Thursday, and the morning brings two main topics: the cardinal Becciu appeal process resumes at the Vatican, and the other is less conspicuous: yesterday the Pope did not say a word about immigrant detention centers in the United States, and two headlines from serious outlets suggest the opposite. That makes seven cases in a week in which an attempt is being made to manipulate reality, and it is no longer a streak.
The rest of the day: Parolin speaks at the Gregorianum about the twentieth century; the Vicariate announces five Advent parish visits that the liturgical calendar did not include; the popemobile turns a century that is in fact ninety-six years; Bartholomew says in Assisi that they have been meeting for forty years without achieving anything decisive; Cupich presents a disputed award today; an adapted Confiteor that names no saint, contrary to what is being published; and a dinner hosted by Cardinal Burke is again circulating without a single named source.
The Pope said nothing, and two headlines say he did
We cannot settle for the headlines. Let us begin with the fact, which is small and moving. At the end of Wednesday’s general audience, in the greeting line in St. Peter’s Square, the Pope shook hands with about thirty people from Chicago, from the Coalition for Spiritual and Public Leadership, led by Michael N. Okińczyc-Cruz. They gave him an album of photographs and letters written by detained immigrants, posed for a photograph and went on their way. Among them were auxiliary bishop José María García Maldonado, the Claretian provincial and two religious sisters. It is not the first delivery of letters: Okińczyc-Cruz had already handed him others in September.
Now the headlines. Il saluto del Papa agli attivisti per i migranti nel centro detenzione dell’ICE a Chicago in Vatican News and Il Papa saluta gli attivisti per i migranti nel centro detenzione dell’ICE in ANSA. The two phrases, read as written, place the Pope’s interlocutors inside a detention center in Chicago. They were in St. Peter’s Square, seven thousand kilometers away. It is a syntax problem, not bad faith, and it produces exactly the effect of a story that did not happen.
There is a second, more troubling aspect about which the Pope said nothing. None of the pieces attributes a single sentence on the matter to him. The only quotations are from the visitors themselves. The text of that day’s catechesis, which deals with faith and culture, contains none of the words immigrant, detention, ICE, Chicago, United States, deportation or separated families, nor does it include any greeting to a group from Chicago. What has happened is that a handshake has been turned into a pronouncement, and the location of some visitors has been turned into the location of the news. We note it without satisfaction, because the gesture was good and the cause is serious, and precisely for that reason it does not need anything added to it.
What he did say, and it was a year ago
The substance exists, but it is not from yesterday. On 4 November 2025, in Castel Gandolfo and in answer to journalists, the Pope said that “the spiritual rights of those who have been detained must also be taken into account” and that “I would certainly invite the authorities to allow pastoral agents to attend to the needs of those persons.” He added that many people who have lived “year after year after year without ever causing problems” have been deeply affected, and that they have often been separated from their families “for quite some time.”
And on 18 November, regarding the pastoral message of the U.S. bishops, he drew the line on both sides with a precision worth recalling now that things he did not say are being attributed to him: “no one has said that the United States must have open borders” and “I believe every country has the right to determine who enters, how and when”; and at the same time, “we must find ways to treat people humanely” and “if there are people in the United States illegally, there are ways to deal with that: there are courts, there is a justice system.”
Broadview: what is established and what is alleged
It is worth separating the planes, because the matter is told in full or it is not told. The facility is the Broadview Processing Center, in Broadview, Illinois, about fifteen kilometers from Chicago. The Department of Homeland Security maintains that it is not a detention center but a field office and a temporary processing facility, and that was the argument with which it denied religious access in November 2025.
What has been judicially established is pastoral access, not the conditions. The coalition and other religious leaders sued the federal government; access was denied at Christmas 2025, granted by court order for Ash Wednesday and Holy Week, and since 15 May 2026 an agreement has been in force allowing daily visits, up to five religious leaders per day, in two morning and afternoon slots, with space for celebrations and reasonable efforts to guarantee the privacy of confession. It is a temporary agreement linked to litigation still pending. The figures circulating—more than one hundred thirty-five visits and seven hundred twenty-five immigrants attended since May—are the count of the complaining organization itself, without independent audit. And we have found no official reaction to yesterday’s greeting, which is not the same as saying there has been silence.
Becciu: the hearing is this morning
Riprende il processo Becciu, sotto esame gli omissis e i diritti della difesa in Ticinonline, based on an agency dispatch, and Caso Becciu, domani l’udienza d’appello. Il legale: «L’intera condanna può cadere per un vizio negli atti» in Quotidiano Nazionale, signed by Alessandro Da Rold. Both pieces are dated the 28th and both say “tomorrow”: there was no session on Wednesday and the hearing is today. We write it in the future because this edition goes to press before it begins. The object of the session is the omissis, and they are exactly the acts the defense has been demanding from the beginning: those the promoter of justice did not deposit in full, including passages omitted from the interrogations of Msgr. Alberto Perlasca, whose position was archived and who remains in the proceedings as a witness and principal accuser.
What Becciu’s defense is asking
Attorney Fabio Viglione is not asking for acquittal, nor nullity, nor a reduction of sentence. Asked what he expects from today, he replies that he expects “the Court to give full application to its own ordinance of 17 March.” The reasoning is this: the Court then recognized the nullity of the citation to trial for failure to deposit the acts in their entirety; that nullity “could only have been healed by depositing the documents in their integrity”; and “that order of deposit has not been executed in its entirety and, therefore, that nullity has not been healed.” Hence the headline phrase: the entire conviction may fall because of a defect in the acts.
The sharpest line concerns who decides what the defense may see: “it is precisely that claim to unilaterally select what the defense may know that the Court censured,” and “no norm grants selective powers to the Prosecution over the acts of instruction.” And he makes with Perlasca an argument worth recording in full: if it was held that Perlasca was not in a position to understand the consequences of the investments and his position was archived, with greater reason the same should have happened with the cardinal, who “never departed from what was proposed by the Office directed precisely by Perlasca.” What is a datum of the sentence, and not of the defense, is that the court of first instance excluded personal enrichment when convicting him. And what no source says is whether the five-and-a-half-year sentence is being served or suspended while the appeal is pending.
And the conviction has not been annulled, for the third time
We published it on Monday and we repeat it today because the eve of a hearing is when the error returns. In March several outlets headlined that the conviction was annulled or that the first-instance judgment was annulled. The ordinance of 17 March says something else: it declares a “relative” nullity, therefore not total, does not declare the nullity of the entire trial, and the trial and the sentence “maintain their effects.” What it orders is to renew the debate before the Court of Appeal itself. The appeal of the promoter of justice was declared inadmissible and the Vatican Court of Cassation confirmed it on 12 January, also taking note of his abstention; a consequence the Court left in writing, the responsibility of the acquitted cannot be reopened. And in the table of penalties there is a figure that says a great deal about the priorities of the case: the two successive heads of the Vatican financial information authority were each fined one thousand seven hundred fifty euros for failing to report a suspicious transaction.
Pope Leo’s catechesis: faith called to become culture
The audience was in the square, with the Pope present and some twenty-five thousand people, and the catechesis is the seventh on Gaudium et spes, dedicated to the relationship between faith and culture. The foundation he gives is the Incarnation: “if the divine Word became flesh and came to dwell among us, then faith too is an incarnate reality, interwoven with the culture in which it is immersed.” And faith “is also called to become culture,” inhabiting cultures and shaping them from within “according to the form of Jesus Christ, that is, with charity, service, filial recognition of God’s fatherhood.”
He quotes John Paul II’s phrase that sustains the whole argument, “a faith that does not become culture is a faith not fully received, not entirely thought through, not faithfully lived.” He recalls that Gaudium et spes asks that “the proper and necessary participation of women in cultural life” be recognized and that theologians “seek to collaborate with those who excel in the other sciences.” And the operative phrase, which has generated the headlines: the Constitution “recommends that we not live the faith in a spirit of opposition or hostility toward the world, culture and its human expressions.” And we continue to have problems with the information. Papa: «Non vivere fede in spirito di contrapposizione al mondo», in AsiaNews, puts in quotation marks what is not a quotation. And Leone XIV: «Superare l’analfabetismo». La fede non deve vivere in contrapposizione al mondo performs the day’s finer operation: it puts in quotation marks as the Pope’s text a conciliar exhortation.
Schneider: the adjective that changes the subject
Bishop Schneider: Vatican complicit in migrant «invasion», «dechristianization», by Antonino Cambria, is the report of an interview of Bishop Athanasius Schneider with Michael Matt of The Remnant, broadcast on Saturday the 24th. It is the same day he preached in Santa Maria Maggiore. What he said, in his own words: that the so-called immigration “is not immigration, it is an invasion,” and that “many officials in the Vatican allow themselves to be deceived or are partly in agreement with the process of de-Christianization of Europe.” Both expressions are his and must be reported as such. There are things he did not say and they are headlines. “Complicit” is his word, but he said it to the French government regarding the riots, not to the Vatican; of the Holy See he says “collaborating,” “allow themselves to be deceived,” “partly in agreement” and “supporting.” And along the way the cautions are erased, “I suspect,” and “many officials in the Vatican” is turned into “the Vatican.” Even a nominal criticism of Leo XIV contained in the article is not Schneider’s.
Parolin speaks of the twentieth century
Parolin: i totalitarismi storici sconfitti, ma non la tentazione di «essere come Dio». It is an intervention at the congress “The Holy See before the totalitarian systems in the twentieth century,” of the Gregorianum and the Pontifical Committee of Historical Sciences, held yesterday and today. It is not a greeting: it is an inaugural lecture, and it ranges from Pius XI to John Paul II.
Of Paul VI’s Ostpolitik he says that choice “was right, according to the unanimous judgment of historiography,” and “unanimous” is a very large word for that bibliography. And of John Paul II’s hope of re-Christianization he says that it “was, however, disappointed,” which coming from the Secretary of State is no minor judgment. He also maintains that the regimes placed “social class, race or the State on the altar in place of God” and that of Pius XII one can speak of “a diplomacy of charity without precedent.” The most curious thing, coming from whom it comes and at a congress, is that it does not mention the archives even once. Neither opening of fonds, nor consultation, nor publication of documents, nor project. Nor does he name any current regime or mention Ukraine. Yesterday we observed that the number two of the Secretariat of State spoke to the foreign press about the future of the pontificate. Today the number one speaks, and he speaks of the last century.
Pope Leo returns to the parishes of Rome
Il Papa torna nelle parrocchie romane, visite nelle domeniche d’Avvento: the Vicariate of Rome announced on Wednesday five pastoral visits. Sant’Andrea delle Fratte on Friday 27 November, San Carlo da Sezze in Acilia on the 29th, Sant’Eligio in Lunghezza on 6 December, Santa Lucia next to piazzale Clodio on the 13th and San Roberto Bellarmino in the Parioli on the 20th. That this does not appear in the liturgical calendar of the 27th is not an anomaly. The January-February calendar also did not include the Lenten parish visits, which the Vicariate announced separately fourteen days later.
The Mass of the 5th, without Francis in the heading
Leone XIV: il 5 novembre messa in suffragio dei cardinali e vescovi defunti nel corso dell’anno in AgenSIR, which correctly identifies the source: a notice from the Office of Liturgical Celebrations signed by Msgr. Diego Ravelli and published in the Bollettino of the 28th. The datum is in the comparison. Last year that Mass was on 3 November at eleven and was for “the deceased Roman Pontiff Francis and the deceased cardinals and bishops in the course of the year.” This year Francis’s name no longer appears in the heading, which is canonically correct because he no longer died in the course of the year. It is the first of these Masses since his death in which he is not named.
A century of popemobile that are ninety-six years
Udienza ai dirigenti di Mercedes-Benz: the Pope received them on Wednesday in the small hall of the Paul VI Audience Hall, on the occasion of the exhibition “Un secolo di papamobile” of the Vatican Museums, inaugurated that same day in a glass pavilion of the Giardino Quadrato. The first automobile used regularly by a Pope is a Nürburg 460, Pullman limousine, given to Pius XI on 23 May 1930. From 1930 to 2026 are ninety-six years. What the Pope literally said is that the popemobile “has gone from being a means of transport to becoming an instrument of encounter,” and he asked that technological innovation continue to be put “at the service of human dignity, care for creation and the common good.” The headline circulating, “technological innovation always at the service of the common good,” is agency copy: it cuts human dignity and creation, which is precisely what the sentence contained.
Bartholomew: “we have achieved nothing decisive”
Patriarch Bartholomaios: Christen haben zu wenig für Frieden getan, KNA dispatch. The Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople spoke on Tuesday afternoon in the basilica of St. Francis, on the fortieth anniversary of the first world meeting of prayer for peace, and said the hardest and most honest phrase of the entire week in Assisi, for which one is always grateful: “what have we become accustomed to?”, and “we have continued to meet, but we have achieved nothing decisive.”
He asked to “cross the mud of conflict without letting oneself be infected by the virus of hatred” and expressly pointed to fundamentalisms, “also Christian.” A reading note: the German headline generalizes to “Christians,” and he does not reproach any Church in particular, much less Rome. It is self-criticism spoken from within and among equals, which is the only kind that usually serves for something.
Smerilli is not the Pope’s envoy
Sor Alessandra Smerilli, la economista de León XIV para el área social del Vaticano, interview by Facundo Chaves in Infobae, of the 28th. She has been presented as Leo XIV’s envoy to Buenos Aires, and she expressly denies it. “I must clarify that Pope Leo XIV did not send me directly here to prepare the visit. I was invited by the bishops, by the Episcopal Conference and by the Catholic University of Argentina.” She will give the inaugural lecture at the UCA presenting Magnifica humanitas, will meet with young entrepreneurs and with popular movements. “A skein is not untangled by pulling. It is untangled by loosening and respecting the order in which the thread became tangled. Whoever pulls obtains a tighter knot.” And the closing: “the opposite of the knot is not the loose thread: it is the weave. Development untangles knots, not bonds.” On the criticisms of Argentine social movements she does not go into substance, says she does not yet know the concrete reality and limits herself to saying that “in every reality there exists a seed of good that it is necessary to know how to recognize.”
Three more things. She maintains that there is “a perfect continuity” between Francis and Leo XIV in this matter and that “the vision is the same.” Of the European protests she says that “they are always a sign of great social malaise and of a rage that cannot express itself in any other way,” protagonized above all by young people who “cannot manage to be heard”: compare with the reading Schneider makes of the same disturbances above, because they are the same facts and two incompatible diagnoses, spoken the same week. And a phrase of hers that we read with a wry smile: that in the Vatican there were “moments of anxiety” over the operation, but that “the communication on the part of the doctors was simple and punctual.” From inside it was seen that way. From outside we have spent a week unraveling two notes from the same day that everyone took for one and three words that changed between one communiqué and the next.
The ACS report
Perseguitati e dimenticati? Luce sui paesi in cui i cristiani sono sempre più oppressi, by Anna Bono on the biennial report of the pontifical foundation Aid to the Church in Need. The data from ACS’s own note: four hundred thirteen million Christians in countries with serious violations of religious freedom, some two hundred twenty directly exposed to persecution, discrimination or violence, eighteen countries examined, the situation worsens in fifty-five percent of the cases and does not improve significantly in any. The period runs from August 2024 to June 2026. It warns against attributing violence only to religion, because ethnic identity, political instability, poverty and competition for land and resources overlap. It also recalls the fifteenth anniversary of the assassination of Shahbaz Bhatti.
Cupich presents an award today, and the objection has a flank
Cardinal Cupich awards Democrat billionaire who funds abortion. The award is the Nostra Aetate of the Archdiocese of Chicago, the recipient is Michael J. Sacks, CEO of GCM Grosvenor, and the presentation is at the annual gala of the Mundelein seminary. There is a report from Crain’s Chicago Business of 29 September, according to which Sacks donated six hundred thousand dollars to shore up abortion-access infrastructure in Illinois, and in a militant database for an electoral datum of 2012.
Cupich responded in writing on the 26th, invoking Nostra Aetate: that honoring people who do not share fundamental Catholic teachings “recognizes their dignity,” and that “there can be no dialogue if respect is conditioned on complete agreement on Church doctrine or policy.” The norm invoked against the award, the 2004 statement of the U.S. bishops on not honoring those who act against fundamental moral principles, is designed for Catholic politicians, and Sacks is neither one nor the other. There the cardinal has his reply.
The Confiteor that names no saint
James Martin’s «ministry» posts «LGBTQ confiteor» calling on «queer saints». It is worth saying exactly what it is: it is not a liturgical text, it is not a social-media post and it is not by Father James Martin. It is an essay signed by Ariell Watson Simon, published on 25 October on the Outreach website, which Martin founded and which is part of America Media. The prayer names no saint. It says “all my spiritual ancestors, queer saints,” in the generic. The names of Sergius and Bacchus and of Perpetua and Felicity, which circulate associated with this text, are from another author and from a congress last June. Whoever writes that this prayer invokes Sergius and Bacchus reproduces an error. The adaptation suppresses the Virgin, the angels and the saints; changes the “through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault” for “through my fear, through my complacency, through my worst mistakes”; and replaces the “pray for me to God our Lord” with “pray with me, so that together we may build a better tomorrow.” That is: it eliminates intercession before God and turns it into a shared task.
Burke’s dinner, and why we are not reporting it
Circulating again, with an article of 27 October, is the account of two dinners that Cardinal Raymond Burke is said to have hosted in his Roman apartment at the beginning of May 2025, during the General Congregations, in which conservative cardinals are said to have examined Robert Prevost and directed toward him between twenty and twenty-five votes. The origin is not from this week: it is a retroscena by Francesco Capozza published in Il Tempo on 21 August, which Rorate Caeli translated on 25 October.
The account cites not a single named source: “someone who was present has revealed to us,” “according to some of the participants,” and the star phrase—“we cannot trust him, let us vote for anyone but Parolin”—is attributed to an unidentified cardinal. It says that Cardinal Erdő led the first ballot with Parolin and Prevost behind by a handful of votes, and also that Prevost had obtained quite a few more votes than Parolin in that same ballot. Both things cannot be true. The author of this week’s article himself concedes that the reconstruction “remains unverified.” And the most useful objection has been published by Phil Lawler, who considers the account plausible and good journalism but not a complete account, and adds three things of common sense: that the cardinals who spoke may have exaggerated their own influence, that the diners did not form a bloc, and that a dinner-table agreement does not bind anyone’s secret vote. None of those named has said anything.
Mutsaerts replies to Roche: unity is not uniformity
Mutsaerts: l’unità cattolica non significa uniformità rituale, reports the reply of Bishop Robert Mutsaerts, auxiliary bishop of ’s-Hertogenbosch, to statements by Cardinal Arthur Roche. It is worth giving first what Roche said, because it is strong and is from 13 October, in an interview with AdVaticanum: that the Church had to be called to the Council, “and the Council is the highest form of legislation within the Catholic Church, which is ignored at the risk of one’s own soul”; and that whoever rejects or resists it “moves away from the center of Catholicism.”
The reply, from his own blog, makes three distinctions and all three are debatable in the good sense of the word. The first: “attachment to a liturgical tradition does not equal rejection of the Magisterium,” and it is “precisely that distinction that risks being lost in the current debate.” The second is formulated by conceding what must be conceded: whoever categorically denies the validity of the new Mass, rejects papal authority or affirms that the Catholic Church is no longer so after the Council “certainly assumes a problematic position,” but whoever loves the traditional Mass, accepts Catholic doctrine and remains faithful to the Pope “cannot without more be accused of the same.”
The third is the one that gives the headline: “Catholic unity has never been synonymous with liturgical uniformity.” It reviews the Eastern and Western rites, from Byzantine to Ambrosian, which no one disputes, and asks: “if liturgical diversity does not necessarily harm the unity of the Church, why should the centuries-old Roman liturgy harm it.” And it closes with the most uncomfortable argument, which is conciliar and not nostalgic: the Council foresaw a reform of the liturgy but at the same time established that Latin be maintained in the Latin rites and that Gregorian chant have a place of preeminence, so that “a great part of what today is considered typically traditionalist was altogether obvious to the conciliar Fathers.” Hence his conclusion: “it is curious that attachment to the most ancient liturgy is presented as resistance to the Council itself.”
And Gaudium et spes in the opposite direction
Intrinsecamente cattivo? Una domanda /1. It reviews a book by Aristide Fumagalli to maintain that the doctrine of intrinsece malum rests on aged naturalistic instruments that separate the act from its circumstances, from intentions and from context, and concludes that “the personalist option is the only plausible one.” It cites Veritatis splendor, Amoris laetitia and Gaudium et spes. In a single day the Second Vatican Council has served three different purposes and by three different hands: the Pope glosses Gaudium et spes to say that faith is called to become culture; a moral theologian uses Gaudium et spes to discuss the category of intrinsically evil act; and a Dutch bishop uses Sacrosanctum Concilium to maintain that what today is called traditionalism was obvious to the conciliar Fathers. The prefect of Divine Worship warns that the Council is ignored at the risk of one’s own soul. Four uses of the same event in twenty-four hours, and none of the four cites the others. That is not an anomaly or a scandal: it is, probably, the most exact description available of what it means to receive a council sixty years later.
And we are finishing. At nine the Becciu hearing begins and tomorrow we will know whether the Court applies its own ordinance; on 5 November there is Mass at nine at the altar of the Chair, without Francis’s name in the heading for the first time; and there are eight days left until the trip to America, with the day of 14 November, the most complicated point of a complicated trip and still without anyone commenting on it.
Have a good day.
“Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.”