Time Magazine named Pope Francis its person of the year after nine months of his papacy. “He took the name of a humble saint and then called for a church of healing,” Time wrote in its announcement quoted by CNN. “The septuagenarian superstar is poised to transform a place that measures change by the century.” Read more
“The kumara does not tell of how sweet it is” says an old Maori proverb. For Funaki Vehekite, 53, the sweet potato is all the sweeter because it allows him to support his family and keep his five children in school. At his farm in Tongatapu, Tonga’s largest island, he also produces food crops such as kape, Read more
Pope Francis paid tribute to anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela for “forging a new South Africa” and said he hoped his example would inspire the nation to strive for “justice and the common good.” The pontiff praised the “steadfast commitment shown by Nelson Mandela in promoting the human dignity of all the nation’s citizens and in Read more
Andrea Tornielli, a veteran Vatican journalist, writes in her new book, “I Fioretti di Papa Francesco (The Little Flowers of Pope Francis),” that the life of Pope Francis was saved by nuns who worked in the hospital where the pontiff was ill as a young man. “I am alive thanks to one of them,” the Read more
More than 10,000 young people have signed a giant birthday card for Pope Francis, offering their prayers and well-wishes for the Holy Father’s 77th birthday on Dec. 17. “We wanted to give the Pope a gift he would truly appreciate; something he would be proud of,” said Mark Nelson, founder of Catholic to the Max, Read more
Eighteen years after Samundar Singh brutally stabbed a Catholic nun in Madhya Pradesh and flung her on the roadside to bleed to death, the former convict and reformed killer, has been invited to meet Pope Francis at the Vatican. The nun, Sister Rani Maria, was stabbed 54 times inside a packed Indore-bound bus passing through Read more
On Dec. 10th, 2013, Pope Francis is inviting the world to join him in a global wave of prayer to end world hunger. The global wave of prayer will begin at noon in Tonga, progressing around the world until reaching American Samoa 24 hours and 164 countries later. Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga, president of Vatican-based Read more
In addition to having worked sweeping floors and running tests in a chemical laboratory as a teenager, Pope Francis revealed he also used to work as a bouncer. He has told one group that when he was young, he worked as a bouncer, and that his work later in life, teaching literature and psychology, taught Read more
It would make for some pretty amazing headlines if Pope Francis turned out to be a Marxist. Between his hints at rehabilitating liberation theology—condemned by his predecessors—and talk about casting off “the economic and social structures that enslave us,” Marxism isn’t totally out of the question. But happily for nervous church leaders, Francis’s first Apostolic Exhortation, issued Tuesday, doesn’t quite suggest someone Read more
It’s like a dream or a movie. In less than a year, Pope Francis has transformed the dominant discourse around Catholicism from scandal and despair to joy and the evangelical demands in light of poverty and economic exclusion. “Each individual Christian and every community,” he wrote in Evangelii Gaudium last week, “is called to be an instrument Read more