Faithful take part in the “Walking Towards You” procession in Lebanon to honor Father Bechara Abou Mrad in Joun on Oct. 4, 2025. / Credit: Noelle El Hajj/ACI MENA

ACI MENA, Oct 6, 2025 / 12:54 pm (CNA).

In Lebanon, thousands of Christians filled the streets on Saturday, Oct. 4, in a solemn procession honoring Father Bechara Abou Mrad, a Melkite priest whose cause for sainthood is underway. 

In a country often marked by hardship and unrest, the glow of candles and sound of hymns offered a moment of peace as the faithful carried icons and flags in tribute to a man remembered for his quiet life of prayer, humility, and service.

Born Salim Abou Mrad in Zahle in 1853, the young man entered the Basilian Order of the Most Holy Savior at age 21, taking the religious name “Bechara,” which means “Annunciation” in Arabic. Known for his humility and dedication, he spent his life in prayer and service until his death in 1930. In 2010, Pope Benedict XVI recognized his heroic virtue, declaring him venerable.

Mrad was known as “the apostolic hermit,” a title reflecting his unique balance of deep solitude and active charity. His life joined rigorous asceticism and constant prayer with an untiring devotion to the salvation of souls, lived out through the sacraments of the Church and humble works of Christian love.

This year’s procession, titled “Walking Towards You,” began at the monastery and school of the Salvatorian Sisters and continued for just over a mile to Deir el-Moukhalles, the Greek Catholic Monastery of the Savior, where Mrad lived and where his tomb is. The procession concluded with a Mass celebrated by Archimandrite Antoine Rizk.

The event took place in Joun, a village whose name means “corner” in Aramaic. It lies between Mount Lebanon and South Lebanon, forming a natural corner that inspired its name. However, participation extended beyond the region, with many Catholics from across the country joining the locals from nearby southern villages.

In an interview with ACI MENA, CNA’s Arabic-language news partner, Father Youssef Mezher, parish priest of al-Mharebiyya in South Lebanon, explained the significance of the procession.

“After periods of displacement, we often feel a kind of discouragement,” he said. “But during this procession we felt as though Father Bechara himself was illuminating the area with his presence. We are deeply rooted in this region. The procession renewed our Salvatorian spirituality and gave new strength to our families and youth.”

Mezher also described the procession as a message of steadfastness and perseverance in a ‘Holy Land’ — the land once visited by Christ and the Virgin Mary, which, he said, “must continue to shine with light among us.” He added that the community remains determined to stay in the region despite the challenges and hardships they face.

For many who walked, the procession was deeply personal. From the nearby village of Anan, Gloria Haddad expressed her hope that the event would help the world learn more about Mrad, describing it as “more than a religious gathering, it is a message that reveals the depth of our community’s faith, resilience, and rootedness.” 

She added that “the world needs to learn from Father Bechara’s genuine humility, simplicity, and purity of service.”

Haddad also called for greater media attention on his story, emphasizing the need for international coverage: “His story can touch hearts and transform lives around the world.” She encouraged people everywhere to discover his life and miracles.

“I recommend everyone, no matter which country they come from, to read about him or watch the film ‘Siraj al-Wadi,’ which tells his story and miracles.” She noted that while thousands already take part in this annual procession, she believes that when his canonization is announced, the numbers will multiply; a moment she and her community eagerly await.

Maya Abboud Maamary, one of the founding members of the Family of Father Bechara Abou Mrad, established 17 years ago, spoke of her deep spiritual bond with him. 

“Father Bechara is with me every day, in every moment. Whoever truly wants to know him must strive to resemble him, to be humble, to love serving others, and to work in silence,” she said.

For the Melkite community in Lebanon, this yearly procession is more than a tradition. It is a testimony that the memory of one humble monk continues to inspire faith and unity. While the official cause for sainthood moves forward, Mrad’s legacy is already alive in the devotion of the people who walk in his footsteps.

This story was first published by ACI MENA, CNA’s Arabic-language news partner, and has been translated for and adapted by CNA.

Pope Leo XIV shakes hands with Knights of Columbus Supreme Knight Patrick Kelly during an audience with Knights of Columbus leadership at the Vatican on Oct. 6, 2025. / Credit: Vatican Media

Vatican City, Oct 6, 2025 / 12:24 pm (CNA).

Pope Leo XIV on Monday met with leaders of the Knights of Columbus, whom he thanked for their generosity to the Vatican and their dedicated service to local communities in the United States. 

He also expressed his “profound gratitude” for the Knights’ funding of the restorations of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s baldacchino and monument of the Chair of St. Peter in St. Peter’s Basilica, completed last year. 

Such contributions are “a visible sign of your continued devotion to the vicar of Christ,” the pontiff said, addressing members of the board of directors and their families in the Apostolic Palace’s Hall of the Consistory. 

“Throughout its history, the order has supported the charitable work of the Roman pontiff in a variety of ways, including through the ‘Vicarius Christi’ Fund, which allows him to express solidarity with the poor and most vulnerable throughout the world,” Leo continued.  

The pope noted that local Knights councils “seek to bring the compassion and love of the Lord into your local communities, including through your efforts to uphold the sanctity of human life in all of its stages, to assist victims of war and natural disasters, and also to support priestly vocations.”  

The Knights of Columbus is a lay Catholic men’s organization with more than 2.1 million members worldwide. It was founded by Blessed Michael McGivney in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1882. 

The pope also sent a video greeting to the Knights of Columbus during their 143rd Supreme Convention in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 5. On July 4, Supreme Knight Patrick Kelly and Supreme Chaplain Archbishop William Lori of Baltimore met Pope Leo for the first time in a private audience at the Vatican.

Pope Leo XIV waves from the popemobile at the crowds gathered in St. Peter’s Square for Mass on Pentecost Sunday on June 8, 2025. / Credit: Daniel Ibanez/CNA

Vatican City, Oct 6, 2025 / 09:35 am (CNA).

Pope Leo XIV has permitted the Holy See’s main financial body to use financial institutions outside the Vatican for its investment activities, reversing Pope Francis’ 2022 instruction to move all funds to the so-called Vatican bank.

In the legal order, published Monday, Leo said the Vatican’s asset management body, the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See (APSA), should generally use the Institute for the Works of Religion (IOR) — better known as the Vatican bank — for its investment activities, unless the competent bodies “deem it more efficient or convenient to use financial intermediaries established in other countries.”

The pope said he consulted experts and evaluated recommendations from the Council for the Economy for the rescript, called Coniuncta Cura (“Shared Responsibility”).

Pope Francis in August 2022 had ordered the Holy See and connected entities to move all financial assets out of other banks and solely into the IOR in the wake of controversy over investments by the Secretariat of State.

The papal rescript was Francis’ interpretation of Article 219, paragraph 3 of Praedicate Evangelium, the constitution of the Roman Curia promulgated in March 2022, which says “the execution [of APSA’s management of real estate and moveable assets] is carried out through the Institute for the Works of Religion.”

In Leo’s rescript, which repeals his predecessor’s, the investment activities must also conform to policies from the Vatican’s investment oversight committee, established in 2022 and chaired by Cardinal Kevin Farrell.

“Co-responsibility in communio is one of the principles of service of the Roman Curia, as desired by Pope Francis and established in the apostolic constitution Praedicate Evangelium of March 19, 2022,” the pontiff wrote.

“This shared responsibility, which also concerns the curial institutions responsible for the Holy See’s financial investment activities, requires that existing provisions be consolidated and the roles and responsibilities of each institution be clearly defined, enabling everyone to converge in a dynamic of mutual collaboration,” he said. 

Members of Students for Liberty protest chemical abortions at March for Life, Jan. 24, 2025. / Credit: Tyler Arnold/CNA

CNA Staff, Oct 6, 2025 / 08:00 am (CNA).

California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill last week allowing doctors to anonymously prescribe abortion pills, a move ethicists and medical professionals say will endanger women.  

The law, designed to protect abortionists, allows them to prescribe the pill anonymously, protecting them from any professional, legal, or ethical oversight and from lawsuits filed by other states. 

California abortionists are already facing lawsuits for prescribing abortion drugs in states where they are illegal. In some cases, women maintain that they were coerced or deceived into taking the drugs by the father of their unborn child.

According to the new law, the doctor remains anonymous — even to the patient being prescribed the pill. His or her identity is only accessible via a subpoena within the state of California. 

Even the pharmacists dispensing the abortion drug may do so without including their names, or the names of the patient or prescriber, on the bottle. 

Abandoning women 

Dolores Meehan, a nurse practitioner and the executive director of Bella Primary Care in San Francisco, said the law is “codifying a type of back-alley abortion.”

“There’s no safety oversight at all from the perspective of the patient,” she told CNA. “It’s such a violation of patients’ rights.”

Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk, a senior ethicist at the National Catholic Bioethics Center, called the policy “patient abandonment.” 

Health care professionals “have a duty to provide careful medical supervision and oversight to patients who seek to obtain dangerous pharmaceuticals,” he told CNA.

“This oversight calls for significant patient scrutiny, medical testing, interviews, and in-person exams to assure that any prescribed medications will be appropriate for the specific medical situation of the patient,” Pacholczyk continued. “Such attentive oversight gets thrown to the wind when lawmakers and politicians like Gov. Newsom seek to pass unprincipled laws.”

Offering anonymous prescriptions, Pacholczyk said, “is a significant dereliction of duty.”

To do so implies “a willingness to look past important procedural requirements and duties, whether it’s health screening of the woman, obtaining her emergency contact information, or assuring follow-up care and support for her,” he continued.

The policy, Pacholczyk said, “works to corrode the very core of authentic medicine.”

Meehan expressed similar concerns about the anonymity of doctors prescribing abortion pills. 

She noted that licenses exist to ensure that “individuals are clear of any malfeasance or any malpractice.” 

“You can look up my license, and you can look up everything about me,” she said. “But if you don’t know my license, you don’t know who I am, you can’t.”

She noted that patients are turned into consumers but without any recourse should something go wrong. 

“You might as well go on Craigslist,” Meehan said. 

Not an informed choice

After he signed the bill, Newsom said that “California stands for a woman’s right to choose.” 

But Meehan noted that women don’t always know what they are choosing when they take the abortion pills. 

“It’s not about women’s rights, and it’s certainly not about women’s safety, and women’s health, and women’s choice,” Meehan said. “Because choice should always, always, always be accompanied by informed consent.”

“The gross misunderstanding about the abortion pill is that it’s somehow easy,” Meehan said. “But what so many women don’t understand is that they’re going to miscarry at home.” 

They’ll go through this “loss,” she noted, “by themselves.” 

“Women are really ill-prepared for what’s going to happen in their bodies. There’s the whole idea of women’s choice, but you’re not giving them informed choice,” she said. 

Pacholczyk shared similar concerns for women undergoing chemical abortions, saying that self-administered chemical abortions are a “harsh reality.”  

The abortion “often takes place in a bathroom, with psychological trauma experienced by a mother who may see her aborted baby floating in a toilet,” he said.  

Chemical abortions can sometimes lead to “serious medical complications — including sepsis, hemorrhage, or a need for repeated attempts to expel the child’s body” — for 1 in 10 women within 45 days of taking the abortion pill, he added. 

If a woman has an ectopic pregnancy, “administering the abortion pill could increase the risk of complications or delay urgently needed treatment,” Pacholczyk continued.

Dr. Susan Bane, vice chair of the board of directors of American Association of Pro-life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, told CNA that the new law “removes the final safeguard” in the distribution of abortion drugs. 

“Anonymous distribution of mifepristone is medical malpractice at its worst,” said Bane, an OB-GYN with more than 25 years of experience in women’s health care. 

“The distribution of this dangerous drug through the mail, without examination or ultrasound before prescription, and without follow-up appointments, has had deadly consequences,” she continued. 

Women deserve better treatment, according to Pacholczyk. 

“Rather than treating women as anonymous entities, and forcing them into greater isolation … mothers deserve the supportive medical attention and active care of their health care team,” he said.

“Ideally, such attentive care should help them feel strengthened and empowered to carry their pregnancies to term rather than defaulting to a fear-driven and desperate attempt to end their child’s life,” he said.

Lower standard of care 

Jordan Butler, spokesperson for pro-life advocacy group Students for Life of America, called the policy “reckless.” 

“Eliminating requirements for identification and pregnancy verification creates dangerous loopholes that allow sexual abusers to evade accountability,” Butler said. 

Through the policy, Newsom and the abortion industry are “exploiting vulnerable women and children for profit,” she said. 

Pacholczyk and Meehan expressed similar concerns for the lower standard of care women — especially vulnerable women — would receive under the law. 

For women and girls facing human trafficking or coercion, protections “don’t exist,” Meehan said.  

“You could have your local pedophile, a sex offender, stockpiling them,” Meehan said.  

“Politicians, the media, and many in the medical profession have decided that abortion deserves an entirely different and lower standard than the rest of medicine,” Pacholczyk said. 

“We would never sanction such a loose approach with other potent pharmaceuticals like opioids or cancer medications,” Pacholczyk said.

This story was updated on Oct. 7, 2025, at 5:44 p.m. ET with the comments from Dr. Susan Bane.

null / Credit: Tatiana Vdb via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Oct 6, 2025 / 07:00 am (CNA).

A Michigan-based program is providing thousands of dollars to expecting mothers to lessen poverty and improve babies’ health — and all that’s needed is an ultrasound and an ID.

The first community-wide and unconditional cash transfer program for new families in the United States called Rx Kids began with the mission to improve “health, hope, and opportunity.” The initiative began in January 2024 in Flint, Michigan, where enrolled mothers receive $1,500 during their pregnancies and an additional $500 a month for the first year of their child’s life. 

In 2024, Dr. Mona Hanna, a pediatrician and the director of the Michigan State University-Hurley Children’s Hospital Pediatric Public Health Initiative, launched the program with the help of Luke Shaefer, the inaugural director of Poverty Solutions, an initiative that partners with communities to find ways to alleviate poverty.

The city of Flint had been struggling with childhood poverty, “which is a major challenge and economic hardship, especially for new families,” Shaefer told CNA. In order to find ways to combat it, Hanna spoke directly with mothers. They shared how impactful the 2021 expanded Child Tax Credit was, which provided parents funds to put toward necessities for their children.

The program had helped “child poverty plummet to the lowest level ever recorded,” Shaefer explained. He had worked on the program design himself, so he was brought in to help create Rx Kids with a similar goal.

The hope for Rx Kids was simply “to support expectant moms during pregnancy,” Shaefer said. Oftentimes, “the period of pregnancy and the first year of life is actually when families are the poorest,” he said. To combat this, the money helps fund food, rent, car seats, diapers, and other baby supplies and necessities. 

Even families higher on “the economic ladder really struggle to make ends meet when they’re welcoming a new baby, which is really maddening because it’s such a critical period for the development of a child,” Shaefer said. “What happens in the womb, and then what happens in the first year of life, are fundamental to shaping the architecture for kids throughout the life course.”

Expecting mothers from all economic backgrounds can apply to the program. To enroll, women submit an ultrasound and identification to verify residency within the participating location. The only other qualification is that the mothers are at least 16 weeks along in their pregnancies or will have legal guardianship over the child after birth.

Funding and operations

Rx Kids is funded through a public-private partnership model that combines federal funds, often Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and private support from philanthropic foundations, local businesses, and health care systems. 

Since it started, the program has provided nearly $11 million in cash transfers to the more than 2,000 enrolled mothers in Flint. There have also been 1,800 babies being born in the city within the program. 

The cash transfers are sent through the nonprofit GiveDirectly, which solely administers cash payments to families through programs like Rx Kids to lessen global poverty. It currently has operations in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Mozambique, Rwanda, Uganda, and the U.S.

After seeing success with Rx Kids mothers in Flint, the program expanded to help Michigan families in Kalamazoo, Eastern Upper Peninsula, Clare County, and Oakland County. It has now enrolled more than 3,500 mothers, provided nearly $15 million in funds, and contributed to more than 2,800 babies.

“Not unlike the support provided by the nearly 100 pregnancy resource centers in Michigan whose staff and volunteers walk alongside women providing material support, counseling, and parenting classes, the Rx Kids program aims to care for women and babies during the challenging time of pregnancy and infancy by providing a no-strings-attached cash program,” Genevieve Marnon, legislative director at Right to Life of Michigan, told CNA.

“The pro-life community has long recognized that when women are supported, respected, and valued, they are more likely to choose birth to abortion and experience better health outcomes,” Marnon said. 

In a state where abortion is “considered a constitutional right, every effort to ensure women have the support they need to make a choice for life is something to applaud.”

Success and benefits

“Programs like [Rx Kids] lead to healthier birth weights, lower rates of postpartum depression, and an atmosphere that celebrates each and every woman and child,” Maron said. “The data speaks for itself.”

Recently, Rx Kids received back “the first line of research that is looking really positive,” Shaefer said. Researchers from Michigan State University and the University of Michigan conducted a study published by the American Journal of Public Health that analyzed more than 450,000 births across Michigan. 

The researchers reported that after the program launched in 2024, Flint experienced an 18% drop in preterm births and a 27% reduction in low birth weight when compared with the previous year and similar Michigan cities. 

There was also a reported 29% reduction in NICU admissions, which prevented nearly 60 hospitalizations annually. The outcomes were linked to behavioral changes of women during their pregnancies, including increased prenatal care.

“We’re not forcing anyone to go to prenatal care, but when we provide the economic resources, they go,” Schaefer explained.

Church support

The Catholic Church in Michigan has also been in favor of the program. Jacob Kanclerz, communications associate for the Michigan Catholic Conference (MCC), told CNA that it helps provide “mothers facing difficult circumstances with the resources they need to make a choice for life and avoid resorting to abortion.”

MCC, which serves as the public policy voice for the Church in the state, “supports the Rx Kids program because of its direct assistance to mothers and children in need in lower-income communities in Michigan.”

In line with the Church, the program works “to promote and protect human life as well as provide for the poor and vulnerable in society,” Kanclerz said. MCC has supported funding in the state budget for the Rx Kids program and has testified in support of the expansion of Senate Bill 309, which would incorporate the program officially into state law.

At a hearing for the bill, Tom Hickson, vice president for public policy and advocacy for MCC, said: “By helping mothers pay for critical prenatal and infant health care services and other expenses surrounding childbirth, Rx Kids can help mothers provide their babies the care they need while in the womb and after they are born.”

He added: “This program has been a wonderful help to expectant mothers and their babies who need extra support during this critical stage of life.”

Rx Kids is currently helping Michigan families, but it also offers a startup guide for other states and communities interested in modeling the program. Schaefer said there is “a ton of interest” from other states that hope to implement the program.

There are two versions of the Rx Kids model that areas can implement, depending on their funding availability and goals. One offers $1,500 during pregnancy and an additional $500 each month for six months following the child’s birth. Communities can also model the original version implemented in Flint, which offers a $1,500 cash transfer during pregnancy, and the additional monthly funds for a whole year.

To secure funding, Rx Kids encourages communities to utilize public sources, state or federal dollars, and private support from philanthropic organizations that want to contribute to the mission of alleviating poverty and supporting babies and their mothers.

The Sistine Hall of the Vatican Apostolic Library. / Credit: Courtney Mares/CNA

Vatican City, Oct 6, 2025 / 06:00 am (CNA).

Long before cloud servers and computers, medieval Catholic monks preserved the intellectual inheritance of the ancient world by handwriting Greek and Latin manuscripts. Centuries later, the Vatican Library and other Catholic institutions in Rome are turning to new technologies, including digitization, robotics, and artificial intelligence (AI), to ensure that patrimony endures.  

The Vatican Apostolic Library, formally founded in the 15th century, is digitizing about 80,000 handwritten manuscripts, part of a collection that also includes 2 million books, 100,000 archival documents, and hundreds of thousands of coins, medals, and graphics.  

“People often think of the Vatican Library as a dusty old place, but actually it has tended to be sort of on the cutting edge,” Timothy Janz, the library’s former vice prefect and now “Scriptor Graecus,” told CNA.

To underscore his point, Janz pointed to one of the many Renaissance frescoes on the walls of the Vatican Library’s Sistine Hall depicting books stored upright on open shelves — a novelty at a time when volumes were usually laid flat. 

“Being a public library at all was something unusual in the 16th century,” he said, adding that Pope Nicholas V first described in a letter in 1451 his desire for a library “for the common convenience of scholars.” 

The Vatican Library’s mission, Janz said, has always been twofold — “to make works available to readers and also to keep them for future readers.” Digitization, then, is “a new way of doing what the founder actually wanted the library to be for, to make these works available.” 

The Vatican’s digitization efforts are focused on their one-of-a-kind historic manuscript collection as well as some of its oldest books, incunabula books printed during the earliest period of typography before 1500.

One of the oldest manuscripts in the Vatican collection is the “Hanna Papyrus,” which is from the third century A.D., which has already been digitized, as has the fourth-century “Codex Vaticanus,” one of the earliest complete manuscripts of the Bible in Greek. The digitization project began in 2012 and has so far put about 30,000 manuscripts online. 

The vision is “to have a real digital library that is really usable and user-friendly,” Janz said. 

Elsewhere in Rome, other historic Catholic institutions are going even more high tech.  

At the Alexandria Digitization Hub in Rome’s historic center, a robotic scanner turns the fragile pages of centuries-old books from the Pontifical Gregorian University’s library collection at a rate of up to 2,500 pages per hour. Within minutes, the texts — some that had only been accessible to scholars traveling to Rome — can be searched, translated, and even fed into an artificial intelligence model trained to reflect Catholic teaching. 

The initiative is led by Matthew Sanders, CEO of a Catholic technology firm called Longbeard, which is using robotics and AI to digitize Catholic collections in some of Rome’s historic pontifical universities and institutes. 

The project began when the rector of the Pontifical Oriental Institute asked whether its 200,000-volume library on Eastern Catholic and Orthodox traditions could be made accessible to scholars in the Middle East, Africa, and India without requiring travel to Rome. The request was simple: digitize the books, make them readable on any device, and allow them to be instantly translated. 

Since then, the Alexandria Digitization Hub’s workload has grown. Longbeard is currently working to digitize the historic collections of the Salesian Pontifical University and the Pontifical Gregorian University and plans to work with the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas and the Venerable English College, as well as several religious orders, to digitize some or all of their collections. 

Digitized works can be folded into a growing Catholic dataset, training Longbeard’s AI systems such as Magisterium AI and an upcoming Catholic-specific language model, Ephrem. Institutions can choose to make their texts public or keep them private. Scholars can search across collections, generate summaries, or trace an AI-generated answer back to its source. 

The system also enables translation through Vulgate AI. Sanders recounted stumbling upon an untranslated papal document on St. Thomas More: “I never knew this existed. It was in Latin. It hadn’t been translated. We ingested it through Vulgate, and suddenly I was able to read it.”

“When you actually go to the hub and see a book being scanned, and an hour later that work is available to anyone in the world to query in any language — that’s when you realize what this really means,” he said.

For now, the Vatican Library is taking a more cautious approach to artificial intelligence and robotics. Janz explained why he believes manuscripts in particular require a human touch rather than automation.

For scholars, he said, “the reason this manuscript is interesting is because in this specific place, it has a word which is different from other manuscripts — maybe it’s just one letter that changes it from a word into a different word,” Janz explained. “It’s that little difference that makes this book so valuable.” This type of work requires 100% accuracy, he added. Even if automated AI transcription reaches “99.9% accuracy … it’s basically useless.” 

Sanders said he “wholeheartedly” agrees that for “the deep, meticulous work of textual criticism, the original manuscript is the ultimate authority, and a human expert is irreplaceable,” but he added that “to limit the role of AI to mere transcription is to miss its revolutionary potential.”

“AI, even with a 99.9% accuracy rate, transforms these silent collections into a dynamic, queryable database of human knowledge,” he said. “It allows a researcher to ask, ‘Show me all 15th-century manuscripts that discuss trade with the Ottoman Empire,’ and get instantaneous results from collections across the globe. It can identify patterns and conceptual links that were previously undiscoverable. The AI finds the needles in the haystack; the scholar is then free to perform the exacting analysis on the invaluable originals.”

For the Vatican Library, the digitization effort has also been integrated into its conservation efforts of these historic texts. “Every manuscript that goes to the scanners first goes to our conservation workshop and is thoroughly examined to make sure that ... it can stand the strain of being digitized,” Janz said. “When the digitization is done, it goes back to the conservation workshop again, and they check to see if anything has changed.”

“We’ve discovered many manuscripts that needed to be fixed, needed conservation work as a result of going through each and every one and looking at it,” he said.

Still, the Vatican Library is not ignoring AI altogether. It is developing a project to catalog illustrations from medieval manuscripts, making images searchable by theme. In partnership with Japanese researchers, it is also training machine learning models to transcribe medieval Greek handwriting. “It will make mistakes and we tell it what the mistakes are … maybe eventually it will get to a point where it can do things reliably,” Janz said.

In the future, Janz said he would love to see technology make it possible to have transcriptions of all of their manuscripts in the historic languages available for scholars.

As for AI, he remains cautious. “I think we’re pretty open to it. I think we shared the same concerns about AI that everyone else has.”

Inside the Vatican Library’s Sistine Hall, an ornate series of frescoes traces the long history of libraries and learning: Moses receiving the Law, the library of Alexandria, the apostles recording the Gospels. Sanders sees his AI project as continuing in the mission of ensuring that the wisdom from the past is “shared as broadly as possible.”

“If we are going to progress as a civilization, we have to learn from those who came before us,” he said. “Part of this project is making sure their reflections and insights are available today.”

Pope Leo XIV celebrates Mass in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican on Oct. 5, 2025. / Credit: Daniel Ibañez/CNA

Vatican City, Oct 5, 2025 / 07:50 am (CNA).

Pope Leo XIV on Sunday condemned the resurgence of antisemitic hatred and appealed for renewed commitment to peace in the Middle East while also assuring prayers for victims of a devastating earthquake in the Philippines.

“I express my concern about the rise of antisemitic hatred in the world, as unfortunately we saw with the terrorist attack in Manchester a few days ago,” the pope said from St. Peter’s Square before leading the Angelus prayer. He added that he “continue[s] to be saddened by the immense suffering of the Palestinian people in Gaza.”

The pope said that “in the dramatic situation in the Middle East, some significant steps forward have been taken in peace negotiations,” and he urged all leaders “to commit themselves to this path, to bring about a ceasefire, and to release the hostages.” He also invited the faithful “to remain united in prayer, so that the ongoing efforts may put an end to the war and lead us towards a just and lasting peace.”

Turning to the Philippines, where a strong earthquake struck the central region on Sept. 30, Pope Leo expressed closeness “to the dear Filipino people” and said he prays “for those who are most severely affected by the consequences of the earthquake.”

“Faced with any danger,” he added, “let us remain united and supportive in our trust in God and in the intercession of our Blessed Mother.”

Call to pray for peace

The pope invited Catholics to join spiritually with those gathered at the Shrine of Our Lady of the Rosary in Pompeii for the traditional supplication held each October.

“In this month of October, as we contemplate with Mary the mysteries of Christ Our Savior, let us deepen our prayer for peace: a prayer that becomes concrete solidarity with those people tormented by war,” he said. “Thank you to the many children around the world who have committed themselves to praying the rosary for this intention. You have our heartfelt thanks!”

Pope Leo also greeted participants in the jubilee for missionaries and migrants, thanking them for their witness.

“The Church is entirely missionary and is one great people journeying towards the kingdom of God,” he said. “But no one should be forced to flee, nor exploited or mistreated, because of their situation as foreigners or people in need! Human dignity must always come first.”

‘A new missionary age opens in the Church’

Earlier that morning, the pope celebrated Mass for the Jubilee of the Missionary World and the Jubilee of Migrants in St. Peter’s Square, inviting Catholics to renew their missionary vocation through compassion and welcome.

“Today we celebrate the jubilee of the missions and of migrants,” he began. “This is a wonderful opportunity to rekindle in ourselves the awareness of our missionary vocation, which arises from the desire to bring the joy and consolation of the Gospel to everyone, especially those who are experiencing difficult and painful situations.”

Recalling the prophet Habakkuk’s lament — “O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not hear?” — the pope said that faith transforms lives and “makes of them an instrument of the salvation that even today God wishes to bring about in the world.”

True faith, he said, “does not impose itself by means of power and in extraordinary ways” but “carries within it the strength of God’s love that opens the way to salvation.”

Pope Leo said the missionary calling today means responding to suffering close at hand as well as far away.

“If for a long time we have associated with mission the word ‘depart’ … today the frontiers of the missions are no longer geographical, because poverty, suffering, and the desire for a greater hope have made their way to us,” he said.

“Those boats which hope to catch sight of a safe port, and those eyes filled with anguish and hope seeking to reach the shore, cannot and must not find the coldness of indifference or the stigma of discrimination!” he warned. “Mission is not so much about ‘departing’ but instead ‘remaining’ in order to proclaim Christ through hospitality and welcome, compassion and solidarity.”

The pope encouraged renewed cooperation among churches, noting that migration from the Global South can “renew the face of the Church and sustain a Christianity that is more open, more alive, and more dynamic.” He also called for “new missionary effort by laity, religious, and priests who will offer their service in missionary lands,” especially in Europe.

Concluding, Pope Leo offered his blessing “to the local clergy of the particular churches, to missionaries and those discerning a vocation,” and told migrants: “Know that you are always welcome!”

Throughout his homily and his Angelus address, Pope Leo returned to a single message: faith expressed in prayer, compassion, and hospitality remains the seed of peace — whether in war-torn regions, along migration routes, or in the hearts of those who choose to welcome others.

This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.

Sister Norman Pimentel, “the immigrants’ nun,” participated in an Oct. 2, 2025, meeting with Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican. / Credit: Victoria Cardiel/EWTN News

Vatican City, Oct 5, 2025 / 07:00 am (CNA).

Sister Norma Pimentel is known as “the immigrants’ nun.” For over a decade, she has directed the Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley (CCRGV) Humanitarian Respite Center, a humanitarian aid center located in McAllen, Texas, on the border with Mexico. From there, she has provided assistance to people who arrive in the United States seeking asylum.

According to Pimentel, the increase in arrests by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to expel immigrants who lack legal status in the country has unleashed a climate of fear in communities.

‘Raids are taking place everywhere’

“People are extremely afraid ... they know that nowhere is safe, they pick you up anywhere, and you can’t even go to the supermarket because raids are taking place everywhere,” the religious explained.

Last year, the center received a legal request from the Texas attorney general’s office to compel a CCRGV representative to sit for a deposition regarding its immigrant assistance efforts, although the case was subsequently dismissed by a judge.

Pimentel said the sense of widespread fear has also spread to other residents of the Rio Grande Valley. Many now think: “If I help him, maybe something will happen to me too,” she told ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner, shortly after participating in the Oct. 2 “Refugees and Migrants in Our Common Home” conference with Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican.

The initiative, part of the Jubilee of Migrants, is the first global meeting promoted by the Vatican to bring together religious institutions, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and experts dedicated to addressing the challenges of migratory flows.

At the meeting, the pontiff asked all of the participants to promote a culture of “reconciliation and hope” to address the “urgent challenges” of migration.

“The Holy Father strongly affirms that immigrants are human beings who must be recognized and treated with dignity. Therefore, you can’t say you’re pro-life if you don’t defend the lives of human beings and immigrants,” Pimentel pointed out.

Every so often, dozens of exhausted people knock on her door, their bodies reflecting the consequences of a hellish journey. Most travel hundreds of miles on foot to reach the U.S.-Mexico border.

Pimentel, a sister of the Missionaries of Jesus, who works side by side with the bishop of Brownsville, Daniel Flores, always greets them with a warm welcome: “We are right on the border, there with the immigrants, with the migrant families, who are truly part of our Church.”

“We are very versed in how to be present, how to speak and encourage people to be good neighbors, to help each other, to not feel afraid that the government won’t allow us to live our religion, our faith, and to be present to help people when they need it,” she explained.

The most important thing is “that they don’t feel abandoned and alone” and that they realize that, despite the growing hostility, “they do matter in this life.”

This total commitment is born from the conviction that every person who suffers bears the face of Christ. In any case, Pimentel doesn’t hide the fact that she sometimes feels overwhelmed. “We don’t have enough resources,” she lamented.

She’s also convinced that giving these migrants a face and sharing the horror stories they endure is the best antidote to society being fed up with immigrants: “When I see a crying child who comes up to me and says, ‘Help me,’ with tears streaming down his face, [I want] to be able to share that with other people. That way, people can feel that pain, the cries of that child or that mother who is scared and afraid of how to protect her children.”

That’s why she never misses an opportunity to make known the pain of these people because “when you get close to a human being who is suffering, your heart connects and you change.”

This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.

St. Pio of Pietrelcina, better known as Padre Pio. / Credit: After Elia Stelluto, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

CNA Staff, Oct 5, 2025 / 06:00 am (CNA).

For the first time in the United States, Catholics will have the opportunity to venerate the full-size habit worn by St. Pio of Pietrelcina, also known as Padre Pio.

The rare opportunity will take place from Oct. 11–14 at the National Centre for Padre Pio in Barto, Pennsylvania, in the Diocese of Allentown.

A group of Italian Capuchin friars from Padre Pio’s friary — the Our Lady of Grace Capuchin Friary in San Giovanni Rotondo in southern Italy — will bring the habit to be displayed at the national center, which has been designated a jubilee site within the Allentown Diocese. 

“This unprecedented visit from the friars of San Giovanni Rotondo is an amazing opportunity for us to be able to share a rare and intimate relic of Padre Pio with his devotees,” Vera Marie Calandra, the vice president of the center, said on the group’s website. 

“We expect to have pilgrims visiting from throughout the United States, and we will be ready to make their visit a special time of veneration, prayer, and reflection.”

The weekend of festivities will open on Saturday, Oct. 11, with Mass celebrated by the Capuchin friars from San Giovanni Rotondo. Following the Mass, there will be a procession honoring Padre Pio. 

Mass will also be celebrated on Sunday, Oct. 12, with a procession following. On Oct. 13, Harrisburg Bishop Emeritus Ronald Gainer will celebrate Mass in English followed by a Mass celebrated in Italian by the friars. 

Allentown Bishop Alfred Schlert will celebrate Mass on Oct. 14 followed by a Mass celebrated in Italian by the friars. 

“We could not be more excited about having the opportunity to have Padre [Francesco] Dileo and other friars from Padre Pio’s Our Lady of Grace friary in San Giovanni Rotondo, Italy, visit us with these rare and precious relics,” said Nick Gibboni, the executive director of the National Centre for Padre Pio.

“We continue to be enormously blessed to have a close relationship with Padre Pio’s brother friars, and we are excited about our continued relationship.” 

In addition to the habit’s visit at the national center, the friars will also be taking the habit to the Padre Pio Foundation of America in Cromwell, Connecticut. The habit will be available for veneration at St. Pius X Church in Middletown, Connecticut, from Oct. 15–18. 

Padre Pio was a Capuchin Franciscan friar, priest, and mystic of the 20th century. He is known for his deep wisdom about prayer and peace, having the stigmata, miraculous reports of his bilocation, being physically attacked by the devil, and mastering the spiritual life. 

His tomb can be found in the Sanctuary of St. Mary Our Lady of Grace in San Giovanni Rotondo, Italy.

Pope Leo XIV signs his first apostolic exhortation, “Dilexi Te,” at the Vatican on Saturday, Oct. 4, 2025. / Credit: Vatican Media

CNA Staff, Oct 4, 2025 / 14:39 pm (CNA).

Pope Leo XIV on Oct. 4 signed the first apostolic exhortation of his pontificate, the text of which is expected to be released next week.

The Vatican said in a press release that Leo signed the exhortation Dilexi Te (“I Have Loved You”) in the library of the Apostolic Palace. The Holy See did not reveal the text of the document, which it said will be presented on Oct. 9 by the Holy See Press Office.

The focus of the document was also not officially announced, though it is reportedly expected to focus on the poor. It was signed on the feast of St. Francis of Assisi.

The signing of the document took place in the presence of Archbishop Edgar Peña Parra, substitute for general affairs of the Secretariat of State, the Vatican said.