The Vatican’s Secretary of State has told delegates at the UN Climate Summit that climate change is caused by humans and that we all bear responsibility to protect and value creation. Speaking at the COP-24 conference on Tuesday, Cardinal Pietro Parolin said the international community also has a moral responsibility to address climate change.
Just once in a while, in the middle of a complex and difficult political muddle, there can come a moment when the voice of common sense can be heard above the clamour, ringing with the blessed clarity of a bell from a church steeple. “What I want,” said the plaintive voice of a woman on the radio this week, “is for all this nonsense to stop.”
Shortly after the 2016 referendum, a friend of mine, an experienced diplomat, said of Brexit that it could best be understood as a type of cult, played out on a vast – and therefore catastrophic – national stage. We both knew of the likely range of disastrous consequences that would flow from the “decision” that the “people” had supposedly then just taken.
In a world where national egotism is growing stronger, fraternity still has something to offer. The concept has formed part of the France's motto of “liberty, equality, fraternity” since 1848. Now, France’s Constitutional Council has ruled that fraternity “must be respected as a constitutional principle by the legislator and may be invoked in legal hearings.”
Lord (Chris) Patten, the former Conservative party chair, has launched an attack on fellow Tories, “right-wing English nationalists” and elements of the press who are seeking to drive through Brexit having used immigration to win the referendum two years ago.
The story of the Aquarius is a sign that Europe is heading for a refugee crisis this summer worse than any previously. Aquarius, a motor vessel hired by non-government organisations including Médecins Sans Frontières, had rescued nearly 700 refugees, a quarter of them children, from unseaworthy small boats off the Libyan coast. It proposed to land them in Italy, as had been done previously. Meanwhile, the new Italian interior minister, Matteo Salvini, fulfilling what he said was a campaign pledge, refused to let the Aquarius dock.
The Conservative peer Lord Patten of Barnes, Chancellor of Oxford University, has outlined the urgent need to speak out for the role of universities as bulwarks of liberal democracy. "The foundations of liberal democracy are being eroded “at an accelerating pace”.
Jacob Rees-Mogg talks to Lorna Donlon about reconciling Catholicism and Consevatism. The light dapples on the grumpy waters of the River Thames and Jacob Rees-Mogg MP and I are nudging towards the end of afternoon tea alongside a terrace in the Houses of Parliament, when I raise the question of the leadership of the Conservative Party. ... “Well, you know I am eligible to be pope,” he pronounces in a jocular tone. “All Catholic males are eligible to be pope if the Holy Ghost so decides …
Tackling human trafficking has become one of the main priorities of the Catholic Church in recent years. In September last year, Vatican officials met with groups, including police authorities, from around the world to share experiences on how they try to combat the scourge.
It is not clear to me that the risk to Alfie’s health of being transported to Rome in an air ambulance in order to receive continued treatment was so great that to have decided to try it would have been gravely unreasonable. When parents with reasonable disagreements with their child’s doctors have no right to take their child to other doctors for treatment, and when medical guidelines allow doctors and judges to make judgements on the worth of a life, the sad reality is this: that bad laws make hard cases.
The parents of sick toddler Alfie Evans will today appeal against a High Court decision preventing him from being taken to Rome for treatment, lawyers have confirmed.
Three patriarchs — two of them Orthodox and the other Catholic — have co-signed a statement strongly condemning the Western air strikes against Syrian government positions while reasserting their support for the Assad regime and its Russian and Iranian allies.
That first Times story – one in no fewer than 50 anti-Oxfam articles it published over just 10 days – came just as the new darling of the Conservative right, the prominent parliamentary Catholic, Jacob Rees-Mogg, presented a petition to Downing Street on behalf of a Daily Express “crusade” entitled “Stop the foreign aid madness” – a sentiment which runs counter to decades of Catholic Social Teaching on aid endorsed by popes Paul VI, John Paul II and Benedict XVI.
A day before visiting CRS, Cardinal Tagle spent time visiting officials throughout Washington discussing the church’s view on migration and immigration and the need for a compassionate response for people on the move.
In evangelical thought the Jerusalem decision is in keeping with God’s biblical promise of the Holy Land to the Jewish people while the coalescing of Jews in Israel is, to evangelicals, a sign of the end-times when Christ will once again reign on earth. Catholics, the largest religious denomination in the United States, are wary of this fusion of Christian Zionism and apocalyptical theology and Pope Francis and the Vatican have been critical of President Trump’s Jerusalem move.
The holy places of the three great monotheistic religions – the Western Wall of the Temple, the Basilica of the Holy Sepulcher and the Esplanade of the Mosques – are located only meters apart.This is why the city has “a special vocation for peace,” as Pope Francis stated on Wednesday morning, just a few hours before Donald Trump announced his decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
It gives me great pain to watch as the pluralist, tolerant, hospitable, creative society that Catalonia had become is being destroyed – from within and from without. It is a heartbreaking tragedy for Catalonia, for Spain, and for Europe. A “silent majority” of Catalans, proud of their culture but wanting to remain part of Spain and of the EU, is caught in the crossfire. Whatever the outcome of the current crisis, deep wounds have been opened up that will take another generation to heal.
The Catalan crisis is a European crisis. Guillermo Íñiguez explains why the troubles facing Catalonia in the wake of the independence referendum should concern citizens across the continent. Tolerating or even normalising the current Catalan secessionist plan could set a very dangerous precedent in Europe.
"As all of us know, in recent years the church has come to acknowledge her own failures in providing for the protection of children: Extremely grave facts have come to light, for which we have to accept our responsibility before God, before the victims and before public opinion," the pope said Oct. 6.
"Many of us feel intense pain, as if a dagger had been thrust into our guts," said Cardinal Antonio Canizares Llovera of Valencia. "What has happened is very serious -- an act of sedition, fraud and betrayal, a coup against the rule of law and a violation of the nation's constitutional order and the coexistence in freedom of all Spaniards."