Free Republic

Prophecy of St Malachy When I read The Year of Three Popes by Peter Hebblethwaite (about the events of 1978 which saw the death of Paul VI, the election and death of John Paul I, and then the election of John Paul II) he mentions the spate of editorials in the Osservatore Romano and the spate of letters to the editor in the Times of London at the time of the conclaves about what the mottos attributed to the dead pope or the next pope by St Malachy in his prophecies. Enthralled, I went to the library and looked through...

Vatican papers offering the first direct evidence that Pope Pius XII tried to help Jews during the Second World War have been discovered by an Italian expert. The documents undermine critics' claims that Pius - condemned by critics as "Hitler's Pope" - put the interests of Rome first and did not protest about the fate of Jews during the Holocaust. A letter, signed by the Pope in October 1940 and sent to Giuseppe Palatucci, Bishop of Campagna in southern Italy, instructed him to give money "in aid to interned Jews", to whom Pius also referred in an earlier letter as...

Everyone assumes that John Paul II's successor will be a conservative. Don't bet on it. The Vatican, the 109-acre inter-national headquarters of Roman Catholicism, works at the leisurely pace of an institution that has seen it all over 2,000 years of history. This is a place that closes shop every day at 1 p.m., where decisions that might take weeks in other organizations can be "studied" for years, awaiting an "opportune" moment to be announced. It is not accustomed to working under pressure of tight deadlines, as it showed in late April, when all 13 American cardinals were summoned for...