Pope Francis

When four graduate students at Ball State University took on an awareness campaign, they hoped it would have a global reach. Then, a global institution reached back.

Pope Francis has approved the recognition of a miracle attributed to the intercession of two of the shepherd children who saw Our Lady of Fatima in 1917, thus paving the way for their canonization.

British media reports, a “lone wolf” assailant sped his car over Westminster Bridge toward the British Parliament killing 5 and injuring 40 people in the terrorist attack.

Archbishop Bernardito Auza, the Vatican’s permanent observer to the United Nations, called on all nations to recognize the responsibility to care for and share water because it is a life-sustaining resource.

Some 5 million people in South Sudan — half of its total population — are on the brink of starvation and a quarter of a million children are already severely malnourished, a representative from the U.S. bishops’ Catholic Relief Services said.

Released March 26, 1967 — perhaps purposefully on Easter — Blessed Paul’s encyclical, “Populorum Progressio” (“The Progress of Peoples”,) rooted the Catholic Church in solidarity with the world’s poorest nations. He called for the elimination of economic disparity and reminded people to recognize the common threads that unite humanity in a world with finite resources.

Pope Francis told priests to be ready to use confession as an opportunity to evangelize and remind people of the basic, essential truth of faith and morality. Pray to God for the gift of humility and the recognition of one’s own sins that God fully pardoned, he told them.

Evangelization, mercy, encounter and accompaniment are the hallmarks of the first four years of Pope Francis’ papacy, Archbishop Christophe Pierre, apostolic nuncio to the United States, said March 15.