Readers may have noticed that I’ve been absent from the Crux site for more than three weeks. The reason, which I didn’t announce in advance, is that I recently had to have a fairly major surgery on my oesophagus, and then I spent more than three weeks in the hospital here in Rome recovering. Although I’m home…

Letter from USA Once again a Nobel Peace Prize was announced Friday, and once again a pope didn’t win. This year’s honour went to human rights’ campaigners in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, in what’s widely been seen as an implicit condemnation of Russian President Vladimir Putin and both his war in Ukraine and his anti-democratic…

Letter from Rome Life, as the famous John Lennon saying goes, is what happens while you’re making other plans. In a similar fashion, we might say that news is what happens while you’re paying attention to something else. This summer, Catholic chatter was dominated by ultimately baseless rumours that Pope Francis was about to resign.…

The death of former Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev at the age of 91 has triggered an avalanche of commentary and tribute around the world, mostly focusing on Gorbachev’s role in the peaceful dissolution of the Soviet system for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990. A sidebar to the story that probably deserves…

Pope Francis August 27 created 20 new cardinals, including 16 under the age of 80 and thus eligible to vote for the next pope. It was Francis’s eighth consistory, and whenever we get a new crop of Princes of the Church, several chronic misconceptions tend to head once more unto the breach. Herewith, three conceptual…

Whenever the next papal election occurs, in the run-up to the big vote airwaves and column inches will be full of traditional wisdom about conclaves, often expressed in familiar soundbites destined to be recycled almost endlessly. One such classic is, “He who enters a conclave as a pope exits as a cardinal,” usually taken to…

By now, Pope Francis has denied that he’s on the brink of resigning so often that it’s virtually become part of his verbal “Greatest Hits” collection, akin to his rhetoric on the evils of clericalism or the dignity of migrants. Although he’s 85 and suffering from acute pain in the right knee related to osteoarthritis,…

If you were listening closely this week, your ears may have picked up a subterranean rumbling out of Rome. It was the sound of the tectonic plates of history shifting, as, perhaps for the first time ever, the Vatican actually more or less came clean about its finances. In the old days, it used to…

A new publication by the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life has drawn criticism over contributions from some theologians arguing for a distinction between moral norms, such as the Church’s condemnation of artificial birth control, and the pastoral application of those norms in concrete circumstances. Basically, the suggestion seemed to be that in some limited circumstances,…

Some years ago, veteran Italian journalist Massimo Franco wrote a book about US/Vatican relations called Imperi Paralleli (“Parallel Empires”), arguing that the intersection between Washington and Rome has driven a great deal of history over the last two centuries. At the moment these parallel empires are intersecting again, each gripped by a maddeningly complicated legal drama. Trial…