“These are strong, courageous people of hope,” Daniel Corrou, S.J., the director of Jesuit Refugee Service/Middle East and North Africa, said. But even hope has its limits.

Six churchmen and a diocesan communicator were sentenced to 10 years in prison on conspiracy charges as Nicaragua’s increasingly tyrannical regime continues its persecution of the Catholic Church.

Pope Francis repeated his pressing call for an end to the violence that has forced millions into camps for refugees or the internally displaced in South Sudan.

The Catholic Church in Germany has so far paid more than $43.5 million (40 million euros) to victims of sexual abuse, German Catholic KNA agency has reported.

In the D.R.C., Pope Francis has shown his advanced age and physical mobility problems have not limited his extraordinary capacity to console the afflicted, call evildoers to conversion and sustain the faithful in hope.

Seventy-five years after Gandhi’s death, when Hindu nationalism has risen to the highest echelons of the Indian government, his legacy in the nation he helped liberate is complex and, in some cases, denigrated.