Lying prostrate on the floor before the main altar of St. Peter’s Basilica, Pope Francis celebrated the Liturgy of the Lord’s Passion. The pope presided at the service March 29 to commemorate Christ’s death on the cross.

As Georgetown University law professor Michael Gottesman put it, the people who lined up outside the Supreme Court for days to be able to watch a legal argument about the validity of same-sex marriage must have been surprised to find half the court’s time devoted to debating legal standing, jurisdiction and states’ rights versus federalism.

Pope Francis became the first pope to tour the excavated necropolis where St. Peter is buried, said Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, Vatican spokesman.

An Italian priest who died in a Nazi concentration camp and two victims of Soviet-bloc regimes during the Cold War were among those recognized on March 27 as martyrs by Pope Francis.

By Cindy Wooden Gazing from a hillside overlooking Rome's Colosseum, where thousands of people gathered to pray the Way of the Cross, Pope Francis said Christ's cross is God's response to evil in the world. "Sometimes it may seem as though God does not react to evil, as if he is silent. And yet, God has spoken," the pope said March 29 at the end of the nighttime prayer service. God...

Of the several widely acknowledged priorities in the run-up to the conclave that chose Pope Francis, including the challenge of secularism and the growth of the church in the global South, none was more prominent than a need to reform the Roman Curia, the church’s central administration in the Vatican.

With Jesus’ resurrection “love has triumphed, mercy has been victorious,” Pope Francis said in his first Easter message “urbi et orbi” (to the city and the world).

Gazing upon the image of a crucified man on the Shroud of Turin, Catholics contemplate Jesus and are called on to remember his great love for them and for all who suffer, Pope Francis said.

In Easter messages, Catholic patriarchs in the Middle East highlighted the need for an end to the war in Syria, now entering its third year.

Catholics must allow the grace of their baptism and of the Eucharist to transform their lives and make them instruments of God’s grace in the world, Pope Francis said.