Vatican II
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When kneeling divides rather than unites
“Let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker!” The title of the pastoral letter by Sydney’s Archbishop Anthony Fisher, taken from Psalm 95, already hints at its content: the cleric wants to promote the importance of kneeling once again in his archdiocese. The Innsbruck liturgical scholar Liborius Olaf Lumma studies bodily postures in the liturgy.…
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Restoring kneelers!
Sydney clergy must now restore kneelers everywhere, treating contested history as fact and recasting decades of reverent standing as a deficiency.
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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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