With a warm embrace, a helping hand, shared prayer, a long discussion and lunch together, Pope Francis spent several hours with retired Pope Benedict XVI March 23 at the papal summer villa.

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff said Pope Francis confirmed he would be in Rio de Janeiro in July for World Youth Day and, she said, he also told her he intended to visit Brazil’s National Shrine of Our Lady of Aparecida.

Sister Kate Kuenstler, a canon lawyer, had finished her talk about the rights of laypeople under Church canons when a man in the audience posed a question: How could he stop the bulldozers from tearing down his beloved church? The more she read, the more she understood the steps required to suppress, or close, a parish. She began to see that bishops did not always follow canon law or were unaware of canons governing closures.

On the evening of July 4, 1976, Rodolfo Capalozza, then a seminarian in Argentina for the Pallottine religious community in Buenos Aires, made a fateful decision to catch a movie and then visit his parents. In the morning, Capalozza would learn that two other seminarians and three priests from the community were repeatedly shot after midnight at the church rectory of San Patricio in the Argentine capital’s Belgrano district.

Toward the end of a Mass of thanksgiving at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception celebrating the inauguration of Pope Francis March 19, a brass and timpani ensemble erupted with a triumphant hymn.

The pope met with Vatican diplomatic corps on May 22. in the Apostolic Palace’s Sala Regia, the vast “royal hall” where popes traditionally received Catholic monarchs.

Pope Francis carries woven palm fronds as he walks in procession at the start of Palm Sunday Mass in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican March 24.

Pope Francis’ style of breaking away from his security detail and diving toward the crowds means his protectors have had to do a quick rewrite of strategy, sometimes on the spot.

General elections in Zimbabwe, expected in the second half of the year, will be as important in determining the country’s destiny as the 1980 vote that led to independence from Great Britain, said the Zimbabwe Catholic Bishops’ Conference. Zimbabwe “needs to close the door to political intolerance, violence, impunity, lack of transparency and accountability, intimidation, corruption and open another (door) to a true democratic dispensation,” Zimbabwe’s eight bishops said in a mid-March pastoral letter.

The election of Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, Argentina, as the pope holds great promise for interreligious relations to continue on a path started by Blessed John Paul II, said several U.S. religious leaders.