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You don’t expect an apologist to write much about dying and death. That’s for the evangelist trying to close the sale. But the great apologist C. S. Lewis wrote surprisingly often about the death that awaits us all. Lewis wrote so much about death because he believed so strongly in the reality of Heaven and Hell, and wanted his readers to get to the first and not the second. Our final end is the real point of almost all his writing. The pandemic may make us think about a little more about our inevitable death than we usually do. And therefore about how we should live to be prepared for it. Here’s where Lewis is so helpful. He saw clearly how the end of life tells us how to live. From This Life to the Next This is the key to Lewis’s writing on the subject: He believed Heaven to be more real...

> Italiano> English> Español> Français > All the articles of Settimo Cielo in English * Set free on April 7 by the High Court of Australia, which unanimously judged the accusations as baseless, Cardinal George Pell, 79, sent off his prison journal for publication by Ignatius Press, the American publishing house founded and directed by the Jesuit Joseph Fessio, a veteran disciple of Joseph Ratzinger and member of his “Schulerkreis.” And now his wish is coming true. The first volume of Pell’s “Prison Journal” will be released on December 15, and Settimo Cielo is previewing some of the passages here, with the permission of the publisher. The 350-page book covers the first five months of the 404 days the cardinal spent in solitary confinement in the Melbourne Assessment Pr...

CNA Staff, Dec 7, 2020 / 08:00 am MT (CNA).- The Vatican’s Promoter of Justice is seeking an eight-year jail term for a former president of the Institute for Religious Works, according to Italian media reports. The HuffPost said Dec. 5 that Alessandro Diddi had requested the sentence for Angelo Caloia, the 81-year-old ex-president of the institute commonly known as the “Vatican bank”, for money laundering and self-laundering, and embezzlement. Caloia was president of the institute — also known by its Italian initials, IOR — from 1989 to 2009. The website said that this was the first time that the Vatican had sought a prison sentence for financial crimes. CNA has not independently verified the report. The Holy See press office did not respond to a request for comment on Monday. ...

A few years ago, I attended a Mass at which the homilist was a newly ordained young Jesuit.  The homily was his first sermon, and I assume that the Lord gives a profound anointing to a priest’s first sermon.  I never learned the priest’s name, or spoke a word to him, but the sermon he preached on that occasion has affected me every day since. In clear and unequivocal tones, the young priest stated, “God wants to meet you at the point of your greatest fear.”  Go, he explained, to the point of your greatest fear, in your mind and heart, and God will meet you there.  When He meets you there, tell Him about the fear, and He will help you there. Those words struck me in my core.  I had to admit that although I had consecrated my life to Jesus through His Blessed Mother,...

ROME – Although nobody really has paper filing cabinets anymore, we all carry around their virtual equivalents in our heads. Mine contains a gigantic folder, literally groaning with material, which I call my “only in Italy” file. Over the course of twenty-plus years of visiting and living here, I’m often amused by the foibles and idiosyncrasies of Italian life that reflect its utterly unique cultural matrix. More often than not, these “only in Italy” curiosities involve the Catholic Church, with which the country always has had a striking love/hate bond. Case in point? Every day in Rome at noon a canon is fired from the city’s Janiculum hill, near a gigantic statue of Giuseppe Garibaldi, the father of Italian unification. The tradition began in 1847 under Pope Pius IX, who was frustrated t...

One August day in 1987, Brian Campbell was refilling the hole left by a tree stump in his yard in Romford, East London, when his shovel struck something metal. He leaned down and pulled the object from the soil, wondering at its strange shape. The object was small—smaller than a tennis ball—and caked with heavy clay. “My first impressions,” Campbell tells Mental Floss, “were it was beautifully and skillfully made … probably by a blacksmith as a measuring tool of sorts.” Campbell placed the artifact on his kitchen windowsill, where it sat for the next 10 or so years. Then, he visited the Roman fort and archaeological park in Saalburg, Germany—and there, in a glass display case, was an almost identical object. He realized that his garden surprise was a Roman dodecahedron: a 12-si...