Letter from Rome Fans of the Roma soccer team, one of the two professional squads in the Eternal City, are in a grumpy mood these days. In part that’s because of the team’s uneven performance, but even more so because of perceived mismanagement by its American owners, Texas billionaire Dan Friedkin and his son Ryan.…
Letter from Rome If ever proof were needed of Pope Francis’s indefatigable commitment to outreach, the fact that today he’s travelled to Vanimo in Papua New Guinea, the most remote corner of a country which already represents the world’s peripheries, to meet with people utterly unaccustomed to having world leaders come calling, surely delivers it.…
Some years back, a couple of enterprising figures on the Roman scene, devoted Catholics with backgrounds in business, had the bright idea of trying to help the Vatican build a genuine professional development system for its workforce of roughly 5,000, divided between the Roman Curia and the Vatican City State. Fuelling the effort was the…
A recent Vatican move to lodge schism charges against Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, a notorious papal critic who’s accused Pope Francis both of covering up sexual abuse and also various doctrinal errors, has drawn potentially surprising support from a couple of high-profile conservative commentators. Luigi Bisignani, an influential lobbyist and power-broker who has strong ties…
Friday was among the most remarkable single days in the entire Pope Francis era, and given the way this papacy has generated non-stop thrills, chills and spills for more than 11 years now, that’s truly saying something. It was a long day’s journey into night, beginning at 8:30am with a still-unexplained, but nonetheless deeply amusing,…
Letter from Rome With the imminent departure of Joseph Donnelly as the US Ambassador to the Holy See, it seems likely the post will be vacant for a while. It would make little sense to try to ram through a nominee before the election in November, and afterwards it can take a new (or returning)…
Less than a week after Pope Francis called on people to recognise migrants as “a living image of God’s people on their way to the eternal homeland,” voters across Europe dealt a potentially serious blow to that vision by rewarding far-right, anti-immigrant parties in elections for the European parliament. While mainstream, pro-EU forces are still…
When I arrived on the Vatican beat more than 25 years ago, a bitter cross controversy at Auschwitz and tensions over the passion play in Oberammergau both were making global headlines. It was shortly before the release of John Cornwall’s Hitler’s Pope, reviving debates over Pius XII’s alleged “silence” on the Holocaust, as well as Pope…
Letter from Rome Though it’s likely apocryphal, the story goes that during British rule of India, colonial officials became concerned about poisonous cobras in the city of Delhi and decided to offer a bounty for every dead snake. Enterprising locals, naturally, began to breed cobras in order to collect the reward. When the British discovered…
Letter from Rome It was an otherwise quiet day on March 15, 2008, when an unemployed 77-year-old Russian man walked unannounced and unaccompanied through the main entrance to the Basilica of St Francis in the hillside Italian city of Assisi, quietly hoping to mill around and soak in the atmosphere. Perhaps unfortunately for him, that…