The opening days of the Amazon Synod have been marked by the familiar polar tensions at the heart of the Catholic Church: between center and periphery, universal and local; between the demands of the law and the pastoral needs of a particular people. But now there is something new, something that is tilting the balance Read more
When an apparently innocuous teaching document comes out of Rome – and a pope calling us to holiness fits that description better than most – it’s always important on the Vatican beat to ask: Why this, and why now? When you apply the context lens, two recent events help answer that question. One was yesterday: Read more
While in Dublin recently, I stopped by the Jesuit community at Milltown to meet a man who had once taught Scripture in a huge college outside Buenos Aires, which was at that time run by the man who is now pope. Father James Kelly recalls the regime at the Colegio Maximo in the early 1980s Read more
Writing a “new” biography of Pope Francis is fraught with challenges. For one, there have already been so many biographies written that it is difficult to imagine how anything new or previously unknown could be presented. For another, the fact that Francis himself is making headlines weekly (at least) rather tends to highlight there may Read more