Texas lawmakers held a hearing Oct. 21 on the fate of a Texas man whose scheduled execution was halted the previous week after an unprecedented legal effort by members of a state House panel who questioned the evidence behind his conviction.

Donald Kerwin set the tone for an Oct. 16 webinar on migrant deaths with a clarifying statement: “Accounting for deaths, it means more than accurately counting them or enumerating them. … What it means is identifying decedents, investigating deaths, determining their causes and repatriating remains to loved ones.”

Russia’s latest blockage of Western religious websites and social media accounts tightens the Kremlin’s chokehold on Russian residents’ information access, the editor of a Ukrainian religious news outlet told OSV News.

In an early October massacre, at least 150 people, including many Christians, were killed in northeastern Burkina Faso’s town of Manni, in what turned out to be a brutal terrorist rampage.

Pope Francis decided the question of ordaining women deacons was not to be discussed at the 2024 Synod of Bishops, and he directed a synod-related study group on women’s ministries not to explore the matter, according to the Vatican’s doctrinal chief.

An Indigenous Tzotzil priest and peace activist was murdered after celebrating Sunday Mass in Mexico’s southern Chiapas state, where the Catholic Church has denounced government inaction in the face of rising violence.

The Vatican’s safeguarding commission has “an opportunity and obligation to make the church a more Samaritan church,” Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley, president of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, told commission members during its plenary assembly.

Former President Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, said he “will look at” a religious exemption to his proposed mandate to cover in vitro fertilization treatments, commonly known as IVF — a procedure the church condemns as linked to the “abortion mentality” and destructive of human life — in an interview with a Catholic television host.

Even if some members of the Synod of Bishops end up feeling disappointed by the results of the synod, “God’s providence is at work in this assembly, bringing us to the Kingdom in ways that God alone knows,” the spiritual adviser to the synod on synodality told them.

As members of the Synod of Bishops entered the last week of their meeting in Rome, the synod’s secretary-general urged them to resist the temptation of “covetousness” — the desire “to keep everything for ourselves, to possess, to hoard, to define, to close.”