Catholic church

It’s not every day, you know, you get to see a bit of the elbow of Thomas a Becket. In fact, since 1538 when his bones were unceremoniously exhumed from their shrine at Canterbury, the chances have been pretty sparse. So if you haven’t been to catch up with that bit of the elbow which has just been returned from Hungary, now’s your chance: run and catch it. It was reunited with other reputed relics of Becket from Stonyhurst and St Magnus the Martyr in Cheapside earlier this week; it’s off to St Magnus’s today, Wednesday, for evensong and it will be returning to Westminster tomorrow to St Margaret’s church,

To subscribe to The Spectator’s weekly podcast, for free, visit the iTunes store or follow us on SoundCloud. After the row over tax returns, are political scandals not what they used to be? Richard Littlejohn asks in his Spectator cover piece this week whether we’ve come a long way from the days of Christine Keeler and the Profumo Affair. Have we forgotten what a scandal is really about? Isabel Hardman is joined by Matthew Parris, author of Great Parliamentary Scandals, to discuss. As he puts it:- For quite a long time, sex was very delicious. I think we’re beginning to find tax and financial matters delicious too.’ Also on the Spectator podcast, Political Editor James

Last week we reached the beginning of the end of the pontificate of Jorge Bergoglio — the ‘great reformer’ of the Catholic church who, it appears, has been unable to deliver the reforms that he himself favours. This despite being Pope. On Friday, he published a 200-page ‘exhortation’ entitled Amoris Laetitia, ‘The Joy of Love’ (or ‘The Joy of Sex’, as English-speaking Catholics of a certain vintage immediately christened it). This was Francis’s long-awaited response to two Vatican synods on the family, in 2014 and last year, which descended into Anglican-style bickering between liberals and conservatives. At the heart of the disputes lay the question of whether divorced-and-remarried Catholics could

Here’s the beginning of the Guardian’s report on Amoris Laetitia (Joy of Love), Pope Francis’s response to the Synod on the Family: Pope Francis has called for the Catholic church to revamp its response to modern family life, striking a delicate balance between a more accepting tone towards gay people and the defence of traditional church teachings on issues such as abortion. In a landmark papal document entitled Amoris Laetitia (Joy of Love), Francis outlined his vision for the church on family issues, urging priests to respond to their communities without mercilessly enforcing church rules: “Each country or region, moreover, can seek solutions better suited to its culture and sensitive

Given how apocalyptic the predictions were, Anglicanism’s make-or-break meeting about issues of human sexuality last week proved something of a damp squib. The Anglican Communion was supposed to be rent asunder. Upheaval was imminent. Schism was certain. Conservative African Archbishops were going to be tripping over their cassocks in the rush for the door. In the end, however, unity prevailed and the status quo was (boringly) upheld as the 36 primates gathered here together voted overwhelmingly to stick to the church’s traditional view of marriage. Nothing really changed: Anglican HQ merely recognised formally the break its American division has been boasting about for over a decade. So the summit ended

Pope Francis has used another mid-flight press conference to make a statement of significance to millions of Catholics. Asked if the Church should drop its opposition to the use of condoms to stop the spread of Aids (a teaching already modified by Benedict XVI), he effectively declared that the debate was a waste of time. He referred to Jesus’s practice – opposed by the Pharisees on legalistic grounds – of healing on the Sabbath. ‘Healing is obligatory!’ he said. Earlier in the interview, the Pope took aim at Catholic ‘fundamentalists’ whose attachment to rules was ‘idolatrous’. Here’s a transcript from RomeReports: Question: Aids is a serious problem in Africa, the epidemic continues. We know that prevention is

This week the Catholic Herald published a blog post by Dr Edward Condon, an American canon lawyer, that began with a description of the Holy Father’s method of communicating his thoughts to the faithful: … soundbites lifted from off-the-cuff remarks, second hand accounts of midnight phone calls, and semi-reliable digests of interviews with nonagenarian atheists all making the news, followed by a maelstrom of interpretation and counter-interpretation before an eventual ‘clarification’ comes out of the Vatican press office amounting to little more than ‘We don’t think any of you have it quite right’. I’ve made the same observation myself (though not nearly so memorably). What I couldn’t explain was why Francis

Pope Francis yesterday gave an address to the profoundly divided Synod on the Family in which he confirmed his plans to decentralise the Catholic Church – giving local bishops’ conferences more freedom to work out their own solutions to the problems of divorce and homosexuality. This is the nightmare of conservative Catholic cardinals, including – unsurprisingly – those in the Vatican. They thought they had a sufficient majority in the synod to stop the lifting of the ban on divorced and remarried Catholics receiving communion, or any softening on the Church’s attitude to gay couples. But in yesterday’s keynote speech, delivered as the synod enters its last week, Francis told them that the decentralisation

The Catholic Church is this week in the biggest mess it’s been in since the Second Vatican Council, and Pope Francis is to blame. The Vatican cardinals in charge of doctrine, finance and worship are believed to have written to Francis at the beginning of the Synod on the Family – now in its second chaotic week – privately warning him that it was likely to spin out of control. That’s because most of the world’s bishops don’t support any major change to the church’s rules on allowing divorced and remarried people to receive communion, or to the way it treats gay couples. You may think they’re wrong, but that is the situation. Also,

Pope Francis’s three-week Synod on the Family began on Sunday. Most of the 279 ‘Synod Fathers’ are senior bishops, many of them cardinals. They have no authority to change any aspect of Catholic teaching or pastoral practice. They are discussing the ‘hot button’ issues of communion for the divorced and remarried and the spiritual care of gay Catholics — but, once the meeting is over, power will rest entirely in the hands of the Pope. Conservative Catholics aren’t happy. Last year, at a preparatory ‘extraordinary’ synod, officials hand-picked by Francis announced in the middle of the proceedings that the Fathers favoured a more relaxed approach to gay relationships and second