A bureau within the US State Department said on Sunday it is “monitoring” the abortion facility “buffer zone” case of a Dorset woman, ahead of the release of her verdict on Friday. 

The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, & Labor (DRL), a bureau within the United States Department of State, issued a statement on the case of Livia Tossici-Bolt, 63, on X, saying: “We are concerned about freedom of expression in the United Kingdom… We are monitoring [Dr Tossici-Bolt’s] case.”

US Vice-President JD Vance is reported to be considering a visit to Rome during Easter weekend.

According to Bloomberg, the potential plan would see the US vice-president arrive in Rome on Good Friday, 18 April, and depart from the city on Easter Sunday, 20 April.

The news outlet reported on 1 April that it had viewed correspondence confirming the intended visit, though it noted that an official involved has said that the trip is still in the planing phase and could change.

ROME – Italian Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s Secretary of State, has said Pope Francis continues to rest after his return from the hospital, and is not receiving anyone or holding meetings or audiences of any kind.

He also said that no definitive plans for Holy Week and Easter have yet been decided, but expects that cardinals could be tapped to preside over liturgical celebrations in the pope’s place.

Speaking to journalists on the margins of a recent event in Sacrofano, Parolin said that after his March 23 return from Rome’s Gemelli Hospital, the pope “rests, he doesn’t see anyone, and, to my knowledge, he does not have audiences and he does not receive people.”

MUMBAI, India – On Sunday, Pope Francis offered his prayers for the people of Myanmar, who have been “suffering so much because of the earthquake.”

The 7.7 earthquake on March 28 has killed at least 1,600 people in Myanmar and 18 in neighbouring Thailand.

Cardinal Charles Maung Bo of Yangon, the president of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Myanmar, issued a statement saying the Church “joins our country’s men and women in solidarity as they face yet another crisis.”

“This tragic event has further exacerbated the profound multi-dimensional humanitarian crisis already gripping Myanmar, where, as per the UN estimate, nearly 20 million people, including 6.3 million children, are in dire need of assistance,” the cardinal says.

“How did he look?” That was the question people would ask, for years, every time I attended a papal event. The Pope in those days was John Paul II, who had the looks of a leading man and the gait of a star athlete when he was elected and kept them both for well over a decade.

John Paul II had an appendectomy in October of 1996 (a little less than a year before I moved to Rome), but would not be hospitalised again until February of 2005, even though he was less and less himself.

There had been speculation regarding his health for years, in particular, rumours – later confirmed and eventually acknowledged even by the Vatican – that John Paul II was suffering from Parkinson’s Disease. I don’t quite recall when he began to use a roller as a mobility aid and strength-saving measure, but he was definitely relying on it by the Jubilee Year 2000.

In his new book, Sebastian Morello has produced a brilliant excoriation of how and to what effect western civilisation has been possessed by Cartesian thought and what he subsequently terms “the black magic of modernity” – of which he argues our present society is an extreme manifestation. Morello’s central target in Mysticism, Magic, and Monasteries: Recovering the Sacred Mystery at the Heart of Reality is the supremacy of rationalism and Cartesian dualism – the fundamental distinction between mind and body posited in the 17th century – by which, he argues, European societies and the western Church have been misled to the point of complete inversion.

Why did the prodigal son, in Sunday’s Gospel, decide to come home? He had become restless in his father’s house but now he had found a new and worse monotony, feeding the pigs abroad. He was hungry physically, but he also had a hunger for something deeper, as revealed by the little phrase “entering into himself” which introduces his monologue about going home (Luke 15:17 – our lectionary is more metaphorical: “he came to himself”).

By implication, he had been living “outside himself” beforehand, and only by “entering into” himself did he realise that he needed to “enter into” his home again: he realised he was a son, even though his sins had turned him into a slave, given nothing by his master.

Yet his awareness of being a son was still confused: he wanted to say “treat me as one of your hired servants” to his father, and rehearsed these words as he walked home. But his father’s loving embrace took these words from his lips: he rehearsed them but couldn’t actually say them in that moment, since he knew unmistakably that his father was treating him with love as a son not a slave.

Chaldean Catholic Archbishop Bashar Warda has been named in a federal lawsuit in the United States filed by a dual Iraqi-American woman over claims about his personal, political and business ties to what is essentially the Iraqi mafia.

For years, Archbishop Warda has been a point of reference not only within his Chaldean Catholic community, but for Iraqi Christians generally, especially in the wake of the violent persecution and mass displacement unleashed by ISIS in 2014.

Amid the ISIS-induced mass displacement and the ongoing effort to rebuild after the liberation of the Nineveh Plain in 2017, Warda gained a reputation as an avid entrepreneur and one of the strongest defenders of one of the world’s most persecuted Christian minorities.

Fish-free Lent?

Sir – We generally consider Lent as a time for “giving up something”. In pursuit of broadening our Lenten horizons, the faithful could consider giving up unhelpful notions and prejudices and, in turn, choose to abstain from the consumption of that which is not ours in the first place – namely, the flesh of fish and other animals. Extending compassion and kindness to all is inherent not only to the Christian faith, but to the essence of what it means to be human.

As an Oregon Catholic currently resident in the UK, I read Portland Archbishop Alexander Sample’s recent response to the Governor of Oregon’s designation of 10 March as “Abortion Provider Appreciation Day” with great interest. 

Having now returned to Oregon for a visit home I have since heard two homilies from Oregon priests reflecting on the Archbishop’s wise words.

Under the headline “The Celebration of Death”, Archbishop Sample’s teaching opens with the following line:

“There are moments when words fail, when the mind stares into the abyss and finds no bottom. When all that’s left is a kind of stunned silence – the kind you feel when you realise just how far a culture can drift from reality.”

ROME – Nearly a week after being discharged from the hospital, Pope Francis continues to make slow but steady improvement, however, it is still unclear whether he will be able to preside over Holy Week and Easter liturgies.

The Vatican Press Office said Friday the pope continues to undergo daily respiratory and motor physiotherapy, and he continues to receive drug therapy to treat the remnants of his complex respiratory infection.

He was discharged from Rome’s Gemelli Hospital on Sunday, March 23, after spending 38 days at the facility for treatment of a polymicrobial respiratory infection and double pneumonia. Admitted Feb. 14, he had two close brushes with death during the ordeal, but managed to pull through.

As an Oregon Catholic currently resident in the UK, I read Portland Archbishop Alexander Sample’s recent response to the Governor of Oregon’s designation of 10 March as “Abortion Provider Appreciation Day” with great interest. 

Having now returned to Oregon for a visit home I have since heard two homilies from Oregon priests reflecting on the Archbishop’s wise words.

Under the headline “The Celebration of Death”, Archbishop Sample’s teaching opens with the following line:

“There are moments when words fail, when the mind stares into the abyss and finds no bottom. When all that’s left is a kind of stunned silence – the kind you feel when you realise just how far a culture can drift from reality.”

In a recent ethics lesson, I introduced a class to the concept of Virtue Ethics. Not all of my pupils were entirely convinced, something which shouldn’t have surprised me given the zeitgeist in which these young students are steeped.  

Virtue Ethics, in brief, is an Aristotelian ethical theory that seeks to find the “golden mean” between the vices of excess and deficiency. This “golden mean” is a virtuous characteristic.

Such virtuous acts, Aristotle says, should then be repeated until they become habit. And then, by becoming habit, they become embodied as character.

For example, the excess of the golden mean “courage” is “recklessness”, and the deficiency is “cowardice”. By practising “courage” it becomes habitual and thus the individual becomes a courageous person.

Virtue ethics is not purely Aristotelian, however; Catholicism borrows heavily from this thought-world and frames a lot of its moral language in terms of virtues and habits.

As Jilma Meneses settles into her role at the helm of Catholic Charities of Western Washington, she says her top priority is to establish the organisation’s sustainability plan for the future given the uncertainty around potentially looming federal cuts.

Like Catholic Charities branches nationwide, Catholic Charities of Western Washington – encompassing the areas covered by the Archdiocese of Seattle – operates a number of its services through federal and state contracts. For Meneses, the question now is if and how the organisation can provide those services if those contracts disappear.

To find out, and prepare, the organisation is creating budget scenarios related to the potential impacts to the organisation’s programs, and people, for budget cuts up to 50 per cent.

Mel Gibson’s sequel to his hit movieThe Passion of the Christ is set to begin production in Italy this August. The new film, The Resurrection of the Christ, been 20 years in the waiting.

The Passion of the Christ was released in 2004 and garnered a profit of $370 million domestically, becoming both acclaimed and controversial for its graphic portrayal of the sufferings of Christ on His way to Cavalry. Many credit it as the movie that opened the door to faith-based films and media production taking off in Hollywood. 

News of the start date for The Resurrection of the Christ came from Manuela Cacciamani, CEO of Rome’s Cinecittà Studios, reports Catholic News Agency (CNA).

“I can confirm that the next film directed by Mel Gibson, produced by Icon Productions, The Resurrection of Christ, will be shot entirely in Cinecittà starting in August and requires many theatres and stage constructions,” the CEO said in an interview with Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore.

Pope Francis’s primary doctor during his hospitalisation has said it was the Pope himself who chose to keep trying different therapies when his life was most at risk, and has also attributed the pontiff’s “miraculous” recovery, in part, to prayer.

Speaking to Italian journalist Fiorenza Sarzanini with Italy’s newspaper of record, Corriere della Sera, Doctor Sergio Alfieri said the night of Feb. 28 was “the worst” night of the Pope’s five-week-long ordeal.

A journalist considered a living legend within the Vatican’s press corps has spoken about the unique communication style of Pope Francis that has, in her opinion, revolutionised how the papacy addresses the world.

Mexican journalist Valentina Alazraki compared the different styles displayed across the three most recent papacies she has covered – popes John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Francis – highlighting the weaknesses and strengths displayed during the different papacies, and how the different styles of the respective popes impacted both how the media covered the head of the Catholic Church and reflected him back to the wider world.

Alazraki gave a keynote address during the third communications conference of the Spanish Conference of Religious (CONFER), held recently in Madrid.

A member of the US federal commission that monitors religious freedom worldwide has expressed hope that the Trump administration will prioritise the issue, especially as the overall situation continues to deteriorate around the world.

“Our new Secretary of State [Marco Rubio] was a champion of international religious freedom when he was in the senate, so I imagine when the dust settles at the State Department…this will be a priority for him and that’s encouraging,” Maureen Ferguson, a commissioner with the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, told Crux on March 25.

Jordan Peterson made a helpful contribution to our understanding of the dynamics of the exchange of ideas, when he observed that, in the case of certain dogmatic progressives, it was not so much a case of people having ideas on certain subjects, but more that the ideas seem to have the people.

In fact, he went further and used the language of deliverance. He talked more specifically of people being possessed by certain ideas. Elon Musk offered a variation on the same theme, by describing certain ideas as analogous to a virus. In particular, he talked about people being infected by a “woke-mind” virus.

Both these approaches differ from what have been the normative assumptions about ideas in a culture that stretches back to the Enlightenment. But they do raise the question of whether people have ideas or ideas have people?

ROME – Without mentioning Pope Francis directly, the Israeli Embassy to the Holy See hit back against the pontiff’s condemnation Sunday of the resumption of “heavy Israeli bombings” in Gaza, saying renewed military action is because Hamas is not respecting ceasefire conditions.

“The Israeli operation is conducted in full conformity with international law and seeks to reduce the civilian damage to a minimum,” a March 24 statement from the Israeli Embassy to the Holy See said.

It insisted that Israel’s recent military activity in the Gaza Strip is being conducted “in full conformity with international law. While Hamas deliberately targets civilians, Israel adopts extraordinary measures to reduce the civilian damage to a minimum”.