The new policy instructs priests who currently celebrate a form of the Mass, sometimes called the Latin Mass or Tridentine Mass, which was supplanted with the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, to request permission from the archbishop if they wish to continue using the extraordinary form.

Our Dispatches contributors were kind enough to share some thoughts on what stories are likely to be important in 2022 as we cross off, in some relief, the concluding days of 2021.

Since chef Fadi Kattan was a child getting underfoot in his grandmother’s kitchen, the preparation and communal eating of the burbara pudding has been a pre-Christmas symbol of the coming of the holiday on the Palestinian West Bank.

Patriarch Sabbah: “When you celebrate Christmas, remember that in Bethlehem, in Jerusalem, life is not a Christmas life. It is not the blessed life of the new redeemed humanity. The song of the Angels is far away.”

Pope Francis, who turned 85 on Dec. 17, is “looking well and in good health,” Cardinal Oswald Gracias, the archbishop of Mumbai, said in an exclusive interview with America’s Vatican correspondent.

Sister Sylvia Ndubuaku: “We are for women the society has rejected. We receive traumatized women with this illness and we perform free surgeries for them.”