Speaking to reporters a few days before receiving their red hats, many of the 21 new cardinals said their induction into the College of Cardinals was less about them and more about their local church and its contribution to the universal church.

Hope and fraternity must be kept alive, organized and coordinated into concrete action so every crisis can be read as an opportunity and dealt with positively, Pope Francis said.

Speaking Sept. 26 during a high-level meeting on the elimination of nuclear weapons at the U.N. General Assembly in New York, Archbishop Paul R. Gallagher, the Vatican foreign minister, called eliminating nuclear weapons a “moral imperative.”

Child pornography is “criminality available to everyone through their phones,” Pope Francis said.

In a visit of under 30 hours to Marseille, France, Pope Francis highlighted his key appeals and positions concerning migration and the mandate for people of faith to care for the “stranger” in one’s land.

Four months after soliciting public input on the development of safeguarding guidelines, the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors said it had reviewed 300 responses and 700 suggestions that “largely confirmed the approach adopted” for establishing rules and procedures to handle abuse in the Catholic Church.

People often are tempted to think their relationship with God is some kind of commercial transaction where they buy God’s grace with their hard work, Pope Francis said.

The world and the Catholic Church today need to take a leap forward “in faith, charity and hope,” Pope Francis said in his homily at a late afternoon Mass in Marseille’s open-air stadium.

Unlike earlier meetings of the Synod of Bishops, which focused on a specific issue or a specific region of the world, the “synod on synodality” is focused on the church itself: Who belongs? How are leadership and authority exercised? How does the church discern God’s call? How can it fulfill its mandate to share the Gospel with a changing world?

In a rather unusual moment for secular France, the president of the country confirmed he will attend Mass celebrated by Pope Francis in Marseille Sept. 23.