The pope will travel to Bahrain, a small majority-Muslim country in the Persian Gulf region. Pope Francis will be the first pope to visit the region.

“You can leave a mark,” Pope Francis told members of the global network; just make sure that “your mark is positive and moves toward integral human development.”

“I asked her, ‘Auntie, you’re not leaving?’ and, after a moment of silence, she answered ‘I don’t know, I want to wait,” Comboni Sister Gabriella Bottani said of her aunt, Comboni Sister Maria De Coppi.

“Today, in a special way, six months since the start of the war, let us think of Ukraine and Russia, two countries I consecrated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.... We need peace.”

Canon lawyers are proposing new laws that will delineate the rules on papal retirement. Retired Pope Benedict XVI has had to trailblaze a path, as the last pope to step down was in 1294.

The resignation of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI has sparked internal debate over the status and titles of former Popes. One group of canon lawyers and academics are working to draft a ruleset for this navigating papal resignations going forward.

The oldest member of the College of Cardinals, Cardinal Jozef Tomko, died in Rome at the age of 98.

The pope shares St. Vincent of Lérins’s view on how doctrine can develop and how there can be growth in the expression and awareness of the faith and in morals “while always remaining faithful to its roots.”

“The ideal bishop does not exist,” Sister Reungoat said. But he has to be a shepherd who is “close to the people entrusted to him, he has to know how to involve priests, laity and religious, and people of different generations.”

“Being close to the created world is a way of being close to the creator, and that’s why sciences played such an important role in the apostolates of the Jesuits,” said the director of the Vatican Observatory.