Pope makes last-minute decision not to deliver Palm Sunday Mass homily

Pope Francis decided at the last minute to skip his homily during Palm Sunday Mass in St Peter’s Square, avoiding a strenuous speech at the start of a busy Holy Week that will test his increasingly frail health.

Francis – affected by bad knees and persistent respiratory problems – also did not participate in the procession of cardinals around the obelisk in the piazza at the start of the Mass.

Instead, the 87-year-old pontiff blessed the palm fronds and olive branches carried by the faithful from the altar.

Francis had been expected to deliver a homily halfway through the service and a prepared text had been distributed to journalists.

Pope Francis arrives to celebrate the Palm Sunday mass© Provided by The Irish News

But when an aide presented Francis with his glasses to begin reading, the pope made clear he would not deliver the remarks, leaving the crowd waiting in silence.

The Vatican press office said the homily was replaced by “a moment of silence and prayer”.

Francis did pronounce prayers throughout the service and offered a long appeal for peace at the end of the Mass.

He said he was praying for the families of those killed in what he called an “inhuman” attack at a Moscow concert hall and also asked for prayers for “the martyred Ukraine” and people of Gaza.

Vatican officials estimated some 60,000 people attended the Mass, held under a sunny spring sky.

Francis spent several minutes greeting them from the Popemobile, making several loops around the square at the end of the service.

Palm Sunday kicks off a busy week for Francis leading up to Easter Sunday when the faithful commemorate the resurrection of Christ.

Pope Francis rubs his eyes before the start of the Palm Sunday Mass (Alessandra Tarantino/AP)© Provided by The Irish News

On Thursday, Francis is due to travel to a Rome women’s prison for the traditional washing of the feet ritual. On Friday he is scheduled to preside over the torchlit Way of the Cross procession at Rome’s Colosseum re-enacting Christ’s crucifixion.

The following day marks the Easter Vigil, during which Francis presides over a solemn night-time service in the basilica, followed by Easter Sunday Mass in St Peter’s Square and his noontime blessing from the loggia above.

The Holy Week schedule is challenging for popes even under the best of circumstances.

But that is especially true this year for Francis, who has been battling on and off all winter what he and the Vatican have described as a case of the flu, bronchitis or a cold.

For the last several weeks he has occasionally asked an aide to read aloud his speeches and catechism lessons to spare him the effort.

On Sunday, there was no substitute called in and the homily was skipped. Vatican officials said the prepared text was to be considered as never having existed. Usually, the pope does not deliver a homily at Easter but he traditionally offers reflections on Palm Sunday.

Even when he is not sick, Francis often speaks in a whisper and seems to run out of breath easily. He had part of one lung removed when he was a young man because of a respiratory infection.

Pope Francis waves as he leaves at the end of the service (Alessandra Tarantino/AP)© Provided by The Irish News

At this time last year, he was in hospital for three days with an acute case of bronchitis but then rallied to get through Holy Week.

He has been in hospital two other times during his pontificate for abdominal surgery, including one 10-day stay in 2021 to remove part of his large intestine.

At the end of the Mass, Francis offered a long prayer for peace for all those suffering from war, and for the Lord to comfort the victims of the “vile terrorist attack” in Moscow.

“May he convert the hearts of those who protect, organise and carry out these inhuman acts that offend God, who commanded us not to kill,” Francis said.

Without citing Moscow, Francis also asked the faithful not to forget Ukraine’s suffering. He noted many Ukrainians are now without electricity as a result of “intense attacks on infrastructure, which not only bring death and suffering, but also the risk of a humanitarian catastrophe of even bigger dimensions”.

“Please don’t forget the martyred Ukraine,” he said. “And let us also think of Gaza, which is suffering so much, and so many other places of war.” 

New York City's mayor gets baptized in jail by Rev. Al Sharpton on Good Friday

“Having been arrested and then elected mayor, I reminded these young men that where you are is not who you are,” Adams, a Democrat, said in a statement. "For the first time in their lives, their mayor didn’t look down at them — I sat side by side with them to be cleansed and recommit ourselves to getting on the right path.” NYC Mayor Jail Baptism:

New York City Mayor Eric Adams marked Good Friday by receiving a jailhouse baptism from the Rev. Al Sharpton, joining in on the religious rite with a group of men incarcerated at the troubled Rikers Island jail complex.

The ceremony came as part of a visit to the jail complex where Adams was scheduled to meet with detainees on the Christian holiday.

Images from the event, provided by the mayor's office, appear to show Adams interlocking hands with Sharpton during a prayer, the reverend washing Adams' feet and Adams being baptized.

Adams and the civil rights leader have close ties through their long tenures in New York politics. Adams often calls into Sharpton's satellite radio show and the pair have appeared together at City Hall events.

Pope Francis calls predecessor Benedict a key transitional figure

Pope Francis has described his predecessor Benedict XVI as a transitional pope, saying he was the only possible candidate to follow the upheavals under former pope John Paul II.

Germany's Joseph Ratzinger, who became pope Benedict, was the only candidate who could be pontiff at the time when a new pope was elected in 2005, said Francis, the current head of the Catholic Church in an extract from a book due to be published in Spanish on Wednesday.

"After the revolution of John Paul II, who was a dynamic, very active pontiff, who took the initiative, who travelled... We needed a pope who could maintain a healthy balance, a transitional pope," said Francis, referring to the election of Ratzinger who became Benedict XVI.

In the papal election at that time, some cardinals sought to block Ratzinger's election, Francis said in the book of by the Vatican correspondent of Spanish newspaper ABC.

At the time, the cardinals also brought his name into play but, "if they had chosen someone like me, someone who creates a lot of chaos, I wouldn't have been able to achieve anything. At that time, it would have been impossible," said Francis, in the book called "El Sucesor," or The Successor.

Germany's pope emeritus Benedict XVI, born as Joseph Ratzinger in Bavaria in 1927, was pope from 2005 until his unexpected resignation in 2013. He died in 2022.

He was succeeded by Francis, born Jorge Bergoglio, in 2013.

Pope Francis pictured during the Holy Mass on Easter Sunday at the St. Peter's Square. Domenico Cippitelli/LPS via ZUMA Press Wire/dpa© DPA

Lawyers hit out at Vatican’s ‘trial of the century’ after Pope secretly changes law four times

Prominent lawyers have hit out at the Vatican’s recently concluded “trial of the century,” highlighting violations of basic defense rights and rule of law norms that they warn could have consequences for the Holy See going forward.

The opinions cite Pope Francis’ role in the trial, since he secretly changed Vatican law four times during the investigation to benefit prosecutors. And they call into question the independence and impartiality of the tribunal since its judges swear obedience to Francis, who can hire and fire them at will.

The critiques underscore the growing problems on the international stage for the peculiar microstate that the Holy See calls home: an absolute monarchy where Francis wields supreme legislative, executive and judicial power.

The legal opinions are likely to feature in the appeals within the Vatican court system of the nine people who were convicted in December of several financial crimes linked to the Vatican’s bungled 350 million euro ($380 million) investment in a London property. And they could also be raised during the current review of the Holy See’s compliance with European norms at the Council of Europe.

During two years of hearings, defense attorneys highlighted many of the same issues now raised by outside analysts. But the tribunal led by Judge Giuseppe Pignatone repeatedly rejected their motions.

Reporters watch a screen in the Vatican press room showing Vatican tribunal president Giuseppe Pignatone reading the verdict of a trial against Cardinal Angelo Becciu and nine other defendants (Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved)© (Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved)

After the first verdicts were issued, the Vatican’s editorial director, Andrea Tornielli, insisted that the process had been fair, that the judges acted independently and that the trial was carried out “in full respect of the guarantees for the suspects.”

Geraldina Boni, a professor of canonical and ecclesiastic law at the University of Bologna and an adviser to the Vatican’s legal office, disagreed in an article published Monday in the peer-reviewed legal journal of the University of Milan.

Writing with church legal experts Manuel Ganarin and Alberto Tomer, Boni described the four secret executive decrees that Francis penned during the investigation as giving prosecutors “essentially, and a bit surreally, ‘carte blanche’” to pursue their case without any judge overseeing them.

The decrees, which were never published, gave prosecutors authorization to intercept suspects' communications and take “whatever” precautionary measures against them were necessary, including deviating from existing Vatican law. The defense only learned about their existence once the trial was underway.

Pope Francis greets Italian journalist Andrea Tornielli at the Vatican

Boni, who said she was asked to provide a legal opinion for the defense of Cardinal Angelo Becciu, who was convicted of embezzlement, said the decrees represented a clear violation of the right to a fair trial, which calls for “the equality of arms” between defense and prosecution.

“It’s obvious that the people under investigation in the case were placed in a situation of substantial and onerous disadvantage, given they were completely unaware of the prosecution’s new investigative powers and thus unable to reasonably foresee the effects of their actions,” she wrote in "State, Church and Confessional Pluralism."

Francis has seemingly sought to justify the measures taken to get the trial off the ground, telling tribunal staff in 2023 that they should “avoid the risk of confusing the finger for the moon,’” or allowing obstacles to stand in the way of a greater good.

But Boni argued that in criminal and procedural law, the ends cannot justify the means. Such an attitude, she warned, “could end up justifying any conduct and any use of sovereign power in the search at all costs for the guilty.”

Even though the tribunal tried to compensate for such “unacceptable abuses,” she wrote, the anomalies were so grave as to have “invalidated the entire justice of the trial, prospecting a violation of divine law to which even the pope is subject.”

Paolo Cavana, a professor of canonical and ecclesiastic law at the Vatican-affiliated LUMSA University, argued that the Holy See is beholden to European norms guaranteeing a fair trial “by an independent and impartial tribunal,” even though it technically never signed the European Convention on Human Rights.

Writing in the same journal as Boni, Cavana argued that the Holy See committed to upholding the convention’s fundamental principles when it concluded a monetary agreement with the EU in 2009 allowing the Vatican to use the euro as its official currency.

But he said it is a matter of debate whether the Vatican’s judges are truly independent “given the pervasive character of the pontiff’s powers."

It's clear that the papal decrees exercised on the judges "a strong pressure about the outcome of the trial itself,” he wrote.

Vatican Trial Critique (Copyright 2020 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)© (Copyright 2020 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)

Cavana, who since 2019 has also served as an adviser to the Italian premier on church and Vatican matters, warned that Italy and other states may not recognize sentences pronounced by a tribunal if the judges are not considered independent and impartial.

Rodney Dixon, a veteran British international and human rights lawyer, said as much in a legal opinion prepared at the request of defendant Raffaele Mincione. Dixon said countries should refuse to cooperate with the Vatican tribunal, and should refuse to respect its verdicts, since the trial had been “marred by substantial violations of well-established international legal obligations applicable to all criminal proceedings.”

Tribunal head Pignatone repeatedly rejected defense claims that the suspects weren’t getting a fair trial, and even went so far as to exclude the testimony of defendant Gianluigi Torzi, who was arrested and detained for 10 days without being charged as a result of the special powers given to prosecutors by the pope.

In a March 1, 2022 ordinance, Pignatone said that while the Vatican had not adhered to any international human rights conventions, its own laws incorporated their principles fully.

He noted that both Italian and Swiss courts have previously recognized the independence and impartiality of Vatican judges and recalled that in the actual exercise of their work, Vatican judges are “subject only to the law.”