Cardinal Walter Kasper, the former head of Vatican ecumenism efforts, said he now believes there are reasons to create a women’s diaconate because a synodal Church will need a more “sibling-like” culture. “In my personal opinion, opening the permanent diaconate to women has good theological arguments in its favour and would be a sensible pastoral step,” wrote the former president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity in his autobiography, due to appear on 10 June. “Women and men have the same dignity before God and must therefore be recognised with their own charisms,” the 92-year-old German cardinal wrote in Der Wahrheit auf der Spur (“On the Trail of Truth”).
“We will continue to need good bishops and priests in the future, but in a synodal Church, the era of clericalism and arbitrary decisions by bishops is over,” he continued. “The laity want and should be heard, and they can also expect accountability from the bishops and priests.” Kasper said the drop in vocations could bring the institution back to the situation of the ancient Church. Advocates for a female diaconate often cite examples for this office in the letters of St Paul.
“The early Church was not a holy remnant that some dream of today; it was a holy beginning from which our Church has grown like a small mustard seed into a large tree,” he said. The Rome-based cardinal, noting changes in the world-wide faith, said developments in the Global South could “bring new momentum to the Church and soon make us Europeans look old”.
Kasper had long had doubts about women deacons, especially after the Anglican Communion split over the question of women priests and bishops while he was head of the Vatican’s ecumenism office–now the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity – in 2001-10, responsible for relations with other Chri-stian churches. But he said he now saw the question as a “megatopic” that Rome must face. “Without conversion, prayer, and repentance, all reforms, no matter how well-intentioned, have no future,” he said.
Pope appoints Sr. Tiziana Merletti as Secretary of Dicastery for Consecrated Life
Pope Leo XIV has appointed Sister Tiziana Merletti, former Superior General of the Francis-can Sisters of the Poor, as Secre-tary of the Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life. The Dicastery is responsible for orders and religious congregations, as well as secular institutes.
As Secretary, Sr Merletti will serve under Sr Simona Brambilla, who was appointed to lead the Dicastery in January–becoming the first woman ever to lead a Vatican department.
From 2023 to 2025, Sr Bram-billa had served as Secretary of the Dicastery, the role now held by Sr. Merletti. The Pro-Prefect of the Dicastery for Consecrated Life is Cardinal Ángel Fernández Artime.
Sr Merletti is the third woman to hold the position of Secretary within a dicastery of the Roman Curia, following Sister Alessandra Smerilli at the Dicastery for Pro-moting Integral Human Develop-ment, and her predecessor Sister Simona Brambilla.
With Pope Francis’ Apostolic Constitution Praedicate Evan-gelium, laypeople, including women, can now lead dicasteries and become prefects, a role that had previously been reserved for cardinals and archbishops.
Vatican refreshes official website for first time in nearly 30 years
The official website of the Vatican for the first time has been refreshed since it was created in the 1990s, prominently featuring multimedia content and online links to other Vatican offices and ministries. A banner image of a waving Pope Leo XIV against a simple light blue background can now be found spread across the top half of the revamped Holy See website’s homepage published earlier this week.
Replacing the outdated dropdown mega menus found in the older version of the Holy See’s homepage is a large, clickable “Magisterium” button — which also features a small icon of the pontiff’s new coat of arms — to help online visitors find the pope’s prepared homilies and speeches and additional information about the Vatican.
Acquiring tickets for papal audiences and liturgical celebrations has also been made easier through the updated website. Earlier this year, the Prefecture of the Papal Household — which is one of four Vatican offices featured on vatican.va — launched its new website with digital registration forms for individuals and pilgrim groups wanting to see the pope.
The other three Vatican ministries featured on the updated website are the Church’s charitable organization Peter’s Pence, the Pope’s Worldwide Prayer Network, and the yearlong 2025 Jubilee Year of Hope.
Daily news and calendar events related to Pope Leo XIV and the Vatican can also be viewed on the updated homepage in nine languages: Arabic, English, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Latin, Portuguese, and Spanish.
Additional information and Church documents that can be accessed from the new homepage include the Bible, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, codes of canon law, ecumenical councils, Catholic social teaching, and reports on the Church’s response to the abuse of minors.
High court’s decision to allow 350,000 Venezuelans to lose TPS disturbs Catholic advocates
Catholic immigration advo-cates said they were “disturbed” by a Supreme Court order allow-ing the Trump administration to end legal protections from depor-tation for about 350,000 Vene-zuelan immigrants. The Vene-zuelans, a typically Catholic population, were permitted to remain in the United States without risk of deportation due to dangerous conditions in their homeland. The high court’s May 19 order paused a ruling by a federal judge in San Francisco that had blocked Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem from terminating the protections granted under a program known as Temporary Protected Status.
Anna Gallagher, executive director of the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, also known as CLINIC, said in a May 20 statement, “We have said it before: arbitrarily revoking the legal status of hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people who expected to be able to remain safely in the United States is cruel and unwarranted.”
Earlier in May, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to revoke TPS for the group of Venezuelan immigrants. Noem “vacated” a renewal of their TPS status in January, but those plans were blocked by a judge when those impacted by the decision argued proper procedures were not followed by the government.
YouTube Shuts Down AI-Generated Channel Falsely Attributing Sermons to Pope Leo XIV
YouTube has removed a channel that amassed nearly a million views by publishing sermons supposedly delivered by Pope Leo XIV—sermons he never gave. The channel, titled «Sermons of Pope Leo XIV,» had gained a following of almost 18,000 subscribers before it was taken offline on May 21. Each of its 26 videos featured AI-generated texts delivered in a synthetic voice crafted to sound like the newly elected pontiff. While some scripts loosely drew inspiration from actual addresses, none were authentic papal messages.
Jack Malon, a spokesperson for YouTube, confirmed the takedown in comments to Aleteia. “We terminated the channel in question for violating our policies on spam, deceptive practices, and scams,” he said, noting that additional channels operated by the same creator were also removed. YouTube declined to identify those additional channels but emphasized that attempts to bypass bans by creating new accounts would be met with further enforcement.
The now-defunct channel had clearly struck a chord with unsuspecting viewers. Despite a disclaimer embedded by YouTube warning that the content had been digitally manipulated or generated, many comments revealed that users took the messages at face value.
The phenomenon underscores the increasingly complex challenges faced by digital platforms in an age when artificial intelligence can convincingly replicate public figures, including religious leaders. In the post-truth era, the boundary between reality and simulation is becoming harder to police, especially when deepfakes tap into the emotional and spiritual needs of believers.
Catholics, Buddhists gather in Cambodia for interreligious meeting focused on peace
The Vatican commenced its eighth Buddhist-Christian Colloquium on 27 May in Cambodia, bringing together representatives of both religions to discuss the promotion of peace in Asia. Prefect for the Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue Cardinal George Koovakad delivered a short speech on the first day of the May 27–29 conference on “Buddhists and Christians Working Together for Peace through Reconciliation and Resilience,” highlighting the significance of the two religions’ common commitment to peace, Vatican News reported. “Together, as Buddhists and Christians, let us explore how reconciliation and resilience can help shape peaceful and compassionate societies,” Koovakad said.
Approximately 150 people from Cambodia and abroad are participating in the three-day meeting organized by the Vatican’s Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue, the Apostolic Vicariate of Phnom Penh, Saint Paul Institute, Preah Sihanouk Raja Buddhist University, and the MAGGA Jesuit Research Centre.
Since 1995, the Vatican has held a series of Buddhist-Christian meetings in different countries to advance mutual understanding and collaboration between the Church and non-Christian religions in the spirit of Pope Paul VI’s Second Vatican Council declaration Nostra Aetate released in 1965. The last Buddhist-Christian Colloquium in 2023 was held in Bangkok and focused on the theme of “healing a wounded humanity and the earth.”
Church in Korea keeps up quest for reconciliation between the peninsula’s two nations
Eight decades after the partition of the Korean peninsula, the Catholic Church in South Korea remains one of the few actors that, with perseverance and faith, keeps alive the hope for reconciliation between the two Koreas. “Hatred and suspicion can never be a solution,” Bishop Simon Kim Jong-Gang, president of the Korean Reconciliation Commission, told ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner.
Last month, the Korean bishop led a pilgrimage to Kyodong Island on the border with North Korea in a gesture that highlighted the Church’s commitment to reconciliation between the two countries. The bishops walked along the three-mile barbed-wire fence on the island that has divided the two countries since the Korean War (1950–1953) and prayed that the two countries would put their differences behind them.
For 80 years, soldiers on both sides of the demarcation line at the Panmunjom Peace Village in the Demilitarized Zone between the two Koreas have stood guard face to face, armed and under the pressure that any minor incident could trigger a new war. In 2018, as part of agreements between the two countries to build mutual trust, the Joint Security Area was cleared of firearms and military posts. But this openness was short-lived. In early 2020, North Korea closed its borders due to the COVID-19 pandemic and again ordered its soldiers to shoot at any movement across the border.
Kim noted that there are no exchanges between South and North Korea. “It’s impossible to meet people, exchange letters or phone calls, or even send emails between the two sides of Korea.”
Laudato si’: Pope Francis’ ecological legacy lives on in Malaysia
Pope Francis’ call for ecolo-gical conversion has transformed hearts and communities world-wide. In Malaysia, the late Pope’s call for climate responsibility has flourished, with churches leading the movement for environmental stewardship. Inspired by the late Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato si’, which came out ten years ago, the Catholic Church in Malaysia is converting used cooking oil into biofuels, planting trees, cutting single-use plastics, recycling candles, and pledging to live out a “deep ecological spirituality.”
In 2023, the country’s bishops signed an Ecological Diocese Pledge, committing parishes to live out “deep ecological spiritua-lity” and advance environmental justice across the country.
All nine bishops in Malaysia initially signed the pledge, before encouraging all the country’s parish priests to do so as well. The document includes ecological protocols, self-monitoring forms, and other documents designed to assist each diocese and parish in their ecological transition, with a focus on reducing carbon foot-prints and fostering community resilience.
The text of the pledge reads, “The Roman Catholic Parish of (name), Malaysia, hereby decla-res its pledge to be an Ecological Diocese in perpetuity, living out a deep ecological spirituality and advancing ecological justice and resilience for all creation, by pursuing decarbonised pathways and the building of community and Earth resilience, according to the Ecological Diocese Protocols appended to this pledge, to the best of its ability and creativity within local circumstances.”
The Archbishop of Kuala Lumpur, Julian Leow Beng Kim, told Vatican News that Pope Francis “truly highlighted the existential problem of climate change with the encyclical Laudato si’ and the more recent and urgent call to action of Laudate Deum.”
“The world is indeed in crisis, and the whole of humanity must respond and have an integral conversion now before it is too late,” Archbishop Julian said. He added that he is encouraging all parishes in the Archdiocese to undergo an ecological conversion, saying that “although much has been done, much more is needed locally and globally to tackle this climate crisis.”
In the Philippines, empty chapels spark call for Eucharistic renewal
As the National Eucharistic Revival comes to an end in the United States this year, many believe there is a need for a global Eucharistic revival in other parts of the world — including the Philippines. Empty adoration chapels in the majority-Catholic country and lack of belief in the Real Presence are leading more parishes to implement a simple initiative called the “Holy Hour Pledge” and call for more catechesis.
Filipino-American priest Father James Cervantes of the Marians of the Immaculate Conce-ption (MIC) lamented the phenomenon throughout different parishes across the Philippines, despite its renown as the largest Catholic nation in Asia and the third largest in the world.
“I came here to Manila just a year and a half ago. I noticed there are a lot of adoration chapels where Jesus is exposed, but they’re empty and abandoned. I was puzzled. I thought, ‘OK, maybe this is just one.’ But then I visited another church and another, across different cities – and again, Jesus was exposed, but they were all empty. In the U.S. and in Poland, this wouldn’t even be allowed. All I could think was, ‘Oh Lord, no one is in here, I’m so sorry Lord.’” Cervantes recounted a tragic situation in one of the Manila parishes whereby the monstrance – with the consecrated host – was stolen by thieves inside an empty adoration chapel.
Caritas Indonesia: hope and care for creation at the centre of its 2025 meeting
Caritas Indonesia’s 2025 National Network Meeting was held from 21 to 24 May at the headquarters of the Catholic Bishops’ Confe-rence of Indonesia (KWI), in central Jakarta. The biennial meeting brought together the main actors of the Catholic Church’s huma-nitarian network to renew their commitment to cooperation, environmental justice and inclusive development across Indonesia. The theme echoed the Jubilee motto with hope at its centre.
The event fostered spiritual and strategic reflection, with participants urged to deepen their shared mission of mercy and solidarity. “The National Meeting is a vital opportunity to nurture synergy and strengthen the spirit of fraternal cooperation among diocesan Caritas offices nationwide,” said Emeritus Bishop Aloysius Sudarso SCJ, Chairman of the Karina Foundation’s Governing Board. “This spirit must guide our efforts in disaster response and long-term humanitarian programmes,” he added.
Now in the third year of the 2023-2027 Strategic Plan, Caritas Indonesia’s commit-ment is more on green initiatives. During the event, the dioceses presented their best pra-ctices for the care of Creation, in line with Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si’. “These ecological programmes reflect our commit-ment to care for our common home,” Bishop Sudarso said, expressing hope that the meeting would generate follow-up actions to scale up environmental work across the country.