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When lockdown started in March, the world went instantly, strangely silent. City streets emptied. Joggers and families disappeared from parks. Construction projects froze. Stores closed.  Now a network of seismic monitoring stations around the world has quantified this unprecedented period of quiet. The resulting research into “seismic silence,” published in Science today, has shown just how much noise we contribute to the environment. It has also let scientists get an unparalleled listen to what’s happening beneath our feet. “We can safely say that in modern seismology, we’ve never seen such a long period of human quiet,” says Raphael De Plaen at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Querétaro, one of the paper’s 76 authors. Seismic noise, or vibrations of the earth, is most...

Do not resuscitate purple bracelet on a patient in the hospital Getty A report due to be launched this week by disability advocacy organization Inclusion London affirms the fear many disabled people have experienced throughout the pandemic over being denied life-saving treatment, should they become seriously ill with coronavirus. In the report entitled, “Abandoned, forgotten and ignored – the impact of Covid-19 on Disabled people”, several survey respondents attested to being pressured by their doctor to have DNR, or Do Not Attempt Cardio Pulmonary Resuscitation orders placed on their medical records. This is further supported by research carried out last month by disability charity Scope, which found that 63% of disabled people feared they would not receive the treatment they needed if th...

The convent in Livonia, Michigan, was especially hard hit, with 13 out of 44 sisters succumbing to the new coronavirus. Since Good Friday, 13 Felician sisters in one Michigan community and another Felician sister in New Jersey have died, all falling prey to the deadly Coronavirus. The Register talked with Suzanne Wilcox English, who serves as director of mission advancement for the Felician Sisters of North America, about the sisters who lost their lives during the pandemic. English reported that the departed sisters had brought many talents to God’s service: Among their number were teachers, college professors, a multilingual translator, a librarian, a director of religious education, an organist and a nurse. One had served as secretary at the Vatican’s Secretariat of State. Another...

During a short papal flight from Boston to New York on October 2, 1979, Father Jan Schotte (later a cardinal but then a low-ranking curial official) discovered that Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, the Vatican’s Secretary of State, had done some serious editing of the speech Pope John Paul II would give at the United Nations later that day. Schotte, who had helped develop the text, found to his dismay that Cardinal Casaroli had cut just about everything the Soviet Union and its communist bloc satellites might find offensive – such as a robust papal defense of religious freedom and other human rights. Schotte took the revised, bowdlerized text to John Paul II’s private cabin on Shepherd One and explained why he thought Casaroli, the architect of the Vatican’s attempt at a rapprochement with comm...

I was ordained a priest in 2002, on the day before the Sixteenth Sunday of the Year. At my first parish Mass that Sunday, the homilist—the masterful preacher Father Paul Holmes of Seton Hall University—told the people that this new priest was sent to preach the gospel to “congregations that are filled with wheat and weeds, with saints and sinners.” Not a world full of good and evil, but “congregations,” that is, the Church. The parable of the wheat and the tares (Matthew 13:24–43) was read that Sunday, as it is every three years according to the lectionary cycle. So it was in 2002, and again this past Sunday, eighteen years on. “Tares” (or “darnel”) is a more suggestive translation than “weeds,” for the tares are often confused for wheat but are poisonous. They look healthy, but ...