With song, cake and circus performers, Pope Francis celebrated his 87th birthday in festive style at the Vatican.

A Catholic priest can bless a gay or other unmarried couple as long as it is not a formal liturgical blessing and does not give the impression that the Catholic Church is blessing the union as if it were a marriage, the Vatican doctrinal office said.

The Vatican City State criminal court sentenced Cardinal Angelo Becciu to five years and six months in prison on two counts of embezzlement and one of aggravated fraud but found him not guilty of abuse of office or witness tampering.

When St. Francis of Assisi staged the first Nativity scene 800 years ago, he did so to remind people of the powerful, awe-inspiring truth that God became human in Jesus, Pope Francis said.

Pope Francis condemned the Israeli military’s killing of two Christian women sheltering at a Catholic parish in Gaza and an attack on a convent, noting that in the current fighting “unarmed civilians are targets for bombs and gunfire.”

In a particularly unwelcome revelation for American Catholics, the federal government announced that same month in a Federal Register notice a procedural change in how it processes green cards for foreign-born religious workers.

Some people came to the Synod on Synodality at the Vatican in October “with the hope that it would bring dramatic change to the life of the church,” Dominican Father Timothy Radcliffe said in a talk in Indianapolis Dec. 6. “Other people hoped it would exactly change nothing.”

When Ukraine’s embattled citizens gather this Christmas, their rich festivities will feel symbolically different — as the festival is celebrated for the first time on Dec. 25, in line with the Western calendar.

Now in his seventh season as the Buffalo Bills’ team chaplain, Vanden Bos is a rare breed in the NFL: He is a full-time chaplain.

Women who have conceived a child out of wedlock and have the courage to choose life for their baby “should be encouraged to have access to the healing and consoling power of the sacraments,” said the head of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith.