Upon his arrival in the Catholic island of East Timor on Monday, Pope Francis entrusted the new country to the Blessed Virgin Mary,“I entrust East Timor and all its people to the protection of the Immaculate Conception, heavenly patroness invoked under the title of ‘Virgem de Aitara,’” Pope Francis said at the welcome ceremony at the Presidential Palace in the capital city of Dili on Sept. 9.

Following the National Eucharistic Congress that drew more than 50,000 people to Indianapolis in July, Bishop Andrew Cozzens of Crookston, Minnesota, described the event as a “real experience of unity” for the Church in the United States. It is no coincidence that the Eucharistic devotion displayed by so many Catholics — including so many Knights of Columbus and their families...

Greetings from Quito, Ecuador, where I arrived last night to cover the International Eucharistic Congress, a week-long global pilgrimage event organized under the aegis of the creatively named Pontifical Committee for Eucharistic Congresses at the Vatican. I got to Quito well after midnight, and I really haven’t seen or done anything yet, save for taking a Tylenol PM and hitting the hay.

More than 4,000 Catholics on Sept. 2 assembled in the remote Jamboni jungle to mark the 25-year observance of the death of 33-year-old Father Arul Das of the Balasore Diocese, who was shot and pierced with arrows in his thatched chapel-house during the early hours of Sept. 2, 1999.

For as brilliant as the entire 1977 television miniseries Jesus of Nazareth is, the most creatively realized sequences by director Franco Zeffirelli are arguably the depiction of the infancy narratives. This includes the episode of the Magi played, in their own idiosyncratic styles, by legendary actors Fernando Rey, Donald Pleasance and James Earl Jones, who died yesterday at age 93.

America has had no shortage of pessimistic critiques in recent years.And with titles like Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics and The Decadent Society: How We Became Victims of Our Own Success to his name, Ross Douthat has become something of a master of the genre.But at a Sept. 6 talk at the University of Notre Dame, the conservative Catholic commentator and New York Times columnist sounded an uncharacteristically optimistic note regarding the United States’ prospects.

The USCCB has released its audited financial statements for 2023, potentially shedding additional light on the recent administration of the CCHD, an anti-poverty program administered by the bishops conference which has at times attracted controversy.

In 2010 the Guardian newspaper published an article entitled “Pope gives top job to abortion hardliner”. Pope Benedict XVI, the article claimed, “has handed one of the most powerful jobs in the Vatican to a Cardinal who said recently...” – get this – “...that abortion was wrong”. The surprise expressed in the Guardian article is indicative of a philosophy that has captured Western civilisation, and destroyed the minds of its many adherents: moral relativism.

The psalms are the prayer book of the Church. For this reason, we do well not only to pray them regularly, but also to commit to memorizing them by heart so that “His praise will always be on my lips” (Ps 34:1). What follows is a small sampling of psalms worth learning for different occasions, following the numbering system employed by the NAB and RSV translations...

As the 10th National Eucharistic Congress concluded recently in Indianapolis, with prayers for a new Pentecost in the U.S. Church, it’s a good time to look back at Mother Teresa of Calcutta and her participation in the 41st International Congress in Philadelphia in 1976. What was her understanding of the unitive and transformative meaning of the Eucharist?