Mark Pattison

Less than a week after the bishop of Jefferson City, Missouri, blacklisted a dozen liturgical hymns, he rescinded the decree. A new decree calls for a consultative process in the selection of liturgical music. 

Bishop W. Shawn McKnight of Jefferson City decreed Oct. 28 that a dozen hymns no longer be used at churches in his mid-Missouri diocese. The most familiar of these: Marty Haugen's "All Are Welcome."

An all-boys high school in St. Louis offers a pre-apprenticeship curriculum for juniors and seniors, with representatives from skilled trades explaining to students about their jobs, the skills needed and how to acquire them.

Phil Donahue, who died Aug. 18, took on every possible topic in his talk show that ran for nearly 30 years. That included, in 1993, the clergy sex abuse crisis, which he described as "the Catholic Church's Watergate."

Six Catholic investment funds are among the 130 groups in the Climate Action 100+ that were sent letters from the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee claiming they may have violated U.S. antitrust law.

The commutation Dec. 13 of all condemned prisoners on Oregon's death row was one key in the Death Penalty Information Center's 2022 report on capital punishment in the United States.

The 90-minute documentary, "The Letter," a film on the pope's 2015 encyclical Laudato Si', is currently on YouTube and will air Dec. 21 on PBS. 

A provision in the Inflation Reduction Act, signed into law this summer by President Joe Biden, increases the size of the tax credit for conversions to renewable energy and makes nonprofit entities, like parishes, eligible to receive the tax benefits themselves.

In a year that had little good news for immigrants in a nation of immigrants, there were some wins.

Latinos may be changing American politics more than politics is changing Latinos.

Abortion-related questions -- and Americans' responses to them -- were front and center in the new American Values Survey issued Oct. 27 by the Washington-based Public Religion Research Institute.

Next year will mark the 40th anniversary of the U.S. bishops' landmark pastoral letter "The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response."

The Federal Communications Commission has authorized that technology be made available to inmates with hearing disabilities so that they may be able to communicate with loved ones and lawyers.

The image of a white victim does not tell the complete story of clergy sexual abuse in the United States, according to a number of panelists during an Oct. 5 online forum titled "Neglected Voices in the Clergy Sexual Abuse Crisis."

The current farm bill doesn't expire until 2023, yet already Catholic advocates are lining up their arguments to assemble the kind of farm bill they want to see next year.

If trends of the past 30 years continue for the next 50, Christianity will lose its majority status in the United States by 2070, according to a new demographic study by the Pew Research Center.

The number of Catholic institutions where at least some of its employees have union representation has grown to more than 600, according to the annual "Gaudium et Spes Labor Report" by the Catholic Labor Network.

This year's annual Labor Day statement from the U.S. bishops touts two bills awaiting action in Congress as being helpful to children, women and families: the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act and an expansion of the federal child tax credit.

Only 18 of the 176 dioceses got a grade of 60% or better -- what the Voice of the Faithful considered a passing grade when it released the report July 13.

Despite their pro-life bona fides, a five-member panel at a July 14 Georgetown University forum voiced their hesitancies with the Supreme Court's Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision that overturned the court's landmark Roe v. Wade ruling 49 years earlier.