Austen Ivereigh

The most interesting part of the visit of Prince Charles and Camilla to Pope Benedict never happened The Pope never did present the royal couple with a facsimile of the letter written by English nobles to Pope Clement VII in 1530 pleading for the annulment of Henry VIII s marriage to Catherine of

The bishop-turned-president of Paraguay Fernando Lugo has joined a long line of Latin-American presidents in confessing to having fathered a child out of wedlock He admitted Monday to being the father of a two-year-old boy conceived while he was still Bishop of San Pedro He ceased his active mi

Walter Cardinal Kasper President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity recently gave talks at Yale Divinity School and St Thomas More Catholic Chapel at Yale in which he talked about the recent developments in interfaith dialogue He said that strong relationships among Catholi

So the new Archbishop of Westminster will be the current Archbishop of Birmingham Vincent Nichols He was always the front-runner and his appointment will come as little suprise It was clearly not the shoe-in that some always thought it would be The appointment took much longer than anticipated

There are rumours on a German traditionalist blog that Fr Federico Lombardi the Pope s communications chief will stand down after the Pope s Holy Land trip in May I have no idea if they are true But I do know that whatever the Jesuit s limitations the Pope s communications problem is n

Remember the atheist bus advertising campaign I posted on here and here It s since spread from the UK to other countries encountering opposition from advertising regulators and a variety of church responses It s a way of taking the temperature of how faith and culture sit together around the

It was an apology of sorts — but not of the sort to make amends The Holocaust-denying schismatic British bishop whose rehabilitation by the Vatican sparked an international row apologised last night for remarks in which he denied the scale of the Nazis genocidal campaign against the Jews The a

Might the shortly-to-retire Archbishop of Westminster sit in the House of Lords — the first Catholic bishop since the Reformation to do so The question has been raised in The Tablet which this week interviews the prime minister Gordon Brown and finds him open to the idea So when the cardinal r

Paul Elie s superb Atlantic Monthly essay on the Archbishop of Canterbury includes an anecdote about Dr Williams joking that he should have worn a T-shirt with the words GRAVELY DEFICIENT on it to visit the then head of the Vatican s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith CDF Cardinal Rat

Fr Manuel Musallam the Parish Priest of Gaza has told Caritas Jerusalem There are dead bodies lying on the streets The clinics are carrying out operations on the floor and women have no place to give birth There is extreme fear everywhere here The phosphorous gas being thrown in by Gaza is c