“My election as pope did not convert me suddenly,” Pope Francis said, “so as to make me less sinful than before. I am and I remain a sinner. That’s why I confess every two weeks.”
Vatican Dispatch
Posted inFaith, Vatican Dispatch
Vatican releases list of participants for Synod on the Amazon
The list includes all of the diocesan bishops of the nine countries from the Amazon region, as well as three from the United States.
Posted inFaith, Vatican Dispatch
Archbishop Gomez: V Encuentro brings the vision of Pope Francis to the United States
Some 40 percent of the U.S. Catholic community has a Hispanic background and that “more than 50 percent of the Catholics in the United States under the age of 18 are Hispanic.”
Posted inFaith, Vatican Dispatch
Prosecution of priest accused of abusing Vatican altar boys begins
Rev. Gabriele Martinelli is accused of the sexual abuse of altar boys who served the papal masses in St. Peter’s Basilica and who lived in a Vatican pre-seminary in the years before 2012.
Posted inFaith, Vatican Dispatch
Pope Francis to visit Japan and Thailand in November
Pope Francis believes that Christianity and the Catholic Church can have a great future in this continent where two-thirds of humanity live.
Posted inFaith, Vatican Dispatch
Pope Francis on plane: ‘I am not afraid of schisms. I pray they do not happen.’
Heading home from his trip to Africa, the pope criticized “schools of rigidity” in the church but said he welcomed criticism and did not see a U.S. schism as imminent. America’s Vatican correspondent, Gerard O’Connell, reports.
Posted inFaith, Vatican Dispatch
Pope Francis praises diversity of Mauritius but encourages greater openness to migrants
Pope Francis encouraged the Mauritian people to support “a better division of income and the integral promotion of the poor” and “not to yield to the temptation of an idolatrous economic model that sacrifices human lives on the altar of speculation and profit alone.”
Posted inFaith, Vatican Dispatch
400 years after first Jesuits arrived, Pope Francis celebrates Mass in Mauritius
“Our young people are our foremost mission! We must invite them to find their happiness in Jesus,” the pope said at Mass for 368,000 Catholics.
Posted inFaith, Vatican Dispatch
“Poverty is not inevitable!”: Pope Francis’ message to the young people of Madagascar
Father Opeka welcomed Pope Francis to Akamasoa which, he said, “was one a zone of exclusion, suffering violence and death” but over the past 30 years “Divine Providence has created an ‘oasis of hope’ in which children have regained their dignity, young people have returned to work and their parents have begun to work to prepare a future for their children.”
Posted inFaith, Vatican Dispatch
Pope Francis in Madagascar: We cannot remain indifferent.
On Sunday, Sept. 8, his last day in Madagascar, Pope Francis celebrated Mass for approximately one million people. The overwhelming majority of those present at Mass are poor, but they love Francis because they see him as “a man of God” and “the pope of the poor,” one who is on their side in world where they have so little.