In Depth:  Catholicism

evangelicals & catholics

Leonardo De Chirico

Evangelicals have known for centuries that Rome is a ‘mission field’.

It is no coincidence that as soon as the breach of Porta Pia opened in 1870 (when Rome was liberated from Papal power and the Pontifical State ended), Bibles and Christian tracts were immediately smuggled in to further the evangelisation of the city. Rome was a mission field because it prevented the free circulation of God’s word in the vernacular language and suppressed any attempts to bring about a Biblical reformation.

evangelicals & catholics

Leonardo De Chirico

The publication of Fiducia supplicans (18 December 2023) is stirring a hot debate. Some say that nothing changed; others say that all changed. The declaration came from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (the former Inquisition), with explicit approval from Pope Francis.

It provides ‘the possibility of blessings for couples in irregular situations and for couples of the same sex’ (n. 31). The Vatican document also says that there is no question of recognizing gay unions as marriage, that Catholic doctrine on marriage, sex and sexuality does not change, that the blessing is not a sacrament but a sacramental, that it has no liturgical official setting … all important, yet secondary, doctrinal clarifications that do not modify the main point. What had never been officialised in a magisterial document is now part of Rome’s teaching.

evangelicals & catholics

Leonardo De Chirico

The veneration of relics is tragically alive and well.

This September, a relic of the heart of Saint Pio (Padre Pio) will be exposed for veneration in San Giovanni Rotondo (southern Italy), where Saint Pio (1887–1968) lived most of his life and is buried.

evangelicals & catholics

Leonardo De Chirico

Because of the massive number of Roman Catholics around the world (1.3 billion people!), there is a high probability that all of us have neighbours, friends, family members and colleagues who are such.

Wherever you are in the world, Roman Catholics will likely to be your next door neighbour. Many Catholics believe and behave like most Western secular people do: without any sense of God being real and true in their lives. In other words, they are not born again, regenerated Christians.

evangelicals & catholics

Leonardo De Chirico

We may well know people who are professing Roman Catholics. They may be friends, colleagues, family members, neighbours.

They may be practicing or just nominal. They may be disconnected from their church or serious about their loyalty to it. They may be interested in starting a ‘spiritual’ conversation or indifferent towards religious things. They may be consistent with what they profess to believe or have their own ‘fruit salad’ type of belief system where elements of Roman Catholicism are combined with Eastern religions or secular practices. That is to say that Roman Catholics can be very different people. How can we communicate the gospel to them?

evangelicals & catholics

Leonardo De Chirico

It was the historian Paolo Prodi (1932– 2016) who coined the expression ‘Tridentine paradigm’ to indicate the set of identity markers that emerged from the Council of Trent (1545–1563) and which shaped the Catholic Church for centuries, at least until the second half of the 20th century.

Prodi explored the self-understanding of the institutional Church of Rome which, in the wake of and in response to the ‘threat’ of the Protestant Reformation, closed hierarchical and pyramidal ranks up to the primacy of the Pope. The Church consolidated its sacramental system, regimented the Church in rigorous canonical forms and parochial territories, and disciplined folk devotions and the control of consciences. It promoted models of holiness to involve the laity emotionally and inspired artists to celebrate the new vitality of the Church of Rome in a memorable form.

evangelicals & catholics

Leonardo De Chirico

When the reigning pope creates new cardinals, it is because he is thinking not only of the Roman Catholic Church of today but, above all, that of tomorrow.

Cardinals are those who, in addition to assisting the pope with governing the universal Church, meet in conclave and elect the successor once the reigning one has died or, as in the case of Pope Ratzinger, resigns.

evangelicals & catholics

Leonardo De Chirico

At first glance, it seems like a cannibalistic gesture, even if it is addressed to God and not to a human being. Yet it is the quintessence of Roman Catholicism.

We are talking about ‘eating God,’ an act that is at the heart of the Roman Catholic understanding of the Eucharist. Can Roman Catholicism really be thought of as the religion of ‘eating God’? Exploring it is Matteo Al-Kalak, Professor of Modern History at the University of Modena-Reggio, in his latest book, Mangiare Dio. Una storia dell’eucarestia (Eating God. A History of the Eucharist).

evangelicals & catholics

Leonardo De Chirico

Since the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman coined the expression Liquid Modernity (2000), the adjective ‘liquid’ has been applied to almost all phenomena, e.g. liquid society, liquid family, liquid love, etc.

In our world, liquidity seems to describe well the vacillating, uncertain, fluid and volatile feature of contemporary life. To the already wide range of associations, liquidity has been added as a descriptor for a specific religious tradition, i.e. liquid Roman Catholicism. George Weigel, a conservative American intellectual, talks about it in a worried tone in his article ‘Liquid Catholicism and the German Synodal Path’ (First Things, 16 February 2022).

evangelicals & catholics

Leonardo De Chirico

Among the many puzzling things introduced by Pope Francis, his teaching (magisterium) is perhaps the level that was most impacted by the Argentinian Pontiff.

Many Roman Catholics (and also many non-Catholic observers), accustomed to associating the papal magisterium with an authoritative, coherent and stable form of doctrinal teaching, are perplexed if not dismayed by a Pope who seems both to say and not say, to argue for something and to undermine it, to state one position and then contradict it the next breath.

evangelicals & catholics

Leonardo De Chirico

I am not English, nor Anglican, but the story of the conversion of the former Anglican bishop Michael Nazir-Ali to Catholicism struck me.

Bishop Nazir-Ali’s concerns over the trajectory taken by the Anglican Church on some key doctrinal and moral issues made him look at Rome as a much safer place to identify with. Rome’s image was perceived as being a traditional, stable, authoritative institution with an aura of doctrinal and moral integrity. The question is whether Bishop Nazir-Ali is aware of the evolutions of Roman Catholicism under the papacy of Francis, which are the result of trends stemming from Vatican II.

evangelicals & catholics

Leonardo De Chirico

The fire at Notre-Dame cathedral (see photo) in Paris on 15 April, 2019 is a symbol of the church that burns in secularised Europe and, more generally, in the globalised world.

Andrea Riccardi’s book, La Chiesa brucia: Crisi e futuro del cristianesimo (The Church Burns: Crisis and Future of Christianity) (Bari-Rome: Laterza, 2021) starts with the evocative image of the burning Notre-Dame. Riccardi is well-placed to bring forth his analysis, being professor of Contemporary History at the University of Rome III and a biographer of John Paul II. His is an insider’s and scholarly voice on the inner dynamics of Roman Catholicism.

evangelicals & catholics

Leonardo De Chirico

There is a general perception that Pope Francis’s pontificate has entered an irreversibly declining phase.

It is not just a question of age: yes, Pope Francis is elderly and in poor health. But aging aside, the pontificate finds itself navigating a descending parabola. It started with the language of ‘mission’ and ‘reform’. Francis’ reign, now nearly ten years old, was immediately engulfed in difficulties, particularly within the Catholic Church.

evangelicals & catholics

Leonardo De Chirico

On the occasion of the 700th anniversary of Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), Pope Francis wrote an Apostolic Letter to celebrate Dante as a ‘prophet of hope and poet of mercy’.

The magnitude of Dante’s significance for Western civilisation is extensive. Here the focus will be to sample Dante’s relationship with the Bible in The Divine Comedy, his most-known work.

evangelicals & catholics

Leonardo De Chirico

Whenever we talk about lands tormented by decades of wars and violence, sometimes perpetrated in the name of religions, we must do so with sobriety.

This is to say that commenting on Pope Francis’ recent trip to Iraq (5-8 March 2021) can become a pretext for easy criticism if one does not try to enter the complexity of the situation. Therefore, it must be acknowledged that the Roman pope’s call to religious freedom, his appeal to respect for minorities, and his invitation to national conciliation were commendable.

evangelicals & catholics

Leonardo De Chirico

Indulgences make us think of the time of the Reformation. Some may think of indulgences as a matter of the past, relating to the days of Martin Luther, and not be aware that the Roman Catholic Church has been offering them since, and is still offering them today.

In the teaching of the Catholic Church, an indulgence is ‘a way to reduce the amount of punishment one has to undergo for sins’ according to Catholic author, Edward Peters.

evangelicals & catholics

Leonardo De Chirico

It has been rightly called the ‘political manifesto’ of Pope Francis’ pontificate.

In fact, there is a lot of politics and a lot of sociology in the new encyclical All Brothers, a very long document (130 pages) that looks more like a book than a letter. Francis wants to plead the cause of universal fraternity and social friendship. To do this, he speaks of borders to be broken down, of waste to be avoided, of human rights that are not sufficiently universal, of unjust globalisation, of burdensome pandemics, of migrants to be welcomed, of open societies, of solidarity, of peoples’ rights, of local and global exchanges, of the limits of the liberal political vision, of world governance, of political love, of the recognition of the other, of the injustice of any war, of the abolition of the death penalty. These are all interesting ‘political’ themes which, were it not for some comments on the parable of the Good Samaritan that intersperse the chapters, could have been written by a group of sociologists and humanitarian workers from some international organisation, perhaps after reading, for example, Edgar Morin and Zygmunt Bauman.