VATICAN CITY - Having so much world-famous art housed in Rome's churches and chapels has risked turning the city's sacred spaces into sightseer circuses. A hushed prayerful atmosphere for the faithful is often broken by clicking cameras and tourists exchanging guidebook details.

WASHINGTON - If you think somebody's famous because they've written scads of books on spirituality, traveled the world speaking about God's love, and have 150,000 people on a daily email list for meditations, then brace yourself for when that person sits down for a televised face-to-face interview with Oprah Winfrey.

All of us struggle, and we struggle in three ways. First, sometimes we struggle simply to maintain ourselves, to stay healthy and stable, to stay normal, to not fall apart, to not have our lives unravel into chaos and depression. It takes real effort just to maintain our ordinary health, stability and happiness. 

Ancient Greece expressed much of its psychological and spiritual wisdom inside its myths. The Greeks didn’t intend these to be taken literally or as historical, but as metaphor and as an archetypal illustration of why life is as it is and how people engage life both generatively and destructively. 

VATICAN CITY - Retired Italian Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, who comes from the same diocese as Pope Paul VI did and worked for him in the Vatican Secretariat of State, described the late pope as a man rich in spirituality, a thinker and a pastor "very sensitive to the challenges of the modern world."