News Briefs

Italy’s foreign minister, Emma Bonino, told reporters on Aug. 6 that “it seems” the Italian Jesuit priest Paolo Dall’Oglio, missing more than a week in Syria, “has been kidnapped by...a local version of Al Qaeda.” • The attorney Frances X. Hogan, Jane Marie Klein, O.S.F., and the diocesan leader and social worker Barbara Thorp received the U.S. bishops’ People of Life Award for lifetime commitment to the pro-life movement on Aug. 4. • On Aug. 7 Secretary of State John Kerry appointed the ethicist Shaun Casey of Virginia to head the new State Department Office of Faith-Based Community Initiatives. • Msgr. Robert Weiss, pastor of St. Rose of Lima in Newtown, Conn., and the parish’s St. Virgilius Knights of Columbus Council 185 received the first Caritas Awards from the national Knights of Columbus in recognition of their extraordinary efforts in the aftermath of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School last December. • Pope Francis’ orders restricting the use of the Latin Mass in communities of the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate “do not intend to contradict the general instructions” of Pope Benedict, but respond to the congregation’s “specific problems,” said Federico Lombardi, S.J., the Vatican spokesman, on Aug. 2.