Cuba

VATICAN – With Christmas just over a week away, visitors came to St. Peter's Square with their Baby Jesus figurines for a traditional blessing by the Pope.

VATICAN – In the technology support department at the Vatican Museums, Villanova University student Justin Myers is spending a semester creating virtual tours of galleries, part of a larger project to make the museums accessible to everyone.

VATICAN – If the Holy Family lived in Rome and the baby Jesus had a cold or flu, Mary and Joseph certainly would bring him to the Vatican pediatric clinic for help, Pope Francis said.

MOSUL, Iraq (CNS) -- Christians are cautiously returning to Mosul, the once-bustling Iraqi city that for three years was the capital of the caliphate established by the Islamic State group.

Third Sunday of Advent (Year C) Dec. 16 (Zephaniah 3:14-18a; Psalm Isaiah 12; Philippians 4:4-7; Luke 3:10-18)

Canada’s David Saint-Jacques joined the exclusive club of space explorers when he blasted off to the International Space Station on Dec. 3, almost 46 years after NASA ended the Apollo program that put men on the moon. On Dec. 19, 1972, the last Apollo mission ended with the splashdown of the Apollo 17 capsule. It was an historic achievement, though by this time — after five previous moon landings in three years — the excitement of moon landings was waning. The last moon mission, however, held a deeper meaning for Fr. Harold O’Neill, who was a professor of dogmatic theology at St. Augustine’s Seminary in Toronto. At the time he wrote this for The Register, he was studying at the University of Regensburg in West Germany, where he drew inspiration from a lecture by Professor Joseph Ratzinger, who later became Pope Benedict XVI.

TEL AVIV, Israel – For foreign workers and other nonlocal Christians living in Israel, celebrating Christmas far from loved ones in a country where Christians are a minority can be a difficult time.

EDMONTON – Citing the needs of fragile patients, Covenant Health has clarified how assessments are done in its facilities for patients who want to end their lives under provisions of Canada’s assisted suicide and euthanasia law.

Standing on the outside looking in as the world’s environment ministers and their armies of technocrats hammered out the rulebook for Paris Agreement on climate change, Canadian Josianne Gauthier wished there was an injection  of urgency onto the agenda.

An investigation by the Diocese of Hildesheim, Germany, is shedding new light on child sex abuse in Catholic children's homes in the country in the 1950s. A central figure in the inquiry is an esteemed and controversial figure, Bishop Heinrich Maria Janssen, a former priest in Nazi-occupied Poland awarded Germany's highest federal decoration in 1966 for postwar charity work.