St Ann Catholic Church Fayetteville, NC

Pope Francis will visit the southern Italian city on February 23 to meet with Mediterranean bishops.

Caritas Internationalis is the Church’s federation of relief and development agencies; the Global Forum on Migration and Development is taking place in Ecuador.

“As the Church and growing numbers of pro-life Americans continue to advocate for women and children in courthouses and legislatures, the Church’s pastoral response is focused on the needs of women facing pregnancies in challenging circumstances,” said Archbishop Joseph Naumann of Kansas City (KS), chairman of the US bishops’ Committee on Pro-Life Activities. “While this has long been the case, the pastoral response will soon intensify.”

“They showed us unusual kindness“ (cf. Acts 28:2) is the theme of the 2020 Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. “Hospitality is an important ecumenical virtue, which is open to listening to the experience that other Christians have of God,” in the words of the Vatican summary of the Pope’s January 22 remarks. “When we welcome Christians of a different tradition we reveal God’s love to them and receive the gifts that the Holy Spirit has sown in them.”

“Between 2000 and 2010, individual contributors dropped nearly 26% before beginning a climb upward,” according to the report. “Now, it appears that the organization’s donors are again tracking downward, showing a loss of nearly 27% from just the previous year.” However, “taxpayer dollars to Planned Parenthood increased nearly 70% from $363.2 million in 2008 to $616.8 million in 2018.”

“I am not only terribly shocked but also greatly grieved that desecration was done to the Eucharistic Lord in that church,” said Archbishop Peter Machado of Bangalore, the capital of the southwestern Indian state of Karnataka (map).

A gruesome killing in Drogheda, a city of 40,000 on Ireland’s eastern coast, has shocked the nation. “All human life is sacred, and an attack of this nature on someone who is still a child is disgusting and beyond belief,” said Auxiliary Bishop Michael Router of Armagh. “This desecration of life has diminished our common humanity and our sense of ourselves as a civilized people.”

Born in 1947, Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller was prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith from 2012 to 2017.

On January 20, Pope Francis received the bishops of Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. Recounting that the Pope said the report would be published, the bishop of Tyler (Texas) added, “It’s about the victims. It’s about the children of God who have suffered through the negligence and bad acting of bishops, priests, and other members of the Church.”

Professor Dani Rodrik (@rodrikdani), who hails from Turkey, has devoted his research to “globalization, economic growth and development, and political economy,” according to his website. The goal of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences is “promoting the study and progress of the social, economic, political and juridical sciences, offering the Church the elements which she can use in the study and development of her social doctrine.”