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“We will always be in favor of truth, of justice, in favor of the victims,” Archbishop Escobar said during a Jan. 10 news conference in which he said the files on war crimes investigated in the 1980s by the church’s legal aid office, Tutela Legal, are available for the public and investigators.

The bishops wrote, “Our organizations have first-hand knowledge that these actions have generated fear among immigrants and have made their communities more distrustful of law enforcement and vulnerable to misinformation, exploitation and fraud. We find such targeting of immigrant women and children—most of whom fled violence and persecution in their home countries—to be inhumane and a grave misuse of limited enforcement resources.”

Francis has made concern for migrants a centerpiece of his papacy, and on Jan. 11 in his annual address to diplomats accredited to the Holy See he again urged governments to “overcome the inevitable fears associated with this massive and formidable phenomenon.”

“Thank God that someone finally has the courage to close the loopholes in our pitiful gun control laws to reduce the number of mass shootings, suicides and killings that have become a plague in our country,” said Bishop Kevin J. Farrell of Dallas in a Jan. 5 entry titled “The Cowboy Mentality” on his blog.

“We are especially disturbed by reports of immigration officials forcibly entering residences in Georgia and Texas over the last several days to conduct invasive searches and round ups of Central American asylum seekers, including children as young as four,” the statement said.

“Have these tragic events provoked some genuine awakening, and have we offered perspectives for the society of tomorrow by learning lessons from the past?” asked a Jan. 6 statement from the French bishops’ conference.

There are no formal refugee camps in Lebanon. Rather, some Syrians establish informal tent settlements. Others find ways to rent space in apartments or squat in abandoned buildings.
As of November, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees calculated there were nearly 1.1 million registered refugees living in Lebanon.

“It is absurd to force a pharmacy to sell drugs against their conscience when there are over 30 pharmacies within five miles that already sell the exact same drugs,” said a Jan. 4 statement by  Luke Goodrich, deputy general counsel of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which is representing the pharmacists. “This law does nothing but punish people of faith.”

“Our society is increasingly aware of the flaws in the application of the death penalty, which is inconsistent, arbitrary and too often applied in error,” wrote Michael Sheedy, executive director of the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Violence and fear-mongering seem “rampant in both church and society” in the northeast African country, said Bishop Edward Hiiboro Kussala of Tombura-Yambio. Five armed men, believed to be allied to South Sudan’s main rebel group, assaulted and threatened religious sisters at the Solidarity Teacher Training College in Yambio, the capital of the country’s Western Equatoria state, on Dec. 28.