With many “thanks” and “best wishes,” a group of 10 asylum-seekers greeted Pope Francis on his birthday Dec. 17.

By no longer requiring the abortion drug mifepristone to be picked up in person, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is “merely succumbing to the abortion industry’s pressure to loosen safety standards,” instead of protecting the lives and health of mothers and children as it should do, said the U.S. bishops’ pro-life chairman.

The decrease of vocations to religious life, including in the Society of Jesus, is a lesson in humility and a reminder that a calling to religious life depends on God, Pope Francis told Jesuits in Greece.

Thomas J. Quigley, who worked for 45 years in service to the U.S. bishops, mostly in the realm of foreign policy, died Dec. 11 at age 91.

A group of Catholic and Anglican theologians has publicly called on the Vatican to review and overturn a papal document from 1896 that declared Anglican ordinations “absolutely null and utterly void.”

Early in the morning Dec. 11, following a tornado warning for Daviess County the night before, Owensboro Bishop William F. Medley found that his cellphone service was down — and that Gov. Andy Beshear had made an announcement about lives lost in a sudden tragedy.

Pope Francis established a new Vatican foundation that will promote initiatives based on the principles set out in his encyclical “Fratelli Tutti, on Fraternity and Social Friendship.”

The Supreme Court turned down emergency requests Dec. 13 from New York health care workers seeking a religious exemption from the state’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for its health care employees.

Catholic men and women formally installed in the new ministry of catechists are not simply religious education teachers but are engaged in “the proclamation and transmission of the faith, carrying out this role in collaboration with the ordained ministers and under their guidance,” said a letter accompanying the Latin text of the Rite of Institution of Catechists.

Pope Francis encouraged people to take part in a new global campaign launched by Caritas Internationalis, the Vatican-based umbrella organization for national Catholic charities.