The Vatican appoints Pope Benedict’s longtime secretary as its envoy to the Baltic states

BERLIN (AP) — Pope Francis has appointed the longtime secretary of the late Pope Benedict XVI, who was sent back to his native Germany without a new assignment last year after a falling-out with the current pontiff, as the Vatican’s diplomatic representative to the Baltic states. The Vatican announced in its daily bulletin Monday that Archbishop Georg Gänswein was named as the papal nuncio to Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. Francis removed Gänswein from his Vatican job last year and ordered him to return to his diocese of origin — Freiburg in southwestern Germany. The Freiburg archdiocese said last summer that he wouldn’t be given a permanent job there