Amnesty International has issued a devastating report detailing summary executions, child abductions, sexual assaults, forced religious conversions and “ethnic cleansing on a historic scale” committed by the Islamic State militant group as it swept across northern Iraq from its base of o

Chicago Catholics are as feisty and independent as the wind that famously whips across this city from its lakeshore. In decades past, they enthusiastically embraced the labor and Catholic Worker movements. At some parishes today, lay people give sub-radar reflections at Sunday Mass.“Catholics

The State of California’s Corrections Department will end its policy of isolating mentally ill inmates for up to 23 hours a day and instead move them into specialized housing, where they will receive more humane treatment.The move, announced on Aug. 29, comes after U.S. District Court Judge La

Vatican Radio reports that so far this year nearly 1,900 migrants have died trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea into Europe—far surpassing the 700 dead recorded in 2013 and 500 in 2012. • Cardinal Edmund C. Szoka, a former Vatican official and one-time head of the Archdiocese of Detroit

The Catholic Church should make “unconventional couples” feel at home instead of making them targets of “de facto discrimination,” the leader of the Italian Bishops’ Conference and an ally of Pope Francis said. “Couples in irregular matrimonial situations are also

Floridians increasingly see gay marriage as a weightier question of civil rights.