Sunday and the Solemnity of All Saints, and the day begins with a change that was signed yesterday and a game that is being played today. Medjugorje has a new apostolic visitor, Montse Alvarado takes possession in Communications, and on Saturday the Pope received seven thousand people from two American universities that this afternoon face each other in Rome in an official NCAA match.
The rest of the day: the formula for the Medjugorje appointment is not new; it is a copy of 2021; the Italian Episcopal Conference denies a report about its Islam fact sheets; the Chinese bishops who were in Rome are not the ones coming to the centenary congress; a headline puts in quotation marks a phrase that its protagonist did not say; and the article claiming that the Synod is a fog is published while the Synod has a calendar with dates and deadlines. And on Saturday there was a second audience, with the delegates of the municipalities affected by the earthquake in Central Italy, ten years after the quakes.
Medjugorje changes visitor
The government news was published in yesterday’s Bollettino, bulletin 857, with both acts in the same entry: the Pope accepts the resignation of Archbishop Aldo Cavalli and appoints Bishop Francesco Cavina “apostolic visitor with special character for the parish of Medjugorje,” in Bosnia and Herzegovina, “for an indefinite period and ad nutum Sanctae Sedis.” Two clarifications that will be lost along the way. The office is for the parish, not for the shrine, the place, or the country. And the Bollettino gives no reason for the change: neither age, nor health, nor end of mandate. There is no note, no communiqué, no attached letter.
Nor is the formula the news, although it may seem so. The bulletin of 27 November 2021 that appointed Cavalli said exactly the same thing, with the same designation, the same parish scope, and the same five Latin words. And it had already come before: when Francis appointed Archbishop Henryk Hoser visitor on 31 May 2018, the communiqué described the post as “exclusively pastoral,” without term and ad nutum. Three provisions in eight years, identical wording. Whoever headlines that Leo XIV is hardening the Medjugorje regime, or changing the criterion, has no document behind it: what there is is continuity.
Of the changeover, what is on record. Vatican News adds the context the Holy See does not provide: Cavalli turned eighty on 18 October. He is an apostolic nuncio, arrived at the post from the nunciature in the Netherlands, and resigns only from Medjugorje. He was never nuncio in Bosnia and Herzegovina: the apostolic visitor and the diplomatic representative to that State are distinct offices, one pastoral and the other diplomatic, and they are not the same.
Cavina and the two meanings of “seven years”
The incoming bishop is the emeritus of Carpi, born in Faenza in 1955, and there is a date that explains why this appointment is read the way it is. On 26 June 2019 the Pope accepted his resignation from the pastoral government of the diocese and entrusted the apostolic administration to the archbishop of Modena-Nonantola, Erio Castellucci. Cavina was 64, eleven years below the age set by canon 401, and, as usual, no reason was given. That is an absence worth noting, because the removal of a diocesan bishop is serious matter and nothing was explained.
The origin of the controversy was an April 2019 article in L’Espresso; from there came allegations whose outcome is not on record. And on his procedural situation the media contradict one another: Avvenire described an archive requested by the Modena prosecutor’s office and granted by the judge, which presupposes that he was investigated, while ANSA stated that he never was and Crux reported that the police considered the case closed without formal investigation. Without a judicial document in sight, that is a discrepancy between media outlets and not a fact. There is no conviction or known open proceeding. His own words at the time, in his letter: he took a step back “exclusively out of the love I have for this local Church of Carpi,” and spoke of “continuous attempts at delegitimization.”
The doctrinal clarification remains, the one almost everyone mangles when Medjugorje comes up. The note of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith “La Regina della Pace,” of 19 September 2024, granted a nihil obstat: it authorizes public worship and expressly states that this does not imply “a declaration of the supernatural character of the phenomenon,” nor declaring the presumed events authentic, and that the corresponding decree is issued by the bishop of Mostar-Duvno. It was not an approval of the apparitions. The messages, in the text, are “presumed messages.”
Audience for Villanova University
On Saturday, in the Paul VI Hall, the Pope received some seven thousand people including professors, students, and alumni of Villanova University and the University of Notre Dame, with both rectors. The speech is published and contains three phrases worth noting: that sport, when well lived, “is medicine for body and spirit”; that “no one is born a champion, just as no one is born a saint”; and, of the two teams, that “although there is competitive rivalry between them, of course they are not enemies.”
The last one is worth reading twice, because ANSA headlines it as sport teaching that “rivals are never enemies”, and that is not in the text. The Pope says something more limited and with the condition stated first: there being sporting rivalry, they are certainly not enemies. The absolute formula, with the “never,” belongs to the agency. Whoever cites it as a papal word will be citing a headline.
What happened in the hall. Vatican News reports that the Pope moved from his chair to stand almost at the athletes’ height in the group photo, and they gave him a commemorative jersey with the number XIV. That he stepped onto the platform is a fact; that he did so to appear taller is the reporters’ reading: the Associated Press writes that he stepped up to gain a few centimeters on them, and Vatican News describes the gesture without attributing intention to it.
And one of the headlines we already know. EWTN’s Spanish piece carries “champion saint” in the URL, and there is no athlete in question. The real headline is the Pope’s quotation about the champion and the saint; the saint who appears in the speech is Pier Giorgio Frassati, named as one of the patrons of the athletes, along with Blessed Basilio Moreau among the intercessors.
The game, and the “firsts” that hold up
The game is today, and it is not a pilgrimage friendly: it is an official regular-season Division I NCAA match. Notre Dame announced it on 17 April, a double-header, men’s and women’s, and the venue is the Palazzo dello Sport. The university says the event was conceived after the election of Leo XIV and that the papal audience had been planned since spring. The official biography of Leo XIV states that he earned a degree in Mathematics from Villanova in 1977 and that he studied philosophy there. Notre Dame’s announcement, however, asserts no link between Villanova and the Pope: the “obvious link” one reads here and there is gloss by whoever is writing, not data from the universities.
The mayors of the earthquake
The same Saturday there was another audience in the Apostolic Palace, and it is the one that has been least reported. The Bollettino records it in bulletin 855: the Pope received the delegates of the municipalities in the areas struck by the Central Italy earthquake, ten years after the sequence of quakes that left hundreds dead. The audience falls on the day after the tenth anniversary of the 30 October 2016 tremor.
Of the speech, what has substance. It draws on the Book of Nehemiah, and does so by referring to number 8 of Magnifica humanitas: from there it takes two things, communal responsibility and the gaze capable of seeing what can be built from the ruins. It names Saint Rita of Cascia, Saint Nicholas of Tolentino, Saint Benedict, and Saint Francis of Assisi, on the eight-hundredth anniversary of his death, and recalls that the house the Lord commanded him to repair was the Church. It asks that material reconstruction be as rapid, safe, and transparent as possible, because hope needs concrete answers and a clear direction. And from Haggai it takes the order of things, which is to rebuild the center first, closing with the verse: “take courage, all you people of the land, says the Lord, and work, for I am with you.”
Artificial intelligence, and a date in Geneva
On Friday, in the Consistory Hall, there was a speech on artificial intelligence, and it is necessary to situate what it is and what it is not. The piece from L’Osservatore Romano circulating as an article is neither a chronicle nor an editorial: it is the full translation of the papal speech made by the newspaper, unsigned, with its own lead that warns of it. The original is the address to participants in a meeting of the Pontifical Academy for Life with the Future of Life Institute, held at the Casina Pio IV.
We summarize it in four sentences. That “machines are instruments, not persons.” That some propose granting those systems rights “or even legal personality,” which he sets out in order to reject it. That they must remain “always subject to effective, informed, and responsible human control.” And the concrete request: to take “concrete steps toward the prohibition of lethal autonomous weapons,” with the demand for “shared standards, independent oversight, and clear mechanisms of accountability.” Vatican News supplies the date the speech does not give: the review conference of the convention on certain conventional weapons is held in Geneva from 16 to 20 November. There is the datable hook of a text that, for the rest, creates nothing: neither body, nor commission, nor norm.
The speech draws again and again on Magnifica humanitas, Leo XIV’s first encyclical, signed 15 May and published the 25th. It is a gloss on the encyclical, not a development. Note that it does not cite Antiqua et nova, the 2025 joint note on artificial intelligence and human intelligence, even once.
Alvarado takes possession
Today, All Saints, the new prefect of the Dicastery for Communication takes possession. The Bollettino appointed her on 2 June and already set this date there, so five months have passed between one thing and the other. Yesterday we reported the farewell of Paolo Ruffini and the quantifier that is going to get mangled: Montse Alvarado is the first laywoman at the head of a dicastery, not the first woman, which was Sister Simona Brambilla in January 2025. About the departure, resignation, or whatever of Ruffini, who turns seventy, nothing at this hour.
The vote, second wave of information
Two days after the Press Office note about the ballot sent by mail, the Italian press has produced a second round, and the summary is that no one provides a new fact. It remains unconfirmed that the ballot has arrived and unconfirmed that it has been counted.
The most striking case is a headline that promises a datum and does not have it. Poste Vaticane. Cosa significa il voto per corrispondenza di Leone XIV, by Antonello De Oto, professor of Ecclesiastical and Canon Law at Bologna, does not mention the Vatican postal service even once: neither Poste Vaticane, nor Poste Italiane, nor the diplomatic pouch, nor by what channel the ballot left. What is inside is canon law, with a single norm cited, canon 287, to conclude that there is no obstacle because voting without revealing the sense of the vote is not taking a political position. And he commits the only verifiable slip of the round: he treats the vote as validly cast, when valid casting is precisely what no one has confirmed.
AGI attributes to historian Michael Walsh, and attributes in turn to CNN, that Leo XIV would be the first Pope to vote in a democratic election; and a few lines later the agency itself reduces it to the conditional. It adds, by the same route, that as cardinal he would already have voted in primaries and in the 2024 presidential election. Franco Monaco, in Domani, writes expressly that curiosity about whom he voted for will not be satisfied, and does not speculate: that is more than others have done. But he says the Pope “wanted it to be known,” and that is an intention that is not on record, because the note was released in response to press questions. And he speaks of a “recent” confrontation with Trump without dating it. What he does sustain, and verified, is his documentary citation: paragraph 39 of Magnifica humanitas deals with democracy and names Centesimus annus by its title.
The Italian bishops’ Islam fact sheets
There is an Italian case that deserves the three planes separated, because the accusation is serious and what is verifiable is finer. Schede sull’islam e ora di religione, la CEI attacca mentendo, an editorial by Riccardo Cascioli, maintains that the Italian Episcopal Conference is lying when it denies promoting the teaching of Islam in schools.
Riccardo Benotti reconstructs it in SettimanaNews: the eleven fact sheets on Islam were published by the Episcopal Conference and the Pontifical Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies on 10 November 2025, following the model of the sixteen on Judaism presented with the Italian Jewish communities in Ferrara in March 2023. On 21 October of this year there was a second presentation, at Palazzo Borromeo. And the trigger of the case was not the presentation: it was a phrase by Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, “I would send everyone to school, because there is notable ignorance,” which some headlines turned into an invitation for everyone to study Islam.
The second thing is what the Conference says. Through Vincenzo Corrado, director of its communications office, it called the matter a “hoax” born of a distortion, placed the material as sources for editors of Catholic religion textbooks, said that whoever claims the religion hour has been emptied “does so with malice,” and recalled that the indications for the subject are adopted by presidential decree after agreement with the Conference itself.
And the third is what is written, which is where the matter gets refined. The 2025 page frames the project as provision to Italian schools of “texts for quality Catholic religion teaching.” The page of 19 October of this year says the fact sheets are “intended first of all for schools,” and that of its education office quotes Don Alberto Gastaldi saying they give teachers tools to answer students’ questions. So what is documented is that the denial describes the project more narrowly than its own website does. The claim that hundreds of religion teachers welcomed the fact sheets with pleasure does not appear on any of the official pages.
Four Chinese bishops, not two
Here is a confusion we have been dragging along and that it is worth clearing up, because they are different people. Ferruccio Michelin, in Formiche, reports that two Chinese bishops traveled to Rome for the tenth anniversary of Amoris laetitia and were unable to meet either the Pope or the officials of the Secretariat of State who follow relations with Beijing. He does not name them. The agency Fides names them, placing them at the 7–14 October meeting: Matteo Zhen Xuebin, coadjutor bishop of Beijing, and Giuseppe Huang Bingzhang, bishop of Shantou.
Those of the congress are two others. On Thursday 5 November, at the Pontifical Urbaniana University, Fides is organizing “The Face of the Universal Church in China, One Hundred Years since the Consecration of the First Six Chinese Bishops,” with Cardinal Parolin, Cardinal Stephen Chow of Hong Kong, Cardinal Tagle, and Bishops Giuseppe Li Shan of Beijing and Ignazio Ding Zuyao of Haimen, consecrated on 15 October. The centenary is of the consecration celebrated by Pius XI in St. Peter’s on 28 October 1926. Ding Zuyao also succeeds one of those six in Haimen.
The imperfect agreement
«Meglio un accordo imperfetto che niente». Il Vaticano e la complicata relazione con la Cina, by Matteo Matzuzzi in Il Foglio, carries the phrase in quotation marks in the headline. It is not a quotation from anyone. What Msgr. Paul Richard Gallagher said to a small group of Vatican journalists, according to the Catholic Herald, is that the imperfections “are evident” and that the situation is “certainly an improvement” compared with before the agreement. “Better an imperfect agreement than nothing” is the journalistic rendering of that stance: in the Herald it is the reporter’s subhead and in Il Foglio it is the headline. In quotation marks, it looks like his.
And the chronology of the agreement, which also circulates badly. It was signed in Beijing on 22 September 2018, by Msgr. Antoine Camilleri and Vice-Minister Wang Chao. It was renewed for two years on 22 October 2020, another two on 22 October 2022 and four more on 22 October 2024, so it runs until October 2028: there is no new renewal, and what is recent is declarative. The text remains unpublished. And the signing date is often confused with October, because the renewal deadlines fall in October; it is September. AsiaNews, for its part, reported another congress for the same centenary, that of Fu Jen University in Taipei, on 16 and 17 October.
The Synod has a calendar
Che fine farà il Sinodo?, by Vinicio Albanesi is opinion and presents itself as such. It maintains that the results are indecipherable because the process drags on without end, that participation was set by the bishops, that the language of the documents is hierarchical, and that the dioceses are waiting for instructions. And it closes with a fundamental reproach: that the Synod has remained silent in the face of war, poverty, and inequality.
The contrast is that the calendar exists and has dates. The “Tracce per la fase attuativa,” of 29 June 2025, signed by Cardinal Grech, set the stages and state that the first person responsible in each local Church is the diocesan bishop. And the Secretariat published the detail with deadlines in May: in 2026 there are no assemblies planned; diocesan assemblies in the first half of 2027, with materials before 30 June; episcopal conferences in the second half, before 31 December; continental assemblies in the first four months of 2028, before 30 April; and the ecclesial assembly in the Vatican in October 2028. One can debate whether the calendar serves; what cannot be said is that it does not exist. Add a detail: the “prophetic phase 2025-2030” cited in the article does not appear in those documents, which culminate in 2028.
And the piece was published on the 31st, the day after the Synod appointed two under-secretaries, Jesuit Giacomo Costa and Salesian Elena Massimi, for a five-year term. It does not mention them, nor does it mention Grech. It may have been written earlier; what we do not know is why it was published without a line about them.
Uruguay, Argentina and Peru
It is worth putting the trip in its place, because it is being told as a trip to Peru with stopovers. It is not. The Bollettino announced it on 5 August: apostolic journey to Uruguay, Argentina, and Peru, from 6 to 17 November, at the invitation of the heads of state and ecclesiastical authorities. Uruguay from the 6th to the 8th, with Montevideo, Paysandú, and Florida; Argentina from the 8th to the 11th, with Buenos Aires, Córdoba, and Luján; and Peru from the 11th to the 17th, with Lima, Chiclayo, Cusco, and Pucallpa. The detailed program was published on 21 September. Peru is the third stage, not the trip. Of the first, Vatican News has published an interview with Guzmán Carriquiry in which he maintains that the visit will update the country’s Catholic roots. It is the assessment of a former ambassador, not an announcement, and it should be read as such: the piece circulating by being reproduced on other sites is the same interview.
Villa Nazareth, and a president quoting Parolin
A small event with a detail worth noting because everything surrounding Villa Nazareth does not go unnoticed at the Vatican. Sergio Mattarella received a delegation from Villa Nazareth for its eightieth anniversary and said that “these are not easy times, particularly complex, in which uncertainty is a widespread feature,” and that the future “is not pre-constituted, it depends on us; it has to be designed, and it must be designed particularly by the young.” Villa Nazareth is the Roman university college presided over by Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Secretary of State, and the President of the Republic quoted words of the Pope and of Parolin himself. It is not an act of government, but it is the Secretariat of State appearing at the Quirinal through the door of an educational work, and everyone knows its influence in Italian political life.
Abuse procedures that were not opened
Federica Tourn published on 26 October the second installment of a series on abuse complaints in the seminary of Ugento, in the diocese of Ugento-Santa Maria di Leuca, referring to the rectorship from 1987 to 1995. There is one complainant, a former seminarian. What matters here is the status of each channel, because that is what gets confused when these things are told in haste.
In the civil sphere there is a lawsuit before the court of Lecce, with a first hearing on 22 October and a claim for one million euros; the defendants deny and allege prescription, and there is no ruling. The prior canonical investigation was requested and appears not to have been opened. The formal request for investigation to the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and to the metropolitan was presented on 27 May and no response is on record. Canonical process not initiated. Penal channel not mentioned. So there is no conviction, either civil or canonical, and what there is is the account of a complainant and a lawsuit in progress. The four bishops the piece points to for silence or omission appear in that account, not as an established fact, and the technical report and recordings that accompany it are partisan material. No other media outlet carries it.
Wrapping up the day
We are finishing. Today Alvarado takes possession and the game is played; tomorrow is the commemoration of the faithful departed, with Mass at the Verano; on Tuesday the United States votes and the PETA complaint about priests and bullfighting is presented in Rome; on Wednesday the 5th the suffrage Mass at the altar of the Chair, and that same day the centenary Chinese congress at the Urbaniana; on the 6th the trip to Uruguay begins. It remains unknown whether the ballot arrived, why the visitor to Medjugorje was changed, and why the one coming in left Carpi.
Have a good day. And today’s Gospel, which is that of the Beatitudes and comes to mind on a day that begins with the Queen of Peace.
“Blessed are the peacemakers.”