Awful fact: by 2030, half a billion people will be practicing open defecation. That’s an improvement. The current numbers are staggering: 2.5 billion people lack adequate sanitary facilities; 849 million practice open defecation. In Southeast Asia, that means 38 percent of the population; in sub-Saharan Africa, 25 percent meet their needs without safety and privacy. Read more
We appear to have reached one of those extraordinary moments in history when people everywhere, communities and even entire nations, feel increasingly stressed and vulnerable. The same may be said of the planet as a whole. Whether intellectually or intuitively, many are asking the same question: Where are we heading? How do we explain the Read more
On the day that the papal nuncio to Ireland, Archbishop Charles Brown, told the US-based Catholic News Service that he saw “that Irish Catholicism had entered a new springtime,” representatives of the Association of Catholic Priests (ACP) were trying to convince a group of Irish bishops that the Irish Catholic Church was facing, among other Read more
It’s like a dream or a movie. In less than a year, Pope Francis has transformed the dominant discourse around Catholicism from scandal and despair to joy and the evangelical demands in light of poverty and economic exclusion. “Each individual Christian and every community,” he wrote in Evangelii Gaudium last week, “is called to be an instrument Read more
These are the very early days of a phenomenon that will reshape Christianity forever, the coming of what theologians call the “Third Church.” The “First Church” was that of the original disciples and the generations that followed them, centred on the Mediterranean and making the first missionary advances into lands and cultures outside of Israel. Read more
Two different visions of the Catholic Church’s future will be on “display” in metro Detroit this weekend with separate conferences — one liberal, the other conservative. Both are expected to draw thousands. The liberal conference is sponsored by the American Catholic Council and is expected to be one of the biggest gatherings of left-leaning Catholics Read more