John L Allen Jr/ Crux, Author at Catholic Herald

John L Allen Jr/ Crux

Cardinal Ambongo: emerging papal candidate due to Fiducia Supplicans

January 31, 2024

ROME – There is a story that during British rule of India, colonial officials became concerned about poisonous cobras in the city of Delhi and decided to offer a bounty for every dead snake. Enterprising locals, naturally, began to breed cobras in order to collect the reward. When the British discovered the ruse and withdrew

Is the Pope after an ‘Assisi on the Tiber’ to promote his spiritual vision

January 23, 2024

Mikhail Gorbachev once declared that while he remained an atheist, he had to admit that Soviet Communism had never produced anyone quite like Saint Francis, the Poor Man of Assisi, and his universal humanistic appeal. The former Soviet premier, who visited Assisi in 2008, is one in a long list of global figures who’ve been

Dutch cardinal could get papal successor boost after response to ‘Fiducia Supplicans’

January 21, 2024

ROME – This week voters in the New Hampshire primary will head to the polls, taking part in what has long been the premier proving ground in US politics. A disappointing performance in the New Hampshire primary can spell the premature end of a presidential campaign, while a better-than-expected showing can propel a previously second-tier

Emanuela Orlandi to be back in the spotlight in 2024

January 14, 2024

ROME – If she’s somehow still alive, today would mark Emanuela Orlandi’s 56th birthday. In the popular mind, however, especially here in Italy, she remains forever fifteen, the age at which she vanished after a music lesson in June 1983, thereby creating the basis for the most celebrated unsolved Vatican mystery of the modern era. Orlandi,

Musings from Mongolia: Christmas in Ulaanbaatar with Cardinal Marengo’s small but growing flock

January 07, 2024

ROME – Religion, like politics, is basically local. Faith isn’t forged in the HQs of spiritual bureaucracies and their political battles, however riveting those conflicts may be for journalists, bloggers and posters on social media. Belief instead is won or lost in the trenches, one person, one heart and mind, at a time. In that

Mixed reactions to Vatican ‘Trial of the Century’: will anyone actually go to jail?

December 17, 2023

ROME – After a staggering total of 30 months, 85 hearings stretching over some 600 courtroom hours, 69 witnesses and almost 150,000 pages of documentation, the Vatican’s “Trial of the Century” reached a crescendo on Saturday night with guilty verdicts against Cardinal Angelo Becciu and eight of the other nine defendants. In a sense, the

Becciu guilty: sentenced to five-and-a-half-years imprisonment by Vatican court

December 16, 2023

ROME – In the long-awaited denouement of the Vatican’s “trial of the century,” which has been seen widely as a litmus test of Pope Francis’s press for reform, a Vatican tribunal Saturday sentenced Italian Cardinal Angelo Becciu to five years and six months in prison for his role in various financial crimes. Becciu was also

Changing the conclave? Whatever happens next is likely also to have happened before

December 10, 2023

ROME – Despite two separate denials of mounting intensity, speculation continues to make the rounds that Pope Francis has tasked a veteran Italian cardinal and canon lawyer with preparing changes to the rules governing the next papal election, including the possibility of the participation of laypeople, either beforehand or even in the balloting itself. On

Who needs enemies? Pope’s special nominee to Synod on Synodality facing trial in Sicily

December 03, 2023

ROME – It has emerged that one of Pope Francis’s special nominees to the Synod on Synodality, Luca Casarini, is under investigation in Sicily. The case centres on an Italian non-governmental organization called “Mediterranea,” which Casarini runs. Casarini is a former leader in the “no-global” movement and a leftist activist; in October he took part

Nostra Aetate revisited: do papal overtures to Muslims compromise the Church’s relationship with Jews?

November 26, 2023

ROME – When Pope Francis was elected in 2013, the forecast among those invested in Jewish-Catholic dialogue generally was rosy. The new pope brought considerable background to the relationship, given that Argentina has the largest Jewish population in Latin America and the sixth largest outside Israel – indeed, the first kosher McDonalds outside Israel was

Uncharted territory for Church as Francis’s home country elects ‘anti-Pope’ president

November 21, 2023

DENVER – When you’re talking about the Catholic Church, you need to be awfully careful about using the word “unprecedented” to describe any new development. This is an institution with more than 2,000 years of history, which has seen just about every vicissitude imaginable, and its opposite, over that span. As the late Cardinal Francis

Roma locuta, causa finita est … err, what was that the Pope said?

November 19, 2023

ROME – By any measure one chooses to employ, the papacy is among the most visible offices on the face of the planet. On the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, for instance, Pope Francis’s combined following of 53 million, spread over his nine different language accounts, currently puts him in third place among

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