The Second Assembly of Australia’s Plenary Council prepared to close July 8 after two days of catching up and passing almost all of the motions in its guiding document including a revised version of the section on the equal dignity of women and men in the Catholic Church.

Sister Simone Campbell, a longtime advocate for economic justice and health care policy, and late labor leader Richard Trumka received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, in a White House ceremony.

– A resolution that passed the European Parliament criticizing the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on abortion and calling for inclusion in the Charter of the European Union of a universal right to abortion is part of a “radical political” agenda that threatens basic human rights and the cohesion of the union, said the general secretary of the Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the European Union.

The Vatican is now a formal party to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change and has declared it intends also to formally join the 2015 Paris Agreement.

The July 4 mass shooting brought devastation to yet another community in the U.S. and such a tragic situation “has become shockingly commonplace in our country,” said the chairmen of three committees of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Ann Augherton, managing editor of the Arlington Catholic Herald, newspaper of the Diocese of Arlington, Virginia, is the recipient of the 2022 St. Francis de Sales Award from the Catholic Media Association.

With the issuance of two recent Gallup polls on Americans’ belief in God and their views on morality, one could come to the conclusion that the United States could be in a heap of trouble.

Scott Richert, publisher of Our Sunday Visitor, said July 6 the Indiana-based Catholic publishing company would fill the void left behind by the closure of the domestic operations of Catholic News Service in January 2023 with OSV News.

San Antonio Archbishop Gustavo García-Siller in a recent homily railed on smugglers as well as the injustices toward immigrants, referring to the June 27 deaths of 53 people in a sweltering cargo section of an abandoned semitruck near San Antonio as they were being smuggled into the country.

“God forgive me, I hope he’s in heaven,” Benedictine Father Kenneth Reichert said about the man who entered Conception Abbey 20 years ago, pointed a semi-automatic MAK-90 rifle at him and fired twice.