CDA meeting Monday

The Catholic Daughters of the Americas will be having their monthly meeting in Carlin Hall following the 5:30 p.m. Monday Mass.

There will be a wine and cheese party.

Vatican touts new memoir by Benedict XVI’s 2nd secretary

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Retired Pope Benedict XVI’s second secretary came out with a new memoir Thursday, a light, photo-filled daily journal that sharply contrasts with the bombshell tell-all book published last month by the late German pope’s main assistant.

“My Days With Benedict XVI” by Archbishop Alfred Xuereb is the latest book to hit Italian bookshelves following Benedict’s Dec. 31 death. It was launched Thursday at a semi-official Vatican event alongside another book by a longtime Vatican reporter “The Resignation: I Didn’t Flee.”

The two new publications served to blunt, in some ways, the negative criticism of Francis that erupted in the weeks after the death of the first “emeritus pope” by refocusing attention on Benedict himself.

Pope Francis recently acknowledged that Benedict’s death had been “instrumentalized” by conservatives to accentuate the idea of competing papal camps, a reference to the books, interviews and memos published by Benedict’s longtime secretary, Archbishop Georg Gaenswein, and some conservative cardinals that were highly critical of the reigning pontiff.

Xuereb was the “second secretary” to Benedict during his 2005-2013 pontificate, and remained on as secretary to Francis for the first months of his papcy. Francis then placed Xuereb in his new Economy Ministry before making him ambassador to Korea and Mongolia, where Francis is expected to visit later this year in the first-ever papal visit.