The 185-year-old St Malachy's seminary opened just four years after Catholic Emancipation

There had been speculation that Mgr Gilfredo Marengo's commission would challenge Church teaching

Fr Carlos Aldunate SJ taught the young Jorge Mario Bergoglio in 1960

Mount St Bernard Abbey faced an uncertain financial future. Then the monks created an ale that has critics buzzing

If someone were to produce a word count of one of the most overused words in our language today, I imagine that the word “pride” would come very near to winning the contest. “Pride” is our zeitgeist word: it’s the spirit of the age. We’re constantly told how “proud” we should be about every aspect

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When Cardinal Leopoldo Brenes heard that paramilitaries had surrounded a basilica in the city of Diriamba, he dropped everything and rushed there. Masked men seemingly working for the government had trapped protesters inside and the cardinal feared a massacre. More than 300 people have been killed in Nicaragua since April, when the state announced pension

✣ Cardinal’s aide arrested for alleged child abuse What happened? The former chancellor of the Archdiocese of Santiago, Chile, was arrested following allegations that he had abused seven children aged 11 to 17. Five of the reported victims were his nephews. The priest, Fr Óscar Muñoz Toledo, has been jailed pending a trial. Police are

✣ Highlights from the week online Cleared of murder – then hugged by a Pope Amaury Coutansais-Pervinquière told the incredible story of Tomasz Komenda, a Polish man who spent 18 years in jail after being wrongfully convicted of the rape and murder of a teenage girl. His mother had given him a photo of St

Lansing, Michigan Consecrated virgins ‘shocked’ by new Vatican rules The US Association of Consecrated Virgins has said it is “deeply disappointed” after a Vatican instruction suggested the discipline was open to women who were not virgins. The document, Ecclesiae Sponsae Imago (“The Image of the Church as Bride”), said: “To have kept her body in

The Vatican is drawing up guidelines for the sale of deconsecrated buildings Does not God dwell here anymore? That is the question a conference at Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian University will be addressing later this year. Starkly as it is couched, and poetic as it sounds, the question is in reality quite prosaic. The focus of

The Ofsted head’s latest speech won’t allay the concerns of faith schools “The last thing a chief inspector should be is a crusader.” So said the Chief Inspector of Schools, Amanda Spielman, in a Guardian interview back in February. And yet the Ofsted chief has often been caught up in controversies over what she calls