After a shooting spree late Nov. 7 at a country-music bar in Thousand Oaks, about 40 miles from the heart of Los Angeles, Archbishop Jose H. Gomez of Los Angeles asked people to "pray hard" for the victims and their families.

Sister Carol Keehan, a Daughter of Charity, has announced her retirement as president and CEO of the Catholic Health Association of the United States, effective June 30, 2019.

Thousands of people gathered outside and inside the Sailors and Soldiers Memorial Hall of the University of Pittsburgh Oct. 28 at an interfaith service to mourn the victims of the horrific shooting a day earlier at the Tree of Life synagogue.

A funeral Mass will be celebrated Nov. 3 at St. Joseph's Abbey in Spencer for Trappist Father Thomas Keating, a leading figure in the centering prayer movement that got its start in the 1970s. He died Oct. 25 at the abbey.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals based in San Francisco heard oral arguments Oct. 19 in a lawsuit that aims to overturn a 2017 federal regulation expanding the exemption to the federal contraceptive mandate to include the Little Sisters of the Poor and other religious employers.

The bishops of Virginia's two Catholic dioceses said in a joint statement Oct. 24 that they wanted to assure Catholics in the state and the public "we are cooperating with the attorney general's office."

The Vatican said only that Francis had "relieved (Holley) from the pastoral governance" of the diocese and named Louisville Archbishop Joseph Kurtz to replace him temporarily.

Capuchin Father Raniero Cantalamessa, preacher of the papal household, will direct the Ignatian style retreat, the U.S.C.C.B. announced Oct. 23.

Catholic clergy and laypeople have been expelled from Myanmar's northern Shan state by a China-backed ethnic minority army.

Indiana's attorney general Oct. 15 petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to review and reverse a ruling by a lower court declaring unconstitutional an Indiana law that makes it illegal for women in the state to have an abortion solely based on the race, gender or disability of a fetus.