Young people were going to confession on street corners and park benches throughout Lisbon during World Youth Day, but in the 150 plywood confessionals set up in Vasco da Gama Garden three of them found themselves face to face with Pope Francis.
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Young people were going to confession on street corners and park benches throughout Lisbon during World Youth Day, but in the 150 plywood confessionals set up in Vasco da Gama Garden three of them found themselves face to face with Pope Francis.
Fifteen World Youth Day pilgrims from Ukraine, most of whom had lost a father or other close relative in the war, had a private meeting with Pope Francis Aug. 3.
Pope Francis kicked off the second day of his Aug. 2-6 visit to Lisbon meeting with Catholic university students, telling them to maintain a restless search for a better future and to work toward a more inclusive and just world.
On the first day of an Aug. 2-6 trip to Portugal, a country that recently has been embroiled in a clerical sexual abuse crisis, Pope Francis met with a group of abuse survivors.
When Pope Francis arrives in Portugal for World Youth Day, he’ll be met by the colorful fanfare and palpable excitement characteristic of these gatherings, yet he’ll also have the task of wading through the aftermath of a recent report on clerical abuse in the country.
As Pope Francis heads to Lisbon Aug. 2 for World Youth Day, an event often dubbed the “Catholic Woodstock” due to the large and celebratory crowds it always draws, he faces the unique challenge of revitalizing the faith amid growing European secularism and progressively empty pews in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Destroying grain is a “grave offense to God,” Pope Francis said, appealing to authorities in Russia as “my brothers” and urging them to resume cooperating with a United Nations’ initiative to guarantee the safe transport of grain out of Ukraine.
When Barbara Lee retired as a U.S. magistrate judge, she didn’t start playing bingo and she definitely didn’t get bored. The former judge and attorney, who lives in Manhattan, spent the first 16 years of her retirement teaching English primarily to Chinese immigrants at Cabrini Immigration Services, currently in Washington Heights.
During a meeting with Pope Francis’s special envoy for Ukraine on Tuesday, U.S. President Joe Biden shared his wishes for the pontiff’s “continued ministry and global leadership,” according to a brief White House statement, but the two men apparently did not identify any specific new pathways to peace.
Italian Cardinal Matteo Maria Zuppi, Pope Francis’s personal envoy for the Ukraine-Russia war, will meet with President Joe Biden on July 18 as part of his current trip to Washington to promote peace and discuss solutions to the conflict, the White House has announced.