Though it sounds terrible to say out loud, generally speaking, the death of a Catholic bishop doesn’t really rate as a news story anywhere outside his own diocese. Most bishops aren’t towering public personalities, and besides which, with more than 5,000 bishops in the world and an age profile that skews old, deaths just aren’t…
Right now, cinemas are featuring the summer blockbuster Dunkirk, written and directed by Christopher Nolan, about the famous WWII evacuation of trapped Allied troops which most Brits regard as among their finest hours. That evacuation, in which hundreds of ordinary people joined an impromptu flotilla to bring the troops home, occasioned Winston Churchill’s famed 1940…
Right now, as Inés San Martín reports in this week’s International Analysis (facing) there’s a fascinating drama unfolding in the Diocese of Ahiara in Nigeria, where Pope Francis has thrown down one of the most authoritarian gauntlets we’ve seen any Pope fling in a long time. He’s threatened every priest of the diocese, no matter…
Last Saturday, Romans awoke to find a provocative image staring out from their neighbourhood newsstands. On the cover of the latest issue of the magazine Millennium, published by the daily Il Fatto Quotidiano, was a traditional depiction of St Sebastian with arrows protruding from his body, but with the head of the Pope, under the…
Given the way German Cardinal Gerhard Müller has become identified as the Vatican’s leading in-house sceptic about Pope Francis’ cautious opening to Communion for the divorced and civilly remarried in Amoris Laetitia, it was written in the stars that when and if Müller was ever replaced as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of…
While it’s probably too much to say that Pope Francis has an explicit ‘Swedish strategy’, it’s becoming increasingly clear that Sweden has both a place in the Argentine Pope’s heart and a role to play in his vision of a ‘Church of the Peripheries’. In some ways, the plates had already been shifting in the…
Four years of Pope Francis notwithstanding, it remains generally true in Europe that the more overtly Catholic a political party is, the more likely it is to advocate a restrictive line on immigration. That’s the case with the Law and Justice party in Poland, for instance, as well as Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party in Hungary,…
Here’s a papal pop quiz: When’s the last time you can remember a Pope openly demanding that all the priests of a specific diocese, whether they currently live there or not, write him a personal letter within 30 days pledging their loyalty, and threatening them with suspension if they don’t comply? If your answer is…
Right now, it doesn’t seem much like hyperbole to say the political relationship between the United States and Europe appears to be on the brink of unravelling. At the very least, ties across the Atlantic are facing serious new strains. Last week, US President Donald Trump announced a pull-out from the Paris climate change agreement,…
Muted reactions to statements from Cardinal Gerhard Müller are highly revealing, writes John L. Allen Jr. There’s an old philosophical head-scratcher about whether, if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a noise? In similar fashion, one might ask if an alleged Vatican heavyweight makes…