Catholic News Service

Pope Francis once again pleaded for an end to the bloodshed and violence in Ukraine after images of innocent civilians apparently executed in Bucha sparked outrage and horror around the world.

Two weeks after meeting Pope Francis at the Vatican and inviting him again to visit Lebanon, President Michel Aoun tweeted that the visit could take place as early as June.

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson's nomination to the Supreme Court moved forward April 4 after a 53-47 Senate procedural vote to bring her nomination before the full Senate likely before April 8.

Ukrainian Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk of Kyiv-Halych said disturbing images from Ukraine after Russian retreat are evidence that "the struggle of Ukraine is a spiritual struggle against evil."

Police in England have produced national guidelines to allow priests to give last rites to Catholics dying at crime scenes. The change follows the outcry by Catholics at the denial of permission to administer the sacrament of the anointing of the sick to Sir David Amess, a Catholic politician, after he was stabbed repeatedly in an attack Oct. 15.

Nicaragua has approved a law increasing government control over educational institutions and stripping funds from Jesuit-run Central American University, which has been at odds with the government.

The Biden administration has confirmed it will lift a public health measure in May that was put in place at the start of the coronavirus pandemic that has kept asylum-seekers out.

A local Catholic college founded by Ukrainian women religious has teamed up with 15 other schools to confer honorary doctorates on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

A bishop in Ukraine accused Russian forces of deliberately targeting aid centers and of destroying the port of Mariupol to scare other cities into surrendering.

Meeting members of a foundation supporting individuals with autism and their families, Pope Francis happily put on a gift of a red chef's apron over his white cassock and gave his guests an enthusiastic "thumbs-up."

The president of Caritas Ukraine is an American citizen — the daughter of Ukrainian refugees — and yet she has not left Ukraine, even after the U.S. government advised Americans to leave.

Members of Canada's Assembly of First Nations gave Pope Francis a "cradleboard," a traditional baby carrier, and asked him to keep it overnight as he reflected on what happened to Indigenous children who were sent to residential schools and, particularly, to those who never made it home again.

Munich Cardinal Reinhard Marx has called for a change in Catholic teaching on homosexuality, reported the German Catholic news agency KNA. "The catechism is not set in stone. One may also question what it says," Marx told the weekly magazine Stern in an interview published March 31.

Human rights groups in Washington sounded the alarm after the Salvadoran government began mass arrests and suspended personal freedoms following a record-breaking spree of homicides by gangs in late March.

"Serious thinking" about inequality in health care "is a task we can no longer put off," Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, told a New York audience,

Msgr. Thomas W. Powers, vicar general of the Diocese of Bridgeport, Connecticut, has been named rector of the Pontifical North American College, the U.S. seminary in Rome.

Pope Francis asked people to pray for his upcoming trip to Malta and to pray for an end to the "savage cruelty" of war.

With his voice often trembling and tears sliding down to his beard, the head of the Ukrainian Catholic Church spoke via Zoom about the death and destruction Russia is raining down on his people and his country.

"It is necessary, then, to change approach and admit the urgency of building a 'we' that lives in the common home" of creation, said the interim president of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development in a talk at the Pontifical Urbanian University in Rome March 30.

Holding together the obligation to protect and promote the Catholic identity of Catholic schools while reaching out to a broader community of students and teachers requires a commitment to dialogue.