Rome — A 15-year-old Italian web designer is set to become the Catholic Church’s first saint from the millennial generation. On Monday, in a ceremony called an Ordinary Public Consistory, Pope Francis and the cardinals residing in Rome formally approved the canonization of Carlo Acutis, along with 14 others.
No specific date has been set for the canonization of Acutis, who was dubbed “God’s Influencer” for his work spreading Catholicism online, but he’s likely to be proclaimed a saint in 2025.
Monday’s consistory was merely a formality, as Acutis’ cause for sainthood had already been thoroughly examined and approved by the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Causes of the Saints. The initial announcement came in May.
An image of 15-year-old Carlo Acutis, an Italian boy who died in 2006 of leukemia, is seen during his beatification ceremony celebrated by Cardinal Agostino Vallini, center, in the St. Francis Basilica, in Assisi, Italy, Oct. 10, 2020.
Gregorio Borgia/AP
Acutis was born to wealthy Italian parents in London in 1991, but the family moved to northern Italy shortly after his birth. His family have said he was a pious child, asking at the age of 7 to receive the first communion.
He went on to attend church and receive communion every day. As he grew older, he became interested in computers and the internet, creating a website on which he catalogued church-approved miracles and appearances of the Virgin Mary throughout history.
According to the Vatican, Acutiswas “welcoming and caring towards the poorest, and he helped the homeless, the needy, and immigrants with the money he saved from his weekly allowance.”
He reportedly used his first savings to buy a sleeping bag for a homeless man he often met on his way to mass.
Acutis died in October 2006 at the age of 15 in Monza, Italy, of leukemia. Some of the city’s poorest residents, whom Acutis had helped, turned out to pay their respects to the teenager at his funeral.
His body lies in an open tomb in Assisi, in central Italy, wearing blue jeans and Nike sneakers.
A friar visits the tomb of Carlo Acutis in the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore on the eve of the beatification ceremony of Acutis, Oct. 9, 2020 in Assisi, Italy.
Vatican Pool/Getty
“I am happy to die because I lived my life without wasting even a minute of it on anything unpleasing to God,” Acutis was quoted as saying before he died.
Pope Francis declared Acutis “blessed” in October of 2020, after a miracle attributed to him was approved by the church. That miracle was a young boy in Brazil who was healed of a deadly pancreatic disease after he and his mother prayed to a relic of Acutis.
In order to be declared a saint, a second miracle — this one posthumous — needed to be approved. It came in 2022, when a woman prayed at Acutis’ tomb for her daughter, who just six days earlier had fallen from her bicycle in Florence, causing severe head trauma.
She required a craniotomy and had a very low chance of survival, according to doctors. On the day of the mother’s pilgrimage to Acutis’ tomb, the daughter began to breathe spontaneously. Just a few days later, the hemorrhage disappeared completely.
Along with Acutis, the canonizations of 14 other people were approved Monday, including 11 people who were killed in Syria in 1860, during the Syrian Civil War, which saw thousands of Christians killed.
Francis is the first pope from the Americas, the first of his name, and more than any other pope in recent memory, has dedicated his life and ministry to the poor, the peripheral, and the forgotten. All while leading the Catholic Church on difficult, sometimes controversial issues that not everyone supports. We were granted a rare interview at the Vatican, and spoke to him, in his native Spanish, through a translator, for more than an hour. Not lost in translation was the 87 year old’s warmth, intelligence and conviction. We began by discussing the Church’s first World Children’s Day. Next weekend, Pope Francis will welcome tens of thousands of young people to the Vatican, including refugees of war.
Norah O’Donnell: During World Children’s Day, the U.N. says over a million people will be facing famine in Gaza, many of them children.
Pope Francis (In Spanish/English translation): Not just in Gaza. Think of Ukraine. Many kids from Ukraine come here. You know something? That those children don’t know how to smile? I’ll say something to them (mimics smile)… they have forgotten how to smile. And that is very painful.
Norah O’Donnell: Do you have a message for Vladimir Putin when it comes to Ukraine?
Pope Francis (In Spanish/English translation): Please, warring countries, all of them, stop. Stop the war. You must find a way of negotiating for peace. Strive for peace. A negotiated peace is always better than an endless war.
Pope Francis and Norah O’Donnell
60 Minutes
Norah O’Donnell: What’s happening– in Israel and Gaza, has caused so much division, so much pain around the world. I don’t know if you’ve seen in the United States, big protests on college campuses and growing antisemitism. What would you say about how to change that?
Pope Francis (In Spanish/English translation): All ideology is bad, and antisemitism is an ideology, and it is bad. Any “anti” is always bad. You can criticize one government or another, the government of Israel, the Palestinian government. You can criticize all you want, but not “anti” a people. Neither anti-Palestinian nor antisemitic. No.
Norah O’Donnell: I know you call for peace. You have called for a cease-fire in many of your sermons. Can you help negotiate peace?
Pope Francis (In Spanish/English translation): (sighs) What I can do is pray. I pray a lot for peace. And also, to suggest, “Please, stop. Negotiate.”
Prayer has been at the center of the pope’s life since he was born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Argentina, in 1936, into a family of Italian immigrants. Before entering the seminary, Bergoglio worked as a chemist.
His own personal formula is simplicity. He still wears the plain silver cross he wore as the archbishop of Buenos Aires. Though it’s not what Francis wears, but where he lives that set the tone for his papacy, 11 years ago.
Instead of a palace above St. Peter’s Square, he chose the Vatican guest house Casa Santa Marta as his home.
We met him there under a painting of the Virgin Mary. Surrounded by the sacred, Francis has not forsaken his sense of humor, even when discussing serious subjects, like the migrant crisis.
Norah O’Donnell: My grandparents were Catholic. Immigrated from Northern Ireland in the 1930s to the United States, seeking a better life. And I know your family, too, fled fascism. And you have talked about with migrants, many of them children, that you encourage governments to build bridges, not walls.
Pope Francis (In Spanish/English translation): Migration is something that makes a country grow. They say that you Irish migrated and brought the whiskey, and that the Italians migrated and brought the mafia… (laugh) It’s a joke. Don’t take it badly. But, migrants sometimes suffer a lot. They suffer a lot.
Pope Francis and Norah O’Donnell
60 Minutes
Norah O’Donnell: I grew up in Texas, and I don’t know if you’ve heard, but the state of Texas is attempting to shut down a Catholic charity on the border with Mexico that offers undocumented migrants humanitarian assistance. What do you think of that?
Pope Francis (In Spanish/English translation): That is madness. Sheer madness. To close the border and leave them there, that is madness. The migrant has to be received. Thereafter you see how you are going to deal with him. Maybe you have to send him back, I don’t know, but each case ought to be considered humanely. Right?
A few months after becoming pope, Francis went to a small Italian island near Africa, to meet migrants fleeing poverty and war.
Norah O’Donnell: Your first trip as Pope was the Island of Lampedusa, where you talked about suffering. And I was so struck when you talked about the globalization of indifference. What is happening?
Pope Francis (In Spanish/English translation): Do you want me to state it plainly? People wash their hands! There are so many Pontius Pilates on the loose out there… who see what is happening, the wars, the injustice, the crimes… “That’s OK, that’s OK” and wash their hands. It’s indifference. That is what happens when the heart hardens… and becomes indifferent. Please, we have to get our hearts to feel again. We cannot remain indifferent in the face of such human dramas. The globalization of indifference is a very ugly disease. Very ugly.
Pope Francis has not been indifferent to the Church’s most insidious scandal– the rampant sexual abuse of hundreds of thousands of children worldwide, for decades.
Norah O’Donnell: You have done more than anyone to try and reform the Catholic Church and repent for years of unspeakable sexual abuse against children by members of the clergy. But has the church done enough?
Pope Francis (In Spanish/English translation): It must continue to do more. Unfortunately, the tragedy of the abuses is enormous. And against this, an upright conscience and not only to not permit it but to put in place the conditions so that it does not happen.
Pope Francis
60 Minutes
Norah O’Donnell: You have said zero tolerance.
Pope Francis (In Spanish/English translation): It cannot be tolerated. When there is a case of a religious man or woman who abuses, the full force of the law falls upon them. In this there has been a great deal of progress.
It’s Francis’ capacity for forgiveness and openness that has defined his leadership of the Church’s nearly 1.4 billion Catholics. He put them and the world on notice, during an impromptu press conference on a plane in 2013, when he spoke on the subject of homosexuality.
“If someone is gay,” he said, “and he searches for the Lord and has good will…who am I to judge?”
… and he did not stop there.
Norah O’Donnell: Last year you decided to allow Catholic priests to bless same-sex couples. That’s a big change. Why?
Pope Francis (In Spanish/English translation): No, what I allowed was not to bless the union. That cannot be done because that is not the sacrament. I cannot. The Lord made it that way. But to bless each person, yes. The blessing is for everyone. For everyone. To bless a homosexual-type union, however, goes against the given right, against the law of the Church. But to bless each person, why not? The blessing is for all. Some people were scandalized by this. But why? Everyone! Everyone!
Norah O’Donnell: You have said, “Who am I to judge?” “Homosexuality is not a crime.”
Pope Francis (In Spanish/English translation): No. It is a human fact.
Norah O’Donnell: There are conservative bishops in the United States that oppose your new efforts to revisit teachings and traditions. How do you address their criticism?
Pope Francis (In Spanish/English translation): You used an adjective, “conservative.” That is, conservative is one who clings to something and does not want to see beyond that. It is a suicidal attitude. Because one thing is to take tradition into account, to consider situations from the past, but quite another is to be closed up inside a dogmatic box.
Pope Francis has placed more women in positions of power than any of his predecessors, but he told us he opposes allowing women to be ordained as priests or deacons.
Pope Francis
60 Minutes
Francis’ devotion to traditional doctrine led one Vatican reporter to note that he’s changed the tune of the Church, but the lyrics essentially remain the same. This frustrates those who want to see him change policy on Roman Catholic priests marrying; contraception, and surrogate motherhood.
Norah O’Donnell: I know women who are cancer survivors who cannot bear children, and they turn to surrogacy. This is against church doctrine.
Pope Francis (In Spanish/English translation): In regard to surrogate motherhood, in the strictest sense of the term, no, it is not authorized. Sometimes surrogacy has become a business, and that is very bad. It is very bad.
Norah O’Donnell: But sometimes for some women it is the only hope.
Pope Francis (In Spanish/English translation): It could be. The other hope is adoption. I would say that in each case the situation should be carefully and clearly considered, consulting medically and then morally as well. I think there is a general rule in these cases, but you have to go into each case in particular to assess the situation, as long as the moral principle is not skirted. But you are right. I want to tell you that I really liked your expression when you told me, “In some cases it is the only chance.” It shows that you feel these things very deeply. Thank you. (smiles)
Norah O’Donnell: I think that’s why so many people– have found hope with you, because you have been more open and accepting perhaps than other previous leaders of the church.
Pope Francis (In Spanish/English translation): You have to be open to everything. The Church is like that: Everyone, everyone, everyone. “That so-and-so is a sinner…?” Me too, I am a sinner. Everyone! The Gospel is for everyone. If the Church places a customs officer at the door, that is no longer the church of Christ. Everyone.
Norah O’Donnell: When you look at the world what gives you hope?
Pope Francis (In Spanish/English translation): Everything. You see tragedies, but you also see so many beautiful things. You see heroic mothers, heroic men, men who have hopes and dreams, women who look to the future. That gives me a lot of hope. People want to live. People forge ahead. And people are fundamentally good. We are all fundamentally good. Yes, there are some rogues and sinners, but the heart itself is good.
Produced by Keith Sharman, Julie Morse and Anna Matranga. Associate producer, Roxanne Feitel. Broadcast associates, Eliza Costas and Callie Teitelbaum. Edited by Jorge J. García.
Pope Francis sits down for a historic interview with CBS Evening News anchor and managing editor Norah O’Donnell in an hour-long special airing Monday, May 20 at 10 p.m. ET on CBS and streaming on Paramount+. In a wide-ranging conversation, Francis speaks about countries at war, his vision for the Catholic Church, his legacy, his hope for children and more.
Norah O’Donnell is the anchor and managing editor of the “CBS Evening News,” anchor of CBS News Election Specials and a 60 Minutes contributing correspondent. O’Donnell is a multiple Emmy Award-winning journalist with nearly three decades of experience covering the biggest stories in the world and conducting impactful, news-making interviews.
In a historic interview from the Vatican, Pope Francis sat down with “CBS Evening News” anchor and managing editor Norah O’Donnell to discuss a range of issues, including the criticism he’s faced for trying to make the church more inclusive. The pope’s full interview will air on “60 Minutes” on Sunday, May 19, 2024.
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A Vatican tribunal on Saturday convicted a cardinal of embezzlement and sentenced him to 5 ½ years in prison in one of several verdicts handed down in a complicated financial trial that aired the city state’s dirty laundry and tested its justice system.
Cardinal Angelo Becciu, the first cardinal ever prosecuted by the Vatican criminal court, was absolved of several other charges and nine other defendants received a combination of guilty verdicts and acquittals among the nearly 50 charges brought against them during a 2 ½ year trial.
Italian Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu, Prefect emeritus of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints during the penitential procession on Ash Wednesday at the Basilica of Santa Sabina.
Grzegorz Galazka/Archivio Grzegorz Galazka/Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images
Becciu’s lawyer, Fabio Viglione, said he respected the sentence but would appeal.
Prosecutor Alessandro Diddi said the outcome “showed we were correct.”
The trial focused on the Vatican secretariat of state’s 350 million euro investment in developing a former Harrod’s warehouse into luxury apartments. Prosecutors alleged Vatican monsignors and brokers fleeced the Holy See of tens of millions of euros in fees and commissions and then extorted the Holy See for 15 million euros to cede control of the building.
Prosecution in Vatican’s criminal court
Becciu, the first-ever cardinal to be prosecuted in the Vatican’s criminal court, was accused of embezzlement-related charges in two tangents of the London deal and faced up to seven years in prison.
In the end, he was convicted of embezzlement stemming from the original investment of 200 million euros in a fund that bought into the London property, as well as for his 125,000 euro donation of Vatican money to a charity run by his brother in Sardinia. He was also convicted of using Vatican money to pay an intelligence analyst who in turn was convicted of using the money for herself.
The trial had raised questions about the rule of law in the city state and Francis’ power as absolute monarch, given that he wields supreme legislative, executive and judicial authority and had exercised it in ways the defense says jeopardized a fair trial.
The defense attorneys did praise Judge Giuseppe Pignatone’s even-handedness and said they were able to present their arguments amply. But they lamented the Vatican’s outdated procedural norms gave prosecutors enormous leeway to withhold evidence and otherwise pursue their investigation nearly unimpeded.
Prosecutors had sought prison terms from three to 13 years and damages of over 400 million euros to try to recover the estimated 200 million euros they say the Holy See lost in the bad deals.
In the end, the tribunal acquitted many of the suspects of many of the charges but ordered the confiscation of 166 million euros from them and payment of civil damages to Vatican offices of 200 million euros. One defendant, Becciu’s former secretary Monsignor Mauro Carlino, was acquitted entirely.
The trial was initially seen as a sign of Francis’ financial reforms and willingness to crack down on alleged financial misdeeds in the Vatican. But it had something of a reputational boomerang for the Holy See, with revelations of vendettas, espionage and even ransom payments to Islamic militants.
The secretariat of state, for example, sought damages to fund a marketing campaign to try to repair the reputational harm it says it incurred. Even the Vatican communications department said the trial itself had been a “stress test” for the legal system.
London property and charity payments
Much of the London case rested on the passage of the property from one London broker to another in late 2018. Prosecutors allege the second broker, Gianluigi Torzi, hoodwinked the Vatican by maneuvering to secure full control of the building that he relinquished only when the Vatican paid him off 15 million euros.
For Vatican prosecutors, that amounted to extortion. For the defense – and a British judge who rejected Vatican requests to seize Torzi’s assets – it was a negotiated exit from a legally binding contract.
In the end, the tribunal convicted Torzi of several charges, including extortion, and sentenced him to six years in prison.
It wasn’t clear where the suspects would serve their time. The Vatican has a jail, but Torzi’s whereabouts weren’t immediately known.
Cardinal Angelo Becciu talks to journalists during press conference in Rome, Sept. 25, 2020.
Gregorio Borgia / AP
The original London investigation spawned two other tangents that involved the star defendant, Becciu, once one of Francis’ top advisers and himself considered a papal contender.
Prosecutors accused Becciu of embezzlement for sending 125,000 euros in Vatican money to a Sardinian charity run by his brother. Becciu argued that the local bishop requested the money to build a bakery to employ at-risk youths and that the money remained in the diocesan coffers.
The tribunal acknowledged the charitable ends of the donation but convicted him of embezzlement, given his brother’s role.
Becciu was also accused of paying a Sardinian woman, Cecilia Marogna, for her intelligence services. Prosecutors traced some 575,000 euros in wire transfers from the Vatican to a Slovenian front company owned by Marogna and said she used the money to buy luxury goods and fund vacations.
Becciu said he thought the money was going to pay a British security firm to negotiate the release of Gloria Narvaez, a Colombian nun taken hostage by Islamic militants in Mali in 2017.
He said Francis authorized up to 1 million euros to liberate the nun, an astonishing claim that the Vatican was willing to make ransom payment to al-Qaida-linked militants.
The tribunal found both Becciu and Marogna guilty and sentenced Marogna to three years and 9 months in prison.
Once considered a papal contender, Becciu became the first cardinal ever prosecuted by the Vatican’s court, the Associated Press reported.
Becciu was also found not guilty on some charges. He has previously denied the allegations, and his lawyer said he would appeal the sentencing.
Most of the charges centered on a “highly speculative” purchase of a luxury property in London’s affluent area of Chelsea, while Becciu was a senior leader in the Vatican’s Secretariat of State. The property was later sold at a loss of at least €140 million ($152 million), Vatican News said.
Two financiers involved in the property sale were also found guilty of financial crimes and received sentences of five-and-half years and six years.
The initial London investigation led to other allegations, with prosecutors accusing Becciu of embezzlement for sending €125,000 ($136,000) of Vatican money to a charity run by his brother and paying a woman €575,000 ($627,000) for her intelligence services, the AP reported. The woman was sentenced to three years and nine months.
In response to the first accusation, Becciu argued the local bishop requested the money, which remained with the church, to support charity work. To the latter, he said he thought the money was going to pay a security service to negotiate the release of a nun taken hostage by militants connected to al-Qaeda in Mali in 2017.
Two former Vatican officials were also sentenced to seven years on Saturday, while another two received fines, Vatican News said. A lawyer and former advisor to the Secretariat, who helped negotiate the property deal, received one year and 10 months.
TIME reached out to the Vatican press office, which was not open at the time of publication, for information and comment.
Vatican City — Pope Francis was in a “good and stable” condition Monday but was receiving antibiotics intravenously and would limit his activities for a few days to regain strength and fight off a lung inflammation, the Vatican said. The pope, who will turn 87 on Dec. 17, revealed the inflammation on Sunday but said he would still travel later this week to Dubai to address the climate change conference.
Francis skipped his weekly Sunday appearance at a window overlooking St. Peter’s Square a day after the Vatican said he was suffering from a mild flu. Instead, Francis gave the traditional noon blessing in an appearance televised live from the chapel in the Vatican hotel where he lives.
Pope Francis, battling what he said was a lung inflammation, delivers his Sunday Angelus blessing from his residence at the Casa Santa Marta, Nov. 26, 2023, in Vatican City.
Simone Risoluti/Getty
“Brothers and sisters, happy Sunday. Today I cannot appear at the window because I have this problem of inflammation of the lungs,” Francis said. The pontiff added that a priest, sitting beside him, would read out his day’s reflections for him.
In those comments, Francis said he was going to the United Arab Emirates for the COP28 gathering on climate change and that he would deliver his speech, as scheduled, on Saturday to the participants.
“Besides war, our world is threatened by another great peril, that of climate change, which puts at risk life on Earth, especially for future generations,” the pontiff said in the words read by the priest.
“I thank all who will accompany this voyage with prayer and with the commitment to take to heart the safeguarding of the common house,” the pontiff said, using his term for Earth.
Not immediately explained was the discrepancy between the pope saying he has lung inflammation and the Vatican saying a day earlier that Francis had a CT scan at a Rome hospital “to exclude the risk of pulmonary complications” and that the exam was negative.
In the spring of this year, Francis was hospitalized for three days for what he later said was pneumonia and what the Vatican described as a case of bronchitis necessitating treatment with intravenous antibiotics.
This weekend has been very windy and unusually chilly for late autumn in Rome.
The pontiff’s voice dipped low, and at times he seemed almost breathless in his brief introductory remarks explaining why he didn’t make the window appearance, and at the end when he added his usual request to “don’t forget to pray for me.”
After the Vatican published a bombshell letter from Pope Francis earlier this week in which he opened the door for priests to bless same-sex unions, the pope on Wednesday kicked off an important three-week-long meeting of Catholic bishops by saying “everyone, everyone, everyone, everyone” must be allowed in. Chris Livesay reports.
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Vatican City, Vatican – Pope Francis on Saturday elevated 21 clergymen from distant corners of the world to the rank of cardinal, saying diversity was indispensable to the future of the Catholic Church.
Under sunny skies and with a crowd that filled half of Vatican City’s grandiose, colonnaded St Peter’s Square, the 86-year-old pope welcomed the new “Princes of the Church” — one of whom could one day become the successor to the current pontiff.
“The College of Cardinals is called to resemble a symphony orchestra, representing the harmony and synodality of the Church,” said Francis, seated under a canopy before the gathered cardinals on the steps of St Peter’s Basilica.
Pope Francis appoints as new cardinal Archbishop of Hong Kong Stephen Chow Sau-yan during the Ordinary Public Consistory for the Creation of new Cardinals at St. Peter’s Square on September 30, 2023 in Vatican City, Vatican.
Franco Origlia via Getty Images
Diversity signals church priorities
“Diversity is necessary; it is indispensable. However, each sound must contribute to the common design,” said the Argentine Jesuit.
The choice of the new cardinals, who include diplomats, close advisers and administrators, is closely watched as an indication of the priorities and position of the Church.
One of them could also one day be elected by his peers to succeed Francis, who has left the door open to stepping down in the future should his health warrant it. In June, the Pope had his second abdominal surgery in just two years was completed “without complications.” His health problems have fueled rumors that the Pope could resign.
Saturday’s ceremony, known as a consistory, is the ninth since Francis in 2013 was named head of the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics.
One by one, the scarlet-clad cardinals knelt before the pope, who bestowed on them the two symbols of their high office: a scarlet four-cornered cap known as a biretta, and a cardinal’s ring.
To some, a grinning Francis uttered an encouraging “Bravo!” or “Courage!” as he shook their hand.
Newly appointed cardinals receive congratulations from cardinals and bishops during the Ordinary Public Consistory for the Creation of new Cardinal.
Franco Origlia via Getty Images
During his papacy, Francis has sought to create a more inclusive, universal Church, looking past Europe to clergy in Africa, Asia and Latin America to fill the Church’s highest ranks.
Eighteen of the 21 newly made cardinals are under the age of 80 and thus currently eligible to vote as “cardinal electors” in the next conclave, when Francis’ successor will be decided.
They are among 99 cardinal-electors created by Francis, representing about three-quarters of the total.
That has given rise to speculation that the Church’s future spiritual leader will be similar to Francis, preaching a more tolerant Church with a greater focus on the poor and marginalized.
A growing Catholicism
With his latest roster of cardinals, Francis has again looked to the world’s “peripheries” — where Catholicism is growing — while breaking with the practice of promoting archbishops of large, powerful dioceses.
The array of cardinals represent “a richness and a variety of experience, and that’s what the Church is all about,” the Archbishop of Cape Town, Stephen Brislin, told AFP Thursday. “The Church encompasses all people, not just a certain group of people,” he said.
There are three new cardinals from South America, including two Argentinians, and three from Africa, with the promotion of the archbishops of Juba in South Sudan, Tabora in Tanzania, and Brislin from Cape Town.
Asia is represented by the Bishop of Penang in Malaysia and the Bishop of Hong Kong, Stephen Chow, who is seen as playing a key role in seeking to improve tense relations between the Vatican and Beijing. Some of the new cardinals, like Chow, have experience in sensitive zones of the world where the Holy See hopes to play an important diplomatic role.
Pope Francis appoints as new cardinal Archbishop of Tabora (Tanzania) Protase Rugambwa during the Ordinary Public Consistory for the Creation of new Cardinal at St. Peter’s Square.
Franco Origlia via Getty Images
The list includes the Holy Land’s top Catholic authority, Italian Archbishop Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the first seated Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem to be made cardinal.
“Jerusalem is a small laboratory, interreligious and intercultural, and that’s a challenge that the whole world is facing at this point,” Pizzaballa told AFP.
Also to be promoted is the apostolic nuncio, or ambassador, to the United States, France’s Christophe Pierre, whose decades-long diplomatic career includes posts in countries including Haiti, Uganda and Mexico.
Top administrators in the Curia, the Holy See’s government, are also being recognized. There is Italy’s Claudio Gugerotti, prefect of the Dicastery for the Eastern Churches; Argentina’s Victor Manuel Fernandez, whom the pope recently named head of the powerful Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith; and Chicago-born Robert Prevost, a former missionary in Peru who leads the Dicastery for Bishops.
Vatican City — Pope Francis skipped meetings Friday because he was running a fever, the Vatican said. There were no details provided about how sick Francis was.
The last time he spiked a serious fever, in March, the 86-year-old pontiff was rushed to the hospital where he was diagnosed with acute bronchitis. He received intravenous antibiotics and was released three days later.
A Vatican official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak about the pope’s health, said Francis didn’t receive anyone in audience Friday “because of a feverish state.”
There were no formal audiences scheduled Friday, but Francis keeps a separate, private and unofficial agenda of meetings with people he receives at his residence.
Francis has had a busy week, presiding over a meeting of the Italian bishops conference, participating in an afternoon encounter Thursday with his school foundation Scholas Occurentes, as well as meeting with several other prelates and visiting dignitaries.
He is due to preside over Pentecost Mass on Sunday in St. Peter’s Basilica, and in a sign that he was expected to recover quickly, the Vatican on Friday announced a new official audience with Italian President Sergio Mattarella, scheduled for Monday.
Pope Francis participates in the conclusion of the first World Congress of Eco-Educational Cities at the Patristic Institute Augustinianum in Rome, Italy, May 25, 2023.
Grzegorz Galazka/Archivio Grzegorz Galazka/Mondadori Portfolio/Getty
The hospitalization in March was Francis’ first since he spent 10 days at Rome’s Gemelli hospital in July 2021 to have 13 inches of his colon removed.
Francis had part of one lung removed when he was a young man due to a respiratory infection, and he often speaks in a whisper. But he got through the worst phases of the COVID-19 pandemic without any public word of ever testing positive.
The pontiff also used a wheelchair frequently over the last year due to strained ligaments in his right knee and a small knee fracture. More recently he said the injury was healing and he’s been walking more with a cane.
Francis has said he resisted having surgery for the knee problems because he didn’t respond well to general anesthesia during the 2021 intestinal surgery.
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VATICAN CITY (AP) — Scaffolding in a niche of the Vatican Museums’ Round Hall conceal from view the work of restorers who are removing centuries of grime from the largest known bronze statue of the ancient world: the gilded Hercules Mastai Righetti.
For more than 150 years, the four-meter-tall (13-foot-tall) figure of the half-human Roman god of strength has stood in that niche, barely garnering notice among other antiquities because of the dark coating it had acquired.
But it was only after removing a layer of wax and other material from a 19th-century restoration that Vatican experts understood the statue’s true splendor as one of the most significant gilded statues of its time. Museum-goers will be able to see its grandeur for themselves once the restoration is finished, which is expected in December.
“The original gilding is exceptionally well-preserved, especially for the consistency and homogeneity,” Vatican Museum restorer Alice Baltera said.
The discovery of the colossal bronze statue in 1864 during work on a banker’s villa near Rome’s Campo dei Fiori square made global headlines.
Visitors drawn to the ancient wonder at the time included Pope Pius IX, who later added the work to the papal collection. The statue depicting Hercules after he finished his labors had the last names of the pope — Mastai — and of the banker, Pietro Righetti, added to its title.
The statue has been variously dated from the end of the first to the beginning of the third centuries. Even in its day, the towering Hercules was treated with reverence.
The inscription FCS accompanying the statue on a slab of travertine marble indicates it was struck by lightning, according to Claudia Valeri, curator of the Vatican Museums department of Greek and Roman antiquities. As a result, it was buried in a marble shrine according to Roman rites that saw lightning as an expression of divine forces.
FCS stands for “fulgur conditum summanium, a Latin phrase meaning “Here is buried a Summanian thunderbolt.” Summanus was the ancient Roman god of nocturnal thunder. The ancient Romans believed that not only was any object stricken imbued with divinity, but also the spot where it was hit and buried.
“It is said that sometimes being struck by lightning generates love but also eternity,” Vatican Museums archaeologist Giandomenico Spinola said. The Hercules Mastai Righetti “got his eternity … because having been struck by lightning, it was considered a sacred object, which preserved it until about 150 years ago.”
The burial protected the gilding, but also caused dirt to build up on the statue, which Baltera said is very delicate and painstaking to remove. “The only way is to work precisely with special magnifying glasses, removing all the small encrustations one by one,” she said.
The work to remove the wax and other materials that were applied during the 19th-century restoration is complete. Going forward, restorers plan to make fresh casts out of resin to replace the plaster patches that covered missing pieces, including on part of the nape of the neck and the pubis.
The most astonishing finding to emerge during the preliminary phase of the restoration was the skill with which the smelters fused mercury to gold, making the gilded surface more enduring.
“The history of this work is told by its gilding. … It is one of the most compact and solid gildings found to date,” said Ulderico Santamaria, a University of Tuscia professor who is head of the Vatican Museums’ scientific research laboratory.
Pope Francis has given King Charles III two shards of wood that the Vatican says are from the “True Cross” on which Jesus Christ was crucified, to be included in the British monarch’s upcoming coronation ceremony. The shards will be incorporated into a new cross that will lead the coronation procession on May 6.
‘The Cross of Wales’ is displayed for a photograph ahead of a ceremony to bless the Cross at Holy Trinity Church in Llandudno, north Wales, on April 19, 2023.
Getty Images
The new cross, which was a gift from then-Prince Charles to the Church in Wales, a branch of the Anglican Church, to mark its centenary in 2020, has been made from reclaimed wood, recycled silver and Welsh slate, the Reuters news agency reported. The two small shards donated by Pope Francis have been shaped into a cross and incorporated behind a gemstone.
“I can confirm that the fragments of the relic of the True Cross were donated by the Holy See in early April, through the Apostolic Nunciature, to His Majesty King Charles III, Supreme Governor of the Church of England, as an ecumenical gesture on the occasion of the centenary of the Anglican Church in Wales,” the Holy See press office said Thursday.
After the coronation, the cross will return to Wales, where it will be shared between the Anglican and Catholic churches there, Reuters reported.
“Its design speaks to our Christian faith, our heritage, our resources and our commitment to sustainability,” Andrew John, the Anglican Archbishop of Wales, said, according to Reuters. “We are delighted too that its first use will be to guide their majesties into Westminster Abbey at the Coronation Service.”
Pope Francis was discharged on Saturday from the Rome hospital where he was treated for bronchitis, quipping to journalists before being driven away: “I’m still alive.”
Francis, 86, was hospitalized on Wednesday at Gemelli Polyclinic after reportedly having breathing difficulties following his weekly public audience. The pontiff was treated with antibiotics administered intravenously, the Vatican said.
Before departing, Francis had an emotional moment with a Rome couple whose 5-year-old daughter died Friday night at the hospital. Serena Subania, mother of Angelica, sobbed as she pressed her head into the chest of the pope, who put a hand on the woman’s head.
Francis seemed eager to linger with well-wishers. When a boy showed him his arm cast, the pope made a gesture as if to ask “Do you have a pen?” A papal aide handed Francis one, and the pope autographed the cast.
Pope Francis autographs the plaster cast of a child as he leaves the Agostino Gemelli University Hospital in Rome, Saturday, April 1, 2023.
Gregorio Borgia / AP
The pontiff answered in a voice that was close to a whisper when reporters peppered him with questions, indicating he did feel chest pain, a symptom that convinced his medical staff to take him to the hospital Wednesday.
Francis sat in the front seat of the white Fiat 500 car that drove him away from Gemelli Polyclinic. But instead of heading straight home, his motorcade sped right past Vatican City, according to an Associated Press photographer positioned outside the walled city-state.
The pope was apparently headed to a Rome basilica that is a favorite of his. After he was discharged from the same hospital in July 2021 following intestinal surgery, Francis stopped to offer prayers of thanksgiving at St. Mary Major Basilica in Rome, which is home to an icon depicting the Virgin Mary.
On Friday, Vatican officials said Francis would be at St. Peter’s Square for Palm Sunday Mass to mark the start of Holy Week, which culminates on Easter, April 9.
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Rome — The Vatican said Thursday that Pope Francis had “rested well” overnight after being hospitalized with a respiratory infection, and that “his clinical picture is gradually improving and he is continuing his planned treatment.”
“This morning after breakfast, he read some newspapers and resumed work. Before lunch, he went to the little chapel of the private [hospital] apartment where he prayed and he received the Eucharist,” Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni said in a statement.
The Vatican said late Wednesday that the pope had checked into Rome’s Gemelli hospital complaining of difficulty breathing, and that the 86-year-old pontiff would need a few days of treatment at the facility. He does not have COVID-19, according to the Vatican.
As CBS News correspondent Chris Livesay reported, Francis’ hospitalization brought a wave of sympathy from around the world, including from President Biden, who urged people to “say an extra prayer for him.”
Pope Francis meets children at the end of his weekly general audience in St. Peter’s Square, at the Vatican, March 29, 2023.
Alessandra Tarantino/AP
Just hours before he was admitted for treatment, the pope appeared to be in good health at his general audience in St. Peter’s Square as he greeted the faithful, but afterward he was seen wincing in pain as he climbed back into the “Popemobile.”
Francis has often relied on a wheelchair to get around since he tore a knee ligament last year. When he does walk, he has a pronounced limp. The mobility issues have forced him to cancel both Vatican celebrations and overseas trips.
Pope Francis is helped to get back into his vehicle at the end of weekly general audience in St. Peter’s Square, at the Vatican, March 29, 2023.
Alessandra Tarantino/AP
Outside the Gemelli hospital, the faithful have kept vigil since Francis was admitted, much as they did in 2021, when he was hospitalized for 10 days for colon surgery. He was treated for diverticulitis, a painful condition that, Francis revealed in January, had returned.
The health problems have fueled persistent rumors that Francis, now a decade into his papacy, could decide to resign, as did his predecessor Pope Emeritus Benedict.
CBS News Vatican consultant Father Anthony Figuereido told us recently, however, that Francis had “certainly made it clear – unless he’s impeded from being a pope, maybe through some minor difficulty, some illness of the mind, he will continue to be that pope.”
Earlier this year, Francis became the first pontiff in modern history to preside over the funeral of his predecessor.
Francis championed Benedict’s “brave” decision to retire at the age of 85, a year younger than the current head of the Catholic Church is now.
It was a cold wind that blew through St. Peters Square at the Vatican over the weekend, but that didn’t deter Pope Francis from taking a stroll outside to greet the faithful, as he often does. When images appeared online showing the 86-year-old pontiff atypically wrapped up against the elements in a stylish white puffer jacket and silver bejewelled crucifix, they soon went viral, racking up millions of views on social media platforms.
The picture, first published Friday on Reddit along with several others, was in fact a fake. It was an artificial intelligence rendering generated using the AI software Midjourney.
Fake photos generated by artificial intelligence software appear to show Pope Francis walking outside the Vatican in a designer coat, which he never did.
While there are some inconsistencies in the final rendered images — for example, the pope’s left hand where it is holding a water bottle looks distorted and his skin has an overly sharp appearance — many people online were fooled into thinking they were real pictures.
The revelation that they had been dupped left some Twitter users shocked and confused.
“I thought the pope’s puffer jacket was real and didn’t give it a second thought,” tweeted model and author Chrissy Teigen. “No way am I surviving the future of technology.”
The “pope in the puffer jacket” was just the latest in a series of “deepfake” images created with AI software. Another recent example was pictures of former President Donald Trump that appeared to show him in police custody. Although the creator made it clear that they were produced as an exercise in the use of AI, the images, combined with rumors of Trump’s imminent arrest, went viral and created and entirely fraudulent but potentially dangerous narrative.
Midjourney, DALL E2, OpenAI and Dream Studio are among the software options available to anyone wishing to produce photo-realistic images using nothing more than text prompts — no specialist training required.
As this type of software becomes more widespread, AI developers are working on better ways to inform viewers of the authenticity, or otherwise, of images.
CBS News’ “Sunday Morning” reported earlier this year that Microsoft’s chief scientific officer Eric Horvitz, the co-creator of the spam email filter, was among those trying to crack the conundrum, predicting that if technology isn’t developed to enable people to easily detect fakes within a decade or so “most of what people will be seeing, or quite a lot of it, will be synthetic. We won’t be able to tell the difference.”
In the meantime, Henry Ajder, who presents a BBC radio series entitled, “The Future Will be Synthesised,” cautioned in a newspaper interview that it was “already very, very hard to determine whether” some of the images being created were real.
“It gives us a sense of how bad actors, agents spreading disinformation, could weaponize these tools,” Ajder told the British newspaper, I.
There’s clear evidence of this happening already.
Last March, video emerged appearing to show Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy telling his troops to lay down their arms and surrender. It was bad quality and quickly outed as a fake, but it may have been merely an opening salvo in a new information war.
So, while a picture may speak a thousand words, it may be worth asking who’s actually doing the talking.
Pope Francis on Saturday updated a 2019 church law aimed at holding senior churchmen accountable for covering up sexual abuse cases, expanding it to cover lay Catholic leaders and reaffirming that vulnerable adults and not just children can be victims of abuse when they are unable to freely consent.
With the update, Francis made permanent temporary provisions that were passed in 2019 in a moment of crisis for the Vatican and Catholic hierarchy. The law was praised at the time for laying out precise mechanisms to investigate complicit bishops and religious superiors, even though it amounted to bishops policing fellow bishops without any requirement that civil law enforcement be informed.
But implementation has been uneven, and abuse survivors have criticized the Vatican for a continued lack of transparency about the cases. Their advocates said a wholesale overhaul was necessary, not just Saturday’s minor modifications.
“The Catholic people were promised that (the law) would be ‘revolutionary,’ a watershed event for holding bishops accountable. But in four years, we’ve seen no significant housecleaning, no dramatic change,” said Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of BishopAccountability.org, an online resource that has identified 40 bishops investigated globally under the new protocols.
The new rules conform to other changes in the Catholic Church’s handling of abuse that were issued in the last four years. Most significantly, they are extended to cover leaders of Vatican-approved associations headed by laymen and women, not just clerics.
The expansion is a response to the many cases that have come to light in recent years of lay leaders abusing their authority to sexually exploit people under their spiritual care or authority, most recently the L’Arche federation of Jean Vanier.
The update also reaffirms that adults such as nuns or seminarians who are dependent on their bishops or superiors can be victims of abuse. Church law had long held that only adults who “habitually” lack the use of reason could be considered victims in the same sense as minors.
The 2019 law expanded that definition and it is retained in the update, making clear that adults can be rendered vulnerable to abuse as situations present themselves. The inclusion is significant given resistance in the Vatican to the #MeToo pressure to recognize rank and file parishioners who are abused during spiritual direction by a priest as possible victims.
The definition reads that a victim can be “any person in a state of infirmity, physical or mental deficiency, or deprivation of personal liberty which, in fact, even occasionally, limits their ability to understand or to want or otherwise resist the offense.”
“This can be read as further manifestation of how the church cares for the frailest and weakest,” said Archbishop Filippo Iannone, prefect of the Vatican’s legal office. “Anyone can be a victim, so there has to be justice. And if the victims are like these (vulnerable adults), then you must intervene to defend their dignity and liberty.”
Francis originally set out the norms as a response to the decades of cover-up exposed by the 2018 Pennsylvania grand jury report and the scandal over then-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who was eventually defrocked for abusing adults as well as minors. Francis himself was implicated in that wave of the scandal, after he dismissed claims by victims of a notorious predator in Chile.
After realizing he had erred, Francis ordered up a full review of the Chilean abuse dossier, summoned the presidents of bishops’ conferences to Rome for a four-day summit on safeguarding and set in motion plans for a new law to hold senior churchmen to account for abuse and cover-ups.
The 2019 law and its update Saturday contain explicit standards for investigating bishops and superiors, but entrusts other bishops to do the work. It also mandates all church personnel to report allegations of clergy abuse in-house, though it doesn’t mandate reporting of abuse by lay leaders and refrains from requiring any reporting to police. The new law expands whistleblower protections and reaffirms the presumption of innocence of the accused.
The update makes clear each diocese must have an office to receive complaints, a more specific requirement than the original call for a mere “system,” such as an email address. The change derived from Francis’ realization that many dioceses, particularly in poorer parts of the world, dragged their feet.
The pope recently warned there was a “clear and present danger” of abuse in areas with fewer financial resources.
“Maybe upwards of two-thirds of the bishops’ conferences around the world haven’t really had the type of capacity-building and resources to implement process this in any meaningful way,” said the Rev. Andrew Small, secretary of the pope’s child protection advisory board.
Survivors have long complained that the Vatican spent decades turning a blind eye to bishops and religious superiors who moved predator priests around from parish to parish rather than report them to police.
The 2019 law attempted to respond to those complaints, but victims’ advocates have faulted the Holy See for continued secrecy about the investigations and outcomes. The most egregious recent case concerned the secret sanctions imposed in 2021 on East Timor Bishop Carlos Ximenes Belo, a Nobel Peace Prize winner.
Small agreed that abuse survivors, as well as the broader Catholic flock, must at the very least be informed of case outcomes.
“Part of the process of justice, let alone healing, is the awareness that people were held accountable for their actions,” he said. “And we’re not anywhere near where we should be on that.”
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Pope Francis on Sunday expressed sadness and worry at the news that Bishop Rolando Álvarez, an outspoken critic of the Nicaraguan government, had been sentenced to 26 years in prison.
It’s just the latest move against the Catholic Church and government opponents, and comes amid growing concern for Álvarez.
“The news that arrived from Nicaragua has saddened me no little,” the pontiff said, expressing both his love and concern at a traditional Sunday gathering in St. Peter’s Square.
He called on the faithful to pray for the politicians responsible “to open their hearts.”
Álvarez was sentenced Friday, after refusing to get on a flight to the United States with 222 other prisoners, all opponents of President Daniel Ortega. In addition to his prison term, Álvarez was stripped of his Nicaraguan citizenship.
The bishop said if he boarded the plane, it would be he was admitting he was guilty to a crime he never committed, according to a person close to Álvarez who asked not the be identified out of fear of reprisal.
“Let them go and I’ll stay and serve out their sentence,” he said that Álvarez told him.
Until now, no one has been able to contact Álvarez, nor confirm for themselves where he is or if he is safe, he said.
That concern was also echoed in Nicaragua’s capital, when Cardinal Leopoldo Brenes said someone had asked him what they could do for Álvarez.
“Pray, that is our strength,” Brenes told those gathered inside the Metropolitan Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. “Pray that the Lord gives him strength, gives him judgment in all of his actions.”
The comments by Pope Francis and Cardinal Brenes on Sunday were the first made publicly by the church about the expulsion of the prisoners — several priests did board the flight — and of Álvarez’s sentence.
Ortega ordered the mass release of political leaders, priests, students and activists widely considered political prisoners and had some of them put on a flight to Washington Thursday. Ortega said Álvarez refused to board without being able to consult with other bishops.
Nicaragua’s president called Álvarez’s refusal “an absurd thing.” Álvarez, who had been held under house arrest, was then taken to the nearby Modelo prison.
In the run-up to Ortega’s re-election in November 2021, Nicaraguan authorities arrested seven potential opposition presidential candidates to clear the field. The government closed hundreds of nongovernmental organizations that Ortega has accused of taking foreign funding and using it to destabilize his government.
The former guerrilla fighter has long had a tense relationship with the Catholic Church. But he targeted it more directly last year in his campaign to extinguish voices of dissent.
Ortega kicked out the papal nuncio, the Vatican’s top diplomat in March. Later, the government shut down several radio stations in Álvarez’s Matagalpa diocese ahead of municipal elections. Álvarez was arrested in August along with several other priests and lay people, accused with undermining the government and spreading false information.
The church’s response to the government’s increasingly aggressive behavior has been muted, apparently in an attempt to not inflame tensions.
On Saturday, a few thousand Ortega supporters marched in the capital in a show of support for the expulsion of the opposition prisoners. While some seemed genuine in their support, the government has earned a reputation for turning out people by making government employees attend.
Outside Managua’s cathedral Sunday, it was clear that the lengthy sentence for a priest and stripping critics of their citizenship rankled people in the still heavily Roman Catholic country.
Jorge Paladino, a 49-year-old architect, said he felt “disillusioned, upset, dismayed.” He said those who were expelled will always be Nicaraguans, regardless of what they are told.
María Buitrago, a 61-year-old retiree, spoke softly but with indignation.
“They took their nationality in a horrible way as if they are gods and can take from someone where they live, where they were born,” Buitrago said. “They can’t take Nicaraguan blood. They can’t take it. But they do what they please.”
——
Associated Press writer Christopher Sherman in Mexico City contributed to this report.
The Vatican said Monday it has reopened the investigation into the 1983 disappearance of the 15-year-old daughter of a Vatican employee, months after a new Netflix documentary purported to shed new light on the case and weeks after her family asked the Italian Parliament to take up the cause.
The Vatican prosecutor, Alessandro Diddi, opened a file on Emanuela Orlandi’s disappearance, based in part “on the requests made by the family in various places,” said Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni.
A lawyer for the Orlandi family, Laura Sgro, said she had no independent confirmation of the development, which was first reported by Italian agencies Adnkronos, LaPresse and ANSA. She noted that her last Vatican filing on the case came in 2019, when the Vatican opened two tombs in their cemetery after Sgro received a mysterious tip. The dig turned up no new information.
Orlandi vanished June 22, 1983 after leaving her family’s Vatican City apartment to go to a music lesson in Rome. Her father was a lay employee of the Holy See.
Her disappearance has been one of the Vatican’s enduring mysteries, and over the years has been linked to everything from the plot to kill St. John Paul II and a financial scandal involving the Vatican bank to Rome’s criminal underworld.
The recent four-part Netflix documentary “Vatican Girl” explored those scenarios and also provided new testimony from a friend who said Emanuela had told her a week before she disappeared that a high-ranking Vatican cleric had made sexual advances toward her.
In addition, Sgro and Orlandi’s brother Pietro announced a new initiative last month to convene a parliamentary commission of inquest into the case. For 40 years, he has sought to find answers in his sister’s disappearance, saying that he believes the Holy See is hiding information in the case that might implicate high-ranking members of the clergy.
Lawyer Laura Sgro, left, listens to his client Pietro Orlandi, brother of Manuela, a 15-year-old daughter of a Vatican employee disappeared in 1983, during a press conference on the establishing of a parliamentary investigative commission on Manuela Orlandi and other cold cases in Rome, Dec. 20, 2022.
Alessandra Tarantino / AP
Three previous initiatives in the Italian Parliament have failed to get off the ground, but Sgro and opposition lawmaker Carlo Calenda argued that the Vatican couldn’t consider the case closed when there were so many questions left unanswered.
“We are a great secular nation that treats the Vatican with respect, but this case certainly cannot be considered closed in this way,” Calenda said last month.
Speaking to RaiNews24 on Monday, Pietro Orlandi called Diddi’s decision a “positive step” that the Vatican has apparently changed its mind, gotten over its resistance and now will go over the case from the start.
VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis praised Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI’s “acute and gentle thought” as he presided over a packed Wednesday general audience in the Vatican, while thousands of people paid tribute to the former pope on the final day of public viewing in St. Peter’s Basilica.
Francis was greeted by an enthusiastic crowd in the Paul VI auditorium and shouts of “Viva il papa!” or “Long live the pope” as he arrived for his weekly catechism appointment with the faithful.
This week’s audience drew an unusually large crowd given the more than 130,000 people who have flocked to the Vatican following Benedict’s death on Saturday and lined up to pay their respect to the German pope, who is lying in state in the basilica.
Francis is due to preside over Benedict’s funeral on Thursday, an event that is drawing heads of state and royalty despite Benedict’s requests for simplicity and Vatican efforts to keep the first Vatican funeral for an emeritus pope in modern times low-key.
Francis drew applause when he opened his remarks by noting all those who were outside paying tribute to Benedict, whom he called a “great master of catechesis.”
“His acute and gentle thought was not self-referential, but ecclesial, because he always wanted to accompany us in the encounter with Jesus,” Francis said.
Later Wednesday, Vatican officials were to place Benedict’s body in three coffins — one of cypress wood, one of zinc, and then a second wooden casket — along with a written account of his historic papacy, the coins minted during his pontificate and his pallium stoles.
The coffins are to be sealed before Thursday’s funeral and burial in the crypt once occupied by the tomb of St. John Paul II in the grottos underneath the basilica.
Benedict, who was elected pope in 2005 following John Paul’s death, became the first pope in six centuries years to resign when he announced in 2013 he no longer had the strength to lead the Catholic Church. After Francis was elected pope, he spent his nearly decade-long retirement in a converted monastery in the Vatican Gardens.
Thousands filed past the body of Benedict XVI on Monday as the pope emeritus, who died Saturday at age 95, lay in state at St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican.
He will be buried by his successor, Pope Francis, on Thursday.
Benedict’s body, draped in red and gold vestments, is flanked by two Swiss guards, and surrounded by the faithful paying their respects, amid solemn organ music and singing. It’s the kind of setting you’d expect for a papacy marked by his orthodoxy, albeit not without his contradictions.
Thousands of faithful began paying their respects to Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI at St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, January 2, 2023.
ANDREAS SOLARO/AFP via Getty Images
He was known as a traditionalist — “God’s rottweiler” — for fiercely adhering to church doctrine. But Benedict’s papacy was a papacy of firsts.
Despite his failures, during a 2008 trip to the U.S., he was the first pope to meet with victims of sex abuse and to publicly apologize, condemning what he called “filth” in the church.
While he made a majestic farewell over the Eternal City in his exit from the papacy in 2013, he never exited the Vatican. While Francis championed Benedict’s bravery to abdicate his power, having two men wearing white created the impression of two competing ideological camps: Francis the more liberal, Benedict the arch-conservative.
Tina White, visiting the Vatican from Detroit, said it was a mistake for Benedict to step down: “It’s an amazing honor to be elected pope. And you shouldn’t throw that away.”
But now, for the first time since he became pope nearly 10 years ago, Francis is finally the only one, now mourning his only confidant who could possibly understand what it meant to be pope, said Gerard O’Connell, Vatican expert for the Jesuit magazine America.
CBS News asked O’Connell, “What does Francis lose with the death of Benedict?”
“Francis has always been attracted to grandparents,” O’Connell replied. “He’s always referred to grandparents as very important in the life of the family. He has lost a grandfather.”
On Thursday it will be Francis making history, becoming the first pope in modern times to preside over the funeral of his predecessor.
The Vatican says the ceremony will be sober and simple — exactly as Benedict wanted.
VATICAN CITY (AP) — Veteran reporter Giovanna Chirri was starting to doze off in the Vatican press room on a slow holiday when all of a sudden the Latin she learned in high school made her perk up — and gave her the scoop of a lifetime.
It was Feb. 11, 2013, and Chirri was watching closed-circuit television coverage of Pope Benedict XVI presiding over a pro-forma meeting of cardinals to set dates for three upcoming canonizations.
But at the end of the ceremony, rather than stand up and leave the Consistory Hall of the Apostolic Palace, Benedict remained seated, took out a single sheet of paper and began to read.
“I have convoked you to this consistory, not only for the three canonizations, but also to communicate to you a decision of great importance for the life of the Church,” Benedict said quietly in his German-clipped Latin.
Chirri followed along but only began to realize the import of what was unfolding when she heard Benedict then utter the words “ingravescente aetate.” The term is Latin for “advanced age,” and is the title of a 1970 Vatican regulation requiring bishops to retire when they turn 75.
Knowing both Latin and Vatican regulations well, Chirri slowly began to realize that Benedict had just announced he too would be retiring, at the end of the month, because he believed he was getting too old for the job.
It was the first papal resignation in 600 years, and Chirri, the Vatican correspondent for the authoritative ANSA news agency, was about to report the news to the world.
“Hearing this ‘ingravescente aetate’ I started to feel sick physically, a really, really violent reaction,” Chirri recalled years later.
Her head felt like it was a balloon inflating. Her left leg began to shake so uncontrollably that she had to hold it down with one hand as she started making phone calls to her Vatican sources to check that she had heard Benedict correctly.
After finally receiving confirmation from the Vatican spokesman, Chirri sent the flash headline on ANSA at 11:46 a.m.
“The pope is leaving the pontificate beginning 2/28,” it read.
Benedict died Saturday, almost a decade after that momentous day.
Years later, Chirri still searches for the right words to express the emotional, physical, professional and intellectual combustion that that headline, and all it implied, caused her.
“I was terrified by news that was unthinkable to me,” she said.
Aside from the fact that she truly liked Benedict as a pope, Chirri couldn’t comprehend that the conservative German theologian who spent his life upholding church rules and doctrine would take the revolutionary step of resigning.
“Now eight years have passed and we’re used to it,” she said in an interview in 2021. “But eight years ago, the idea that the pope might resign was beyond (reality). It was a theoretical hypothesis” that was technically possible but had been rejected repeatedly by popes over the centuries.
Chirri won accolades for having had both the intellectual capacity to understand what had transpired, and the steely nerves to report it first and accurately among mainstream news organizations — no small feat considering the near-official authority that an ANSA headline carries in reporting Vatican news.
It was a holiday in the Vatican that day — the anniversary of the Lateran Accords between Italy and the Vatican — and only a handful of other reporters were even in the press room to hear the in-house broadcast of the ceremony.
But Chirri was there, the right person in the right place at the right time.
“Certainly, if I hadn’t been an Italian who studied Latin in the 1970s in Italy, I never would have understood a thing,” Chirri said of Italy’s classics-heavy public high school curriculum.
“Also, because the pope was reading so calmly, it was like he was telling us what he had had for breakfast that morning,” she added.
Only later, would it emerge that Benedict had been planning to retire for months. A nighttime fall during a 2012 trip to Mexico confirmed to him that he no longer had the strength for the globe-trotting rigors of the 21st century papacy.
Benedict knew well what was required to make the announcement legitimate: Though only a handful of popes had done it before, canon law allows for a papal resignation as long as it is “freely made and properly manifested.”
Some traditionalists and conspiracy theorists would later quibble with the grammatical formula Benedict used, claiming it rendered the announcement null and that Benedict was still pope.
But Benedict fulfilled both requirements under the law: He stated that he had come to the decision freely, made it public in a Vatican ceremony using the official language of the Holy See, and repeated it for years to come to remove any doubt.
“As far as canon law is concerned, it’s impeccable,” Chirri said.
And for anyone paying attention, Benedict had hinted about his intentions for years.
In 2009, during a visit to the earthquake-ravaged city of L’Aquila, Benedict prayed at the tomb of Pope Celestine V, the hermit pope who stepped down in 1294 after just five months in office. Benedict left on Celestine’s tomb a pallium — the simple white woolen stole that is a symbol of the papacy.
No one thought much of it at the time. But in retrospect, a pope leaving behind a potent symbol of the papacy on the tomb of a pope who had resigned carried a message.
One year later, in a 2010 book-length interview, Benedict said point-blank that popes not only could but should resign under certain circumstances, though he stressed that retirement was not an option to escape a particular burden.
“If a pope clearly realizes that he is no longer physically, psychologically and spiritually capable of handling the duties of his office, then he has a right, and under some circumstances, also an obligation to resign,” Benedict said in “Light of the World.”
He essentially laid out that same rationale to his cardinals on that chilly February morning.
“After having repeatedly examined my conscience before God, I have come to the certainty that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine (St. Peter) ministry,” he said.
He said that in modern world, “strength of mind and body are necessary, strength which in the last few months, has deteriorated in me to the extent that I have had to recognize my incapacity to adequately fulfill the ministry entrusted to me.”
Closing out his remarks, Benedict thanked the cardinals for their love and service and begged their forgiveness for his defects.
And in a promise he kept to the very end, he vowed to continue serving the church “through a life dedicated to prayer.”
