John L. Allen, Jr., at the National Catholic Reporter, took note of the address recently given by Cardinal Peter Turkson, just as Acton did. Allen’s blog post, which referenced Acton’s Samuel Gregg and his National Review Online piece, noted that the Cardinal posed some very specific and probing questions for business people who wish to integrate their spiritual life and work life:
Read more on More on Cardinal Turkson: ‘A Vatican document to make Socrates proud’…
Thanks to George McGraw, Executive Director of DigDeep Right to Water Project, for his kind and thoughtful Counterpoint to my original post. He and his organization are clearly dedicated to the noble cause of providing clean water and sanitation to all, a cause which everyone can and should support. It is also a very sensible objective that would aid the world’s poor much more than trendier causes such as “climate change” and “population control” which tend to view the human person and his industriousness as fundamental problems to be solved through central planning, birth control, sterilization and abortion.
Read more on Reply to George McGraw and Catholic World News on ‘The Right to Water’…
Not surprisingly, the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace (PCJP)’s latest document on water has garnered scant media attention. Why, after all, would journalists, already notorious for their professional Attention Deficit Disorder and dislike of abstract disputation, report on something named “Water: An Essential Element of Life,” especially when it is nothing more than an update of a document originally released in 2003, and then updated in 2006 and 2009, with the exact same titles?
Read more on Does the Vatican think water should be ‘free’?…
The Secretary of State was not pleased.
I couldn’t believe my ears. But today I can.
Sandro Magister, one of Rome’s most veteran and credible vaticanistas, confirmed this afternoon what I had heard – and feared – nearly two weeks ago (See his Nov. 10 editorial “Too Much Confusion. Bertone Puts the Curia Under Lock and Key” ): The Pontifical Council’s controversial Note released two weeks ago “Towards Reforming the International Financial and Monetary Systems in the Context of Global Public Authority” really had not been independently reviewed by the Church’s highest authorities.
Read more on Confusion and Lockdown over Vatican’s Financial Note…
Samuel Gregg is quoted in today’s New York Times story about the Vatican note calling for a central world bank — he gives the final word on the document. The “politically liberal Catholics” quoted before him reveal that they have missed a crucial distinction in the document produced by the Pontifical Council for Peace and Justice. Gregg, of course has picked up on that distinction; he wrote yesterday:
Read more on Vatican’s Call for Central World Bank: What the Left Misses…
This morning the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace issued a bold statement advising how to bring order to the global financial crisis. I was in attendance at the much anticipated press conference that was organized to debrief reporters on the statement’s content.
Read more on Vatican Releases Note on Global Financial Reform…
On his flight to World Youth Day in Madrid this morning, Pope Benedict XVI responded to a question about the current economic crisis. Not sure what the question was, but the well-respected Italian Vatican analyst Andrea Tornielli captured the reply. Here’s my quick translation of the Pope’s answer:
Read more on World Youth Day: Pope talks profits and people…
Last week the Federal Circuit Court handed down what seemed to many a funny decision: that human genes are patentable. Myriad Genetics owns patents for two tumor suppressor genes, BRCA1 and BRCA2 (mutations of these genes are correlated with increased incidence of breast cancer, making them of great interest to doctors and scientists). Myriad was sued by doctors and researchers who claim that genes fall into the category of “products of nature,” which makes them unpatentable, but the court disagreed.
The President of Chile, Sebastián Piñera, visited Pope Benedict XVI in the Vatican yesterday, and the Vatican’s daily newspaper L’Osservatore Romano carried a front-page article by Piñera on “Economic Development and Integral Development,” a theme of great interest to us at Acton and the subject of our current conference series Poverty, Entrepreneurship and Integral Development.
Read more on Chilean Model of Integral Development Visits the Vatican…
Steve Connor in The Independent (HT: RealClearReligion) speculates about some happenings at the Vatican with regard to genetically-modified (GM) food. It’s important to note, as is the case in this article, that things that happen in various committees and study groups at the Vatican do not by default have some kind of papal endorsement.
