The return of Archbishop Gänswein

After several months of silence, people at the Vatican are once again talking about Archbishop Georg Gänswein, the former private secretary of the late Benedict XVI. Pope Francis sent the 67-year-old prelate back to his native Germany without a new assignment in early 2023 shortly after Benedict's death, but Gänswein's name has recently come up again in the news.

The first time was on April 3 with the publication of El Sucesor, a book-length interview with Francis published by Javier Martinez Brocal, the Rome correspondent for the Spanish newspaper ABC. In this new volume, the Argentine pope talks at considerable length about his relationship with his Bavarian predecessor. And he is unsparing in his criticism of the late pope's private assistant.

"I regret to say that his secretary sometimes made my work difficult," Francis says, for example. And he says Gänswein bears much of the fault for the way some people manipulated Benedict XVI and his legacy to attack him (Francis) and his pontificate.

Gänswein's name was in the news again just a few days later when the Argentine newspaper La Nacion reported on April 11 that Francis would soon be making the German archbishop an apostolic nuncio. Although the appointment has not yet been confirmed and there is no word about where Gänswein might be sent to represent the Holy See, the news produced two typical reactions inside the Vatican on Francis' governing style.

Some say this is the pope's way of showing mercy to a man who clearly aided the anti-Francis forces during his time at the Vatican. But others say it's just the Jesuit pope once again being inconsistent and shaking things up.

The Italians have a saying, dalle stelle alle stalle, which literally means "from the stars to the stables". And it's often used to describe the way Francis sometimes unseats the men he has previously promoted. But this time it's the other way around. Archbishop Gänswein seems to have spent these past several months in Germany as a sort of purgatory. And now Francis evidently believes it's time to once again entrust him with responsibilities.