Helene’s devastation is offering a hard lesson: No community or U.S. region can consider itself safe from the extreme weather events that global warming is seeding and supercharging.

A Reflection for Friday of the Twenty-seventh Week in Ordinary Time, by Kevin Clarke

Chief Correspondent Kevin Clarke joined a team from Catholic Charities USA assessing needs in North Carolina after Hurricane Helene.

Most families have been forced to move many times and with each new displacement, families lose or abandon more belongings. Not many of them by now have clothing appropriate for worsening weather conditions.

The violence has claimed the lives of thousands of innocent victims, but it also “struck a profound blow to the common feeling of belonging to the Holy Land, to the consciousness of being part of a plan of Providence.”

Focus on the fate of Israel, its hostages in Gaza and the people of Gaza and south Lebanon means that little attention is being paid to other continuing crises around the world—Sudan, Haiti, Myanmar among them.

Catholics in the audience may not have been as startled by Senator Vance’s emphatic, sympathetic invocation of the second response of the Kyrie eleison.

Father Dan Corrou says all Jesuit Refugee Service operations have been suspended. Many of the agency’s employees, like thousands of other residents of southern Lebanon, are fleeing toward Beirut or making plans to.

Juan López was gunned down as he was leaving Mass by a still unidentified assassin, becoming the latest casualty among defenders of creation and Indigenous and human rights in Honduras.

In the debate against Vice President Kamala Harris, former President Trump claimed without evidence that members of an Ohio city’s growing Haitian community were “eating cats; they’re eating dogs … they’re eating pets.”