In a sense, the pope’s messages all amount to the same thing: Hello and God bless you. But there is a care in the language that is striking.

Pope Francis hit out strongly against the way people have sought to manipulate Benedict’s death. “People who instrumentalize such a good person, [a man] of God, almost I would say a holy father of the church, have no ethics,” he said. “They are of a party, not of the church.”

The decision comes at a time when Cardinal Ouellet is pursuing a defamation case against a Canadian woman church worker, who had accused him of unwanted sexual touching.

Pope Benedict’s German biographer, Peter Seewald, confirmed that nine weeks before he died, Benedict revealed that insomnia was the “central motive” for his resignation.

Pope Francis criticized laws that criminalize homosexuality as “unjust,” saying God loves all his children just as they are and called on Catholic bishops who support the laws to welcome LGBTQ people into the church.

The pope warned there's a risk that a reform process in the German Catholic Church over calls for married priests and other possible liberalizing reforms might become harmfully "ideological."