Justin McLellan

After spending the night in the hospital, Pope Francis is “steadily improving” from a respiratory infection and continuing his planned course of treatment, the Vatican press office said.

According to Father Phillip Larrey, dean of the philosophy department at the Rome’s Pontifical Lateran University, Silicon Valley techies are posing those questions to ethicists and religious leaders as artificial intelligence develops rapidly and is used in myriad ways impacting people’s daily lives.

Before praying the Angelus with some 25,000 visitors gathered in St. Peter’s Square March 19, the pope reflected on the day’s Gospel reading from St. John in which Jesus gives sight to a blind man on the Sabbath.

Many of the 40 international trips Pope Francis has made over the past 10 years have been to countries where Christians are a minority or where he can draw close to people on the fringes of the world’s attention.