Catholic church

“What to get someone who has everything, I thought,” said Secretary of State Marco Rubio yesterday, as he handed Pope Leo a funny little crystal-football present. “Wow, OK,” replied Leo, stiffly. It was a useful reminder that Rubio is not always a smooth operator. For all the articles suggesting he has now overtaken Vice President J.D. Vance as favorite to be the 2028 Republican nominee, for all the media gushing over the “Secretary of Everything” in the White House briefing room, Lil’ Marco can still be something of a robotic plonker on the big stage. Lil’ Marco can still be something of a robotic plonker on the big stage It

Donald Trump’s latest clash with the Catholic Church stunned even the most hardened veterans of culture-war X. According to the President of the United States, the Chicago-born Pope Leo XIV, the conspicuously holy spiritual leader of 1.3 billion people, is “WEAK on crime and terrible on foreign policy.” He also claimed that, “If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican.” For commentators accustomed to the fog of modern diplomatic platitudes, such trash talk was the equivalent of a Holy Roman Emperor hurling insults at a medieval pontiff. In the year 963, for example, the Emperor Otto I accused Pope John XII of fornicating with his

Sometimes it’s a wonder Israel can stand with all the self-inflicted gunshot wounds in its feet. Israeli police placed their country in the eye of a diplomatic and religious storm by accosting their most senior Catholic clergymen as they made their way to pray at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Religious gatherings have been restricted during the ongoing war with Iran, which has repeatedly targeted built-up civilian areas including Jerusalem. Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, and Father Francesco Ielpo, Custos of the Holy Land, were prevented from accessing the Holy Sepulchre on Palm Sunday, the day when Christians mark Jesus Christ’s entry into Jerusalem. The story

Many US bishops and cardinals have been vocal in their criticisms of immigration policy

An FBI memo called for sources to be developed within parishes

I began to suspect that the bookmakers had no idea what they were doing.