VATICAN (CNS): Many people, including many Catholics, believe the pope always ruled over the Catholic Church as an absolute monarch, appointing the world’s bishops and definitively settling issues of faith and morals. Yet that exercise of the papal office is comparatively new.
 
The pope’s supreme power, both in governance and doctrine, was defined by the First Vatican Council in 1870 and has been seen as crucial to defending the Church from hostile governments and cultural forces around the world.
 

The story of creation presents us with a panoramic view of the world. Scripture reveals that in the beginning God intended humanity to cooperate in the preservation and protection of the natural environment.
 
At first, as we read in Genesis, “no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth and there was no one to till the ground” (2:5).
 

VATICAN (SE): While joint statements from popes and ecumenical patriarchs have a longish history, the most recent one signed by Pope Francis and the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople is the first expressing the concern for the well-being of creation held by the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. 

MUMBAI (UCAN): This year marks the 500th anniversary of the beginning of the Reformation, an event which changed the history of western Europe and much of the rest of the world.

At its heart is Martin Luther’s claim that the individual could seek and find God in the depths of his soul, not through obedience to a corrupt external Church structure. The first blow for freedom of choice, for freedom of conscience was struck here.

ROME (SE): “I hope that the next declaration opens the way for shared Eucharistic communion in special cases,” Walter Cardinal Kasper said in expressing his hope for ecumenical progress through intercommunion.

VATICAN (SE): Fifty years ago the Anglican Centre was set up in Rome as a result of an historical meeting between Pope Paul VI and Archbishop Michael Ramsey, the archbishop of Canterbury and head of the worldwide Anglican Communion.

HAVANA (SE): The embrace that Christianity has waited over 1,000 years to see became a reality on February 12 in a hangar at José Marti Airport in Havana, Cuba, as Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill of Moscow put their arms around each other in a reconciliatory gesture.

The two described their historic greeting as an end to a millennium of division due to human weakness and sin, contradicting  Christ’s prayer that they may be one.