The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, resigned last week over his role—mainly of inaction or insufficient action after the fact—in the cover-up of sexual abuse.

Welby’s resignation came mere days after a major independent inquiry concluded he had not sufficiently reported, investigated, or contained John Smythe, a man described as “the most prolific [...]

After Bishop Paskalis Syukur asked not to be created cardinal, Pope Francis decided that the number of red hats with the right to vote in the Conclave would remain unchanged: there will be 20. In Syukur’s place, Pope Francis has decided to give the red hat to the Archbishop of Naples, Domenico Battaglia.

Pope [...]

For all the expectations the late synod on synodality created, it really turned out to be a wet squib. One thing the synod accomplished, however, was to make the language in which the Church describes herself more sociological.

Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, general rapporteur, presented a detail of the Synod’s final document as the real [...]

It is said that Pope Francis is a Pope of the Global South, and this is true. Pope Francis embodies, in words, deeds, and omissions, the vision of the Global South on many issues of great international interest: from the piecemeal world war to the Ukrainian conflict; from the Israeli-Palestinian situation to the vision [...]

A new autobiography of Pope Francis will be published in January of the coming Jubilee Year, 2025. It is called Spera—Hope!, i.e., a verb in the imperative mood—and and a major Italian publishing house is bringing it out. The original plan was to release the book only after Francis’s death, but Francis came to [...]

Finding a common and constant thread running through the first two weeks of discussion at the Synod, well, it takes time and effort. Those who support the synodal path will say the difficulty is a feature, not a bug; that openness to the Holy Spirit also requires not having pre-established plans; that continuous back-and-forth [...]

Pope Francis works by catchphrases. His preferred method is to drop them into an interview or a question-and-answer dialogue.

His method has its fans and supporters. Introducing the book that collects the Pope’s dialogues with Jesuits from around the world, Antonio Spadaro SJ praised the Pope’s refusal to give prepared speeches but to open [...]

Pope Francis will create 21 new cardinals in a consistory to be held on Dec. 8, 2024. Twenty of them are eligible to vote in a conclave, bringing the number of cardinals who would vote in a conclave to 141. The number will drop dramatically during 2025, when 13 cardinals will be over 80. [...]

The letter in which Pope Francis asked the cardinals to limit expenses and find external funding for the Holy See arrived almost unexpectedly. Sent Friday, 20th September 2024, the letter had some of the usual papal rhetoric against the alleged “resistance” to reforms. It took a while to get to the poijnt, too. Finally, [...]

In the jargon of the United Nations’, we speak of third- (or fourth)-generation human rights, not born from common accord but crafted as tools for imposing a vision of the world. The Holy See constantly notes in every international gathering that these rights and their terminology do not have a universal consensus.

In the [...]