The House finally passed a five-year farm bill on Jan. 29, more than a year after the previous agriculture program expired and two days before a stopgap extension was itself set to expire. While Catholic groups and other rural advocates had been urging passage of a farm bill, their enthusiasm for th

The Vatican Congregation for Religious hopes to release its final report on the 2009-10 visitation of U.S. women’s communities “soon.” Speaking to reporters on Jan. 31 at the Vatican, Archbishop José Rodríguez Carballo, O.F.M., secretary of the Congregation for Institutes of Cons

The global pope-apalooza continued in January as Pope Francis was featured on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine and in “superpope” graffiti that sprouted up on buildings around Vatican City. • It was announced on Jan. 27 that Pope Francis has accepted the resignation of Melkite Ar

Number of unaccompanied minors apprehended at U.S. border doubled last year.

House Republicans released a one-page set of “standards for immigration reform” during their annual retreat in Cambridge, Md., on Jan. 29. Bishop Eusebio Elizondo, M.Sp.S., auxiliary bishop of Seattle and chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Migration,

In Jordan’s capital city, Amman, prayers for peace were being offered by refugee Syrian Christians as talks between the warring sides in Syria’s civil war opened in the Swiss town of Montreux. Dubbed Geneva II, the talks aim for a transitional government, an end to the violence and the d

Despite single-digit temperatures, thousands descended on Washington on Jan. 22 to declare their opposition to abortion. Most of the red noses and chapped lips belonged to faces under 25. “We are the pro-life generation,” read signs carried by the marchers. The president of the March for

Debt from college loans makes some men and women postpone joining a religious community, according to a survey of men and women professing final vows as members of a religious order. Ten percent of those who professed final vows in 2013 had an average amount of $31,000 in college debt and the averag

The cardinal who heads Pope Francis’ Council of Cardinals said the Catholic Church is entering a “new era” and accused critics of the pope’s statements on economic injustice of failing to “understand reality.”“Francis wants to lead the church in the same dir

A series of bomb attacks rocked Cairo, Egypt, on Jan. 23, the day before the third anniversary of the street revolution in 2011 that toppled the Hosni Mubarak regime. Six people were killed, hundreds were injured, and the city’s police headquarters, strafed and scored in the aftermath of a mas