Looming on the geopolitical horizon this week is a significant threat to the multinational campaign on climate change that emerged far from Baku, when Donald Trump became president-elect of the United States.

A Reflection for the Memorial of St. Martin of Tours, Bishop, by Kevin Clarke

Joseph Hazboun, CNEWA’s regional director in Jerusalem, described expanding difficulties for the Christian Arab community on the West Bank but added that nothing, of course, compared to the complete humanitarian breakdown being experienced in Gaza.

Helene’s devastation is offering a hard lesson: No community or U.S. region can consider itself safe from the extreme weather events that global warming is seeding and supercharging.

A Reflection for Friday of the Twenty-seventh Week in Ordinary Time, by Kevin Clarke

Chief Correspondent Kevin Clarke joined a team from Catholic Charities USA assessing needs in North Carolina after Hurricane Helene.

Most families have been forced to move many times and with each new displacement, families lose or abandon more belongings. Not many of them by now have clothing appropriate for worsening weather conditions.

The violence has claimed the lives of thousands of innocent victims, but it also “struck a profound blow to the common feeling of belonging to the Holy Land, to the consciousness of being part of a plan of Providence.”

Focus on the fate of Israel, its hostages in Gaza and the people of Gaza and south Lebanon means that little attention is being paid to other continuing crises around the world—Sudan, Haiti, Myanmar among them.

Catholics in the audience may not have been as startled by Senator Vance’s emphatic, sympathetic invocation of the second response of the Kyrie eleison.