The top 5 international Catholic stories you read in 2024 (and some we wish you had)

It’s that time of year again when journalists exhausted by Christmas and New Year’s over-celebrating look for easy ways to fill digital column inches. Yes, it’s the dreaded Top Five list of best received reports hosted by our “Dispatches” department.

“Dispatches” sometimes wanders slightly afield with regional and political reports on the United States and church news, but it is meant primarily as the home of America’s international news coverage, with stories coming in from regular contributors in Canada, Latin America, the Middle East and Asia, Europe and Africa. The only twist I will offer to the Top Five below (as measured by readership engagement) is a follow-up short list of reports I’ve compiled of stories that I believe deserve greater attention.

Here’s our 2024 lead stories from Dispatches:

1. The last priests and nuns in Ireland: Exploring the Irish Catholic Church’s steep decline
2. Why does the French government—and not the Catholic Church—own Notre-Dame Cathedral?
3. ‘We want them to go’: Spain is pushing Benedictine monks to leave Franco’s tomb, Spanish Civil War memorial
4. Gaza protests reached Jesuit colleges—schools with a history of student activism
5. Are Catholic nonprofits really to blame for the migrant crisis at the border?

Here are some Dispatch reports that did not get big numbers, though they concern issues that remain important:

• Border enforcement policies are effective—at driving up migrant deaths
• As Milei’s fiscal reforms bite in Argentina, church-run soup kitchens do brisk business
• The anti-immigrant tide is rising ahead of EU elections, pushing voters to the right

We began 2024 with a new weekly column focusing on international issues, “The Weekly Dispatch,” penned by yours truly. I also contribute with national (“Catholic bishop defends immigrants after Trump falsely claims Haitians in Ohio are ‘eating pets’”) and church reports (“Should you stand or kneel to receive communion?”), along with the occasional rant, but among these international columns, the top five Weekly Dispatches were:

1. Will Canada allow autism to become a justification for assisted suicide?
2. Catholic charities and religious freedom are under fire at the border
3. The Vatican’s moral objection to the global surrogacy industry
4. Why isn’t anyone talking about the exodus of Christians in Nagorno-Karabakh?
5. What will the fall of al-Assad mean for Syria’s ancient Christian community?

And here are a few of my columns (in no particular order) I wish had received a little more attention last year:

• On Óscar Romero’s feast day, El Salvador may have peace from gangs. But at what cost?
• Sudan, Haiti and Myanmar suffering continues—but not on the front page
• Winter is coming in Gaza. How much worse will the misery get?
• The world is terrible at protecting children in conflict zones

And for good measure, here’s a feature report I wrote last year for the actual old-school magazine (yes, America endures on paper!) that attempted to make sense of an emerging era of global conflict:

‘The world’s on fire’: How the Catholic Church is responding to global warfare.

Please join America and its Dispatches department in 2025 for more international reports and deep dives on the issues and trends that are affecting our world today.