“In our days, love is on the lips of many ‘influencers’ and in the refrains of many songs,” Pope Francis said in today’s general audience on the theological virtue of charity. “We speak a lot about love, but what is love?”

Vincentian Father Joseph S. Williams, pastor of St. Vincent de Paul Parish in Chicago, said in a May 8 statement that he was “deeply sorry for any confusion and/or anger that this has caused, particularly for the People of God.”

For every Fátima, there are dozens of unverified reports of divine messages, “weeping” statues, healing relics and prophetic revelations that have vexed church authorities and challenged the Vatican’s ability to track and verify such events.

It is not surprising that Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, an eminent paleontologist, got himself in trouble with church officials and his Jesuit superiors.

Fasting “at least for one day of the week from futile distractions” such as social media also can be a path toward a jubilee indulgence, according to norms published by the Vatican May 13.

Ric Burns’s splendid two-part PBS documentary, “Dante: Inferno to Paradise,” has brought Dante’s achievement beyond the groves of academe and into America’s living rooms.

“You do not have to believe in Marian apparitions to be a good Catholic,” Father James Martin writes. “But I do. I’ve never had a problem believing in them.”

On Jesuitical, Zac and Ashley speak with Andrea Von Kampen about her new album “Sister Moon,” which draws on the spiritual and ecological wisdom of St. Francis of Assisi and Pope Francis’ “Laudato Si’.”

“Human life is not a problem, it is a gift,” said Pope Francis at a meeting on Italy's longtime decline in births and population growth on May 10. “The problem is not how many of us there are in the world, but what kind of world we are building.”

Pope Francis today promulgated the decree, known as a “Bull of Indiction,” for the Jubilee Year 2025, which he will open in St. Peter’s Basilica on Dec. 24, 2024, and close on Jan. 6, 2026.