Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, the Vatican’s 71-year-old culture minister, paid his own tribute on Monday to the late rocker Lou Reed, tweeting one of his best-known songs before clarifying he was not condoning any reference to drugs some have seen in the song. Ravasi, an Italian who is the same age as Reed was when he…
The Vatican has withdrawn thousands of official papal medals from sale after discovering they had misspelled Jesus’ name. A Latin inscription around the edge of the medals to mark the first year of Pope Francis’ pontificate referred to “Lesus”. The medals, produced in gold, silver and bronze by the Italian State Mint, went on sale…
An Op-Ed in the Vatican newspaper blasted “unrestrained anti-Semitism” at a music festival in Belgium where British rocker Roger Waters displayed an inflatable wild boar balloon with a Star of David and other symbols on it. “The spirit and the style of the Werchter Rock festival was visible, with the fans who had every right…
The Vatican has recently announced that two popes who were pioneers in Christian-Jewish relations — John XXIII and John Paul II — are leading candidates for canonization as saints in the Roman Catholic Church. John Paul II was, of course, the pope who followed in the steps of John XXIII in his forthright condemnation of…
● From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933–1965 By John Connelly Harvard University Press, 384 pages, $35 My definition of Catholic-Jewish relations: an unnatural act engaged in by partially consenting adults — following an opening prayer. This one-liner tells us much that we need to know about the relationships…
An Italian Catholic activist and journalist who was declared a Righteous Gentile for saving Jewish lives during World War II has formally been put on the road to sainthood by the Roman Catholic church. Odoardo Focherini was beatified – the step before sainthood – at a ceremony Saturday in his hometown of Carpi, near Modena…
For its first pavilion at the prestigious Venice Biennale international art festival, the Vatican is presenting an exhibit inspired by the first book of the Torah, rather than by a New Testament theme. Called “Creation, Un-Creation, Re-Creation,” the three-part show in the Vatican’s pavilion will draw on the first 11 chapters of Genesis, Cardinal Gianfranco…
Confronted by what it considers the existential threat of communism, convinced that Christianity and nationalism are one and the same, and compelled by self-interest to place social order above political liberty: Welcome to the world of the Catholic Church in Argentina during the “dirty war.” But most French Catholics during the “dark years” of 1940–1944…
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