Kasper spoke of a “deaconess” role that could include special liturgical functions.

Ellen Grady, a member of the Catholic Worker from Ithaca, N.Y., does not like the idea that war has come home to her backyard. The war, in this case, is the country’s war on terror. The place where it is being waged is the Hancock Field Air National Guard Base near Syracuse, a little more than

Mary Jo Copeland, founder of Sharing and Caring Hands and Mary’s Place for the homeless in Minneapolis, Minn., was honored on Feb. 15 with the Presidential Citizens Medal. • A Pew Research survey reports Americans favor President Obama’s proposal to raise the minimum wage to $9 an h

The next pope will have a Catholic world in transformation to shepherd.

A Sri Lankan Catholic bishop and 132 Christian clergypersons and religious from different churches in north and east Sri Lanka have written a letter to the U.N. Human Rights Council appealing for an end to the crisis in that country. They charge that thousands of Tamil people, including church leade

The United Nations reports that the number of Syrian refugees in Lebanon has exceeded 265,000 and that it expects 1.1 million Syrian refugees overall in surrounding nations by June. • Human rights groups are concerned by reports that the Zimbabwean prison service, where 74 men and 2 women are b