Pope Francis will begin the Holy Year on December 24 with the opening of the Holy Door of St. Peter’s Basilica. Francis’s desire for the Year is to see it unfold under the sign of hope: Spes non Confundit—“Hope does not disappoint”– is the opening sentence and the title of the special instrument by [...]

There is a time and a place for everything, including speculation on the next pope. This week saw some grist for the mill, with the publication of a sort of voter’s guide for the red hats who will pick Francis’s (and Peter’s) successor.

We’ll get to that.

First, we need to consider what [...]

The Consistory of December 7 might not have ended on December 8 with the Mass of the Cardinals. There is a sense in which it will continue until December 15, when Pope Francis will make a one-day visit to Corsica. That visit is one discerning observers may choose to see as a sort of [...]

The new papal funeral rite has a striking detail: in the first phase, the one at home, the dead Pope is exposed in a simple white cassock. This is particularly unusual. Priests are composed in their vestments because a priest is a priest forever. All the more so for a bishop, who is “chief [...]

Motus in fine citius, the old physicists would say, “Movement increases as the end approaches.” Writers use it when they want a fancy way of saying that time itself seems to compress and therefore to move more quickly in times of crisis, and especially in times of final crisis. If it applies generally, the [...]

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, resigned last week over his role—mainly of inaction or insufficient action after the fact—in the cover-up of sexual abuse.

Welby’s resignation came mere days after a major independent inquiry concluded he had not sufficiently reported, investigated, or contained John Smythe, a man described as “the most prolific [...]

After Bishop Paskalis Syukur asked not to be created cardinal, Pope Francis decided that the number of red hats with the right to vote in the Conclave would remain unchanged: there will be 20. In Syukur’s place, Pope Francis has decided to give the red hat to the Archbishop of Naples, Domenico Battaglia.

Pope [...]

For all the expectations the late synod on synodality created, it really turned out to be a wet squib. One thing the synod accomplished, however, was to make the language in which the Church describes herself more sociological.

Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, general rapporteur, presented a detail of the Synod’s final document as the real [...]

It is said that Pope Francis is a Pope of the Global South, and this is true. Pope Francis embodies, in words, deeds, and omissions, the vision of the Global South on many issues of great international interest: from the piecemeal world war to the Ukrainian conflict; from the Israeli-Palestinian situation to the vision [...]

A new autobiography of Pope Francis will be published in January of the coming Jubilee Year, 2025. It is called Spera—Hope!, i.e., a verb in the imperative mood—and and a major Italian publishing house is bringing it out. The original plan was to release the book only after Francis’s death, but Francis came to [...]