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.

The agenda for the Second Assembly of Australia’s Plenary Council was disrupted July 6 after more than 60 of the 277 members staged a protest over issues regarding women in the church, including the defeat of a motion to formalize support for the ordination of women as deacons.

The Chinese Communist Party is seeking to expand its apparatus to monitor and curb religious activities in cyberspace through training and deploying hundreds of “auditors” across the country, triggering concerns from rights groups.

Pope Francis said he plans to name two women to the committee that helps him choose bishops for the world’s Latin-rite dioceses.