While the forces of a market economy may obstruct people from advancing social justice, society cannot remain mute in the face of unjust labor practices and exploitative economic structures, Pope Francis said.
The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith will publish its new norms for the discernment of apparitions and other supernatural phenomena May 17, the Vatican press office said.
The spiritual practice of reparation "may be somewhat forgotten or wrongly judged obsolete" today, but it is essential for the promotion of justice and healing, including on behalf of those who have suffered abuse in the church, Pope Francis said.
Pope Francis signed a letter on synodality in the presence of parish priests and urged them to be "missionaries of synodality," said several of the priests present.
In a meeting at the Vatican on May 2, Pope Francis received assurances from Jordan's King Abdullah II that Christian and Islamic holy sites in Jerusalem will be protected amid the Israel-Hamas war.
"Here, then, is the great enemy of faith: it is not intelligence, it is not reason, as, alas, some continue obsessively to repeat," Francis said. The enemy is "simply fear."
"Tradition comes alive in the art of creatively transmitting the messages entrusted to us. We must transmit them in new translations into a living, intelligible language," Father Tomáš Halík, a Czech theologian, told the priests. "To be faithful to tradition is not to be resistant to change."
The most important outcome of the current Synod of Bishops on synodality is the synodal process itself and not the hot-button topics discussed, Pope Francis said.
The reform projects launched by Pope Francis — reforming not just institutions like the Roman Curia, but attitudes and pastoral approaches — will not be reversed, even though some may take different forms in the future, said Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Vatican secretary of state.
While the virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance are the marks of a righteous individual, the virtues of faith, hope and love emphasize a connection to other people fueled by belief in God and reliance on prayer, Pope Francis said.
Pope Francis met briefly with Chuck Robbins, CEO of Cisco Systems — the U.S. digital communications conglomerate — after Robbins signed on to the "Rome Call for AI Ethics," a project coordinated by the Pontifical Academy for Life.
The Catholic Church in the United States is grappling with a tendency to become more "auto-referential" and withdraw itself from the international stage and universal church, Pope Francis' representative to the United States said.
Peace can spread and grow from "small seeds" like including someone who is left out of an activity, showing concern for someone who is struggling, picking up some litter and praying for God's help, Pope Francis told Italian schoolchildren.
Pope Francis and his international Council of Cardinals continued their discussions about the role of women in the church, listening to women experts, including a professor who spoke about how culture impacts women's roles and status.
The Vatican Secretariat of State sent a formal statement to the French Embassy to the Holy See reaffirming that Pope Francis had sent a top Vatican official to investigate a French religious congregation and warning that interference by a French civil court in an internal church matter could be a "serious violation" of religious freedom.
The morning after Iran launched hundreds of drones and missiles at Israel, Pope Francis pleaded with nations to avoid a further escalation of the violence.
Humanity must have more direct contact with nature to counter the modern lifestyles that are destroying the planet, Pope Francis told members of the Italian Catholic Movement of Adult Scouts during a meeting at the Vatican April 13.