In an email, the East Texas bishop told RNS that he ‘cannot voluntarily abandon the flock that I have been given charge of as a successor of the apostles.’

The chairman of the U.S. bishops’ domestic policy committee said the nation has “urgent work” to do to really show a “radical solidarity with working families.”

To provide quality formation—human, academic, spiritual and pastoral—to our future priests is a sacred duty. We would be able to do this better if we had fewer seminaries, all of them excellent ones.

Retired Bishop Howard J. Hubbard of Albany, whose request to be returned to the lay state was rejected by the Vatican, has been hospitalized at Albany Medical Center after suffering a major stroke this week.

Parsing the numbers and understanding the implications can be challenging. Are we learning anything new?

Bishop Valério’s nomination came as a surprise to many since Pope Francis had named Américo Manuel Alves Aguiar, auxiliary bishop of Lisbon, a cardinal on July 9. It had been wrongly presumed then that the pope would appoint the cardinal-elect as the new patriarch after the World Youth Day celebrations.