Names and faces

■ Pope Francis urged Vatican bureaucrats Monday to stop their gossipy, self-absorbed conflicts, issuing another tough-love Christmas message at the end of a year marked by the coronavirus pandemic and a financial scandal at the Holy See. He gathered his cardinals, bishops and Vatican prelates for his annual Christmas greeting in the Apostolic Palace. In past years, Francis has used the occasion to deliver a brutal dressing-down of the clerical court that surrounds the papacy, once denouncing the “spiritual Alzheimer’s” of some Holy See clerics. Like the rest of the world, the Vatican’s 2020 was marked by a virus lockdown that grounded the globe-trotting pope, canceled his weekly appointments with the faithful and shuttered the Vatican Museums, the Holy See’s main source of revenue. Those pastoral and financial setbacks have been compounded by a scandal over the Holy See’s bungled investment in a London real estate venture that is now the subject of a corruption investigation. Francis said conflicts in the church between left and right, progressives and traditionalists, only hurt the church and distort its true nature. He stressed that “crisis” isn’t the same as “conflict,” with crises in the church offering an opportunity for renewal while conflicts are just “a waste of energy and occasion for evil.” “The first evil that conflict leads us to, and which we must try to avoid, is gossip, idle chatter, which traps us in an unpleasant, sad and stifling state of self-absorption,” the pope said.

■ Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former l aw ye r, says he deserves early release from home confinement, but federal authorities refuse to credit him for good behavior and hundreds of hours of work and courses completed behind bars. On Monday, he filed court papers contending that he “could be eligible for release in a matter of weeks or months” under the First Step Act, a sweeping criminal justice reform Trump signed into law in 2018. Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison after pleading guilty to tax evasion, campaign finance fraud and lying to Congress. Cohen had been scheduled to remain in prison until next November, but was released in May to serve the remainder of his sentence at home because of the spread of covid-19 in federal prisons. The U.S. Bureau of Prisons, Cohen said, told him in a letter last week that he is “not entitled to any credits for his work performed at FCI Otisville,” the federal lockup in New York where he served more than a year. Cohen said the letter left him “at a loss,” calling it “nothing more than a stonewall tactic.” The bureau did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Francis

Cohen