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.”

Pope Francis called on the faithful to yearn to serve, not thirst for power, as he proclaimed 14 new saints, including Canada-born St. Marie-Léonie Paradis, founder of the Little Sisters of the Holy Family, and 11 martyrs.

Deacon Liguori does not believe he is “The King” reincarnated. Yet if you ask his fans, they’ll tell you that may be the best way to describe him.

British Catholics have welcomed the appointment of Father Timothy Radcliffe, their country’s best known Dominican preacher, as a cardinal, predicting it will raise their church’s profile at home and abroad.

As the Catholic Church commemorates World Mission Sunday Oct. 20, Divine Word Father Victor Roche, national director of the Pontifical Mission Societies in Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, said Catholics should not only reflect on the work carried out by priests and men and women religious, but also on their own personal calling to be missionaries in their own country.