Catholic News Service

A bishop in Ukraine accused Russian forces of deliberately targeting aid centers and of destroying the port of Mariupol to scare other cities into surrendering.

Meeting members of a foundation supporting individuals with autism and their families, Pope Francis happily put on a gift of a red chef's apron over his white cassock and gave his guests an enthusiastic "thumbs-up."

The president of Caritas Ukraine is an American citizen — the daughter of Ukrainian refugees — and yet she has not left Ukraine, even after the U.S. government advised Americans to leave.

Members of Canada's Assembly of First Nations gave Pope Francis a "cradleboard," a traditional baby carrier, and asked him to keep it overnight as he reflected on what happened to Indigenous children who were sent to residential schools and, particularly, to those who never made it home again.

Munich Cardinal Reinhard Marx has called for a change in Catholic teaching on homosexuality, reported the German Catholic news agency KNA. "The catechism is not set in stone. One may also question what it says," Marx told the weekly magazine Stern in an interview published March 31.

Human rights groups in Washington sounded the alarm after the Salvadoran government began mass arrests and suspended personal freedoms following a record-breaking spree of homicides by gangs in late March.

"Serious thinking" about inequality in health care "is a task we can no longer put off," Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, told a New York audience,

Msgr. Thomas W. Powers, vicar general of the Diocese of Bridgeport, Connecticut, has been named rector of the Pontifical North American College, the U.S. seminary in Rome.

Pope Francis asked people to pray for his upcoming trip to Malta and to pray for an end to the "savage cruelty" of war.

With his voice often trembling and tears sliding down to his beard, the head of the Ukrainian Catholic Church spoke via Zoom about the death and destruction Russia is raining down on his people and his country.

"It is necessary, then, to change approach and admit the urgency of building a 'we' that lives in the common home" of creation, said the interim president of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development in a talk at the Pontifical Urbanian University in Rome March 30.

Holding together the obligation to protect and promote the Catholic identity of Catholic schools while reaching out to a broader community of students and teachers requires a commitment to dialogue.

 Salvadoran Catholics gathered March 27 at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York to honor the country's saint, who defended life and human rights.

God always forgives and joyously welcomes back everyone who returns to him, even after a life of mistakes and sin, Pope Francis said.

As Russia's violent monthlong invasion continued to devastate Ukraine, Pope Francis laid the fates of both countries at the feet of Mary in the hopes that peace would finally reign.

Mary Minette, director of shareholder advocacy at Mercy Investment Services, credits women religious for staying the course on the environment for years, long before many investors recognized the growing threats to people and creation. Now sisters are and other activists are advocating for corporations to be more transparent with investors.

Dozens of people experiencing poverty and homelessness around the world got to ask Pope Francis any question they wanted.

Madeleine Albright, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, the first female secretary of state and longtime professor at Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service, died March 23 in Washington. 

The Supreme Court March 24 ruled in favor of a Texas prisoner who wanted his pastor to pray aloud over him and place his hands on him in the execution chamber.

The Biden administration said March 24 that the United States plans to welcome up to 100,000 Ukrainians as refugees.