ROME – When Pope Francis visits Belgium and Luxembourg later this year, the trip will not only constitute a favour to a key ally, but it will also mark an opportunity for Pope Francis to reinforce several priorities of his pontificate.

On 20 May the Vatican officially announced the Pope’s Sept. 26-29 visit to Belgium and Luxembourg, saying in a statement that he would make a stopover in Luxembourg on 26 Sept. while on his way to Belgium, where he will stay from Sept. 26-29, visiting the cities of Brussels, Leuven and Louvain-la-Neuve.

Last week a bi-partisan bill to rename a street adjacent to a Chinese government building in Washington, DC, “Jimmy Lai Way,” was introduced in Congress, following the January 26 piece in The Hill by Nina Shea, that proposed that Congress do precisely that to “honor [Lai’s] heroism in defending cherished principles of freedom”: Rename the Chinese Embassy’s address to honor a Hong Kong hero | The Hill

Why did a record number of people go on this year’s Paris to Chartres pilgrimage? And why were so many of the estimated 18,000 – 20,000 pilgrims who made the journey so young?

The pilgrimage is devoted to the Traditional Latin Mass and over Pentecost weekend and Whit Monday each year – 18-20 May this year – pilgrims walk around 60 miles from Paris to the Cathedral of Our Lady of Chartres.

The three chairmen of the United States Conference of Catholics Bishops recently wrote to Congress to urge lawmakers to address the nation’s serious maternal health problems, with the bishops citing the country’s high maternal mortality rate.

ROME – Rumors set in motion this week by a journalist close to Pope Francis, Elisabetta Piqué of Argentina’s La Nacion, suggest the pontiff may be on the verge of naming his erstwhile bête noire, German Archbishop Georg Gänswein, as his apostolic nuncio, meaning ambassador, to an unspecified foreign country.

“Their joy was so great that they still could not believe it” (Luke 24:41)

In Sunday’s Gospel, the Risen Jesus’s disciples do not believe in him for a strange reason: their joy is too great!

It seems odd, but sometimes we can lack faith for this reason: we think it is all too good to be true.

This is a bleak time to be pro-life. The holistic vision of human life from conception to natural death as being invested with dignity and worthy of respect is being steadily undermined by legislatures.

I hesitate to call the Fourth Gospel “John’s Gospel”, since there is no reliable sign that John had anything to do with its authorship. It is the gospel of the Beloved Disciple, but who was he? The Beloved Disciple is never given a name, and that is quite deliberate. He (or perhaps she – except that women were rarely literate in those days) occurs four times in the text.