In Erfurt, Germany, there are 70 stairs that separate the cathedral from the Church of St. Severe. Erfurt was the place were Martin Luther was an Augustinian monk before his ‘reformation’ and schism. And these 70 stairs were often used as a symbol of the distance between the Catholic Church and the Lutheran [...]

Faith and intellectual depth: these are the two key words provided by Fr. Arturo Sosa, elected General Superior of the Society of Jesus, These keywords epitomize the character of the Jesuits, and will weigh on the new General’s formulation of the guidelines of his mandate. The General Congregation that elected Fr. Sosa, [...]

Pope Francis announced the third consistory of his pontificate the day after Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco was elected President of the Council of European Bishops’ Conferences (CEBC). The two events are not linked. But the two choices indicate two different orientations. And this leads to a question: is there a submerged schism in [...]

Paradoxically, Pope Francis’s “Back to the Future” adventure happened with his two-step trip to Caucasia, that is, in those lands where history is measured in millenniums, rather than in centuries. It is really looking toward East, to those lands full of history, that one can find the future challenges of Catholicism, for at [...]

There is a thread that links Pope Francis’s international trips with Curia reform and even with the profile of new bishops – in the end, the real reform of Pope Francis. This thread outlines criteria provided by three keywords: periphery, decentralization, “pastorality”. These are the three main topics of Pope Francis’s pontificate – [...]

What is the Holy See’s latest mission? To take religions out of the ghetto where they have been abandoned as a result of public opinion and radicalism. This mission seemed to be the main theme behind the speeches that Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Vatican Secretary of State, delivered at the United Nations.

In [...]

Benedict XVI’s “Last Conversations,” the recently published book interview with journalist Peter Seewald is not only a sort of final chapter of the Pope Emeritus’s biography – he will soon turn 90 – the book is a clue to interpreting the Church that shows once more just how few people really understand

With his second motu proprio in a few months, Pope Francis completed one part of the much discussed Curia reform, thus closing the era of reforms that followed Blessed Pope Paul VI’s rationale. The new dicastery for Integral Human Development does not simply mark the shutdown of the Pontifical Councils for Justice and [...]