Boubanar Traore wants to go home. He’s not sure how he’ll survive there, however, so for now he sits in a camp for displaced people, hoping that things will change.

After doctors told Floribeth Mora Diaz that a brain aneurysm left her with days to live, she retreated to her Costa Rican home and prayed to Blessed Pope John Paul II. From her bedroom in a small town in Costa Rica’s Cartago province, Mora said she heard his voice. “Rise! … Don’t be afraid.” She got up from her bed, prompting her husband to ask her, “My love, what are you doing here?” As a teary-eyed Mora recalled at a July 5 news conference, she responded to her husband, “I feel better.” That was in May 2011. Doctors could not explain the rapid improvement, and Mora became the second miracle attributed to the Blessed John Paul, who died in 2005.

Be joyous, authentic and loving while resisting fly-by-night commitments, catty gossip and sleek cars, Pope Francis told future priests, brothers and nuns.

In this tiny South Hebron Hills encampment of tents and cave dwellings, where camels cling to the sandy hillside and hardy goats scrounge for shoots of brush and desert grasses, it is summer camp time for the children. It is the 11th year in which the South Hebron Hills Popular Resistance Committee and the Alternative Information Center, a joint Palestinian-Israeli non-governmental organization promoting cooperation, have run a summer camp for the children of Tuba and four other villages. The European Union funds the program.

In this ancient city that has become synonymous with the ends of the earth, the recent terrorism of Islamist extremists belies long years of peaceful Muslim-Christian coexistence. Troubles in Timbuktu began in April 2012 when the city was taken over by the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad, or MNLA, a largely Tuareg group that wants a secular and independent state in northern Mali. Yet the group’s Islamist allies soon turned against the MNLA and drove it out of the city. That left the jihadists in control of Timbuktu.

With retired Pope Benedict XVI sitting next to him, Pope Francis formally recited separate prayers to consecrate Vatican City to St. Joseph and to St. Michael the Archangel. The early morning ceremony in the Vatican Gardens July 5 featured the unveiling of a new statue of St. Michael, sculpted by Giuseppe Antonio Lomuscio. The project, along with a fountain by Franco Murer dedicated to St. Joseph, was initiated under Pope Benedict.

The two popes whose canonizations received final clearance July 5 “each had a profound impact on the church and the world,” as New York Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan put it.

As people of faith and as Americans, the nation’s Catholics should kneel in prayer and also stand in defense of religious freedom, Washington Cardinal Donald W. Wuerl said July 4 during the closing Mass for the Fortnight for Freedom at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington.

Egypt’s Catholic leaders welcomed the military overthrow of the country’s Islamist president and voiced confidence that Christians and Muslims can work together to build a “real democracy.”

Pope Francis’ first encyclical, “Lumen Fidei” (“The Light of Faith”), released July 5, is the latest installment in a centuries’ old papal tradition. An encyclical is considered the most authoritative form of papal writing, and though many examples are now remembered only by scholars, the messages of others have continued to resonate within the church and beyond.