Hong Kong was tense and festive when I arrived for a small 1997 conference about religion coverage in global media. The reason for the odd atmosphere was obvious: In a few days, on July 1, Great Britain would yield control of that great city to the People’s Republic of China...

Pope Leo XIV has appointed Bishop Richard Moth, a former bishop of Britain’s military ordinariate, as the 12th Archbishop of Westminster, succeeding Cardinal Vincent Nichols who is retiring at the age of 80. A canon lawyer, Bishop Moth, 67, has served as Bishop of Arundel and Brighton in southern England for the past decade...

A retired New York bishop has filed for personal bankruptcy protection in federal court after a state jury verdict found him, along with other officials, personally liable for the collapse of a Catholic hospital pension fund that left about 1,100 retirees without the lifetime monthly payments they were expecting...

The Holy See said on Dec. 19 that Pope Leo XIV had made two new episcopal appointments in the United States, with the Vatican announcing a new bishop for the Diocese of Palm Beach as well as an auxiliary bishop for the Diocese of Phoenix.

When it was first published in 1993, Pope St. John Paul II’s encyclical on the reform of Catholic moral theology, Veritatis Splendor (The Splendor of Truth), dealt a severe blow to the pride of many German theologians, who had long thought themselves the cutting edge of Catholic intellectual life...

The announcement by the Vatican this morning that Pope Leo XIV accepted the resignation of Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York and appointed Archbishop-designate Ronald Hicks to succeed him will bring a lot of deserved attention to the affable and talented former bishop of Joliet...

In his most significant U.S. episcopal appointment to date, Pope Leo XIV is going back to his Chicago roots, tapping a young prelate with a remarkably similar background to his own as the next archbishop of New York. The Pope’s pick for the Big Apple is Bishop Ronald Hicks, 58, the current ordinary of the Diocese of Joliet...

Pope Leo XIV is expected to appoint Bishop Ronald Hicks of Joliet as the next Archbishop of New York, The Pillar has confirmed, with an announcement expected as early as Dec. 18.

It was Newman himself who observed in one of his most celebrated sermons that “one little deed, done against natural inclination for God’s sake” is a stronger proof of Christian character than “all the dust and chaff of mere profession.” And in Jane Austen’s more virtuous characters, we find ample support for the conclusion that, while most eminently delighting her readers, she sought also to instruct them.

Jimmy Lai, the Catholic human rights advocate whose long-running national security trial in China has drawn criticism and charges of persecution, was found guilty on Dec. 15 of multiple violations of China’s national security laws, bringing an end to several years of what advocates have described as a politically motivated show trial against a popular Hong Kong publisher.