Cardinal Luis Pascual Dri, Argentine friar held up by Pope Francis as model confessor, dies at 98
Dri, a Capuchin friar, died Monday in the Argentine capital, where his funeral was being celebrated Wednesday, the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano said.
Dri was made a cardinal by Francis in 2023 at the age of 96 in recognition of his lifetime of work hearing confessions of the faithful and dispensing merciful absolutions. Up until his death, he worked as the confessor at the Our Lady of Pompeii parish in Buenos Aires.
Francis frequently referred to Dri during his pontificate and held him up as a model confessor for other priests, urging them to always be merciful in the confessional. For Francis, the sacrament of reconciliation was particularly important and he urged priests to always pardon those who seek forgiveness.
He once quoted Dri as saying he was so willing to dispense absolutions because God himself 'gave me a bad example' in forgiving all his sins.
Pope Leo XIV , who was made a cardinal during the same consistory as Dri, issued a message of condolences Wednesday signed by the Vatican secretary of state. In it, he recalled Dri as a 'devoted pastor, who was so dear to Pope Francis, and who for so many years gave his life to the service of God and the church as a confessor.'
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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP's collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
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13-07-2025
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These LGBTQ+ Archives Defy Erasure, One Memory at a Time
Jul 13, 2025 5:30 AM In Latin America, LGBTQ+ history collections are a form of resistance. Grassroots projects are using the memories of community members to fight against systematic violence and demand justice. For a long time Argentina's Trans Memory Archive was only a virtual space, but today it is a hybrid one. Its staff is responsible for the preservation and protection of items that share the story of trans life in the country. Trans Memory Archive of Argentina Being queer, often, means feeling unseen. 'We come from a history of erasure that is manifested not only through hate crimes and discrimination, but also through a lack of representation, symbolic violence, and the absence of legal protections,' explains André Mere Rivera, director of the Queer Memory Archive of Peru (Archivo de la Memoria Marica del Perú). The project Mere leads is part of a growing wave of collaborative projects in which Latin American LGBTQ+ communities preserve and share their struggles and triumphs. 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A transgender woman and a senior citizen, she learned everything she knows about being an archivist at her current job. Hernández is part of the Trans Memory Archive of Argentina (Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentina), an initiative that not only preserves the history of gender and sexual dissidence, but has also inspired others throughout Latin America and the Caribbean to create their own collections. 'The archive was born out of the need to find each other and know that we are alive,' says María Belén Correa, founder and director of the Trans Memory Archive, the largest project of its kind in the region. It's a space that brings together the past struggles and current demands of trans communities. 'Creating an archive is a way of situating ourselves, of showing that we are here, and that we have always been here,' says Queer Memory Archive of Peru's Mere. 'We are not all the same, we are not mere bodies, nor are we an idea imported from abroad. 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Without this archive, Nastri believes that not only would a crucial part of history be lost, but many moments of joy would also be forgotten. 'Something that this community has are strong family bonds,' she explains. 'They have a tragic history but it's shared in a very joyful way.' The Trans Memory Archive of Argentina organization receives materials documenting the community's history both as donations and loans. Trans Memory Archive of Argentina Covarrubias affectionately calls the staff at the Trans Memory Archive his 'Argentinian mothers and grandmothers.' They led him to a realization that since an archive like it didn't exist in Mexico, he'd have to be the one to build it. 'It was essential to find others like us. There are fewer works on transmasculinity than on any other gender identity,' he explains. Tired of only seeing texts from the global north, he decided to look closer to home. 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Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentina Peru's archive began with official documents about LGBTQ+ life that Mere had gathered. He then wrote to his friends asking them to share items they had published. Today, they have books, flyers, posters, leaflets, pins, booklets, embroidery, and works by queer artists such as Javi Vargas, which address HIV, power, and authority. They also have preserved costumes from a short film and memorabilia from a festival with the slogan 'Make Peru Gay Again.' Mere directs the archive, while Fernando Correa coordinates the research and oversees the methodology of interviews they have conducted to document certain places and moments in the history of the community. 'Talking about memories can be a sensitive topic in communities like ours, which are often impacted by violence. Many memories revolve around the violence we have experienced and continue to experience, from discrimination and murders to misrepresentations in the media, but our memories are also our relationships, the bonds of our communities, and our actions caring for one another,' says Mere. At Argentina's Trans Memory Archive, the work of the trans women who catalog its materials grows every day. The items are varied: Some are virtual, some physical, and some hybrid. All of them are centered on a collective memory, including interviews with trans people in different formats. 'The landscape begins to change when we have access to archival tools and then train people to create other similar spaces throughout Latin America,' Belén says. At times when dissenting voices have been silenced, the archive preserves them for future generations. Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentina From another part of the southern end of South America, other artistic exercises in memory are emerging, such as Felipe Rivas San Martín's The Inexistent Archive ( Archivo Inexistente ). The Chilean artist used artificial intelligence to construct a speculative album of LGBTQ+ couples from the working class of Abya Yala (an indigenous name for the Americas) using fiction to highlight and overcome the challenges created by the lack of records at the beginning of the 20th century. The Queer Memory Archive of Peru, together with WikiAcción Perú, organized training sessions about using Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons to create entries and upload images of marches, role models, and community events. It also works with the organization Ruta Colectiva on a long-term pride mapping project: a map of community centers, nightclubs, hospitals, churches, and other spaces that are or have been significant to the community. A similar initiative is hosted on the website of Brazil's Bajubá Museum where a collaborative map highlights locations related to LGBTQ+ cultural heritage. But it is in disseminating the research they have collected that technological advances are more important in this new archival wave. This was clear at the First Latin American Trans Archives Congress, which brought together 21 self-managed projects from 14 countries in the region. Many projects use social media to share materials, events, and profiles, as well as to showcase their processes, social demands, and achievements. At the same time, harassment and censorship also occur on social media. It is more common, Covarrubias adds, for transmasculine bodies to be censored than cisgender bodies. Materials from the archive were used to create a book that resembles a family photo album. 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Gas workers in Peru stumble across 1,000-year-old mummy: See photos
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