Another intense day of information with eyes on two continents. Last Uruguayan morning: Mass in Florida and in the mid-afternoon Buenos Aires, where Milei awaits him. From the two days in Montevideo, three things remain that were not in the script: a commission to the bishops of the entire world, seven consecutive texts without naming a single conflict, and two phrases attributed to him that he did not say. And from Rome, a bulletin that did include appointments, and an indicted bishop seated on the doctrinal commission of the Italian Episcopal Conference.
Florida, and in the afternoon Milei
According to the official program: Mass in the square in front of the cathedral basilica of Florida, national shrine of the Virgin of the Thirty-Three; farewell and flight to Argentina. Welcome at the monument to San Martín, welcome ceremony at the Casa Rosada and visit to the President of the Republic after his address to the authorities at the Palacio Libertad. And it repeats the oddity of last week: the lunch with the bishops at the Jesús Buen Pastor house appears only in the Polish version of the program, not in the Italian one. ANSA headlines the face-to-face with Milei and puts the number of attendees at last night’s vigil at one hundred thousand, seventy thousand inside the Centenario and thirty thousand outside.
The fast that the official headline left out
On Friday afternoon, at Vespers in Montevideo Cathedral, Leo XIV asked for something that is not an exhortation but a commission, and of universal scope. The official text, in the Spanish in which he delivered it, says: “I invite my brother bishops throughout the world to promote in their dioceses days of prayer and fasting” for the increase of vocations to the priesthood and consecrated life. Bishops, in their dioceses, prayer and fasting, said from a local cathedral and addressed to the entire episcopate.
He himself recounts the trigger. “When, in 2024, the interdiocesan seminary received no new candidates,” some faithful began to gather for days of prayer and fasting, and afterwards “several young men have begun their journey in the seminary and in consecrated life and are seated among us.” From there the leap: “I would like this experience of Uruguay to find an echo throughout the Church.” And an invitation to read it as a response: “see in these fruits the proof that our God listens to the prayer of his people.”
What is striking is who underlines what. Vatican News, in Spanish, headlines “Leo XIV invites the bishops to promote days of prayer for vocations”, without the fasting, although the word appears four times in the body and the direct quotation records it in full. The Italian edition of the same outlet puts the commission in indirect style. And Silere non possum does the opposite and puts it in the headline, with the quotation cut word for word from the original. Here the critical outlet transcribes accurately and the official outlet softens it.
Two cautions. That same article adds that in 2025 five young men entered the seminary and in 2026 eight, and those figures are nowhere to be found: the papal text says only “several young men.” They belong to the outlet, not to the Holy See. And the instrument is not new, although the purpose is: on 20 August 2025, in the general audience, he had called for prayer and fasting for 22 August, but for peace. This is the first time he applies it to vocations.
To gauge what we are talking about, Uruguay has 71 major seminarians and 369 priests, compared with 587 in 1980, with 11,066 annual baptisms compared with 41,673 then, according to data from the Church’s Central Office of Statistics; Argentina, 871 seminarians compared with 2,260 in 1990; Peru, 864 compared with 2,077 in 2010. Worldwide, the statistical dossier of the Fides Agency gives 106,495 major seminarians as of 31 December 2023, 1,986 fewer than in the previous count, with Europe at 12,800 and a drop of 661.
Seven texts, no conflict, and the phrases he did not say
Reviewed term by term, the seven official texts published from the trip show a count of zero conflicts named. Neither Ukraine, nor Gaza, nor Sudan, nor Haiti, in the words to journalists on the flight, in the address to the authorities, in the homily of Vespers, in the homily of Paysandú, in Casavalle, in the world of education or at the vigil. The word war appears twice, both times in generic form: “human fingers are producing the most terrible of ‘human works’: war” and, in the Centenario Stadium, “the love of God is stronger than death, hatred, violence, war and sin”. The last time he named one remains the Angelus of 1 November.
From yesterday’s day two attributions have emerged that do not hold, and a third characterization that does not either. The first is a fusion: in Paysandú he said “how important it is to be a bridge-builder!” and, separately, “be bridges, so that many may encounter Jesus.” What has circulated as a quotation is a third phrase, stitched from the two and which he never uttered, the imperative to be bridge-builders. The second is a generalization: the text of Casavalle says “a son of this country, so rich in resources, should not go to bed without eating”, not that no one should go to bed without eating. And the third is a characterization: that same text contains neither the words drug trafficking nor drug, neither in Spanish nor in Italian. What it says is “insecurity and violence,” and that “there are children in Uruguay who do not go to school for fear of not returning.” The drug-trafficking neighborhood is a label of the chronicles, not of the Pope.
And a fourth, of opposite sign, because it comes from those who reproach him for remaining silent about abortion. It is circulating that his message to the March for Life in Washington made “not the slightest reference” to the unborn. The message exists, he himself signed it, it is dated 17 January, the Bollettino published it on the 22nd, and it asks them to march “for the unborn children,” whom he calls “the littlest of our brothers and sisters.” What does not appear there is the word abortion. He has used it: on 31 January, in the Clementine Hall, quoting Mother Teresa, “the greatest destroyer of peace is abortion,” with the reference to her 1994 National Prayer Breakfast speech. And the phrase about immigrants attributed to him in quotation marks is another fusion: on leaving Castel Gandolfo, on 30 September last year, of those who are against abortion and in favor of the death penalty he said “is not really pro-life,” which is a statement, and of those who accept inhumane treatment of immigrants he said something else, “I do not know if that is pro-life,” which is a doubt. He named no cardinal.
The health of Pope Leo XIV
We correct our own before correcting anyone else. On Wednesday we wrote that the communiqué did not name the organ, and that is false. The medical bulletin of 13 October, signed by Dr. Luigi Carbone and Professor Stefano Margaritora, names everything: “the lower lobe of the right lung was removed with video-assisted technique” and “the intraoperative histological examination confirmed the diagnosis of pulmonary adenocarcinoma, as suspected by the preoperative tests.” Organ, lobe, technique and diagnosis, in an official source, and ACI Stampa headlined it that way the same day. What is not in the communiqué is the word tumor, which is an abbreviation used by the media.
He, for his part, has not named the diagnosis even once. On the flight he said he could say he felt quite well and that the journalists were witnesses, and to cancer patients he said not to be afraid, that early diagnosis is the best path and that regular check-ups are a blessing. In the Gemelli he was reading the breviary, the book of prayers and the newspapers. And about tennis, that he had not yet returned to it, but that he would.
We also missed the passage that turns this into a political argument, and it was in Friday’s speech that we reviewed in full looking for something else. Before the authorities he said “recently I have experienced first-hand the limitations that illness imposes”, and from there he moved to “ensuring that health care is within reach of every person, regardless of their resources.” Askanews recovered it yesterday, a day later.
The holy priests of Santander
The total number of yesterday’s beatification is the one we gave, eighty: Francisco González de Córdova and seventy-nine companions. From the homily, Semeraro began with “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” and with the fact that Jesus on the cross prayed for his persecutors. An arithmetical warning for anyone who is going to add: the note of the Episcopal Conference of 14 October gives 2,404 blesseds, 11 canonized, 3,040 martyrs in process and 48 causes, and says that those who already have a promulgated decree, Santander included, are included in that register. The figure does not grow today, and those are the numbers we published in October.
The appointments continue in Rome
Yesterday we wrote that Rome had emptied out. It lasted a day. Bulletin 0878, of Saturday, touched four sees: resignation of the bishop of Bangued, in the Philippines, without successor; resignation and appointment in Santiago de Cuba; resignation of José Lampra Cá in Bissau, with transfer of Victor Luis Quematcha from Bafatá; and resignation of Joaquín Hermes Robledo Romero in San Lorenzo, Paraguay, with transfer of Pierre Laurent Jubinville from San Pedro, who is also president of the Paraguayan Episcopal Conference since 2024. In Santiago de Cuba, Dionisio Guillermo García Ibáñez leaves and Juan Gabriel Díaz Ruiz enters, transferred from Matanzas, born in Céspedes on 14 November 1960. The Bollettino does not give the reason for the resignation: it cites neither canon 401 nor any other, so the age route is our reading and not their datum. EWTN attributes 61 years to Díaz Ruiz, incompatible with the date of birth she herself publishes: he turns 66 next Saturday.
Gisana remains on the doctrinal commission of the CEI
Yesterday we reported that the bishop of Piazza Armerina is indicted for false testimony before the Tribunal of Enna, with sentence set for 11 December. What was missing was the piece that turns it into a Roman matter, and it is verifiable: Rosario Gisana appears as a member of the Episcopal Commission for the doctrine of the faith, proclamation and catechesis, presided over by Riccardo Battocchio, bishop of Vittorio Veneto. The appointment is from the Permanent Council of 23 September, in its autumn session, for the five-year period 2026-2031.
That the matter comes out now, and not in September, is due to the piece published today by Federica Tourn, who has been following the case. It includes a comment from Church historian Sergio Tanzarella, for whom the election was a mistake and the prior control insufficient: “centuries later, some Catholics still seem convinced of an implicit impunity before any crime.”
The planes must be separated carefully, because the file has three distinct levels. What is firm is the conviction of priest Giuseppe Rugolo, three years confirmed in Cassation. What is pending is Gisana’s indictment, which will be resolved on 11 December. And what Tourn’s text adds is of another order: a phrase of Gisana in wiretaps from the Rugolo proceeding, “I covered up this story,” which Tanzarella considers criminally irrelevant and morally grave, and an offer of twenty-five thousand euros as a scholarship that the victim is said to have rejected. That figure is sustained by the article without a document in sight, and so we publish it: as his assertion. The Bollettino, meanwhile, records no resignation.
Co-redemptrix: three letters and no response
Exactly one year ago, on 4 November 2025, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith published the doctrinal note Mater Populi fidelis, signed by Cardinal Fernández, whose paragraph 22 states that it is always inappropriate to use the title Co-redemptrix. A translation correction that falls to us: inappropriate, not inopportune, which is how we have been titling it, and the entire controversy revolves around that adjective. In the presentation, the prefect fixed its rank: signed by the Pope, it belongs to the ordinary Magisterium of the Church.
Since then, the International Marian Association has written three times. A twenty-three-page response on 8 December 2025, from a theological commission described as more than forty theologians from fifteen countries, without a nominal list; a follow-up letter on 19 March 2026; and a third on 4 November last, the day of the first anniversary of the note. Edward Pentin transcribes from this last one a dry phrase: unfortunately, to date they have received no response from the Dicastery. The letter is not published, so the quotation is what he transcribes from a document that is not public.
Response from the Dicastery, none. What there is is a clarification from Fernández in an interview with Diane Montagna of November 2025, where he maintains that the note refers to this moment and that it does not intend to judge the past in any way, and that the signatories are ruled out precisely because of the channel: it was not officially promulgated. And that distinction is the news, not a technicality.
Gracias, the caste and the Indian courts
From the interview with Cardinal Oswald Gracias, archbishop emeritus of Bombay, we have all headlined the same thing and the least important. We too, on Tuesday: that he would not prohibit the traditional Mass if it does not imply a rejection of the Council. Messainlatino reproduced the entire interview on Saturday, signed by Niwa Limbu for AdVaticanum on 2 November, and read from beginning to end there is quite a bit more than liturgy.
What no one has collected is what he says about the caste system inside the Indian Church, and he says it without cushioning: the caste system belongs to Hindu culture and therefore also influences Christians. The concrete thing is the legal mechanism. Dalits who convert to Christianity lose the privileges they had as Dalits, because the authorities maintain that in the Church there is no caste system. And the finishing touch is a defeat admitted by a cardinal: they have turned to the courts to try to remedy it, he says, but without great results. That defeat has a date and a name, and he does not give them: last 24 March the Supreme Court of India resolved the case Chinthada Anand v. the State of Andhra Pradesh declaring that no one can profess a religion other than Hinduism, Sikhism or Buddhism and at the same time claim registered-caste status. The plaintiff was a Christian pastor born in the madiga community, and he lost that status upon converting.
Alongside, two data points that have also not been told: that laws hostile to the Christian community are being introduced, with restrictions on adult baptisms, and an uncomfortable precision about who suffers the hostility, which according to him often falls on evangelical groups and not on the traditional churches. Of the traditional Mass, what gives weight to his position is precisely what the headline leaves out: he had authorized it in three churches in Bombay, he did not notice an increase in attendance and his difficulty was finding priests with sufficient Latin to celebrate it with devotion.
The Veneto, end-of-life and the legal office of the CEI
On Thursday, the Italian Council of Ministers decided to challenge before the Corte Costituzionale Veneto regional law number 17, of 8 September, on procedures for regional health assistance for medically assisted suicide. The regional council had approved it on 2 September by thirty-two votes in favor, fourteen against and four abstentions.
The government split internally. Salvini did not participate in the discussion or the vote, Calderoli spoke against and Forza Italia placed on record the request for a national law. The president of the regional council, Luca Zaia, said he fully respects the decision adopted and that it is a constitutional prerogative of the Government, while at the same time claiming the chamber’s decision. The president of the region, Alberto Stefani, maintains that his law is substantially different from those approved in other regions because of the amendments approved in the sense of favor vitae. No one details what those amendments contain, and the most concrete count we have found comes from where it was least to be expected: Matteo Castagna maintains that there were ten, all approved, and that they sought to make the law almost entirely, if not completely, inapplicable in practice. The number is his and we have not verified it in the minutes of the regional council.
What almost no one has placed alongside is that the Italian Church had already written its position, and in legal writing, not by declaration. The National Office for Legal Problems of the Italian Episcopal Conference, in its update of 27 August, says that the regions cannot introduce, modify or consolidate on their own the legal presuppositions of end-of-life, and that the regulation of those presuppositions requires uniform discipline at national level, leaving them only the organizational plane. That document also carries the accounting of the matter: Tuscan law 16/2025 and Sardinian law 26/2025, both challenged, with judgments 204 of 2025 and 148 of 2026 annulling parts of each.
And the national law that everyone is demanding remains where it was. Two bills sleep in the joint commissions of Justice and Health of the Senate, Bazoli’s from the opposition and Zanettin and Zullo’s from the majority, and the plenary will not see them before 19 January. Seven years after judgment 242 of 2019. With a final paradox: the article we have just cited is titled “Non si può votare una legge nazionale sul fine vita,” and its own conclusion maintains the opposite, that one does not vote to create moral truth and that one must deliberate, also by vote, to give the common good a concrete, reasonable and just discipline. The text also admits that the formula of the headline is not attributed there literally either to Saint Thomas, or to Pius X, or to the 1917 Code. A headline that the body contradicts.
Wrapping up the day
Two pieces from the German weekly Die Tagespost, which this week has given more than many agencies. The first, the preliminary analysis of the trip presented by José Francisco Serrano Oceja, which reads it in historical and ecclesiological key and gives a key that no one had thought to enunciate this way: in both cases, he says, these are destinations that Pope Francis left aside, the Uruguay of now and the Spain of June.
The second is by Guido Horst, of 30 October, and is the one that truly sustains the thesis of the Vatican contradiction regarding the decree of excommunication of 2 July against the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X. The points of friction are verifiable: the note declares the confessions of its priests invalid, against the faculties granted by Francis on 1 September 2015, extended in Misericordia et misera on 20 November 2016 and completed on 27 March 2017 for marriages, and it does not say by what act they would be revoked nor what formal adherence to schism means for a layperson. We collected it on Tuesday. The Fraternity’s appeal, of 11 July, remains without published resolution.
On that same file something more is circulating, and we give it with all reservations because it is anonymous testimony at two removes. Christian Lassale, in Medias-Presse-Info, reconstructs a note published on 15 September on the site of the General House of the Fraternity and in Forum Cattolico, withdrawn a few days later, in which a priest recounts that a canonist of a diocesan tribunal saw a document that the Dicastery for Legislative Texts distributed in summer to the canonical authorities of the affected countries, the French Episcopal Conference among them, and that was never published. According to that account, the only point without interpretive difficulty would be the excommunication of the six bishops, only Leo XIV could have abolished the privileges of Francis, and canonically everything would remain as before the decree. The detail that says the most, if it is true, is the final advice to the Ordinaries: to delegate a priest to receive the exchange of promises, so that the gaps in the decree of 2 July are not revealed too openly. Neither the author nor his source has seen the document, so this is not accredited data: it is what a medium maintains.
And one more attribution, of the kind we have carried all week. In the video message to the congress of the Urbaniana on the first Chinese bishops, the phrase according to which the Church in China has never been deprived of the ministry of legitimate Pastors who have preserved intact the apostolic succession appears only once, and in quotation marks: it is from Benedict XVI, letter to Chinese Catholics of 2007, number 8. Whoever puts it in the mouth of Leo XIV without saying so attributes to him as his own a judgment from nineteen years ago. What is truly his, in that text, is something else: that no Pastor in the Church can claim the mission for himself alone, but receives it and exercises it in communion.
“Behold, the bridegroom comes; go out to meet him!”