Morning Keys: Vatican to publish Francis’s private diary

 

Written by Morning Keys

Here are today’s key Catholic stories, led by news that the Vatican will publish The Private Diary of Pope Francis, notes he kept from 1992 to 2024, in a book by Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández out Nov. 24. Also inside: Pope Leo XIV’s letter to Gaza’s Catholic parish after a strike killed a Christian mother and daughter, Archbishop Shawn McKnight’s call for Kansas to commute every death sentence, and Leo’s meeting with U.S. bishops’ leaders on the eve of the Amoris Laetitia gathering. New at Where Peter Is this morning, Mike Lewis asks whether the saints are owed the same work of mercy as everyone else: burial.

Today’s Mass readings (USCCB) · Saint of the day (Vatican News): St. Bruno

Top stories

Vatican to publish Pope Francis’s private diary in a book by Cardinal Fernández

Vatican to publish Pope Francis’s private diary in a book by Cardinal Fernández. The Private Diary of Pope Francis presents and comments on notes Jorge Mario Bergoglio kept from Dec. 20, 1992, to Aug. 18, 2024. The Vatican Publishing House and partner publishers will release it Nov. 24 in five languages across 94 countries; Andrea Tornielli said it offers “an even deeper understanding of the Argentine Pope’s inner life.” Gerard O’Connell notes Francis once said he meant to destroy his most intimate notes himself. — Vatican News · America (Gerard O’Connell) · Also: Crux (Hillel Italie, AP)

Leo to Gaza’s Catholic parish after a deadly strike: “How long, O Lord?”

Leo writes to Gaza’s Catholic parish after a strike kills a Christian mother and daughter: “How long, O Lord?” In a message to Fr. Gabriel Romanelli of Holy Family Church, the pope mourned Maysa Khader Ibrahim Abu Daoud and her daughter, Mary Hafez Michel Najjar, Greek Orthodox women killed with three others in Saturday’s Israeli strike on a Gaza City apartment building. “I have been praying to God for them, for their families and for the entire community of Gaza,” he wrote. — Vatican News · Also: America (Junno Arocho Esteves, OSV News)

Archbishop McKnight urges Kansas to commute all nine death sentences

Archbishop McKnight urges Kansas’s governor to commute all nine death sentences. Writing after Tennessee’s failed execution of Christa Pike, the archbishop of Kansas City in Kansas said it “proved once again that there is simply no humane way for the government to kill a human being,” and urged Gov. Laura Kelly, in her final months in office, to commute the state’s nine death sentences to life without parole. — Kansas City Star (Archbishop Shawn McKnight)

Mike Lewis: Let the dead rest in peace, not pieces

Mike Lewis: Let the dead rest in peace, not pieces. Starting from Blessed Fulton Sheen’s jawbone on display at his beatification, Mike traces the history of dividing saints’ bodies and notes that the Church forbids families to divide a loved one’s ashes but sets out procedures for dividing the bodies of saints. Burying the dead is a work of mercy, he writes, and “when the two are in tension, mercy should come first.” — Where Peter Is (Mike Lewis; Oct. 6)

From Where Peter Is

• Robert Fastiggi on the death penalty and doctrinal development. Reprinted from the new collection Faith in Crisis, the essay argues that Francis’s 2018 revision of the Catechism calling the death penalty inadmissible is an authentic development of doctrine that Catholics are bound to accept. Andrew Likoudis’s introduction notes a Pew finding that 65 percent of U.S. Catholics now favor capital punishment for murder. — Where Peter Is (Robert Fastiggi; Oct. 5)

Pope and Holy See

• Leo meets U.S. bishops’ conference leaders before the Amoris Laetitia meeting; Peoria’s bishop gives him a Sheen relic. Archbishop Paul Coakley and Bishop Daniel Flores, the USCCB president and vice president, met the pope Monday on their annual Rome visit and will attend the Oct. 7–14 gathering. Leo also received Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami and Bishop Louis Tylka of Peoria, who presented a relic of Blessed Fulton Sheen. — Angelus News (OSV News) · Also: Holy See Press Office
• Leo tells Vatican employees that women’s presence is “a valuable asset that must be increasingly recognized and appreciated.” Addressing the Association of Lay Vatican Employees and Women in the Vatican, the pope stressed “the irreplaceable centrality of the human person” as artificial intelligence reshapes work and urged dialogue as “the main route” for resolving workplace problems. — Vatican News (Christopher Wells) · Full text: Holy See Press Office · Also: IT
• Leo asks Korean priests and religious to be witnesses of hope for World Youth Day Seoul and “artisans of peace.” Meeting about 170 Koreans in Rome, many working on the 2027 WYD, the pope recalled the Venerable Thomas Choe Yang-eop, “the martyr of sweat,” and said Christian memory “is not nostalgia, but gratitude.” — Vatican News · Full text: Holy See
• Leo’s foreword to YOUCAT: Love Forever calls true love “a covenant for life.” In the preface released as the youth catechism on love and marriage launches in Rome today, the pope tells young people that true love “is not merely a fleeting, briefly inflamed emotion” but “a deep commitment to the other, a decision, a journey and a covenant for life.” — Vatican News
• Protection of Minors Commission sets priorities for its next phase. Closing its Sept. 28–Oct. 2 plenary, the commission said “safeguarding credibility depends on the ability to translate commitments into measurable actions,” reviewed its forthcoming third annual report, approved the working document for the fourth, and stressed the “meaningful participation” of victims and survivors. — Vatican News
• Leo makes Vanity Fair’s “New Establishment” list as “His Holiness the Humanist.” The pope placed 18th on a list topped by AI executives, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei; the magazine cited his AI encyclical Magnifica Humanitas and wrote that an American pope who “prizes the dignity of immigrants and opposes the concentration of economic power” is “bound to get in a few dustups.” — National Catholic Reporter (Justin McLellan)

United States

• Bishops in four states campaign against abortion ballot measures. Bishops in Virginia, Nevada, Idaho, and Missouri are issuing statements, bulletin inserts, and lawn signs despite polling that suggests an uphill fight; Las Vegas Archbishop George Leo Thomas told NCR he will release a pastoral letter by mid-October urging voters to reject Nevada’s Question 6. — National Catholic Reporter (Brian Fraga)
• Feature: How the St. Francis Breadline feeds New York’s homeless, without judgment. Founded by the Franciscans in 1930, during the Great Depression, outside the Church of St. Francis of Assisi near Penn Station, the breadline has, by most accounts, missed only one day in 96 years (because of Hurricane Sandy) and now serves more than 300 meals each morning. — America (Jim McDermott)

Around the World

• Residents of the West Bank’s last all-Christian village are “living in fear.” For the fourth straight year, Taybeh’s residents can’t harvest their olives after the Israeli army declared the area a closed military zone, Palestinian Christian activist Ihab Hassan told Vatican News: “Most of the land is out of reach,” while “Israeli settlers are roaming freely.” — Vatican News (Joseph Tulloch)
• EU bishops warn a court opinion on erasing baptismal records could create “significant legal uncertainty.” COMECE’s secretariat responded after an EU Court of Justice advocate general’s opinion in a case on whether a Belgian diocese must delete baptismal register data on request; the ruling may come late this year or early next. — The Pillar (Luke Coppen) · Also: Crux (Fionn Shiner)

Video and Podcasts

• Inside the Vatican: Amoris Laetitia at 10. This week’s episode looks back at the tense 2014 and 2015 synods on the family, what Pope Francis decided in Amoris Laetitia, and why Pope Leo is revisiting it at this week’s meeting. — YouTube · Apple Podcasts · Spotify (America Media; Oct. 5)

Commentary

• Opinion: Karen Park on why Christa Pike’s guilt does not erase her dignity. Recalling St. Thérèse of Lisieux’s prayers for the condemned murderer Henri Pranzini, Park writes about the botched Tennessee execution, which happened as she was reading to her second graders about Thérèse on the eve of her feast. — National Catholic Reporter (Karen E. Park)