On Dec. 21 evening, Pope Francis visited the Pope emeritus in order to exchange Christmas greetings. As he has done every year since his election, Pope Francis on December 21 made the short journey to the Mater Ecclesiae Monastery, for a Christmas visit with his predecessor, Pope emeritus Benedict XVI. Pope Francis has visited the Monastery several times over the course of the past year. Most recently, in October, he called on the Pope emeritus on the eve of the canonization of Paul VI. Before that, the Holy Father made a surprise visit with the fourteen new Cardinals he had created in the Consistory of June this year.

One of the proposals made at last month’s meeting of U.S. Catholic bishops for investigating future allegations of misconduct by prelates appears likely to receive Vatican approval, according to several eminent canon lawyers and theologians. Celebration, NCR’s sister publication, will publish a new reflection each day during Advent.

The suggestion to empower the nation’s metropolitan archbishops to examine accusations made against bishops in their regions of the country corresponds both with the way the church handled such issues in earlier centuries and the current Code of Canon Law, they say.

Nicholas Cafardi, a respected civil and canon lawyer, noted that the current version of the code already says the Vatican can give archbishops “special functions and power” in their regions “where circumstances demand it.” “This function could be to receive and investigate accusations of sexual impropriety … and then to report to the Holy See on the results,” said Cafardi, who has advised bishops and dioceses on canonical issues for decades.

Richard Gaillardetz, a theologian who has written several books on the practice of authority in Catholicism, said simply: “It’s just good ecclesiology.” “It wouldn’t be too hard to envision the Holy See granting metropolitans special functions, and I could imagine that being done,” he said.

In the Catholic Church, metropolitan archbishops are those who are tasked with both leading an archdiocese and presiding over the bishops in their wider ecclesiastical province. While their role in their provinces has been largely honorific in recent centuries, it was much more expanded in the earlier church.

“It would be an interesting move,” Jesuit Fr Steven Schoenig, a historian who has focused his research on the role of archbishops in the Middle Ages, said of the proposal. “It would kind of restore things to an earlier stage in the church’s history.”

The possibility of empowering arch-bishops to investigate allegations made in their provinces was raised at the annual meeting of the bishops’ conference in November, when the prelates were considering a number of proposals to respond to this year’s spate of revelations of clergy sexual abuse.

Pope Francis has wanted the creation of a single service dedicated to the Catholic Charismatic Renewal organizations since 2015 — a vision that is now becoming a reality thanks to the creation of CHARIS (Catholic Charismatic Renewal International Service), which will be officially instituted on Dec. 8.

This new body within the Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life will replace the two existing services known as the International Catholic Charismatic Renewal Service and the Catholic Fraternity.

For the 50th anniversary of the Catholic Charismatic Movement in June 2017, Pope Francis already asked the two bodies to join together to organize the celebration at the Circus Maximus in Rome. On this occasion, the Pope quoted the late Belgian Cardinal Leo Suenens, the strong-est episcopal promoter of the movement in its early days, who called it “a current of grace, a renewing breath of the Spirit for all the members of the Church.”

The international service will be made of 18 members, as well as a moderator and an ecclesiastical assistant — Capuchin Father Raniero Cantalamessa, preacher to the Papal Household and a long-time supporter of the charismatic movement. The service’s officials will fully assume their functions from June 9, 2019, the Solemnity of Pentecost.

The International Organisation for Migration (IOM), the UN-backed inter-governmental agency, has said that some 2,133 people seeking asylum have been killed or gone missing this year while trying to reach Europe by sea. The organisation said that in the period to 28 November, some 107,583 migrants and refugees had entered Europe by sea this year – the fifth successive year in which the arrival of irregular migrants and refugees had topped 100,000; but down on the figures by the same date in both 2017 and 2016 for the same period.

The Mediterranean Sea crossings from North Africa and the Middle East to Europe account for two thirds of the total number of migrants and asylum seekers killed or missing across the road this year – some 3,341 people. But the IOM warn that comparisons are hindered by incomplete data gathering in some regions. This year’s figure for the number killed or missing in the Mediterranean is considerably less than last year’s total of 3,113.

The regularisation of more than a hundred new churches and Christian places of worship “is a positive step” and confirms that the government intends to “put into practice” what is in the “law on irregular places of worship approved a year and a half ago,” said Fr Rafic Greiche, spokesman for the Egyptian Catholic Church, who spoke to AsiaNews about 168 churches and other Christian places of worship recently approved by a ministerial committee.

Chaired by Prime Minister MostafaMadbouly (who is also Housing and Urban Utilities minister), the committee “legalised” 151 churches with another 17 set to follow.

“The approval process touches churches that lacked proper authorisation,” said the clergy-man. “This is an administrative issue meant to grant a legal status to buildings” that belong to Egypt’s Christian minority, which has been recently targeted by Islamic extremist groups.

In the past two months, the committee looked at churches that had requested regularisation, giving the go-ahead during a session attended by officials from the ministries of Justice, Antiquities and Parliamentary Affairs. The Prime Minister also authorised the regularisation of other places of worship if they meet legal requirements.

On the very same day on which the Pontifical Urban University was opening anexhibit (see photo) dedicated to the heroic Ulma family of Poland – “this big family,” Pope Francis said, “shot by Nazi Germans during the second world war for having hidden and given aid to Jews” – in Italy the National Institute of Statistics released the figures on births and marriages in the year 2017.

Anything but “big” families, like that of those Polish martyrs or like many in Italy a century ago. The collapse of the birth rate here reached an all-time low in 2017. In a country of 60.5 million inhabitants, just 458,151 children were born last year, and even fewer, around 440,000, new births are predicted for 2018, a little more than 7 for every 1,000 inhabitants, 30 % below the average for the European Union, which is already the region with the lowest birth rate in the world.

If one considers that the “total fertility rate” that ensures zero growth, meaning a balanced turnover of the population, is 2.1 children per woman, the Italian figure has been dramatically below this for decades and in 2017 sank to the level of 1.32, with quite a few regions even more stingy with births, and with Sardinia even falling to the level of 1.06.

These are numbers that already attest to an inexorable march toward the extinction of a people.

But even more striking are the figures concerning marriage. There were 203,000 in 2016, and dropped to 191,000 in 2017, down 6% in a single year, a decrease second only to the structural one in 1975, the year following the approval of divorce in Italy.

The Vatican’s third most powerful official has been convicted in Australia on all charges he sexually abused two choir boys there in the late ’90s, according to two sources with knowledge of the case.

A unanimous jury returned its verdict for Cardinal George Pell (Australian time) after more than three days of deliberations, the sources said, in a trial conducted under a gag order by the judge that prevented any details of the trial being made public.

Pell, the Vatican’s finance chief and the highest Vatican official to ever go on trial for sex abuse, left Rome in June 2017 to stand trial in Melbourne.

As that trial was about to get underway in June, a judge placed a suppression order on all press coverage in Australia, according to the order reviewed by The Daily Beast. Prosecutors applied for the order and it was granted to “prevent a real and substantial risk of prejudice to the proper administration of justice.” That order remains in place in Australia.

That trial, known as “the cathedral trial,” was declared a mistrial earlier this year after a hung jury, the sources say. A retrial began immediately and ended with the unanimous verdict.

In a book published last year, journalist Louise Milligan reportedly wrote that Pell was accused by two former choir boys of sexual abuse while he was archbishop of Melbourne in the ’90s. The boys sang in the choir at St Patrick’s cathedral and were allegedly abused by Pell in a room in the confines of the church. Pell’s office told The Guardian in 2017 he “repeats his vehement and consistent denials of any and all such accusations.”