VATICAN CITY (CNS): “We want to announce that all bishops present in Rome, in writing, have placed our positions in the Holy Father’s hands so that he may freely decide regarding each one of us,” Bishop Juan Ignacio Gonzalez Errazuriz of San Bernardo said on May 18 in a statement on behalf of Chile’s bishops.
 
The unprecedented decision was made on the final day of their May 15 to 17 meeting with Pope Francis to discuss the country’s clerical sexual abuse scandal.
 

NEW YORK (CNS): Speaking at Fordham University, New York, about his experiences as Vatican spokesperson under Pope Benedict and Pope Francis, Jesuit Father Lombardi, who retired in 2016, said, “The vision and experience of the reality of the Church, led by the Spirit of the Lord, is the most profound and powerful element of continuity between the different popes.” 
 
His talk, From Benedict to Francis: A Jesuit Reflects on Serving Two Pope, under the univerity’s Russo Family Lecture, was given on May 15.

VATICAN (CNS): Pope Francis announced on May 20 that he would elevate 14 new cardinals—two from Asia—on June 29. He said that coming from 11 nations, the cardinals-elect “express the universality of the Church, which continues to proclaim the merciful love of God to all people of the earth.”
 

VATICAN (CNS): Pope Francis warned of the “dangers of speaking to young people without letting them speak, leaving them at ‘a safe distance’.”
 
In a May 12 video message to young people who had gathered at several sites around the world to pray the rosary together, he said, “Young people do not bite, they can come close and have enthusiasm. And not only do you have enthusiasm, you hold the key to the future.”
 

VATICAN (CNS): Bishop Juan Ignacio Gonzalez Errazuriz of San Bernardo, Chile, acknowledged the damage inflicted on survivors of clerical sex abuse and the mishandling of cases by Church leaders in the country. “We have made mistakes,” he said.
 
“Receiving information that sexual abuses occurred in our community left many people in shock, because it is something that is unacceptable, intolerable, unjustifiable from every point of view,” the bishop said.
 

ROME (CNS): Too often, evangelisation is stifled by “faith understood only as things to do and not as a liberation that renews us at every step,” said Pope Francis said on May 14, as he spoke to some 1,700 diocesan leaders, both clergy and laity, at the Basilica of St. John Lateran, in Rome.
 

VATICAN (Agencies): Archbishop John Hung Shan-chuan (洪山川) of Taipei, invited Pope Francis to visit Taiwan, possibly during the national Eucharistic Congress to be held on the island next March, AsiaNews and Reuters reported on May 11.
 
Reuters reported that the archbishop, who is in Rome for an ad limina visit together with six other Taiwanese bishops, said at a reception at Taiwan’s embassy to the Holy See, “No pope has ever landed in Taiwan.” 
 

VATICAN (CNS): For more than 50 years, the writings of retired Pope Benedict XVI on the relationship between faith and politics have insisted that the measure of human freedom is the extent to which each person acknowledges being dependent on the love of God, Pope Francis writes in the preface to a new book, Liberating Freedom: Faith and Politics in the Third Millennium.
 
The book is a collection of essays over the course of several decades, including during Pope Benedict’s eight-year pontificate.
 

VATICAN (CNS): “Pope Francis appreciates the ecumenical commitment of the German bishops and asks them to find, in a spirit of ecclesial communion, a result as unanimously as possible,” said a statement from the Vatican as the pope called for the bishops of Germany to continue working together to find broader consensus on guidelines for allowing a Protestant married to a Catholic to receive the Eucharist.
 

VATICAN (SE): Pope Francis hailed the agreement reached at the recent inter-Korean summit regarding denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula, and expressed the hope that that their courageous commitment may achieve “a path of sincere dialogue for a Korean Peninsula that is free of nuclear weapons,” Vatican News reported