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Vicente Fernández, iconic Mexican singer who elevated mariachi music, has died at 81 Vicente Fernández, the iconic Mexican singer, actor and film producer whose mighty baritone voice helped elevate mariachi music to an art form, died early Sunday morning at a hospital in Guadalajara, Mexico. He was 81 years old.

It seems that the Pope’s Argentinian theologian Victor Manuel Fernández didn’t do his boss any favors when he recently defended Amoris Laetitia. Fernández made headlines once again when he contributed an essay entitled “Chapter Eight of Amoris Laetitia: What Remains after the Storm” to a special edition of Latin American theology journal Medellín (Vol. 43, Num 168, 2017). According to Convivium Editor-in-chief Father Raymond J. de Souza, Fernández gives the impression that the Holy Father wanted to remain “ambiguous and unclear” in Amoris Laetitia, “a document addressed to the entire Church” while reserving clarity for a private letter that was...

The ghostwriter of the Pope’s apostolic exhortation says the Holy Father wanted to discreetly change the Church’s pastoral practice on a key part of the Church’s moral teaching, while a prominent English Dominican calls for a procedure to correct papal errors in the document. One of Pope Francis closest advisers has publicly responded for the first time to trenchant criticisms of the Pope’s apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia, insisting that, on the issue of remarried divorcees receiving Holy Communion, the Pope intended to discreetly change pastoral practice by taking into account the importance of responsibility and culpability in complex cases.

On May 10, the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera published an interview with Archbishop Victor Fernández who is a close collaborator of Pope Francis. He is said to have ghost-written Pope Francis’ first Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium and to be now involved in the drafting of the Pope’s encyclical on questions concerning the environment. He had previously worked together with then-Cardinal Bergoglio in Argentina, and headed Cardinal Bergoglio’s team redacting the touchstone Latin-American bishops’ (CELAM) document of Aparecida in 2007. His words are therefore to be taken very seriously, since, more than most people, he knows the Pope’s mind. This...