Catholic News Service

Middle Tennessee's immigrant and refugee communities have been hit particularly hard by the COVID-19 virus. In response, parishes and Catholic Charities of Tennessee have been trying to provide the spiritual and material support they need to persevere through the pandemic.

Prior to the July 17 execution of Dustin Honken, a 52-year-old man from Iowa, Catholic leaders, including the bishops of Iowa, Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin of Newark, New Jersey, and the Benedictine priest who had been Honken's spiritual adviser for 10 years, pleaded for a lesser sentence or at least a delay.

As finance ministers representing the world's wealthiest countries prepare to meet online, Caritas Internationalis echoed Pope Francis' call for debt relief to poor countries reeling from war, poverty and the coronavirus pandemic.

Instead of one simple message, the Bible is "a library produced over a millennium with multiple and often diverging responses to very difficult situations, said Jesuit Fr. Dominik Markl, a scholar at Rome's Pontifical Biblical Institute.

Catholic organizations and others who fear that proposed changes by the Trump administration will all but eliminate the asylum system rushed to meet a July 15 deadline to make their voices heard. 

Bishop Eugenio Scarpellini of El Alto, Bolivia, died July 15 after contracting COVID-19. He was remembered by colleagues as a tireless promoter of missions.

After the Supreme Court cleared the way for the second federal execution in a week, 68-year-old Wesley Purkey was killed by lethal injection at the penitentiary July 16 in Terre Haute, Indiana.

Pope Francis has named Bishop Edward C. Malesic of Greensburg, Pennsylvania, to head the Diocese of Cleveland.

Inocente Orlando Montano, the former Salvadoran army colonel accused of participating in "the decision, design or execution of the killings" of six Jesuits in 1989, testified in his Spanish trial that no order was ever given to eliminate the priests.

Americans participating in a study of attitudes toward abortion said they do not typically discuss it, find the labels "pro-life" and "pro-choice" inadequate, and generally do not consider abortion a "desirable good" for society, according to a University of Notre Dame study.

In keeping with new directives from the state of California to stop the spike in confirmed cases of the coronavirus, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles announced July 13 it will discontinue indoor Masses and other liturgical services, effective immediately.

An expert witness has testified that the slayings of six Jesuit priests in El Salvador in 1989 was "premeditated" and preceded by campaigns to discredit the Catholic Church and the Society of Jesus.

In a 2 a.m. decision July 14 after numerous last-minute filings, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 to overturn a trial court order blocking the execution of federal death-row inmate Daniel Lewis Lee.

A man crashed his van through the doors of Our Lady Queen of Peace Church in Ocala, Florida, early in the morning July 11 and once inside, the church's pastor said, the man set the interior of the church ablaze and drove off.

The combination of concern over government response to COVID-19 and the economic collapse brought about by the pandemic with the national reckoning over racism following the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis has found Catholics sharing in a public mood that has decidedly soured on politics, according to a panel of speakers.

Pope Francis said he was saddened after a Turkish court ruled to revert the iconic Hagia Sophia museum into a mosque.

Nearly every bishop responding to a survey said the coronavirus pandemic has seriously affected the celebration of the sacraments and rites and sacramental preparation programs in their dioceses.

U.S. Catholic college and university leaders have joined the nation's higher education community in condemning a new policy announced by the Trump administration that would prevent international students from remaining in or coming to the United States if their colleges use a completely online format in the fall semester due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Federal death-row inmate Dustin Lee Honken was convicted of "heinous" crimes but killing him "will do nothing to restore justice or heal those still burdened by these crimes," Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin said in a July 9 letter to President Donald Trump.

Twenty schools in the Archdiocese of New York will not reopen in the fall because of the financial fallout caused by the novel coronavirus pandemic.