News & Commentary

Students from Everest Academy in Lemont, Ill., cheer May 8, 2025, after it was announced that Chicago-born Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost was elected as the next pope. He chose the papal name Leo XIV. (OSV News photo/Vincent Alban, Reuters)

Chicago abuzz with ‘unbelievable’ joy the first American Pope is a hometown son

Catholics and non-Catholics alike were abuzz with excitement in Chicago May 8, after one of the city's native sons became pope. Taking the name Leo XIV, the new pontiff has made many firsts.
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Pope appeals for peace in Holy Land, says death of children ‘unacceptable’

The injury and death of so many innocent people, especially children, caused by escalating violence between Israel and the Gaza Strip is “terrible and unacceptable,” putting the area at risk of sinking into “a spiral of death and destruction,” Pope ...
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High court to hear major abortion case from Mississippi in its next term

The U.S. Supreme Court said in a May 17 order that it will hear oral arguments during its next term on a 2018 Mississippi abortion law banning most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.
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U.S. climate envoy meets pope, speaks at Vatican conference

John Kerry, U.S. President Joe Biden's special envoy for climate, met privately with Pope Francis May 15, the day after giving a keynote address at a closed-door meeting of the Pontifical Academy for Sciences and the Pontifical Academy for Social ...
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US bishop urges end of violence between Israelis, Palestinians

The chairman of the U.S. bishops' Committee on International Justice and Peace called on Israelis and Palestinians to end the violence in Jerusalem and Gaza that has claimed dozens of lives and left hundreds of people injured.
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Advocate: S. Carolina approval of firing squad, electric chair ‘chilling’

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- The passage of a bill by South Carolina lawmakers in early May to restart executions after 10 years and to add death by firing squad or electric chair as options if lethal injection drugs are not available ...
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Coroner rules 1971 massacre victims in Belfast were ‘entirely innocent’

A coroner in Northern Ireland ruled that a priest and nine lay Catholics who were shot dead by British troops almost 50 years ago were "entirely innocent" and their deaths were unjustified.
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