As one of the bench put it, the week just past always makes for a "full immersion" experience... and to be sure, that the lounge of the USCCB hotel was dead by 10 on Wednesday night goes to show how knocked out everyone tends to be by Plenary's end.
Along those lines, while this scribe has five days of catch-ups and notes to unwind and assemble for print, let's start with something apparently lost in the wider mix (even if this crowd was duly forewarned).
Building upon his historic message to open the 100th Plenary, as the bench's elections unfolded on Tuesday morning, the Cardinal-Secretary of State Pietro Parolin delivered an even more extensive – and, quite possibly, even more significant – word, appearing at the Catholic University of America in Washington to propose Pope Francis as the ultimate figure of continuity with Vatican II, citing how he's "taken up anew" the Council's teaching and rebooted model of church.
Especially given two of the examples cited by Papa Bergoglio's top deputy – episcopal collegiality and what Francis has termed the "poor Church for the poor" (with global Catholicism's first-ever Day of the Poor accordingly being marked this weekend) – the hourlong talk is as salient to the moment as the interest in it has been sparse.
While publication of Parolin's text has been prohibited – Lord only knows why – gratefully a fullvid of his Italian address is around, with a captioned translation in English....
And here it is:
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