Good Friday service led by Pope Francis

By Laura Smith-Spark, CNN

updated 1:00 PM EDT, Fri April 18, 2014

Pope Francis breaks tradition, again

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Pope Francis leads service at St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican
• In the evening, he will walk the Stations of the Cross at the Colosseum in Rome
• Good Friday, which recalls the day Jesus died on the cross, is a solemn day for believers

(CNN) -- Pope Francis on Friday evening was leading a service at St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican to mark Good Friday, the most solemn day in the Christian calendar.

Later Friday, he will take part in a nighttime ceremony marking the Stations of the Cross, also known as the Way of the Cross or Via Crucis, at Rome's Colosseum -- one of the city's best known landmarks.

Roman Catholics worldwide will reflect Friday on the gospel account of the Lord's Passion, recalling the day Jesus died on the cross before rising three days later, according to Christian doctrine.

Holy Week, one of the most significant periods of the Roman Catholic year, will culminate on Easter Sunday with a Mass in St. Peter's Square, led by the pope.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/04/18/world/europe/vatican-pope-good-friday/

The Political Genius of Pope Francis

This guy could teach President Obama a thing or two.

By CANDIDA MOSS

January 17, 2014

Late last year, when President Obama reviewed the draft of a speech he was scheduled to give on economic inequality, he sent it back with a request: He wanted his speechwriter to add a quote from Pope Francis’s recent letter to the Catholic church.

“Across the developed world, inequality has increased,” Obama said in the Dec. 4 speech. 

“Some of you may have seen just last week, the pope himself spoke about this at eloquent length. ‘How could it be,’ he wrote, ‘that it’s not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?’”

The rhetoric of quotation is subtle, but in this particular round of political name-checking, Francis is the authority brought in to lend credibility to Obama’s policies.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/01/pope-francis-political-genius-102301.html#ixzz2rFoSwrNV