Francis appeared at Rome's Olympic Stadium on Saturday to kick off a football match as part of the Vatican's celebration of "World Children's Day".
The cameras of Vatican television CTV couldn't hide the fact that many of the seats in the stadium were empty (screenshots below). Despite this, Francis appeared to be in good spirits.
The centrepiece of the event was a four-metre high "Cross of Joy". Its producer, Mimmo Paladino, said it mixed Christian culture and fairy tales (sic).
Earlier in the day, Francis held an audience at the Vatican with children from war-torn regions, including Palestine and Ukraine. He joked around and donned a baseball cap given to him by the children.
In his message for Children's Day, he wrote that "everything that is not new will pass away. God is newness. The Lord always gives us something new".
It is to be feared that the children may have applied this statement to their desire to buy a new mobile phone.
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This riveting account by a survivor of adolescent sexual abuse first appeared in the Catholic League Journal, Catalyst, in April 2020. It is republished with permission at Beyond These Stone Walls.
As an adolescent victim of homosexual clergy abuse, I know the challenges that men face in coming forward. Many of us are silenced in shame after being abused. Aggravating the recovery process is that, despite the evidence, there is an ongoing agenda to cover up the homosexual nature of the abuse crisis, disenfranchising more than 80% of us victims.
Recovery is difficult enough without predatory advocacy groups and their lawyers trolling us for profit and politics. The added torment of being told the problem isn’t related to homosexuality only compounds our pain. For this reason, I am grateful to the Catholic League for giving me the opportunity to relay the difficulties facing victims of homosexual abuse in particular, with all due respect and recognition of the grief suffered by victims who …More

Mother Isabel de la Trinidad did not consult with her community, the Poor Clare Sisters of Belorado, when she decided to break with the Archdiocese of Burgos and join Pablo de Rojas Sáncez-Franco, a self-declared sedevacantist bishop, Sister María Amparo, 81, said in an interview with DiarioDeBurgos.es (May 18).
The nun has been in religious life for 62 years, 20 of them spent in Belorado. She left three days after the nuns' declaration of schism. Sister María strongly denies Mother Isabel’s claim that the decision was unanimous.
“You can’t make such a decision like that without a chapter, and there was no meeting. We were presented with facts that had already been established,” she said. According to the sister, the 16 nuns were called to gather in a parlour, where Pablo de Rojas Sánchez-Franco waited and told the nuns that he was now in charge.
Sister María says she spoke out against the [pseudo-] bishop at the meeting: “The Lord put words in my mouth. I told him: We are under the …More

A woman from Madrid, who suffers from several illnesses and has a very serious visual impairment, has regained her sight thanks to the waters of Lourdes, the famous Marian sanctuary in the south of France.
The extraordinary event was immediately verified by doctors and recorded by the Sanctuary.
The possible miracle took place during a Spanish pilgrimage that ended on 19 May.
So far, out of hundreds of alleged miracles, only 70 have been recognised by the Lourdes medical commission, the last in February 2018. This case could become number 71. A process of medical and spiritual discernment is underway.
Picture: © Lawrence OP, CC BY-NC-ND, #newsUgzipchtmo

The plenary meeting of the 'International Commission for Theological Dialogue' with the Orientals in Rome in January was supposed to be about Our Lady.
But the Orientals wanted to talk about Francis' homosexual propaganda piece 'Fiducia supplicans', Cardinal Kurt Koch told Die-Tagespost.de (23 May).
So the Cardinal invited Tucho Fernández to the meeting. But the coward "could not come" in person and only sent a written statement, which the Orientals described as "insufficient".
Before having caused a schism in the Catholic Church, the homosex issue has already divided the Anglicans. At Koch's recent meeting with Anglican lay bishops, the African representatives were absent. The reason: Canterbury pushes for homosex-propaganda and the Anglican ordination of women.
"Talking to [lay] Archbishop Welby, I had to say frankly that we have similar tensions in the Catholic Church over the same issues," admits Cardinal Koch.
He warned that "there are quite a few bishops in Germany, Switzerland …More

Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker made a public statement on Friday night following his memorable commencement speech at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas, which caused a nervous breakdown for the regime's propaganda activists.
Butker was speaking at an event sponsored by DailyWire.com, a warmongering outlet that recently kicked out Catholic convert Candace Owens for condemning the war in Gaza.
"If it wasn't clear that timeless Catholic values are hated by many, it is now," Butker said, announcing that the "shocking level of hatred" would not stop him from being "unapologetic" about the Faith.
"Over the past few days, my beliefs, or what people think, I believe, have been the focus of countless discussions around the globe."
"The more I've talked about what I value most, my Catholic faith, the more polarising I've become. It's a decision I made consciously, and one I have no regrets about".
"As the days went by, even those who disagreed with my viewpoints shared their …More

The Jesuits are in "deep decline", writes Father Julio Fernández Techera SJ, 57, rector of the Catholic University of Uruguay, in a eleven-page study dated 22 April and first circulated among Jesuits on 18 May. The main points.
- The decline in admissions to the Jesuits in the West is getting worse every year.
- Many members are leaving the order.
- A friend told Fernández that in his province there have been 72 novices in the last ten years, while in the same period 71 Jesuits have left the Society.
- 314 novices joined the Jesuits in 2023, while 319 Jesuits died.
- There are currently 13,995 Jesuits, but in a few years the Society of Jesus will have disappeared from several European countries and will be insignificant in others in Europe, America and Oceania.
- Africa is the only continent where the Jesuits are growing.
- Since 2013, the Jesuits have lost more than 3,000 members. - "The problem is not only that many members of the order are dying and few are joining, but also that we …More

The former Pontifical Academy for Life, now the Pontifical Academy for Death, has betrayed its founder, John Paul II, and its first president, Professor Jérôme Lejeune, said George Weigel, John Paul II's biographer and neo-conservative warmonger, at a conference on bioethics held in Rome on 17-18 May.
As an example, he cited the book with the euphemistic title "La Gioia della Vita" ("The Joy of Life") published by the Academy in February. It contains a prologue by the homosexual activist Vincenzo Paglia, who is also a Vatican archbishop and president of the academy.
The authors of the articles in the book attempt to whitewash contraception, medically assisted procreation and euthanasia suicide.
Weigel describes the book's authors as "dissenting from the authoritative teaching" of the Church, and formulates the truism that the book espouses an "anti-biblical and anti-metaphysical anthropology" that would have been " completely foreign, indeed abhorrent, to both Jérôme Lejeune and John …More