- What about the child?
The potential pitfalls of commercial surrogacy have emerged in the case of a Down’s syndrome baby born to a Thai woman. Yet there may be circumstances in which the Church’s ethical opposition to surrogate motherhood could be challenged
- Editorial
- Features
- Columnists
- Home News
- World News
- Parish Practice
- Notebook
- Letters
- Letters Extra
- The living Spirit
- Puzzles
- Books
- Arts
- Classifieds
- Pope appeals for peace and reconciliation in Korea as he begins five-day trip
- Baroness Warsi: PM should seriously consider military intervention to save Iraq's religious minorities
- Catholic Patriarch in Baghdad calls for international community to flush out IS jihadists or face blame for 'slow genocide'
- Benedictine community at Downside holds back from electing new abbot and 'considers its future'
- We should have seen the Iraq crisis coming Baroness Warsi
- Wealthy Korea needs a jolt from Pope Francis Fr John Sullivan
- Any chaplain will do? New Government rules are an attempt to nationalise our faith Bishop Tom Williams
- Nun who removed Islamic flag from east London estate calls for peace
- Jesus in the everyday: view the unusual art of Eularia Clarke
- Missionary medics die as ebola death toll passes 1,000
- Havana gives go-ahead for Catholic church in Cuba
- Rome’s abuse prosecutor thanks media for keeping up pressure
- Ukraine's Catholic leaders back military campaign
- Pope Francis' fulsome tribute to evangelical bishop
- Transport cut puts Welsh Catholic schools under pressure
- Hesitation in the face of evil
There has been widespread criticism, entirely justified, of the British Government’s timid and complacent response to the unfolding humanitarian crisis in northern Iraq. This is not to question the bravery of RAF air crew flying missions to drop supplies to the tens of thousands of Yazidi refugees trapped ...
- Choices facing infertile couples
An Australian couple paid a woman living in Thailand to bear a child for them. In fact she gave birth to twins, one of whom had Down’s syndrome. That child is still with the mother who bore him while the Australian woman has the child’s sibling. This much is agreed: almost all the other facts of the case are disputed.
- No hugging or kissing during the sign of peace – and priests must stay on the altar, states Vatican
- Former Chief Rabbi describes persecution of Middle Eastern Christians as 'one of the crimes against humanity of our time'
- Vatican brings together Mark Carney, Mohammad Yunus, Jeffrey Sachs to call for more person-centred economy
- Archbishop Martin: abuse will remain a wound in the side of the Church until every single survivor has achieved the personal healing he or she deserves
- What about the child?
Joanna Moorhead
The potential pitfalls of commercial surrogacy have emerged in the case of a Down’s syndrome baby born to a Thai woman. Yet there may be circumstances in which the Church’s ethical opposition to surrogate motherhood could be challenged
- Sealed with a handshake
Mark R. Francis
Reactions to the Vatican’s new guidelines on the appropriate way of offering the sign of peace during Mass suggest that the real significance of the document has been misunderstood
- Papacy forged in the crucible of conflict
John Pollard
When the cardinals met to elect a new pope in September 1914, Europe was at war. But the grim international situation was not the only factor that would influence the outcome
- Built by numbers
Helen Gosh
A decade of work by volunteers is uncovering an Elizabethan Northamptonshire garden rich in Catholic symbolism, which is testament to the beliefs of an English recusant
- Contemporary society does not see the persecution of Christians as a popular cause
Francis Campbell
Late last year, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, Douglas Alexander, wrote an article highlighting his concern about the persecution of Christians in the Middle East. Asked about it a few weeks later, he summed up the difficulty at the heart of Western indifference
- Get the balance right
Bernard Cotter
It is good for priests to look for saintly role models, but it is not always easy to find someone whose example offers insights into how to deal with the extraordinary demands of contemporary life
- Faith in the Family: a lived religious history of English Catholicism, 1945-82
Alana Harris, reviewed by James Sweeney
One of the things Pope Francis picks out in his apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium is the importance of popular religiosity. It is now widely acknowledged that an unintended consequence of the transformation of Catholic consciousness at the time of the Second Vatican Council was a neglect of the ordinary forms of piety.
- Uneasy crowns
Mark Lawson
An amusing Hollywood story involves Alan Bennett’s play The Madness of George III being renamed The Madness of King George for its cinema version because of apparent concern in the marketing department that audiences would assume the theatrical title to be the third part in a sequence of summer comedies called “The Madness of George” and choose not to see the movie without knowledge of the previous two.
