New website, including a blog, from Robert Duncan, freelance writer, sometime commenter here and other places. Start with this interesting interview with John Allen and explore.

R.D.: In your opinion is the Vatican out-of-touch and outdated, or is it just as relevant for today´s generation as it was for our parents and grandparents?

J.A.: If by “out of touch” you really mean “counter-cultural,” certainly the Vatican takes positions on moral questions that would place it out of the mainstream in some parts of the developed world. It does not accept gay marriage, divorce, abortion or birth control, and certainly that challenges the liberal consensus
in many societies.

On the other hand, it’s hard to see how the Vatican is “irrelevant.” I watched the build-up to the Iraq war, for example, when Tony Blair, Jose Maria Aznar, Tarik Aziz, Koffi Annan, and other diplomatic heavyweights were rotating in and out of the Vatican like clients at a deli counter. It wasn’t because they had nothing better to do; it was because John Paul II’s position on the war was moving opinion, undercutting the moral argument for the intervention.

Rarely has the Holy See been more relevant. The Vatican is, and will remain, an extraordinarily important global point of reference