Having spent most of my adult life and career living in western Europe and covering Catholicism, I’ve developed three broad observations about the cultural landscape here vis-à-vis the Church. – First, the Church is undergoing a long-term transition from a culture-shaping majority to an optional subculture, sometimes in harmony with the broader majority and sometimes…
Letter from Rome Had you or I been among the almost 30 million Americans who tuned in to hear Walter Cronkite bring us the news of the evening of October 29, 1969, we would have heard a great deal about an underground Soviet nuclear test that day, one of 19 throughout the year that exacerbated…
In rediscovering what it means to be Italian, will the faith that has defined the country for centuries be reconsidered asks John L. Allen Fifty years from now, Italians now alive probably will still smile whenever someone mentions the summer of 2021, what’s now being described as the greatest summer in the history of Italian…
It was both predictable and inevitable that the Vatican’s “trial of the century”, featuring fraud and embezzlement charges against Italian Cardinal Angelo Becciu and nine other individuals plus three corporate entities, and with the participation of attorneys representing other interested parties such as the Secretariat of State, would begin Tuesday with a whimper rather than…
Letter from Rome Though it hardly made a dent in the weekend’s news cycle given Pope Francis’s bombshell crackdown on the Latin Mass, Italian Cardinal Angelo Becciu announced his latest lawsuit Saturday, in this case suing an Italian newspaper called La Verità for defamation over a report regarding movements of money in Becciu’s home diocese in Sardinia.…
Letter from Rome What impact it may have on the course of justice in a Vatican tribunal remains to be seen, but one point is becoming steadily clearer about the case of Italian Cardinal Angelo Becciu, who’s been indicted along with nine other defendants for various forms of financial crime and corruption and who’s set…
Letter from Rome Toward the end of this week, rumours made the rounds in the Vatican press corps that Friday would be a venerdi di fuoco, meaning a day of fire. Friday came and went without sparks, so we breathed a sigh of relief. It turned out to be short-lived, however, because Saturday brought a…
Letter from Rome In response to a burgeoning controversy last week over the Vatican’s novel protest of a draft anti-homophobia law in Italy, Italian Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Secretary of State, said June 24 the goal of the move wasn’t to interfere with Italy’s internal politics but rather to head off a potential problem. Instead…
Letter from Rome In a seemingly dramatic decision this week, three-quarters of America’s bishops voted to move ahead with a controversial document on the Eucharist despite objections that it could disrupt Church unity and set the stage for a fatal showdown with US President Joe Biden. The key word in that sentence, however, is “seemingly”,…
Letter from Rome Every kid knows that bringing a report card home to the parents is, to a large extent, a challenge in framing things your way. A disappointing C in English? “Everybody knows Mrs Smith is the toughest grader in school … that’s like an A from anybody else.” A surprising B+ in math?…