As they open their doors for a new academic year, the nation’s Catholic schools are enjoying overall strong growth, along with a firm commitment to mission, experts told OSV News.

As Argentines prepare to elect their new president Oct. 22, a group of clergy close to Pope Francis launched an unprecedented intervention in the highly charged political atmosphere in the South American country.

More than 7,000 people took to the streets of London for the annual March for Life, which had as its theme “Freedom to Live.”

After Pope Francis told young Russian Catholics they were heirs of “the great, educated Russian Empire,” Ukraine’s bishops told him that some of his statements were “painful and difficult for the Ukrainian people” and are used by Russia to justify its invasion of Ukraine.

Pope Francis said he knows people wonder why he traveled close to 6,000 miles to Mongolia to visit a Catholic community of only 1,450 people.

On a day when history was made 60 years earlier with the March on Washington, Father Robert Boxie III, the Catholic chaplain at Howard University in the nation’s capital, noted that the campus ministry program there was making history of its own, with the blessing and dedication of its new Sister Thea Bowman Catholic Student Center.

Local and national organizers of the National Eucharistic Congress — which will take place in Indianapolis July 17-21, 2024 — have been meeting virtually for some time.

With a beatification Mass for the Ulma family set for Sept. 10, the Vatican emphasized that all nine members of the Polish family are considered martyrs, including the child that was born during the massacre.

Mexico’s Supreme Court overturned a state-level abortion ban, a decision observers say could hasten the removal of restrictions on the procedure nationwide.

Visiting Mongolia Sept. 1-4, Pope Francis encouraged the nation’s tiny Catholic community to grow in faith and charity, but the visit also was designed to reassure the government that it has nothing to fear from the Catholic missionaries who arrived in the country in 1992.