President Donald Trump’s decision to shut down the US Agency for International Development – USAID – or at least freeze it pending thorough scrutiny and reassessment has created great panic among many of the world’s NGOs counting on it.

According to a logic that began after the Second World War – remember the Marshall [...]

Pope Francis has confirmed Cardinals Giovanni Battista Re and Leonardo Sandri as Dean and Vice Dean, respectively, of the College of Cardinals. The news may appear at first blush to be of the housekeeping variety – and it is – but housekeeping can say a lot..

Re and Sandri have already turned 80, which [...]

Two recent events demonstrate that Pope Francis’s pontificate has lost all balance. They occurred in Latin America and also testify to the polarization and “war” that took place in the Latin American Church in the Seventies.

The two events are the suppression of the Sodalitium Christianae Vitae, a lay association whose founder was convicted [...]

With the announced appointment of Sister Raffaella Petrini as governor of the Vatican City State starting in March, Pope Francis has made his primary intent clear. Faced with an attitude he summarily describes as: “It has always been done this way,” Pope Francis rather applies a personal approach, from which flow changes to both [...]

Pope Francis published his autobiography on Friday of this past week, to significant fanfare, at least from the Vatican side of the operation and certain obliging media outlets.

Titled Spera in Italian—Hope in English, to be read not as a noun but as a verb in the imperative mood—the book hit stores on January [...]

Three papal appointments in one week have created confusion and surprise.

On January 6, Pope Francis appointed Cardinal Robert McElroy Archbishop of Washington. On the same day, the Pope appointed Sister Simona Brambilla as the Dicastery for Religious Institutes prefect. Also on that day, Pope Francis appointed a cardinal, Angél Fernandez Artime, to serve [...]

If all the rumors are confirmed, Pope Francis will visit Nicaea on May 24, together with the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople Bartholomew, to celebrate the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea.

It will not be the first joint trip of Bartholomew and Francis, who have already been together to Jerusalem and Lesbos. If [...]

In his Urbi et Orbi address on Christmas Day, Pope Francis renewed his appeals for ceasefires in Ukraine and the Holy Land. He also took a look at other significant global crises and specifically mentioned the decades-long division—physical and political, hence social—in Cyprus.

Never before has Pope Francis’ diplomacy been put to the [...]

Pope Francis will begin the Holy Year on December 24 with the opening of the Holy Door of St. Peter’s Basilica. Francis’s desire for the Year is to see it unfold under the sign of hope: Spes non Confundit—“Hope does not disappoint”– is the opening sentence and the title of the special instrument by [...]

There is a time and a place for everything, including speculation on the next pope. This week saw some grist for the mill, with the publication of a sort of voter’s guide for the red hats who will pick Francis’s (and Peter’s) successor.

We’ll get to that.

First, we need to consider what [...]