A merge between ministry and technology has been bringing Mass into people’s homes for 20 years, and more recently, onto their smartphone screens.

VATICAN – As the pre-synod gathering on youth approaches, Vatican organizers are inviting young people around the globe to join in the discussion through Facebook groups in six different languages.

ACAPULCO, Mexico – The Bishop of Chilpancingo-Chilapa, Mexico denied that Fr. Germain Muñiz Garcia, who was murdered on a Mexican highway Feb. 5 along with Fr. Iván Añorve Jaimes, had any connection to organized crime, as the Guerrero State Prosecutor's Office has recently claimed.

SANTIAGO, Chile  – Pope Francis challenged young Chileans, telling them to always ask themselves, "What would Christ do in my place?"

MONTREAL – Christmas is just around the corner, and so are thousands of Catholics who ritually fill churches every Christmas Eve.

VATICAN CITY – Pope Francis' @Pontifex Twitter accounts reached more than 40 million followers just a few months before the fifth anniversary of when Pope Benedict XVI launched the initiative.

In what may be a first for transparency in the Canadian Catholic Church, St. Boniface Archbishop Albert LeGatt has publicly released a 108-page report on the state of his bilingual diocese in Manitoba.

ABUJA, Nigeria – For one Catholic bishop in Nigeria, social media and family life are two keys for evangelization and sharing the values of the Catholic Church.

Youth ministry is about awakening souls and being alive in God’s love and mercy, said Dan Dematte, the keynote speaker at last week’s Canadian Catholic Youth Ministry Network conference.

MONTREAL - Canada’s first Syriac Catholic bishop says his immediate challenge is to minister to refugees from the Middle East and at the same time move forward with plans for evangelization in his vast new Canadian diocese as he prepares for the demands of the Easter season.

It was a good idea that didn’t work. Before the reform of the Roman calendar in the 1960s, the octave day of Christmas — Jan. 1 — was celebrated as the feast of the circumcision and holy name, as Jewish boys were named on the eighth day after birth. There was a minor feast of the divine maternity of Mary in the calendar on Oct. 11, which St. John XXIII chose for the opening of Vatican II, and now serves as his feast day.

Blessed Junipero Serra’s motto was “always forward, never back.” But as the date nears for his canonization by Pope Francis, Serra’s life of faithful evangelization is being fiercely — and many say unfairly — questioned by detractors who insist on looking back into the life and times of the 18th-century missionary priest.

ROME - The canonization of Blessed Junipero Serra honours a famous missionary who was motivated by love of God, but it also is a call to recognize how the process of evangelization must respect peoples and their cultures, said the head of the Franciscan order.

LONDON - Catholic bishops in England and Wales hope to establish evangelization teams to transform about 5,000 churches into "missionary parishes."

QUITO, Ecuador - Catholics will never be effective evangelizers if they are squabbling among themselves, and they cannot show the world how faith in Christ responds to the human yearning for freedom and peace if they are divided, Pope Francis said.