There is a new willingness in the Catholic Church, modeled by Pope Francis, to hold its disagreements in fruitful tension, allowing the Spirit to show new paths forward that transcend those divisions.

The history of the church was nothing close to a steady, if interrupted, march to eliminate slavery.

In a sense, the pope’s messages all amount to the same thing: Hello and God bless you. But there is a care in the language that is striking.

Pope Francis hit out strongly against the way people have sought to manipulate Benedict’s death. “People who instrumentalize such a good person, [a man] of God, almost I would say a holy father of the church, have no ethics,” he said. “They are of a party, not of the church.”

The decision comes at a time when Cardinal Ouellet is pursuing a defamation case against a Canadian woman church worker, who had accused him of unwanted sexual touching.

Pope Benedict’s German biographer, Peter Seewald, confirmed that nine weeks before he died, Benedict revealed that insomnia was the “central motive” for his resignation.