On the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi in 1965, in the middle of a historic visit to New York City, Pope Paul VI ascended the rostrum before the United Nations General Assembly and summoned the world to peace. The visit came two and a half years after John XXIII’s Pacem in terris refashioned the Read more
Pope Francis has given Russia’s President Vladimir Putin the edge of his tongue for launching a “savage” war. Rather than use the Russian president’s name, Francis instead referred to Putin as “some potentate” who had unleashed the threat of nuclear war on the world in an “infantile and destructive aggression” under the guise of “anachronist Read more
As I write this the war news gets grimmer by the day. We have gone in the space of a few weeks from ‘it could not happen’ to ‘not in 2022!’ to ‘is there no respect for life – much less for self-determination – in Putin’s vision?’ Meanwhile, many of us are discovering just how Read more
The response of Catholic moral theologians to the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been universally negative. “The war in Ukraine is a spiritual, human and ecological catastrophe,” said Eli S. McCarthy, a peace activist at Georgetown University’s Justice and Peace Studies, in a recent email to me. The view is shared by Catholic pacifists as Read more
It was around 4 pm on Thursday when I checked the global news and saw the words of Vladimir Putin’s invasion speech coming through minute by minute; I had just finished an overnight tramp, something I had done in-part to escape the overwhelmingness of the local and global situation. I often check international news sites Read more
Pope Francis expressed gratitude, Friday, for the cease-fire in the Holy Land. “My thoughts turn to the events taking place these days in the Holy Land,” Francis said, referring to the conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. “I thank God for the decision to halt the armed conflicts and acts of violence, and I Read more
Pope Francis is urging Israeli and Palestinian leaders to put down their arms and spare the children, in the latest round of hostilities between Israel and the Gaza Strip. The injury and death of so many innocent people puts the entire area at risk of sinking into “a spiral of death and destruction,” he says. Read more
Peace is more than just the avoidance of conflict or the absence of a feud, or on a more grand scale, war. Peace is the work for justice and the output of charity. The Church preaches peace because peace is a sign and fruit of the promise of Christ, the Redeemer. Peace is more than Read more
Sometimes you need to catch your breath when a Vatican official’s speaking echoes a theologian’s writings. Which way is this going to go? Not long ago, the Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, echoed a 50-year-old passage from a book by … wait for it … Swiss theologian Hans Küng. Speaking on Spain’s church-owned Read more
I’m not a Catholic. Unless you can genetically inherit religion I am most certainly not Catholic. My Irish grandmother was Catholic, but I think she had God whipped out of her by the nuns at Erskine College at age 13. She was one of the naughtiest girls in her year, and the reckless auburn-haired nymph Read more