After his arrival to Belgium in the rain on Thursday night, Pope Francis told civil authorities the next day to make peacemaking a priority, and voiced regret over recent scandals in the Belgian Church, including the crises of clerical sexual abuse and forced adoptions.
The Catholic Church must plead for forgiveness for the crime of the abuse of minors by its members and everything must be done to prevent such “a disgrace” from ever happening again, Pope Francis said.
Pope Francis met with the bishops of Mozambique Sept. 24, a day after he had canceled his scheduled audiences because of “a mild flu-like condition.”
Maronite Patriarch Cardinal Bechara Rai expressed “profound sorrow” over the “devastating toll” of Israeli airstrikes on Lebanon, the country’s state news agency NNA reported Sept. 22.
Saying Pope Francis had “a mild flu-like condition,” the Vatican press office announced he had canceled his scheduled audiences Sept. 23.
While offering an overall favorable judgment on the Marian apparitions and devotions associated with the Medjugorje phenomenon in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Vatican nevertheless said in a new document released Thursday that some issues still need to be clarified.
Recognizing the spiritual value of devotions connected to Medjugorje, but not ruling on the authenticity of the alleged apparitions or alleged messages from Mary, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith also noted that church officials have issued a “series of divergent opinions” about the phenomenon over the past four decades.
The 87-year-old Pope Francis publicly thanked God for allowing him “to do as an old pope what I would have liked to do as a young Jesuit,” and that is to travel to Asia to preach the Gospel.
Throughout 2024, Franciscans around the world commemorate the 800th anniversary of St. Francis of Assisi receiving the stigmata on Sept. 17, 1224, the appearance of the bodily wounds of Christ’s crucifixion.
While Pope Francis was out of town in Asia and Oceania, a mini-tempest erupted in Rome after a French court appeared to assert that France, not Italy or the Vatican, actually owns the Church of the Trinità dei Monti in the city’s famed Piazza di Spagna and the famed 135-step adjoining staircase, referred to in Italian as the Scalinata but better known in English as the Spanish Steps.
