Vatican City, Mar 7, 2015 / 01:49 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- What’s so important about an encounter? Pope Francis thinks one encounter is key to everything.  

“Everything in our life, today as at the time of Jesus, begins with an encounter,” the Pope said at a March 7 audience. Christ is always there first: “when we arrive, He is there waiting.”

Vatican City, Mar 6, 2015 / 12:55 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Pope Francis on Wednesday reminded bishops to turn their sights to the Eucharist – rather than themselves – as the source of unity for the Church.

“The bishop does not gather people around himself, or his own ideas, but around Christ, present in his word and in the Sacrament of his Body and Blood,” the Pope said Mar. 4 during an audience with bishops taking part this week in a gathering of the Focolare movement.

Vatican City, Mar 4, 2015 / 05:05 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Statutes for the Vatican's three finanical oversight bodies were released earlier this week, largely consolidating the influence of the Secretariat for the Economy and its prefect, Cardinal George Pell.

Signed by Pope Francis Feb. 22 and having come into effect March 1, the statutes of the Council for the Economy, the Secretariat for the Economy, and the Office for the General Auditor provided a legal framework to the three new Vatican offices.

Rome, Italy, Mar 4, 2015 / 05:16 am (CNA/EWTN News).- In his general audience Pope Francis condemned modern society for silently disposing of the elderly, saying that a civilization which views them only as burdensome is ‘perverse’ and ill.

“It’s is a mortal sin to discard our elderly…The elderly are not aliens. We are them – in a short or in a long while we are inevitably them, even though we choose not to think about it,” the Pope told pilgrims present in St. Peter’s Square for his March 4 general audience address.