Christopher Altieri

4 days ago | cruxnow.com | Andrew Dampf |John Allen Jr |Elise Ann Allen |Christopher Altieri

ROME — It was fitting that when Pope Leo XIV was elected, the Italian Open tennis tournament was being played just up the road from the Vatican. Because tennis is the sport that the first American pope likes to play. “I consider myself quite the amateur tennis player,” Leo, the Chicago-born Augustinian missionary Robert Prevost, said in a 2023 interview with the Augustinian Order after taking over the Vatican’s powerful Dicastery for Bishops following years as a missionary in Peru.

4 days ago | cruxnow.com | Christopher Altieri |John Allen Jr |Charles Collins |Elise Ann Allen

In case you hadn’t heard, the cardinals elected Pope Leo XIV to succeed Pope Francis to the See of Peter. Born Robert Francis Prevost, the Augustinian missionary priest who served as prior general of his Augustinian order in Rome and was bishop of Chiclayo in Peru, came late to the Vatican – in 2023 – when the recently departed Pope Francis made him prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops and gave him the red hat.

4 days ago | cruxnow.com | Colleen Barry |John Allen Jr |Elise Ann Allen |Christopher Altieri

SOAVE, Italy — The announcement that an American cardinal had been elected Roman Catholic Church’s 267th pope had special meaning for a group of students at an international Catholic school in Rome. Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost — now Pope Leo XIV — confirmed the Marymount International School 9th graders, usually 14 or 15 years old, in a Mass on May 11, 2024.

4 days ago | cruxnow.com | Matt Sedensky |John Allen Jr |Elise Ann Allen |Christopher Altieri

A Chicago-born cardinal walks into a conclave. The rest of the joke tells itself. In the breathless day since Pope Leo XIV’s election as the first American pontiff, the memes, doctored images and tongue-in-cheek references have piled up deeper than Chicago’s pizza and more loaded than its hot dog, seemingly irresistible to comics and commoners alike. Stained-glass windows depicting a dunking Michael Jordan? A change in canon law to make ketchup-topped frankfurters a sin? Cameos in “The Bear”?

3 weeks ago | catholicworldreport.com | Christopher Altieri |Carrie Gress

Pope Francis listens to a question from a journalist aboard his flight from Athens, Greece, to Rome Dec. 6, 2021. (CNS photo/Paul Haring)Pope Francis, who said he never wanted to be earthly head of the Catholic Church and frequently governed as though he were a simple parish priest, is dead. The 265th successor to St. Peter the Apostle exchanged time for eternity at 7:35am Rome time on 21 April, of complications arising from a respiratory infection.