Although Crux’s John Allen likes to pretend otherwise, Roman Catholicism is now clearly divided between the Party of Francis and the Party of Benedict. Not since the days of the Jesuits and the Jansenists has the Catholic elite — clerical and lay intellectual — been at daggers drawn as it is now. Yesterday, the New York Times nicely encapsulated the partisan Read more
Tim Wilson is a changed man. In the past four years he has converted to Catholicism, met and married singer/songwriter Rachel, and had two “sparkling” children — Roman, 17 months, and Felix, five months — whose existence lights him up from the inside like a sky lantern. For those readers who might confuse fiction for Read more
A Swedish doctor has been accused of denying one of his patients antibiotics when he refused to join the Catholic Church. The doctor was forced to leave his job as a locum at a practice run by the local authority in southern Sweden, Region Skåne. Bosses at the GP surgery reported him after it emerged Read more
Catholicism in Ireland is being abandoned to obsessive extremists, a leading priest has said. Fr Brendan Hoban also criticised a “religious media more anxious to protect its pockets than engage with the realities of faith in the world”. Fr Hoban is the co-founder of the Association of Catholic Priests in Ireland. He made these criticisms Read more
Catholicism is not for the fainthearted says blogger Rick Becker. He suggests three easy steps to take if you want avoid being a Catholic: Read only your bible. Study the Church’s detractors and their version of Catholic teaching. Focus on the most egregious examples of Catholic hypocrisy, misdeeds and immorality. Read more
Nine percent of Americans say that they are Catholics, but that Catholicism is not their religion! That striking fact was uncovered in recent research by the Pew Research Centre. Two out of 10 respondents told the Pew pollsters that they are Catholics in the sense that they “claim the faith as their current religion.” Another one Read more
Congress and the United Nations rolling out their red carpets, nuns working overtime to bake communion hosts, prison inmates carving a walnut throne, tickets for events snapped up in seconds: America is gearing up for pope-mania. Pope Francis is expected to be greeted with huge crowds and across-the-board reverence when he tours Washington, New York Read more
Ten years ago this month, I became a Catholic. It happened in the attic of the guest house at Ealing Abbey. There was just me, a friend and a monk, and the operation took about an hour. Afterwards we went for cocktails. I started things as I meant to go on. I guess the two big Read more
The financial crisis and its aftermath have revealed the dark side of the post-cold war model, but Catholic social teaching proposes correcting the way market forces work so that they serve the public interest. It was 25 years ago this month that communism ceased to be a threat to the west and to the free Read more
Pope Francis is a Charismatic. Though I made the case for this in a HuffPost blog almost a year ago, the Argentine pontiff’s penchant for Spirit-centred Catholicism has been one of the most underreported aspects of his dynamic papacy. Francis’s spirited participation in the 37th Annual Convocation of the Charismatic movements along with some 50,000 Catholics at Read more