Is the Andrew Tate phenomenon something Catholics should be talking about?

The former professional kickboxer made the news in 2022 when he was arrested with his brother, Tristan, in Romania on charges of rape and human trafficking. He has been in the news again recently, after he returned to the US to face a civil case from a woman who alleges he and his brother coerced her into sex work and then defamed her after she gave evidence to Romanian authorities.

On Friday, Tate said he was returning to Romania to clear his name, and denies all the accusations.

In the last week, the internet has been ablaze with comments about Netflix’s new mini-series titled Adolescence.

The immaculately produced show follows the story of a 13-year-old boy, Jamie, who is accused – and guilty – of murdering a young girl from his school.

The motive? Jamie’s acceptance of “toxic masculinity” – specifically, the manosphere of online misogynistic content.

I have written before on this topic and there is no doubt that such content exists in vast quantities across both the darker and more mainstream areas of the internet. And it is certainly true that the ideas picked up by the show are ones that parents and teachers are wrestling with daily.

The show has been so influential that the UK Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, has called for the programme to be shown in schools to raise awareness of the issues.

The hyper-masculine Andrew Tate, a man currently accused of sex trafficking, has been the primary focus of concern by various bodies, as a homing beacon of the movement.

Catholic activists who assist immigrants and refugees in El Salvador have lamented the deportation of 238 Venezuelan immigrants by President Donald Trump’s administration to El Salvador, where they were placed by President Nayib Bukele’s administration in a mega-prison on 16 March. They say they feel impotent in the face of the arbitrariness of Bukele’s regime, which ignored information requests and failed to clarify any doubts raised by the detainees’ families.

Since his presidential campaign, Trump had pledged to invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to expel undocumented immigrants allegedly affiliated with criminal or “terrorist” organisations.

In his previous campaign, Trump had repeatedly mentioned MS-13 (or Mara Salvatrucha, a gang originally formed by Salvadorans in Los Angeles and later expanded throughout Central America and Mexico). Now, he has frequently cited the Venezuelan mafia group Tren de Aragua, claiming that it had infiltrated the United States.

Pope Francis’s medical team has announced that after five weeks of hospitalisation and two brushes with death, he will be discharged today, but must continue to rest and undergo his various therapies at home.

Speaking to journalists during a March 22 press conference, Italian doctor Sergio Alfieri, director of the medical surgical department of Rome’s Gemelli Hospital and head of the Pope’s medical team there, said: “The good news is that the Holy Father is being discharged.”

“The Holy Father will return to Santa Marta,” he said, referring to the Pope’s residence in the Vatican’s Saint Marta guesthouse.

However, while well enough to leave hospital, Francis will be required to observe a period of rest for two months and must continue his drug regimen and his motor and respiratory physiotherapies.

Today Pope Francis made his first public appearance in five weeks, coming to a balcony of Rome’s Gemelli Hospital to wave and give a blessing to the faithful who had gathered below.

He arrived in a wheelchair as the crowd, estimated at between 500 and 600 people, chanted his name and cheered.

Francis appeared rested but visibly fatigued by the effort, waving and giving a few thumbs up. When he asked for the microphone, he said he had spotted an elderly woman in the crowd holding a bouquet, adding in a raspy voice: “Thanks to everyone. I see a woman with yellow flowers, she’s great!” 

In Sunday’s Gospel, Jesus tells a parable about a fig tree in a vineyard. It is striking that the owner has planted it among his vines, and so when it fails to bear fruit he considers cutting it down so that it does not “use up the ground” meant for the vine.

When we are called into the Church, we are like fig trees in a vineyard: we have no right to be there – our presence is a grace. And if we do not bear fruit in charity, we are not only harming ourselves but also depriving others who might otherwise bear fruit: we are “using up the ground”. Do I ever consider that the place I take in the church pew – or seat on the sanctuary – might be used better by another?

It’s not that I’m jealous of Fr Mike Schmitz and his success in producing an app that takes you through the Catechism in one year – and which has been downloaded millions of times – but I’m certainly inspired. The Catechism is one of the richest resources in the Catholic Church; Protestantism falls apart into thousands of splinters without an authoritative presentation of what the Church believes and teaches.

It’s one of the reasons so many people convert to Catholicism from Protestant denominations. In a society where so many people feel cast adrift without moorings, there is an ever-increasing hunger for something that contains the ring of truth and that they can engage with at a serious level. That’s partly why, with one of my other hats on – and inspired by Fr Schmitz – the YouTube channel Catholic Unscripted has set about offering a journey through the Catechism.

Hundreds of Catholics gathered at Mar-a-Lago, President Donald Trump’s famous Palm Beach private club and residence, for a prayer and fellowship event on the Feast of St Joseph.

The 19 March event at the famous location in Florida was organised by Catholics for Catholics, a group that seeks to unite conservative ideals with Catholic teachings and promote a shared appreciation of US heritage.

Tickets for the event, priced at $1,500 for the full programme, included morning activities, a cocktail reception and dinner. The gathering drew both lay Catholics and around 100 priests were expected to attend.

Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin has said that during his three recent visits to Pope Francis in hospital there has been no discussion regarding the option of resignation.

“No, no, not at all,” the cardinal stated when asked by reporters at an event held at the St. Regis Hotel in Rome on 10 March, reports the Catholic News Agency (CNA).

Parolin addressed the topic of the health of the 88-year-old pontiff who has been hospitalised since Feb. 14, and his ability to still lead the global Catholic Church.

“I think we should go by the medical reports, because they’re the ones that tell us exactly what the Pope’s condition is,” the cardinal said, noting that during his last visit to the Pope at Gemelli Hospital on March 9, he found him in better condition than on his previous visits.

The number of Catholics around the world has tipped over the 1.4 billion mark, according to the latest research from the Vatican.

The Vatican’s Central Office of Church Statistics has released the 2025 Pontifical Yearbook providing details about the number of Catholics, consecrated religious, priests, bishops and the like throughout the world.

The global Catholic population increased by 1.15 per cent between 2022 and 2023, rising from approximately 1.39 billion to 1.406 billion, according to the Pontifical Yearbook 2025, which was compiled by the Central Office of Church Statistics, a department of the Vatican’s Secretariat of State.

The percentage increase was very similar to that of the previous biennium, reports Vatican News.

In perhaps another sign that he is not willing to be limited by his hospital bed, Pope Francis has released his prepared message for the forthcoming 62nd World Day of Prayer for Vocations that will occur on 11 May.

In his statement released 19 March, the Pope describes how “a vocation in the Church” is not limited to those who pursue ordination to become priest; everyone can experience a form of vocation, the pontiff says, “whether lay, ordained or consecrated”.

He explains: “Every vocation confirms us in our mission of being Christ’s presence wherever light and consolation are most needed. In a particular way, the lay faithful are called to be the ‘salt, light and leaven’ of the Kingdom of God through their social and professional commitments.”

Pope Francis has sent the Presidential Medal of Freedom he was awarded by former President Joe Biden to Buenos Aires Cathedral.

Awarded to the Pope a few days before the end of Biden’s administration in January 2025, the medal was officially received at the cathedral in the Argentinian capital with a special Mass on 13 March and will now be exhibited in a museum.

Even though Biden’s reasons for honouring the Pope ostensibly had a humanitarian basis – he mentioned in a previous conversation with Francis his gratitude for the pontiff’s work to alleviate global suffering and in defence of human rights and of religious liberty – politics may have played a role for both of them in relation to the medal.

On Wednesday morning the Pope concelebrated Mass for the liturgical solemnity of Saint Joseph in the chapel attached to his private suite on the 10th floor of Gemelli Hospital.

He spent the rest of the day alternating between his various therapies, prayer and some work activities.

As Pope Francis marks 33 days in Rome’s Gemelli Hospital fighting double pneumonia, the official medical information provided to journalists has become less detailed and less frequent, which in this case would appear a positive sign.

A new mini-documentary specially produced for the Catholic Herald sheds light on the divide in the Catholic Church between traditionalists who desire the right to practise the Latin Mass and progressives who see the old rite as an outdated relic.

At the same time, there are those who defend the role, accessibility and importance of the Novus Ordo rite and fear that it, along with the unity of the Church in general, risks being comprised by the heat and turmoil generated around the Latin Mass issue.

With Pope Francis’s health even more in question, given his recent medical scares, many are contemplating what the future holds for the Tridentine Mass.

Offering further confirmation of his ongoing recovery, Pope Francis has written to Italy’s leading newspaper from his hospital room to call for “disarming the earth” in the context of the various wars currently underway, including Ukraine and Gaza.

“We must disarm words, to disarm minds and disarm the earth,” Francis wrote. “There is a great need for reflection, for calm, [and] for a sense of complexity.”

In a moment of tension, the pope called for special attention to language, calling on journalists especially to “feel the full importance of words”.

Catholics around the world will have been delighted at the news that Pope Francis is now recovering from his ailments. Progress has been slow, his doctors concede, but it seems to be measurable. No date has yet been set for him to leave Rome’s Gemelli hospital. Yet the presumption is certainly that he will do so. Given the touch-and-go nature of Francis’s condition during February, the sense of relief is palpable.

Francis’s illness catalysed a somewhat surreal experience for me as a papal historian. In my book Electing the Pope, I discussed at some length the complex economy of knowledge which has traditionally surrounded the pope’s health. Cardinals, ambassadors of Catholic powers, but also the Roman people themselves would go to extraordinary lengths to discover any fragment of information. 

ROME – In the heart of St Peter’s Square, where every night for the past month the Roman Curia has been staging a rosary for Pope Francis, there stands a towering statue of Saint Peter with one hand pointing out and another hand pointing to the ground.

The symbolic meaning of this is is thought to be that the hand pointing to the ground means this, Vatican City, is where laws are made, and hand pointing out, to the world, is where they are obeyed.

Of late the Vatican has been giving the world an object lesson in the point, calling for an implementation of the pope’s Synod on Synodality, one point of which is the empowerment of women and laity, while simultaneously pretending these women and laity don’t exist in their nightly rosary for the ailing pontiff.

ROME – On Monday the Vatican confirmed a recent phone call between a top official and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and voiced its hope that any ceasefire agreement reached would be free of any “preconditions”.

In a March 17 statement, the Vatican confirmed that three days prior, on March 14, Zelenskyy spoke with Secretary of State Italian Cardinal Pietro Parolin over the phone, which Zelenskyy wrote about the same day on social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.

“When the sun had gone down and it was dark, behold, a smoking firepot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces.” (Genesis 15:17)

In Sunday’s first reading, God commits himself to Abraham through a blaze of glory. As we know from Jeremiah (34:18-19), it was customary to walk between cut-in-half animals as a sign of a commitment, the implication being that one who breaks it will be cut in half too.

So when God passed between the split carcasses, He promised to make Abraham’s offspring as many as the stars (Genesis 15:5), while He shone forth with flames, like a star Himself. Abraham in his slumber would never have dreamed that God would break His word and suffer the curse symbolised.

Being in Rome when even taxi drivers and waiters will volunteer updates on the state of the Pope’s health is a strange experience. One can only imagine what it must have been like for Vatican watchers or residents before the invention of smartphones, X and the 24-hour news cycle.

In 1958 Michael de la Bédoyère, who was then editor of the Herald, found himself in the excruciatingly tricky position of not knowing for sure whether Pope Pius XII was alive or dead when the paper faced its weekly press deadline. He gambled that he would be dead by the time the paper went on sale in time for Sunday Mass. 

De la Bédoyère was proved to be right. Pope Pius’s condition had been gravely worsening all week after two strokes, the first of which had paralyzed him, after which he received the Last Rites. After the second stroke, his situation was described as beyond hope – hence the editor’s gambit.