Pope Francis said on February 5 he is planning to visit India next year and is studying a possible trip to Mongolia later in 2023 in what would be a first for a Pope.
The Pope outlined his upcoming travel schedule during his flight back to Rome from South Sudan, wire agency AP reported.
He confirmed that he would be in Lisbon, Portugal for World Youth Day the first week of August and would participate in a September 23 meeting of Mediterranean bishops in Marseille, France.
He said there was “the possibility” that he would fly from Marseille to Mongolia, which would be a first for a pope.
Looking further ahead, Francis said he thought he would visit India in 2024, after plans for a trip in 2017 fell apart.
Pope Francis spoke to reporters after a six-day visit to Congo and South Sudan, where he was joined in the South Sudanese capital, Juba, by the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby and the moderator of the Church of Scotland, the Rt. Rev. Iain Greenshields.
The Catholic, Anglican and Presbyterian leaders made a novel joint visit to push South Sudan’s political leaders to make progress on implementing a stalled 2018 peace accord that ended a civil war following the country’s 2011 independence from Sudan.

Addressing the European assembly of the Synod on Synodality, Cardinal Mario Grech—the secretary-general of the Synod—has given a strong indication of the Vatican’s plans for the worldwide assembly.
In a homily preached during Mass at Saint Vitus cathedral in Prague on February 8, Cardinal Grech prayed that “our endeavour not become an exercise in exclusive distinction, between those who are in and those who are out.” Yet he also cautioned against a tendency to “blur the distinction between what is within the Catholic tradition and what is outside.”
Some commentators have read Cardinal Grech’s homily as a rebuke to the German bishops, whose “Synodal Path” calls for dramatic changes in Church teaching and discipline. But the cardinal does not call for reject-ion of those proposals. On the contrary he welcomes the tension between the radical proposals of liberal bishops and the conservative calls for clarity. He suggests that the tension will remain when the work of the Synod is done.
The German bishops and their liberal colleagues call for the development of an “inclusive” Church, which would downplay (if not eliminate) moral teachings that offend the sensibilities of the secularized Western world. Tra-dition-minded Catholics respond with a demand to clarify those teachings, to ensure that the Chu-rch does not stray from perenni-al truths. The cardinal, in his homily, nods to both sides of that dispute.
Cardinal Grech sends a reassuring message to conservative Catholics: “The Synod is not there to destroy distinctions, to destroy the Catholic identity.”

European Catholics debated on February 9 morning the contents of a final document that will influence the discussions of the Synod of Bishops at the Vatican in the fall.
On the final day of public speeches in Prague on Feb. 9, the 200 delegates at the European Continental Assembly were asked if the assembly’s final document drafted by a six-member committee was faithful to what was discussed in the previous three days of the assembly.
Ukrainian Bishop Oleksandr Yazlovetskiy, a Latin auxiliary bishop of Kyiv, was one of the first to take the floor, raising an objection to the repeated use of the term LGBTQ on “every other page” in the document, suggesting instead that it would be better to cover the topic within a single paragraph.
Archbishop StanisBaw Gdecki objected to the framing of “conservative and liberal” when describing the Church, suggesting instead to clarify whether given statements agree or disagree with the Gospel.
The Polish prelate added that the document does not communicate the position of the Church in its references to “LGBT” per-sons.
Bishop Georg Bätzing, the president of the German bishops’ conference, said that the Church is not yet in a “new Pentecost” as the document claimed.
Archbishop Felix Gmür of Basel, Switzerland, noted that parts of the text seemed “too vague” and could be more clear, especially in underlining where tensions exist.

With all that has been said about the passing of Pope Benedict XVI, most of it neglects the larger historical context—his prediction of the end of our era and his vision for the one to follow it.
One must begin back in the decade following the horrors of World War I in April 1917. By then the Enlightenment Era’s victory for universal peace and prosperity was reckoned so successful as to justify a serious proposal to “outlaw war.” It resulted in a Kellogg-Briand Pact that was signed by all the world powers, including the US and Germany.
Over his lifetime, Ratzinger became a dominant force in the intellectual debate over the influence of progressive liberalism in the West and the world, notably debating with atheist philosophers like Jurgen Habermas with mutual concessions and respect. His life spanned the early optimism and dominance of Wilsonian idealism, Nazi rule and defeat in World War II, the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the end of the Soviet Union.
He rejoiced in the Cold War victory but did not see it as The End of History or believe that it produced a new man to populate it. To Ratzinger, 1991 was no more a final victory than it was 1917. Indeed, his magnum opus, a collection of articles written du-ring the 1990s until his papa-cy, Truth and Tolerance, predicted the end of the Enlightenment itself.
By the close of the 20th century, it had become clear to both the religious Ratzinger and secular Habermas that Western reason, science, democracy, and unbounded freedoms were failing. The Nazi and communist alternatives had fallen but the “feeling that democracy is still not the right form of freedom is fairly general” Ratzinger noted. Critics were raising valid questions about its legitimacy.
How free are elections? To what extent is the people’s will manipulated by publicity, that is by capital, by the agency of a few people who dominate public opinion? Is there not a new oligarchy of the people who decide what is modern and progressive, what somebody enlightened has to think? How fearsome this oligarchy is, the way they can publicly execute people, is well enough known. Anyone who gets in their way is an enemy of freedom because he is preventing freedom of expression.

Since its creation in the 16th century, this church has been an important cultural and intellectual resource for Ukrainian id-entity. Most Ukrainians regard themselves as Orthodox, not Catholic. But with anywhere from 4.5 million to 6.5 million members, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church is the third-largest church in Ukraine, representing about 10% to 15% of the Ukrainian population.
Despite its relatively small size, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church has, in the words of historian Kathryn David, “played an outsized role … in the creation of the Ukrainian nation.”
As a professor of religious studies who has spent three decades exploring the social and political role of religion in Eastern Europe, I am fascinated by the growing influence of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine.
As its name suggests, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church has a complex heritage. It is a Ukrainian church consisting of Ukrainian parishioners and headquartered in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv.