Pope Leo XIV named Archbishop Edgar Peña Parra, the substitute secretary for general affairs at the Vatican Secretariat of State, as the apostolic nuncio to Italy and the Republic of San Marino, the Vatican said.

Marking the start of Holy Week, Pope Leo XIV used his first Palm Sunday Mass to issue a forceful plea for peace, urging an end to war as he reflected on Christ’s Passion.

On the threshold of Holy Week and amid the U.S. and Israel-Iran war gaining new fronts, and harvesting new victims daily, the Patriarchs and Heads of the Churches in Jerusalem issued an annual Easter message, calling the war an “expanding wreckage” and its timing a “deep darkness.”

In the principality known for super yachts and sports cars, Pope Leo XIV urged Monaco’s wealthy citizens to remember the poor and protect every human life, calling on them to remember that the Last Judgment “places the poor at its center.”

The Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem said an agreement has been reached with Israeli authorities to allow Holy Week and Easter celebrations to take place at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher after they were initially barred from celebrating Palm Sunday.

The upcoming National Eucharistic Pilgrimage — which takes place as the U.S. celebrates its 250th anniversary in 2026 — marks a moment for “a country still in conversion,” and “a country still on pilgrimage,” said Jason Shanks, president of the National Eucharistic Congress organization.

As Pope Leo XIV prepares to visit Monaco March 28, Americans will no doubt be reminded of another U.S.-born Catholic monarch — the actress-made-princess Grace Kelly, who lived in Monaco following her marriage to its Sovereign Prince Rainier III in April 1956 until her untimely death in 1982.

The subreddit r/AskAPriest was created around five years ago. Father Jacob Maurer, one of its founders, said it stemmed from a need he and fellow priests who posted on r/Catholicism identified.

The Vatican’s top diplomat to the United Nations condemned modern and historical slavery — while countering what he called a “partial narrative” in a newly adopted U.N. resolution denouncing the transatlantic slave trade as “the gravest crime against humanity.”

Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen will be beatified on Sept. 24 in St. Louis, the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints announced March 25.