Joseph Zen Ze-kiun, an Emeritus Cardinal from China, has warned the Vatican that allowing the Chinese government to appoint Catholic bishops would mean “surrender”. He, made the comment on Tuesday following an announcement by the current bishop, John Tong Hon, that the Vatican and the Chinese government are in dialogue over the appointment of bishops. Read more
Pope Francis has created a gender-balanced commission to study the possibility of allowing women to serve as deacons in the Catholic church. The 12-member panel of scholars will study the question of whether women were ordained as deacons in the early church, and whether they could be ordained in the Catholic Church today. If female Read more
A Marist priest and theologian who died last week in Dublin had his heart and spirit broken by the Vatican, a former president of Ireland has said. Mary McAleese was speaking of the late Fr Seán Fagan, who died at St Vincent’s Hospital in Dublin last Friday. For many years he was critical of Vatican Read more
An arrangement is reportedly looming between the Vatican and China that would fall short of full diplomatic ties, but would address key issues. Reuters reported sources as saying a working group was set up in April to resolve the issue of who has authority to select and ordain bishops in China. The group is also Read more
There are many ways of analyzing the fault lines in the Vatican, but perhaps the most time-honored (if also often exaggerated) is the tension between an Italian old guard and pretty much everybody else. By conventional political logic, anyway, Saturday saw the Italians notch a fairly big win. It could turn out, however, to be Read more
The Pope has clipped Cardinal George Pell’s wings by removing some of the administrative functions done by his department. Pope Francis essentially reversed a 2014 law that had transferred the main operational section of the patrimony office to the Australian cardinal’s Secretariat for the Economy as of Saturday. Francis said he is removing the tasks because Read more
Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI has alleged that a so-called gay lobby was operating in the Vatican when he was Pope, but he broke it up. Benedict’s comments were reported in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Serra. The comments are in a new book of interviews between the retired Pope and journalist Peter Seewald. Corriere della Read more
Brother Guy Consolmagno is the director of the Vatican Observatory and president of the Vatican Observatory Foundation. Raised in Detroit, Michigan, he studied Earth and Planetary Sciences at MIT for his bachelor’s and master’s degrees and at the University of Arizona for his doctorate. During a break in his studies he spent two years teaching Read more
The Vatican and an archbishop in the Philippines are engaged in a tug-of-war over the validity of alleged Marian apparitions. A few months ago, Archbishop Ramon Arguelles of Lipa announced that alleged apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary to a local nun in 1948 were supernatural. But last month, Archbishop Arguelles stated the Holy See Read more
Rome’s first ever female mayor has promised to pursue unpaid taxes worth hundreds of millions of euros from the Vatican. Virginia Raggi, 37, had said that if elected, she would pursue claims worth €250m and €400m. These are allegedly unpaid taxes on the Vatican’s real estate holdings and other assets. The taxes had never been Read more