SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador -- COVID-19 put a damper on last year’s celebrations to mark the 40th anniversary of St. Oscar Romero’s martyrdom, but a continuing pandemic couldn’t stop this year’s festivities.

A group of Toronto high school students is spreading some Easter season cheer and brightening the days of residents in a retirement residence.

With rising COVID-19 cases across Ontario, the provincial government has implemented a province-wide “emergency brake” that will lower capacity for worship services.

Think back a year ago … to an Easter Sunday that reverberated with fear and anxiety as the world’s people tried to grasp the enormity of COVID-19.

After months of speaking out against inequity in COVID-19 capacity guidelines, the Archdiocese of Montreal was finally gifted some good news from the Quebec government.

Fr. Harrison Ayre knows COVID lockdowns can wear you down. He’s felt it more in the last few months.

VATICAN CITY -- More investment and action are needed to ensure people have access to clean and safe water for drinking and sanitation, said the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development.

VANCOUVER -- B.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice Christopher Hinkson has upheld the public health order banning in-person religious services in British Columbia.

OXFORD, England -- A commission of Catholic bishops warned religious freedom is threatened in the European Union, as restrictive laws are imposed in the wake of COVID-19.

Restrictions on places of worship in grey lockdown zones will be loosened and churches will be able to host services with up to 15 per cent of their capacity as of March 15.

VATICAN CITY -- Offering general absolution to the faithful without having them personally confess their sins first may still be done in places seeing serious or increasing levels of coronavirus infections, a Vatican official said.

Toronto’s Cardinal Thomas Collins is sending a clear message to Queen’s Park: It’s time for a “fair and equitable approach to the return to worship.”

Forty days in the desert — that’s our usual starting point for Lent. But we would prefer to choose our desert, and most years we do. We decide what we will give up for Lent. We choose spiritual reading, take on volunteering and charitable acts, memorize a new prayer, set aside time for meditation. Diligent Catholics like to plan our desert experience.

COVID has not cancelled Lent, nor Ash Wednesday, though a few things will feel a little different.

The head of the UN World Food Program warned Pope Francis in a Jan. 28 meeting at the Vatican that famine looms in a number of countries as COVID-19 ravages communities around the world