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Irish Times
18-05-2025
- Politics
- Irish Times
The financial heavyweight, the media guru and the abuse investigator: What next for top Irish Vatican clerics under Pope Leo XIV?
The hurly-burly is almost done. Pope Leo XIV's Mass of inauguration in St Peter's Square takes place tomorrow and then the new papacy begins properly. As the first US pontiff becomes the 267th occupant of the Throne of St Peter, it would not be unreasonable to consider the likely fate of those Irishmen working at the Vatican, particularly given the high profile that at least one of them took in the run-up to the conclave where Cardinal Robert Prevost was elected pope in a surprise vote. For now, all officials there stay in place, as announced by the new pope last week. They include prominent Irish figures: Dublin-born Cardinal Kevin Farrell, who as Camerlengo effectively ran the Vatican between the two popes; Archbishop John Kennedy, secretary for discipline at the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, the powerful Vatican department, and Bishop Paul Tighe, secretary for the culture section of the Dicastery for Culture and Education, an administrative unit of the Curia. There are good reasons to believe all will remain in place, if not ascend further as this papacy gets into its stride. Each is highly experienced in areas deemed critical to the Catholic Church by the College of Cardinals in discussions before the conclave: its finances, the issue of abuse and artificial intelligence (AI). READ MORE Cardinal Farrell (77), as Camerlengo of the Holy See, has probably become the best-known Irishman worldwide since Pope Francis died on April 21st. [ 'Wouldn't it be great if he got voted in?' The cardinal from Drimnagh tasked with organising the papal conclave Opens in new window ] It is unlikely Cardinal Farrell's duties as Camerlengo will be needed any time soon. However, he has much more weighty roles (in the temporal sense) at the Vatican. Last November he was appointed by Pope Francis as sole director of the pension fund for the Holy See, covering former employees of both the Roman curia and Vatican City state. This, the Pope said at the time, was because of 'a serious prospective imbalance of the fund' leaving it unable to meet its obligations. Cardinal Farrell has an MBA from the University of Notre Dame in the US. His appointment was due to the dire financial situation at the Vatican. Its last set of accounts, approved in the middle of last year , included an €83 million shortfall, while its pension fund shortfall has been estimated at €631 million. Cardinal Kevin Farrell officiates in his capacity as Camerlengo as the body of Pope Francis lies in state in St Peter's Basilica last month. Photograph: Antonio Masiello/Getty In 2020, the pope appointed Cardinal Farrell to lead the Vatican's Commission for Reserved Matters, a new office which oversees investments and spending related to sovereign or confidential diplomatic matters. That followed a scandal over the investment of more than $200 million (€179 million) by the Vatican in a London building. In 2022 Pope Francis appointed Cardinal Farrell as chair of the Pontifical Committee for Investments with responsibility for ensuring all such were ethical and in line with Catholic teaching. And in January 2024, Pope Francis appointed Cardinal Farrell to head the Vatican's Supreme Court. Cardinal Farrell is something of a heavyweight at the Vatican, not least when it comes to finances, one of the main subjects discussed by the College of Cardinals at their meetings before the recent conclave began. It is clear Pope Francis had great confidence in his abilities and there is no reason to think Pope Leo might believe otherwise. What Pope Leo may do is relieve Cardinal Farrell of his role as prefect of the Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life, which he has held since it was established in 2016, to allow him concentrate on helping to eliminate the Church's debt. Another Irishman likely to remain in situ at the Vatican is yet another Dubliner, Archbishop John Kennedy (56) from Clontarf. He has been working at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) since 2003 where his boss was the late Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI. Currently it has two new sections: a doctrinal section and a disciplinary section, while, in 2022, the Vatican's Commission for the Protection of Minors became part of this Dicastery, but with its own staff and constitution. In 2017 then Msgr Kennedy (he became an Archbishop last September) was appointed head of the disciplinary section at the CDF , becoming secretary of the newly named Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) in 2022 with responsibility for leading investigations into credible clerical child sex abuse allegations worldwide. Archbishop Kennedy is the highest-ranking Vatican official on clerical abuse cases. A line in the sand in all of this was drawn by Archbishop Kennedy himself last October when the Vatican's secretariat of state attempted to overrule his decision to laicise an Argentinian priest convicted by a church tribunal of child sexual abuse. His decision was countermanded by the secretariat, which placed the priest under restricted ministry instead. Archbishop Kennedy went to Pope Francis and countermanded the countermand. The archbishop's action was described by one Vatican commentator as 'without precedent in the modern era'. Pope Leo XIV has identified artificial intelligence as a focus of his papacy. Last Saturday, in his first formal address to the College of Cardinals, Pope Leo XIV recalled how Leo XIII, with the 1891 encyclical Rerum novarum, addressed social consequences 'of the first great industrial revolution' and referred to the church's offer of 'social teaching' in response to 'the developments of artificial intelligence (AI)'. [ Pope Leo XIV sets out vision for papacy and cites AI as critical challenge facing humanity Opens in new window ] On Monday last, in his first public audience with the media, he again referenced AI, speaking about the requirement for 'responsibility and discernment in order to ensure that it can be used for the good of all, so that it can benefit all of humanity'. Few at the Vatican are as knowledgeable about AI and social media generally as Navan man and priest of the Dublin Archdiocese, Bishop Paul Tighe (67). He has worked in that area at the Vatican for 17 years. As secretary at the Vatican's Dicastery for Culture and Education he was one of the main movers behind the Vatican document Antiqua et Nova: (Old and New) Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence, published with the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith in January. As he put it earlier this year, in a podcast for America magazine, 'AI can handle data better than we can but what AI cannot necessarily do is answer the deeper questions that we should be posing to that data: what is it to be human, what is intelligence, what is it that makes life worthwhile.' Bishop Paul Tighe, referred to by some commentators as 'the Vatican's media guru'. Photograph: Nick Warren/PA Speaking to The Irish Times, Bishop Tighe recalled how the late Pope Francis feared AI would serve 'the interests only of a powerful elite'. He has travelled widely in Africa, Asia, North America and Latin America advising church bodies working with social media and is a regular attender at the Web Summit and the Biennale in Venice. Bishop Tighe, referred to by some commentators as 'the Vatican's media guru', has become something of link man internationally between the Church and contemporary culture in its many expressions. Formerly director of the office for public affairs in the Archdiocese of Dublin, he was appointed secretary at the Vatican's Council for Social Communications in 2007 where he is responsible for the Church's contact with the media at an international level. He helped lead something of a digital revolution at the Vatican where he was part of the team that instigated the Pope's Twitter/X handle, @Pontifex and developed the popular ThePopeApp for mobile phones, as well as the website, which is considered invaluable for Vatican watchers. As part of his reforms of the Roman Curia in 2013, Pope Francis set up a commission chaired by the UK peer Chris Patten to reform communications at the Vatican, with Bishop Tighe as secretary. It led to the creation of a new secretariat for communications which oversees all of the Vatican's communications offices. He did not, however, manage to revolutionise how the Vatican tells the world about the election of a new pope with smoke emerging from a chimney over the Sistine Chapel. Speaking to the US Catholic Telegraph, Bishop Tighe said: 'Here we are talking about social media, digital media and new technologies, [while] in the church our biggest communications moment is delivered by smoke.' He, along with Cardinal Farrell and Archbishop Kennedy, are likely to feature in the Vatican's hierarchy for some time to come.
Yahoo
07-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
'I fear a world without him': Pope Francis was a global influencer. Here's how he did it.
He knelt with difficultly as aides helped him get low to the floor to kiss the shoes of South Sudan's warring leaders. On a visit to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where the world's first atomic bombs were dropped, killing tens of thousands, his message was unequivocal: Nuclear weapons are immoral. In his final weeks, even during his hospitalization for pneumonia, he held nightly video calls with Gaza's tiny Christian community. Pope Francis, who died April 21 at age 88, fought for social justice and the marginalized. He pressed for nuclear disarmament and an end to wars in Sudan, Gaza and Ukraine. He decried what he once described as "inhuman" conditions facing migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. His first significant trip outside Rome as pontiff was to the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa, a key site in Europe's migration crisis. Pontiffs have been players in global affairs for hundreds of years, mixing their role as the worldwide head of the Catholic Church with informal duties as peace brokers, mediators and influencers who held or shifted the church's teachings on issues from abortion to climate change, from an all-male priesthood to baptism for LGBTQ+ people, from contraception to the death penalty. But according to some who knew, worked for and studied Francis, whose funeral is April 26, his lasting influence on the world stage may turn out to be having exercised a form of Vatican "soft power" that privileged getting closer to people and communities over the trappings of the church as an institution. He viewed social outreach as the core business of his papacy, not fights over doctrine. As conclave looms: major Catholic nations may be passed over again The next pope: American Catholics are divided "He spoke directly to people. He went to them and captured their imaginations − and their hearts," Bishop Paul Tighe, an Irish-born prelate who has been the Vatican's dicastery for culture and education since 2022, said in an interview. "There was an authenticity about him. That was the power he had. I think people felt good when they met him. He gave power to their better nature." When Francis in 2019 kissed the feet of the South Sudanese leaders at the head of a country grappling with civil war, he was 82 and suffering with chronic leg and back pain. He urged them to lay down their weapons. Four years later, he traveled to South Sudan and bluntly warned the nation's authorities: "Future generations will either venerate your names or cancel their memory, based on what you now do." When the Argentina-born pontiff visited Japan that same year, he became the first pope to do so in nearly 40 years. Kayoko Mori, an 82-year-old Catholic who survived the atomic bomb, met the pope in Hiroshima. "Seeing him call for the abolition of nuclear weapons made me feel deeply that he was on our side," she said. Papal conclave: The step-by-step process used to elect new pope to succeed Pope Francis After the Vatican announced Francis had died, members of the Holy Family Church in Gaza gathered at the church to mourn and pray for someone who was not only the head of one of the major branches of Christianity but who phoned them almost every night throughout the war around 7 or 8 p.m., according to the Vatican News Service. The pope would check on how those huddled inside the church were coping. About 1,000 Christians live in Gaza, a majority Palestinian Muslim enclave, according to State Department figures. "What did you eat today?" the pope asks the Rev. Gabriele Romanelli, the parish priest at Holy Family, and his assistant, Yusuf Assad, in one such video call that was filmed by the Vatican in late February. "Chicken. The rest of the chicken we had left from yesterday," the church officials in Gaza responded. Romanelli said the church last received a call from Francis about 36 hours before he died. Pope Francis: 'Not an emperor in his palace' Michel Chambon is a French-born Catholic theologian and cultural anthropologist who researches religion and globalization at the National University of Singapore's Asia Research Institute. He said in an interview that it was notable that Francis visited dozens of countries and territories around the world and that apart from one trip to the United States − in 2015 − these were predominantly destinations in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and outside Western Europe. He did not visit his native Argentina as pope. Chambon said this was part of a "deliberate agenda" that was carefully designed to give more visibility to marginalized people caught up in specific "points of tension and conflict" such as poverty, illness and climate change. He said the pope was not interested in making "courtesy calls" to world leaders. (Vice President JD Vance, a Catholic convert who has disagreed with Francis over immigration, visited him at the Vatican a day before he died.) Pope Francis took sides: migration and right-wing ideas rose globally "He saw himself as a pastor who cared for those people who are on the margins," Chambon said. Chambon said that the pope led the Catholic Church with humility and simplicity and that this will be, ultimately, part of his enduring global message and influence. Francis was sometimes referred to as "the pope of the peripheries" for this reason. Chambon said this extended to his living circumstances and attire. Life and times: Pope Francis, 266th occupant of the throne of St. Peter, has died When the pope gave his first speech on the balcony of St Peter's Basilica in 2013, he was dressed in simple white robes, not the luxurious ermine-trimmed cape typically worn by new pontiffs. Francis never moved into the papal apartments in the Apostolic Palace in Vatican City, the pope's official residence and the opulent and historically significant center of the Catholic Church's administration. Instead, he chose to live in a more modest Vatican guesthouse. He took his meals in the common dining room downstairs. His remains will be placed in a simple wooden coffin lined with zinc. For his funeral, it will not be raised on a platform. "He was not an emperor in his palace," Chambon said. Pope Francis: His impact Tighe, the Vatican culture secretary, said that in more bureaucratic terms Francis restructured many of the organizations within the Roman Curia, the various units and bureaus that make up the Catholic Church's administration, including his own. He said they were streamlined and new leadership was brought in. "Those reforms will persist," he said. "But his real legacy will be that somehow people will not be able to think of him without seeing him as a challenge to be more focused, rather than simply concerned with our own problems." More: Francis was the first pope to visit a Catholic school in the US Rabbi Rick Jacobs agreed with that sentiment. He is the president of the Union for Reform Judaism, a New York-based group that represents progressive American Jewish synagogues, organizations and ideas. Jacobs had a private audience with the pope in 2017 when he had convened religious leaders from around the the world for a Vatican conference on migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. Pope Francis tributes: world reacts to the pontiff's death "What I loved about the pope was that he had this gentle, humble manner. But he was fierce, and fearless, in taking on not only the issues but the leaders of the world," Jacobs said in a phone interview. He said the contrast with the pope's predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, a "scholar and recluse who rarely seemed to weigh in on the urgent matters of the day, could have not be starker." Jacobs said the pope "almost singlehandedly put climate change on the world agenda as a fundamental religious conviction" when he spoke about it at the United Nations in New York in 2015. He said some people criticized Francis when he made public statements about conflicts, whether to do with Russia's invasion of Ukraine or the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. Pope Francis: he used final Easter address to call for Gaza ceasefire He is not one of them. "He was always on the side of those suffering the most. He also took aim at those who wanted to narrow our understanding of what human obligation puts upon all of us. I fear a world without him." This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Pope Francis was a global influencer
Boston Globe
28-01-2025
- Boston Globe
Vatican warns about the risks of artificial intelligence
Advertisement The paper 'is a synthesis of a lot of the existing materials that have been developing organically over the last while,' drawing on Francis' past statements and writings to look at AI's effect on relationships, education, warfare, and work, said Rev. Paul Tighe, one of the people who worked on it. The paper was written over six months by a Vatican team in consultation with various experts, including those in AI. The paper tries to map out 'an understanding of what it is to be human that in a sense gives shape to the ethical concerns,' said Tighe, who is the spokesperson for the Vatican's department of culture and education. The paper warned of AI's potential to destroy the trust on which societies are built because of its potential to spread misinformation. 'AI-generated fake media can gradually undermine the foundations of society,' the document said. 'This issue requires careful regulation, as misinformation — especially through AI-controlled or influenced media — can spread unintentionally, fueling political polarization and social unrest. 'Such widespread deception is no trivial matter; it strikes at the core of humanity, dismantling the foundational trust on which societies are built.' It decried the 'harmful sense of isolation' that AI could generate, as well as 'specific challenges' for children, 'potentially encouraging them to develop patterns of interaction that treat human relationships in a transactional manner, as one would relate to a chatbot.' Advertisement The document cited concerns that AI could be used to advance what the pope has described as the 'technocratic paradigm,' a belief that the world's problems could be solved through technological means alone. 'Technological developments that do not improve life for everyone, but instead create or worsen inequalities and conflicts, cannot be called true progress,' the document stated, citing Francis' 2024 World Day of Peace message. When it comes to work, the document said, 'the goal should not be that technological progress increasingly replaces human work, for this would be detrimental to humanity.' It should also never 'reduce workers to mere 'cogs in a machine,'' as the 'dignity of laborers and the importance of employment for the economic well-being of individuals, families, and societies, for job security and just wages, ought to be a high priority for the international community' as AI spreads. The paper also repeated concerns about using the technology in remote-controlled weapons that result in 'a lessened perception of the devastation' from their use and 'an even more cold and detached approach to the immense tragedy of war.' The paper warned about 'the concentration of the power over mainstream AI applications in the hands of a few powerful companies.' Those companies could exercise 'forms of control as subtle as they are invasive, creating mechanisms for the manipulation of consciences and of the democratic process,' the document stated, citing a 2019 document by Francis. Francis has increasingly raised concerns about AI. In an address to political, economic, and business leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week, Francis wrote that AI raised 'great concerns about its impact on the role of humanity.' Advertisement This month, the Vatican released a document with guidelines for the use of AI inside its own walls, regulating its application. This article originally appeared in
New York Times
28-01-2025
- New York Times
Vatican Warns About the Risks of Artificial Intelligence
The Vatican called for constant oversight of artificial intelligence on Tuesday, warning about the potential for 'the shadow of evil' in the technology, which it said offered 'a source of tremendous opportunities but also profound risks.' In a new document meant to advise the Catholic faithful, the church warned that the technology should be used to complement human intelligence, 'rather than replace its richness.' The document was approved by Pope Francis, who has repeatedly warned that the application of artificial intelligence should be grounded in ethical and moral considerations. 'In all areas where humans are called to make decisions, the shadow of evil also looms here,' the Vatican said in the paper. It added, 'The moral evaluation of this technology will need to take into account how it is directed and used.' The paper 'is a synthesis of a lot of the existing materials that have been developing organically over the last while,' drawing on Francis's past statements and writings to look at A.I.'s effect on relationships, education, warfare and work, said the Rev. Paul Tighe, one of the people who worked on it. The paper was written over six months by a Vatican team in consultation with various experts, including those in A.I. The paper tries to map out 'an understanding of what it is to be human that in a sense gives shape to the ethical concerns,' said Father Tighe, who is the spokesman for the Vatican department of culture and education. The paper warned of A.I.'s potential to destroy the trust on which societies are built because of its potential to spread misinformation. 'A.I.-generated fake media can gradually undermine the foundations of society,' the document said. 'This issue requires careful regulation, as misinformation — especially through A.I.-controlled or -influenced media — can spread unintentionally, fueling political polarization and social unrest. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
