Vatican post for Radcliffe

POPE FRANCIS has named the former head of the Dominicans, Fr Timothy Radcliffe, to the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, the Vatican body devoted to social justice, write Liz Dodd and Christopher Lamb.

Fr Timothy, who lives at Blackfriars, Oxford, where he helped to launch a social justice institute, is a theologian and an honorary doctor of divinity at Oxford University. He will serve as a consultor on the pontifical council, one of whose priorities would be the crisis in the Middle East, Fr Timothy told The Tablet.

“This could develop into a region-wide confrontation between Sunni and Shiite Muslims,” he said. “It could lead to even more terrible suffering for millions of Muslims, migration and the virtual extinction of the ancient Christian communities, the Yazidis and other minorities.”