The Catholic Church in Europe and other places will, as retired Pope Benedict XVI had said, be smaller and less influential, but the church’s mission and joy is not to increase numbers but to share the Gospel, Pope Francis told Jesuits in Malta.

For many U.S. dioceses, this year marked the first chrism Mass to draw a capacity crowd of congregants since before the pandemic. For the last two years, COVID-19 turned most in-person liturgies into livestreamed events.

With some 1,800 priests concelebrating and renewing the promises made at their ordinations, Pope Francis celebrated the chrism Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica April 14.

Pope Francis blessed a special Easter basket during a private audience with Supreme Knight Patrick Kelly and his family at the Vatican April 11.

Leaders of the Knights of Columbus see the Catholic men’s fraternal organization as a powerful engine for evangelization, and to start that engine they are developing a program to train members on how to evangelize.

Russian forces in Ukraine attacked a Caritas office in Mariupol and a Catholic seminary in a small village north of Kyiv, prompting renewed calls for an end to the war and to the targeting of innocent civilians.

Brooklyn Bishop Robert J. Brennan urged prayers April 12 for victims of an early morning shooting spree at a Brooklyn subway station and for the protection of first responders on the scene and those hunting for the shooter.

In Russia’s war on Ukraine, “the forces of evil” are clearly at work, leading to “abominable” attacks on innocent people and widescale destruction of their homes, Pope Francis said.

The head of the Ukrainian Catholic Church asked Pope Francis to scrap plans to have a Ukrainian woman and a Russian woman carry the cross together during the pope’s Way of the Cross service at Rome’s Colosseum April 15.

The U.S. Catholic Church’s three-year eucharistic revival about to get underway “is not a program but a movement” that is an invitation to the faithful from God to go on mission and be compelling witnesses of our faith, said Tim Glemkowski, the newly named executive director of the National Eucharistic Congress.