Stefanie Tiefenbacher, 87, of the Missionary Sisters of the Precious Blood, was robbed and murdered in her bedroom in the small town of Ixopo, near Durban, South Africa. • An appearance by Sister Jeannine Gramick, censured for positions on homosexuality and same-sex marriage, at a Catholic chur

Beheadings, enslavement, kidnappings and rape plague minority religious communities across the Middle East, and it is time for President Obama to fill a job created to address their plight, a group of prominent evangelicals, scholars and other religious leaders told the White House. In the seve

The president of the Latin American bishops’ conference called Pope Francis’ planned visit to Cuba an opportunity for the church to play a larger role in a country experiencing reforms and re-embracing institutionalized religion.“Whether we want to accept it or not, Cuba is undergo

The Jesuit Refugee Service expressed disappointment on April 24 with the measures announced by the European Union to respond to the accelerating migrant crisis in the Mediterranean, describing the outcome after meetings in Brussels as “a lost opportunity.” James Stapleton, the internatio

Nauman Masih, a 14-year-old Pakistani Christian doused with gasoline and set afire by a group of Muslim attackers, passed away on April 15 in Lahore. The boy had been stopped and assaulted after confirming he was a Christian. The attack was allegedly in retaliation for the lynching by Christians of

Pope Francis spent 50 minutes with a delegation from the Leadership Conference of Women Religious on April 16. The symbolic encounter came after the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the L.C.W.R. announced that they had reached a positive conclusion to a three-year effor

Pope Francis is considering the possibility of visiting Cuba in September, before or after his trip to the United States, the Vatican said on April 17. • Parents of Martin Richard, the 8-year-old boy killed in the Boston Marathon bombings of April 2013, called on the government on April 17 to e

Bishop Oscar Cantú of Las Cruces, N.M., chair of the Committee on International Justice and Peace of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, urged Congress to give the “Lausanne framework,” concluded by U.S. and E.U. negotiators with Iran, a chance. His letter arrived on April 14 as U.

‘A bishop stands for Christ, the head of the church,” Chicago’s Cardinal Francis George said to Mary Ann Walsh, R.S.M., America’s U.S. Church correspondent, in one of his last interviews. “What he faces is always tied to that vocational understanding. It means that

The British charity Oxfam has appealed for an end to the fighting in Yemen and the opening of borders to allow entrance to desperately needed humanitarian aid. Nuha Al-Saeedi, an Oxfam program manager in Yemen, reports that conditions are getting worse each day as basic commodities run dangerously l