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Pope Francis said that women “must be protected and helped in this dual task: the right to work and the right to motherhood.”

The Heritage event comes after a series of undercover videos released this summer showed physicians and others associated with Planned Parenthood describing the harvesting of fetal tissue and body parts during abortions at their clinics and discussing the sale of post-abortion fetal tissue.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told reporters. “The challenge is nothing less than to chart a course out of hell. And that’s not going to happen overnight, but I am convinced that the steps that we worked on today, if followed up on, if worked on in good faith, can begin to move us in the right direction.”

Rainfall this week has helped disperse haze in several regions of Indonesia severely affected by forest and peat fires. The Voice of America news service reports that the governor of Riau province in northern Sumatra said Wednesday a 90-minute rainfall cleared much of the smoke and improved visibili

Syriac Catholic bishops, meeting in Lebanon during their annual synod, called for a diplomatic solution to achieve peace in Syria and Iraq.In a statement released at the conclusion of the synod, the bishops pleaded for an end to the civil was in Syria, now in its fifth year and urged countries&mdash

Climate change and the refugee crisis are the two biggest challenges facing Europe that need a unified response recognizing the “ecological debt” richer nations owe poorer ones, the president of Europe’s Roman Catholic bishops conference said on Oct. 29.

The magnitude-7.5 temblor on Oct. 26 left at least 380 people dead and thousands of homes and buildings badly damaged. The number of dead and injured will likely rise as first-responders reach affected areas. Initial reports indicate significant damage to homes and infrastructure in the hardest-hit areas of Pakistan. The earthquake also cutoff communication in parts of the two countries.

“I do believe all our prayers are headed in the same direction and can be a really powerful force coming together,” said Peta Jones Pellach, an Orthodox Jewish woman. “I don’t see it as just symbolic. I believe in the power of prayer.”

“Only God knows the stories of those people who have given their lives, who have died, and continue to be stoned with the hardest stone that exists in the world: language.”

“Expressing everything in terms of balance of power—the struggles of groups and classes, friends and enemies—creates fertile ground for social barriers, contempt, even hatred and terrorism and their veiled or open justification,” Cardinal Parolin told representatives of the world’s religions Oct. 28 at Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian University.