President Joe Biden has canceled his upcoming trip to Italy, including an audience with Pope Francis, in order to “remain focused on directing the full federal response” in the wake of the devastating wildfires raging in California, the White House said.
As Pope Francis became the first pope to celebrate Mass on the French island of Corsica Dec. 15, the usual excitement of an open-air Mass with the pope was combined with the flair and pageantry of a Renaissance fair.
The head of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops says Pope Francis’ new encyclical offers a “simple and powerful” cure to many problems that plague modern society.
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.
Maria Notaro of La Guli Pastry Shop in Astoria has revised her cookie recipe that commemorated Pope Francis’s 2015 visit to New York City. She recently shared a batch of the treats with people trying to grow in the faith, even while incarcerated at Rikers Island.
Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, former nuncio to the United States, has been excommunicated after being found guilty of schism, the Vatican said.
Pope Francis “never intended to offend or express himself in homophobic terms, and he extends his apologies to those who were offended by the use of a term, reported by others,” that is considered vulgar in Italian, the Vatican press office said.
Pope Francis formally recognized a miracle attributed to the intercession of Blessed Carlo Acutis, a 15-year-old Italian teenager whose birth in 1991 will make him the first “millennial” to become a saint.
Pope Francis said he is not open to the possibility of ordaining women as deacons, weeks after authorizing several Vatican study groups to look into that issue and others as part of the Synod on Synodality — although “women have always had … the function of deaconesses without being deacons,” and that “making space in the church for women does not mean giving them a ministry.”
In the latest comment from the Vatican on “Fiducia Supplicans,” the controversial declaration issued by the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith in December 2023 that includes guidelines on the blessing of same-sex couples, Pope Francis clarified that he didn’t allow blessings of “the union” but of “each person.”
