“Let us try to try to bring out the good even from the difficult situation that the pandemic imposes upon us”, Francis encourages at the Angelus
In consistory today, Francis cautions newly-elevated prelates against “corruption in the priestly life”, encourages them to be humble “shepherds”
After this Saturday’s consistory, Europeans will make up 42% of cardinals eligible to vote for the next Pope, down from 52% in 2013
At the Angelus: “We will be judged on love… We will be judged on works, on compassion that becomes nearness and kind help”
“Today the Church tells you, she tells us: ‘Use what God has given you and look at the poor'”, Francis insists at Angelus
At Requiem for deceased cardinals and bishops, Francis insists resurraction not a “distant mirage” but an event “already present and even now mysteriously at work in our lives”
Francis mourns for victims of the coronavirus “who have died alone, without the caress of their loved ones, and for those who have given their lives serving the sick”
Pope Francis has personally baptised the two-year-old conjoined twin girls from the Central African Republic who were separated in June in a delicate and pioneering operation at the Vatican-run Bambino Gesù Children’s Hospital.
In his homily at Mass today for the feast of Saints Peter and Paul, Pope Francis offered keys for the truly “prophetic” Church he said we need today. “Not forcefulness, but forthrightness. Not palaver, but prayer. Not speeches, but service”, the pontiff pleaded.
In his homily today at Mass for the Feast of Corpus Christi, Pope Francis pleaded for “urgent” help for “those who hunger for food and for dignity, those without work and those who struggle to carry on”.
“All this suffering will be of no use if we don’t build a more just and fair and more Christian society, together”, Pope Francis has implored on COVID-19.
Five years on from its publication, Pope Francis has ‘updated’ his encyclical Laudato si’ on care for our Common Home, issuing a series of tweets this week to explain the heart of the Church’s vision of integral ecology.
Pope Francis celebrated the 100th anniversary of the birth of St John Paul II by offering Holy Mass at the altar where the Polish pope is buried in St. Peter’s Basilica.
“The time has come to eliminate inequalities, to heal the injustice that is undermining the health of the entire human family!”, Pope Francis clamoured today in his celebration of Divine Mercy Sunday at the church of Santo Spirito in Sassia, close to St. Peter’s Square, where he warned that in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, “the risk is that we may then be struck by an even worse virus, that of selfish indifference”.
In his Easter blessing Sunday, Pope Francis urged the world to “ban for ever… indifference, self-centredness, division and forgetfulness”, adding that, faced with the threat of the coronavirus, “the whole world is suffering and needs to be united” in tackling the pandemic.
“Let us silence the cries of death, no more wars!”, Pope Francis cried Saturday at the Easter Vigil, pleading with the world: “May we stop the production and trade of weapons, since we need bread, not guns”.
“Let us not allow so much pain to have been in vain”, Preacher of the Papal Household, Capuchin friar Raniero Cantalamessa, has appealed to the world in a Good Friday service presided over by Pope Francis in a desolate St. Peter’s Basilica scarred by the coronavirus.
There is another positive case of COVID-19 in the Vatican, as official Holy See news website Vatican News reports.
At 11.00 this morning, at the Altar of the Cathedra of Saint Peter’s Basilica, the Holy Father Francis presided at the solemn liturgical celebration of Palm Sunday of the Passion of the Lord.
The Prefecture of the Papal Household has announced that Holy Week celebrations in Rome will take place without the physical presence of the faithful, in an attempt to contain the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus.
A Dutch florist has cancelled the Vatican’s Easter flower supply in the first sign the Pope’s Holy Week could fall victim to the coronavirus restrictions.
On the seventh anniversary of Pope Francis’ election to the Petrine ministry, Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, the Prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, says that every new Pope is a gift from God that is “unwrapped” through the years of his papal ministry.
In a letter to the people of the Veneto region of Italy – an area particularly hard hit by the coronavirus epidemic – Pope Francis has shared “a beautiful page of charity”.
“Our earthly possessions will prove useless, but the love we share will save us”, Pope Francis has recalled this Ash Wednesday in a Mass at the Basilica of Santa Sabina on Rome’s Aventine Hill.
Pope Francis has reminded hospital staff and administrators that “the sick person is not a number”, urging them to favour “closeness” and “warmth” with patients over the merely “economic-financial… systems” of healthcare.
Ahead of the 75th anniversary Monday of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, Pope Francis recalled this morning at the Angelus prayer the “appalling tragedy” of the Holocaust, insisting that “indifference is admissible and remebrance is a duty”. “Never again, never again”, the pontiff cried, calling tomorrow for “a moment of prayer and of recollection” on the part of all.