Benny Lai, dean of Italian Vatican-watchers, during the last years of his life always insisted, “It’s not my Vatican anymore.” Lai – accredited since 1946 – especially missed the sense of symbols, the importance of gestures, the theological depth. Benny Lai was not a believer. But he grasped the core issue at the [...]

The latest interpretation of Benedict XVI’s resignation was given in recent weeks by Fr. Silvano Fausti, a Jesuit who was Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini’s confessor. Right before he died last month, Fr. Fausti granted a video interview and recounted that during their last meeting Cardinal Martini had told the current Pope Emeritus that [...]

Pope Francis’ trip to Latin America may be epitomized in one image: the Pope’s disappointed face when the Bolivian president, Evo Morales, gave him a crucifix sculpted in the shape of a hammer and sickle that had been allegedly designed by the Jesuit Fr. Luis Espinal, assassinated by a death squad in [...]

Each of Pope Francis’ steps in the upcoming trip to Ecuador, Bolivia and Paraguay will be characterized by the Spanish word “alegria”. This is the same theme heralded by “Evangelii Gaudium” (the Joy of the Gospel), the Apostolic Exhortation that Pope Francis has indicated to be the reference point of his pontificate. [...]

To encounter the secular world or to shape a new civilization? Pope Francis’ Church is divided between these two poles. Despite the Pope’s continual appeals in favor of desecularization, of going against the grain and of fighting ideological colonization (especially in terms of the family,) his notion of ‘going to the peripheries’ has [...]

The encyclical “Laudato Si” not only reveals Pope Francis’ thought concerning the social teaching of the Church and good ecological practices. The genesis of its drafting also reveals the world around Pope Francis. True, the Pope makes his decisions himself. But is is also true that there is a world around him, [...]

What if Pope Francis’ encyclical on ecology is in reality a text with a broader message, and ecology is just a papal pretext to ask the world’s rulers for further mutual collaboration and a greater commitment to peace, and to ask people of good will to adopt a more sober lifestyle? A few days [...]

There must be a hidden criterion by which Pope Francis chooses the countries to which he travels. As far as the Old Europe is concerned, after the trip to Sarajevo the criterion seems clear: going where God is needed and where the thirst for God has created what he calls – when speaking about [...]