The long-awaited American journey of Pope Leo XIV through Uruguay has begun. The Pope will wake up in Montevideo and fly to Paysandú; we follow the trip, the official speeches are published and there is no point in dwelling on them unless we have important passages. Our Specola operates these days on European time, which sets the reference information published. From yesterday, thirty thousand people remain in Plaza Independencia, a speech that mentioned no conflict and, as is now customary—an ugly custom—media attributing to him phrases he did not say. Rome has been left empty; today we have two rulings on the same building in Budapest that contradict each other—live and learn.
First speech and Paysandú
Today’s schedule, according to the official program: flight and Mass in Parque París Londres in Paysandú, and back in Montevideo at one-thirty. In the afternoon, Casavalle, the Catholic University and a vigil at Estadio Centenario. The Mass is votive of Blessed Jacinto Vera, first bishop of Uruguay, before whose tomb the Pope prayed last night in the cathedral.
Examined term by term the speech to the authorities, in Spanish and Italian: Ukraine does not appear, nor Gaza, nor Sudan, nor Haiti. Nor does the word “war.” Neither abortion, nor euthanasia, nor assisted dying, nor secularization, nor migration. The last time Leo XIV named a conflict was the Angelus of 1 November, regarding humanitarian action in Oleshky; since then have come the Summer, the general audience and now Montevideo.
The two issues that the Uruguayan press summarizes as abortion and euthanasia he addressed without using either word: “who has not yet been born already belongs to the human family and to the future of his people,” “the protection of the one about to be born and the support of those who welcome him are inseparable,” and, on the other side, “being accompanied to the natural end of her life.” He also said that “this neutrality does not require that the religious dimension be confined to the private sphere,” and quoted Artigas in the Congress of 1813: “my authority emanates from you and it ceases by your sovereign presence.”
From that have emerged four phrases that are not his. El Observador puts in quotation marks “belongs to the human nation” where the text says “family.” Infobae headlines in quotation marks “coexistence is part of Uruguay’s history”, cutting off the “among people of different origins and traditions” that was the sense of the phrase, and that quotation does not appear in the body of its own live coverage. La diaria headlines “references to Artigas and abortion” when the word is not in the speech. And C5N puts in quotation marks “the human person is not worth what he has, what he does or what he produces,” which does not exist: what there is is “nor today can the value of a person be measured by what he produces, by his work or by his capacity to fend for himself.” Two quotations from El Observador, by contrast, come out literal and clean.
We have mentions in the media of 27 October, when the six-day truce was announced and Washington presented Melania Trump as exclusive mediator; Gallagher told Reuters that he did not believe the Holy See had played a direct role in arranging it, despite the Pope’s calls to Putin on 16 October and to Zelensky on 19 October.
Two courts and the same building in Budapest
The Institute for the Works of Religion announced last night that a court in Malta awards it 24.1 million euros, plus eight percent interest, to be paid jointly by four companies: Optimum Evolution Fund SIF, Optimum Asset Management, Futura Investment Management and Futura Funds SICAV. First instance, First Chamber of the Civil Court, case 923 of 2017. The basis is breach of fiduciary duties, article 1124A of the Maltese civil code: the word “fraud” does not appear, and neither does it in the dispatches. It is not stated whether the judgment is final or whether anyone will appeal it, and none of the reports claim to have read the text.
On 21 October, sixteen days earlier, the Metropolitan Tribunal of Budapest ordered the IOR to pay more than twenty million for the same property. The Institute maintains, in a note of 24 October, that that is not a judgment but a default ruling arising from a notification problem, that the court “has not examined the merits” and that it will oppose it within fifteen days. So there is no victory: there are two contradictory first-instance rulings in three weeks, in two jurisdictions, concerning the palace of the former Budapest Stock Exchange, and neither is final.
The matter dates back to 2013. According to Milano Finanza’s reconstruction, the IOR committed forty-one million to compartment Kappa of a Maltese fund, disbursed seventeen and that November, with Ernst von Freyberg as president, refused to pay the remaining twenty-four. Care not to confuse those twenty-four it did not pay with the 24.1 it now collects: they are figures of opposite sign that almost coincide. Nor with the “more than twenty-four million” that the Vatican Tribunal awarded the Institute in 2021 when it convicted Angelo Caloia for the sale of twenty-nine properties—that is an entirely different case.
The Vatican thread of the matter is not Becciu; it is another: the Promoter of Justice has an open criminal investigation into Kappa, with eleven million seized in Switzerland last year, according to the same financial coverage. And a nomenclature clarification, because we have seen it misspelled: the IOR has been presided over by François Pauly since April and the director general has been Giovanni Boscia since 1 October; what Cardinal Petrocchi presides over is the Cardinal Commission, which is something else.
Two beatifications, Guatemala and Santander
Both are today, and the Pope announced them on Wednesday. In Guatemala, the Franciscan Augusto Rafael Ramírez Monasterio, parish priest and guardian of San Francisco el Grande in Antigua, shot on 7 November 1983 after a second kidnapping: today marks exactly forty-three years. The Dicastery places the martyrdom in the intention of the governmental armed forces to strike in him a representative of the Church who had denounced social injustices. Cardinal Robles Ortega, archbishop of Guadalajara, presides as delegate, and he is the first Guatemalan priest raised to the altars. The Pope said “in Antigua Guatemala,” although the venue is the Florencia estate, in Santa Lucía Milpas Altas, another municipality of the same department.
And we continue with beatifications in Spain, this time in Santander, Francisco González de Córdova and seventy-nine companions, who died between 1936 and 1937: sixty-seven priests, three seminarians from Monte Corbán, three Discalced Carmelites and six laypeople; Semeraro presides in the cathedral. The Spanish Episcopal Conference counted in July 2,449 blesseds, of whom 2,404 are martyrs of the twentieth-century persecution, with 349 causes open and 3,344 candidates. That page does not mention today’s beatification, and the updated figure has not been published: we do not calculate it ourselves; as always, the well-paid official media seem not to notice what is happening in their own house.
Lugano and a 1968 article
What yesterday we reported as an assertion by a medium has now been verified and we think it worth pointing out. The convention between the Swiss Federal Council and the Holy See, signed in Bern on 24 July 1968, provides in its first article, third paragraph: “the bishop of Lugano shall be appointed by the Holy See and chosen from among Ticinese citizen priests.” There lies the explanation for four years of vacant see, and the apostolic administrator himself states it plainly. The Corriere del Ticino, which revealed the cantonal government’s letter, carries an interview with Alain de Raemy in the weekly Catholica on 10 October: Ticinese citizenship is one of the requirements, and acquiring it remains for him an open option. As for the letter, what exists is more modest than the word “protest”: dated 14 October, signed by Marina Carobbio Guscetti and Chancellor Arnoldo Coduri, it responds to a private individual, lawyer Franco Gianoni, and merely expresses the wish that the vacancy not be prolonged, while respecting the 1968 convention. The canton has not published it and Rome has not replied.
The death of Don Piero Vergari
He has died at the age of ninety. The note from his diocese of incardination, Assisi-Nocera Umbra-Gualdo Tadino, records that he was born in Sigillo in 1936, ordained in 1961, canon of the co-cathedral of Nocera Umbra, religion teacher and employee of the Holy See. The date and place of death are not stated anywhere. To many readers this name will mean nothing; it is important because he is “the priest of the Orlandi case.” The official note of his death mentions neither San Apolinar, nor Enrico De Pedis, nor the Orlandi case. Nothing from the Vicariate of Rome or the Holy See. ANSA, by contrast, headlines “the priest friend of De Pedis”, and that friendship is not attested by any judicial ruling.
What is documented is more precise. In 1990, as rector of San Apolinar, he was the one who requested permission from the Vicariate to bury De Pedis there, attaching a declaration calling him a “great benefactor of the poor”; the permission was signed by Cardinal Ugo Poletti, and Gianni Barbacetto reconstructed those documents with their dates. Before the parliamentary commission he acknowledged having known him in the church and in prison, and described him as a devout man who brought flowers. Of Emanuela Orlandi he said: “I never saw her.” He was investigated in 2012 and the investigating judge archived the case on 19 October 2015, with sixty-three pages of reasoning, because the elements gathered lacked “the consistency, even circumstantial, necessary to sustain the accusation at trial.” The Court of Cassation declared the Orlandi family’s appeal inadmissible in May 2016 and the archive became final. He was never charged, there was never a trial: he was not acquitted, and the case did not prescribe. He had left the rectorship of San Apolinar in 1991.
In Rome we continue with news
The Pope left yesterday and the day’s bulletin on the trip, without a single line of appointments. We do not officially know whether Parolin or Gallagher are traveling; the Press Office names the papal entourage as a body and never by name. The list we are waiting for does not exist.
Of what is moving in the courts, two things. In Piazza Armerina, Bishop Rosario Gisana is charged with false testimony before the Court of Enna, together with his judicial vicar; the prosecutor requested two years on 9 October and the verdict is set for 11 December. The conviction of priest Giuseppe Rugolo, by contrast, is final: three years, confirmed by Cassation on 14 May, after the appeal excluded the diocese from civil liability. Versions are also circulating about a resignation requested from the bishop: the diocese says it knows nothing, the Press Office refers to the Bollettino, and the Bollettino contains no resignation. Gisana remains bishop of Piazza Armerina and, until 11 December, an accused person.
And of Becciu, nothing new in November, but the October photo is worth recalling: the seventh session lasted eleven minutes, from 9:17 to 9:28, with three of the ten defendants in the courtroom, and the four January 2027 hearings are only for preliminary matters. Since the prosecution’s appeal was declared inadmissible, the sentences can no longer be increased. Who today sustains the accusation, after the Promoter of Justice’s abstention, is still not recorded anywhere.
Wrapping up the day
The Dicastery for the Service of Charity opens the Mother of Mercy and St. Martin clinics, under the right colonnade, from Monday the 9th to Saturday the 14th, from eight to six without interruption and without appointment, for World Day of the Poor on the 15th. Medical visits, flu vaccination, tests, and free glasses, dental prostheses and hearing aids.
The fourteen-meter statue announced to welcome the Pope is not in Lima, as has been headlined, but in Callao, which is a different province: in Parque del Niño Gaelito, facing the sea, commissioned by Mayor César Pérez and financed entirely by Caja Huancayo, which has not published the amount.
On what a papal trip costs we always move in mystery; the figure of four hundred thousand euros circulates, attributed to the Dicastery for Communication. It is worth saying what it is: an estimate of its own by the medium that publishes it, by extrapolating per diems and overtime for a delegation of more than thirty people, without budget or document, and not including the plane. The text itself admits that “in the absence of detailed accounts it is not possible to establish it.” There is no official figure on the cost of an apostolic journey: the Holy See’s financial statements do not break it down as a line item.
Giuseppina Coali presents her book on the Orlandi case this afternoon in Trento, with a prologue by the Promoter of Justice. In the interview with Il Dolomiti she maintains the precision that her father, chief inspector of the Gendarmerie, did not officially follow the investigation, and adds on her own that “he could not not know,” which is a daughter’s judgment, not a fact. That she testified for four hours before Diddi in 2023 had been published by La Verità five days earlier.
And the letter from the Uruguayan who denounces a priest for abuse has not reached the Pope as promised: it remains in the hands of Cardinal Sturla. What is on record, and is another piece of news, is that the Uruguayan Episcopal Conference denied him the audience in writing: “under the present circumstances we do not consider it appropriate to process his request.”
Today’s Gospel closes the parable of the steward: “You cannot serve both God and money.”