Catholic News Service

Everyone has gifts and talents that can be a public witness to God's love and mercy, Pope Francis told a group of people with intellectual disabilities and their teachers.

The wounds of Christ, still visible after his resurrection, are the greatest sign of God's love and mercy, Pope Francis said on Divine Mercy Sunday.

Pope Francis confirmed he will travel to Mongolia in September, becoming the first pope to visit the Asian nation, which is home to a cardinal and some 1,300 Catholics.

Pope John Paul II's longtime aide denied the "vile insinuations" that the former pope was maliciously involved in the case of Emanuela Orlandi, a Vatican schoolgirl whose 1983 disappearance is the focus of an ongoing Vatican investigation.

Failing to provide needed medication to elderly people is a "hidden and progressive euthanasia," Pope Francis said.

Pope Francis has chosen "His mercy is from age to age," a passage from the Gospel of Luke, as the theme for the 2023 celebration of the World Day for Grandparents and the Elderly.

In their discussions about the life of the church and "synodality," or walking together, Catholics in United States and Canada noted the negative impact "polarization" is having on the church, said Bishop Daniel E. Flores of Brownsville, Texas.

The idea that stopping the arms race is essential for stopping war is not utopian but is "healthy realism," Pope Francis wrote.

The women disciples, who were the first to meet the risen Jesus, offer a lesson to all Christians: "We encounter Jesus by giving witness to him," Pope Francis said.

Easter is the time "to roll away the stone of the tombs in which we often imprison our hope and to look with confidence to the future, for Christ is risen and has changed the direction of history," Pope Francis said as he celebrated the Easter Vigil Mass.

Instead of presiding over the nighttime Way of the Cross seated atop a hillside overlooking Rome's Colosseum, Pope Francis followed the service from his Vatican residence, spiritually united in prayer with the 20,000 people gathered outside the ancient amphitheater April 7.

On Good Friday, the pope's preacher said that without God, humanity is nothing.

Jesus never abandons anyone; he has come to save, serve and accompany everyone, Pope Francis told young inmates.

Priests "anointed" by the Holy Spirit should be authentic agents of harmony rather than "instruments of division," Pope Francis said.

Wanting to meet potential partners through dating apps like Tinder is "normal," and the church's teaching on sex is "still in diapers," Pope Francis said in a conversation with a group of young people gathered in Rome.

The Focolare movement has published its first report on cases of abuse received between 2014 and 2022, as well as its updated and planned measures to better and more quickly handle accusations, promote a "safeguarding culture" and offer reparation to victims.

During Lent this year, residents of the Domus Sanctae Marthae, where Pope Francis lives, decided to clean out their closets and give away things other people could use. "You can't imagine how much stuff there was," the pope said.

Almost two years after updating a section of the Latin-rite Code of Canon Law dealing with crimes and punishment, Pope Francis promulgated a similar update to the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches.

Saying he wanted to protect the rights of members of religious orders facing expulsion, Pope Francis made small changes to canon law, giving them more time to appeal their dismissals.

Parliaments and legislatures should have quotas to include Indigenous people and members of displaced ethnic groups in political processes, Pope Francis said.