Pope Francis’s rollicking plane ride home: Rule of celibate priests ‘always open’ to change

 

So when Francis finally climbed aboard his plane Monday night to return to Rome, a Vatican spokesman told reporters to keep the questions short. The pope had to rest.

But 77-year-old Francis, looking alert, was having none of that. And in what turned into one of the more freewheeling exchanges of Francis’s 15 months as pontiff, he took an hour of questions that touched on sexual assault victims, celibate priests and whether he had plans for retirement. Both the candor and the impromptu nature with which he responded are likely to expand his growing reputation as the most tolerant, iconoclastic pope of the past 40 years.

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