Loading...
Loading...
Click here if you don’t see subscription options
Nuns distribute food and drinks to needy people in St. Peter's square at the Vatican, Friday, Jan. 6, 2017. After the Angelus prayer Pope Francis offered some 300 needy people a simple lunch of a sandwich and drink, as part of his long-running outreach to the poor and homeless who live around the Vatican.(AP Photo/Andrew Medichini)

Pope Francis treated a few hundred homeless people and refugees to a simple sandwich lunch on Friday, and urged the faithful to find God in the peripheries of society, not its palaces.

Francis celebrated Mass marking Epiphany, the biblical tale of the three wise men who set out to find the infant Jesus and offer precious gifts. At the end of the service, homeless people and refugees joined volunteers to hand out 50,000 booklets with biblical tales of God's mercy to pilgrims gathered in a frigid St. Peter's Square.

Francis said he too wanted to give the faithful the gift of God's mercy for the coming year.

He then offered some 300 needy people a simple lunch of a sandwich and drink, the Vatican said, part of his long-running outreach to the poor and homeless who live around the Vatican.

During this Christmas season, Francis has emphasized the humble setting of Christ's birth while criticizing a church that is closed in on itself, its wealth and its achievements. It's a message Francis has repeated during his papacy, faulting those who are obsessed with Christianity's rules and morals over God's mercy, particularly to society's most marginal.

Francis criticized those who are "anesthetized" to God's mercy, who want to "control everything and everyone" and fear any challenges to their wealth and achievements.

They suffer, he said, from "a bewilderment born of fear and foreboding before anything that challenges us, calls into question our certainties and our truths, our ways of clinging to the world and this life."

Francis' pastoral outreach, particularly to divorced and civilly remarried Catholics, has been criticized by conservatives who have argued that church teaching prohibits these Catholics from receiving Communion. Francis says God's mercy is infinite and that the Eucharist isn't a prize for the perfect, but medicine for wounded souls.

Copyright 2017 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Comments are automatically closed two weeks after an article's initial publication. See our comments policy for more.

The latest from america

This week on “Jesuitical,” Zac and Ashley chat with Mark Francis, C.S.V., who attended Catholic Theological Union with Leo XIV (then known as Bob Prevost), about the unique education that shaped the future pope.
JesuiticalMay 23, 2025
Catholic bishops are calling for prayer after two Israeli Embassy staff members were slain late May 21 outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington.
President Donald Trump meets South Africa's President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office of the White House, Wednesday, May 21, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
President Trump offered a vibrant demonstration of the kind of worst-case scenario Pope Leo may have had in mind about the collapse of critical thinking.
Kevin ClarkeMay 22, 2025
In his first appointment of a top-level official of the Roman Curia, Pope Leo XIV named Sister Tiziana Merletti, a canon lawyer, to be secretary of the Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life.