Let’s be honest: We are all cafeteria Catholics. The real question is how we avoid a food fight in the cafeteria.

In the preface to a new book, Pope Francis writes how Vatican II has been central to his personal spirituality, and discusses how the church must continue to implement its insights.

Christians must be on guard and avoid the temptation of thinking themselves better than others, an attitude that risks turning the church into a place of “separation and not communion,” Pope Francis said.

In many countries, hundreds or thousands of cases of clerical sexual abuse have made the need for conversion in the church painfully obvious.

“I found it sad that the pope has to defend himself,” Gerard O’Connell said this week on Inside the Vatican. “EWTN is based in the United States. Can not the [U.S.] Catholic bishops’ conference defend the pope on this?”

As with much of his pastoral approach overall, the pope’s outreach to L.G.B.T. people can be characterized by the word “accompaniment.”