Pope Francis has taken the rich social tradition of the Church that was championed by Pope John Paul II and “made it front stage,” says Bishop Frank Dewane. He said that while there has been a constant tradition of Catholic social activism, he believes there’s been an uptick during the Francis papacy.
Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark, is urging his fellow U.S. bishops to hold out for a clean DACA bill, rather than settle for a compromise that includes funding for the border wall.
The U.S. bishops have termed the Trump administration’s decision not to renew the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designation to El Salvador as “heartbreaking” and pledged to stand with Salvadoran TPS recipients as they risk being separated from their families and homes in the United States.
The response to Cardinal Law’s death has been nothing short of a delicate tightrope act of witnessing to both the Christian hope of resurrection in death and great mercy in light of grave sins, while also duly acknowledging the continued pain of the clergy sexual abuse crisis – the most cancerous manifestation in the Roman Catholic Church, according to some observers, since the Protestant Reformation.
In the midst of the U.S. bishops’ “Solidarity in Suffering” campaign, designed as a Week of Awareness and Education for Persecuted Christians, leaders from Iraq on Thursday urged the United Nations and the international community to recognize Christians as key to stabilizing the Middle East.
Tuesday’s meeting at the fall assembly of the U.S. bishops’ conference ended with discussions on how the Church in the country should work to implement Pope Francis’s 2013 apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium and his 2015 exhortation Amoris Laetitia.
In his first presidential address as head of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) on Monday, Cardinal Daniel DiNardo said the nation “seems more divided than ever…but our role continues to be witnessing to the Gospel.”
As the U.S. bishops meet in Baltimore this week, one of the most closely-watched elections will be for the head of the pro-life committee, as its outcome likely will be viewed as a bellwether for the direction of the conference as a whole.
Kicking off the centennial gathering of the U.S. bishops, the Vatican’s Secretary of State, Italian Cardinal Pietro Parolin, praised the U.S. bishops for their defense of both the unborn and access to healthcare in a homily for the opening Mass of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ fall assembly.
On this one-year anniversary of the election of President Donald Trump, The Tablet examines the ways in which the U.S. Catholic bishops have shifted their policy priorities over the past year and how immigration, in particular, has become a defining issue for the U.S. Church.
