After nearly two years of studying the pastoral status of Medjugorje, where the Virgin Mary has allegedly been appearing since 1981, the Vatican announced May 12 that Pope Francis has given the green light for priests to lead pilgrimages there but expressed no opinion on the authenticity of the “noted happenings.”
In the wake of an April 30 open letter accusing Pope Francis of heresy signed by 19 clergymen and scholars, demanding the pontiff’s resignation, theologians and cardinals at a conference in Rome on Wednesday instead praised Francis’s theology and magisterium.
Following February’s Vatican summit to address the Church’s fight against clerical sexual abuse, Pope Francis released a new law on Thursday making it mandatory for all clerics and members of religious orders to report cases of clerical sexual abuse to Church authorities, including when committed by bishops or cardinals.
Pope Francis has invited bishops of the Ukrainian Catholic Church to the Vatican in July to find ways the church can best serve their people, peace and the Gospel.
Cardinal Jorge Urosa, former Archbishop of Caracas, Venezuela, says the local bishops strongly condemn what he called the “immoral” repression perpetrated by the government of Nicolas Maduro, which, according to the United Nations, has seen at least five people killed in the past few days, three of them minors.
See The Tablet’s coverage of Pope Francis’ Apostolic Voyage to Bulgaria and North Macedonia.
After a brief, whirlwind trip to Skopje, Pope Francis issued a summons to young people and consecrated, telling them to look to Mother Teresa as an example to keep dreaming, and of how big things can come in small packages.
While much of the secular world reacts with alarm to a new United Nations report warning that up to one million species may be at risk of extinction due to human activity, it’s another kind of global threat that has the organizers of an annual Rome conference especially concerned this year.
Each of these three new books on the papacy is informative and interesting. “The Pope: Francis, Benedict, and the Decision That Shook the World” is by the author of the screenplay for a dramatic film with the same title being produced by Netflix. The co-authors of “The Papacy: What the Pope Does and Why It Matters” are a former Baptist who became a Catholic and a literature professor and deacon who spent eight years in a Catholic seminary. Gerard O’Connell, author of “The Election of Pope Francis: An Inside Account of the Conclave that Changed History,” is an associate editor and Vatican correspondent for the Jesuit weekly magazine, America, as well as a reporter on the Vatican for various other English-speaking Catholic news outlets.
Vanier, who was 90, died from cancer Tuesday morning in a facility in Paris run by the L’Arche community that he founded in 1964. Upon hearing the news, Francis released a brief statement through a spokesman saying he’s “praying for [Vanier] and for the entire L’Arche community.”
