Death row inmates in Florida’s prisons refer to their 6-foot-by-9-foot cell as their “house,” with some having lived in their “house” for 40 years — longer than one Catholic lay chaplain said he has lived in his family home in Tallahassee.

Pope Francis said the Second Vatican Council so shaped his theological and pastoral vision that perhaps he has not been as explicit as he should have been in highlighting those ties, especially when it comes to his contributions to Catholic social teaching.

The bishops of the Armenian Catholic Church elected Archbishop Raphaël François Minassian, the ordinary for Armenian Catholics in Eastern Europe, to be their church’s new patriarch.

The Catholic Church suffers from a temptation to attempt to return to attitudes and practices of the past, an attitude that blocks pastoral outreach to many of those who are marginalized, Pope Francis told Jesuits in Slovakia.

A dozen bishops of the Armenian Catholic Church prayed for the assistance of the Holy Spirit as they met in Rome to begin their second attempt at electing a patriarch for their church.

To listen to the Holy Spirit, members of the church must listen to each other and especially to those who are marginalized, Pope Francis said, explaining how dioceses are to help the church prepare for the Synod of Bishops.

Pope Francis praised Catholic lay movements and associations for living out the Gospel in their everyday lives and for promoting education, social support and evangelization in the world’s peripheries.

Pope Francis has not devalued the Torah and does not question the fact that the Torah is crucial for modern Judaism, Cardinal Kurt Koch told two prominent Jewish leaders.

The debate about denying Communion to politicians who support abortion must be handled in a pastoral way, not by public condemnations that seek to “excommunicate” Catholics who are not in line with church teaching, Pope Francis said.

Pope Francis made sure that while the world often disregards the young and the marginalized, in the Catholic Church, “no one ought ever to feel out of place or set aside.”