Some Church groups are pressing for a post-pandemic opening up, others, who have already opened up, are sounding a lament as they find it is not business as usual. There are signs of grieving for the parish – an institution on its knees. World War II changed Western history. The post-war Catholic parish was an Read more
Since COVID-19 first began to spread, Pope Francis has been challenging Catholics and the world about the response to the pandemic. As a pastor, he’s also offered us hope. Now, a collection of his messages on the pandemic put together by Cardinal Michael Czerny, a Canadian Jesuit who works closely with the pope in Rome, Read more
When Pope Francis was elected pope, the Vatican was in trouble. The Roman Catholic Church’s mishandling of sexual abuse and a series of financial scandals had challenged the credibility of the institution and emptied its pews. For Francis, the root of the church’s problems was clericalism: the belief that religious people belong to a superior Read more
Many have asked whether the Catholic Church can survive the shock of the conviction of Cardinal George Pell and the impact on its credibility, even utility. Yet to assume that the institution is exclusively the Church is to miss the point: Cardinal Pell has been sentenced, not Australia’s Catholics. Believers, and those who identify with Read more
“So much is at stake this week (in Rome) …I hope something important comes from it.” This is what Anne Barrett Doyle, the co-director of BishopAccountability.org, said to reporters at the Foreign Press Association in Rome two days before the Vatican summit on the protection of minors in the church is scheduled to begin. But Read more
In a line for his vision for renewal and change, Pope Francis captured something that is true for the church across the world but most especially for the church in Australia. The pope described our time in the church and wider society as “not so much an era of change as a change of era.” Read more
The most remarkable year of my life and easily the one in which my faith grew the most was the 12 months I spent as a young man working at a rural college in India. The double blow of not knowing God and not knowing anybody at all brought me to a place of loneliness Read more
Student Tyler Dixon is used to being asked about women’s place on the marae. Her pakeha friends ask if the traditional role of women in the powhiri is sexist. “I just try to explain that females have their own type of mana. Traditionally Maori really revered their women, and looked after their women, and I Read more
The image that surfaces when Sr Teresa Forcades speaks is evocative of spiraling energy, bubbling in spirit, and of being on the ground with the needs of the people of God. Forcades — a Benedictine nun, activist, feminist theologian and physician from Catalonia in Spain — and Francis — a Jesuit pope from Argentina — Read more
It is difficult to overestimate the rate and depth of change and the collapse of a phase of the Church’s life that is currently underway. Throughout the world, but particularly in Ireland, the sense of the end of an era that delivered the largest growth in the history of the Church, something foundational is happening. Read more