Austen Ivereigh

Simmering tensions between the Church and the Italian Right over immigration spilled out over the weekend after the Italian bishops joined UN criticism of the way international ships recently left 73 Africans on a raft to die of dehydration ignoring their pleas for help Only five survived The bis

The water stoup at the entrance to my parish church has been removed Our priest will not give Communion on the tongue only in the hand And we no longer shake hands to give the peace but put our hands together bow slightly and make smiling Indian gestures to each other nbsp It is not trendy l

Only days after the the Episcopal Church TEC at Anaheim Calif defied the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lambeth Conference by agreeing to resume gay blessings and consecrations of actively gay bishops — read MSW here — comes news that 34 American bishops have defied the defiers The rebels

Rocco Buttiglione arguably Europe s leading Catholic politician has given a very interesting interview to the Italian daily Corriere della Sera saying he no longer believes abortion should be made illegal The former friend of Pope John Paul II and Communion and Liberation member remains passiona

I wanted to say something on the Anglican Communion s apparently inevitable slide into schism but nbsp today rather than document disintegration I d rather nbsp edify nbsp nbsp This may be because I m just back from Worth Abbey a Benedictine monastery an hour south of London where I went for

I understood it tonight — not the papal encyclical I ll come to that but the business of putting people on the fourth plinth in London s Trafalgar Square real people standing or sitting or knitting or whatever for an hour at a time 24 hours a day over the next couple of months It s call

Who wrote Caritas in veritate The Pope of course and in so far as it bears Benedict XVI rsquo s signature the whole carries his authority But it is obvious that some passages are more Benedictine than others The often sharp shift in style and language is one of the least impressive characteris

Remember The Mission that great 1986 film about eighteenth-century Jesuits in the Paraguayan jungle starring Robert de Niro and Jeremy Irons Its British director Roland Joffe is making a new Catholic drama – about the early life of Opus Dei and its founder St Josemar iacute a Escriv aacute de

In these days there is a masterclass in politics being given by the Obama administration in the US and the Brown Government in the UK Two teachers are demonstrating vividly and compellingly both what politics should be for and what happens when it fails One teaches a lesson in greatness the oth

I was at Lambeth Palace a few hours ago hearing the Archbishop of Canterbury introduce a lecture by dramatically describing the chaos and failure of the current political moment nbsp Then I returned home and switched on the News to catch a breaking story that a third minister has resigned fro