TAMPA, Florida – Funded by a parish in Florida, a new Catholic church is being built in Cuba and is the first the island nation has seen in 60 years.

VATICAN CITY – Czech Cardinal Miloslav Vlk, who washed windows and ministered underground during communism, died of cancer March 18 in Prague at the age of 84.

VATICAN CITY – When white smoke poured out of the chimney of the Sistine Chapel on October 16, 1978, Fr. Eamon Kelly, a seminarian studying in Rome at the time, couldn’t have known that he was witnessing the election of a future saint.

BEIJING - On a hazy Sunday morning, the fourth floor of a dingy gray office building in a far-flung region of this city is bursting with prayer.

In the Chinese capital, it’s not uncommon for church services to be held in Soviet-era office buildings. But the poorly lit, cracked-concrete dankness of this particular location cannot dampen the enthusiasm of this evangelical congregation.

HONG KONG - Cardinal John Tong Hon of Hong Kong has issued an "urgent appeal" to Communist Party chiefs in Beijing, calling on them to order a halt to an ongoing cross-removal campaign from Christian churches in Zhejiang province.

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.

For all the talk about global warming what we’re now seeing is a freezing trend that’s producing an ice sheet over Satan’s lake of fire. We know this is happening because events long thought possible only when the underworld’s climate turned entirely upside down — when hell froze over — have become the order of the day.

OTTAWA - Parliamentarians marked the first John Paul II Day a day early April 1, recalling the late pope’s legacy as a defender of human dignity against oppression.

WARSAW, Poland - Ukrainian Catholic leaders have warned their Church is being driven underground again, a quarter-century after it was re-legalized with the end of communist rule.

VATICAN CITY - Catholics venerate Blessed John Paul II for his holiness, as demonstrated, among other ways, by his globetrotting evangelism and long-suffering endurance in the papacy despite his illness.

ABOARD THE PAPAL FLIGHT TO MEXICO (CNS) -- En route to Latin America for his second papal visit to the region, Pope Benedict XVI called for patience with the Catholic Church's effort to promote freedom in communist Cuba, and criticized Catholics who participate in illegal drug trade or who ignore their moral responsibilities to seek social justice.

The pope, flying to Mexico March 23, followed his usual practice of taking a few preselected questions from reporters on the papal plane.

Responding to a question about human rights in Cuba, where he will arrive March 26, and where opposition leaders have been arrested after publicly appealing for a meeting with him, Pope Benedict said that the "church is always on the side of freedom, freedom of conscience, freedom of religion."