Pope Francis offered a heartfelt appeal for death row prisoners in the United States, which significantly comes as Joe Biden, the second Catholic president in the country’s history, nears the end of his term.

When Archbishop Tarcisius Isao Kikuchi receives the red hat and cardinal’s ring from Pope Francis in St. Peter’s Basilica on Dec. 7, he will be the seventh Japanese cardinal in the history of the Catholic Church.

“In Hong Kong, we have our wounds that we need to heal,” Cardinal Stephen Chow, S.J., the bishop of Hong Kong, told America’s Vatican correspondent in this exclusive interview.

“The Roman Curia can no longer say, ‘The law is set here, and it is to be obeyed out there,’” Archbishop Charles Scicluna of Malta told America’s Vatican correspondent in this exclusive interview.

In “a note of accompaniment” to the final document, the pope made clear that Catholic bishops throughout the world are to lead their churches in building a synodal and missionary church in the 21st century.

“What I’d like to see is the breaking down of this notion that there are the professional Christians—who are the priests, the bishops, the religious and many lay people—and the recognition that we’re all part of this together.”

“Each day is becoming more difficult, but we do not surrender,” Father Igor Boyko, 48, the rector of the Greek Catholic seminary in Lviv, told Gerard O’Connell. “To surrender means we are finished.”

For Pope Francis, Matteo Ricci is not so much a figure of the past but rather “a prophetic figure” who nourishes the hope of encounter today—in China and around the world.

The cause for the canonization of Pedro Arrupe, S.J., 28th superior general of the Society of Jesus, took an important step forward today, Nov. 14, with the closing of its diocesan phase.

In an exclusive interview with Gerard O’Connell, Cardinal Cupich says young Catholics will look back at the synod as “one of the most historic moments in their lives, for it has redirected the focus of where the church is going.”