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VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Three semitrucks full of flowers and plants — doused with holy water by a bishop before beginning their journey from the Netherlands — arrived in St. Peter’s Square March 30. Since 1985 Dutch flower growers have created the garden of blooms paired with blossoming bushes and trees that frame the popes’…
VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Easter is a promise that no matter how dark the world may seem and no matter how heavy the burdens one carries, victory belongs to the Risen Christ and all who believe in him, Pope Francis said. “Let us lift our eyes to him and ask that the power of his…
ROME (CNS) — For the second year in a row, Pope Francis followed the nighttime Way of the Cross service from his Vatican residence as 25,000 people gathered outside Rome’s Colosseum. While he had been scheduled to attend in person, the Vatican released a communique right at the start of the service March 29…
VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Just before some 1,500 priests, bishops and cardinals renewed their priestly promises, Pope Francis asked them to embrace “compunction,” which he said was “an aspect of the spiritual life that has been somewhat neglected yet remains essential.” Looking at its etymology, he said that “compunction is ‘a piercing of the heart’…
ROME (CNS) — As Pope Francis poured water over their feet, dried them with a towel and kissed their feet, 12 women inmates at Rome’s Rebibbia prison wept. The pope celebrated the evening Mass of the Lord’s Supper March 28 at the women’s prison under a tent set up outside. The 12 women whose feet…
VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Pope Francis told Catholics in the Holy Land that he knows Holy Week this year is “so overshadowed by the Passion and, as yet, so little by the Resurrection.” In a letter published March 27, Pope Francis told the region’s Catholics that he was remembering all of them in his prayers,…