Caring for people with autism spectrum disorders is caring for families, said Archbishop Zygmunt Zimowski, president of the Pontifical Council for Health Care Ministry."Autism spectrum disorders affect families, not just the person who has the illness," the archbishop told reporters at the

At least four worshipers, three of them U.S.-born, were killed in an attack on a west Jerusalem synagogue on Nov. 18 by two Palestinians wielding a gun, an ax and a meat cleaver, police said.The incident was the latest violent event in the tense city where relations between Arabs and Jews have been

Pope Francis denounced a "false compassion" that would justify abortion, euthanasia, artificial reproduction technologies and medical research violating human dignity. And he urged medical doctors to "go against the current" and assert "conscientious objection" to such

The Vatican has lifted its ban on the ordination of married men to the priesthood in Eastern Catholic churches outside their traditional territories, including in the United States, Canada and Australia.Pope Francis approved lifting the ban, also doing away with the provision that, in exceptional ca

Pope Francis called for preserving the family as an institution based on marriage between a man and a woman, which he said is not a political cause but a matter of "human ecology.""The complementarity of man and woman ... is at the root of marriage and the family," the pope said

A recently reassigned Vatican official has urged Pope Francis to take the issues of Communion for the divorced and remarried, cohabitation and same-sex marriage "off the table" for next year's Synod of Bishops.Addressing more than 300 delegates at the family and marriage conference in