Pope Leo XIV on Sunday urged parties across the Middle East to suspend their attacks and reopen diplomatic negotiations, warning that escalating military operations were endangering civilians and worsening shortages of drinking water and electricity. “I continue to follow with deep concern the ongoing and escalating violence in the Holy Land, where, in recent days,…

Hidden beneath layers of paint for more than 200 years, one of the largest surviving Baroque Christian painting programs in the Baltic region has emerged inside St. John’s Church at Vilnius University in Lithuania. The church, formally named the Church of St. John the Baptist and St. John the Apostle and Evangelist, has yielded a…

If you want to clean more-than-century-old marble statues of the apostles, you don’t simply use soap and water. Rather, you must spray the figures with a “specialized conservation material” that subsequently dries into a “latex-like layer,” which is then “carefully peeled away,” thus preserving the statue’s original finish. The process “is labor intensive and takes…

A sedevacantist group of monks in Scotland hosted an illicit consecration of a “bishop” on July 25 in spite of repeated warnings that doing so would constitute a schismatic act and a break from the Catholic Church. The Transalpine Redemptorists, or the Sons of the Most Holy Redeemer, livestreamed the counterfeit ceremony from their monastery…