This week on “Inside the Vatican,” host Colleen Dulle and Vatican correspondent Gerard O’Connell take a look back at this year in Vatican news.

The decrease of vocations to religious life, including in the Society of Jesus, is a lesson in humility and a reminder that a calling to religious life depends on God, Pope Francis told Jesuits in Greece.

A Reflection for Thursday of the Third Week of Advent

So, who is Mary? Like any other character in the Gospel, we are meant to try on her life in meditation, to learn from her what it means to be a disciple. Mary is one of us.

“God is not in the devastation. He’s not in the destruction. He was not in the storm,” said the director of Catholic Charities in the Diocese of Owensboro, Ky. “But he’s in the response, and that’s where we are.”

Thomas J. Quigley, who worked for 45 years in service to the U.S. bishops, mostly in the realm of foreign policy, died Dec. 11 at age 91.

New migrant caravans to the United States are always forming with large contingents of Central Americans, but there is a growing presence of Haitians, Venezuelans and Brazilians among them.

Protestants account for most of the decline — down 4 percentage points from five years ago and 10 percentage points since a decade ago. Catholics held relatively steady at 21 percent.

A Reflection for the Wednesday of the Third Week of Advent

“Profoundness of the heart grows with silence, silence that is not mutism as I said, but which leaves space for wisdom, reflection and the Holy Spirit.”