News Briefs

Archbishop Ignatius Kaigama of Jos, Nigeria, called for calm after a suicide car bomb struck a Catholic church on March 11, taking the lives of three worshipers and provoking retaliatory violence that resulted in seven more deaths. • On March 12 Pedro Pimentel Rios, extradited from the United States to Guatemala in July, was sentenced to 6,060 years in prison for his role in the 1982 killing of 201 people during Guatemala’s “Dos Erres” massacre. • On March 13 Cuban authorities granted Havana’s Cardinal Jaime Ortega a rare opportunity to address the nation on state-controlled television to talk about the anticipated arrival of Pope Benedict XVI on March 26. • “We can see Jesus taking Marie by the hand and saying, ‘Blessed are you, Marie, in your hunger and your thirst for righteousness,’” said the Rev. Dennis Mason of St. Dominic’s parish in Oyster Bay, N.Y., during the funeral Mass on March 12 for Marie Colvin, a veteran war correspondent killed in Homs, Syria. • Caritas Internationalis reports that requests for aid are increasing and one million people are going hungry in Spain as the nation’s economic crisis continues.