Extra, extra! News and views for Wednesday, December 3, 2025

Abandoning Latin – “The Vatican has announced the most far-reaching overhaul of its internal administration in a quarter of a century, with Pope Leo XIV approving two major regulatory texts that will reshape daily life inside the Holy See.” Vatican ends routine use of Latin in sweeping overhaul (The Catholic Herald)

Figuring Out Fernandez – “Though they are reasonably unlikely to be breaking out in song anytime soon, Vatican types may be looking at Fernandez’s troubled tenure as DDF head and wondering: ‘How do you solve a problem like Fernández?’” (Crux)

The Concept of Celicity – “Before the early eighteenth century, there was no suggestion that the peoples we now know as ‘the Celts’—the Irish, Scots, Welsh, Bretons, Cornish, and Manx—had anything to do with the Celtae or Keltoi of Classical writers.” Who Are the Celts? (St. Austin Review)

Unaware of Despair – “People can get used to most anything. Even the abyss may be rendered tolerable—or, for that matter, luxurious … ” Walker Percy’s Pilgrimage (First Things)

Distorting Institutional Missions – “Anyone working in a university today knows the mood: dashboards, key performance indicators, rubrics, and assessment grids—the sense that what gets measured has quietly replaced what matters.” From Revelation to Self-Cultivation: The Theological Transformation That Created the Modern University (Church Life Journal)

Ephemeral Human Life – “We lived in a whirlwind of loss: First the minds, then the bodies of our parents were gone, and all we had left was a bunch of furniture and boxes of stuff.” The Bad News (The Lamp)

Suspected Money Laundering – “The deeper question is whether the Church has fully internalised a truth it proclaims but sometimes struggles to practise: that transparency is not a threat to the Gospel, but a servant of it.” What leaked recording of Vatican official discussing FBI probe reveals (The Catholic Herald)

Polygamy in Africa – “One struggles to find almost any attention given in Una caro to the family issues facing wives and children most hurt by polygamy.” With address of polygamy, Vatican flunks early test of synodality (Crux)

Doorway to a Cloistered Monastery – “A beach day, a thick manuscript, and five years of quiet access turned into a book that lets the world step inside a hidden monastery.” Behind the Grille: How a Cloistered Nun’s Manuscript Changed Everything (Words and Pictures by Jeffrey Bruno)

No Hagia Sophia Visit – “The primary reason for the omission is the delicate shift in Hagia Sophia’s status from a secular museum back to an active mosque in 2020.” Why Pope Leo XIV Will Not Visit Hagia Sophia (The Greek Reporter)

AI Tops Billboard Chart – “The number one song ‘Walk my Walk,’ by the artist Breaking Rust, was 100% generated by AI.” Artificial Music for Artificial Ears: AI Rocks the Jukebox (The Washington Stand)

(*The posting of any particular news item or essay is not an endorsement of the content and perspective of said news item or essay.)