richmond, Virginia. She was turning 98, and I was happy to be able to see her in the lead up to that day. A mighty woman, but that’s another story!…
Dear Editor, We have a new strain of Covid, with more mutations, and possibly more powerful than our vaccinations. This is frightening, and people are very worried and scared. People are divided, some are vaccinated, others have chosen not to be. Older people, in many cases, are staying at home, and some have never emerged…
Editor’s Comment When he was first made a bishop in Argentina, Pope Francis took as his motto the Venerable Bede’s account of Jesus recruiting the tax collector Matthew, miserando atque eligendo, which roughly translates “He saw him through the eyes of mercy and chose him”. Friends say that Bishop Bergoglio liked the way Latin had…
We can expect the literary focus of 2022 to be the centenary of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses: but an equally important milestone, especially for Christians, was the appearance of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in 1922. This long poem burst upon the world with considerable fanfare, as Eliot’s biographer Richard Ellmann put it,…
The View Advent and Christmas are meant to be seasons of hope and joy. Nonetheless, many people have found 2021 much more distressing than 2020, as our resilience has been tested by the ongoing strain of the pandemic and the restrictions that accompany it. We have seen our church-going friends give up going to Mass,…
The vast network of monasteries helped to lay the foundations of the welfare state we are now so familiar with by helping the poor in organised ways writes David Quinn Back in 1986 a movie called The Name of the Rose went on release internationally. It was based on the book of the same name…
Pope tells young people to dream big Spending a bit of time with young people before leaving at the end of his apostolic trip to Cyprus and Greece, Pope Francis encouraged them to have the courage to hope, to dream and even to question their faith. He met with Catholic teenagers and young adults from…
Fr Ronald Rolheiser
John L. Allen Jr.
Michael Kelly
Mary Kenny
Breda O'Brien
David Quinn