Mark Pattison

Year in review: Hurricane, fire, flood and even earthquake, Catholic Charities agencies did their best to help thousands of their fellow residents through some of the worst natural disasters they had ever encountered.

The farm bill that passed both houses of Congress by wide margins doesn't have money in it to protect endangered species, but it did preserve one that had been on the threatened list: bipartisanship.

The revelation in late November that a Chinese researcher had edited genes in human embryos and then implanted them in a woman was "a train wreck of a thing to do," said an ethicist at the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Philadelphia.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' 2019 budget, approved Nov. 14 by a 223-12 vote with six abstentions, reflects increased expenses related to the new clergy sex abuse crisis, according to the conference treasurer.

The U.S. bishops overwhelmingly approved a pastoral letter against racism Nov. 14 during their fall general meeting at Baltimore.

"Despite many promising strides made in our country, the ugly cancer of racism still infects our nation," the U.S. bishops say in a proposed pastoral letter on racism.

With Pope Francis midway into the sixth year of his pontificate, the percentage of U.S. Catholics who view him favorably, while still strong, is noticeably down.

To be a voice for victims of clerical sexual abuse, Fr. Brendan McGuire realized he had to come to terms with the abuse he suffered at the hands of a priest when he was 18. It was a secret he had held for 35 years.

Advocates for refugee admissions into the United States decried what one statement called a historically low cap of 30,000 for fiscal year 2019, which begins Oct. 1, and asked Congress to work with the Trump administration to more than double that number.

The 1983 Code of Canon Law did not anticipate crimes being committed by bishops that could result in their laicization, according to a canon law professor at The Catholic University of America.

A pair of open letters to Pope Francis asking him for answers to charges of cover-ups by him and others over abuse allegations against retired Archbishop Theodore McCarrick of Washington were sponsored by the Catholic Women's Forum, a project of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a Washington-based think tank.

Echoing what Pope Francis said during a Mass in May, the bishop who heads the U.S. bishops' Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development said, "The struggle of working people, of the poor" is not first a "social or political question. No! It is the Gospel, pure and simple."

More committees are not the answer to stop the abuse of children and vulnerable adults by clergy, said an Aug. 28 statement by the National Review Board, which is charged with addressing clerical sexual misconduct in the Catholic Church.

What became known following a New York Times investigation into two seminarians who said they had been abused by Archbishop Theodore McCarrick is that settlements were reached with each man in the mid-2000s.

Washington -- Bishops are commenting on the scandal that has enveloped the former archbishop of Washington and its impact on the larger church. A round up of statements -- Coakley of Oklahoma City, Etienne of Anchorage, Burbidge of Arlington, Virginia, Chaput of Philadelphia.

The Field Hospital: After the 2018 U.S. Special Olympics in Seattle, Catholics there aim to leverage that success for pastoral initiatives for those with developmental disabilities.

By a 5-4 majority, the Supreme Court declared June 27 that one of its rulings from 1977 was "wrongly decided" and overruled it, in a case on whether public-sector unions could continue to make nonmembers pay fair-share fees not related to the unions' lobbying and political efforts.

Hundreds of American adults have called the Washington headquarters of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops seeking to provide foster care for immigrant children separated from parents.

Since the administration announced a "zero tolerance" policy for illegal border crossings, resulting in family separation, 2,000 more minors have entered U.S. custody.

This year's National Catholic Prayer breakfast took on a decidedly Kansas flavor, as Archbishop Joseph Naumann of Kansas City and Sam Brownback, a former House and Senate member and governor of Kansas, addressed nearly 1,000 gathered at a Washington hotel May 24.