BEIRUT – Lebanon's Catholic religious leaders appealed to the international community to stop the wars in the Middle East and to bring about a comprehensive and just peace.

JERUSALEM – The controversial Israeli Nation State law must be repealed because non-Jews also are citizens of Israel, said the Catholic ordinaries of the Holy Land.

WASHINGTON – Catholic leaders in Texas criticized President Donald Trump's April 4 announcement that he would be deploying National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexico border.

WARSAW, Poland – Russia's minority Catholic Church has pledged to help build a civil society after the nation's March 18 election and called on President Vladimir Putin to "justify voters' confidence" after his victory.

LONDON – Catholic leaders in London offered prayers for victims of a fire in a 24-story apartment building.

WASHINGTON – Many religious leaders viewed President Donald Trump's executive order on religious freedom, which he signed in a White House Rose Garden ceremony May 4, as a step in the right direction.

WASHINGTON – U.S. Catholic leaders are warning that proposed changes to the American Health Care Act will harm poor people.

WASHINGTON – Catholic leaders are calling for governments to protect the territorial rights of indigenous people suffering eviction from their lands and pollution of their water because of mining and oil operations in the Amazon basin.

WASHINGTON – Amid reports of an imminent executive order to halt most refugee resettlement in the U.S., one international Catholic charitable group is speaking out.

DUBLIN - The Irish cannot afford to be complacent about violence, even though they have lived with a peace agreement for 15 years, said Ireland's most senior Catholic leader.

WASHINGTON - Catholic leaders worldwide expressed words of hope and joy in calling upon Catholics to come together as one body behind the papacy of Pope Francis.

MANCHESTER, England - Catholic leaders in Europe hailed the decision to give a Nobel Prize to two pioneers of adult stem-cell research as a triumph for ethics.

A statement from the Commission of the Bishops' Conferences of the European Community, known as COMECE, said that awarding the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine to John B. Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka represented an "important milestone" in recognizing the superior potential of adult stem-cell research over destructive experimentation on human embryonic stem cells.

The Anscombe Bioethics Centre, an institute serving the Catholic Church in the United Kingdom and Ireland, also described the award as an "achievement of great ethical significance."

"This technique offers hope of progress in stem-cell research without relying on the unethical destruction of human embryos," said David Jones, director of the Anscombe center in Oxford, England.

"The past attempts to clone human embryos and the bizarre experiments to create admixed human-nonhuman embryos have delivered nothing," he said.

"In contrast, the transformation of adult cells into stem cells is making great progress," he continued. "This is science at its best: both beautiful and ethical."

The Nobel committee said England's Gurdon and Yamanaka of Japan had "revolutionized" science through their work.

"These discoveries have also provided new tools for scientists around the world and led to remarkable progress in many areas of medicine," the committee said.

Both scientists were involved in research into changing mature cells into stem cells, which have the potential to become specialist organ cells and be harvested in the potential treatment of a variety of diseases.

Many hope such work may prepare the ground for therapies to repair heart tissue after heart attacks, for instance, or to reverse the progress of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases.

Gurdon distinguished himself by using an intestinal sample to clone frogs, and Yamanaka pioneered a technique of reprogramming mature cells to become "pluripotent" by altering their DNA.

In an Oct. 8 statement, COMECE said the award should encourage European Union institutions to switch funding from "ethically problematic and scientifically and economically less-promising" embryonic stem-cell research to non-embryonic stem cell research, which held out greater potential.

"This is an important milestone in recognizing the key role that non-embryonic stem cells play in the development of new medical therapies as alternatives to human embryonic stem cells," the statement said.

"There have been continuing scientific advances in fields of research involving alternative stem cells ... (that) present better prospects for clinical applications; or have indeed already demonstrated widespread clinical results and do not raise any special ethical problems," it said.

"Today's Nobel Prize rewards such efforts to discover alternatives," the statement added.