Cardinal George Pell, 77, was sentenced to six years in prison March 13, just over two weeks after a Melbourne court allowed the publication of news that he had been found guilty of sexually abusing two boys.

Catholic Church leaders in Venezuela say a peaceful transfer of power from embattled President Nicolas Maduro to a transitional government, probably led by National Assembly president Juan Guaido, is the best hope for the crisis-wracked country.

At a time of mounting anti-Christian persecution around the world, Pope Francis celebrated the memory Sunday of nine seminarians killed during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s by revolutionary miners who had occupied the city of Oviedo.

Spreading the Gospel in a place where hate or love are doled out based on tribal membership is a hard task but, since 2008, Sister Orla Treacy of the Irish Loreto Sisters has risen to the occasion.

A Catholic News Service contributor in Caracas, Venezuela, was taken by military counterintelligence officials after his home was raided early March 6.

Declaring that the Catholic Church is unafraid of history, Pope Francis announced that documents in the Vatican Secret Archives relating to the wartime pontificate of Pope Pius XII will be open to scholars in 2020.

The festival is intrinsically Catholic – its calendar position immediately precedes Ash Wednesday as a “farewell to the flesh” before Lent, and it was introduced to the islands by 18th-century French Catholic refugees fleeing persecution.

Father Marco Pozza, an Italian priest and author of a new book on the “Hail Mary” containing reflections from Pope Francis, has described papal devotion to Mary – not just Francis’s, but that of all popes – as a reflection of the belief that she’s the figure in Christian tradition most feared by the devil.