Austen Ivereigh

ROME Last night standing outside the Jesuit Curia — an obvious meeting-place for an America correspondent at the Vatican — waiting for a colleague I watched the entrance to the Rome HQ just opposite of the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre The cars had been cleared from that part of the Borgo San

ROME There are three non-Christian participants known as special invitations at the Middle East Synod here now in its fourth day of speeches and discussions Rabbi David Rosen is a Jewish American leader well known in Catholic circles and a regular habitue of the annual interreligious peace

A Lebanese bishop yesterday reminded the Synod that Pope John Paul II in his 1995 encyclical Ut Unum Sint called for a review of the practice of papal primacy in the light of the ecclesiology of the First Millennium It was good to recall said Guy-Paul Noujaim a Lebanese auxiliary and titular bi

ROME The excellent New York-based Catholic Near East Welfare Assocation CNEWA yesterday organised a fringe press meeting to consider some of the North-American dimensions of the Synod discussions It was hosted by CNEWA s secretary-general Msgr also Archimandrite of the Greek-Catholic patriarc

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ROME I arrived this morning to find the 185 Catholic bishops summoned by Pope Benedict to discuss the Middle East deep into their discussions nbsp It s day three of the two-week Special Assembly for the Middle East of the Synod of Bishops and they are beginning the discussion in small groups i

There was a time — and it lasted many years — when the crisis caused by clerical sex abuse happened outside the Vatican s walls Even when it was no longer seen as just an Anglo-Saxon problem it remained a bishops problem a question for the local Church as it was known in Rome There was plen

That s America s not of course America s Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University has a hard-hitting article under that title at the Guardian that s well worth a read He paints a picture of a United States in a nasty mood no longer interested in compassion and falling into the politics of rac

Given that the Blessed John Henry Newman has only been approved for devotion in England and the optional memorial celebrating him approved for 9 October in the National Calendar for England alone it would obviously be very wrong and wicked for this Englishman to alert American Catholics to the exi