VATICAN CITY - Show kindness, understanding and mercy in today's broken and wounded world, Pope Francis said.

VATICAN CITY - Even though the Vatican may be a target for terrorism, it won’t be “paralyzed by fear,” said the Vatican’s Secretary of State.

Catholics should be guided by mercy, not fear, in the wake of the Paris terror attack, said Hamilton Bishop Douglas Crosby three days after co-ordinated terrorist attacks killed at least 129 and sent 415 people to hospital.

PARIS - Shortly after the string of deadly, near-simultaneous attacks around the French capital, Faical Ouertani got a call from distraught friends in Tunisia.

VATICAN CITY - Here is a translation of a statement issued by the director of the Holy See press office, Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, shortly after the terror attacks in Paris Nov. 13.

JERUSALEM - The Council of Religious Institutions of the Holy Land issued a strong condemnation against an early morning arson attack on the Benedictine Church of the Multiplication at Tabgha on the Sea of Galilee on June 18.

NEW DELHI - Each day, children on their way to Mount Carmel School pass through gates under the watch of armed security guards, and now city police officers who stop there on government orders after a nearby Catholic convent and school were broken into.

NAIROBI, Kenya - Faced with a fierce enemy driven by Muslim extremist ideology, the Kenyan government has cracked down on funding for al-Shabab, the Somali group that claimed responsibility for killing 148 mostly Christian students at Garissa University College a week ago.

The pre-Easter tragedies of the German jet deliberately flown into the French Alps and the terrorist attack at a Kenyan university have several links, some not all that obvious.

NAIROBI, Kenya - The president of the Kenyan bishops' conference called on Easter worshippers to commit themselves to praying for peace and security in their homeland after militants attacked a college campus days earlier.

WASHINGTON - A new report from the Liberty Institute in Plano, Texas, shows that incidents of "religious hostility" have more than doubled in the United States over the past three years.

PARIS - As France emerges from its worst terrorist attack in decades, a biting novel that imagines the country governed by Islamic law is part of a swirling debate about its basic values. Will the country respond to the shootings with fear and xenophobia, as suggested by the book“Soumission, or Submission — or embrace its multicultural, multifaith identity?

CAPE TOWN, South Africa - Since Somali militants killed 36 non-Muslim quarry workers in early December, Christians in Kenya "are living in fear, wondering where the next attack will be," said Bishop Emanuel Barbara of Malindi, Kenya.

OXFORD, England - The Catholic Church in the Central African Republic pleaded for firmer action by United Nations-backed peacekeepers after an attack on a Bangui church left the parish priest and at least 14 worshippers dead.

ISTANBUL - In the second row of Sts. Peter and Paul Catholic Church, Ayhan Mutlucu sat in silence after 11 a.m. Mass. She had the seen TV reports that U.S. tourist Sarai Sierra was dead, apparently murdered after disappearing two weeks earlier in a nearby area.