Marginalized, sidelined from history, increasingly made to play a part which is not that of the main character – as secularization increasingly envelopes the Church from the inside, attacks against the Church are coming more frequently from the outside, from the cultural world, following a campaign that began with the Enlightenment. Traces of this [...]
Beyond the issues to be clarified, the story that involved the Order of Malta and that brought about the resignation of the Grand Master at the Pope’s request might provide a formidable key to understanding Pope Francis’s pontificate. Pope Francis’s ideas, choices and perceptions come almost directly from his personal history. This point [...]
Moscow or Beijing? While nothing is yet known about Pope Francis’s 2017 trips – except for the already scheduled trip to Fatima for the 100th anniversary of the apparitions – this question is not about the near future, but the distant future of possible papal trips. And it deals with those two Eastern [...]
The “lineamenta” (guidelines) of the forthcoming synod on young people, published January13, paved the way to a new path for the synod. Much has changed since the times when it was thought that the Synod of Bishops was going to gain more importance in the Curia – the chair of the first [...]
A recent article published in the onine magazine The Week and then mentioned in various American media shed light on a particular “modus operandi” of Pope Francis in tackling the issue of abuse of minors by clergy.According to the article, Pope Francis is dismantling the set of reforms put into effect by St. [...]
From Leonardo DiCaprio to Martin Scorsese, from “The Revenant” to “Silence,” Hollywood as usual feels the world’s pulse and shows how the Church is perceived, or at least the way the world would like to perceive it. It is probably not by chance that Pope Francis’s 2016 opened with a January 28 meeting with [...]
It was Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Mueller, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, who gave a wider breadth to the current debate around the Vatican and within the Church. The debate involves Catholic doctrine, the post-synodal exhortation “Amoris Laetitia,” and the Pope himself, and it has taken very sharp, almost wary [...]
Pope Francis delivers his Christmas greetings to the Roman Curia this week, and during the first week of January he will deliver his first address of the year to the diplomatic corps. It is likely that these two speeches will set the tone for the upcoming year, one that could be rich in surprises.
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What will be the leading themes of the next Conclave? This question has been circulating for some time in Rome, and it does not come from an alleged wish to get rid of Pope Francis, nor from the improbable possibility that the Pope would resign or even die. The question is circulating because, after [...]
At midnight on November 30 the historical Vatican Radio station located within the Vatican walls shut down its broadcasts on medium wave (AM). This is part of a process of broadcast reform that began back in 2012 when the then Vatican Radio Director, Fr. Federico Lombardi, SJ, announced that the Radio was going [...]