The Week of Christian Unity, the church celebrated this week, supports an unfashionable cause. It encourages the healing of divisions between churches. Divisions rule In culture, politics and religion, however, division provides most of the news of the day. The religious headlines emphasise fractures within churches. They tell of discrepancy between the professed values of Read more
On May 1, the Associated Press ran an interesting report on the return of conservative Catholicism in the United States. The nutshell of the article is this sentence: “Generations of Catholics who embraced the modernizing tide sparked in the 1960s by Vatican II are increasingly giving way to religious conservatives who believe the church has Read more
“Without liturgical reform, there is no reform of the Church,” Pope Francis said emphatically last February during an address to the plenary assembly of the Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. His remarks came around the 60th anniversary of Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy that was issued during Read more
As this column is being written, the Synod of Bishops is bringing to a close the most opaque assembly ever to be held in its relatively brief, post-Vatican II history. Actually, once the members of the October 4-29 gathering have voted on a final document (Saturday evening) and then celebrated the concluding Mass in St. Read more
Conventional wisdom holds that it takes a century for an ecumenical council to flower and bear fruit. Altering customs and thought habits, especially when linked to faith, takes a long time. Simply getting the word out of a council’s teaching and its implications can take decades. Then, there are people and institutions for which new Read more
Of all that happened in the liturgy in the aftermath of Vatican II, only two events were visible to most people. First, was the disappearance of Latin (which had become a de facto badge of identity for many Catholics), and the second was the fact that now the president of the Eucharistic assembly ‘faced the Read more
On 11 October 1962, the Second Vatican Council opened, and a year later, Sacrosanctum concilium changed the Church’s liturgy. It was expected by most of the bishops that it would ratify a series of documents prepared by the curia covering a raft of issues – but in essence, this was seen as an exercise in Read more
The word synodality has been around a year or so now and people are still asking what it really means — for them, of course. The last time the church said it was going to make changes was in 1965. Fifty-eight years ago. In the meantime, all the changes to be seen were basically meaningless Read more
There is probably no pope in all of history — certainly not in the last 400 some years — who served so briefly as Bishop of Rome and yet had such an immense impact on the Catholic Church as John XXIII. [That’s leaving aside Sixtus V. He’s the hard-nosed pope who, in just five years Read more
Variously described as a maverick, a “kick-arse dude in a robe” and an “anti-Catholic lowlife”, the Catholic priest Father Bob Maguire became the darling of the people – and the media – for his community work and his often acerbic statements delivered with humour, irreverence and hyperbole. Maguire, who has died aged 88, defiantly and Read more