The Major Penitentiary is sometimes referred to as chief confessor of the Catholic Church because he has broad faculties that are reserved to the Holy See to grant pardon and forgiveness for sins for which an ordinary priest or bishop cannot grant absolution.
Pope Francis has been managing church-state relations well since Javier Milei’s election, while the church hierarchy in Argentina has kept a cautious and skeptical distance from the country’s new leader.
In a speech at his weekly general audience, Pope Francis highlighted justice in his cycle of catechesis on virtues. Justice, the pope said, is animated by the righteous person who “desires the good of society as a whole.”
The Vatican press office announced that the Dicastery for the Doctrine of Faith’s declaration on human dignity, said to include a faith-based critique of “gender ideologies” and surrogacy, will be released April 8.
The pope called for specific, concrete, immediate steps that political leaders could take to end the wars and bring peace to the Holy Land and to Ukraine.