Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI 's body is lying in state as thousands of people lined up hours before dawn on Monday to pay their respects.The doors of St. Peter's Basilica opened for viewing by the public at just past 9 a.m. (0800 GMT; 3 a.m. EST) when the first faithful entered.Public viewing lasts for 10 hours on Monday in St. Peter's Basilica. Twelve hours of viewing are scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday before Thursday morning's funeral, which will be led by Pope Francis, at St. Peter's Square.The frail, 95-year-old Benedict died Saturday morning in the Vatican monastery where he had lived since his retirement in 2013, when he became the first pontiff to resign in 600 years.Security officials expected at least 25,000 people to pass by the body on the first day of viewing.

Video above: President Joe Biden asks people to say an "extra prayer" for Pope Francis during an event at the White House

Pope Francis was hospitalized with a respiratory infection Wednesday after experiencing difficulty breathing in recent days and will remain in the Rome hospital for several days of treatment, the Vatican said.

The 86-year-old pope, who had part of one lung removed as a young man, doesn't have COVID-19, spokesman Matteo Bruni said in a statement late Wednesday.

The hospitalization was the first since Francis spent 10 days at the Gemelli hospital in July 2021 to have 33 centimeters (13 inches) of his colon removed.

It immediately raised questions about Francis' overall health, and his ability to celebrate the busy Holy Week events that are due to begin this weekend with Palm Sunday.

Bruni said Francis had had trouble breathing in recent days and went to the Gemelli hospital Wednesday for tests.

“The tests showed a respiratory infection (COVID-19 infection excluded) that will require some days of medical treatment in the hospital,” Bruni's statement said.

Francis appeared in relatively good form during his regularly scheduled general audience earlier Wednesday, though he grimaced strongly while getting in and out of the “popemobile.” He nevertheless rode around the square as usual, kissing babies and greeting the faithful.

Bruni said Francis, an Argentine Jesuit, was grateful for the prayers and messages wishing him a speedy recovery, including from the Italian bishops conference.

President Joe Biden, at the start of an Oval Office meeting with President Alberto Fernández of Argentina, told reporters he had just learned of Francis’s health problems and said he was concerned about his dear “friend.”

Francis had part of one lung removed when he was a young man due to a respiratory infection, and he often speaks in a whisper. But he got through the worst phases of the COVID-19 pandemic without at least any public word of ever testing positive.

Related video below: Pope Francis is welcomed in Congo last month

Francis was scheduled to celebrate Palm Sunday this weekend, kicking off the Vatican's Holy Week observances: Holy Thursday, Good Friday, the Easter Vigil and finally Easter Sunday on April 9. He has canceled all audiences through Friday, but it wasn't clear whether he could keep the Holy Week plans.

Francis has used a wheelchair for over a year due to strained ligaments in his right knee and a small knee fracture. He has said the injury was healing and been walking more with a cane of late.

Francis also has said he resisted having surgery for the knee problems because he didn't respond well to general anesthesia during the 2021 intestinal surgery.

He said soon after the surgery that he had recovered fully and could eat normally. But in a Jan. 24 interview with The Associated Press, Francis said his diverticulosis, or bulges in the intestinal wall, had “returned."

Thousands of Arizona Catholics recently learned they may have been improperly baptized with the wrong words.

In Michigan, a separate but similar controversy has been ongoing since 2020. For years, a deacon at St. Anastasia Church in suburban Detroit used the words "we baptize" instead of "I baptize." The Vatican says that phrase makes the sacrament invalid.

The Detroit Archdiocese says it found about 200 baptisms were done properly, and 71 people so far have been baptized again. But 455 people haven't responded. One person who was affected was a priest, the Rev. Matthew Hood. He was quickly baptized and ordained again as a priest in 2020.

The situation has had many seriously upset, with one unidentified woman commenting during a talk who said, “Why do you think so many people are leaving the Catholic Church?” She said, “This is a great example why. This is just awful.”

Another man said, “What would Jesus do?” And then said, “I think he would be on a different side here and say by what you’re doing you have disrupted so many lives, so many people,”

Church members went to try and find videos of baptisms to see if family members had invalid sacraments.

Rev. Hood said, “We’re aware there are young people who no longer practice the faith. This problem has opened that up.” He said, “But for some individuals, it has been the opportunity to say I haven’t taken my faith seriously and this is an opportunity to do that, to realize something real is at play here.”

VATICAN CITY — Retired Pope Benedict XVI admitted Monday he attended a meeting in 1980 regarding a case of sexual abuse of a child.

The meeting happened when Pope Benedict was the archbishop of Munich, Germany.

In a statement published in the German Catholic newspaper, Die Tagespost, the former pope’s personal secretary Archbishop Georg Gänswein clarified that contrary to what was stated during a hearing, Benedict did attend the Ordinariate meeting.

This comes after a report faulted Benedict for not taking action against four abusive priests in Germany.

The newspaper reports that the former pope is “very sorry for his mistake.”

The priest involved in the investigation was allowed to resume pastoral work.

This is a decision that could have only been made with the consultation of the archbishop.

Gänswein said Benedict plans to explain how the error happened after he goes through the nearly 2,000-page report.

Benedict lives in the Vatican today.

He resigned from the papacy in 2013.

VATICAN CITY —

President Joe Biden said Pope Francis told him he should continue to receive Communion, as the world's two most prominent Roman Catholics ran overtime in highly personal discussions on climate change, poverty and the coronavirus pandemic that also touched on the loss of the president's adult son and jokes about aging well.

Biden's support for abortion rights and same-sex marriage has has put him at odds with many U.S. bishops, some of whom have suggested he should be denied Communion.

Biden said abortion did not come up in the meeting at the Vatican. “We just talked about the fact he was happy that I was a good Catholic and I should keep receiving communion,” Biden said.

Video released by the Vatican showed several warm, relaxed moments between Francis and Biden as they repeatedly shook hands and smiled. Francis often sports a dour look, especially in official photos, but he seemed in good spirits Friday. The private meeting lasted about 75 minutes, according to the Vatican, more than double the normal length of an audience with the pontiff.

The pair sat across from one another at a desk in the papal library, accompanied by a translator. They then proceeded to an exchange of gifts and a broader meeting including the first lady and top officials. The lengthy session put Biden more than an hour behind schedule.

“Biden thanked His Holiness for his advocacy for the world’s poor and those suffering from hunger, conflict, and persecution,” the White House said. "He lauded Pope Francis’ leadership in fighting the climate crisis, as well as his advocacy to ensure the pandemic ends for everyone through vaccine sharing and an equitable global economic recovery.”

Biden takes pride in his Catholic faith, using it as a moral guidepost to shape many of his social and economic policies. He wears a rosary and attends Mass weekly.

After leaving the Vatican, Biden said he had a “wonderful time” and that the pope prayed for him and blessed his rosary beads. Asked what the prayer was about, Biden replied, “Peace.”

A dozen Swiss Guards in their blue and gold striped uniforms and red-plumed halberds stood at attention in the San Damaso courtyard as Biden and his wife, Jill, arrived. They were received by Monsignor Leonardo Sapienza, who runs the papal household, and then greeted one by one the papal ushers, or papal gentlemen, who lined up in the courtyard.

“It’s good to be back,” Biden said as he shook the hand of one of them. “I’m Jill’s husband,” he told another before he was ushered into the frescoed Apostolic Palace and taken upstairs to the pope’s private library.

According to the Vatican, Biden presented Francis a woven chasuble, or liturgical vestment, made in 1930 by the famed papal tailor Gammarelli and used by the pope’s Jesuit order in the U.S., where it was held in the archives of Holy Trinity Church, Biden’s regular parish in Washington. The White House said it would make a donation to charity in the pope’s name.

Holy Trinity is steeped in American history and played a role in advocating for abolition, desegregation and civil rights since it was founded in 1787. President John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic U.S. president, also worshipped there.

Biden also slipped what's known as a challenge coin into the pope's palm during a handshake, and hailed Francis as “the most significant warrior for peace I’ve ever met.”

The personalized coin depicts Biden's home state of Delaware and a reference to his late son Beau's military unit, the 261st Theater Tactical Signal Brigade. Biden told Francis that Beau would have wanted him to present the coin to the pope.

"The tradition is, and I’m only kidding about this, but next time I see you, if you don’t have it, you have to buy the drinks," Biden said, referring to the coin. He added: “I’m the only Irishman you’ve ever met who's never had a drink.”

Francis laughed and responded: “The Irish brought whisky.”

Biden, 78, also relayed the story of American baseball player Satchel Paige, a Black pitcher who played late into his fifties, in a parable about aging. “'How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you were,'" Biden quoted Paige as saying. "You’re 65, I’m 60,” Biden added, as Francis, 84, pointed to his head and laughed.

Francis presented Biden with a ceramic tile depicting the iconography of the pilgrim, as well as a collection of the pope’s main teaching documents, the Vatican said. In the Vatican video, he could be heard asking Jill Biden to “pray for me.”

The warm encounter stood in stark contrast to Donald Trump’s 2017 meeting with Francis, with whom the former president had a prickly relationship. Photos from that 30-minute meeting showed a stone-faced Francis standing beside a grinning Trump. Biden's meeting also was longer than the 52 minutes Barack Obama spent with Francis in 2014.

Biden is visiting Rome and then Glasgow, Scotland, for back-to-back summits, first a gathering for leaders of Group of 20 leading and developing nations and then a global climate conference.

Biden and Francis have previously met three times but Friday's encounter was their first since Biden became president.

Biden also met separately Friday with Group of 20 summit hosts Italian President Sergio Mattarella and Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi.

He will end the day by meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron, part of an effort to mend relations with France after the U.S. and U.K. decided to provide nuclear-powered submarines to Australia, scotching an existing French contract.

Biden’s meeting with Pope Francis generated some controversy in advance as the Vatican on Thursday abruptly canceled plans to broadcast the meeting with Biden live and denied press access. Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni said the revised television plan reflected the virus protocol for all heads of state audiences, though he didn’t say why more robust live TV coverage had been initially scheduled and then canceled.

The Vatican instead provide edited footage of the encounter to accredited media.

The visit came as U.S. bishops prepared to meet in roughly three weeks in Baltimore for their annual fall convention. Among the agenda items is an effort by conservatives to disqualify Biden from receiving Communion. Any document emerging from the event is unlikely to single out the president by name, but he still could face some form of rebuke.

Francis has stressed that he will not reject political leaders who support abortion rights, though Catholic policy allows individual bishops to choose whether to prevent people from taking Communion.

BAGHDAD (AP) — Pope Francis has urged Iraqis to treat their Christian brothers as a precious resource to protect, not an “obstacle” to eliminate as he opens the first-ever papal visit to Iraq.

The pontiff has brushed aside coronavirus and security worries to make the visit in a show of support for Iraq's beleaguered Christians.

At a church where Christians suffered one of their worse massacres by militants a decade ago, Francis recognized the community's traumas but urged them to stay in Iraq to ensure the community endures.

Iraqi President Barham Salih has echoed his call for tolerance, saying “The East cannot be imagined without Christians.”

ROME (AP) — Pope Francis cracked down Friday on the spread of the old Latin Mass, reversing one of Pope Benedict XVI’s signature decisions in a major challenge to traditionalist Catholics who immediately decried it as an attack on them and the ancient liturgy.

Francis reimposed restrictions on celebrating the Latin Mass that Benedict relaxed in 2007, and went further to limit its use. The pontiff said he was taking action because Benedict’s reform had become a source of division in the church and been exploited by Catholics opposed to the Second Vatican Council, the 1960s meetings that modernized the church and its liturgy.

Critics said they had never before witnessed a pope so thoroughly reversing his predecessor. That the reversal concerned something so fundamental as the liturgy, while Benedict is still alive and living in the Vatican as a retired pope, only amplified the extraordinary nature of Francis’ move, which will surely result in more right-wing hostility directed at him.

Francis, 84, issued a new law requiring individual bishops to approve celebrations of the old Mass, also called the Tridentine Mass, and requiring newly ordained priests to receive explicit permission to celebrate it from their bishops, in consultation with the Vatican.

Under the new law, bishops must also determine if the current groups of faithful attached to the old Mass accept Vatican II, which allowed for Mass to be celebrated in the vernacular rather than Latin. These groups cannot use regular churches; instead, bishops must find alternate locations for them without creating new parishes.

In addition, Francis said bishops are no longer allowed to authorize the formation of any new pro-Latin Mass groups in their dioceses.

Francis said he was taking action to promote unity and heal divisions within the church that had grown since Benedict’s 2007 document, Summorum Pontificum. He said he based his decision on a 2020 Vatican survey of all the world’s bishops, whose “responses reveal a situation that preoccupies and saddens me, and persuades me of the need to intervene.”

The pope’s rollback immediately created an uproar among traditionalists already opposed to Francis’ more progressive bent and nostalgic for Benedict’s doctrinaire papacy.

“This is an extremely disappointing document which entirely undoes the legal provisions,” of Benedict’s 2007 document, said Joseph Shaw, chairman of the Latin Mass Society of England and Wales.

While Latin celebrations can continue, “the presumption is consistently against them: bishops are being invited to close them down,” Shaw said, adding that the requirement for Latin Masses to be held outside a parish was “unworkable.”

“This is an extraordinary rejection of the hard work for the church and the loyalty to the hierarchy which has characterized the movement for the Traditional Mass for many years, which I fear will foster a sense of alienation among those attached to the church’s ancient liturgy,” he said.

Benedict had issued his document in 2007 to reach out to a breakaway, schismatic group that celebrates the Latin Mass, the Society of St. Pius X, and which had split from Rome over the modernizing reforms of Vatican II.

But Francis said Benedict’s effort to foster unity had essentially backfired.

The opportunity offered by Benedict, the pope said in a letter to bishops accompanying the new law, was instead “exploited to widen the gaps, reinforce the divergences, and encourage disagreements that injure the Church, block her path, and expose her to the peril of division.”

Francis said he was “saddened” that the use of the old Mass was accompanied by a rejection of Vatican II itself “with unfounded and unsustainable assertions that it betrayed the Tradition and the ‘true Church.’”

Christopher Bellitto, professor of church history at Kean University, said Francis was right to intervene, noting that Benedict’s original decision had had a slew of unintended consequences that not only created internal divisions but temporarily roiled relations with Jews.

“Francis hits it right on the head with his observation that Benedict’s 2007 loosening of regulations against the Latin rite allowed others to use it for division,” he said. “The blowback proves his point.”

The blowback was indeed fierce, though it’s also likely that many will simply ignore Francis’ decree and continue on as before with sympathetic bishops. Some of these traditionalists and Catholics already were among Francis’ fiercest critics, with some accusing him of heresy for having opened the door to letting divorced and civilly remarried Catholics receive Communion.

Rorate Caeli, a popular traditionalist blog run out of the U.S., said Francis’ “attack” was the strongest rebuke of a pope against his predecessors in living memory.

“Francis HATES US. Francis HATES Tradition. Francis HATES all that is good and beautiful,” the group tweeted. But it concluded: “FRANCIS WILL DIE, THE LATIN MASS WILL LIVE FOREVER.”

Messa in Latino, an Italian traditionalist blog, was also blistering in its criticism.

“Mercy always and only for sinners (who are not asked to repent) but no mercy for those few traditional Catholics,” the blog said Friday.

For years, though, Francis has made known his distaste of the old liturgy, privately labeling its adherents self-referential naval-gazers who are out of touch with the needs of the church. He has cracked down on religious orders that celebrated the old Mass exclusively and frequently decried the “rigidity” of tradition-minded priests who prioritize rules over pastoral accompaniment.

Traditionalists have insisted that the old liturgy was never abrogated and that Benedict’s 2007 reform had allowed it to flourish.

They point to the growth of traditionalist parishes, often frequented by young, large families, as well as new religious orders that celebrate the old liturgy. The Latin Mass Society claims the number of traditional Masses celebrated each Sunday in England and Wales had more than doubled since 2007, from 20 to 46.

But for many, the writing was on the wall as soon as Francis stepped out onto the loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica after his 2013 election without the ermine-trimmed red velvet cape that was preferred by Benedict and is a symbol of the pre-Vatican II church.

The restrictions went into immediate effect with its publication in Friday’s official Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano.

VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis has changed church law to explicitly criminalize the sexual abuse of adults by priests who abuse their authority.

It also says laypeople who hold church office can be sanctioned for sex abuse crimes.

The new provisions, released Tuesday after 14 years of study, were contained in the revised criminal law section of the Vatican’s Code of Canon Law, the in-house legal system that covers the 1.3-billion member Catholic Church.

The most significant changes aim to address major problems and shortcomings in the church’s handling of sexual abuse.

The laws recognize that adults, too, can be victimized by priests who abuse their authority, and said that laypeople in church offices can be punished for abusing minors as well as adults.

The Vatican also officially criminalized "grooming" minors or vulnerable adults by priests to compel them to engage in pornography. According to the Associated Press, it's the first time the Vatican has officially recognized the acts — commonly used by sexual predators in the hopes of building relationships with victims — as criminal.

The new laws also take steps to prevent priests and bishops from covering up abuse allegations and attempt to hold them responsible for "omissions and negligence in failing to properly investigate and sanction errant priests," the Associated Press reports.