In two moves, Pope Francis has shown he intends to strongly carry forward the line of zero tolerance on clergy sex abuse. Two very clear moves: an archbishop has been put on house arrest, another one has been removed from his post. Yet, all of this may not be sufficient to remove the [...]
That Pope Francis wanted to proclaim Pius XII blessed is something that has been rumored in recent times. To speed up procedures, the Pope could use the «equipollent canonization,» a formula he already used six times since the beginning of the Pontificate. He might do it again. Pius XII’s file has been [...]
The time for the diplomacy of truth came into play when the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue released a strongly worded statement last Aug. 12. For the first time, a Vatican dicastery listed all the horrible acts of the Caliphate, subtly reminding the secular world that it was the secularist [...]
The “nota verbale” (verbal note) sent by the Vatican’s Secretariat of State to all the ambassadors accredited to the Holy See represents Pope Francis’ most recent initiative to promote peace. It is through persuasion, dialogue and prayer that Pope Francis hopes to influence current armed conflicts, to bring them to an end. In [...]
That Pope Francis is very attentive to the dialogue with non-believers is clear from his most recent conversation with Eugenio Scalfari, the founder of the Italian leftist newspaper “La Repubblica”. Scalfari, a self-proclaimed atheist, who even wrote a book entitled “Me and God”, on his being a non-believer. The conversation published by [...]
Decisions are yet to be announced, and they will be this week. But the amount of gossips, rumors, even the leaks anticipating the data of the balance sheet of the Institute for Religious Works (the so called “Vatican bank”) show that there had been a war behind these decisions. The roots of this war [...]
As the establishing of a Secretariat for Communication among the offices of the Roman Curia seems imminent, the closing of a missionary magazine has again led to questions about the very communication of faith to the peripheries of the world, Pope Francis’ favorite theme. While communications are ever more professionalized (a needed [...]
Perhaps a Pope coming from the ends of the world was needed to put an end to the so-called “Italian exception”. Id est, that privileged relationship between Italy and the Holy See that tightly linked the two banks of the Tiber. The relation was tight because of geography: Rome is in Italy, and [...]
Pope Francis, some say, may be the first Pope to earn a Nobel Prize, for Peace. Only a few people know that, before Francis, the idea of proposing Benedict XVI for the Nobel Prize, in Literature, had been seriously considered.
Father Giuseppe Costa, director of the Vatican Publishing House, had this idea, as he [...]
In his last meeting with Roman clergy, Benedict XVI spoke about a «Second Vatican Council of the media and a real Second Vatican Council,» complaining that the media wanted to set the agenda of the Conciliar fathers. Nowadays something similar is happening again, with respect to Pope Francis’ papacy. One could speak about [...]