The spokesman insisted "it is wrong to reduce all the important things the pope said to the religious women to just this question."

"I don't want to exaggerate, but there is a feeling on the part of the Palestinians that the current Israeli government just wants a purely Jewish [Jerusalem]."

"Ambient air pollution...is the greatest environmental risk to health—causing more than 3 million premature deaths worldwide ever year,"

Rousseff's enraged backers called the move a coup d'etat and threatened wide-scale protests and strikes.

Pope Francis agreed a women's diaconate should be given more careful consideration, telling hundreds of nuns from around the world that he himself always wondered about the role of deaconesses in the early church.

An average of 66,000 people were displaced every day in 2015.