Though it was, in a sense, 530 years in the making, required two separate departments of the Roman Curia to address, and came a full eight months after demands burst into full public view during a high-profile papal trip to the New World, Thursday’s repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery by the Vatican may turn Read more
One test of a given thinker or leader’s impact is the ability to shape language. Karl Marx, for instance, gave us “the bourgeoisie” as an all-encompassing bogeyman of modern capitalism; Ronald Reagan gave us the “evil empire” as a slogan of opposition to the Soviet state Marx’s thought helped to create. By that standard, Pope Read more
Whatever else Pope Francis’s decision Monday to open the archives from the pontificate of Pius XII in 2020 may mean, there’s one preliminary conclusion that seems take-it-to-the-bank, no-doubt-about-it, slam-dunk certain. Here it is: Opening the archives will not – indeed, by definition, cannot – settle the historical controversy about Pius XII and his alleged silence Read more
If a Las Vegas casino had opened a betting line eight months ago on the likelihood that within a year the most popular figure on the planet would be the pope, one has to imagine the odds would have been awfully long. Yet that’s basically today’s situation, as Francis continues to garner acclaim and admiration Read more
Though there aren’t yet hard numbers to back it up, it’s a good bet that the single most interviewed human being on the planet since March 13, 2013, has been a simple 64-year-old housewife in the Argentine city of Ituzaingó, about an hour outside Buenos Aires. The woman is Maria Elena Bergoglio, and her older Read more
Anybody who’s seen the movie “Pulp Fiction” probably recalls the scene where John Travolta explains to Samuel L. Jackson that in France, McDonald’s calls the quarter-pounder a “Royale with cheese” because, in light of the metric system, the French wouldn’t know what a quarter-pounder is. (It turns out that the movie got the French slightly Read more
The 25th Synod of Bishops began Sunday, this one dedicated to “The New Evangelization for the Transmission of the Christian Faith.” New evangelization is the apple of Pope Benedict XVI’s eye, so the synod, held every couple of years or so since 1967, is being touted by the Vatican, along with the Year of Faith Read more
In the normally tranquil world of the Vatican, where keeping up at least the appearance of unity is a fine art, the Pontifical Academy for Life has long been something of an outlier. There, internal tensions have a habit of erupting into full public view. The latest such row, featuring a public call from academy Read more
At the moment there is not a great deal of interest in who the next pope will be as Pope Benedict XVI seems to be in good health. According to John L Allen Jr, though, “with an 85-year-old pope beginning to show his age, speculation about who might come next is always in the background, Read more
In one sense it is correct to say that the crackdown on the LCWR would seem to be “Rome vs. America”, in that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has declared that the Leadership Conference of Women Religious needs renewing. But, says John L Allen Jr in his National Catholic Reporter column, “At Read more