Cardinal George Pell has written of variations in attitudes about devolution of authority from Rome to local bishops under different pontificates. In an essay he co-authored on subsidiarity, Cardinal Pell wrote about the preferences of some liberal Christians living in countries with more liberal episcopacies. During the pontificates of St John Paul II and Benedict XVI, Read more
Posts Tagged ‘Rome’
Pope stuns tourists by dropping in on Rome optician
Tuesday, September 8th, 2015
Pope Francis stunned tourists and passersby on the Via del Babuino in Rome on September 3 by dropping into an optician’s to buy eye-glass lenses. “I don’t want a whole new set of frames, just new lenses,” the pontiff told Alessandro Spiezia, proprietor of the eyewear shop in the heart of the Spanish Steps area. Read more
Rome piazza to be named after Martin Luther
Friday, August 28th, 2015Rome is to have a piazza named after German theologian and reformer Martin Luther, which will be close to the Colosseum. City authorities finally approved a 2009 proposal by the Union of Seventh Day Adventist Churches to mark the 500th anniversary of the start of the Reformation. The Vatican reportedly did not oppose the project, Read more
Hollywood-style funeral of mobster sparks outrage in Rome
Tuesday, August 25th, 2015
The Hollywood-style funeral of a notorious mobster in Rome has seen anti-Mafia campaigners demanding to know why police and the Catholic Church allowed it. The funeral of Vittorio Casamonica, 65, on August 20 featured a gilded horse-drawn carriage, flower petals tossed from a helicopter and theme music from “The Godfather”. The coffin was draped with Read more
The war on Rome
Tuesday, June 2nd, 2015
For nearly 350 years, anti-Catholic bias was a reliable and powerful presence in the political and religious culture of the United States. Today, when the Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, for example, insists that Muslim immigrants ‘want to use our freedoms to undermine… freedom’, it can be easy to forget that for most of US history, Read more
Priest honoured for saving Italian Jews from holocaust
Tuesday, April 28th, 2015
A Portuguese priest has been honoured for his wartime actions in saving of dozens of Jews during the Nazi holocaust. Fr Joaquim Carreira risked his life to save others while at a Rome pontifical college during the Second World War. A nephew of Fr Carreria, also a priest, received a medal on his behalf from Read more
The charitable activities of Pope Francis
Friday, April 10th, 2015
It’s 8.10 pm at the Vatican City and just a few meters away from Saint Anne’s Gate (Porta Sant’Anna) is a grey Fiat Ducato van. Its boot is filled with canned food, milk, juices, crates of fruit and toothbrush and toothpaste kits. Before getting in, a small group of people recite the Our Father. There Read more
Ecumenism must begin in Rome
Friday, April 10th, 2015
John XXIII at the Opening of Vatican II, the 21st Ecumenical Council: The substance of the ancient doctrine of the deposit of faith is one thing, and the way in which it is presented is another. Further, the Pope said that it is necessary first of all that the Church should never depart from the sacred Read more
Vatican cemetery ‘a little piece of paradise’
Thursday, March 19th, 2015
A small, inconspicuous cemetery inside the Vatican walls made headlines recently with the burial of a Belgian homeless man, Willy Herteleer. “The pilgrims’ tomb” is a common grave, just a few yards from the tombs of bishops, royalty and intelligentsia. Herteleer is buried there, his name engraved on the tombstone of plot No. 106, along Read more
Married priests still on Pope Francis’s radar
Tuesday, February 24th, 2015
Pope Francis has said that the issue of married men working as priests in the Latin-rite Catholic Church is “in my diary”. Speaking to priests of the diocese of Rome on February 19, the Pope responded to questions on the issue, according to a report in the Italian bishops’ paper L’Avvenire. At the meeting, a Read more