Pope Francis had plenty to talk about last week when he led a service at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan.
He expressed sorrow about recent tragic events and shame about problems within the Roman Catholic church, and he called for the clergy members at the service to be close “to the poor, the refugee, the immigrant, the sick, the exploited, the elderly living alone, prisoners, and all God’s other poor.”
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The pope may be in an especially good position to comment on the challenges facing the elderly living alone: He himself is a single 79-year-old man who lives alone as an immigrant in the middle of Rome, an ocean away from his only living sibling.
He also leads a religious entity that has been providing various forms of professional and informal long-term care (LTC) services for millennia.