In the long-awaited denouement of the Vatican’s “trial of the century,” which has been seen widely as a litmus test of Pope Francis’s press for reform, a Vatican tribunal on December 16 sentenced Italian Cardinal Angelo Becciu to five years and six months in prison for his role in various financial crimes.
Becciu was also fined roughly $8,700 and permanently barred from holding any public office in the Vatican City State. An attorney representing Becciu immediately indicated plans for an appeal.
Becciu, 75, was already the first cardinal ever to stand trial on criminal charges before a Vatican civil court, and he now becomes the first ever to be convicted and sentenced. Prosecutors had asked for seven years and three months of prison time for the cardinal.
From 2011 to 2018 Becciu held the all-important position of sostituto, or “substitute,” in the Secretariat of State, making him effectively the pope’s chief of staff, the only figure in the Vatican system with the right to see the pope on a routine basis without an appointment.
Presiding judge Giuseppe Pignatone, a veteran Italian jurist, read the verdicts aloud on Decemebr 16 in a hall belonging to the Vatican Museums which was converted into a makeshift courtroom in order to accommodate not only public interest, but the sheer number of attorneys and support personnel necessary to try such a complex case.
Stretching over two and a half years, the trial featured 86 separate hearings and heard almost 70 witnesses, after what amounted to almost a year of procedural squabbles before the court ever got to the substance of the charges.

Not so much a decision, much less a revolution, it is a promise Pope Francis made to the Virgin Mary: “I want to be buried in Santa Maria Maggiore. The place is already ready.”
Pope Francis, 87 years old next week, on 17 December, revealed his intention to Mexican broadcaster N+, while also explaining that he is working to simplify the funeral rite for popes. The Pope also made clear that, although he thinks about death – in part due to old age that “arrives as it is” – the idea of resigning is not at all in the plans.
On the contrary, the Holy Father reveals a desire to travel to Belgium in 2024, in addition to “pending” trips to Polynesia and his native Argentina. The interview was conducted by well-known journalist Valentina Alazraki, a veteran Vatican watcher, on the day Mexico celebrates its “mother,” Our Lady of Guadalupe. The “Morenita” is indeed present throughout the interview, during which the Pope reiterates his “great devotion” to Our Lady. Hence, the choice of St. Mary Major as the place of his eventual burial.
The choice marks a historical novelty, especially with respect to the Popes of the recent past, all of whom were buried in the Vatican Grottoes (the last being Benedict XVI, who died on 31 December 2022). However, the decision to be buried in St Mary Major reinforces the bond with the Liberian Basilica, which the Pope has visited more than 100 times: beginning the day after his election, 14 March 2013; then before and after every international trip; and finally, last week, 8 December, when he went to pay homage with a “Golden Rose” offered to the Salus Populi Romani, the Marian icon that tradition says was painted by St Luke and that watches over the inhabitants of the City of Rome.

Chow, who was jailed in 2020, said in her statement that she made her decision “consi-dering the situation in Hong Kong, my personal safety, my physical and mental health.”
“Perhaps I will never go back again in my lifetime,” she said.
In 2021, Chow was released from prison in Hong Kong after serving more than 6 months for attending an “unlawful” assem-bly in 2019.
She was convicted of attend-ing public protests against a law that would have allowed for political prisoners to be extradited to mainland China to face trial in some circumstances. She was charged and sentenced along with Joshua Wong, a Christian and co-founder of the Demosisto pro-democracy organization with Chow.
Chow was separately facing charges of “colluding with for-eign forces” and other offenses under Hong Kong’s controversial National Security Law.
Before her imprisonment, Chow was banned from running in Hong Kong elections following election law reforms. She has been accused of “sedition” under the terms of the National Security Law, imposed on Hong Kong by the mainland government on July 1, 2020.
The law effectively crimi-nalizes many forms of political speech or criticism of the govern-ment; Chow, Wong, and Nathan Law, another pro-democracy activist currently seeking political refuge in the U.K., were forced to dissolve Demosisto within days of it being imposed.
Following her release from prison, Chow stepped back from public speaking, noting at the time that she needed to recover physically from her time in prison, noting that “[my] body has become too thin during this period.”
Earlier this year, Chow was offered the return of her passport and the possibility of international travel if she first undertook a well-photographed trip to main-land China where several police officers took her on a tour of an exhibition of Chinese national achievements and a visit to the headquarters of the technology company Tencent.
Chow wrote statement Sun-day that “I don’t want to be forced to do anything any more, and I don’t want to be forced to go to mainland China any more.”

Vowing to pursue a program of “justice and peace,” the newly elected president of the Pakistan Catholic Bishops’ Conference says that agenda will include speaking out against the country’s controversial blasphemy laws.
Critics allege that those laws, which criminalize blasphemy against state-recognized religions, are often abused to oppress religious minorities in the over-whelmingly Muslim nation, as well to settle scores among Muslims themselves.
Famously, an illiterate Catholic woman named Asia Bibi was sentenced to execution by hang-ing for blasphemy in 2010 and spent almost a decade on Pakistan’s death row, until an inter-national pressure campaign resulted in her release in 2019 and settlement in Canada.
“Innocent people should not be targeted and sentenced,” said Bishop Samson Shukardin of Hyderabad, who was elected the new leader of the Pakistani bishops in early November.
“My mission is to raise my voice and bring help and relief to the innocent victims,” Shukardin told Crux. The 62-year-old bi-shop insisted that while there are anti-Christian forces in Pakistani society, it’s not universal.
“We take this up with the government on a regular basis, and the government has been very supportive,” he said.
“This anti-Christian sentiment is not pan-Pakistan, but [only] in various places,” Shukardin said. More broadly, Shu-kardin sketched a social development agenda for his term as conference president.

One of India’s largest private hospital companies is believed to be involved in an organ trafficking operation, an investigation published this week by the English The Telegraph newspaper reported.
According to the investigation, several poor citizens from Myanmar were transferred to Delhi’s Apollo Hospital (one of two hospitals in the capital run by the Indraprastha Medical company, also known as IMCL) and paid to have their kidneys exported, which are then donated to other patients, often even foreigners.
“The allegations made by recent international media against IMCL are absolutely false, ill-informed and misleading,” the private company said in a statement. Apollo Hospitals Group said it agreed with the IMCL statement. “As part of its corporate governance policy, IMCL has initiated an investigation into the matter to delve into all aspects of the transplant process,” the company further explained.
Organ sales are being considered in India (and Myanmar), but it would not be the first time reports have emerged of kidney trafficking in India, where there is a shortage of donors. Nearly a million Indians are diagnosed with chronic kidney disease every year and around 200,000 people suffer from end-stage renal failure. By some estimates, only 10% of Indians who develop kidney disease see a nephrologist, and at least 20 Indians die every day waiting for an organ donation. As of 2022, only 7,500 trans-plants have occurred across the country.

As the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is celebrating its 75th birthday, the Vatican’s Permanent Representative in Geneva, Archbishop Ettore Balestrero, organized a symposium that aimed to focus on both human rights and care for creation.
The Dec. 8 symposium, co-sponsored by the Sovereign Order of Malta, Caritas in Veritate Foundation, and the International Catholic Migration Commission, formed part of week-long commemorations of the declaration, signed Dec. 10, 1948, widely seen as a foundational text for modern human and civil rights.
In his introduction, Archbishop Balestrero said the 30-article landmark document, adopted by the U.N.’s General Assembly, had recognized the “intrinsic dignity of the human person” in the wake of World War II.
However, he added that the global situation 75 years later looked “undeniably dire” and said the Vatican also believed human beings were “relational in nature,” and existed “not as isolated rights-bearers, but in a web of connections and relationships.”

The US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) has released a new report on anti-conversion laws around the world. Providing the legal text for 73 separate laws, the compendium notes that 1 in 4 nations (46 total) restrict the right of its people to either adopt or propagate a religion.
“The right to convert from one religion or belief to another, or to no religion or belief at all, is central to [the] protection for religious freedom,” said Susie Gelman, a USCIRF commissioner. “And in countries with anti-conversion laws, religious minorities tend to be broadly targeted for harassment, assault, arrest, and imprisonment.”
The USCIRF report grouped the laws into four categories. First, anti-proselytizing laws restrict witnessing of one’s faith in 29 nations, including in Indonesia, Israel, and Russia. In Morocco, for example, it is illegal to cause a Muslim to question his or her religion.
The second category of interfaith marriage is restricted in 25 nations, including in Jordan, the Philippines, and Singapore.

Pointing toward the Our Lady of Lourdes Grotto at the Saint Benedict Monastery cemetery in St.Joseph, Minnesota, 61-year-old Patrick Norton recounts the day 13 years ago when he was painting light posts in front of a statue of the Blessed Mother and encountered who he believes was Sister Annella Zervas, OSB.
Zervas, a Benedictine sister, died in 1926 at the age of 26 of a debilitating skin disease.
Norton, who was plucked from the streets of Bombay as a child by Mother Teresa and later adopted by an American family, had been hired by the College of Saint Benedict on Oct. 27, 2010, to do some painting. He told that while finishing up the last light post in front of the grotto he thought to himself, “I wonder if the Blessed Mother thinks I am doing a good job?” When he looked down, there was a nun in full Benedictine habit.
“‘You are doing a good job,’ she told me. We talked a little, but I don’t remember what it was about. Then I watched as she disappeared,” he told.
The encounter was so astonishing that Norton kept it to himself for a year. But in a chance conversation, he was told “there is a holy nun buried in that cemetery” and he came to learn it was Zervas. Eventually, he saw a picture of her and was certain that she was the one who had appeared to him.
Patrick Norton stands beside the lamp post he was painting near the Marian grotto when he saw a woman in full Benedict habit who he believes was Sister Annella Zervas.
An elderly religious sister at Saint Benedict Monastery – who also happened to be named Sister Annella – shared with Norton pictures of Zervas and a booklet about the young sister’s life called “Apostles of Suffering in Our Day” by Benedictine priest Joseph Kreuter, published in 1929.

Pope Francis on December 11 received the prefects of the Italian Republic in the Clementine Hall of the Apostolic Palace and expressed his concern about the low birth rate in the country, lamenting that many times “dogs take the place of children.”
The pope reminded that the task of these government authorities is to act as intermediaries “between the state and the territory, constantly linking the whole with the parts, the centre with the peripheries, the common good with care for people.”
The pontiff highlighted three challenges that the prefects face: public order, critical environmental issues, and taking care of the migrants flowing in.
Regarding public order, the pontiff stressed that it’s a priority, where “respect for the law with care for humanity” must be combined. He stressed that “the protection of victims with the fair treatment of criminals” must be reconciled.
“Added to this is the great responsibility you have to face the risks that members of the police forces face daily, whose care is also your concern,” he continued.
Pope Francis also noted that “public order cannot be administered without personal and interior order. But when this exists, the responsibility of public order feels like a call to create that cli-mate of harmonious coexistence through which difficulties can be addressed and resolved.”
“I would say that yours is a kind of institutional fatherhood: exercised with conscience and dedication, it spares no sacrifices nor sleepless nights and deserves our gratitude,” he said.

The Supreme Court on December 11 rejected over the objections of three conservative justices a Christian therapist’s free speech challenge to a Washington state ban on so-called conversion therapy aimed at changing a child’s sexual orientation or gender identity.
Favored by some conservatives, the widely criticized practice is aimed at encouraging gay or lesbian minors to change their sexual orientations and trans-gender children to identify as the gender identities assigned to them at birth. Washington is one of 26 states that have barred or restri-cted such therapy for minors, the state’s lawyers say.
The court’s decision not to take up the case means the law remains intact.
“This is a victory for LGBT-Q+ civil rights. The research is clear – conversion therapy does not work, and can be particularly harmful to minors,” Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson said in a statement.
Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh all said they would have heard the appeal.
Thomas wrote that there is “a fierce public debate over how best to help minors with gender dysphoria” and that the state had “silenced one side of this debate.”
In a separate brief opinion, Alito said the case “presents a question of national importance” that clearly implicates free speech issues. Brian Tingley, a licensed marriage and family counselor, said the law violates his free speech rights under the Constitution’s First Amendment be-cause the government is seeking to dictate what he says.