On August 8, Pope Francis received José-Lluis Serrano Pentalant, coadjutor bishop of Urgell, in audience. On paper, it looked like just another visit with one of the many newly elected bishops in the world. Most of them meet the Pope at the moment of receiving the mandate. This meeting has something more interesting.

The [...]

Pope Francis appointed Archbishops on July 29th: Msgr. John J. Kennedy, Secretary for the Disciplinary Section of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, and Msgr. Philippe Cuberlié, Undersecretary of the same Dicastery. The choice is rather out of the ordinary, at least in part. It is especially eyebrow-raising, when one considers the [...]

Pope Francis’s decision to change the primatial see of Argentina should not be seen as merely a local choice. Indeed, the decision and the reasons for the decision itself represent, in some way, the entire modus operandi of Pope Francis. There are, in the Pope’s choice to move the primatial see of Argentina from [...]

There is a paradox at the origin of the Francis pontificate. Francis’s reign originated precisely from those who, today, contest him and even out-and-out fight him, and find themselves marginalized and even expelled.

In short, Pope Francis’s pontificate was born from a kind of “self-fulfilling prophecy,” from the idea of a misfortune that one [...]

To judge by the working document recently published, the synod assembly by which Pope Francis wants to introduce the “synodal method” as the practice of the Church will be a reflection of the Francis pontificate.

The working document of the final stage of the Synod on Synodality has substantial differences compared to the first. [...]

It isn’t every day the pope’s chief-of-staff testifies in a major legal proceeding. It’s an even rarer thing for the papal chief-of-staff to testify in proceedings conducted by a state other than the Vatican. That’s what happened last week, though, and it was a really big deal.

Archbishop Edgar Pena Parra, sostituto of [...]

The appointment of Archbishop Georg Gänswein as nuncio to the Baltics closes a circle. Pope Francis had asked Benedict XVI’s former secretary to return to his diocese of Fribourg without assignment after announcing the termination of his role as prefect of the Papal Household. After a year and a half, Francis assigned Gänswein to [...]

Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò faces trial for schism. The outspoken prelate was summoned by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to examine the evidence against him on Thursday, 20 June 2024. The announcement was made by the former nuncio himself, who since 2018 has been the protagonist of a series of [...]

The presentation of the document “The Bishop of Rome” on June 13 was occasion for a a rare exercise in parrhesia (candor) when Cardinal Kurt Koch responded to a question about the ecumenical impact of Fiducia Supplicans. It was a reasonable question, since the Coptic Orthodox Church decided to suspend theological dialogue over the document.

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Between the end of this month and the beginning of August, there will be at least three financial documents from the Holy See:

• The annual report of the Financial Information and Supervision Authority
• The annual report of the Institute for Works of Religion
• The annual budget of the Administration [...]