Pope Francis has decided the next general assembly of the Synod of Bishops will be held in the fall of 2022, but he has not announced the theme for the gathering, the Vatican said.

“We had the ability to see people, the homes and the baseball games on the side of the road,” Cardinal Dolan said in a Feb. 11 interview with Catholic News Service in Havana.

Pope Francis, adopting a suggestion made at the Synod of Bishops for the Amazon, has decided that every priest preparing for service in the Vatican diplomatic corps must spend a year in ministry as a missionary.

A cold, gray, wintry day in South Bend seemed like an appropriate setting for the burial of 2,411 aborted babies, whose remains were interred in Southlawn Cemetery in the city Feb. 12.

Fewer than one-third of Catholics believe the Eucharist is the actual body and blood of Jesus Christ, the Pew Research Center found in a recent poll.

“Les Miserables” (Amazon) has no connection to Victor Hugo’s classic novel of the same name other than its setting — the rundown Paris suburb of Montfermeil, where the poor still struggle and continue to distrust authority figures.

Jesuit Father George V. Coyne, a Baltimore native who led the Vatican Observatory as its director for 28 years, got his start in the field of astronomy as a young student in formation for the priesthood by secretly studying under his blanket, flashlight in hand.

Feb. 12 was the 15th anniversary of Sister Dorothy Stang’s assassination in the Amazon region of Brazil. The U.S.-born nun is remembered as a crusader for the poor and the landless and for her love of the land and the Amazon forest.

Pope Francis acknowledged the serious shortage of priests in remote areas of the Amazon, but he insisted not all avenues have been exhausted to address the issue.

Pope Francis said he dreams of an Amazon region where the rights of the poor and indigenous are respected, local cultures are preserved, nature is protected, and the Catholic Church is present and active with “Amazonian features.”