Many hope the church will repeat that activist role as political divisions depress the economy and the living conditions for average Zimbabweans, and as a severe drought threatens a hunger crisis for millions this year.

The Global Conflict Tracker, part of the Council on Foreign Relations, listed 26 “conflicts around the world of concern to the United States” as of February, and there are new threats on the horizon.

It took more than 12 years to sort through, organize and catalogue the enormous quantity of information from Pope Pius XII's long pontificate. The open collection also includes thousands of notes regarding Pope Pius' charitable activity in Italy and abroad.

The pope said that discourses from some leaders of new forms of populism bring to mind "speeches that sowed fear and then hate in the decade of the 1930s."

Isabel Allende's novel of profound displacement reflects the life of someone who has known displacement as her permanent state.

I had traveled to Iraq to hear more about how this man had survived, a Catholic priest rescued by his Muslim friend. He would tell me that story, too.