News/International

While Philippines President Benigno Aquino III was in Ottawa signing a May 8 agreement to govern how more than $90 million in Canadian aid is spent, the Canadian bishops’ development agency was holding community meetings in the Philippines trying to ensure local people get new permanent homes close to their jobs, family and community.

Encyclicals are important for Catholics. Our theologians study them. Our pastors preach them. Sometimes we even read them.

But there has never been an encyclical like the yet-to-be published papal letter on the environment and climate change due out next month. Even the editorial board of The New York Times is waiting with baited breath. “The Pope is right to speak up for our planet, and the greater the impact the better,” the newspaper wrote in its April 29 editorial.

VATICAN CITY - Pope Francis will bestow sainthood on two Palestinian nuns May 17, a move that’s being seen as giving hope to the conflict-wracked Middle East and shining the spotlight on the plight of Christians in the region.

NAMJUNG, Nepal - "Sir, because of luck, we all survived. But, we may die of hunger," Mithuram Pariyar said when a church relief team arrived after a four-hour drive from Kathmandu.

JERUSALEM - Israel is downplaying the recent media flurry over reports the Vatican and Palestinian representatives have finalized the text of a formal agreement recognizing freedom of religion in the "State of Palestine" and outlining the rights and obligations of the Catholic Church, its agencies and its personnel in the territory.

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.

ROME - Chaldean Bishop Antoine Audo of Aleppo, Syria, and his people are exhausted.

VATICAN CITY - Pope Francis' concern for those suffering on the margins and for small Catholic communities that have kept the faith alive through war or repression will take him to Bosnia-Herzegovina in early June.

JERUSALEM - The Vatican’s decision to recognize Palestine as a sovereign state has angered Israeli officials.

NEW YORK - Fr. Martin Schlag is a trained economist as well as a Catholic moral theologian, and when he first read some of Pope Francis’ powerful critiques of the current free market system he had the same thought a lot of Americans did: “Just horrible.”