Iraqis hope papal visit can help unify country's diverse communities
- Mar 2, 2021
A Caritas shelter located in Rome’s Termini train station suspended activities after nearly half of its residents tested positive for COVID-19.
Italian prosecutors and the government’s privacy watchdog are investigating how the names of women who miscarried or had abortions ended up on crosses over graves for the fetuses in a Rome cemetery.
Catholics actually love to gripe about boring homilies, so much so that a 2019 book titled The Crisis of Bad Preaching called “hollow, vacuous preaching” perhaps “the most common complaint of Catholics around the world.”
Late August in Rome marks the apex of the summer doldrums, the last chance to get away before the press of the fall begins. Pretty much nothing happens in the city, and that very much includes the Vatican.
It’s a poorly kept secret that Pope Francis has a sweet tooth, with a particular weakness when it comes to ice cream. So it shouldn’t have been surprising that the “cold-call pontiff” was at it again this week, to thank an ice cream shop for the gift of several pounds of Italian gelato.
People who today seem enemies may later become friends; disputes that now seem intractable may dissolve; and ideas that seem anathema may come to be not only acceptable but eminently “orthodox.”