Letter from Rome One of Catholicism’s most beguiling features is its endless capacity for complexity, and that certainly extends to its understanding of suffering. On the one hand, few institutions on earth invest more in the effort to alleviate suffering. Yet Christianity also was born in a monumental act of suffering, meaning Christ on…
Rome, in many ways, is a company town, dominated by two major industries – Italian political life and the national government, symbolised in the city’s Quirinal Palace (to Italians, simply the Quirinale), and the Papacy and the Catholic Church, iconically represented by St Peter’s Basilica. As a result, if you’re a devotee of either industry, meaning…
Letter from Rome As President John F. Kennedy famously said after the Bay of Pigs disaster in 1961, more or less paraphrasing Tacitus, “victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan”. The odd thing from a media point of view is that it’s often precisely the opposite way around – failure is…
Letter from Rome Bishop Brian Farrell, Secretary of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, gave a talk at Notre Dame’s Global Gateway facility in Rome addressed to ecumenical and inter-faith experts, which laid out the Church’s post-Vatican II approach to ecumenism and the new directions the press to bring Christians together is getting…
Letter from Rome Observers who’ve watched waves of attempted reforms wash over the Vatican across the years and then recede, often leaving very little changed in their wake, always marvel at the place’s ability to absorb a shock without really giving way. While there are many factors that help explain the staying power, here’s…
Letter from Rome Italy deals Church third big political loss, this time on ‘right-to-die’, writes John L. Allen Jr. Just days before the 11th anniversary of the death of an Italian man whose battle to be allowed to die stimulated wide debate in the country over euthanasia, the Italian senate approved a ‘living wills’ measure…
As a broad generalisation, it’s probably accurate to say that on-the-ground experience of the developing world often issues a fairly stiff challenge to the way Americans think about things, including the Catholic Church. Think Catholicism is in decline? Visit much of Africa and parts of Asia, where the biggest headache is keeping pace with breakaway…
Letter from Rome Marshall McLuhan famously said, “the medium is the message.” In the same vein, one might add that equally often, “the messenger is the message.” When you’re trying to put a human face on something, in other words, the best strategy is usually to have a genuinely decent person making the pitch.…
Italian Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s Secretary of State, was in Moscow last week for meetings with both government officials and leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church. He held a news conference last Tuesday after seeing Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, discussing areas where the two sides agree (persecution of Christians in the Middle East) and…
In the wake of Saturday’s carnage in Charlottesville, Virginia, it’s clearer than ever that American society desperately needs help on race. The Catholic Church has unique resources to deploy, but it can’t afford to allow its own African-American community and leadership to remain “invisible”, as one African-American bishop recently described it. It’s not as if…