Religious nonprofits challenging their participation in the contraceptive mandate under the Affordable Care Act filed a legal brief on April 12 that could end the standoff with the Obama administration. In the brief, objectors to the mandate agreed with a U.S. Supreme Court proposal that such covera
The fight against H.I.V./AIDS is being hampered by a continued stigma on those who are infected, a lack of access to appropriate medical care and fake antiretroviral drugs pedaled on the black market, said activists taking part in a Caritas Internationalis conference. Caritas brought together repres
Lizzy Myers of Mansfield, Ohio, a 5-year-old girl who has a disease that is gradually rendering her blind and deaf, met the pope as part of her parents’ “visual bucket list,” during his general audience in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican on April 6. • The relics of St.
On a number of Native American reservations the suicide rate is unusually high. That is especially true on the Rosebud Reservation in south central South Dakota. In 2007—at the height of an ongoing suicide epidemic—the number of deaths by suicide on Rosebud was roughly 13 times the natio
At a conference sponsored by the Holy See Mission to the United Nations, the message was clear: ending human trafficking and all forms of modern slavery is within global reach, but the complete abolition of these contemporary scourges remains frustrated by a lack of leadership, cross-border coordina
In his post-synodal apostolic exhortation on the family, “Amoris Laetitia” (“The Joy of Love”), Pope Francis not only strongly affirms the traditional Christian ideal of marriage; he also opens doors to the progressive integration into the life of the church of those Catholic