International News

We all know Rome wasn’t built in a day, but LEGO architect Rocco Buttliere had three months.

VATICAN CITY -- The Catholic Church suffers from a temptation to attempt to return to attitudes and practices of the past, an attitude that blocks pastoral outreach to many of those who are marginalized, Pope Francis told Jesuits in Slovakia.

ROME -- The bishops of the Armenian Catholic Church elected Archbishop Raphaël François Minassian, the ordinary for Armenian Catholics in Eastern Europe, to be their church's new patriarch.

MEXICO CITY -- The Mexican Supreme Court has invalidated a clause in a state constitution that provided protection of life "from the moment in which an individual is conceived ... until their death," arguing that no state government could determine when life begins; only the federal constitution could determine that.

MANCHESTER, England -- Doctors from Canada, the U.S. and Belgium have pressed their case to British politicians against a bill to legalize assisted suicide.

WARSAW, Poland -- The bishops' conference of Belarus accused state media of stoking anti-Catholic feeling, after an official newspaper equated priests with Nazis in a front-page cartoon.

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled against blocking a Texas law banning abortions at six weeks of pregnancy.

WASHINGTON -- Former Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick pleaded not guilty Sept. 3 in a Massachusetts court, where he is facing three counts of sexually assaulting a teenager in the 1970s.

VATICAN CITY -- The chaotic withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan was due in part to a lack of foreseeing all possible eventualities, Pope Francis said in a new interview.

NEW ORLEANS -- With most of South Louisiana cut off from electrical power due to the 150-mph winds of Hurricane Ida, the Archdiocese of New Orleans announced Aug. 30 that all schools, along with its main administrative offices, would remain closed until at least Labor Day, Sept. 6.