Vatican II
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Coptic patriarch praying in Venice matters more than it looks
The Coptic Church does not treat sacred space casually. That Pope Tawadros celebrated liturgy at a Catholic basilica — not once, but twice in three years — signals a quiet theological recognition that cuts deeper than diplomatic courtesy or interchurch goodwill.
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Buddhists, Jesuits and the truth about taxi drivers
Buddhist philosophy calls it conceptual proliferation. Catholic theology calls it a failure of reverence for the imago Dei. Fr. John Kerr Locke, a Jesuit who spent fifty years in Nepal, called it something simpler: a mistake. Reducing an entire culture to one bad afternoon with a taxi driver is, he insisted, just factually wrong.
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The theology of chairs
There is a particular irony in celebrating free elections and participatory governance from behind a lectern while your audience sits in silent rows. The Vatican’s meeting with lay leaders exposed a contradiction at the heart of the Church’s synodal project.
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St Jerome’s crude language used to destroy a rival thinker
Vatican II worked to restore the centrality of baptism and the equal dignity of all the faithful — precisely the ground Jovinian occupied in the fourth century. If the Council’s teaching is orthodox today, the logic that condemned Jovinian deserves to be revisited formally.
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False news and discord demand urgent response
Global frustration with misinformation and the collapse of respectful conversation demand more than secular remedies. The World Day of Communications challenges the Church to model the unity it preaches by first healing its own internal Babel.
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Peter’s failures were preserved for a reason
The word “constitutive” was applied freely across Church documents to evangelisation, charity, canon law, and even the male-only diaconate. The one thing it was never again permitted to describe was the Church’s relationship to justice.
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Finding truth and holiness outside the Catholic Church
Holiness is not a closed door. The Church’s relationship with the modern world changed when it began to see the “fullness of religious life” through a broader lens. In Nostra aetate the Church to find common ground with Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam.
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A Holy Thursday and a meal of friends
The story of the Mass moves from intimate home gatherings to imperial basilicas, from the Greek of early Christians to Latin, from Trent to Vatican II. Each shift carried theological weight, and each provoked resistance — a reminder that how a community prays has always been contested ground.
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Synodality, local churches, and the end of Eurocentric theology
Asian theologians shifted the language of mission from ad gentes (“to the nations”) to inter gentes (“among the nations”). That single preposition change carries enormous weight: it replaces a one-directional, subject-to-object model with a dialogical encounter between communities, cultures, and equals.
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Plurality — the West’s greatest and most forgotten achievement
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio praised Mozart and Beethoven as pillars of Western culture, and rightly so. But the thinkers who may matter more today are Locke, Jefferson, and Madison — the architects of a West defined not by sameness but by the right to differ.
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