For several years now, Catholic refugee policy — articulated passionately and repeatedly by the Holy See and many national bishops’ conferences — has focused on the urgent secondary thing, rather than the most important primary thing.

There’s nothing like a feel-good story to kick off a new year, and stories seldom get more uplifting than a dramatic rescue involving a teenage girl who feared for her life.

SAO PAULO – Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro signed a decree in mid-January making it easier for Brazilians to purchase firearms. The decision sparked criticism from several groups in Brazilian society, including some in the Catholic Church.

Canadian Physicians for Life is mobilizing its members for a grassroots appeal to politicians to protect doctors who do not wish to participate in any way in the assisted suicide of patients.

VATICAN – The Vatican has created a set of pastoral guidelines to inspire and improve the church's work in addressing the crime of human trafficking and the care of its victims worldwide.

Who really won the election in Congo matters immensely to the Congolese people, but it also matters to Canada’s Catholic development agency, which spent the last three years helping ordinary Congolese get ready to vote.

OTTAWA – Doug Ford’s free speech policy for Ontario universities may not stem the censorship and even violence against pro-life expression on campuses, say pro-life activists.

OTTAWA – The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops is welcoming the revisions to the Canada Summer Jobs application, but not without reservations.

As predictably as rain falling in Dublin, Irish pro-abortion stalwarts are already agitating for so-called exclusion zones around health facilities where the life-ending procedure is performed.

MANILA, Philippines – Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte is open to talking with church leaders, his spokesman said after the president called on people to kill and rob bishops.

WASHINGTON – No sooner had President Donald Trump finished his Jan. 8 nine-minute speech, his first such event televised in prime time from the Oval Office, about what he termed a crisis at the border, than Catholic groups and others began tearing apart his arguments.

OTTAWA – The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB) is welcoming the revisions to the Canada Summer Jobs application.

KINSHASA – Catholic church leaders in Congo have questioned the official outcome of the Dec. 30 elections, saying the officially published results "do not correspond with the data collected" by the church's 40,000 observers.

Welfare reforms that leave a big gap between the poverty line and being poor enough to receive benefits could end up forcing Church charities to make up the difference for thousands of disabled and marginally employable Ontarians.

OTTAWA – Climate politics are shaping up as a federal election issue in a partisan scenario cautioned against by Pope Francis in Laudato Si’, his 2015 encyclical on the environment.