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.
The U.S. bishops are calling for a national debate on America’s gun policies and renewing their support for a total ban on assault weapons. Their newly released statement comes just two days after America’s latest mass shooting, where a gunman killed 26 people during a church service in Sutherland Springs, Texas.
In a new pastoral letter released on Wednesday, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, Archbishop of Washington, D.C., called for a strengthening of the Church’s efforts to confront racism, labeling it a “divisive evil that leaves great harm in its wake.”
On Tuesday, Cardinal Timothy Dolan decried the ‘senseless’ violence in New York after an attacker drove into a bike path killing eight individuals and injuring a dozen more. Cardinal Dolan called on people to “work towards greater respect and understanding among all people so that heinous and evil acts like this become a thing of the past.”
