Pope Francis - Page 75

On Sunday, Pope Francis spoke about the Christian season of lent, the period of prayer and penance leading up to Holy Week and Easter. “Lent,” said the Pope, “is a time of combat” and “a time of spiritual battle against the spirit of evil.”

In a meeting with pilgrims from the Italian region of Calabria, Pope Francis slammed members of Italian organized crime, telling them they must choose between Jesus and a life of evil. “Jesus did not take devils to lunch,” he said. “He cast them out.”

The Catholic Diocese of Phoenix, Arizona, commemorated thousands of illegal immigrants who died at the Arizona border with Mexico, after Texas Federal Judge Andrew Hanen issued a temporary injunction halting President Barack Obama’s executive amnesty program.

Pope Francis said Wednesday that in every generation, God continues to ask each of us where our brother is, as he asked Cain. “The story of Cain and Abel demonstrates that we are indeed our brothers’ keeper within the human family,” he said.

This morning, Pope Francis condemned the brutal slaying of 21 Coptic Christians perpetrated by ISIS in Libya over the weekend, proclaiming them martyrs killed out of hatred of their Christian faith.

In one of his most important addresses to date, Pope Francis preached a powerful homily at Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica on Sunday, concelebrated with Cardinals from around the world, the day after bestowing the “red hat” on a batch of twenty new prelates.

In his homily Saturday for the installation of the 20 new cardinals he has named, Pope Francis gave the prelates their marching orders, telling them to be magnanimous and respectful, and to avoid a series of vices including jealousy, pride and vanity.

Pope Francis’ reform of the Vatican departments, one of the priorities of his pontificate, seems to be nearing completion. The 165 Cardinals in Rome for meetings with Francis were briefed Thursday on a proposal to shrink the Vatican Curia, merging several existing departments into just two.

The former vice president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops believes that Pope Francis will try to “prod” lawmakers to pass comprehensive amnesty legislation when he address Congress in September. Tuscon Bishop Gerald Kicanas told the House Judiciary Subcommittee

During his General Audience Wednesday, Pope Francis continued his reflections on the family, focusing this week on children. The Pope said that a society’s attitude toward children tells a lot about it, and explains why many European societies that don’t value children are “depressed.”

In a meeting with representatives of the Symposium of Episcopal Conferences of Africa and Madagascar (SECAM) on Saturday, Pope Francis reminded his hearers that the future is in the hands of the young, who need to be protected from “new and unscrupulous forms of colonization,” such as the reckless pursuit of riches, as well as “fundamentalism and the distorted use of religion.”

The Southeast Asian Jihadist terrorist organization Jemaah Islamiyah reportedly planned to kill Pope Francis during his recent trip to the Philippines by detonating a bomb along the route of the papal motorcade, but the attempt was prevented by adjustments to the Pope’s program.

On Monday morning, Pope Francis dropped another clue about the content of his upcoming “encyclical” letter on the environment and human ecology, saying that a Christian who does not take care of creation, shows disdain for the work of God.

In a visit to a Roman parish Sunday, Pope Francis blamed family divisions on the devil, adding that the only cure is Jesus.

The most common complaint about the way the Catholic Church handled the 2001 sex abuse crisis was not the way it dealt with victims or with offending priests, but the way it dealt with bishops who were seen as either complicit or culpably negligent. Now the Vatican seems poised to change that.

After his weekly Angelus prayer on Sunday, Pope Francis paused to reflect on what he called the “shameful plague” of human trafficking, encouraging greater efforts to eradicate this form of modern slavery. February 8 marks the Catholic feast day of

In an address before prefects of a number of Italian cities Saturday, Pope Francis chose to dwell on the topic of immigration, and reaffirmed the need to follow an orderly procedure when dealing with immigrants, in accord with the dictates of the law.

House Speaker John Boehner has announced that Pope Francis will address the United States Congress.

The Latin Times calls newly declared Catholic martyr Oscar Arnulfo Romero a “Marxist Martyr” because of supposed ties to a Marxist-inspired movement called liberation theology that was popular in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s.

After last Wednesday’s smackdown on absentee fathers, this week, Pope Francis weighed the positive qualities of good fathers, even their willingness to punish their children when needed.

In his homily at Mass this morning, Pope Francis said that the Church has to keep going back to the heart of its mission of evangelizing and comforting those who suffer, or it runs the risk of becoming just a philanthropic organization or an NGO.

Two weeks ago at a Sunday Mass, Pope Francis recognized a delegation of Slovaks in the crowd and encouraged their efforts in a national referendum banning same-sex adoption. Just this week, at his weekly audience, Francis did it again.

Pope Francis will speak to a joint session of Congress in September.

Maryam Rajavi, the President-elect of the Iranian Resistance, has sent a message to Pope Francis, requesting his intervention in preventing a blackout of the 1994 terrorist bombing of a Jewish center in Buenos Aires.

As fighting intensifies in the Ukraine, Pope Francis took advantage of his world pulpit to plead for a ceasefire and a return to dialogue.

In his morning homily at Mass Tuesday, Pope Francis once again insisted on the need for Christians to make time for prayer and Bible reading, putting aside other things.

While Italians express ever lower confidence in their own institutions and political representatives, their opinion of Pope Francis is the highest it has ever been, with 89.6% of Italians agreeing with the statement that the Pope is giving new impetus to the Catholic Church, according to a new report by Eurispes, a major Italian research institute.

In addressing a group of Lithuanian bishops Monday, Pope Francis made reference to their country’s recent full entry into the European Union. Instead of congratulating them, however, the Pope warned them of ideological threats to the family they would now be facing.

The 12-page working document for a Pontifical Council meeting, titled Women’s Cultures: Equality and Difference, outlines the topics to be discussed, including gender identity and inequality, female poverty, violence against women, complementarity, generativity and the female body.

A guard walks inside the chapel of the former University of Santo Thomas of Villanueva in Havana, Cuba. THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

After his weekly prayer of the Angelus on Sunday, Pope Francis reached out to Italy’s pro-life movement, encouraging them and expressing his gratitude for their commitment to life. He also summoned all Christians to “a renewed esteem of the human

The Pope gave further indications as to the content of his upcoming letter on the environment Saturday, as he addressed a group from the Italian National Farmers Confederation. Francis told his hearers that in their work of cultivating the land, they were responding to God’s commission “to till and keep” the earth.

When the hastily written interim report was read aloud before all the bishops gathered for the Vatican marriage summit last October, it was met with consternation and disapproval. At the time, it was generally assumed that Pope Francis had never seen the text, but now the Cardinal in charge of organizing the summit has claimed that the document was “seen and approved by the Pope.”

As Armenians are gearing up to commemorate the centenary of the Armenian Genocide at the hands of the Ottoman Empire, the Turkish Foreign Ministry has “mistakenly” published a picture of the Armenian Genocide Monument amidst a collage of photos in a 2015 calendar.

Jean-Clément Jeanbart, the Melkite Greek Archbishop of Aleppo in Syria, has decried what he calls a “plot” to empty the Middle East of Christians. ISIS has a special fear of Christians, he said, because theirs are “the only voices to reach the West.”

British historian William Oddie has called Barack Obama “the most anti-Catholic American president in living memory” because “across the whole spectrum of contemporary moral issues, he is passionately committed to a series of views which run directly contrary to those of the Church.”