At a rather formal meeting in the Apostolic Palace and a more relaxed one with balloons and silly hats in the Vatican audience hall, Pope Francis told children that Christmas is a sign of how much God loves them, and they are called to share that love.

Christmas this year is arriving amid shock and tears. The images of devastation wrought by at least 22 tornadoes slashing their way through Kentucky, Missouri, Arkansas and Illinois are etched in our national consciousness.

Responding to 11 questions it said had been raised about Pope Francis’ document restricting celebrations of the pre-Vatican II Mass, the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments offered a few concessions to bishops but insisted the entire Latin-rite Catholic Church must move toward celebrating only one form of the Mass and sacraments.

Adam Piekarski, a homeless man from Lódz, Poland, never imagined that the sketches he would draw in his free time while waiting for the public showers near Bernini’s Colonnade would lead to the opportunity of a lifetime.

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.