Tuesday, Saint Martin de Porres, of Lima, eight days before the Pope lands in the city where he is buried. Yesterday afternoon Leo XIV celebrated at the Verano cemetery and asked that the tears of mothers touch the consciences of those who can silence the weapons. Today the vote takes place in the United States.
The Mass at the Verano
Sparse attendance in a vast cemetery and an extremely poor altar; it was pitiful to see the Pope surrounded by greenhouse plastics—that is what we are coming to. Before the Mass the Pope prayed at one of the family tombs at the entrance and left a floral arrangement. Vatican News gives the inscription on the central marble: Antonia Coccia Nicolini. It does not state who she was or any connection with the Pope, the diocese or the basilica. Cernuzio reads the gesture as a tribute to all the deceased; EWTN writes that the tomb was “chosen at random,” with white and yellow roses. Neither cites a source and the two accounts do not fit together. No one from the Vatican has explained the choice.
In the homily commenting on the beatitude of those who mourn, the Pope invited prayers for those who have recently lost a loved one, “in particular for those taken by the absurd violence of war,” and exclaimed: “May the tears of so many mothers, so many children, so many elderly touch the consciences of those who have the power to silence the weapons!” He called the Beatitudes “the self-portrait of Jesus” and “the path of a full and fulfilled life, already now and for eternity,” and the cemetery a threshold between this world and the next. He concluded by saying that the bond with the deceased “is not interrupted, but transformed,” and with the promise that there will be no more death, nor mourning, nor weeping, nor toil.
He named no conflict: neither Ukraine, nor the Holy Land, nor Gaza, nor Sudan. The text says “war,” in the generic sense, and anyone who titles it with a specific country will be adding what the Pope did not put. Nor did he take up the phrase from the Angelus on Sunday about the deceased “whom no one remembers,” which is the one everyone has linked to the celebration; that bridge is drawn by Cernuzio in Vatican News, not by the homily. And on the eighth centenary of the death of Saint Francis he quoted the Canticle in its original form, “sora nostra morte corporale,” which ANSA modernizes to “sister bodily Death”: a translation, not a quotation.
Silere non possum makes the same reading and adds the detail: the appeal was to “those who have power,” without naming who. It places the celebration in front of the monumental entrance, beside the basilica of San Lorenzo fuori le Mura, and recalls that it is the second consecutive year that Leo XIV has chosen the Verano for 2 November. And it points out two things the Pope did not say: that the linking of this commemoration with those fallen in war comes from a decree of Benedict XV in 1915, in the midst of the First World War, and that the Verano itself and its basilica were bombed on 19 July 1943. A Mass for the victims of war in a cemetery that war itself bombed, and of that nothing was said.
ANSA headlined “May the pain touch those who can stop the weapons,” in quotation marks and attributed to the Pope. What the Pope actually said, and what the dispatch itself writes correctly four lines below, is about the tears and the consciences of those who have the power to silence the weapons. The body of the text is literal against the text of vatican.va, word for word. Only the quotation marks in the headline are not in the homily.
Castel Gandolfo, after the Mass
Quotidiano Nazionale published last night, signed by Giovanni Panettiere, that the Pope went up to Castel Gandolfo yesterday afternoon after the Mass at the Verano, and reads the gesture as a sign of the full resumption of the government of the Church. Its only attribution to Vatican sources is not about the trip, but about the fact that he would swim in the pool today. No other outlet carries it, neither ANSA nor Vatican News. The headline says the Pope “returns” and the report frames the outing as recovered normality; and it adds that there is no statement from the Press Office, which is something the newspaper does not write anywhere.
Schneider calls for integrating the Fraternity
Bishop Athanasius Schneider, auxiliary bishop of Astana and titular bishop of Celerina since 2011, again calls for the recognition of the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X. In an interview with AdVaticanum on 30 October, without an identified interviewer, he maintains that “it would be a benefit for the whole Church to gradually integrate this work of these priests and faithful.” He says this four months after the excommunications at Écône. And the phrase about the “very narrow and legalistic vision of the reality of the Church” is not directed at canon law in the abstract, but at those who maintain that the Fraternity is in schism.
There is something new, and little, about the appeal: a communiqué from the General House, dated in Menzingen on 13 October and without individual signature, states that the preliminary appeal was presented before the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith itself and that they await the follow-up by the competent authorities. The procedural stage is not recorded, the appeal before the Apostolic Signatura is not recorded and neither is Rome’s response. The interview was recorded on the morning of his pontifical Mass at Santa Maria Maggiore, and he complains about the pilgrimage in four words: “precisely this group was vetoed.” The prohibition and the body that signed it have been documented since Friday; what was missing was hearing it from a bishop.
The interview has reached Spanish with a headline that promises sedevacantism and providence, in razonmasfe.com. Both phrases exist and are his, but they appear in a piece by Myles Allman in LifeSiteNews on 29 October: the headline comes from there and the body of the material from AdVaticanum, without saying so, and in the text offered to the reader there is not a word about either of those two things. Along the way two further slips creep in. The phrase about gradual integration is backdated to 2015, and it is from 2026: in the interview of that year Schneider said there were no compelling reasons to deny canonical recognition and echoed Lefebvre’s request to be accepted “as we are,” but he did not speak of integrating little by little. And where it is written that Francis sent him as visitor to the Fraternity’s seminaries, he had said that “the Holy See” asked him. That 2015 visitation is not recorded either in the Bollettino or in press.vatican.va.
The “extremism” of the veil
It is circulating in Spanish that the Vatican brands as extremism receiving Communion on the knees or wearing a veil. Behind it lies a report of the meeting with the bishops of Panama on their ad limina visit, on 21 October, in the activities section of the website of the Dicastery for Divine Worship. It is not a note, nor a declaration, nor an instruction. It carries no signature. Cardinal Roche is not mentioned. It is the lowest level of documentary authority a dicastery can have: an in-house chronicle. The text speaks of “the danger of extremisms in the liturgical sphere and the instrumentalization of the Eucharistic celebration by some groups of the faithful,” and continues: “Such groups tend to sow division and confusion, raising questions such as Communion received on the knees and in the hand or the use of the veil by women.” The criticism is aimed at the groups and the instrumentalization; regarding the lawfulness of receiving Communion on the knees or wearing a veil, the report takes no position. And there is a detail that dismantles half the matter: the original says “on the knees and in the hand,” while the version circulating in Spanish says “tongue or hand,” and on that tongue the contrast with Redemptionis Sacramentum is later built.
A false priest in Turin
A twenty-five-year-old man of Egyptian origin settled in June in the parish of Santa Rosa da Lima in Turin and for about four months celebrated Mass there and in two other churches in Pozzo Strada, with a pause in July and August. He began by concelebrating and ended by substituting; he heard confessions, absolved and gave blessings. He presented papers dated 31 January 2025 for his ordination and appeared in the diocesan yearbook as an extra-diocesan presbyter. He claimed to come from the Coptic Church, and his peculiarities were attributed to that. On 27 October, after a faithful person alerted don Giuliano Naso, a direct verification was requested from the vicar for pastoral care, Mario Aversano, with the Egyptian ecclesiastical authorities, and within a day it was seen that the papers did not come from the vicariate they claimed. Alberto Riccadonna, spokesman for Cardinal Roberto Repole, declared him a fraud and said they had already removed him and reported him to the prosecutor’s office. The curious case is published by Valentina Dattilo in Quotidiano Piemontese and Giovanni Ruggiero in Open.
The case is so strange that we do not know whether the impostor is baptized; if he is not, the excommunication everyone is commenting on is superfluous. Canon 11 subjects to merely ecclesiastical laws those baptized in the Catholic Church or received into it. The reports say “Coptic Church” without specifying whether Catholic or Orthodox, and no one has published where he was baptized: if he is not baptized in the Catholic Church nor has been received into it, he does not incur the interdict either. The penalty the press attributes to him is not the one that corresponds, and it may be that none corresponds to him.
The question remains that the faithful have asked and no one answers: what value do the confessions and Communions of those four months have—Ecclesia supplet? The archdiocese has not pronounced on the validity of what was celebrated. Nor is it recorded how many Masses he said, nor whether there were baptisms or weddings, nor what celebret he presented. The report opens by saying he had convinced everyone, even the diocese of Turin; the curious thing is that the diocese has said nothing.
With a prologue by the Promoter of Justice
Giuseppina Coali, theologian and religion teacher at the Archiepiscopal College of Trento, publishes a memoir on the case of Emanuela Orlandi with her memories and those of her father, Augusto, who according to her account was chief inspector of the Gendarmerie of the Vatican City State and today suffers from Alzheimer’s. It is published by Il Timone and, very curiously, it is prefaced by Alessandro Diddi, Promoter of Justice of the Vatican City State.
Diddi heads the office that opened the file on the disappearance in January 2023 and that in June sent the records to the Prosecutor’s Office of Rome. And the author testified before that office: she recounts it in La Verità —“my father and I were heard for four hours”— and Nico Spuntoni in Il Giornale reports it. The magistrate who took her statement signs the prologue of the book in which she recounts what she declared. There is not a word about that: neither from the Office of the Promoter of Justice, nor from the Press Office, nor from Diddi, who does not explain anywhere why he signs it.
The author delimits her own book better than its promotional apparatus. She says it is a memoir and not an investigation, that “I point the finger at no one,” that her father considered the Vatican substantially foreign to the disappearance but never found elements of charge against anyone —“and if he had had them, he would not have remained with his arms crossed”— and that of the leads accumulated in forty-three years there are “too many, for sure.” She also specifies that her father did not officially follow the investigations and that the family moved to the Vatican in September 1983, three months after the disappearance; she does not say he was assigned there in June. Of Augusto Coali nothing is recorded outside that account: neither rank, nor years, nor functions, in any source independent of the book and his daughter. The book provides no document, no file and no name, and the minutes of that testimony are not public.
Diddi said in November 2024, to Felice Manti, that if the parliamentary commission wants the documents a rogatory commission is needed: no such commission is recorded as having been issued. The voluntary sending of records to the Prosecutor’s Office of Rome is another matter and the two are easily mixed up. From that date is also the last verifiable reference to the file, with its content reserved, so it cannot be written that it remains open or that it has been archived. The bicameral commission, instituted by law 202 of 4 December 2023, continues to work and has not yet issued a report.
The letter Sturla will take to the Pope
A headline in Infobae, signed by Pedro Tristant, says that Leo XIV will receive in Uruguay the letter of a person who denounces a priest for sexual violence. What is on record is the action of a cardinal: Daniel Sturla, archbishop of Montevideo, met with the complainant on 27 October and undertook to deliver the letter to the Pope, and Telenoche writes that he will hand it over in person during the visit. There is no granted audience, no point on the program, no commitment from the nunciature or the diocese, and no one says the Pope has accepted to receive it or to reply to it. Sturla, to the same channel, summarized the problem: the agenda “has been worked on for some time and is very tight.”
Of the substance almost nothing is on record. The complainant has not given his name publicly and the priest is not named either; the sources do not agree on the most basic point, because El País of Montevideo, cited by the others, speaks of a foreign priest passing through Uruguay, while Telenoche headlines “a Uruguayan priest” and in its own body writes “a member of the Uruguayan Catholic Church,” which designates institutional belonging and not nationality. Neither the diocese nor the congregation is recorded, nor the years of the events, nor whether the complainant was a minor, nor a complaint before the Uruguayan justice system, nor an open canonical process. Nor is there any pronouncement from the Episcopal Conference of Uruguay, from the nunciature in Montevideo or from the Holy See on this case.
The Press Office announced on 27 October, and we reported it the following day, that during the trip there would be “some meetings” with persons who are victims of abuse by members of the clergy and of the Church, without specifying number, place or format. In the official program published none appears, neither in Uruguay, nor in Argentina, nor in Peru. And for Uruguay, Infobae writes that there will be none, because the Church received no requests to that effect.
Trump and the cities of the saints
The President of the United States published on 1 November a message for All Saints Day —a presidential message, not a proclamation— dedicated to the cities that bear the names of saints: San Francisco in California, after the one of Assisi; San Antonio in Texas, after the one of Padua; Santa Monica; San Agustín in Florida; St. Louis in Missouri, “after a holy king of France,” without naming Louis IX; and St. Paul in Minnesota, “after the great Apostle,” without naming Paul. He also names Junípero Serra, Elizabeth Ann Seton, Katharine Drexel and Frances Xavier Cabrini, and ends with the Saints of New Orleans, a franchise granted on 1 November 1966 and baptized by the song. He does not mention the Pope. He does not mention the Catholic Church as an institution: the word Catholic appears once, when speaking of Catholic education with regard to Seton. And he does not mention the elections, which are today. The Press Office had said on 30 October that the Pope sent his ballot by mail to Chicago, without indication of vote.
Alazraki and one hundred and sixty-seven trips
Valentina Alazraki, Televisa correspondent in Rome for fifty years, was the guest of the fifth episode of “Diario Vaticano,” a weekly program of Telepace hosted by Francesco Zanotti, director of the Corriere Cesenate, broadcast on Saturday the 30th. The note announcing it attributes to her two phrases, “I have touched holiness with my hand” and “I have been a witness to the history of the Church,” and gives the count: one hundred and sixty-seven apostolic trips covered, and the one hundred and sixty-eighth on Friday, when the Pope leaves for Montevideo. There is no transcript of the episode.
Wrapping up the day
On Thursday the 5th, at nine o’clock, a suffrage Mass in Saint Peter’s for the cardinals and bishops who died during the year, and a Fides congress at the Urbaniana for the centenary of the first Chinese bishops, with Parolin, Chow, Tagle, Li Shan and Ding Zuyao. On Friday the 6th the trip to Uruguay, Argentina and Peru begins, until the 17th, and that same day, at eleven o’clock, the biographer of Francis Austen Ivereigh gives a lecture at the Universidad del Salvador in Buenos Aires on the Latin American turn from Francis to Leo. And on the Pope’s return, on the 18th, a Mass for the fourth centenary of the dedication of the basilica of Saint Peter.
Have a good day.
“Go out to the roads and hedges and compel people to come in, so that my house may be filled.”