There is an essay by the cardinal-elect Gianfranco Ghirlanda that dates back to 2013 and may reveal the path Pope Francis intends to take with the reforms. The paper was published in La Civiltà Cattolica just after the resignation of Benedict XVI on March 2, 2013, and concerns the procedures of the Church [...]

Pope Francis granted three interviews published this past week. One to Reuters, published in installments; one to the Telam agency; and one for the podcast of Guillermo Marcò, his legendary spokesman in Buenos Aires, who made a podcast of the Pope’s words.

Beyond the contents of the interviews, Pope Francis’ strategy [...]

Pope Francis’ Apostolic letter number 83 is the Pope’s response to the question of the traditional Mass. Released on June 29 and formally signed in San Giovanni in Laterano because the Pope preferred this formula to emphasize his role as bishop of Rome, Desiderio Desideravi consists of 65 paragraphs and is, in practice, [...]

The Council of Cardinals that took place online June 21 was, in some ways, an extraordinary meeting. Not only because it lasted a relatively short time (less than an hour, according to the official statement) when in general cardinals meet for three days. It was striking that there was talk of the application of [...]

In different ways, both Pope Francis’s approach to issues concerning the Order of Malta and the renunciation to the cardinalate of the Bishop Emeritus of Gent, Lucas van Looy, are mirror images that demonstrate how Pope Francis operates. Now more than ever, Pope Francis is alone in command and follows a particularly personalist approach [...]

With the entry into force of the new apostolic constitution, Pope Francis was expected to appoint all the new heads of departments. It was a formal necessity: in fact, none of the previous dicasteries existed anymore, there was a new constitution, and therefore everyone had to be reappointed, both those who would remain at [...]

What should happen today in the Roman Curia (conditional is mandatory: rumors are rumors, things can change in a moment) is a shock and the definitive blow by Pope Francis to the Curia and the very philosophy of the dicasteries. On June 5, the apostolic constitution Praedicate Evangelium came into force, and therefore the [...]

While Pope Francis shows in every way that he is still firmly in charge of the government of the Church despite his inevitable physical decline, there is a lot of talk about the end of the pontificate, and we are already starting to look to his successor. Nothing new because this has always been [...]

The appointment of the new president of the Italian Bishops’ Conference (CEI) next week will signal how Pope Francis wants to delineate the last contours of his pontificate. It is a common view that by now, the pontificate of Pope Francis cannot have great peaks of novelty but only a last propulsive thrust before [...]

The news of the arrest of Cardinal Joseph Zen on May 11 came like a bolt from the blue. The Cardinal was accused by Beijing of collusion with foreign forces and arrested along with three other people who ran a fund to provide legal fees for those detained by the 2019 protests.

The [...]