Blog
Pope Francis calls upon the Catholic charismatic community to work for justice
Asking the world’s charismatic Catholics to take up the invitation of a little known 1970s document urging service of the poor may not seem, at first glance, a radical move.
Francis - the health check
No pope has spoken with such candour about his health, physical and mental, as Francis. Austen Ivereigh sums up the diagnosis.
Francis, US bishops and defending Communion from political manipulation
Just as the true meaning of the Eucharist needs to be defended from those who would use it for publicity, it needs to be defended from those who would use it to divide the worthy from the unworthy.
A Time of Great Uncertainty
Toward the end of March I suggested to Pope Francis that this might be a good moment to address the English-speaking world: the pandemic that had so affected Italy and Spain was now reaching the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia. Without promising anything, he asked me to send some questions.
A Welcome Interruption
A new book by John Cornwell describes the welcome interruption of Francis’s papacy.
On Papal Populism
Pope Francis’s new book offers a vision for a politics rooted in solidarity.
‘Come and See’: The encounter that becomes news
An experienced Vatican journalist texted me when the Pope’s World Communications Day message was released over the weekend. She was bowled over by it and wanted to know if I knew who had had a hand in it (I didn’t). “This message is just so much more concrete, real, and knowledgeable about the business,” my friend wrote. “It’s not just pious platitudes.”
Pope Francis, Fake News, and Post-Truth Journalism
My Christmas was odd, and not just because of lockdown. After three weeks launching Let Us Dream, Pope Francis’s remarkable book on the pandemic that I helped him put together, I was quoted in a UK tabloid news site forecasting his impending resignation.
After Boris gets Brexit done, what’s next for Britain?
Combining an appetite for power with ideological vagueness and counterintuitive alliances, the world’s most successful election-winning machine has done it again.
Beyond the pandemic
In his new book Let Us Dream, the Pope shares a very personal vision of a fairer world in the aftermath of Covid. In one of the most moving passages, he describes coming to see that the call to live in friendship with God and our neighbour is inseparably bound up with care for our environment.
Read: An exclusive essay by Pope Francis on a ‘personal Covid,’ his exile in Argentina
In his new book, “Let Us Dream,” Pope Francis describes his three “personal Covids”: times in his life when circumstances have forced him to stop, reflect and, sometimes, change course.
Our guide to the future: Pope Francis' Covid-19 challenge
This might have been the year when Pope Francis would have seen his work completed. Instead, Covid-19 pitched the world into turmoil and darkness, with its future in the balance, and gave its most prominent spiritual leader his greatest challenge – and opportunity.
The McCarrick Report: 40 years of facts laid bare
There are two jaw-dropping revelations in the Vatican report on the apparently irresistible rise of former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick.
Defending Marriage Is Not Enough
At a vast outdoor Mass in Medellín, Colombia, in September 2017, Pope Francis gave one of the best homilies of his pontificate: on how Jesus showed his first followers what it meant to do God’s will rather than stop at law and morality.
To Discern and Reform: The ‘Francis Option’ for Evangelizing a World in Flux
Writing in the October 2018 issue of The Way, Austen Ivereigh suggests that Pope Francis 'sees in the tribulation and ferment of the Church an opportunity for patient conversion through a renewed humble and joyful dependence on God’s mercy.'
Remembering our future: Pope Francis and the corona crisis
Austen Ivereigh reveals exclusively to Thinking Faith how the interview – the pope’s first for English-language Catholic publications – came about, and how the pope sees a world in crisis being offered the chance to change.
The Pope & the Plague
It was perhaps the most liturgically dramatic moment in the long history of the papacy. A solitary figure in white, stumbling from sciatica, climbed the long steps to the dais above a rain-sodden St. Peter’s Square. “Behold our sorrowful condition,” Pope Francis began.
How to Read ‘Querida Amazonia’: New Wine, New Wineskins
Jesus spoke of the need for new wine in new wineskins for a reason: sometimes we don’t see and hear the new thing happening because we’re looking out for the old thing. Nowhere has that been truer than in the reception of Pope Francis’s latest apostolic exhortation, Querida Amazonia.