In the summer of 1971, no question before the U.S. Supreme Court was as contentious as the Pentagon Papers case, in which the Nixon administration sought to prevent the New York Times and the Washington Post from publishing a classified report on the Vietnam War. In a 6-3 decision, the court eventually upheld the right … Read more
Just when you think that the Vatican’s “trial of the century” against a cardinal and nine other defendants for various alleged financial crimes can’t get any more surreal, two developments pop out of the woodwork to prove you wrong. A hearing Thursday produced both a previously unknown, and unauthorized, recording of a phone call with … Read more
Every leader has stretches he or she probably would like to forget. Mid-August, for instance, was one of those times for US President Joe Biden, as the chaos of the American withdrawal from Afghanistan sent his poll numbers into a death spiral from which he still hasn’t recovered. For Pope Francis, though not quite on … Read more
Somewhere out in the ocean right now, a small buoy is measuring wave direction and speed, along with barometric pressure and water temperature, feeding that data back to observatories. Even small upticks or downticks may signal the first stirrings of what could become a devastating storm. You don’t need special equipment, however, to detect warning … Read more
With release of an annual report showing a healthy profit in 2020 despite the Coronavirus pandemic, Friday capped what’s already been a good run in June for the Institute for the Works of Religion, the so-called “Vatican bank,” including good grades from Europe’s top financial watchdog and a key recognition by the IRS in America. … Read more
Simply serving up lay Italian villains with no standing in the ecclesiastical power structure such as Torzi may be good theater, but it’s hard to argue it’s the end of the story. Last Friday, the latest twist in the Vatican’s version of the “Great Fire of London,” in their case referring to a $225 million … Read more
Before “Who am I to judge?” and before the “throwaway culture,” as well as before his celebrated catalog of the 15 “spiritual diseases” of the Roman Curia, Pope Francis just three days after his election gave us the soundbite which, in many ways, would define his papacy. “How I would like,” the new pope said, … Read more
According to an internal Vatican analysis recently presented to Pope Francis for a meeting with his department heads, declines in revenue due to the coronavirus pandemic will cause the Vatican’s annual deficit to balloon somewhere between 30 and 175 percent, depending on which of three scenarios, ranging from best to worst case, is realized. Under … Read more
Maybe what Pope Francis really needs right now is somebody to put a gun to the head of the system. When Pope Francis recently addressed the ongoing financial reform of the Vatican, he couched the argument in largely spiritual, pastoral and moral terms. Financial breakdowns recently brought to light, the pope said, “beyond their possible … Read more
It doesn’t take a genius-level systems analyst to conclude that Brülhart was simply fed up and decided to walk away. Logically speaking, it may be contradictory to call something both mystifying and utterly predictable, and yet that seems to be a near-constant when it comes to the Vatican’s handling of sensitive or potentially embarrassing news. … Read more