The three leading prelates of the Episcopal Conference of Colombia met with Pope Leo XIV on June 17, four days before the nation’s presidential runoff election, and said afterwards that the Pontiff “reiterated his love and concern for Colombia, encouraging the Church and society to persevere in the search for peace, unity and reconciliation.”

Pope Leo XIV said that in order to foster an encounter with Christ, physical and virtual spaces within the Church need to be safe from abuse.

The nation’s military occupied the cathedral complex in 2023 and used it as a military base. Bishop Celso Ba Shwe welcomed the return of the cathedral but said that he would not reside there, instead ministering in camps filled with persons displaced by the Myanmar civil war.

The interview aired on June 16, the date of publication of his book Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith.

“Unidentified rebels, possibly the ADF, are roaming the countryside,” the missionary said. “One of our nurses, Emmanuel, was gunned down behind our convent wall.”

L’Osservatore Romano reported that “missionaries speak about emptied villages, torched homes, and populations forced to flee without knowing when they might return ... In the village of Diforo, rebels attempted to set fire to the local church and killed a catechist’s son.” However, the missionary told the Vatican newspaper that “we are more afraid of the military than the rebels, especially at night.”

The spokesman, Father Cyril Gamini Fernando, “also urged the public not to be misled by false and defamatory information circulating on social media regarding the ongoing Easter Sunday attacks investigations,” according to The Morning, a newspaper based in Colombo.

The 2019 Sri Lanka Easter bombings killed over 260 people and injured over 500.

“New challenges await a response today from the world of information, which has only one way to overcome them: quality,” the Pope added, as he called on the newspaper to “cherish voices and faces, to uphold the integrity of every news report and every analysis, to preserve the beauty of cultures and regions, to strengthen communities through the truth that unites us all, to guide technology without succumbing to the rhetoric of a single line of thought, to respect diverse opinions, and never to give in to the temptation to maximize profits by resorting to the drug of fake news and manufactured polarization.”

L’Adidge is based in the northern Italian city of Trento.

Cardinal Camillo Ruini, a leading protégé of Pope St. John Paul II, died on June 16 at the age of 95.

The Vatican City State announced that its Governorate signed a memorandum of understanding with the Italian utility Acea to “develop a joint pathway for the definition, structuring, and progressive implementation of the agrivoltaic plant” that the Holy See will “build within the Vatican’s extraterritorial area of Santa Maria di Galeria.”

The WFP, an agency of the United Nations, is headquartered in Rome.