The Focus of the Pope’s Lenten Retreat

February 1, 2018 By Cameron Doody

Embed from Getty Images L’Osservatore Romano announced last Saturday that Pope Francis has chosen the Portuguese priest poet Father José Tolentino de Mendonça to lead the Roman Curia’s 2018 Lenten retreat. Tolentino Mendonça – who is also the vice-rector of the Catholic University of Lisbon and a consultant to the Pontifical Council for Culture – will lead the Pope and his senior Vatican collaborators in a series of spiritual exercises on the overarching theme “In Praise of Thirst”. According to... Read more

Anti-Semitic Mass Reveals Problems in Hungarian Church

January 29, 2018 By Cameron Doody

Embed from Getty Images Does the Hungarian Catholic Church have a problem with anti-Semitism? The question returned to the headlines last week with news of the controversy surrounding a Mass in remembrance of the Nazi sympathizer Miklós Horthy which was scheduled for last Saturday – International Holocaust Remembrance Day – but was cancelled at the last minute thanks to protests from Jewish groups. As Haaretz reported, the president of the World Jewish Congress, Ronald S. Lauder, wrote to Hungarian Prime... Read more

What’s the Pope’s Alternative to “Fake News”?

January 25, 2018 By Cameron Doody

Embed from Getty Images A ‘no’ from Pope Francis this Wednesday to “fake news”, and a ‘yes’ to a “journalism of peace”. The pontiff has dedicated his message for World Communications Day 2018 to unmasking the “spreading of disinformation… to advance specific goals, influence political decisions, and serve economic interests”, and to promoting the “dignity of journalism and the personal responsibility of journalists to communicate the truth”. The Pope’s take on why we fall so easily for “false information based... Read more

‘La Civiltà Cattolica’ Demolishes the “Benedict Option”

January 22, 2018 By Cameron Doody

Further evidence that the highest circles of the Church disapprove strongly of the “Benedict option”, the “historically-conscious antimodernist return to roots” gaining traction amongst American and European Catholic conservatives intimidated by the complexities of ‘post-Christian’ society. The influential Jesuit journal La Civiltà Cattolica ran last week a strongly-worded article in which it alleged that the Benedict option “brings the risk of an exclusive focus on moral rigidity, doctrinal purity and the reestablishment of a parallel society rather than on the... Read more

IR Expert: Church Losing Culture Wars “All Over the Continent”

January 18, 2018 By Cameron Doody

All over Europe today, “religion plays a role of the epicenter of cultural resistance to the new, the fluid, the strange, the unknown”. An interesting diagnosis of the state of the continent from Petr Kratochvil, director of the Institute of International Relations in Prague, who also warns that the Churches “are not really that important” any more “in influencing moral decision-making” and in that sense are losing the “culture wars” currently being fought in Europe all the way from Ireland... Read more

Borghesi: “Pope’s Opponents Are The Ones Sowing Confusion”

January 15, 2018 By Cameron Doody

Embed from Getty Images A devastating rebuke last week of Pope Francis’ critics by the Italian philosopher Massimo Borghesi. In the digital pages of Vatican Insider, the author of a new “intellectual biography” of Jorge Mario Bergoglio has denounced that “the systematic attacks against the current Pope are part of a precise strategy: to strike the Pontiff, who is opposed by many for his commitment to the poor, migrants, etc., in order to bring the Church back to the pre-conciliar... Read more

Archbishop Aupetit of Paris: A Contradiction in Terms?

January 11, 2018 By Cameron Doody

Embed from Getty Images In all the reports I’ve read about the new Archbishop of Paris, Michel Aupetit, one line in particular has caught my attention. The Catholic News Service report on his installation this past Saturday 6 January carried the following quote: “The France-1 TV network said Jan. 8 the archbishop was known to hold ‘very conservative positions’, but also knew ‘how to adapt and show openness of spirit”. What is there to this strange – at least at... Read more

Cardinal “Seriously Concerned” for Church in Bosnia-Herzegovina

January 8, 2018 By Cameron Doody

Embed from Getty Images Nearly half-a-million Catholics in Bosnia-Herzegovina continue to suffer the pains of the 1992-1995 Bosnian war. In an interview with Aid to the Church in Need the Archbishop of Vrhbosna, Vinko Puljić, has said that the ongoing persecution of the country’s Croat minority means that some 10,000 Catholics are forced into exile every year. “During the war and in the immediate aftermath of the war most of the Catholics were expelled from their homes and there was... Read more

‘The Economist’ and the Left-Right Divide in the European Church

January 4, 2018 By Cameron Doody

Embed from Getty Images An interesting claim last week by The Economist: “Clergy are colliding with Christian soldiers across Europe”. Or, more specifically, that “[r]ight-wing champions of Christendom are clashing with leftist clergy”. The Erasmus blog at said magazine surveys nationalist movements in Germany, the UK, Italy and France and concludes that “[i]t’s probably a fair generalization that most European church-goers are a lot more moderate and sensible than the far-rightists who are trying to woo them, but also stand... Read more

Vatican Official Weighs Into Net Neutrality Debate

December 21, 2017 By Cameron Doody

Embed from Getty Images “Only in a world without ethics, neutrality, impartiality and objectivity are synonymous”. This is the warning that has been sounded by the Holy See’s representative on the ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) committee, Monsignor Carlo Maria Polvani, in a front-page article in the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano after what he calls the “epochal” decision of the US Federal Communications Commission to repeal “net neutrality” legislation. “To understand what the provision of the... Read more