Focus

• Food for thought

  Mar 27, 2014

  Last year, in his last public homily as a sitting pope, Pope Benedict XVI said during Ash Wednesday that “by the grace of God, we are called to transform (the Gospel) into a concrete attitude and behaviour during Lent.”

  

• Transformed by grace

  Mar 27, 2014

  The story of John Newton is generally well known. He was a captain in the African slave trade during the 1700s and eventually had a conversion to Christianity. He later joined with his friend William Wilberforce to bring about the end of the British slave trade.

  

• Lenten lessons to help us throughout life

  Mar 27, 2014

  The Lenten Gospels take us through a bleak and dry landscape. To some, this bleakness signals death. To others, it signals a death of the old self and a transformation to a new self.

  

• Food for Thought

  Mar 21, 2014

  When most of us think of the word “discipline,” we think of punishment or of actions that may take away what brings a moment of joy into our lives.

  

• Lent’s call to discipline

  Mar 21, 2014

  A few years ago, I went to a birthday party for a priest friend who was turning 80. This friend was a great homilist and a great writer, but what also impressed me was that at 80, this lean, wiry priest was still getting up every cold Alaskan morning to jog through the predawn streets.

  

• We need discipline to be disciples

  Mar 21, 2014

  In his First Letter to the Corinthians, the apostle Paul encouraged the Church at Corinth to think of their faith as an athlete thinks of a competition: run to win.

  

• Cardinal Bertone gives account of 2013 conclave

  Mar 21, 2014

  Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the former Vatican Secretary of State, offered his perspective on the conclave that elected Pope Francis, in a candid interview with La Stampa.

  

• Religious asked to live poverty, reject capitalism

  Mar 21, 2014

  The Vatican office responsible for the approximately 900,000 priests and brothers and sisters in religious orders around the world called on them this weekend to re-evaluate their holdings of wealth and to issue critiques of the global market capitalist economy, calling it unjust to the world's neediest.

  

• Analysis of Pope Francis’ first year: the view from the Vatican Reform, Rebuild and Renew

  Mar 14, 2014

  When Jorge Mario Bergoglio appeared in the white papal cassock on the central balcony of St Peter’s Basilica on 13 March 2013, few people – if anyone – could have predicted how the then 76-year-old Jesuit would dramatically re-energise the Catholic Church over the next 12 months.

  

• The journey of our brothers and sisters

  Mar 14, 2014

  Depending on where you come from and your circumstances,when you hear the word “journey,” images of the open road and beautiful landscapes come to mind.