Analysis Archives - Page 3 of 40

Meet the prototype for a ‘Pope Francis bishop’
- May 11, 2016
In late April, Bishop Nunzio Galantino visited the southern Italian town of Lamezia Terme in the region of Calabria, one of the most impoverished and mafia-infested zones of the country, to consecrate a new church. Galantino, 67, told the small crowd that there’s something ironic about dedicating a church building

By John L. Allen Jr.
Recalling the anniversary of a broken papal heart
- May 10, 2016
Wherever one chooses to start the story of the modern simplification of the papacy, a key point along the way has to be the first time the world really saw a pope display a broken heart in public, even flirting with rebuking God. It happened on May 10, 1978, the

By John L. Allen Jr.
Pope Francis and Christianity beyond the bunkers
- May 8, 2016
Andrea Riccardi, founder of the Community of Sant’Egidio, had an insightful piece on Saturday in the Italian paper Corriere della Sera about the speech Pope Francis delivered the day before in receiving the prestigious Charlemagne Prize for European integration. In a nutshell, Riccardi’s argument was that Francis sees the main

By John L. Allen Jr.

Theft of sausage and cheese offers a Vatican 101 lesson
- May 7, 2016
Over almost twenty years on the Vatican beat, here’s one iron-clad certainty I’ve reached: A lot of stories that get covered around the world as “Vatican” news actually have much more to do with Italy and its foibles, rather than anything specifically related to the Holy See. Of course, given the

By John L. Allen Jr.

As great speeches do, Francis freeze-frames the moment for Europe

May 6, 2016

The great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, whom Pope Francis – then a young Jesuit – invited in 1968 to speak at the school where he taught, once wrote an essay about the relationship of Argentine culture to European traditions. Having absorbed millions of its emigrants, built cities that imitated

By Austen Ivereigh

Facing an ugly truth about anti-Christian persecution

May 5, 2016

Because of the vast scale of it, and also because its victims tend to be impoverished and already marginalized for other reasons, anti-Christian persecution deserves to rank as one of the transcendent human rights issues of the day. Other religious groups are imperiled too, and if a defense of religious

By John L. Allen Jr.

The Vatican’s most important American may be … nobody

May 3, 2016

For the last decade, there was a clear, slam-dunk answer to the question, “Who’s the most important American in the Vatican?” Everyone knew it was Peter Wells, an official of the Secretariat of State who was recently appointed the pope’s new ambassador to South Africa and made an archbishop. There

By John L. Allen Jr.