History was made in the Vatican on Dec. 2, when Pope Francis and other leaders of the world’s main religions—Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Judaism—signed a joint declaration to work together to eradicate modern slavery in its various forms by the year 2020. Pope Franc

The shooting of Michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson, Mo., exposed long-ignored, long-simmering tensions in the United States. Ferguson amounts to a kind of national Rorschach test on race. Polls show blacks and whites hold decidedly different views about the unarmed teenager’s death.

President Obama’s plan to essentially freeze most deportations of people without documentation in the United States would protect as many as 4.4 million people and their families. “Mass amnesty would be unfair,” the president said in a televised speech to the nation on Nov. 20. &ld

As a young seminarian in the 1960s, the Rev. Robert Rosebrough marched for civil rights. For most of his 46 years as a priest, he has worked in inner-city parishes. His parish, Blessed Teresa of Calcutta is in Ferguson, Mo., a short distance from where a white police officer shot an unarmed African

The Catholic Church calls for the creation of job opportunities and the recognition of the dignity of the poor, not simply for more handouts or expanded government welfare programs, Pope Francis said in a video message played on Nov. 20 at the Italian church’s Festival of Catholic Social Teach

Church officials in Goa, India, were expecting more than five million pilgrims for the once-a-decade exposition of the body of St Francis Xavier on Nov. 22. • While officials from the Kenyan government and bishops’ conference met on Nov. 19, Kenya’s Catholic bishops continued to urg