Vatican City

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI ’s body, his head resting on a pair of crimson pillows, lay in state in St. Peter’s Basilica on Monday as thousands of people filed by to pay tribute to the pontiff who shocked the world by retiring a decade ago.

As daylight broke, 10 white-gloved Papal Gentlemen — lay assistants to pontiffs and papal households — carried the body on a cloth-covered wooden stretcher after its arrival at the basilica to its resting place in front of the main altar under Bernini’s towering bronze canopy.

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Veteran reporter Giovanna Chirri was starting to doze off in the Vatican press room on a slow holiday when all of a sudden the Latin she learned in high school made her perk up — and gave her the scoop of a lifetime.

It was Feb. 11, 2013, and Chirri was watching closed-circuit television coverage of Pope Benedict XVI presiding over a pro-forma meeting of cardinals to set dates for three upcoming canonizations.

Dec 31 (Reuters) - Following are reactions to the death of former Pope Benedict, who was the first pontiff in 600 years to resign from the post rather than rule for life:

GERMAN CHANCELLOR OLAF SCHOLZ ON TWITTER:

"As a "German" #Pope, #BenedictXVI was a special church leader for many, not only in this country. The world is losing a formative figure of the Catholic Church, a forthright personality and a clever theologian. My thoughts are with Pope Francis."

MARKUS SOEDER, PREMIER OF BENEDICT'S HOME STATE OF BAVARIA:

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, the shy German theologian who tried to reawaken Christianity in a secularized Europe but will forever be remembered as the first pontiff in 600 years to resign from the job, died Saturday. He was 95.

Pope Francis will celebrate his funeral Mass in St. Peter’s Square on Thursday, an unprecedented event in which a current pope will celebrate the funeral of a former one.

VATICAN CITY (AP) — The health of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI has worsened due to his age, and doctors are constantly monitoring the frail 95-year-old’s condition, the Vatican said Wednesday.

Vatican spokesperson Matteo Bruni said Pope Francis, who asked the faithful earlier Wednesday to pray for Benedict, went to visit his predecessor in the monastery on Vatican grounds where the retired pontiff has lived since retiring in February 2013.

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis used his Christmas message Sunday to lament the “icy winds of war” buffeting humanity and to make an impassioned plea for an immediate end to the fighting in Ukraine, a 10-month-old conflict he decried as “senseless.”

At noon local time, Francis delivered the traditional “Urbi et Orbi″ (Latin for ”’to the city and to the world”) speech from the central balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica.

Tens of thousands of tourists, pilgrims and residents of Rome crowded into St. Peter’s Square to listen to the pontiff and to receive his blessing.

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis warned Vatican bureaucrats on Thursday to beware the devil that lurks among them, saying it is an “elegant demon” that works in people who have a rigid, holier-than-thou way of living the Catholic faith.

Francis used his annual Christmas greeting to the Roman Curia to again put the cardinals, bishops and priests who work in the Holy See on notice that they are by no means beyond reproach and are, in fact, particularly vulnerable to evil.

VATICAN CITY, Dec 16 (Reuters) - Pope Francis has decided to return to Greece three 2,500-year-old pieces of the Parthenon that have been in the papal collections of the Vatican Museums for more than a century.

The Vatican said in a brief statement on Friday that the pope was giving them to Ieronymos II, the head of the Greek Orthodox Church, as a gesture of ecumenical dialogue with the Roman Catholic Church.

VATICAN CITY (AP) — The text message to the Vatican monsignor offered forgiveness along with a threat: “I know everything about you … and I keep it all in my archives,” it read. “I pardon you, Perlasca, but remember, you owe me a favor.”

The message was one of more than 100 newly revealed WhatsApp texts and other correspondence entered into evidence at the Vatican courthouse last week that have jolted a financial crimes trial involving the Holy See’s money-losing investment in a London property.

VATICAN CITY, Nov 24 (Reuters) - A court at a Vatican corruption trial on Thursday heard a secretly recorded telephone call between the main defendant, embattled Cardinal Angelo Becciu, and Pope Francis.

The recording was made without the pope's knowledge by someone in a room with Becciu in July 2021, shortly before the trial began and while the pope was still recovering from major intestinal surgery, the court was told.