Congo is preparing for a crucial vote to elect a successor for President Joseph Kabila, who has been in power since 2001.

"They shared the belief that this step will help relations between the two sides grow and develop further," said the statement, released Dec. 20.

While church officials have publicly identified 185 clergy members in Illinois as having been “credibly” accused of child sexual abuse, the Illinois attorney general's office states that it found allegations of abuse by at least 500 more.

In a statement issued on December 18, 2018, Greg Schleppenbach, associate director of the U.S. bishops' Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities, decried the epousal by Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, of using fetal tissue from aborted babies for use in medical research.

In a statement issued on December 18, 2018, the U.S. bishops' committee on migration said that the death of the 7-year-old Guatemalan girl trying to enter the United States with her father was a "jarring disruption of the natural order of life" and urged a reexamination of "our failed immigration policies."

From the Center for Investigative Reporting: For more than three decades, Cardinal Bea House on Gonzaga's campus served as a retirement repository for at least 20 Jesuit priests accused of sexual misconduct that predominantly took place in small, isolated Alaska Native villages and on Indian reservations across the Northwest.