Vatican Weekend for February 26th, 2017 features a moving testimony from a former supervisor of executions at a U.S. prison who describes how this harrowing experience led him to become a strong opponent of the death penalty and our resident Vatican watcher Joan Lewis reviews the past week’s events in the Vatican.Listen to this program produced and presented by Susy Hodges:
Vatican Weekend for February 26th, 2017 features a moving testimony from a former supervisor of executions at a U.S. prison who describes how this harrowing experience led him to become a strong opponent of the death penalty and our resident Vatican watcher Joan Lewis reviews the past week’s events in the Vatican.
Listen to this program produced and presented by Susy Hodges:
Palma il Giovane (1550-1628), "Portrait of Pope Pius V." / Credit: Public DomainNational Catholic Register, Apr 30, 2024 / 04:00 am (CNA).Michele Ghislieri, later St. Pius V, was born in Bosco, northern Italy, in 1504 and ordained a Dominican priest in 1528. Recognizing his holiness and learning, his community elected him prior four times.During Pius' lifetime, the Protestant ideas of Luther and Calvin were dissolving Catholic unity throughout Europe. In 1542, Pope Paul IV reorganized the Roman Inquisition to combat them and named Pius an inquisitor. In 1555, the newly elected Pope Pius IV made Pius bishop and later cardinal of Nepi and Sutri, a diocese near Rome, and general inquisitor of all Christendom (with authority over all other inquisitors).Throughout his life, Pius devoted much time to prayer and practiced severe personal penances. He disliked public life and involvement in the governance of the Church, preferring the peace of the cloister, but relented when he saw tha...
Father David Waller will become the first bishop Ordinary of the Ordinariate. / Credit: Courtesy photo / Bishop's Conference of England and WalesNational Catholic Register, Apr 29, 2024 / 18:45 pm (CNA).The Vatican has announced a new leader of the ordinariate in Great Britain.Father David Waller, 62, a parish priest and vicar general of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, will replace Monsignor Keith Newton, 72, who is retiring after serving over 13 years as the ordinary of the ecclesiastical structure for former Anglicans.In a statement, Newton called the Vatican's April 29 announcement "momentous" given that Waller, who is a celibate, will become the first bishop ordinary of the ordinariate. As someone who was already married as an Anglican clergyman before entering the Church through the ordinariate, Newton was not allowed episcopal consecration.Established by Pope Benedict XVI in 2011 through his 2009 apostolic constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus, the ordin...
Landscape view of Sacrofano, Italy, north of Rome. / Credit: Dmitry Taranets/ShutterstockRome Newsroom, Apr 29, 2024 / 15:00 pm (CNA).The World Meeting of Parish Priests for the Synod opened on Monday to discuss "how to be a synodal local Church in mission," allowing priests from around the world to discuss questions raised during the ongoing synod and share their personal pastoral experiences. The four-day meeting, which is taking place from April 29 to May 2 at the Fraterna Domus retreat house in Sacrofano, Italy, just north of Rome, is attended by about 300 priests from around the globe and is divided into several sessions, taking cues from different themes and questions raised in the synod's synthesis report. "The parish priest is a man of the people and for the people. Like Jesus, he is open to the crowd, constantly open to the crowd, to help each and every one understand that they are a letter from Christ," said Cardinal Mario Grech, secretary general of the Gen...
