Letter from Rome It’s probably fair to say that over the centuries, the Pope’s criminal justice system hasn’t exactly enjoyed a sterling reputation. Nineteenth century French novelist and journalist Edmond About, whose 1859 book The Roman Question remains arguably the single best treatment of the papal court, wrote that in the unlikely event you were ever to…
Letter from Rome US President Joe Biden went before the United Nations September 21 and declared, “We are not seeking a new Cold War, or a world divided into rigid blocs.” The statement became necessary in the wake a week earlier of the new “AUKUS” pact among the US, the UK and Australia, seen precisely…
Letter from Rome There’s a famous scene in Woody Allen’s classic 1977 movie Annie Hall in which he and Diane Keaton are having separate sessions with a couples’ counsellor, and their exchanges are shown on a split screen. When the therapist asks how often they’re intimate, Allen says, “Hardly ever, maybe three times a week,”…
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…