Vatican Dispatch
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December 22-29, 2014
What an extraordinary year this has been for the Catholic Church under the leadership of Pope Francis, who continues to inspire and reach the hearts of people far beyond its boundaries!
In this last Vatican Dispatch of the year, I will briefly review what the Argentine pope has done to change the church in 2014 and how he has reached out to the peripheries and opened new frontiers.
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Immediately after his election on 13 March 2013, Pope Francis told himself, “Jorge, do not change, continue being yourself, because to change at your age would be ridiculous.”
He revealed this interesting personal detail in a wide-ranging exclusive interview with Elisabetta Piquè, for La Nacion, the main Argentine newspaper, published today, December 7 (cf links below). She is the paper’s correspondent in Italy, my wife, and author of Francis: Life and Revolution (Loyola...
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December 8-15, 2014
Pope Francis is calling everyone in the church to conversion, especially cardinals, bishops and priests. He is doing so first by example and then by words. And he is disturbing not a few in the process.
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December 1, 2014
On Nov. 8, Pope Francis signed a decree recognizing that Silvio Dissegna, a 12-year-old Italian boy who died from bone cancer on Sept. 24, 1979, had lived the Christian virtues to a heroic degree and can therefore be called venerable.
The signing of that decree may seem an insignificant event in the eyes of the world; but for the pastor-pope, who has given great attention to children and their faith life ever since 1960 in...
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November 24, 2014
‘You know that I am preparing an encyclical on ecology; be assured that your concerns will be present in it,” Pope Francis told 150 representatives of grassroots movements from 80 countries when he met with them in the Vatican on Oct. 28.
As pastor in Buenos Aires, he knew the potential of such movements, and when elected pope he invited two of their representatives—from the wastepaper-pickers’ organization (cartoneros...
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November 17, 2014
The Extraordinary Assembly of the Synod of Bishops on the Family that concluded in Rome on Oct. 19, has not only sparked great interest and expectations throughout the Catholic Church but also raised fears and anxieties in small but influential sectors at leadership and lay intellectual levels.
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November 10, 2014
The recent extraordinary assembly of the Synod of Bishops is likely to go down as a milestone in the history of the church. It was the first time since Paul VI established this organ of collegiality on Sept. 15, 1965, that the assembly “truly functioned as a synod and not a staged gathering of pseudo-concord,” as one senior prelate (who preferred anonymity) told me recently.
There is overwhelming evidence that the October 2014 meeting functioned in a substantially different way than...
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November 3, 2014
The Extraordinary Assembly of the Synod of Bishops on the Family, which closed on Oct. 19, approved a final report that, with the pope’s endorsement, will soon be sent to the 114 Catholic bishops’ conferences worldwide and to the patriarchates and major archbishops of the Eastern Catholic churches.
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October 27, 2014
Pope Francis is concerned about the formation candidates for the priesthood are receiving and is well aware that all is not well behind the walls of seminaries in some countries, and also in Rome, sources say.
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October 20, 2014
The house arrest of the former nuncio, Archbishop Jozef Wesolowski, on Sept. 23, sent tremors through the ecclesiastical establishment in the Vatican and worldwide.
Never before in the history of the Vatican City State had a senior archbishop been arrested for the sexual abuse of minors and possession of a considerable quantity of pornographic material involving minors. The Vatican could arrest him because he was a Holy See...