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Pontifications

The editor of the Vatican daily has taken a lot of heat for his coverage of Barack Obama and his comments that Obama is “not a pro-abortion president.” In a lengthy Q-and-A with Delia Gallagher (a veteran Vatican hand, formerly at CNN) and posted at National Review, Vian stands by his statements, but adds sfumature,…

Bishop Gerald Kicanas of Tucson, a Chicago native and in line to be the next president of the U.S. bishops conference, foresees some informal discussions about the Notre Dame-Barack Obama invite flap, but nothing substantive or punitive. I suspect some side discussions will be intense, but here’s what he is telling NCR’s John Allen, who has this…

That’s the title of an “On Faith” column by Tom Reese, the Jesuit political scientist cited in the post below on the bishops spring meeting in Texas. Father Reese’s take is that the bishops’ agenda “will keep it busy but it will not deal with the real issues facing the church: how to interact with…

The U.S. hierarchy gathers for its spring meeting tomorrow, in San Antonio, in the wake of one of the most divisive and ugly stretches the Catholic Church has seen since, well, Joseph Bernardin was alive. And the bishops themselves have been the perpetrators and victims of much of the nastiness, much of it centered on…

Rome should switch from Latin to English, Thomas G. Casey, SJ, argues in this America essay, “Ave atque Vale.” Casey, an Irish Jesuit and professor of philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, notes that Italian is understandably the Vatican argot, but Latin is its official language–despite the fact that fewer and fewer church officials can speak or…

Watching history unfold is one of the great benefits of modern media. The Daily Dish has wall-to-wall updates, including links to neocons apparently pleased with Ahmadinejad’s “victory”–spare no effort to confirm one’s bias. The NYT is here with the latest on supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei‘s acquiesence to a “high-level inquiry” into alleged voting irregularities. What is happening? Party…

The New York Times reports on apparent evidence of sex selection among Asian immigrants, a cultural holdover from their home countries: The trend is buried deep in United States census data: seemingly minute deviations in the proportion of boys and girls born to Americans of Chinese, Indian and Korean descent. In those families, if the…

Q: How many people work at the Vatican? A: About half of them. Ba-da-boom! Only that rimshot was reportedly delivered by Pope John XXIII himself. Though I’ve never found the citation, it is–as we say at the tabloids–too good to check out. And it sounds like Pope John. It also sounds like the Vatican I…

The excommunications surrounding the abortion for a nine-year-old Brazilian girl who was raped and impregnated with twins by her stepfather continues to roil Rome. Back at the time, a top Vatican official, Archbishop Rino Fisichella, President of the Pontifical Academy for Life and an apparent up-and-comer in Rome (at least then) wrote in L’Osservatore Romano that the…

Pope Benedict XVI has a way with words, but also sound bites (who knew?!), from “the dictatorship of relativism” slogan on the eve of the conclave to this formulation from his homily for the Feast of Corpus Christi: “Today there arises the risk of a serpentine secularization even within the Church, which can convert into a…
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