Brian Roewe

Fifty years after a historic strike by sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, two social justice movements joined forces Monday through a series of nationwide rallies in renewing a broad-based push for racial and economic justice.

Healing Earth, a free online textbook from Loyola University Chicago, blends environmental science with ethics, theology and spirituality for upper-level secondary school and college students.

Lending public support Tuesday to its excommunicated members in Lincoln, Nebraska, the national Call to Action office called for Bishop James Conley to lift the excommunication order "immediately and without condition." 

After 16-month dialogue, the proposal would return Call to Action members to full communion on an individual basis, while leaving in place the 1996 decree against the reform group.

In a docudrama airing on PBS, the 13th-century meeting between St. Francis of Assisi and Sultan Malik al-Kamil gets a fresh look amid our present-day tensions and dehumanization.

 Fr. John Drees, parochial administrator of the Churches of St. Joseph and St. Francis Xavier, fired three musicians Dec. 5, after the priest had learned of their same-sex marriages; parishioners demonstrated overwhelming support for them, not the decision. 

In the wake of President Donald Trump announcing formal U.S. recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, longtime observers react with apprehension, while other express appreciation.

A memorial Mass Dec. 9 in Dayton, Ohio, will remember Kristine Ward, a lay Catholic compelled by the Boston Globe's 2002 clergy sex abuse investigations to become a prominent advocate for survivors.

At public hearings this week in the heart of coal country, local and national Catholic groups argued the moral case for preserving national standards on carbon pollution from power plants. 

The apology was part of a settlement between SNAP and Fr. Joseph Jiang, who had sued the group and the parents of a boy who accused him of sexual abuse, charges that were dropped.

The calls for increased ambition came as COP23, the United Nations climate summit, wound down in Bonn, Germany.

Catholics created prayer guides and joined calls to action ahead of the annual United Nations climate change conference.

Employees, and likely students, will retain access to cost-free birth control through third-party insurers, despite the university's earlier announcements of the end of such coverage.

Since routinely stating on the campaign trail the false belief that climate change is a hoax devised by China, Trump has not elaborated on those opinions. But the bevy of actions undertaken in his administration's first nine months has sent a clear signal of little intent to prioritize climate or other environmental concerns.

The University of Notre Dame in 2018 will cease providing third-party insurance coverage of women's health products and procedures — which included cost-free contraceptives — for employees and students.

The oil facility in Los Angeles' University Park neighborhood has sat idle since 2013. Neighbors of the well fear that a restart in drilling will resurface health issues they hoped were in the past.

Bishops are among Catholic critics of the proposed withdrawal, which "solidifies the already troubling approach of our nation in addressing climate change."

On the eve of the Feast of St. Francis, the Italian diocese encompassing Assisi is cutting financial ties with fossil fuels, joining more than three dozen Catholic groups in marking the patron saint of ecology's feast day.

The $2 million gift to Mitchell Hamline School of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota, seeks to create a national training and resource center for child abuse prevention and response.

Updated: In a statement, the Crookston bishop said he did not pressure a deacon candidate "to remain quiet" about an allegation of sexual abuse, but wished he handled their conversations differently.