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Pope and closest aides do not have coronavirus: Vatican

The Vatican said on Saturday that tests carried out in the building where Pope Francis lives after one resident tested positive for coronavirus showed that the pontiff and his closest aides do not have the disease.

It was the first pronouncement about the 83-year-old pope and his coronavirus status since the current crisis began in Italy, where more than 10,000 people have died.

The long-awaited opening of Pope Pius XII’s wartime records lasted only a week before the coronavirus outbreak shut down the Vatican archives. But that was long enough for documents to emerge that reflect badly on the pontiff accused of silence during the Holocaust, according to published reports.

German researchers found that the pope, who never directly criticized the Nazi slaughter of Jews, knew from his own sources about Berlin’s death campaign early on.

But he kept this from the U.S. government after an aide argued that Jews and Ukrainians — his main sources — could not be trusted because they lied and exaggerated, the researchers said.

the book did not surprise me, as such, but it still stunned, shocked, and disgusted me. You simply cannot unread it, or banish what is quite obviously true from your mind

It helps explain more deeply the rants of Pope Francis about so many of his cardinals, especially his denunciations of “Pharisees” and “hypocrites,” with their sexual amorality and their vast wealth and power. “Behind rigidity something always lies hidden; in many cases, a double life,”

The only tiny consolation of the book is the knowledge that we now have a pope — with all his flaws — who knows what he’s dealing with, and has acted, quite ruthlessly at times, to demote, defrock, or reassign the most egregious cases to places where they have close to nothing to do

Vatican Arrests 2 in Connection With Leaked Documents

arrests come just days before the publication of two books — “Avarizia,” or Avarice, by Emiliano Fittipaldi, and “Merchants in the Temple” by Gianluigi Nuzzi — purporting to raise the lid on old and new scandals at the Vatican.

personal butler, Paolo Gabriele was arrested on charges of leaking the documents to Mr. Nuzzi. Mr. Gabriele was tried and was sentenced in October 2012 to 18 months in prison.

German Catholic theologians and clergy have mobilized against a recent ruling from the Vatican that said the Catholic Church would not bless same-sex unions.

"We decisively distance ourselves from this position," it said.The statement, signed by 266 theologians, said the ruling lacks "theological depth, hermeneutical understanding as well as argumentative stringency."

"A document that in its argumentation so blatantly excludes any progress in theological and human scientific knowledge will lead to pastoral practice ignoring it," Georg Bätzing, Bishop of Limburg, said in a statement published on Facebook on Wednesday.

Beyond appointing eight cardinals as outside advisers, Francis has not yet begun making concrete changes or set forth an ambitious policy agenda

He has chosen to live not in the papal apartments but rather in the Casa Santa Marta residence inside the Vatican, where he eats dinner in the company of lower-ranking priests and visitors.

n his speeches, “his style is simple and direct. It’s not elaborately constructed and complex,

Pope Francis has tapped an Italian lawyer to be the first woman to hold a management position in the Vatican’s most important office, the Secretariat of State.

Francis has called for women to be given greater decision-making roles in the Vatican and the Catholic Church at large, though no women head a Vatican congregation or other important office.

Such leadership positions are reserved for priests, bishops or cardinals and Francis has upheld church teaching prohibiting the ordination of women.

Pope Francis has appointed a female Italian lawyer to a high-ranking role in the Vatican's diplomatic division, further cementing his credentials as one of the most progressive Holy Fathers in history.

Francesca Di Giovanni will serve as the under-secretary in the Section for Relations with States, the arm of the Catholic church that handles the Holy See's political and diplomatic activity, according to a story published in the church's official media Vatican News on Wednesday.

The story notes that Di Giovanni is the first woman to hold a position at that level in the Secretariat of State, the department which includes the Section for Relations with States. The Roman Catholic Church currently only permits men to be ordained as priests and much of the Vatican bureaucracy remains male dominated.

“VatiLeaks” has once again revealed how the Vatican is not only a global force with one billion faithful worldwide, but also a deeply Italian institution where connections and loyalty often count more than merit and Machiavellian power plays are the rule more than the exception.

“This isn’t Watergate. This isn’t ‘Vaticangate.’ This is a small game of power plays in which the ecclesiastical right wants to put the Ratzinger papacy in crisis,”

As the “VatiLeaks” scandal continues, the pope has appeared increasingly isolated, a lonely intellectual unable to rein in his infighting underlings.

In remarkably blunt language, Francis sought to set a new tone for the church, saying it should be a “home for all” and not a “small chapel” focused on doctrine, orthodoxy and a limited agenda of moral teachings.

“The dogmatic and moral teachings of the church are not all equivalent. The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently. “We have to find a new balance,” the pope continued, “otherwise even the moral edifice of the church is likely to fall like a house of cards, losing the freshness and fragrance of the Gospel.”

The new pope’s words are likely to have repercussions in a church whose bishops and priests in many countries, including the United States, often appeared to make combating abortion, gay marriage and contraception their top public policy priorities. These teachings are “clear” to him as “a son of the church,” he said, but they have to be taught in a larger context. “The proclamation of the saving love of God comes before moral and religious imperatives.”

David Kertzer has spent decades excavating the Vatican’s hidden history, with his work winning a Pulitzer and capturing Hollywood’s attention. A new book examines Pope Pius XII’s role in the Holocaust.

Over the last few decades, Mr. Kertzer has turned the inquisitive tables on the church. Using the Vatican’s own archives, the soft-spoken Brown University professor and trustee at the American Academy in Rome has become arguably the most effective excavator of the Vatican’s hidden sins, especially those leading up to and during World War II.

The son of a rabbi who participated in the liberation of Rome as an Army chaplain, Mr. Kertzer grew up in a home that had taken in a foster child whose family was murdered in Auschwitz.

the Vatican objected in particular to an article published in 2010 in Reality, an Irish religious magazine. In the article, Father Flannery, a Redemptorist priest, wrote that he no longer believed that “the priesthood as we currently have it in the church originated with Jesus” or that he designated “a special group of his followers as priests.” Instead, he wrote, “It is more likely that some time after Jesus, a select and privileged group within the community who had abrogated power and authority to themselves, interpreted the occasion of the Last Supper in a manner that suited their own agenda.” Father Flannery said the Vatican wanted him specifically to recant the statement, and affirm that Christ instituted the church with a permanent hierarchical structure and that bishops are divinely established successors to the apostles.

In reply to an association statement expressing solidarity with Father Flannery, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith denied it was acting in a secretive manner, pointed out that Father Flannery’s views could be construed as “heresy” under church law, and threatened “canonical penalties,” including excommunication, if he did not change his views. This month, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith wrote to an American priest, Roy Bourgeois, notifying him of his laicization, following his excommunication in 2008 over his support for the ordination of women.

he is best known as a leading proponent of Traditionalism, a worldview popular in far-right and alternative religious circles that believes progress and equality are poisonous illusions.

Evola became a darling of Italian Fascists, and Italy’s post-Fascist terrorists of the 1960s and 1970s looked to him as a spiritual and intellectual godfather.

They called themselves Children of the Sun after Evola’s vision of a bourgeoisie-smashing new order that he called the Solar Civilization. Today, the Greek neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn includes his works on its suggested reading list, and the leader of Jobbik, the Hungarian nationalist party, admires Evola and wrote an introduction to his works.

there was a constructive search for clarity. After Sachs spoke of the importance of fostering a “global ethics,” Stefano Zamagni, an economics professor at the University of Bologna, cautioned that it was important to qualify such statements. “When we talk about ethics we mean different things,” he said, rattling off a list of ethical frames ranging from utilitarian to neo-contractualist.

The Vatican has suspended a senior German Church leader dubbed the "bishop of bling" by the media over his alleged lavish spending.

"A situation has been created in which the bishop can no longer exercise his episcopal duties", a Vatican statement said.

Bishop Tebartz-van Elst - and his spending habits - had become infamous in Germany, where many people pay Church tax to the state. The tax raised 5.2bn euros for Catholics and 4.6bn euros for Protestants in 2012.

cultural ties to the church are still strong

Festivities for a city’s patron saint sweep up citizens, churchgoers or not, and some 8,000 church-run oratories throughout Italy offer after-school programs and other activities for children. The heroes of two of the most popular shows on Italy’s national broadcaster are a priest and a nun

“Italians tend to know their parish priest, so if they hear of an abuse case somewhere they say, ‘Yes, it’s horrendous, but our priest is not like that,’

American Catholicism, he argued, echoing the article’s thesis, “has become different than mainstream European Catholicism and mainstream Latin American Catholicism,” and has fallen “into the hands of the religious right.”

The authors of the article argue that American evangelical and ultraconservative Catholics risk corrupting the Roman Catholic faith with an ideology intended to inject “religious influence in the political sphere.” They suggest that so-called values voters are using the banners of religious liberty and opposition to abortion to try to supplant secularism with a “theocratic type of state.”

That deep suspicion of evangelical fundamentalism and the fear of politicization corroding the conservative hierarchy of the American Catholic church was laid bare by the article in La Civiltà Cattolica. The authors were the Rev. Antonio Spadaro, the journal’s editor, who is a confidant of Francis’; and Marcelo Figueroa, an Argentine Presbyterian minister who is a friend and longtime collaborator of the pope’s.