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March 23, 2014
VATICAN CITY - Just over five weeks before the canonizations of Blesseds John XXIII and John Paul II, Rome hotels are reporting they are almost fully booked and the Vatican has confirmed the Mass will take place in St. Peter's Square, despite knowing that hundreds of thousands of people will have to watch the ceremony on large video screens.
ROME - U.S. President Barack Obama is to meet Pope Francis for the first time March 27 as Obama wraps up a European tour, a high-profile encounter between two major world leaders that appears to carry especially high stakes from the U.S. perspective.
March 24, 2014
WASHINGTON - Auxiliary Bishop Gregorio Rosa Chavez of San Salvador said there's strong hope and signals from the Vatican that beatification for Archbishop Oscar Romero, the man many consider a modern-day saint, will come in three years.
VATICAN CITY - Cardinal Sean P. O'Malley of Boston, four women -- including a survivor of clerical sex abuse -- two Jesuit priests and an Italian lawyer are the first eight members of the new Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors.
When President Obama and Pope Francis sit down at the Vatican on March 27, the meeting may well offer a vision of what could have been for Democrats and the Catholic Church over the last six years: a leader of the state and a leader of the Church working on the many issues where they agree while working through the issues where they don’t.
March 25, 2014
VATICAN CITY (RNS) A sting inside Vatican City aimed at nabbing the mystery buyer of more than $55,000 in cocaine that was hidden inside 14 condoms was foiled, leaving law enforcement officials searching for the source of a leak.
OXFORD, England (CNS) -- Members of the Ukrainian Catholic Church are fleeing Crimea to escape threats of arrest and property seizures, a priest told Catholic News Service just four days after Russia finalized the region's annexation.
OTTAWA - A Catholic school cannot be neutral when teaching Catholicism "otherwise it is not a Catholic school," said a lawyer representing Montreal's Loyola High School in arguments before the Supreme Court of Canada.
ADJUMANI, Uganda, - It has been two months since Father Raphael Ayiga Lebu has had a good night, or a good day, of sleep.
March 26, 2014
Toronto - Ontario will make celebration of the life of Pope John Paul II on annual event following passage of legislation naming a day in his honour.
VATICAN CITY - The Vatican has accepted the resignation of a German bishop who was at the center of controversy over expenditures for his residence and a diocesan center.
March 27, 2014
NAIROBI, Kenya - The escalating slaughter of elephants and rhinos is drawing the anger of conservationist clerics, who have begun enlisting church members in the battle to save Africa’s wildlife.
DUBLIN - The lone victim of clerical abuse nominated by Pope Francis to sit on the new Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors said the commission must achieve concrete change in order to “show other survivors that the Church is going to get it right.”
Human trafficking is a vile crime, a form of kidnapping and slavery that preys largely on women and children. It respects no boundaries and is conducted worldwide, in rich nations and poor, yet it rates alongside religion and politics as topics polite society prefers to avoid.
There have been five mass extinctions in the last 540 million years. Science tells us a sixth is now underway. But only faith can tell us how we will live through it.
VATICAN CITY - Pope Francis received U.S. President Barack Obama at the Vatican March 27. In what was their first encounter, the two leaders spoke in private for more than 50 minutes, an extraordinarily long time for such a meeting.
Religious and conscientious freedom is at the heart of several ongoing news stories. Some of the stories involve institutions and others individuals, but they all raise the troubling spectre that these rights may exist more in theory than in practice.
In the name of neutrality, seven Supreme Court of Canada justices peered down from their red leather bench at 27 lawyers armed to the teeth with briefs and bristling with arguments in a courtroom full of spectators ripe for the legal fight.
The Fourth Sunday of Lent is Laetare Sunday — the Sunday of rejoicing, complete with rose vestments to lighten the Lenten purple. It complements Gaudete Sunday — the Third Sunday of Advent — but poses a puzzle.
Cradle Catholics sometimes miss the wonder of the universality of their Church: universality in two senses — the “here comes everybody” that overpowers the new convert, and the geographic universality of the Church being everywhere in the world so no one is ever without a home.