Mark Vernon, The Guardian, 12th September 2012  


Whatever his supposed shortcomings in an impossible job, the outgoing archbishop of Canterbury practises what he preaches

We will miss Rowan Williams when he is gone. Not because public life will be the poorer without that beard, those eyebrows: Boris Johnson’s blond mop can fill the gap. Not because conservatives and liberals alike will lose a ready scapegoat: there will be others upon whom to load our discontent. But because he is, to my mind, the leading public intellectual of his generation.

Thomas Rosica, The Tablet, 8th September 2012

He was once seen as a possible Pope, and remained throughout his life the torch-bearer of liberal Catholicism. Cardinal Martini, who died last week, was also a biblical scholar and an influential voice in Vatican councils. Above all, he was an intelligent and loyal servant of the Church. 

Michael Day, The Independent, 3rd September 2012

One of Italy’s most revered cardinals has stunned the Catholic Church by issuing a damning indictment of the institution from the grave, calling for its ‘transformation’.

Hours after Milan’s former Archbishop, Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, died on Friday at the age of 85, the leading daily paper Corriere della Sera printed his final interview, in which he attacks the Church – and by implication its current leadership – for being ‘200 years out of date’.