Ahead of meeting Pope Francis at the Vatican this weekend, New York's Mayor Eric Adams told NCR the pontiff is akin to a global "influencer." Said Hizzoner: "I think he's the right leader for the time we're in right now."
Pope Francis signed a letter on synodality in the presence of parish priests and urged them to be "missionaries of synodality," said several of the priests present.
In a meeting at the Vatican on May 2, Pope Francis received assurances from Jordan's King Abdullah II that Christian and Islamic holy sites in Jerusalem will be protected amid the Israel-Hamas war.
"Here, then, is the great enemy of faith: it is not intelligence, it is not reason, as, alas, some continue obsessively to repeat," Francis said. The enemy is "simply fear."
Loretto Sr. Jeannine Gramick recently wrote to Pope Francis to express disappointment with a new Vatican document that condemned "gender ideology." Francis told Gramick: "Transgender people must be accepted and integrated into society."
Pope Francis has now established 10 working groups to study some of the most controversial issues that have emerged in the Synod of Bishops. Theologians say it is difficult to assess what their impact might be.
Pope Francis has written to a group of parents of LGBTQ persons, responding to their criticism of a Vatican document that condemned gender theory and gender-affirming surgeries. He told them he received their critique with an "open heart."
"Tradition comes alive in the art of creatively transmitting the messages entrusted to us. We must transmit them in new translations into a living, intelligible language," Father Tomáš Halík, a Czech theologian, told the priests. "To be faithful to tradition is not to be resistant to change."