Religious Freedom

Plans for the “Casa USA” campus — with backing from other Catholic health care organizations, individuals and the patronage of Lansing Bishop Earl A. Boyea — call for duplicating Padre Pio’s hospital complex for the first time outside of Italy, including an exact replica of the original friary church of the Capuchin Franciscan who is also known as St. Pius of Pietrelcina.

A U.S. lawmaker and a Catholic bishop are calling for action to end a months-long blockade that has left some 120,000 ethnic Armenians at risk of what he and other experts are calling “genocide by starvation.”

The Nicaraguan regime has extinguished the Jesuits’ legal status and ordered the expropriation of its assets, effectively making it illegal for the Society of Jesus to operate in the Central American country.

A Christian campaigner has urged Catholic church leaders and the Vatican to condemn worsening human rights abuses in Belarus, after another Catholic priest was arrested in front of his parishioners for spreading “extremist material.”