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Tag: Pope Francis
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Pope visits Istanbul’s Blue Mosque for meeting with Turkish religious leaders
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Pope Leo XIV visited Istanbul’s iconic Blue Mosque on Saturday but didn’t stop to pray, as he opened an intense day of meetings and liturgies with Turkey’s Christian leaders, where he again emphasized the need for Christians to be united.
Leo took his shoes off and, in his white socks, toured the 17th-century mosque, looking up at its soaring tiled domes and the Arabic inscriptions on its columns as an imam pointed them out to him.
The Vatican had said Leo would observe a “brief moment of silent prayer” in the mosque, but he didn’t. An imam of the mosque, Asgin Tunca, said he had invited Leo to pray, since the mosque was “Allah’s house,” but the pope declined.
Later, Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni said: “The pope experienced his visit to the mosque in silence, in a spirit of contemplation and listening, with deep respect for the place and the faith of those who gather there in prayer.”
The Vatican then sent out a corrected version of its bulletin about the trip, removing reference to the planned “brief moment of silent prayer,” without further explanation.
Leo, history’s first American pope, was following in the footsteps of his recent predecessors, who all made high-profile visits to the Sultan Ahmed Mosque, as it is officially known, in a gesture of respect to Turkey’s Muslim majority.
Domenico Stinellis / AP
Papal visits to Blue Mosque often raise questions
Other visits have always raised questions about whether the pope would pray in the Muslim house of worship, or at the very least pause to gather thoughts in a meditative silence.
When Pope Benedict XVI visited Turkey in 2006, tensions were high because Benedict had offended many in the Muslim world a few months earlier with a speech in Regensburg, Germany that was widely interpreted as linking Islam and violence.
The Vatican added a visit to the Blue Mosque at the last minute in a bid to reach out to Muslims, and Benedict was warmly welcomed. He observed a moment of silent prayer, head bowed, as the imam prayed next to him, facing east.
AP Photo/Salih Zeki Fazlioglu
Benedict later thanked him “for this moment of prayer” for what was only the second time a pope had visited a mosque, after St. John Paul II visited one briefly in Syria in 2001.
There were no doubts in 2014 when Pope Francis visited the Blue Mosque: He stood for two minutes of silent prayer facing east, his head bowed, eyes closed and hands clasped in front of him. The Grand Mufti of Istanbul, Rahmi Yaran, told the pope afterwards, “May God accept it.”
FILIPPO MONTEFORTE/AFP/Getty Images
Speaking to reporters after the visit, the imam Tunca said he had told the Leo: “It’s not my house, not your house, (it’s the) house of Allah,” he said. He said he told the pope: “‘If you want, you can worship here,’ I said. But he said, ‘That’s OK.’”
“He wanted to see the mosque, wanted to feel (the) atmosphere of the mosque, I think. And was very pleased,” he said.
There was also another change to the official program, after the Vatican said the head of Turkey’s Diyanet religious affairs directorate would accompany Leo at the mosque. He didn’t come and a spokesman from the Diyanet said he wasn’t supposed to, since he had welcomed Leo in Ankara.
Hagia Sophia left off itinerary
Past popes have also visited the nearby Hagia Sophia landmark, once one of the most important historic cathedrals in Christianity and a United Nations-designated world heritage site.
But Leo left that visit off his itinerary on his first trip as pope. In July 2020, Turkey converted Hagia Sophia from a museum back into a mosque, a move that drew widespread international criticism, including from the Vatican.
After the mosque visit, Leo held a private meeting with Turkey’s Christian leaders at the Syriac Orthodox Church of Mor Ephrem. In the afternoon, he was expected to pray with the spiritual leader of the world’s Orthodox Christians, Patriarch Bartholomew, at the patriarchal church of Saint George.
There, they were to sign a joint statement. The Vatican said in his remarks to the patriarchs gathered, Leo reminded them “that division among Christians is an obstacle to their witness.”
Emrah Gurel / AP
He pointed to the next Holy Year to be celebrated by Christians, in 2033 on the anniversary of Christ’s crucifixion, and invited them to go to Jerusalem on “a journey that leads to full unity.”
Leo was ending the day with a Catholic Mass in Istanbul’s Volkswagen Arena for the country’s Catholic community, who number 33,000 in a country of more than 85 million people, most of whom are Sunni Muslim.
The Airbus software update doesn’t spare pope
While Leo was focusing on bolstering relations with Orthodox Christians and Muslims, trip organizers were dealing with more mundane issues.
Leo’s ITA Airways Airbus A320neo charter was among those caught up in the worldwide Airbus software update, ordered by the European Union Aviation Safety Agency. The order came after an analysis found the computer code may have contributed to a sudden drop in the altitude of a JetBlue plane last month.
The Vatican spokesman, Matteo Bruni, said Saturday that ITA was working on the issue. He said the necessary component to update the aircraft was on its way to Istanbul along with the technician who would install it.
Leo is scheduled to fly from Istanbul to Beirut, Lebanon, on Sunday afternoon for the second leg of his inaugural trip as pope.
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Pope Leo XIV celebrates cinema with Hollywood stars and urges inclusion of marginal voices
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VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Leo XIV welcomed Spike Lee, Cate Blanchett, Greta Gerwig and dozens of other Hollywood luminaries to a special Vatican audience Saturday celebrating cinema and its ability to inspire and unite.
Leo encouraged the filmmakers and celebrities gathered in a frescoed Vatican audience hall to use their art to include marginal voices, calling film “a popular art in the noblest sense, intended for and accessible to all.”
“When cinema is authentic, it does not merely console, but challenges,” he told the stars. “It articulates the questions that dwell within us, and sometimes, even provokes tears that we didn’t know we needed to shed.”
The encounter, organized by the Vatican’s culture ministry, followed similar audiences Pope Francis had in recent years with famous artists and comedians. It’s part of the Vatican’s efforts to reach out beyond the Catholic Church to engage with the secular world.
But the gathering also seemed to have particular meaning for history’s first American pope, who grew up in the heyday of Hollywood. The 70-year-old, Chicago-born Leo just this week identified his four favorite films: “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “The Sound of Music,” “Ordinary People,” and “Life Is Beautiful.”
In a sign of how seemingly star-struck he was, Leo spent nearly an hour after the audience greeting and chatting amiably with each of the participants, something he rarely does for large audiences.
Drawing applause from the celebrities, Leo acknowledged that the film industry and cinemas around the world were experiencing a decline, with theaters that had once been important social and cultural meeting points disappearing from neighborhoods.
“I urge institutions not to give up, but to cooperate in affirming the social and cultural value” of movie theaters, he said.
Celebrities just happy to be invited
Many celebrities said they found Leo’s words inspiring, and expressed awe as they walked through the halls of the Vatican Apostolic Palace, where a light luncheon reception awaited them after the audience.
“It was a surprise to me that I even got invited,” Spike Lee told reporters along the red carpet gauntlet in the palace.
During the audience, Lee had presented Leo with a jersey from his beloved Knicks basketball team, featuring the number 14 and Leo’s name on the back. Leo is a known Chicago Bulls fan, but Lee said he told the pope that the Knicks now boast three players from the pope’s alma mater, Villanova University.
Blanchett, for her part, said the pope’s comments were inspiring because he understood the crucial role cinema can play in transcending borders and exploring sometimes difficult subjects in ways that aren’t divisive.
“Filmmaking is about entertainment, but it’s about including voices that are often marginalized and not shy away from the pain and complexity that we’re all living through right now,” she said.
She said Leo, in his comments about the experience of watching a film in a dark theatre, clearly understood the culturally important role cinemas can play.
“Sitting in the dark with strangers is a way in which we can reconnect to what unites us rather than what divides us,” she said.
A ‘hit and miss’ guest list that grew
The gathering drew a diverse group of filmmakers and actors, including many from Italy, like Monica Bellucci and Alba Rohrwacher. American actors included Chris O’Donnell, Judd Apatow and Leslie Mann, his wife.
Director Sally Potter said she was impressed that Leo took the time to speak with each one of them. And she said she loved his comments about the value of silence and slowness in film.
“It was a good model of how to be and how to think about cinema,” she said, noting especially Leo’s defense of “slow cinema” and to not see the moving image just in terms of algorithms.
Director Gus Van Sant said he liked Leo’s vibe.
“He was very laid back, you know, he had a fantastic message of beauty in cinema,” he said.
Archbishop Paul Tighe, the No. 2 in the Vatican culture ministry, said the guest list was pulled together just in the last three months, with the help of the handful of contacts Vatican officials had in Hollywood, including Martin Scorsese.
The biggest hurdle, Tighe said, was convincing Hollywood agents that the invitation to come meet Leo wasn’t a hoax. In the end, as word spread, some figures approached the Vatican and asked to be invited.
“It’s an industry where people have their commitments months in advance and years in advance, so obviously it was a little hit and miss, but we’re very pleased and very proud” by the turnout, he said.
The aim of the encounter, he said, was to encourage an ongoing conversation with the world of culture, of which film is a fundamental part.
“It’s a very democratic art form,” Tighe said. Saturday’s audience, he said, was “the celebration of an art form that I think is touching the lives of so many people and therefore recognizing it and giving it its true importance.”
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Visual journalists Trisha Thomas and Isaia Montelione contributed.
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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
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Pope returns 62 artifacts to Indigenous Canadians as
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The Vatican on Saturday returned 62 artifacts to Indigenous peoples from Canada as part of the Catholic Church’s reckoning with its role in helping suppress Indigenous culture in the Americas.
Pope Leo XIV gave the artifacts, including an iconic Inuit kayak, and supporting documentation to a delegation of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops during an audience. According to a joint statement from the Vatican and Canadian church, the pieces were a gift and a “concrete sign of dialogue, respect and fraternity.”
The items were part of the Vatican Museum’s ethnographic collection, known as the Anima Mundi museum. The collection has been a source of controversy for the Vatican amid the broader museum debate over the restitution of cultural goods taken from Indigenous peoples during colonial periods.
Most of the items in the Vatican collection were sent to Rome by Catholic missionaries for a 1925 exhibition in the Vatican gardens that was a highlight of that year’s Holy Year.
The Vatican insists the items were “gifts” to Pope Pius XI, who wanted to celebrate the church’s global reach, its missionaries and the lives of the Indigenous peoples they evangelized.
But historians, Indigenous groups and experts have long questioned whether the items could really have been offered freely, given the power imbalances at play in Catholic missions at the time. In those years, Catholic religious orders were helping to enforce the Canadian government’s forced assimilation policy of eliminating Indigenous traditions, which Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has called “cultural genocide.”
Part of that policy included confiscating items used in Indigenous spiritual and traditional rituals, such as the 1885 potlatch ban that prohibited the integral First Nations ceremony. Those confiscated items ended up in museums in Canada, the U.S. and Europe, as well as private collections.
Negotiations accelerate on returning items
Negotiations on returning the Vatican items accelerated after Pope Francis in 2022 met with Indigenous leaders who had traveled to the Vatican to receive his apology for the church’s role in running Canada’s disastrous residential schools. During their visit, they were shown some objects in the collection, including an Inuit kayak, wampum belts, war clubs and masks, and asked for them to be returned.
Eric Gay / AP
Francis later said he was in favor of returning the items and others in the Vatican collection on a case-by-case basis, saying: “In the case where you can return things, where it’s necessary to make a gesture, better to do it.”
The Vatican said Saturday the items were given back during the Holy Year, exactly 100 years after the 1925 exhibition where they were first exhibited in Rome.
“This is an act of ecclesial sharing, with which the Successor of Peter entrusts to the Church in Canada these artifacts, which bear witness to the history of the encounter between faith and the cultures of the Indigenous peoples,” said the joint statement from the Vatican and Canadian church.
It added that the Canadian Catholic hierarchy committed to ensuring that the artifacts are “properly safeguarded, respected and preserved.” Officials had previously said the Canadian bishops would receive the artifacts with the explicit understanding that the ultimate keepers will be the Indigenous communities themselves.
The items are expected to be taken first to the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Quebec. There, experts and Indigenous groups will try to identify where the items originated, down to the specific community, and what should be done with them, officials said previously.
A process of reckoning with abuses
As part of its broader reckoning with the Catholic Church’s colonial past, the Vatican in 2023 formally repudiated the “Doctrine of Discovery,” the theories backed by 15th-century “papal bulls” that legitimized the colonial-era seizure of Native lands that form the basis of some property laws today.
The statement marked a historic recognition of the Vatican’s own complicity in colonial-era abuses committed by European powers, even though it didn’t address Indigenous demands that the Vatican formally rescind the papal bulls themselves.
The Vatican on Saturday cited the 2023 repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery in its statement, saying Leo’s return of the artifacts concludes the “journey” initiated by Francis.
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Pope Leo to proclaim seven new saints, including three nuns
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Pope Leo XIV is set to create seven new saints Sunday, including the first from Papua New Guinea, an archbishop killed in the Armenian genocide and a Venezuelan “doctor of the poor”.
Also set to be canonised in the solemn ceremony in St Peter’s Square on World Mission Day are three nuns who dedicated their lives to the poor and sick, and former Satanic priest Bartolo Longo.
Born in 1841, the Italian lawyer subsequently rejoined the Catholic faith and went on to found the Pontifical Shrine of the Blessed Virgin of the Rosary of Pompeii.
The canonisation will be the second for the US pope since he was made leader of the Catholic Church on May 8.
Last month, he proclaimed as saints Italians Carlo Acutis — a teenager dubbed “God’s Influencer” who spread the faith online before his death at age 15 in 2006 — and Pier Giorgio Frassati, considered a model of charity who died in 1925, aged 24.
Canonisation is the final step towards sainthood in the Catholic Church, following beatification.
Three conditions are required — most crucially that the individual has performed at least two miracles. He or she must be deceased for at least five years and have led an exemplary Christian life.
Those to be proclaimed saints Sunday are Peter To Rot, a lay catechist from Papua New Guinea killed during the Japanese occupation during World War II, Armenian bishop Ignazio Choukrallah Maloyan killed by Turkish forces in 1915, and Venezuela’s Jose Gregorio Hernandez Cisneros, a layman who died in 1919 whom the late Pope Francis called a “doctor close to the weakest”.
Also from Venezuela is Maria Carmen Elena Rendiles Martinez, a nun born without a left arm who overcame her disability to found the Congregation of the Servants of Jesus before her death in 1977. She becomes the South American country’s first female saint.
The Italian nuns to be canonised are Vincenza Maria Poloni, the 19th century founder of Verona’s Institute of the Sisters of Mercy, which cares primarily for the sick in hospitals, and Maria Troncatti of the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians.
In the 1920s, Troncatti arrived in Ecuador to devote her life to helping Ecuador’s Indigenous population.
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New Pope Offers Same Headaches for Trump
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Leo probably doesn’t envision Jesus in a MAGA hat.
Photo: Maria Grazia Picciarella/Middle East Images/AFP/Getty ImagesDonald Trump and his team are currently working overtime to convince Americans that anyone who opposes his agenda represents a “radical left” full of “terrorists” who hate America, and for that matter, Christianity. The MAGA movement can’t be happy that one of the world’s oldest and most conservative institutions, the Roman Catholic Church, remains hostile to his mass-deportation program, his efforts to cut government assistance to poor people, and his militant opposition to climate-change initiatives.
During the tenure of the late Pope Francis, Trump allies and many traditionalist Catholics viewed the pontiff as fundamentally misguided (in all but his hard-line position opposing abortion). They hoped his American-born successor would be more “reasonable,” from their point of view. Indeed, as the Washington Post reports, Leo IV “has comforted traditionalists by embracing formal vestments and other reverent trappings of his office more than Francis did.” But in the last week he’s sent a series of signals that he shares Francis’s position on many of the issues that grated on MAGA Republicans, as the Post notes:
At an Oct. 1 Vatican summit, Leo condemned deniers of global warming and issued a blunt call to climate action. And last Sunday, in St. Peter’s Square, he declared a new “missionary age” against the “coldness of indifference” to migrants.
On Wednesday, he met privately with Bishop Mark J. Seitz of El Paso, a critic of the Trump administration’s migrant crackdown, along with other U.S. pro-migrant activists, to receive letters and testimonies from those living in “fear” of detention and deportation in the United States.
Leo “was very clear that what is happening to migrants in the United States right now is an injustice,” said Dylan Corbett, executive director of the Texas-based Hope Border Institute, who attended the meeting. “He said the church cannot remain silent.”
In the middle of this drumbeat of events, the pontiff intervened in an American church dispute over the proposed presentation of an award to pro-choice Catholic Senator Dick Durbin, with these words:
“Someone who says, ‘I’m against abortion but says I am in favor of the death penalty’ is not really pro-life,” he said Tuesday. “Someone who says that ‘I’m against abortion, but I’m in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States,’ I don’t know if that’s pro-life.”
Then today, the pontiff released his first major teaching document, an “apostolic exhortation,” as the National Catholic Reporter explains:
“In a world where the poor are increasingly numerous, we paradoxically see the growth of a wealthy elite, living in a bubble of comfort and luxury, almost in another world compared to ordinary people,” the pope wrote. “We must not let our guard down when it comes to poverty.” …
While the document’s pastoral tone urges a renewed spiritual concern for the marginalized, it also carries sharp edges. For example, it denounces people who internalize indifference by placing their faith in the free market instead of allowing themselves to be consumed by compassion for their neighbor.
[The papal document] calls out Christians who “find it easier to turn a blind eye to the poor,” justifying their inaction by reducing faith to prayer and teaching “sound doctrine,” or by invoking “pseudo-scientific data” to claim that “a free market economy will automatically solve the problem of poverty.”
Sounds “radical left” to me, or perhaps even communist.
The Vatican acknowledged that preparation of this document began under Francis, and those who didn’t like its tone and scope probably hope it was more of a tribute to Leo’s predecessor rather than a statement of his own views. But as the Post noted, there’s another possibility:
Leo holds Peruvian nationality from his years as a missionary there in addition to U.S. citizenship. His critique of market capitalism in particular suggests that in key ways, those who thought they were getting the first American pope are actually getting the second Latin American, one whose stances, like Francis, echo perceptions common in the Global South.
Vatican hostility to Trump could have a limited effect on American Catholics, who, after all, widely disregard church teachings on contraception and other matters. But one of the under-discussed success stories of the president’s 2024 campaign is that he carried self-described Catholics by a 12-point margin over Kamala Harris after splitting this vote right down the middle with Joe Biden four years earlier. Regular criticism from a pontiff who is (so far) wildly popular in the U.S. won’t help Trump’s own flagging popularity. And it’s particularly noteworthy that for the most part America’s conservative-leaning Catholic bishops are in lockstep with the Vatican on the duty owed to immigrants even if they disagree on other issues. Vice-President J.D. Vance was very isolated in his effort to provide a Catholic doctrinal defense of his administration’s mass-deportation effort. And Francis, near the end of his earthly journey, pretty much handed Vance’s ass to him in an exchange on the subject.
As Trump’s armed and masked agents begin assaulting Pope Leo’s home town of Chicago in search of brown people to terrorize or deport, they might want to keep in mind the Vatican is watching and isn’t particularly afraid of MAGA.
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Ed Kilgore
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Pope Leo urges U.S. bishops to speak about Trump’s immigration crackdown after being shown migrants’ letters
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The Texas bishop on the front lines of the U.S. immigration crackdown met Wednesday with Pope Leo XIV, bringing him a packet of letters from immigrant families “terrorized” by fear that they and their loved ones will be rounded up and deported as the Trump administration’s tactics grow increasingly combative.
El Paso Bishop Mark Seitz also showed Leo a video detailing the plight of migrants, and told The Associated Press afterward that Leo vowed to “stand with” them and the Catholic leaders who are trying to help them.
“He had a few words for us, thanking us for our commitment to the immigrant peoples and also saying that he hopes that the bishops’ conference will speak to this issue,” said Seitz, chair of the migration committee of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Leo, who was born in Chicago and is also a citizen of Peru, hasn’t spoken much about U.S. politics since being named the leader of the Catholic Church, but recently pointed out what he sees as contradictions in debates around abortion, the death penalty and immigration.
“Someone who says ‘I’m against abortion but says I am in favor of the death penalty’ is not really pro-life,” he said earlier this month. “Someone who says that ‘I’m against abortion, but I’m in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States,’ I don’t know if that’s pro-life.”
Catholic leaders in the U.S. have denounced the Trump administration’s crackdown, which has split up families, incited fears and upended life in American churches and schools that serve migrant communities. The administration has defended the crackdown as safeguarding public safety and national security.
“We don’t want to get into the political fray, we’re not politicians, but we need to teach the faith,” and especially the Gospel message recognizing the inherent dignity of all God’s children, and to care for the poor and welcome the stranger, Seitz said.
“They’re terrorized. And it is a fear that has a long-term impact on people, on their lives,” he said.
The letters and video Seitz brought to Leo detail the fear that even legal migrants are facing every day. U.S. citizens, immigrants with legal status and children have been among those detained in increasingly brazen and aggressive encounters by federal agents. In Leo’s hometown of Chicago, immigration agents have stormed apartment complexes by helicopter as families slept, deployed chemical agents near a public school and put handcuffs on a city official at a hospital.
“They can’t go out. They are afraid to shop, to go to church and so they stay home,” wrote Maria in one of the letters delivered to Leo. Originally from Guatemala, she has lived in San Francisco for a quarter-century and qualified for asylum years ago, but has relatives in the U.S. who are not legal.
“The pope needs to talk to Trump and ask Trump to think about what he’s doing to immigrants,” she wrote. “The pope needs to plead with Trump and Trump needs to listen to him. Trump has to change what he’s doing.”
Just before he died, Pope Francis strongly rebuked the Trump administration’s plans for mass deportations, warning that the forceful removal of people purely because of their illegal status deprives them of their inherent dignity.
History’s first U.S. pope has followed in Francis’ line. Last weekend, Leo celebrated a special Holy Year Mass for migrants, denouncing the “coldness of indifference” and the “stigma of discrimination” that migrants desperate to flee violence and suffering often face. Asked by reporters this week about the crackdown in Chicago, Leo declined to comment.
Prior to becoming pope, Leo, or then-Cardinal Robert Prevost, often shared posts on social media that were critical of the Trump administration’s stances on immigration.
On Wednesday, Leo was running late for the audience with Seitz and the delegation of around a dozen people, including members of the Hope Border Institute, an advocacy group formed in partnership with the El Paso diocese. The delegation members assured Leo that they would stand with him as they chatted in a Vatican reception room.
“Later on in the meeting he said, ‘I will stand with you,’ so it was a beautiful little exchange,” said Seitz.
There are rumors in the Vatican that the pope may be considering a trip to the United States as early as next year, when the United States celebrates the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. President Trump has invited him.
Francis famously celebrated Mass on the Mexican side of the U.S.-Mexico border in 2016, in Ciudad Juarez, with the liturgy beamed live into a stadium across the border in El Paso.
Seitz was noncommittal when asked if Leo might visit the U.S. side of the border.
“Well, you know he’d be welcome,” he said.
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Pope Leo XIV declares 15-year-old computer whiz, known as ‘God’s influencer,’ a saint
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Pope Leo XIV declared a 15-year-old computer whiz the Catholic Church’s first millennial saint Sunday, giving the next generation of Catholics a relatable role model who used technology to spread the faith and earn the nickname “God’s influencer.”Leo canonized Carlo Acutis, who died in 2006, during an open-air Mass in St. Peter’s Square that was attended by tens of thousands of people, many of them millennials and couples with young children. During the first saint-making Mass of his pontificate, Leo also canonized another popular Italian figure who died young, Pier Giorgio Frassati.The Vatican said 36 cardinals, 270 bishops and hundreds of priests had signed up to celebrate the Mass along with Leo in a sign of the saints’ enormous appeal to the hierarchy and ordinary faithful alike.Both ceremonies had been scheduled for earlier this year, but were postponed following Pope Francis’ death in April. Francis had fervently pushed the sainthood case forward, convinced that the church needed someone like him to attract young Catholics to the faith while addressing the promises and perils of the digital age.An hour before the Mass, St. Peter’s Square was already full with pilgrims, many of them young millennial Italians who had found in Acutis a relatable role model.“I learned from different people what his professors, his teachers, said about his joy and the light he carried around him,” said Leopoldo Antimi, a 27-year-old Roman who got to the square early to secure a spot. “So for me personally as an Italian, even on social networks that are used so much, it is important to have him as an influencer.”Acutis was born on May 3, 1991, in London to a wealthy but not particularly observant Catholic family. They moved back to Milan soon after he was born, and he enjoyed a typical, happy childhood, albeit marked by increasingly intense religious devotion.Acutis was particularly interested in computer science and devoured college-level books on programming even as a youngster. He earned the nickname “God’s Influencer,” thanks to his main tech legacy: a multilingual website documenting so-called Eucharistic miracles recognized by the church, a project he completed at a time when the development of such sites was the domain of professionals.Acutis was known to spend hours in prayer before the Eucharist each day. The Catholic hierarchy has been trying to promote the practice of Eucharistic adoration because, according to polls, most Catholics don’t believe Christ is physically present in the Eucharistic hosts.In October 2006, at age 15, Acutis fell ill with what was quickly diagnosed as acute leukemia. Within days, he was dead. He was entombed in Assisi, which is known for its association with another popular saint, St. Francis.In the years since his death, young Catholics have flocked by the millions to Assisi, where they can see the young Acutis through a glass-sided tomb, dressed in jeans, Nike sneakers and a sweatshirt.Acutis has been on the fast track for sainthood, as the hierarchy has seen that he has proven enormously popular with young Catholics, who see in him a relatable, modern-day role model.“It’s like I can maybe not be as great as Carlo may be, but I can be looking after him and be like, ‘What would Carlo do?’” said Leo Kowalsky, an 8th grader at a Chicago school attached to the Blessed Carlo Acutis Parish.Kowalsky said he was particularly excited that his own namesake — Pope Leo — would be canonizing the patron of his school. “It’s kind of all mashed up into one thing, so it is a joy to be a part of,” Kowalsky said in an interview last week.Frassati, the other saint being canonized Sunday, lived from 1901-1925, when he died at age 24 of polio. He was born into a prominent Turin family but is known for his devotion to serving the poor and carrying out acts of charity while spreading his faith to his friends. AP visual journalist Jessie Wardarski contributed from Chicago.
VATICAN CITY —Pope Leo XIV declared a 15-year-old computer whiz the Catholic Church’s first millennial saint Sunday, giving the next generation of Catholics a relatable role model who used technology to spread the faith and earn the nickname “God’s influencer.”
Leo canonized Carlo Acutis, who died in 2006, during an open-air Mass in St. Peter’s Square that was attended by tens of thousands of people, many of them millennials and couples with young children. During the first saint-making Mass of his pontificate, Leo also canonized another popular Italian figure who died young, Pier Giorgio Frassati.
The Vatican said 36 cardinals, 270 bishops and hundreds of priests had signed up to celebrate the Mass along with Leo in a sign of the saints’ enormous appeal to the hierarchy and ordinary faithful alike.
Both ceremonies had been scheduled for earlier this year, but were postponed following Pope Francis’ death in April. Francis had fervently pushed the sainthood case forward, convinced that the church needed someone like him to attract young Catholics to the faith while addressing the promises and perils of the digital age.
An hour before the Mass, St. Peter’s Square was already full with pilgrims, many of them young millennial Italians who had found in Acutis a relatable role model.
“I learned from different people what his professors, his teachers, said about his joy and the light he carried around him,” said Leopoldo Antimi, a 27-year-old Roman who got to the square early to secure a spot. “So for me personally as an Italian, even on social networks that are used so much, it is important to have him as an influencer.”
Acutis was born on May 3, 1991, in London to a wealthy but not particularly observant Catholic family. They moved back to Milan soon after he was born, and he enjoyed a typical, happy childhood, albeit marked by increasingly intense religious devotion.
Acutis was particularly interested in computer science and devoured college-level books on programming even as a youngster. He earned the nickname “God’s Influencer,” thanks to his main tech legacy: a multilingual website documenting so-called Eucharistic miracles recognized by the church, a project he completed at a time when the development of such sites was the domain of professionals.
Acutis was known to spend hours in prayer before the Eucharist each day. The Catholic hierarchy has been trying to promote the practice of Eucharistic adoration because, according to polls, most Catholics don’t believe Christ is physically present in the Eucharistic hosts.
In October 2006, at age 15, Acutis fell ill with what was quickly diagnosed as acute leukemia. Within days, he was dead. He was entombed in Assisi, which is known for its association with another popular saint, St. Francis.
In the years since his death, young Catholics have flocked by the millions to Assisi, where they can see the young Acutis through a glass-sided tomb, dressed in jeans, Nike sneakers and a sweatshirt.
Acutis has been on the fast track for sainthood, as the hierarchy has seen that he has proven enormously popular with young Catholics, who see in him a relatable, modern-day role model.
“It’s like I can maybe not be as great as Carlo may be, but I can be looking after him and be like, ‘What would Carlo do?’” said Leo Kowalsky, an 8th grader at a Chicago school attached to the Blessed Carlo Acutis Parish.
Kowalsky said he was particularly excited that his own namesake — Pope Leo — would be canonizing the patron of his school. “It’s kind of all mashed up into one thing, so it is a joy to be a part of,” Kowalsky said in an interview last week.
Frassati, the other saint being canonized Sunday, lived from 1901-1925, when he died at age 24 of polio. He was born into a prominent Turin family but is known for his devotion to serving the poor and carrying out acts of charity while spreading his faith to his friends.
AP visual journalist Jessie Wardarski contributed from Chicago.
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Pope Leo XIV feeds fish as he opens Vatican’s ambitious model of sustainable farming and education
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Pope Leo XIV fed fish, petted horses and visited organic vineyards Friday as he inaugurated the Vatican’s ambitious project to turn Pope Francis’ preaching about caring for the environment into practice.Leo formally opened Borgo Laudato Si, a 55-acre utopian experiment in sustainable farming, vocational training and environmental education located on the grounds of the papal summer retreat in Castel Gandolfo. The Vatican hopes the center, open to student groups, CEOs and others, will be a model of ecological stewardship, education and spirituality for the Catholic Church and beyond.Leo travelled by helicopter to Castel Gandolfo and then zoomed around the estate’s cypress-lined gardens in an electric golf cart to reach the center, which is named for Francis’ landmark 2015 encyclical “Laudato Si,” or Praised Be. The document, which inspired an entire church movement, cast care for the planet as an urgent and existential moral concern that was inherently tied to questions of human dignity and justice, especially for the poor.Leo has strongly reaffirmed Francis’ focus on the need to care for God’s creation, and celebrated the first “green” Mass in the estate’s gardens earlier this summer, using a new set of prayers inspired by the encyclical that specifically invoke prayers for creation. On Friday, some 10 years after Laudato Si was published, Leo presided over a liturgy to bless the new center after touring its gardens, fishpond, farm, and classrooms.Leo recalled that according to the Bible, human beings have a special place in the act of creation, created in the “image and likeness of God.”“But this privilege comes with a great responsibility: that of caring for all other creatures, in accordance with the creator’s plan,” he said. “Care for creation, therefore, represents a true vocation for every human being, a commitment to be carried out within creation itself, without ever forgetting that we are creatures among creatures, and not creators.”A greenhouse inspired by St. Peter’s SquareLeo spoke from the heart of the project: a huge greenhouse in the same curved, embracing shape as the colonnade of St. Peter’s Square that faces a 10-room educational facility and dining hall. Once it’s up and running, visiting groups can come for an afternoon school trip to learn about organic farming, or a weekslong course on regenerative agriculture.The center aims to accomplish many of the goals of the environmental cause. Solar panels provide all the power the facility needs, plastics are banned, and recycling and composting systems used to reach zero-waste. Officials say water will be conserved and maximized via “smart irrigation” systems that use artificial intelligence to determine plants’ needs, along with rainwater harvesting and the installation of wastewater treatment and reuse systems.There is a social component as well. The Vatican’s first-ever vocational school on the grounds will aim to provide on-site training in sustainable gardening, organic winemaking, and olive harvesting to offer new job opportunities for particularly vulnerable groups: victims of domestic violence, refugees, recovering addicts, and rehabilitated prisoners.The products made will be sold on-site, with profits reinvested in the educational center: Laudato Si wine, organic olive oil, herbal teas from the farm’s aromatic garden, and cheese made from its 60 dairy cows, continuing a tradition of agricultural production that for centuries has subsidized monasteries and convents.While school groups are a core target audience, organizers also want to invite CEOs and professionals for executive education seminars, to sensitize the world of business to the need for sustainable economic growth.Officials declined to discuss the financing of the project, other than to say an undisclosed number of partners had invested in it and that confidential business plans precluded the Vatican from releasing further information.
Pope Leo XIV fed fish, petted horses and visited organic vineyards Friday as he inaugurated the Vatican’s ambitious project to turn Pope Francis’ preaching about caring for the environment into practice.
Leo formally opened Borgo Laudato Si, a 55-acre utopian experiment in sustainable farming, vocational training and environmental education located on the grounds of the papal summer retreat in Castel Gandolfo. The Vatican hopes the center, open to student groups, CEOs and others, will be a model of ecological stewardship, education and spirituality for the Catholic Church and beyond.
Leo travelled by helicopter to Castel Gandolfo and then zoomed around the estate’s cypress-lined gardens in an electric golf cart to reach the center, which is named for Francis’ landmark 2015 encyclical “Laudato Si,” or Praised Be. The document, which inspired an entire church movement, cast care for the planet as an urgent and existential moral concern that was inherently tied to questions of human dignity and justice, especially for the poor.
Leo has strongly reaffirmed Francis’ focus on the need to care for God’s creation, and celebrated the first “green” Mass in the estate’s gardens earlier this summer, using a new set of prayers inspired by the encyclical that specifically invoke prayers for creation. On Friday, some 10 years after Laudato Si was published, Leo presided over a liturgy to bless the new center after touring its gardens, fishpond, farm, and classrooms.
Leo recalled that according to the Bible, human beings have a special place in the act of creation, created in the “image and likeness of God.”
“But this privilege comes with a great responsibility: that of caring for all other creatures, in accordance with the creator’s plan,” he said. “Care for creation, therefore, represents a true vocation for every human being, a commitment to be carried out within creation itself, without ever forgetting that we are creatures among creatures, and not creators.”
A greenhouse inspired by St. Peter’s Square
Leo spoke from the heart of the project: a huge greenhouse in the same curved, embracing shape as the colonnade of St. Peter’s Square that faces a 10-room educational facility and dining hall. Once it’s up and running, visiting groups can come for an afternoon school trip to learn about organic farming, or a weekslong course on regenerative agriculture.
The center aims to accomplish many of the goals of the environmental cause. Solar panels provide all the power the facility needs, plastics are banned, and recycling and composting systems used to reach zero-waste. Officials say water will be conserved and maximized via “smart irrigation” systems that use artificial intelligence to determine plants’ needs, along with rainwater harvesting and the installation of wastewater treatment and reuse systems.
There is a social component as well. The Vatican’s first-ever vocational school on the grounds will aim to provide on-site training in sustainable gardening, organic winemaking, and olive harvesting to offer new job opportunities for particularly vulnerable groups: victims of domestic violence, refugees, recovering addicts, and rehabilitated prisoners.
The products made will be sold on-site, with profits reinvested in the educational center: Laudato Si wine, organic olive oil, herbal teas from the farm’s aromatic garden, and cheese made from its 60 dairy cows, continuing a tradition of agricultural production that for centuries has subsidized monasteries and convents.
While school groups are a core target audience, organizers also want to invite CEOs and professionals for executive education seminars, to sensitize the world of business to the need for sustainable economic growth.
Officials declined to discuss the financing of the project, other than to say an undisclosed number of partners had invested in it and that confidential business plans precluded the Vatican from releasing further information.
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Pope Francis’ Catholic church reform process ends without giving more equity to women
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Pope Francis’ yearslong process to reform the Catholic Church closed Saturday with recommendations that fell short of giving women more equity as hoped but reflected the pope’s aims for a church that at least listens more to its followers.
In a significant move, the pope said he would not issue a teaching document from the recommendations, which called for women to be allowed all opportunities that Church law already provides while leaving open the contentious question of allowing women to be ordained as deacons.
As a result, it remains unclear what if any authority or impact the synod’s final recommendations will have, given the purpose of the exercise was to provide the pope with specific proposals on reform.
“In this time of war, we must be witnesses to peace” and give an example of living with differences, the pope said in explaining his decision.
TIZIANA FABI/AFP via Getty Images
Francis said he would continue to listen to the bishops’ counsel, adding “this is not a classic way of endlessly delaying decisions.”
Deacons perform many of the same functions as priests, such as presiding over baptisms, weddings and funerals, but they cannot celebrate Mass. Advocates say allowing women to be deacons would help offset the shortage of priests. Opponents say it would signal the start of a slippery slope toward ordaining women to the all-male priesthood that Francis has repeatedly reaffirmed.
Earlier this week, the Vatican’s top doctrinal officer, Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernandez, told the extraordinary assembly of 368 bishops and laypeople that Francis had said the moment “is not ripe” for allowing the ordination of women as deacons. He did not respond directly to a request to define what would determine “ripeness” for a greater role for women.
The multi-year synod process had sparked great hopes for change, especially for women, who have long complained that they are treated as second-class citizens in the church. Women are barred from the church’s highest ministerial positions, yet do the lion’s share of the work running Catholic hospitals and schools and passing the faith onto future generations.
Speaking to the synod on Thursday, Fernandez explained that a special working group would continue beyond the closing of the meeting, but that its focus would be on discussing the role of women in the church — not in the diaconate, or the office of deacon. He added that while working with women in previous pastoral roles, “most did not ask for or want the diaconate, which would be cumbersome for their lay work.”
The meeting asked for “full implementation of all the opportunities already provided for in Canon Law with regard to the role of women, particularly in those places where they remain under-explored.” It leaves open “the question of women’s access to diaconal ministry.”
TIZIANA FABI/AFP via Getty Images
It was the most contested paragraph of the final document, with 258 votes for and 97 against. It was not clear if the “no” votes were because the language went too far or not far enough.
The outcome is a disappointment for Catholics who have been campaigning for recognition that women share a spiritual calling that is no different than a man’s. They also noted that despite the inclusion of women in the synodal process, the working group that is guiding discussions on women’s role is being run by the Roman curia, operating outside the synod.
“I think the final document will be received with much disappointment and frustration by many women around the world who are hoping for concrete changes,” said Kate McElwee, the executive director of the Women’s Ordination Conference.
While she acknowledged a “cultural shift,” she said “the pace of that shift is perhaps too slow for many women.”
The first phase of the synod process ended last year by concluding it was “urgent” to guarantee fuller participation by women in church governance positions, and calling for theological and pastoral research to continue about allowing women to be deacons.
If before the synod the idea of allowing women to be deacons was a fringe proposal pushed by Western progressives, the idea gained attention during the debate. It became something of a litmus test of how far the church was going to go, or not, to address demands of women for greater equality and representation in the church’s highest ranks.
Francis, had other ideas, insisting that ordaining women would just “clericalize” them and that there were plenty of other ways to empower women in the church, even leading Catholic communities, without resorting to ordination.
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Tone deaf and color blind? Catholic Church struggles to keep accused abusers out of religious art
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BRUSSELS (AP) — Little brings more heavenly bliss to the faithful or otherworldly wonder to casual visitors than ethereal hymns cascading amid the columns of Catholic cathedrals. That is, unless the composer is a known molester or someone accused of sexual abuse.
A few days before the highlight of Pope Francis’ visit to Belgium — a Mass at the biggest stadium in Brussels — the specially selected choir of 120 was rehearsing a brand-new closing hymn when it became known that the composer was a priest accused of molesting young women.
The hymn was hastily removed from the order of service and replaced with another composition but it was too late to reprint the official Magnificat booklet for the Mass because of the number of copies required. The name of the alleged abuser, who died two weeks ago, is right there at the bottom of page 52, next to a request for donations, with a bank account number and a QR code.
It was the latest controversy in the Belgian church’s decades-long struggle to come to terms with an appalling history of sex abuse and cover-ups by its priests and clergy — a legacy Francis will confront in person when he meets with survivors of the abuse during his visit.
“I pointed it out to them,” said the Rev. Rik Deville, a retired priest who has been a torchbearer for survivors of church abuse for three decades. “What happened with the hymn is only a symptom of a much wider problem. They still cannot deal with the issue,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press.
For over two decades, Belgium has been facing a continual cascade of abuse reports that officially total several hundred known cases but which, advocates say, are only the tip of the iceberg: Many of the victims and perpetrators have died, or the alleged crimes have exceeded their statute of limitations.
Deville said victims in villages come face to face with such issues on a weekly basis. The Sunday Mass scandal only started to roll early this week when an abuse victim pointed out to a local bishop that he had warmly eulogized the recently deceased priest-composer who had, in fact, been an abuser.
As a result, the Bishop of Limburg, Patrick Hoogmartens, announced he wouldn’t take part in celebratory papal events. It set off the chain of events leading to the change in the Mass program.
“It is only now because it is an international event that something is done about it,” said Deville. “But such things happen on a weekly basis in parishes across the nation that victims are confronted like that. And then nothing is done about it.”
Church authorities said the hymns were chosen in coordination with the musicians who were unaware of the case, which only came to public attention after the recent death of the priest. Hundreds of churches across Belgium still have hymnbooks with his works.
Archbishop Luc Terlinden promised the church would look into it as soon as the Pope leaves.
“Every Sunday in every parish his songs are sung. So it is a wider problem. And I want to look into this as of Monday to see what we will do in the future with our policy on culprits, on facts out of respect for the victims,” Terlinden told VRT network.
Debates over what to do with art, be it music or paintings, when the artist has engaged in problematic or even criminal behavior, have confronted the church and society at large for centuries, long before “cancel culture” became a buzzword.
Few people argue that Caravaggio’s religious masterpieces should be destroyed or taken down because of his criminal life: The man he killed is dead, as is he.
But in Los Angeles four years ago, the archdiocese banned the music of Catholic composer David Haas amid an investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct, allegations Haas strenuously denied.
And more recently, the mosaics of one of the Catholic Church’s most acclaimed contemporary artists, the Rev. Marko Rupnik, have come under scrutiny.
Rupnik’s Jesuit religious order expelled him in 2023 after more than two dozen women accused him of spiritual, psychological and sexual abuses, some while he was creating the artwork. Francis reopened a church investigation amid suspicions that Rupnik had escaped punishment in Francis’ Jesuit-friendly Vatican.
Rupnik hasn’t responded publicly to the allegations, but his art studio has defended him and denounced what it has called a media “lynching.”
The issue about what to do with his artwork is not minor, since Rupnik’s mosaics decorate the facades and altars of some of the most-visited basilicas and churches around the world, including at Lourdes, France; in Fatima, Portugal and even in the Vatican’s apostolic palace.
So far, the bishop of Lourdes decided to keep the Rupnik mosaics — for now — because there was no consensus within a committee of experts he formed about what to do with them. The Knights of Columbus religious fraternity decided this summer to cover the mosaics at its shrine in Washington, and chapel in Connecticut.
But earlier this year, the head of the Vatican’s communications department created an uproar when he defended the continued use of images of Rupnik’s mosaics on the Vatican’s own news portal, Vatican News, even as a canonical investigation is underway at the Vatican’s sex crimes office.
He argued, as have others, that one must separate the art from the artist.
That argument did not sit well with the pope’s top adviser on child protection and fighting clergy abuse, Cardinal Sean O’Malley. He penned a letter to the heads of all Vatican offices in June urging them to refrain from displaying Rupnik’s artwork as a gesture to abuse victims.
“Pastoral prudence would prevent displaying artwork in a way that could imply either exoneration or a subtle defense,” he wrote in June. “We must avoid sending a message that the Holy See is oblivious to the psychological distress that so many are suffering.”
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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
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Belgium’s appalling abuse legacy clouds pope’s trip as survivors pen letter seeking reparations
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VATICAN CITY (AP) — Fresh off a four-nation tour of Asia, where he saw record-setting crowds and vibrant church communities, Pope Francis travels to Belgium this week as the once-staunchly Catholic country again confronts its appalling legacy of clergy sex abuse and institutional cover-up.
He will receive a sobering welcome: Abuse survivors have penned an open letter to Francis, asking him to launch a universal system of church reparations and assume responsibility for the wreckage that abuse has wrought on their lives.
The open letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press, will be hand delivered to Francis when he meets with 15 survivors during his four-day visit starting Thursday, according to the Rev. Rik Deville, who has been advocating on behalf of abuse survivors for over a quarter-century.
Another unpleasant welcome has come from Belgium’s parliament, which spent the past year hearing victims recount harrowing stories of predator priests and this week announced a follow-on investigation. The scope? How Belgian judicial and law enforcement authorities bungled a massive 2010 criminal investigation into the church’s sex crimes.
And in a cascade of events underscoring how easily the scandals still surface, one bishop first had to withdraw himself from attending the pope’s events because he had recently warmly eulogized a priest accused of involvement in an abuse case. And late Wednesday, the pope’s main Mass had to be changed because the final hymn was composed by an alleged abuser.
None of this was foreseen when Belgian King Philippe and Queen Mathilde met with Francis in the Vatican Apostolic Palace on Sept. 14, 2023 and invited him to visit to commemorate the 600th anniversary of the founding of Belgium’s two Catholic universities.
That anniversary is technically the reason for Francis’ trip, which also includes a stopover in Luxembourg on Thursday and a Mass on Sunday in Brussels to beatify a 17th century mystic nun.
And in Belgium, Francis will speak about two of his pet priorities during visits to the French and Flemish campuses of the Leuven university: Immigration and climate, according to Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni.
But Bruni acknowledged in a rare preview that Francis will certainly raise Belgium’s abuse record.
“Clearly the pope is aware of the difficulty, and that for years there has been suffering in Belgium, and certainly we can expect a reference in this sense,” Bruni said.
Revelations of Belgium’s horrific abuse scandal have dribbled out in bits over a quarter-century, punctuated by the bombshell year in 2010, when the country’s longest-serving bishop, Bruges Bishop Roger Vangheluwe, was allowed to resign without punishment, after admitting he had sexually abused his nephew for 13 years.
Two months later, Belgian police staged what were then unprecedented raids on Belgian church offices, the home of the country’s recently retired Archbishop Godfried Danneels and even the crypt of a prelate — a violation the Vatican decried at the time as “deplorable.”
Danneels, a longtime friend of Francis, was caught on tape trying to persuade Vangheluwe’s nephew to keep quiet until the bishop retired. And finally, in September 2010, the church released a 200-page report compiled by child psychiatrist Peter Adriaenssens who said 507 people had come forward with stories of being molested by priests, including when they were as young as two. He identified at least 13 suicides by victims and attempts by six more.
And despite everything that was known and already in the public domain, the scandal reared its head in a shocking new way last year, when a four-episode Flemish documentary, “Godvergeten” (Godforsaken) aired on public broadcaster VRT in the weeks surrounding the royal visit to the Vatican.
For the first time, Belgian victims told their stories on camera one after another, showing Flemish viewers in their living rooms the scope of the scandal in their community, the depravity of the crimes and their systematic cover-up by the Catholic hierarchy.
“We brought nothing new. We just put it all together. We brought the voices together,” said Ingrid Schildermans, the researcher and filmmaker behind Godvergeten. “We put all the things that happened on a timeline, so that they couldn’t say ‘It’s one rotten apple.’”
Amid the public outrage that ensued, both a Flanders parliamentary committee and Belgium’s federal parliament opened official inquests and heard months of testimony from victims, experts and the Catholic hierarchy.
Their testimonies cast new attention on a scandal that had already been blamed for the steep decline in the Catholic Church over a generation in Belgium, where church authorities don’t even publish statistics of weekly Mass attendance because the monthly rate is already in the single digits.
By March, with a papal visit already announced, Francis finally took action and defrocked Vangheluwe, 14 years after he admitted to molesting his nephew. The laicization was seen as a clear bid by the Vatican to tamp down the outrage and remove an obvious problem clouding Francis’ visit.
All of which has left a rather bitter taste among the Belgian public ahead of Francis’ visit, not least because Francis remained tight with Danneels even after his cover-up was exposed, and again showed ignorance of Belgium’s problem when he named the retired bishop of Ghent a cardinal in 2022. The bishop declined the honor because of his poor record dealing with abuse.
The visit has also in some cases retraumatized victims, some of whom had sought to meet with the pope only to be told by church authorities they didn’t make the cut, said Schildermans.
It’s a far different atmosphere than the rapturous welcome Francis received in Asia less than two weeks ago and far removed from the excitement that surrounded St. John Paul II when he toured Belgium in 1985.
Even De Standaard, one of Belgium’s main dailies which long was seen as the most Catholic, had a big weekend takeout under the headline “How revolutionary is Pope Francis really?” The dead giveaway: Not really.
Tuesday brought further evidence of how Belgium’s dreadful record of abuse, cover-up and insensitivity to victims had clouded Francis’ visit.
Bishop Patrick Hoogmartens of northern Limburg announced he wouldn’t take part in celebratory papal events, after revelations that he had just warmly eulogized a priest who was known to have been involved in an abuse case.
“I didn’t make the assessment that it would hurt an abuse victim from the 1970s,” he told TV Limburg.
Late Wednesday, a spokesman for the church authorities, Geert De Kerpel, confirmed a story by VRT network that the choir will have to practice a new closing hymn, since otherwise the pope would have been listening to the melody of a composer-priest who was an alleged abuser.
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Casert reported from Brussels.
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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
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Pope Francis Thinks Americans Should Choose The “Lesser of Two Evils,” Critiques Trump and Harris
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Pope Francis weighed in on Americans’ upcoming choice between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump on Friday, critiquing both candidates as “against life” and urging Catholic voters to choose the “lesser of two evils.”
“One must choose the lesser of two evils. Who is the lesser of two evils? That lady or that gentleman? I don’t know,” Francis told reporters while on the papal plane.
Francis, who has been more openly political on some topics than his predecessors, criticized Trump’s handling of immigration and Harris’s support for accessing abortion services.
“To send migrants away, to leave them wherever you want, to leave them … it’s something terrible, there is evil there. To send away a child from the womb of the mother is an assassination, because there is life. We must speak about these things clearly,” he said.
This isn’t the first time the pope has opined on issues like these during his 11-year tenure.
Back in 2016, when Trump was running his first presidential campaign on building a wall at the southwestern border, Francis said of the GOP-front runner, “A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian. This is not the gospel.”
At the time, Trump immediately bit back, saying, “If and when the Vatican is attacked by ISIS, which, as everyone knows, is ISIS’s ultimate trophy, I can promise you that the pope would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been president.”
In 2021, in a rare public rift between the Vatican and American bishops, the pope, via the institution, warned conservative American bishops to “hit the brakes on their push to deny communion to politicians supportive of abortion rights,” the New York Times reported. The Vatican’s response came as some leading American bishops were questioning whether President Joe Biden ought to be served communion because he endorses some reproductive freedom measures. Biden is the first Roman Catholic to occupy the Oval Office in 60 years—since John F. Kennedy.
Francis, who has called abortion a “plague” and a “crime” akin to “mafia” behavior, said at the time that communion is “not the reward of saints, but the bread of sinners.”
The pope has also critiqued couples who choose to have pets instead of children—echoing Republican vice presidential candidate and new Catholic JD Vance’s “childless cat ladies” remarks—saying that “denial” of fatherhood or motherhood “takes away our humanity.”
In October of 2023, hundreds of delegates from around the world flocked to the Vatican, beginning a monthlong meeting as part of Pope Francis’ “Synod on Synodality”—a gathering to discuss the church’s global aims and plans. For the first time ever, women delegates were allowed to join in.
A couple of months later, in December of last year, Francis released new guidance on same-sex couples who are Catholic, saying that their unions can receive formal blessings—so long as they aren’t mistaken for marriages. Queer couples, the letter made clear, cannot invoke “any clothing, gestures, or words that are proper to a wedding.”
Some of the pope’s positions on women and queerness—while far from revolutionary—have upset a growing movement of a new kind of right-wing American Catholic.
Milo Yiannopoulos, the former Breitbart editor who incited a racist campaign against the comedian Leslie Jones and was banned from Twitter for it in 2016, has called to “make the Vatican straight again” and “make America homophobic again.” (This is the same guy who says he set up the meeting between Trump and white nationalist Nick Fuentes in 2022.)
According to Pew, 20% of US adults describe themselves as Catholics and are generally older than the American average—and three-quarters of this group reportedly view Francis favorably. About six in ten Catholics say abortion should be legal, with 39% saying it should be legal in most cases and only 11% holding that it should be illegal in all cases.
In the 2020 election, 52% of Catholic voters chose Biden, to Trump’s 47%.
Despite criticizing the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates, the leader of the Holy See said Catholics should vote.
“Not voting is ugly,” the 87-year-old pontiff said. “It is not good. You must vote.”
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Katie Herchenroeder
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Pope Francis embarks on his longest trip yet
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He is 87 years old and in recent years has battled health difficulties and begun using a wheelchair. But Pope Francis is embarking on the longest trip of his pontificate.On Monday, the pontiff starts a marathon 12-day visit of four countries in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific: Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Timor Leste and Singapore. It is one of the longest foreign trips any pope has embarked on and marks the furthest geographical distance (32,814 kilometers or about 20,000 miles ) thatFrancis has travelled since his 2013 election.Video above: Pope Francis greets artists and inmates at Venice BiennaleThe landmark visit will allow this pope to highlight key themes of his pontificate, including inter-religious dialogue and protection of the environment.The trip also underscores a significant shift taking place inside the Catholic Church: its tilt to Asia.During his pontificate, Francis’ 44 previous foreign visits have included South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, Myanmar and Bangladesh. He has also appointed cardinals from the Philippines (Luis Antonio Tagle) and South Korea (Lazarus You Heung-sik) to senior positions in the church’s central administration.The Catholic Church is no longer a Eurocentric or western institution but one where churches in Asia, Africa and Latin America have a growing voice. Francis, who as a young man wanted to be a missionary in Japan, has spoken favorably about male and female church leaders coming from countries outside of Europe.”Asia has always been among Francis’ priorities,” Father Antonio Spadaro, a Vatican official and close adviser to the pope, told CNN.Catholics in Asia are often in the minority, although they frequently punch above their weight when it comes to running schools and charitable works.”Thepope is interested not so much in the number of Catholics as the vibrancy,”said Spadaro, who will be travelling with Francis. In many Asian countries, the Jesuit priest explained, the church seeks to act as a “leaven”in trying to serve the “common good,” while Asia “represents the future at this time in the world”.Interfaith declarationOften a minority, the churches in Asia are focused on dialogue with other religions, something that will be a central theme of the trip.While in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim majority country, the pope will take part in a meeting with religious leaders at the Istiqlal Mosque in Jakarta, the largest in Southeast Asia. Afterwards, Francis will sign an interfaith declaration with the grand imam of Indonesia and is also expected to visit an underpass linking the mosque and the Catholic cathedral next door known as the “tunnel of friendship.””Indonesia and Singapore are countries where the need to negotiate a harmonious co-existence with other religions and with the wider community is an ongoing concern,” Christina Kheng, a Catholic theologian from Singapore who teaches at the East Asian Pastoral Institute, told CNN. “What strands out is the dialogue of daily life that Catholics have with people of all faiths.””The pulse of the churches here is quite different from say, those in Europe or US where issues like polarization, secularization and abuse have dominated the headlines,” she added.Spadaro said the “pope wants to give a signal about dialogue with Islam,” and points out that in Timor Leste, the government has adopted a landmark human fraternity document — signed by Francis and the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb – as a national text.Timor Leste is unusual for Asia as 97% the population identifies as Catholic, the highest proportion outside of the Vatican City State.Michel Chambon, who works at the National University of Singapore and is an expert on Asian Catholicism, said the pope’s visit will help build relations and mutual understanding with these countries.”The key thing is that the Vatican is not a European state, it is much more than that,” he said.A giant in the backgroundMeanwhile, the Vatican’s relationship with China, an officially atheist state where religious practice is heavily curtailed by the government, will be in the background to this visit with Francis pushing ahead with trying to rebuild diplomatic relations with Beijing.Catholicism is one of five state-recognized faiths in China. But, state-sanctioned Catholic churches were, for decades, run by bishops appointed by Beijing, not the Holy See, until the two sides reached an agreement in 2018. Details of the accord have never been made public and many within China’s underground congregations who have remained loyal to Rome and long faced persecution fear being abandoned.Although the Holy See-China agreement has faced criticism, the Vatican says the deal is already paying off and hopes to open a permanent office in China. The pope has repeatedly said he would like to visit the country.Supporters of the patient diplomacy strategy point to the Holy See’s improved relationship with another Communist-governed country: Vietnam. After years of talks, the pope was able to appoint the first resident ambassador in Hanoi at the end of last year.Francis’ trip will also see him in a part of the world at risk of rising sea levels and natural disasters, with Papua New Guinea a country on the front line of the climate crisis. During his pontificate, the pope has insisted that the protection of the planet is a pressing moral issue, and his trip to the pacific is a chance once again to urge world leaders to take stronger action.Making this lengthy trip now, after more than 11 years as pope, sends a message to those, including at senior levels in the church, hoping that this pontificate is running out of steam. Spadaro says it underlines the “liveliness of the pontificate at this moment.”Francis will travel, as normal, with a doctor and two nurses. There are risks with making such a long and gruelling visit at his age. But this is a pope willing to take risks and pull off surprises. And he is determined to make one of the most ambitious trips of his pontificate.
CNN —He is 87 years old and in recent years has battled health difficulties and begun using a wheelchair. But Pope Francis is embarking on the longest trip of his pontificate.
On Monday, the pontiff starts a marathon 12-day visit of four countries in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific: Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Timor Leste and Singapore. It is one of the longest foreign trips any pope has embarked on and marks the furthest geographical distance (32,814 kilometers or about 20,000 miles ) thatFrancis has travelled since his 2013 election.
Video above: Pope Francis greets artists and inmates at Venice Biennale
The landmark visit will allow this pope to highlight key themes of his pontificate, including inter-religious dialogue and protection of the environment.
The trip also underscores a significant shift taking place inside the Catholic Church: its tilt to Asia.
During his pontificate, Francis’ 44 previous foreign visits have included South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, Myanmar and Bangladesh. He has also appointed cardinals from the Philippines (Luis Antonio Tagle) and South Korea (Lazarus You Heung-sik) to senior positions in the church’s central administration.
The Catholic Church is no longer a Eurocentric or western institution but one where churches in Asia, Africa and Latin America have a growing voice. Francis, who as a young man wanted to be a missionary in Japan, has spoken favorably about male and female church leaders coming from countries outside of Europe.
“Asia has always been among Francis’ priorities,” Father Antonio Spadaro, a Vatican official and close adviser to the pope, told CNN.
Catholics in Asia are often in the minority, although they frequently punch above their weight when it comes to running schools and charitable works.
“Thepope is interested not so much in the number of Catholics as the vibrancy,”said Spadaro, who will be travelling with Francis. In many Asian countries, the Jesuit priest explained, the church seeks to act as a “leaven”in trying to serve the “common good,” while Asia “represents the future at this time in the world”.
Interfaith declaration
Often a minority, the churches in Asia are focused on dialogue with other religions, something that will be a central theme of the trip.
While in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim majority country, the pope will take part in a meeting with religious leaders at the Istiqlal Mosque in Jakarta, the largest in Southeast Asia. Afterwards, Francis will sign an interfaith declaration with the grand imam of Indonesia and is also expected to visit an underpass linking the mosque and the Catholic cathedral next door known as the “tunnel of friendship.”
“Indonesia and Singapore are countries where the need to negotiate a harmonious co-existence with other religions and with the wider community is an ongoing concern,” Christina Kheng, a Catholic theologian from Singapore who teaches at the East Asian Pastoral Institute, told CNN. “What strands out is the dialogue of daily life that Catholics have with people of all faiths.”
“The pulse of the churches here is quite different from say, those in Europe or US where issues like polarization, secularization and abuse have dominated the headlines,” she added.
Spadaro said the “pope wants to give a signal about dialogue with Islam,” and points out that in Timor Leste, the government has adopted a landmark human fraternity document — signed by Francis and the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb – as a national text.
Timor Leste is unusual for Asia as 97% the population identifies as Catholic, the highest proportion outside of the Vatican City State.
Michel Chambon, who works at the National University of Singapore and is an expert on Asian Catholicism, said the pope’s visit will help build relations and mutual understanding with these countries.
“The key thing is that the Vatican is not a European state, it is much more than that,” he said.
A giant in the background
Meanwhile, the Vatican’s relationship with China, an officially atheist state where religious practice is heavily curtailed by the government, will be in the background to this visit with Francis pushing ahead with trying to rebuild diplomatic relations with Beijing.
Catholicism is one of five state-recognized faiths in China. But, state-sanctioned Catholic churches were, for decades, run by bishops appointed by Beijing, not the Holy See, until the two sides reached an agreement in 2018. Details of the accord have never been made public and many within China’s underground congregations who have remained loyal to Rome and long faced persecution fear being abandoned.
Although the Holy See-China agreement has faced criticism, the Vatican says the deal is already paying off and hopes to open a permanent office in China. The pope has repeatedly said he would like to visit the country.
Supporters of the patient diplomacy strategy point to the Holy See’s improved relationship with another Communist-governed country: Vietnam. After years of talks, the pope was able to appoint the first resident ambassador in Hanoi at the end of last year.
Francis’ trip will also see him in a part of the world at risk of rising sea levels and natural disasters, with Papua New Guinea a country on the front line of the climate crisis. During his pontificate, the pope has insisted that the protection of the planet is a pressing moral issue, and his trip to the pacific is a chance once again to urge world leaders to take stronger action.
Making this lengthy trip now, after more than 11 years as pope, sends a message to those, including at senior levels in the church, hoping that this pontificate is running out of steam. Spadaro says it underlines the “liveliness of the pontificate at this moment.”
Francis will travel, as normal, with a doctor and two nurses. There are risks with making such a long and gruelling visit at his age. But this is a pope willing to take risks and pull off surprises. And he is determined to make one of the most ambitious trips of his pontificate.
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Pope Francis Approves First Millennial Saint
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Carlo Acutis, a devout 15-year-old who died of leukemia in 2006 and has been nicknamed “God’s influencer” for his popular database cataloging Eucharistic miracles, has been officially recognized by Pope Francis as a saint, becoming the first of the millennial generation to be given the title. What do you think?
“I’m sure he’s dabbing in Heaven right now.”
Ivan Vo, Culture Enthusiast
“The Catholic Church is certainly no stranger to giving undue attention to teenage boys.”
Mateo Randolph, Pool Shark
“Was MrBeast even considered?”
Britany Ryder, Industrial Roofer
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Pope Francis formally approves canonization of first-ever millennial saint, teen Carlo Acutis
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Rome — A 15-year-old Italian web designer is set to become the Catholic Church’s first saint from the millennial generation. On Monday, in a ceremony called an Ordinary Public Consistory, Pope Francis and the cardinals residing in Rome formally approved the canonization of Carlo Acutis, along with 14 others.
No specific date has been set for the canonization of Acutis, who was dubbed “God’s Influencer” for his work spreading Catholicism online, but he’s likely to be proclaimed a saint in 2025.
Monday’s consistory was merely a formality, as Acutis’ cause for sainthood had already been thoroughly examined and approved by the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Causes of the Saints. The initial announcement came in May.
Gregorio Borgia/AP
Acutis was born to wealthy Italian parents in London in 1991, but the family moved to northern Italy shortly after his birth. His family have said he was a pious child, asking at the age of 7 to receive the first communion.
He went on to attend church and receive communion every day. As he grew older, he became interested in computers and the internet, creating a website on which he catalogued church-approved miracles and appearances of the Virgin Mary throughout history.
According to the Vatican, Acutis was “welcoming and caring towards the poorest, and he helped the homeless, the needy, and immigrants with the money he saved from his weekly allowance.”
He reportedly used his first savings to buy a sleeping bag for a homeless man he often met on his way to mass.
Acutis died in October 2006 at the age of 15 in Monza, Italy, of leukemia. Some of the city’s poorest residents, whom Acutis had helped, turned out to pay their respects to the teenager at his funeral.
His body lies in an open tomb in Assisi, in central Italy, wearing blue jeans and Nike sneakers.
Vatican Pool/Getty
“I am happy to die because I lived my life without wasting even a minute of it on anything unpleasing to God,” Acutis was quoted as saying before he died.
Pope Francis declared Acutis “blessed” in October of 2020, after a miracle attributed to him was approved by the church. That miracle was a young boy in Brazil who was healed of a deadly pancreatic disease after he and his mother prayed to a relic of Acutis.
In order to be declared a saint, a second miracle — this one posthumous — needed to be approved. It came in 2022, when a woman prayed at Acutis’ tomb for her daughter, who just six days earlier had fallen from her bicycle in Florence, causing severe head trauma.
She required a craniotomy and had a very low chance of survival, according to doctors. On the day of the mother’s pilgrimage to Acutis’ tomb, the daughter began to breathe spontaneously. Just a few days later, the hemorrhage disappeared completely.
Along with Acutis, the canonizations of 14 other people were approved Monday, including 11 people who were killed in Syria in 1860, during the Syrian Civil War, which saw thousands of Christians killed.
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Pope Francis Issues Apology For Using Slur For Gay Men
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Pope Francis has apologized for using a derogatory term about gay men in a discussion with Italian bishops during which he reaffirmed the Catholic Church’s ban on gay priests, a policy that stands at odds with previous statements that there is room for everyone in the Catholic church. What do you think?
“Well, you have to expect some locker room talk when hanging out with bishops.”
Korben Porter, Financial Distiller
“Even the Catholic Church can make the occasional LGBTQ misstep.”
Leanna Rowe, Ham Slicer
“I kind of like the romance of being dehumanized in Italian.”
Fletcher Boyle, Spreadsheet Navigator
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Everyone Who Whoopi Goldberg Has Asked to Be in Sister Act 3
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Asking people to be in your movie is a tough habit to break.
Photo: Lou Rocco/ABC via Getty ImagesAs any regular viewer of The View knows, there are two questions moderator Whoopi Goldberg loves asking the show’s guests on live television. The first of which is to come back to guest co-host, an offer that never materializes, and the second is asking them to co-star with her in the long-awaited Sister Act 3. Goldberg has been struggling to make Sister Act 3 happen for years, and when Disney finally gave the project the go in 2021 with Tyler Perry as a producer, she wasted no time assembling a cast. Using her day job at The View as an open casting call, Goldberg brilliantly circumvents agents and managers by putting actors right on the spot in front of an audience. Anything that has to be done to make this movie happen — after all, what a waste it would be to miss out on a title like Sister Act 3: Breaking the Habit. Let’s look back at the many people who Goldberg has already asked to appear in this (hopefully) upcoming film, from Pope Francis to JoJo Siwa.
As Daisy Ridley took her seat for her May 25, 2024 appearance on The View, she giddily told Goldberg, “I’m a really big fan.” In turn, Goldberg responded by saying, “I know you’re an extraordinary singer, maybe we should talk about 3. But we’ll do that another time.” The sheer power of being able to refer to Sister Act 3 as simply 3, and still have a gobsmacked Ridley know exactly what she’s talking about. Most talk shows only give the guests a mug, The View gives them gigs.
While appearing on The Tonight Show in May of 2024, Goldberg revealed to Jimmy Fallon that during her recent meeting with the pope (who she says seemed to be a fan of Sister Act), she offered him a cameo in the upcoming sequel. “He said he’d see what his time was like,” Goldberg joked. The offer seems like a smart move, given that it might take an act of God to make this movie happen.
In February of 2024, Goldberg reunited with Sheryl Lee Ralph, who played the mother of Lauryn Hill’s character in Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit, and surprised her with an offer to return to the franchise. “We’re in the process of putting together 3, will you come be part of it? Whatever it is?” she asked.
Back when Jimmy Fallon appeared on The View in March of 2023, Goldberg doubled down on an offer she had extended to him. “You still gonna come and do Sister Act?” she asked, with the late night host confirming by telling Goldberg, “Whatever I can do to help, I will do a cameo, I will pop my head through a window and wave, I’ll do whatever you need me to do.”
That conversation got the table thinking, with Joy Behar chiming in to suggest that all of the panelists join the fun. “We could all be nuns also, you know,” she said, with Alyssa Farah Griffin adding, “I’ve been pitching this.” Goldberg didn’t seem quite as receptive to this idea, but conceded that it’s technically a possibility, saying, “Yeah we could.”
While appearing on Loose Women in January of 2023, Goldberg delivered a public plea down the barrel of the camera directly to her Sister Act co-star Dame Maggie Smith. “One of the things that I want to make sure I do while I’m here is I want to let Maggie Smith know, that I’m holding the part of Mother Superior for you, because I just can’t do it with anybody but you,” she said. “So if you need me to come over here and shoot it and do whatever we have to do, we will do whatever you want us to do. Because we don’t want to do it without you, Maggie.”
In October of 2022, during an appearance on Hell of a Week with Charlamagne Tha God, Goldberg teased her dream cast for the project. “I want everybody to come in, I want Lizzo to come in, I want everybody. I want the girl with the chest, what’s her name?” she asked, before remembering Nicki Minaj’s name, “Nicki! I want Nicki to come in.”
When Kathy Najimy, who played Sister Mary Patrick in the original films, came to the table to promote Hocus Pocus 2, she asked about the status of the third movie. Goldberg told her that it was in fact happening, but came short of extending a formal invitation. Perhaps Najimy’s return simply goes without saying! Nonetheless, Goldberg did credit the return of Hocus Pocus with inspiring Disney to let Sister Act’s nuns get back in the habit as well.
Before Jenifer Lewis’s interview on The View in September of 2022 even got started, Goldberg told her, “You know, we’re still gonna do that movie, you know that, going back,” before reminding the audience, “You know, she’s in Sister Act.” Lewis appeared in both Sister Act films as Michelle, one of Deloris Van Cartier’s background singers.
Alright, this one certainly wasn’t a formal offer, but Goldberg made a point to let JoJo Siwa know back in 2021 that casting was underway. Just imagine her introducing a convent of nuns to “gay pop.”
It’s only fitting that the famously booked Keke Palmer was the first to get this ball rolling, not even waiting for Goldberg to make the offer during her appearance on The View way back in November of 2021. “Now Whoopi, I gotta shoot my shot, like I did with Issa a little bit ago,” Palmer said, referring to tweeting her way onto Issa Rae’s Insecure. “I heard that Tyler Perry is doing Sister Act 3 and I just want you to know I’m available for the job. Any job. I mean, you ain’t got to say nothing now, you know, I’ll send you an email or something. Just let me know if you need me.” But as it turns out, great minds think alike. “I already brought it up,” Goldberg responded, which sounds like she’s definitely in the mix, and thank god for that. Forget the pope, Keke Palmer is the most important addition to this franchise!
This post has been updated.
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Tom Smyth
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CBS News surprises Pope Francis with gift inspired by detail in his book
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Millions of people travel across the globe each year to meet Pope Francis, many coming prepared with customary gifts for the head of the Catholic Church — CBS Evening News anchor and managing editor Norah O’Donnell included.
As she wrapped up her recent historic interview with the pope in Vatican City, O’Donnell surprised Francis with a personal gift from CBS News: a vinyl of Walter Cronkite’s 1969 special report on the moon landing.
The gift was inspired by Francis’ book, “Life: My Story Through History,” which chronicles major historical moments the pontiff witnessed throughout his life, including a full chapter about joining the millions of people who turned on their television sets in July 1969 to watch Cronkite’s coverage of the Apollo 11 moon landing.
Francis wrote in the book, “I believe we all understood instinctively that the world would now be different somehow. Progress is fundamental – we have to keep moving – but it must be in harmony with humankind’s ability to manage it.”
“Your Holiness, I read in your book that when you were growing up in the seminary that you watched Neil Armstrong land on the moon, and it was on CBS — translated. This is a record of that moment,” O’Donnell told Francis, showing him the vinyl cover.
CBS News
“Oh!” a smiling Francis exclaimed as he scanned the gift.
O’Donnell then showed Francis the back of the vinyl, which featured Armstrong’s iconic quote, “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
“That’s very kind of you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Pray for me. Don’t forget. In favor, not against,” Francis replied as O’Donnell laughed. “Thank you very much.”
CBS News
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