Austen Ivereigh

Confounding the image of him created by the storm of criticism this past week in the British press Pope Benedict XVI arrived in Edinburgh this morning with his eyes downcast generating a warmth that seemed to spread through the crowds On the flight from Rome he spoke of his sorrow at clerical se

Belgian Cardinal Godfried Danneels whose attempts to mediate in a family dispute over one of his bishops who had abused his nephew ended in disaster was the subject of three previous posts here here and here which I rather agonised over caught up as I was in the human drama of it all The Ca

Over here in Britain we suffer from a particularly enthusiastic kind of professional secularist who loves nothing more than to mount elaborate arguments on the basis of the thinnest premises It must be something to do with our climate whose low grey skies encourage a certain kind of anorak to sp

In Nairobi Kenya a Vatican communications official attending a workshop organised by the African bishops has called for something the African Catholic Church does not yet have a continental news service Catholics in Asia have the excellent UCAN Latin-Americans have the redoubtable ACI Prensa T

Cardinal Danneels s spokesman Toon Osaer has posted a statement by the Cardinal s lawyer in the comboxes below my previous post The statement sheds some important light on how Danneels saw the meeting with the abuse victim his uncle the bishop who abused him and their relatives Leaving aside

I don t often correct myself but I think I need to on this occasion What I wrote on the devastating weekend story of how Cardinal Danneels sought to persuade an abuse victim to remain silent was I now realise too sympathetic to the former Archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels I say this because my fr

The British media are today running a story as is the NYT from the weekend s Belgian press that the former Archbishop of Brussels Cardinal Godfried Danneels sought to persuade the victim of abuse by a bishop to stay quiet nbsp On 23 April — see my post here — that bishop 73-year-old Roger V

Rimini Italy Here at the annual Meeting organised by Communion and Liberation CL — see previous post — there are three regulars from Britain professor John Milbank pictured pioneer of the radical orthodoxy movement and one of the UK s leading experts on Catholic Social Teaching and

Rimini Italy The annual seaside festival in this northern Italian town organised by the Communion and Liberation CL movement since 1980 is an extraordinary phenomenon ldquo Il meeting rdquo as it is known ndash full name Meeting for Friendship among Peoples — nbsp last year attracted

Pity Opus Dei Just when they ve dampened the fires of the Da Vinci Code they find themselves implicated in an extraordinary story of mafioso murders secret service intrigues and of course our old friends Archbishop Marcinkus and the Vatican Bank To be fair Opus Dei s involvement in the story o