Pope Francis

The Vatican on Tuesday issued an overarching investments policy to ensure they are ethical, green, low-risk, and avoid weapons industries or health sectors involved in abortion, contraception, or embryonic stem cells.

Pope Francis said that while the Vatican’s secret and contested agreement with China on the appointment of Roman Catholic bishops is not ideal, he hopes it can be renewed in October because the church takes the long view.

The Vatican’s decision to have both Ukrainians and Russians take part in Pope Francis’ “Way of the Cross” procession on Friday has caused friction with Ukrainian Catholic leaders, who want it to be reconsidered.

Pope Francis apologized to Canadian Indigenous peoples on Friday for the Roman Catholic Church's role in residential schools that sought to erase their cultures and where many children suffered abuse.

A prominent liberal cardinal who leads a body representing European bishops has called for “fundamental revision” in Catholic teaching on homosexuality, and said it is wrong to fire Church workers for being LGBTQ.

FOR ARCHBISHOP JOSÉ Gomez of Los Angeles, social justice movements are “pseudo-religions.” In a November speech, Gomez said that “today’s critical theories” are “profoundly atheistic,” that they spring from a “Marxist cultural vision,” and that they “resemble” heresies in church history. He even blamed social justice movements for “causing new forms of social division, discrimination, intolerance, and injustice.”

Black Catholic theologians and others responded to Gomez’s remarks with a petition that read, in part, “Your speech was particularly painful and offensive to Black Catholic advocates in the United States who have organized for racial justice in the face of indifference and even hostility from many white Christians.” The National Black Sisters’ Conference pointed out that “BLM is not a pseudo-religion; nor is it a ‘dangerous substitute for true religion.’ It is a movement very much in the tradition of Catholic Social Teaching.” And someone ought to introduce Archbishop Gomez to Pope Francis who, in his message for World Youth Day this fall, encouraged young people to “Arise! Uphold social justice, truth, and integrity, human rights. Protect the persecuted, the poor and the vulnerable, those who have no voice in society, immigrants.”

Pope Francis said on Monday that migrants were being exploited as “pawns” on a political chessboard in an apparent reference to the crisis at the Belarus border.

Thousands of migrants are stuck on the European Union’s eastern frontier in what the EU says is a crisis Minsk (Belarus’ capital city) engineered by distributing Belarusian visas in the Middle East, flying them in and letting them go to the border.

Speaking with an Argentine accent, amplifying the voice of the poor, indicting the rich, and betting it all on grassroots movements, we might even ask, do we finally have a liberation theologian in St. Peter’s chair?

Religious leaders should stop saying things like, “We must be good stewards of Creation” or “Our faith teaches us to protect the Earth” and instead getting comfortable saying things like: “ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, and other oil and gas companies are systematically destroying the planet — and financial giants like JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, BlackRock, and Vanguard are bankrolling the destruction.”