The reverberations can be heard nationwide. As church employees and volunteers receive notices requiring them to attend safe-environment trainings, their responses have become familiar: “Again?” “Didn’t we just do that?” “I went through this where I teach; do I need to do it in the parish too?” “I barely come in contact with kids; why Read more
I read “I’m a Catholic but …” in CathNews NZ on Tuesday 6th August, and pondered upon it as I stacked the firewood. I walked over a carpet of camellia flowers – some pink, some brown, some crackly, some squishy. They need to be collected and put on the compost to be transformed, and later, Read more
Last week, Pope Francis loosed a media tsunami by dropping a pebble of sanity into an ocean of religious angst. “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has goodwill, who am I to judge?” he told reporters on the flight back to Rome after his trip to Brazil. What did it Read more
For the faithful it (birth control) is a sad and agonizing issue, for there is a cleavage between the official teaching of the Church and the contrary practice in most families. — Former Patriarch Maximos IV Saigh of the Melkite Greek Catholic Church quoted in What Happened at Vatican II, by John W. O’Malley. Recalling that Thursday was Read more
While pondering last week’s sapphire anniversary of Pope Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae (Of Human Life) and the continuing controversy over the so-called “birth control encyclical” throughout both Church and society, I came across a striking passage in an essay by Polish Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz, written shortly before his death in 2004. “Increasingly the institution Read more
I have been asked at this meeting of the Australian Jesuits and our companions on the journey to explain why I love the Catholic Church despite all the woes we are suffering as a social institution at the moment. I love the Church because it is the privileged space where people can share their deepest Read more
It began when the Pope paid his bill. The day after Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was named the leader of the world’s billion Catholics, he asked his driver to go back to the hotel in the Vatican where he’d been staying during the Congress of Cardinals, to pay his bill. The payment was completely symbolic Read more
Oscar Romero, now back on the path to sainthood, was called to conversion by ordinary Salvadorans. Among the welcome news coming on the heels of Pope Francis’ election was an April announcement that the canonization cause of Archbishop Óscar Romero of El Salvador has been, in the words of Italian Msgr. Vincenzo Paglia, who leads Read more
It was just another weekend at the office for Pope Francis, more of the series of actions, words and gestures that have kept him a fixture in the international media since his March 13 election. On June 15 he took a major step toward reforming the scandal-wracked Vatican bank by appointing his own man, Msg. Read more
Pope Francis has appointed eight cardinals to assist him in reorganizing the Vatican’s administration. One of them is the archbishop of Sydney, Australia, George Pell. Many think he was chosen simply because he is the only cardinal in Oceania and it appears that the pope wanted one from each continental region. When asked in an Read more