NEWS

VATICAN CITY - With the adoption of a detailed new law on financial transparency, vigilance and information, the Vatican has almost completely revamped its finance laws in less than three years, the Vatican spokesman said.

OTTAWA - Pro-life groups have commended the Stephen Harper government for holding the line and not funding abortions in the Third World.

TORONTO - Blessed Cardinal Newman Catholic High School students will be using their annual Scar Trek walk-a-thon to raise money for Canadian Jesuits International's Syrian refugee support efforts.

MANCHESTER, England - Abortions on grounds of gender are legal in Britain, the country's top prosecutor clarified in a letter to the government.

VATICAN CITY - Pope Francis, like Islam's Sufi mystic theologians and poets, "is trying to do good for the sake of the Good One, motivated by love and compassion," said the president of the Islamic Affairs Council of Maryland.

VATICAN CITY - As efforts to recover the bodies of migrants who drowned off Italy's southern coast continued, Pope Francis again asked people to pray for the victims and he sent his almoner to Lampedusa to pray over the 194 corpses recovered as of Oct. 6 and to visit the survivors.

OTTAWA - Defund Abortion rallies organized by Campaign Life Coalitionyouth in Ontario since 2011 have gone national.

First Nations students at Assumption College School in Brantford, Ont., are being encouraged to embrace their native tongue by enrolling in new native language courses.

The archdiocese of Keewatin-Le Pas is taking steps to help curb the anti-aboriginal racism that irunsrampant in northern Saskatchewan.

BALTIMORE - Even after Tom Clancy became an international best-selling novelist whose fans included the likes of President Ronald Reagan, the Baltimore-born writer never forgot the role his hometown Catholic education played in giving him the tools to his success.