The Catholic bishops of South Sudan and Sudan are appealing for their citizens to help foster peace through acts of love, forgiveness and reconciliation.

Police in Ballwin, Missouri are searching for a gunman who sexually assaulted a woman and shot another in the head in a Catholic religious goods store. Archbishop Robert Carlson of St. Louis (which is near Ballwin) asked for prayers for the victims.

Members of the Central American caravan will likely have to wait months to have their asylum cases heard, according to the Rev. Pat Murphy, a Scalabrini priest who runs the Casa del Migrante in Tijuana, Baja California. Fewer than 5 percent will be granted asylum, he said.

"The tremendous loss from the Camp Fire ravaging parts of the diocese is devastating," said Bishop Jaime Soto of Sacramento.

"We Christians cannot stand with arms folded in indifference" or thrown up in the air in helpless resignation, the pope said in his homily Nov. 18, the World Day of the Poor.

The first participants in the caravan of Central Americans arriving in Tijuana, Mexico, were met with hostility as residents of an affluent neighborhood confronted migrants wanting to camp on a beach near the border fence separating the United States and Mexico.