President Barack Obama’s health-care reforms are in deep trouble. All over the United States rival lobby groups have argued and sometimes clashed as opponents of the reforms sense they may be on the verge of victory. There may be sufficient votes in Congress from an awkward alliance of Republicans and conservative Democrats to ensure that whatever legislation emerges from the hullabaloo is a pale shadow of what Mr Obama intended, and indeed promised, during his election campaign. It is unfortunate that the one body that could turn out to be a decisive strategic force in his favour, the US Catholic bishops, have so far concentrated on a specifically Catholic issue – making sure state-funded health care does not include abortion – rather than the more general principle of the common good. Through the national network of Catholic hospitals, delivering nearly 20 per cent of all hospital care, and through the influence they wield as leaders of America’s largest Christian denomination, they could play a central role in salvaging Mr Obama’s health-care programme.

This is indeed a Catholic matter. Few government proposals have had “preferential option for the poor” stamped over them more clearly. Nearly 50 million Americans do not have health-care coverage, which means they cannot afford to go to their doctor when they have symptoms that ought to be investigated, nor can they buy simple and effective remedies such as antibiotics. The Church’s teaching is clear: health care is a basic right, derived from the right to life itself. Of course abortion is important, but the Catholic bishops have not put anything like equal stress on these other social justice dimensions of the health-care debate. Though some grass-roots Catholic lobby groups have mobilised to support the Obama reforms, without episcopal support they will remain marginal to the debate.

The opponents of change are largely funded by the operators of the health insurance ...

One of Pope Benedict XVI’s most controversial initiatives has been his promotion of the Tridentine Rite of Mass as an alternative to the revised rite that reflects the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Archbishop Vincent Nichols, newly installed at Westminster, has lost little time in defusing some of the reasons for the controversy in a forthright message to priests taking part in a training conference ...

It is a toss-up which issue will prove the tougher for President Barack Obama – United States health-care reform or West Bank settlements. Every United States administration since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war has acknowledged that Israeli settlements dotted over the West Bank landscape are a barrier to any peaceful solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has already been responsible for four wars ...

Authorities in Rome have indicated that they want next year’s beatification of John Henry Newman to be conducted in Birmingham, his adopted city. This is a challenge that raises deeper questions – what is the real significance of Newman’s life and work; what is it that should be celebrated? In Britain and elsewhere, Newman’s name is often invoked in support of various causes of the moment ...

Rwandan student Tindyebwa Agaba graduated this week from Exeter University with a 2:1 in politics, six years after he first arrived in Britain. His father had died of Aids, his mother and sister were missing, and after fleeing genocide in his own country, he lived rough in London. His life was transformed by two things: his own ambition and the support of his adoptive parents, the actors Emma Thompson and Greg Wise. ...

Family life in Britain is undoubtedly in crisis, and the breakdown of relationships has reached epidemic proportions. More marriages end in divorce than ever before, and an increasing proportion of the population has dispensed with weddings altogether, preferring the less publicly binding status of informal cohabitation. British Churches, the Catholic Church included, will therefore be sympathetic to the call from ...

Gordon Brown has manifestly not done enough to explain why British troops are dying in the dust and heat of Afghanistan, fighting an enemy whose aim seems to be the replacement of one corrupt Afghan regime by another. True, the Taliban sheltered al-Qaeda in the days when it first declared war-by-terrorism on Western civilisation and carried out the attacks in the United States on 9/11. It is equally true that the Taliban ...