Giovanna Dell'orto

Thanks to migrants, most of whom come to work in the pork processing plant next to giant corn silos on its outskirts, Worthington, Minnesota has bucked the trend of rural communities nationwide that never recovered from the 1980s farm crisis. But such rapid change has come with significant challenges and costs, as schools, churches and law enforcement have sought to respond to new needs despite language and cultural barriers.

The Catholic Diocese of Paterson, New Jersey, and five of its priests whose legal status in the United States expires as soon as next spring, have now sued the federal agencies overseeing immigration. They argue that the change “will cause severe and substantial disruption to the lives and religious freedoms” of the priests as well as the hundreds of thousands of Catholics they serve.

Cardinal Álvaro Ramazzini's unflinching focus on the poor, the Indigenous and the migrant has garnered him great affection from the marginalized, and many threats of violence amid Guatemala's political turmoil.

"Cachita" is etched in tattoos, street murals, cartoons and other artwork on the island. She is revered in makeshift home altars, songs — and at her shrine some 500 miles (805 kilometers) east of Havana.

When Auxiliary Bishop Silvio Báez finished his homily on a recent Sunday, applause broke out among the hundreds of faithful in St. Agatha Catholic Church, on the outskirts of Miami, that has become the spiritual home of the growing Nicaraguan diaspora.

Two dark-haired oxen pulled the sacred image of Our Lady of Remedies on a procession float for more than two hours through the small town of Lamego in Portugal's wine country.

At a Sunday Mass at a church in Kapalua, Hawaii, the Most Rev. Clarence "Larry" Silva, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Honolulu, appealed to somber parishioners not to abandon their faith. "If we are angry with God we should tell him so. He can take it," he said in his sermon, adding later that "God loves us in tragedies and good times and bad times."

A University of Notre Dame professor has filed a defamation lawsuit against a student-run publication over news coverage of her abortion-rights work. The case is raising questions about press freedom and academic freedom at one of the nation's preeminent Catholic institutions of higher education.

Under the tall prairie grass outside this southwestern Minnesota town lies a precious seam of dark red pipestone that, for thousands of years, Native Americans have quarried and carved into pipes essential to prayer and communication with the Creator. Only a dozen Dakota carvers remain.

About 500 Catholic mission churches anchor a uniquely New Mexican way of life for their communities. But it's becoming increasingly difficult to find the necessary resources to preserve the churches.

For the lone pastor in this fragile, starkly beautiful environment, the challenge is to fulfill the church's historical mission of ministering to those in crisis while addressing the pressing and divisive contemporary challenge of climate change.

The migration crisis roiling the borderlands is literally in the backyard of the new chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ migration committee, a ministry started a century ago. Bishop Mark Seitz will be the first border bishop to serve in this role in at least two decades; he says it will allow him to bring “a new energy to this work from someone who sees it pretty much every day.”

Tensions between LGBTQ students and administrations endure at many of the hundreds of U.S. Catholic and Protestant universities. The Christian teachings they ascribe to differ from societal values over gender identity and sexual orientation, because they assert that God created humans in unchangeable male and female identities, and sex should only happen within the marriage of a man and a woman.

When coronavirus struck inside Europe's largest diocesan seminary, it upended the intense educational routine and spurred soul-searching among the nearly 130 young men studying to become Catholic priests.