VATICAN CITY - Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero, to be beatified in San Salvador May 23, has become a symbol of Latin American Church leaders’ efforts to protect their flocks from the abuses of military dictatorships.

CATANIA, Italy - Sitting outside the central train station here in eastern Sicily, a 16-year-old who would only give his name as “Simon” hunched his knees up to his chest and wrapped himself up into a ball. With little spoken English, the teenager from Eritrea has taken to miming the way he travelled across the Mediterranean.

An open letter to Roman Catholic bishops

Dear Bishops

I write to you as a loyal son of the Catholic Church, with a particular request: Could you make an addition to our eucharistic prayers to include an explicit invocation for other Christian churches and for those who lead them?

TORONTO - For almost 100 years in Toronto, thousands of Sunday worshippers have relied on Sunday only streetcar stops to help get them to church on time.

ROME - Australian Cardinal George Pell expects the upcoming Synod on the Family in October will uphold traditional Church teaching.

TORONTO - More than 12,000 times, people in Toronto slept on a vinyl-covered foam mattress on the floor of a church, synagogue or mosque this past winter.

BROD, Kosovo - The Catholic priest followed the village elders up a narrow road that curved between the green hills in the tiny hamlet of Gjonaj in southern Kosovo.

VATICAN CITY - A French court has told authorities in Ploermel, France, to remove the small town's statue of St. John Paul II on claims the statue's placement in a public square violated the separation of church and state.

Some time next month the Vatican will release the Pope’s much-anticipated encyclical on the environment. It will be the first time a pope has devoted an encyclical to environmental matters and already critics are questioning Pope Francis’ qualifications to address this complex scientific issue.

OXFORD, England - A Belgian bishop said the president of the bishops' conference urged Catholics to respect a court judgment against him for failing to act on allegations of abuse.

WINDSOR, Ont. - A $10-million bid to save Windsor’s historic Our Lady of Assumption Church has fallen through.

TLALNEPANTLA, Mexico - The president of the Latin American bishops' conference called Pope Francis' planned visit to Cuba an opportunity for the Church to play a larger role in a country experiencing reforms and re-embracing institutionalized religion.

Approximately 800 km northwest of Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories is Fort Good Hope, a remote, mostly First Nations community through which the mighty Mackenzie River flows on its way to the Arctic Ocean.

St. Albert, Alta. - It was in the fall of 1859 that the Grey Nuns arrived in Alberta, welcomed by Fr. Albert Lacombe at Lac Ste. Anne with ringing church bells and dancing First Nations people.

Cardinal Francis George, recently retired archbishop of Chicago, died in his bed at home, as he said he would. In his latter years, the intellectual leader of the Catholic Church in the United States was famous for his bleak view of the future of religious liberty in America.