Following the March for Life last Friday, I remained with the friars in Washington, D.C., for the weekend. While I was there, I had an opportunity to visit with Leonardo and Marta Lorena Casco and their daughter, Beatriz. The Cascos are from Honduras, but when they were recently married, they lived in Washington. They were my parishioners when I was a young priest, and I baptized Beatriz.

They used to come to the March for Life in those years, and now, for the last couple of years, they have flown up from Honduras to take part.

They have started a very active pro-life movement in Honduras, and it all began with their participation in the March for Life.

Third Order Franciscans

Over the weekend, I also met with the group of Third Order Franciscans that I started when I was pastor in Washington.

The community has grown very much, and I was very pleased to be able to be with them.

Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith

On Sunday, I departed for Rome to take part in our plenary meeting of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

As I always like to do, I was able to have a meal with the Boston priests and seminarians who are in Rome.

This time, we were happy to be joined by Father Jim Savage, a Boston priest who is here on sabbatical at the Institute of Continuing Theological Education at the North American College.

Our meetings of the Congregation started on Monday -- and each day we began our session by praying the Liturgy of the Hours together in the lovely baroque chapel in the CDF headquarters.

Among the matters we discussed in our meetings was the new document on end-of-life care. I was very pleased to see the emphasis on palliative care that is part of that document. We also worked on a revision to the norms on "delicta graviora," the sins reserved to the Congregation.

Audience with the Holy Father

On Thursday, the members of the Congregation had an audience with the Holy Father in the Clementine Hall. There, I was happy to see Msgr. Alejandro Cifres, who was there with his mother. Msgr. Alejandro works at the Congregation and is the uncle of one of our newly ordained priests, Father Marcos Enrique.

In his address to us, the Holy Father spoke about the work we undertook in the plenary assembly. His remarks were, of course, in Italian, but Zenit had a nice translation in English that I would like to share with you on my blog.