Concrete, effective actions and courage, not merely “simple condemnations,” is what Pope Francis said he’s expecting from a Feb. 21-24 Vatican summit on clerical abuse that opened Thursday morning.

Arguably few countries in the world have faced the scope of the Catholic clerical sexual abuse crisis as has Australia. The president of the country’s bishops’ conference believes that the only way to understand the drama is to speak with survivors, whom he compared to Jesus crucified.

If a high-stakes summit this week on the clerical sexual abuse crisis is to succeed, a leading Australian prelate says, it will require a “Copernican revolution” in Catholic culture with survivors, not clergy, directing the Church’s response.

Pope Francis has appointed Bishop Borys Gudziak of the Paris-based Ukrainian Catholic Eparchy of St. Volodymyr the Great, to be the seventh metropolitan-archbishop of the Ukrainian Catholic Archeparchy of Philadelphia, Pa.

Catholic Relief Services (CRS) is working to help Kenyans get enough water. Kenya is a water scarce country, and the annual renewable fresh water supply per capita is just 65 percent of the recommended global standards.

Pope Francis has lifted the canonical penalties imposed 34 years ago on Father Ernesto Cardenal, 94, a Nicaraguan poet and former member of the Sandinista government.

Catholic Relief Services operations began returning to normal following more than a week of unrest by Haitians frustrated by government corruption and high inflation. Warnings against traveling to Haiti by the governments of the United States and Canada remained in place despite a tense calm across the country.

A message presented in a theater with actors reaches people faster than the messages of the clergy at the podium. This is why the Egyptian Catholic Center of Cinema was founded in 1949.

Ahead of Thursday’s kickoff for Pope Francis’s closely-watched summit on sex abuse, major superiors of Religious Orders and Congregations around the world have called the abuse of children “wrong anywhere and anytime” and urged greater involvement of women in reform efforts going forward.