Synod members said they were certain God “will not fail to look on our poverty in order to show the strength of his arm in our days and to sustain us in the path of the new evangelization.”

“We need to get this mandate overturned” by the courts said Archbishop Thomas G. Wenski said of the requirement that many religious employers pay for contraceptives for their workers.

A papal delegation of bishops, including Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan of New York, will travel to the capital of war-torn Syria in late October.

Jacques Berthieu, a French Jesuit (1838–96) and missionary in Madagascar, was canonized in Rome on Oct. 21 together with six other blessed.

Some of Egypt’s Christians are concerned about Islamists in power, but there is greater freedom of speech than before the revolution.

Western nations must resist the pressure to “scapegoat, abandon, even kill, the elderly as a cost-cutting measure,” an Australian bishop said.