The president said that America is now a global leader in taking serious action to fight climate change. “And frankly, approving this project would have undercut that global leadership. And that’s the biggest risk we face—not acting.”

This is the first time the U.S. public has been able to read the fine print of a deal that will govern issues related to commerce, intellectual property and human and labor rights for 40 percent of the global economy—if it clears substantial hurdles being erected in Washington.

The bishops did not downplay those issues which still divide Lutherans and Catholics, but wanted to “work from the vantage point of where we agree rather than those things which divide us.”

The ACLU deploys a relic of 19th century anti-Catholicism to fight school choice.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told reporters. "The challenge is nothing less than to chart a course out of hell. And that’s not going to happen overnight, but I am convinced that the steps that we worked on today, if followed up on, if worked on in good faith, can begin to move us in the right direction."

"Only God knows the stories of those people who have given their lives, who have died, and continue to be stoned with the hardest stone that exists in the world: language."

‘It’s a moment of sanity.” That’s how Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami characterized a confluence of mid-October events promoting criminal justice reform in the United States.On Oct. 21 a new campaign urging reduced incarceration was launched by a surprising source, the grou

“We welcome this modest bipartisan first step to reform our nation's broken criminal justice system,” Catholic leaders wrote to Congress.

"If we do not respond justly and humanely to this challenge in our own backyard, then we will relinquish our moral leadership and moral influence globally."

Non-state actors, Secretary of State Kerry said, “are now the principal persecutors and preventers of religious tolerance and practice. Most prominent, and most harmful, obviously, has been the rise of international terrorist groups such as Daesh, al-Qaida, al-Shabaab, Boko Haram. And all have been guilty of vicious acts of unprovoked violence.”