Just as the true meaning of the Eucharist needs to be defended from those who would use it for publicity, it needs to be defended from those who would use it to divide the worthy from the unworthy.

Toward the end of March I suggested to Pope Francis that this might be a good moment to address the English-speaking world: the pandemic that had so affected Italy and Spain was now reaching the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia. Without promising anything, he asked me to send some questions.

A new book by John Cornwell describes the welcome interruption of Francis’s papacy.

Pope Francis’s new book offers a vision for a politics rooted in solidarity.

An experienced Vatican journalist texted me when the Pope’s World Communications Day message was released over the weekend. She was bowled over by it and wanted to know if I knew who had had a hand in it (I didn’t). “This message is just so much more concrete, real, and knowledgeable about the business,” my friend wrote. “It’s not just pious platitudes.”

My Christmas was odd, and not just because of lockdown. After three weeks launching Let Us Dream, Pope Francis’s remarkable book on the pandemic that I helped him put together, I was quoted in a UK tabloid news site forecasting his impending resignation.

Combining an appetite for power with ideological vagueness and counterintuitive alliances, the world’s most successful election-winning machine has done it again.

In his new book Let Us Dream, the Pope shares a very personal vision of a fairer world in the aftermath of Covid. In one of the most moving passages, he describes coming to see that the call to live in friendship with God and our neighbour is inseparably bound up with care for our environment.

In his new book, “Let Us Dream,” Pope Francis describes his three “personal Covids”: times in his life when circumstances have forced him to stop, reflect and, sometimes, change course.

This might have been the year when Pope Francis would have seen his work completed. Instead, Covid-19 pitched the world into turmoil and darkness, with its future in the balance, and gave its most prominent spiritual leader his greatest challenge – and opportunity.