During his July 17 Angelus address, Pope Francis asked for prayers for his “penitential pilgrimage” to Canada: his July 24-30 apostolic journey there.

Andrea Tornielli, editorial director of the Dicastery for Communication, has followed up with an explanation.

“The key to understanding the papal journey,” writes Tornielli, “lies entirely in the penitential attitude that will characterize its high points. It is the same attitude that Benedict XVI suggested in 2010 in the face of the child abuse scandal; the same that St. John Paul II proposed during the Jubilee of 2000 for the ‘purification of memory,’ when he asked for ‘an act of courage and humility in recognizing the wrongs done by those who have borne or bear the name of Christian’ …”

Tornielli thus sees a continuity between Pope Francis’s upcoming journey, Pope Benedict’s Pastoral Letter to the Catholics of Ireland, and the Day of Pardon on the First Sunday of Lent during the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000.