Days after they gathered for their annual spring meeting, the U.S. Catholic bishops’ conference has laid off an unspecified number of employees as part of the reorganization of a key department tasked with promoting awareness of and advocacy for Catholic social teaching at home and abroad.

Despite tensions with Pope Francis which have sometimes boiled over into public view, Archbishop Georg Gänswein, Pope Benedict XVI’s longtime secretary, will become the pope’s representative to the Baltic states.

The Supreme Court on June 24 agreed to hear a challenge to a Tennessee state law banning certain types of medical or surgical gender reassignment procedures for minors who identify as transgender, the high court’s first major step toward weighing in on the controversial issue.

Pope Francis said that Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati “will be a saint soon.”

Ana Rodriguez-Soto, who recently retired as editor of the Florida Catholic, Miami edition, is the recipient of the 2024 St. Francis de Sales Award from the Catholic Media Association.

Now — with the Vatican’s recent approval of the organization as a lay association of the faithful — Mater Filius is poised to spread its mission as part of the Catholic Church’s pro-life outreach.

Young men from “non-intact” families without a father are more likely to end up in prison or jail than to graduate from college, according to the findings of a new study from the Institute for Family Studies, a Charlottesville, Virginia-based think tank dedicated to researching marriage, family life and the well-being of children.

The Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive research organization that supports abortion, estimated earlier this year that the number of abortions is the highest it has been in over a decade.

On the final day of the Catholic Media Conference in Atlanta, the prefect of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Communication addressed questions posed by journalists about the dicastery’s regular practice of posting art by Father Marko Rupnik — a Rome-based priest accused of sexually abusing multiple women — on the Vatican News website and social media, especially to illustrate church feast days.

Dubbed by local newspapers as “the padre of the poor,” Father Baker (1842-1936) built, in addition to the basilica, an orphanage, a maternity hospital, a trade school and a home for infant care.