The Most Rev Stephen Cottrell assumed temporary leadership of the Church of England on 7 January 2025.

The C of E’s Archbishop of York will hold the post until an official decision is made on who will lead the established state Church in England and the Crown Dependencies, after Justin Welby spent his last day in office on 6 January during the feast of the Epiphany.

The day also marked the 69th birthday of Mr Welby, who served as the 105th Archbishop of Canterbury.

Already more than half a million pilgrims have come to participate in the Jubilee of Hope since Pope Francis inaugurated the 2025 Jubilee year on Christmas Eve.

According to a 7 January press release from the Vatican’s Dicastery for Evangelisation, which is overseeing the organisation of the Jubilee, some 545,532 pilgrims from all over the world have already crossed through the Holy Door in St. Peter’s Basilica since Pope Francis officially opened it during a ceremony on 24 December.

Pope Francis this week made the novel decision to appoint the first-ever woman as prefect of a Vatican department, naming Italian Consolata Sister Simona Brambilla as head of the Dicastery for Religious.

While several women serve in other important roles in the Vatican, including secretaries and undersecretaries of departments, with her appointment, Brambilla, 59, has become the first-ever woman to lead a Vatican dicastery.

Pope Francis has appointed Cardinal Robert McElroy, Bishop of San Diego and a vocal critic of Donald Trump, as Archbishop of Washington. 

An outspoken liberal within the Church and a close ally of Pope Francis, Cardinal McElroy will be installed as the eighth Archbishop of Washington during a Mass on March 11 at 2 p.m. at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception.

PAKISTAN’S Christian community is in shock over the death of a Christian who was shot following six months of persecution. 

Suleman Masih died last Wednesday (1 January) after being attacked by men on motorcycles in Kot Saadullah, Rahawali, Gujranwala on 29^th December 2024. He was shot, sustaining severe kidney damage. 

Pope Francis has begun 2025 by warning Christians against “imagining or inventing a God in the abstract” during his Mass for the Solemnity of Mary, the Holy Mother of God.

During his homily in St. Peter’s Basilica on 1 January, Francis said there is a temptation that “many people today find attractive” to hold this abstract view that is “associated with some vague religious feeling or fleeting emotion”, and which he warned can “mislead many Christians”.

The LORD make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; the LORD lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace. So shall they put my name upon the people of Israel, and I will bless them. (Numbers 6:25-27)

The Church offers us this ancient blessing for the solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God, on the eighth day after Christmas, New Year’s Day.

Pope Francis closed the year by offering a prayer of thanksgiving, during which he said that the hope of brotherly fraternity is not based in ideology, economic systems or progress through technology, rather it is to be found in the incarnate Son of God.

Jimmy Carter, remembered as both a transformative leader and a tireless advocate for peace, has died at his home in Plains, Georgia. Born the year Vladimir Lenin died, he was the first US president to be born in a hospital and the first to live to 100. His life was remarkable, even for a US president.

At year’s end, it’s standard journalistic practice to look back at the most important stories of the past 12 months. Since plenty of people already do that on the Vatican beat, I decided a long time ago to go another direction by offering a list of the most under-covered Vatican stories of the year.

‘[Mary and Joseph] did not understand the saying that he spoke to them.’ (Luke 2:50)

In Sunday’s Gospel for the Holy Family, Mary did not understand her son. But she ‘treasured up all these things in her heart’: prayer illuminates the shadows of our lives.

Victims of Valencia’s terrible floods were remembered at a Requiem Mass held at St James’s, Spanish Place Church in London, with embassy officials and members of the local Spanish community leading the tributes.

The US president-elect has announced plans to travel to Paris this weekend to attend the reopening ceremony of Notre-Dame Cathedral, in what would be his first foreign visit since winning the presidential election at the start of November.

One consequence of information overload in a digital age is an epidemic of “presentism”, meaning the assumption that everything is happening for the first time. With so much data to process from today, who has time for something as remote as yesterday?

Thus for many observers, confronted with the return of Donald Trump, a cut-throat leader of the world’s most powerful nation and a man perceived as overtly hostile to the Pope on multiple fronts, the presentist assumption might be that sales of anti-anxiety drugs right now must be flying off the shelves of the Vatican pharmacy.

The first episodes of The Chosen Season 5 are set to hit US theatres on March 27. From April 10, they will be released globally in over 40 countries, including Brazil, Mexico, Italy, Germany, Poland, the Philippines, the United Kingdom and India.

In the month or so since former President Donald Trump was elected to occupy the White House for a second term, the majority of American bishops have either not commented on the election publicly, or issued a generic statement about the importance of civility, unity, and democracy.

Shortly after Donald Trump was elected anew to the presidency in part due to strong support from Catholics, the U.S. bishops put the incoming administration on notice regarding the possibility of mass deportations of immigrants.

The Vatican and Chinese authorities announced they have renewed a controversial agreement on episcopal appointments for a third time, while this time extending it for four years instead of the two-year period previously agreed upon.

Wes Streeting will vote against the new Bill being considered by the British Parliament that aims to legalise assisted suicide in the United Kingdom. The decision marks an important declaration given Streeting’s senior position in the Cabinet and which makes him responsible for the health of the UK’s population.

In February 2014, a scene unfolded in Rome that struck many observers as akin to the end of history. A conservative German prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith sat on a Vatican stage, sporting a Peruvian poncho and showering praise upon the father of liberation theology in Latin America – a man who once was virtually the Vatican’s Public Enemy Number One.