In the first General Audience since his summer break Pope Francis resumed his Catechesis on the Church and the People of God, but his mind was also on the tensions and recent conflict in the Middle East and an earthquake in China which last Sunday left hundreds dead and over two thousand injured. Expressing his closeness to the people of the province of Yunnan, the Holy Father offered his prayers for the victims and their families, for those injured and those who lost homes in the disaster…

Pope Francis on Tuesday evening met with more than 50,000 altar servers from Germany.

The young people are on their annual pilgrimage to Rome, which this year has a motto from Matthew 12:12:  “Freedom! Because it is lawful to do good.”

The Holy Father arrived in Saint Peter’s Square at 6 pm Rome time, greeted by lively modern music…

• Pope Francis prayed the Angelus with the faithful gathered beneath a dreary, drizzly early August sky in St. Peter’s Square this Sunday, the eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, on which the account of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes from the Gospel according to St. Matthew (14:13-21) is proclaimed. It was on the Lord Jesus’ miraculous feeding of the five thousand that the Holy Father focused his remarks ahead of the traditional prayer of Marian devotion at midday…