Two years ago over the course of a Friday night Dec. 10-11, a series of tornadoes struck western Kentucky, killing 57 with additional fatalities in Illinois, Arkansas, Tennessee and Missouri and damaging and destroying several thousand residences as well as nearly 200 commercial buildings.

Plans to dramatically cut welfare benefits for refugees from Ukraine who flee to Ireland to avoid Russia’s war are causing anxiety, according to a priest who works with the new arrivals. Officials in Dublin say that they want to “slow” the number of people arriving from Ukraine.

Four congregations of women religious filed suit against the board of gunmaker Smith & Wesson Dec. 5 in a Las Vegas court, the day before a shooter killed three people and critically wounded a fourth on the University of Nevada, Las Vegas campus five miles away.

Christians must be open to the Word of God and to welcoming and serving others, Pope Francis said.

Cardinal Grzegorz Rys of Lodz, chairman of the Committee for Dialogue with Judaism of the Polish bishops’ conference, strongly condemned the incident in which a far-right Polish lawmaker used a fire extinguisher to put out Hanukkah candles in the Sejm, the country’s parliament.

The Vatican’s financial planning, budgeting, auditing, investing and saving are essential for carrying out the Catholic Church’s mission and must be handled with the highest sense of responsibility and prudence, Pope Francis wrote in a letter to the staff of the Secretariat for the Economy.

Pope Francis said he has decided to be buried in Rome’s Basilica of St. Mary Major instead of in St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican and that he has simplified the rites for a papal funeral.

Our Lady of Guadalupe is “the mother of all mothers — a loving bridge between worlds and peoples who unifies through her maternal embrace,” the U.S. bishops’ migration chairman said in a statement issued on the Dec. 12 Marian feast.

The Vatican Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith has upheld a rule mandating that the ashes of the deceased be preserved in a consecrated place, but it also said family members could request “a minimal part of the ashes” be kept in a sacred place “of significance for the history of the deceased person.”

The iconic image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, which has become a cultural and spiritual symbol for Latin America, cannot be used to promote any kind of ideology, but must maintain its message of simple love, Pope Francis said.