Pope's point man for charity urges world not to forget homeless in vaccination push
- Jan 21, 2021
Pope Francis has issued a new law formalizing the ability for women and girls to be lectors and altar servers at Mass, something which has long been the common practice in western countries such as the United States but had yet to be written into law.
Christ’s commandment to love God and neighbor is a path trodden by those who have the desire to become saints, Pope Francis told thousands of altar servers from around the world.
Among the thousands of young altar servers braving the sweltering Rome heat, a group from the United States sat patiently in the shade of the colonnade in St. Peter’s Square waiting to take their seats.
Catholic officials in Italy have threatened former altar boys of the pope with criminal defamation charges for having publicly accused an older seminarian of sexual misconduct when they lived together at the youth seminary inside the Vatican gardens. Church lawyers in the diocese of Como have also warned an Italian investigative news program against broadcasting the boys’ claims and have purportedly pressed a church official to recant his suggestion of a cover-up.
A former Roman Catholic priest who was indicted in Maine on 29 counts of sexual misconduct dating to the 1980s has been arrested in Boston. Police and U.S. Marshals took 74-year-old Ronald Paquin into custody on Wednesday near a hospital in the city’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood.
A 79-year-old man who once supervised altar boys as a layman at a Catholic church in Boston has pleaded not guilty to charges that he sexually abused a young boy decades ago, after being arraigned on two counts of child rape and three counts of indecent assault and battery on a child under age 14.