Catholic News Service

In February 2020, New York Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan embarked on a trip to Cuba at the invitation of the island-nation's president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, causing a sensation in Havana.

"I feel hopeful because of the creativity we've been forced to find," said Felician Sister Desiré Findlay, a vocation outreach minister. But she also views the online chats as a stopgap until those discerning a vocation meet the sisters in person, which she said they need to do.

Less than a month after he recognized the "heroic virtues" of three Italian women religious who died caring for Ebola patients in Congo, Pope Francis did the same for three others who also contracted the disease and died in 1995.

"She was fully human like all of us," said Rob Judge, executive director of the National Shrine of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton. "It gives people great hope and great faith."

A Minnesota Dominican sisters' congregation has long given credit to St. Joseph for a late-night firewood delivery during the harsh winter of 1868. 

Sr. Nuria Calduch-Benages is the first woman to hold the position, which involves coordinating the work of the 20 biblical scholars from around the world who study topics in Scripture studies and interpretation on behalf of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Chicago-based Catholic Extension plans to help 1,000 women religious with grants in memory of a group of sisters who died in late December of COVID-19 in Elm Grove, Wisconsin.

Maryknoll Sr. Janice McLaughlin, who ministered in southern Africa for nearly 40 years and was jailed for supporting Zimbabwe's freedom struggle, died Mar. 7 in New York, at age 79. 

A more inclusive attitude and a cooperative approach that includes women are needed for the future of the church and society, said a number of Vatican officials.

Equal access to education is the only means by which women can get into and sustain leadership positions in society, said a Ghanaian nun and medical doctor.

Media reported Sr. Ann Nu Thawng, a member of the Sisters of St. Francis Xavier, stood in front of troops Feb. 28, the bloodiest day since the Feb. 1 military coup, and begged them not to shoot protestors.

The Society of the Holy Child Jesus announced Feb. 25 that it was abandoning its plans to move some of the remains of Philadelphia-born Mother Cornelia Connelly from a chapel in Mayfield School to the Cathedral Basilica of Ss. Peter and Paul. The translation of the relics had been requested in the hope that pilgrims would pray for, and the Society would obtain, the miracles sought for her beatification and canonization, since Connelly was declared venerable in 1992.

The butterflies are waving on and around the sisters' house in New Orleans, as are the ragdolls and pink panthers.

Catholic nuns, priests and laypeople have joined protests in Buddhist-majority Myanmar following the Feb. 1 coup.

For economic policies and systems to promote an end to human trafficking, they must care about people, their dignity and working conditions, and they must be regulated in ways that promote social justice, not special interests, Pope Francis said.

Christian hope is rooted in the knowledge that God is patient with all his children, even when they stray from the path set before them, Pope Francis told consecrated men and women.

Since vaccines began rolling out in December, some elderly sisters have been able to get vaccinated, but not all of them. Many, who live with fellow sisters, not in assisted living or long-term care centers, are not at the top of vaccine eligibility lists. It also depends on where the sisters live and how their states are distributing available vaccinations.

In vast regions of the Amazon, the presence of Black people has been historically invisible. Such a social denial of the Afro Brazilian heritage can be especially harsh on the self-esteem of Black teenagers. Franciscan Sr. Telma Barbosa fights against it.

As COVID-19 cases and deaths continue to rise in the United States, the pandemic has taken a terrible toll on the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet in Latham. In December, nine sisters there died of COVID-19 as nearly half of the residents became infected during an outbreak at the provincial house that has affected 47 sisters and 26 employees since October.

More than 28 years after a 19-year-old nun was found dead in a convent well, a court in India's Kerala state convicted a priest and a woman religious of the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church of murdering her.