Cindy Wooden

Pope Francis, Martin Scorsese, Jane Goodall and a group of less famous "over 70s" talk to young filmmakers about love in the first episode of a four-part documentary. 

The presiding council of the Italian bishops' conference urged individual bishops and regional bishops' conferences to consider drawing up vaccination norms.

Pope Francis said he knows "it often annoys people" when he promotes Catholic teaching on social issues like poverty, migration and ecology, but he is going to keep doing so because the Gospel demands it.

A cardinal or bishop who is a member of the Congregation for Saints' Causes and anyone officially appointed as a consultant to the congregation cannot serve as the postulator or official promoter of a candidate's cause for sainthood.

"It is not a matter of beatifying or canonizing a papacy," insisted Cardinal Beniamino Stella, postulator of the late pope's sainthood cause.

The Catholic Church must move to action to protect children and to guarantee justice for victims and survivors, said Archbishop Charles J. Scicluna.

Pope Francis said the Second Vatican Council so shaped his theological and pastoral vision that perhaps he has not been as explicit as he should have been in highlighting those ties, especially when it comes to his contributions to Catholic social teaching.

The fear, sickness, death, mourning and economic impacts of COVID-19 should make people who are relatively well off and have access to health care think about "what it means to be vulnerable and live in precariousness on a daily basis," Pope Francis told members of the Pontifical Academy for Life.

While denouncing as an "abuse of power" coercive measures to promote vaccination against COVID-19, a leader of the traditionalist Society of St. Pius X said getting vaccinated "may sometimes be an eminently prudent act in the moral sense of the term."

Bishops and others in the Catholic Church often lament the declining number of Christians, but rarely do they examine their own behavior and failure to show others how much God loves them, Pope Francis told the presidents of European bishops' conferences.

A living faith draws strength from remembering the past while continuing to grow in love of God and service to others, Pope Francis said.

Visitors, tourists and employees who want to enter Vatican territory will be required beginning Oct. 1 to show proof of vaccination, recovery from the coronavirus or a negative COVID-19 test.

In God's view, human greatness is measured by how one serves or helps someone who cannot offer anything in exchange, Pope Francis said.

The Catholic Church's advocacy for debt relief is focused primarily on enabling nations with high foreign debt to provide for their people, but the Vatican COVID-19 Commission also is worried about families staggering under debt burdens. In fact, the commission's economy task force has recommended "extensive debt standstills and reductions for indebted households" and the training and deployment of "debt advisers," including through parishes and Catholic charities, to help households get out of debt. While many families with steady incomes from remote working used the pandemic lockdowns to spend less and pay down their debts, people who lost income or lost their jobs often survived thanks only to food banks, charity, government aid and eviction moratoriums.

It is a 'scandal' that 'we produce enough food for all people, but many go without their daily bread,' Pope Francis says in message to U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.

Pope Francis' letter explaining why he was restricting the use of the pre-Vatican II Mass "fearlessly hits the nail on the head: the TLM (Traditional Latin Mass) movement has hijacked the initiatives of St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI to its own ends," said Archbishop Augustine Di Noia.

The Vatican's financial watchdog agency said that in 2020 more financial transactions were flagged as suspicious by Vatican offices, but after investigation it did not have to suspend any transactions or freeze any accounts.

New minister general of worldwide order has served on the 'peripheries,' among migrants, jobless, homeless.

Vatican has not confirmed Pope Francis' attendance at COP26, but he and other faith leaders are preparing for global conference.

Pope Francis, Anglican Archbishop Justin Welby of Canterbury and the Rev. Jim Wallace, moderator of the Church of Scotland, marked the 10th anniversary of South Sudan's independence and promised to visit the country when it has a stable peace.