Bishop John C. Wester of Salt Lake City, chairman of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Communications, surprised America’s church correspondent Mary Ann Walsh, R.S.M., with the prestigious St. Francis de Sales Award from the Catholic Press Association in Albany on March 12. • On March

The Society of St. Vincent de Paul has been unable to confirm the number of its members abducted in Syria, nor where they are being held. The society announced on its website on March 4 that “several colleagues,” along with “women and children,” were kidnapped in the province

Things could not be worse in Venezuela. No, actually, they could be—and probably will be.Despite its prodigious oil wealth, Venezuela is heading over a financial cliff, and it is heading there faster thanks to the plunging price of crude oil. The socialist revolution founded by the late Hugo C

The beatification of El Salvador’s martyred Archbishop Óscar Romero will take place during a ceremony in El Salvador on May 23, the day before Pentecost Sunday. The date was announced on March 11 by Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, postulator of Romero’s cause for sainthood, in El Salvador.

Cardinal Edward Egan’s time as leader of one of the nation’s largest archdioceses was haunted by the unfolding child abuse scandal, shocked by the terror spectacle of Sept. 11, 2001, and troubled by a period of fiscal uncertainty and parish closings. But Cardinal Edward Egan, archbishop

Barbara Moore, a sister of St. Joseph of Carondelet who 50 years ago this March participated in the civil rights march in Selma, Ala., said that events in Ferguson, Mo., and elsewhere show that more needs to be done on race relations in the United States. • Marking International Women’s D