Four years after “The Vatican Cookbook” became a best-seller by revealing the secrets of the papal palate, authors David Geisser and Thomas Kelly have a sequel geared specifically for the holiday season in “The Vatican Christmas Cookbook.”

Meeting with delegations from Castelli in Italy’s Abruzzo region and from Kocevje, Slovenia — responsible, respectively, for the Nativity scene and Christmas tree in St. Peter’s Square — the pope said that Christmas “reminds us that Jesus is our peace, our joy, our strength, our comfort.”

Even though the world is facing a pandemic that may limit many people’s ability to celebrate the sacraments, particularly those people who are in isolation, quarantining or hospitalized with COVID-19, confession by phone is still most likely invalid, said Cardinal Mauro Piacenza, head of the Apostolic Penitentiary.

“We might put this common, perplexing human problem under the heading of ‘addiction.’ Late psychiatrist and theologian Gerald May describes addiction as whatever we put in the place of God and worship in his stead.”

Amid fears that many areas in Ethiopia’s Tigray region remained unsafe, Catholic humanitarian agencies and their partners were moving food and other supplies to locations near the border of Tigray, where a month of fighting has left thousands without food, medicine and other basic needs.

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, Biden’s choice to head the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, has stirred the partisan fires Biden says he hopes to quell.

“Only through a widespread and capillary immunization of the population will it be possible to obtain real advantages in terms of public health to achieve control of the pandemic,” Dr. Andrea Arcangeli said Dec. 11.

“María de Guadalupe es un símbolo poderoso de esperanza. He visto esto en la manera en que muchos católicos se acercan a la historia y veneran la imagen. Ella nos recuerda que no importa qué tan difícil la vida puede ser, Dios no nos abandona. Dios ama a los pobres y a los afligidos. Su cuerpo en embarazo es el santuario que guarda la esperanza última de Dios para la humanidad: Jesucristo.”