- Pope Francis sacks entire board of Vatican's financial watchdog The Independant 06/17/14:
Pope Francis’s battle to clean up the Vatican’s scandal-mired bank, the Institute of Religious Works (IoR), has entered a new stage, with his removal of the entire board of the Holy City’s financial watchdog.
The five Italians heading the Financial Information Authority (AIF) have been replaced with an international group of experts, including a woman, two years before they were supposed to step down. Vatican insiders say the drastic move followed clashes between the board members, who formed part of the old boys’ network and the body’s Swiss director, René Brülhart, an anti-money laundering expert, who remains in charge. ...
- Pope: It's 'intolerable' markets have the power to decide people's fate Catholic News Agency. 06/16/14.
- The Pope: "Let us help a tired Europe to rediscover its roots" La Stampa "The Vatican Insider" 06/15/14:
“Europe is tired, let's help it to find itself”, urges Francis. “A modern culture based on discarding, where anything that is not needed or does not produce is discarded" it is a form of “underlying euthanasia” warns the Pope speaking in the Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere, during the meeting with the Community of Sant 'Egidio.
- Truth be told: the Traditional Catholic position on the Economy is not Libertarian (and the Pope is close to it) Rorate Caeli. 06/03/14. "The positions stated by Pope Francis on economic and social matters are much closer to the Traditional Catholic position on the economy and the State than not. Indeed, it can be said unhesitatingly that this is one area in which the Pope will find mostly allies in Traditional Catholics."
- Pope, at charismatic rally in stadium, invites them to Vatican in 2017, by Cindy Wooden. Catholic News Agency. 06/02/14:
Meeting more than 50,000 Catholic charismatics in Rome's Olympic Stadium, Pope Francis admitted he was not always comfortable with the way they prayed, but he knelt onstage as they prayed for him and over him by singing and speaking in tongues.
"In the early years of the charismatic renewal in Buenos Aires, I did not have much love for charismatics," the pope said June 1. "I said of them: They seem like a samba school."
Little by little, though, he came to see how much good the movement was doing for Catholics and for the church, he told a gathering organized by the International Catholic Charismatic Renewal Services and the Catholic Fraternity of Charismatic Covenant Communities and Fellowships.
- Pope Francis Meets With Doctor Who Saved His Life. National Catholic Register 05/28/14. In 1980, Argentinian surgeon Dr. Juan Carlos Parodi operated on the future pope for gall-bladder failure.
- Photo Story of Pope Francis’ Historic Pilgrimage to the Holy Land Salt and Light TV. 05/28/14.
- Pope says his 'most authentic' gestures in Holy Land were spontaneous Catholic News Agency. 05/26/14:
Regarding his dramatic gestures during the visit, when he prayed at the controversial Israeli-built separation wall in the West Bank and kissed the hands of Holocaust survivors, the pope said the "most authentic gestures are those you don't think about ... mine were not planned gestures, it just occurs to me to do something spontaneously that way."
- Pope makes new Christian unity step in meeting with Patriarch Catholic World Report. 05/25/14. Francis and Bartholomew I emphasize defense of the dignity of the human person at every stage of life, sanctity of family based on marriage, and the promotion of peace and the common good.
Commentary
- The Pope, The Patriarch and True Ecumenism, by Dr. Adam A. J. DeVille. Catholic World Report 05/23/14:
With the pope of Rome and the patriarch of Constantinople going to Jerusalem this weekend, there is naturally a great deal of conversation and consideration of where Orthodox and Catholic Christians have been and where we might be going. I have discussed some of this elsewhere. Here, however, I want to do something different, following a theological method beloved of many in the Christian East, as well as many Western mystics (St. John of the Cross comes to mind), namely the apophatic or “negative” way. I wish, in other words, to explain what true ecumenism is not ...
- Author Discusses ‘The Vatican According to Francis’. National Catholic Register 5/29/14. What impact is a Latin-American pope having on a Roman Curia heavily influenced by Italians? Massimo Franco, a senior correspondent with Italy’s daily newspaper Corriere della Sera, shares his perspective in a new book called Il Vaticano Secondo Francesco (The Vatican According to Francis).
