Feb. 2 marked a turning point in the life of David Ryan, a 61-year-old Irishman who suffered sexual abuse as a teenager. More than 40 years later, he was able to share his story face-to-face with Pope Leo XIV in the first private meeting the pontiff has held alone with a victim of abuse. While…

Pope Leo XIV on Sunday expressed his closeness to the people of Madagascar after two cyclones caused flooding and landslides. “I pray for the victims, their families, and for all who have suffered serious damage,” the pope said after praying the Angelus in St. Peter’s Square on Feb. 15. Looking ahead to upcoming Lunar New…

Restoration work is progressing rapidly on two 13th-century historic mural reliefs at the ancient Mar Behnam and Sarah Monastery in Iraq. The effort is being led by the monastery’s administration in collaboration with the French organization Mesopotamia after the artworks suffered extensive destruction at the hands of ISIS. The monastery was featured in an EWTN…

The 1941 Sikorski-Mayski agreement between the Soviet Union and Poland resulted in the release of tens of thousands of Polish prisoners of war held in the Gulag and other Soviet camps. Their number included thousands of displaced children, many of whom were orphans. No one wanted these children; they couldn’t return to Nazi-occupied Poland, and…

Amid the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, survival means remaining in relationship with Christ and in community with one another, according to a delegation of Ukrainian Catholic Church leaders who gave their testimony at the New York Encounter on Feb. 14. Bishop Pavlo Honcharuk of Kharkiv and Father Wojciech Stasiewicz, director of Caritas-Spes of the Kharkiv-Zaporizhia Diocese,…