“Access to safe drinkable water,” Pope Francis said in his milestone 2015 ecological encyclical “Laudato Si’,” “is a basic and universal human right, since it is essential to human survival and, as such, is a condition for the exercise of other human rights.”

Victims of a fatal bus accident that claimed the lives of eight migrant farmworkers were remembered at a prayer vigil — and the tragedy shows that farmworkers are all too often “lost and forgotten,” said one of the organizers.

Reversing decisions made by Archbishop Mitchell Rozanski almost a year ago, the Vatican ruled this week that it did not find just cause for the Archdiocese of St. Louis to merge three parishes and close one other as part of its restructuring plan.

The U.S. Supreme Court has denied an appeal by a group of New Jersey-based pro-life pregnancy centers to block a subpoena from the state’s attorney general seeking that they disclose donor information.

No mom would ever want to spend Mother’s Day like this: in a hospital room with a 7-year-old son paralyzed from the waist down and told by doctors he might never walk again.

Citing the country’s high maternal mortality rate, U.S. Conference of Catholics Bishops committee chairmen recently wrote to Congress to encourage lawmakers to address the nation’s maternal health crisis.

Missouri’s Republican Gov. Mike Parson signed legislation May 9 that revives an effort to block Planned Parenthood from the state’s Medicaid program.