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
As a somewhat old-fashioned, traditional type, I welcomed the engaging presence and comment of Dame Lyndsay Freer to my radio and TV during the recent papal conclave. Long before the advent of television, St Thomas Aquinas said, “faith comes from hearing“, and the Catholic Church in New Zealand, once again, at least for a limited Read more
Pope Francis has emphasised the “fundamental” importance of women in the Catholic Church, saying they have a privileged role because of their ability to pass on the faith through love. He said women have always had a special mission in the Church as “first witnesses” of Christ’s Resurrection, and because they pass the faith on Read more
Pope Francis joined a prominent Vatican official and seven priests for lunch on Holy Thursday and emphasised the importance of hearing confessions. Archbishop Giovanni Becciu has a longtime custom of inviting priests to join him for lunch on Holy Thursday — a custom that predates his 2011 appointment as deputy secretary of state responsible for Read more
In 2006 nearly 70,000 Maori identified with Catholicism but Pa Petera, Father Peter Tipene, believes fewer and fewer Katorika Maori are turning up on Sundays. He says that with the election of Pope Francis it’s a good time for the church – and for Maori who follow the faith – to reassess and take stock. Read more
In an historic meeting, Pope Francis and Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI prayed side-by-side in the chapel at the papal summer residence in Castel Gandolfo. “In the chapel, the Pope Emeritus offered the place of honour to Pope Francis, but he said: ‘We are brothers’, and wanted them to kneel together in the same place,” said Read more
A question mark hangs over the future of the Vatican Bank as Pope Francis is reported to be considering suggestions from two cardinals that it be closed. Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli, tipped as a possible Vatican Secretary of State, told The Sunday Times that Francis would consider appeals made by Cardinals Christoph Schönborn of Vienna Read more
An Argentine pacifist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1980 has come to the defence of Pope Francis’s actions between 1976 and 1983, when the military ruled the nation. Adolfo Perez Esquivel said Pope Francis preferred to carry out a “silent diplomacy” in helping victims, rather than leading a more public outcry during Argentina’s Read more
Much has been made of the impressions Pope Francis has created by his ordinary, every day activities: catching buses, using a telephone to make his own calls, not dressing in all the fine drapery usually worn by popes, treating people respectfully as he did the journalists, celebrating the Holy Thursday Mass in a Roman prison. Read more
There is no delusion more surprising than that human beings are rational. You need only consider the position the ghastly Kardashians occupy in the hearts and minds of millions of television viewers for evidence of that. We wreck the world through overpopulation, squander resources and exterminate species far lovelier than ourselves. Climate change looks to Read more