“Easter, the heart of our faith, is all the more significant for you who celebrate this feast in the very places where our Lord lived, died and rose again,” Pope Francis writes to Catholics of all rites living in the Holy Land.

In his cycle of catechesis on virtues, Pope Francis calls us to emulate Christ’s patience, saying that “patience is not only a need, it is a calling: if Christ is patient, the Christian is called to be patient.”

Though Pope Francis skipped over his prepared homily at today’s Palm Sunday Mass, he used the opening of Holy Week to condemn terrorism and war in Moscow, Ukraine and Gaza.

Ukrainians had already experienced a “crisis of faith in the pope’s primacy,” Major Archbishop Shevchuk said, and that the pope’s latest statements were “deeply hurtful.”

Pope Francis has dismissed the former bishop of Bruges, Belgium, from the clerical state 14 years after Pope Benedict XVI accepted his resignation following his admission that he sexually abused his nephew.

In his cycle of catechesis on virtues, Pope Francis focused his general audience on prudence, stating that “In a world dominated by appearances, by superficial thoughts, by the triviality of both good and bad, the ancient lesson of prudence deserves to be revived.”