At the end of the 2007 movie Charley Wilson’s War, about how covert American support for the mujahadeen in Afghanistan helped bring down the Soviet empire, a quote appears from the real Texas congressman played in the film by Tom Hanks: “All these things happened, and they were glorious and they changed the world.” “Then,…
When World Youth Day opened in Lisbon, Portugal, it marked the latest edition of the most massively successful version of a “politics of identity” in organised religion today, a clear and indisputable way of proclaiming that Catholicism isn’t sliding toward extinction but remains alive and well. To be clear, organisers of World Youth Day always…
Rome is a city that prides itself on having seen it all over the course of its millennia-long history, so much so that “Been there, done that” might well be the unofficial civic motto. Here’s how journalist Fabrizio Roncone summed up Roman reaction to the record heat this week, which reached an official peak of…
As I write, it’s the great Roman feast of Ss Peter and Paul, the patron saints of the Eternal City. The double feast is of ancient origin, but the link between the two saints has taken on even greater significance with the modern papacy. It was the late Pope John Paul II who once said…
A terse two-line statement from the Vatican on June 15, announcing that Pope Francis has decided to send Archbishop Georg Gänswein back to his home diocese without any indication of a new assignment, has been widely interpreted as a papal rebuff to the 66-year-old German prelate. It is indeed striking that Francis didn’t bother with the…
Anew pope is elected with a history of health issues, who tells people early on he doesn’t expect to have a lengthy papacy. He reigns longer than anyone expected, but eventually faces a health crisis that requires a serious surgery, and which leads many people to assume the end is finally at hand. In fact,…
For those with ears to hear, every so often it’s actually possible to detect the sound of history’s tectonic plates as they shift. Such was the case Thursday, with a remarkable gesture by Pope Francis of inscribing a group of Coptic Christian martyrs into the Roman Martyrology, Catholicism’s official compendium of saints. The move was…
Cardinal Matteo Zuppi of Bologna, president of the powerful Italian bishops’ conference, comes off as a very modern figure. His roots are in the Community of Sant’Egidio, a new movement in Catholicism that dates just to 1968, and he’s a key ally of Pope Francis in his effort to promote a 21st century global Church. Yet…
With Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva back in power in Brazil, the acronym ‘BRICS’ is once again in fashion in international affairs. It refers to Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, with Lula’s vision being that these emerging economic and political superpowers could form a partnership to offset the predominance of the West. This…
On any other day, the dominant Vatican headline on March 29 would have belonged to German Jesuit Fr Hans Zollner, whose unexpected resignation from the Pope’s chief advisory body on combating sexual abuse left the broader state of Francis’s reform campaign an open question. It wasn’t just the fact that Fr Zollner resigned which raised…