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The anti-corruption stance of Pope Francis has riled Italy’s powerful mafia groups, according to a prosecutor who specializes in mob cases. State prosecutor Nicola Gratteri – who works in the southern Italian region of Calabria, where the ‘Ndrangheta mafia is active – told the Italian daily Fatto Quotidiano that Francis’ statements on transparency and dismantling economic power in the Vatican are making mobsters “nervous and agitated.” “I cannot say if the organization is in a position to do something like this, but they are dangerous and it is worth reflecting on,” Gratteri said. “If the godfathers can find a way...

Steps are reportedly being taken to relocate the U.S. embassy to the Holy See onto the grounds of the American embassy to Italy. <-- Advertising --> Although no official decision has been announced, the move appears likely and is being justified on grounds of enhanced security.Previous American ambassadors to the Holy See contacted by the National Catholic Reporter have said they are opposed to the plans.Ambassador James Nicholson, who served as ambassador during the presidency of George W. Bush, said the proposed relocation would be a “massive downgrade” that would turn the embassy into “a stepchild of the embassy to...

A cleric dubbed the “bling bishop” for his luxury lifestyle is unlikely to return to his diocese after Catholics in the area said he could not come back. An assembly of the diocese of Limburg decided on Saturday that their bishop Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst had “so damaged” the relationship of trust between him and his congregation, that his return “did not seem possible”. Tebartz-van Elst became the subject of severe criticism for spending €31 million on a new headquarters in western Germany with €783,000 going on a garden, €25,000 on a table and €15,000 on a bath tub. …

Polling is one of the great tools of modern political campaigns, and one of the banes, too.Polls can be wildly inaccurate. Look at virtually any poll prior to any vote on same-sex marriage in the many states where it has been voted down. They uniformly showed traditional marriage would lose.  But with only one exception, traditional marriage has won, even in liberal states.Polls rely on many intangibles that can sway the person answering: the wording of the question, the sample size, and where they are drawn from.The results of polls are often used not to find out what people are...

The Vatican has done more to counter the Islamic threat than people think. If we in the West now know that Syrian "rebels" are in their majority bloody jihadists and not innocent victims of Assad, it is due to the Vatican news-gathering agencies in the region. At first the Western media were totally biased and were unquestioningly transmitting the propaganda they received from local reporters on the rebels as bona fide news. It was the Vatican agencies that eventually managed to correct this bias. And the Syrian case is just an example. The Vatican is one of the major...

“The text had not been carefully reviewed,” the director of the Holy See Press Office, Fr. Federico LombardiThe Holy See has decided to delete the interview between Pope Francis and Eugenio Scalfari, the founder of Italian newspaper La Repubblica from the Vatican’s main portal (www.vatican.va). Scalfari had met with Francis to thank him for the open letter received and published by the newspaper. In response to journalists’ questions about the reason for this decision, the Holy See’s spokesman, Fr. Federico Lombardi replied: “The information in the interview is reliable on a general level but not on the level of each...

Pope Francis (CNS) Pope Francis’s life is in danger from ‘ndrangheta, Italy’s most feared crime group, a leading anti-mafia judge has said.Nicola Gratteri, a magistrate in the southern city of Reggio Calabria, near ‘ndrangheta’s heartland, has said that Pope Francis’s crackdown on financial corruption in the Vatican, has angered bosses in the notorious crime squad.Gratteri said: “I don’t know if organised crime is in the position to do something, but it’s certainly thinking about it. It could be dangerous.”He said Francis was “on the right path” in attempting to clean out the stables at the Vatican.But Mr Gratteri, who has...

VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis has met with the foreign minister of the Russian Orthodox Church ahead of a Nov. 25 visit to the Vatican by President Vladimir Putin. The Vatican released no details of Tuesday’s meeting with Metropolitan Hilarion, in Rome for a Catholic-Orthodox conference on family values. Simultaneously in Moscow, a top Italian cardinal involved in Catholic-Orthodox dialogue, Cardinal Angelo Scola, met with the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill.

The Vatican is planning an unprecedented public display of the relics of St. Peter, as the Year of Faith comes to a close. The display was announced by Archbishop Rino Fisichella, the president of Pontifical Council for the New Evangelization, in an article appearing in the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano. The archbishop did not supply any details of the plans. The tomb of St. Peter, located under the altar of the Vatican basilica, was unearthed during excavations in the mid-20the century. In 1968, after extensive research and testing, Pope Paul VI announced that relics of St. Peter had been...

The National Security Agency spied on the future Pope Francis before and during the Vatican conclave at which he was chosen to succeed Benedict XVI, it was claimed on Wednesday. The American spy agency monitored telephone calls made to and from the residence in Rome where the then Archbishop Jorge Mario Bergoglio stayed during the conclave, the secret election at which cardinals chose him as pontiff on March 13. The claims were made by Panorama, an Italian weekly news magazine, which said that the NSA monitored the telephone calls of many bishops and cardinals at the Vatican in the...

British parliamentarians have concluded their three-day visit to the Holy See. Eleven members of the All Party Parliament Group, accompanied by the chaplain to Parliament Canon Pat Browne, met with the Pope on Wednesday, after the General Audience. MP Edward Leigh declared after the three day visit that “The Holy See is an enormous soft power, it represent a religion of 1.2 billion people and so the British government and the British parliament is very interested in what the Vatican says.” The Group, made up of representatives of both House of Parliament and all the major political parties, has encountered...

A dying mechanic wanted a few thousand dollars to leave to his wife, two sons and infant daughter. A politically connected millionaire, now running for Virginia governor, wanted to make some money. And a Rhode Island estate planner wanted to become ambassador to the Vatican. All three came together on paper in late 2006 in a deal struck just two months before the 44-year-old mechanic died of cancer. The mechanic got $5,000. The millionaire, Democrat Terry McAuliffe, made at least $47,000. But the estate planning lawyer, Joseph Caramadre, went to prison instead of Rome. Caramadre helped McAuliffe place a bet...

Over at Fishwrap (aka National Schismatic Reporter), the editor is already starting to wring his hands.The editorial is a bit mawkish, but you can forgive that.Here is a sample: Francis is the exclamation point on Vatican II Thomas C. FoxI already hear concerns that the reformist church of 76-year-old Pope Francis might not survive his pontificate. I hear talk that the anti-reformists who took back the Second Vatican Council will likely do it again once Francis is gone from the scene. We ask: Will a church groomed by compassion and mercy, as Francis would have it, be the church of...

A Vatican official reiterated this week that divorced remarried Catholics are still banned from taking Communion. In a lengthy essay published on Tuesday in the Vatican newspaper "L'Osservatore Romano," Archbishop Gerhard Ludwig Müller acknowledged the tensions the church dealt with in choosing to stand by an earlier tenant. "Today even firm believers are seriously wondering: can the Church not admit the divorced and remarried to the sacraments under certain conditions? Are her hands permanently tied on this matter? Have theologians really explored all the implications and consequences?" Müller, the Vatican's chief doctrine official, wrote. Müller denied that mercy superseded the...

VATICAN CITY (AP) -- Pope Francis temporarily expelled a German bishop from his diocese on Wednesday because of a scandal over a 31-million-euro project to build a new residence complex, but refused popular calls to remove him permanently. The Vatican didn't say how long Bishop Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst would spend away from the diocese of Limburg and gave no information on where he would go or what he would do. It said his fate would ultimately be decided by the outcome of a church commission investigation into the expenditures.It said Limburg's vicar general, the Rev. Wolfgang Roesch, who had been...

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- As top-level Internet domain names are being rolled out and up for grabs, the Vatican has scored control of .catholic. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which coordinates the assignment of Internet domain names and addresses around the world, has been allowing entities to apply for ownership of hundreds, and soon thousands, of new domain names such as .london, .insurance and .xbox, among others. The Pontifical Council for Social Communications completed the application process last year and recently received confirmation that it will control the new Internet address extension .catholic and decide who...

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu will not be meeting with Pope Francis during his visit to Rome on Wednesday, a diplomatic source told AFP on Sunday. A statement last week from Netanyahu’s office had said he would be “meeting Pope Francis next Wednesday at the Vatican” and with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry for updates on nuclear talks with Iran and negotiations with the Palestinian Authority. A diplomatic source on Sunday told AFP, however, that no such meeting with Pope Francis will be taking place. The source noted that audiences with the Pope must be arranged sufficiently in advance. …

ROMA, April 28, 2005 -On Sunday, April 24, Benedict XVI inaugurated his “Petrine ministry as bishop of Rome”in the sunlight of a Saint Peter’s Square overflowing with crowds. But his first intention was different. He had wanted to celebrate his first solemn mass as pope, not in the square, but inside the basilica of Saint Peter. “Because there the architecture better directs the attention toward Christ, instead of the pope,” he told the masters of ceremonies on Wednesday, April 20, his first full day as the elected pope. Only the immense number of faithful who were coming induced him to...

The head of the traditionalist Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) has denounced Vatican II, described the post-conciliar liturgy as “evil,” and said that he is grateful the group never reached an accommodation with the Holy See. In a provocative address to the Kansas City audience, Bishop Bernard Fellay said: “It is has never been our intention to pretend either that the Council would be considered as good, or the New Mass would be ‘legitimate.’” He said that although the Novus Ordo Mass introduced after Vatican II may be valid, “The New Mass is bad, it is evil.” Bishop Fellay...

Pope Francis clearly has identified mercy as the spiritual cornerstone of his pontificate, and the impression of deep compassion he's given over the last eight months goes a long way toward explaining his appeal. As a pastoral matter, however, it's not always easy to determine what "mercy" implies in concrete cases. In Rome right now, debate over whether a Catholic funeral ought to be held for Erich Priebke, a former Nazi SS officer responsible for the massacre of 335 Italians in 1944, including 57 Jews, illustrates the point. Priebke died Friday at the age of 100, having lived the last...