More than 50 pilgrims who attended World Youth Day in Rio de Janeiro are seeking asylum in Brazil. Aline Thuller, Caritas’ coordinator for refugees in the Archdiocese of Rio de Janeiro, said the archdiocese received approximately 40 asylum requests from pilgrims from Pakistan, Sierra Leone and Congo.

President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry were consulting with other world leaders about how to respond to Syria’s apparent chemical weapons attack on civilians.

The United States should work with the international community to help Egyptians end violence, restore the rule of law and build an inclusive democracy in their country, said the chairman of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on International Justice and Peace.

Calls for an Olympic boycott because of a Russian law banning “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations” have become “highly politicized,” said an official of the Russian bishops’ conference.

As international leaders increasingly discussed the possibility of some form of armed intervention in Syria, the Vatican announced Pope Francis would interrupt the last week of his summer break in order to meet Aug. 29 with Jordan’s King Abdullah II.

The Coptic Orthodox Church of the Virgin Mary sits in a tiled courtyard a few miles outside Cairo, on the left bank of the Nile as the river bends south toward Upper Egypt.

Church historian captures subtleties of complex Catholic times “History of the Catholic Church: From the Apostolic Age to the Third Millennium” by James Hitchcock. Reviewed by Brian Welter.

Many rural villages in Shaanxi do not have a Catholic parish, and some with churches struggle with sparse attendance. But the village of Fufengxian, near the town of Baoji, has a population that is more than 80 percent baptized Catholics.

An unlikely chain of events made him not only a national celebrity but a stand-in for every priest who has ever ministered to the faithful in an emergency.

Churches and other Christian properties around Egypt had already been looted, so when Catholics in Berba were tipped off that their southern village could be next, they acted fast.