Sandro Magister, the veteran vaticanista for Italy’s L’Espresso, wrote a column last week headlined “In the Amazon Married Deacons Are Already Saying Mass. And the Pope Knows It”. That’s splashy, to say the least.
The story got a good deal of the play one might expect, in most of the places one would expect it to play, but details and corroboration of the headline claim have been hard to come by.
The bones of the story are that Fr Giovanni Nicolini, an elderly Italian priest of some significant regard in his home country, is on video claiming that a bishop of the Amazon region took a phone call from a deacon who had no priest to say Mass of a Sunday, The bishop reportedly told the deacon to “say Mass” himself. Fr Nicolini also claimed that Pope Francis heard of the bishop’s decision and gave his approval. La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana on Tuesday reported that Fr Nicolini had admitted the story was hearsay.
