Peace is so difficult to find because men and women struggle to stop focusing on their own interests long enough to listen to and learn from others, Pope Francis said.

A young priest who was murdered by communist partisans during a wave of anti-church violence in 1947 was beatified as a martyr in Croatia.

Pope Francis made his international advisory panel on church governance a permanent council of cardinals, thereby emphasizing the importance and open-endedness of its work among his pontificate’s various efforts at reform.

Thousands of previously middle-class Syrians now stranded in Armenia are rapidly running out of resources and could soon have no shelter, food or medicine, said an international aid group official.

In his latest wide-ranging interview, Pope Francis said that he aimed to make the Catholic Church less “Vatican-centric” and closer to the “people of God,” as well as more socially conscious and open to modern culture.

Ahmad is head nurse at the mobile hospital, which officially opened Sept. 13. The doctors, nurses and support staff at the new hospital are all Syrian. They all left Syria reluctantly, fleeing the fighting that began in 2011. They saw the hospitals where they worked bombed, homes where they lived destroyed and sniper fire in Aleppo picking off one or two random civilians per day.

As part of its continuing efforts to promote transparency and to demonstrate its stability and adherence to industry standards, the Vatican bank published its annual report for the first time in its history.

Children make up about half of the Syrian refugee population. There are about 740,000 refugees under the age of 11. The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees reports significant numbers of unaccompanied Syrian children crossing the borders with Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. At least 7,000 Syrian children are among the 100,000 casualties of the 32-month-old civil war.

As a series of consultations aimed at the reform of the Vatican bureaucracy began, Pope Francis told his group of cardinal advisers that humility and service attract people to the church, not power and pride.

An international obligation to intervene in situations of war or widespread violations of human rights does not mean a country or group of countries can decide to take military action in another nation, said the Vatican’s foreign minister.