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 [...]

The Consistory of December 7 might not have ended on December 8 with the Mass of the Cardinals. There is a sense in which it will continue until December 15, when Pope Francis will make a one-day visit to Corsica. That visit is one discerning observers may choose to see as a sort of [...]

The new papal funeral rite has a striking detail: in the first phase, the one at home, the dead Pope is exposed in a simple white cassock. This is particularly unusual. Priests are composed in their vestments because a priest is a priest forever. All the more so for a bishop, who is “chief [...]

Motus in fine citius, the old physicists would say, “Movement increases as the end approaches.” Writers use it when they want a fancy way of saying that time itself seems to compress and therefore to move more quickly in times of crisis, and especially in times of final crisis. If it applies generally, the [...]