Jeanie Hannaman

By Sandro Magister, L'Espresso - With the synod for the Amazon filed away, the anticipation is now over what Pope Francis will decide, on the basis of the votes delivered to him in the final document… To judge by the improvised speech in Spanish that Jorge Mario Bergoglio gave in the synod hall at the end of the sessions, on the afternoon of Saturday October 26, his decisions will not take long. And in essence they are already written… To identify them it is enough to go over step by step this speech by the pope, in its verbatim transcription.

By Dr. Jeff Mirus, Catholic Culture - Hence, for example, so much talk about ecology and so little about reclaiming souls for God. If we want to understand why the Amazon (along with much of South America) has drifted away from Catholicism and into various Protestant sects, we need look no farther than the difference between Western Catholics who adhere to a comfortable, mainstream form of liberation theology—call it secularism—and more or less pentecostal Protestants who can still preach at least a dim variant of the Gospel as Christ and the apostles proclaimed it from the first.

By Nicole Winfield, AP - Pope Francis has declared that the Vatican Secret Archive isn’t so secret after all… Francis on Monday officially changed the name of the Holy See archive to remove what he said were the "negative" connotations of having "secret" in its name… From now on, the vast trove of documents, manuscripts and papyrus of popes past will be officially known as the "Vatican Apostolic Archive."…