Nine young adults have been selected as “perpetual pilgrims” to travel with the Eucharist along the East Coast this summer in the third National Eucharistic Pilgrimage. The pilgrims — five men and four women — will participate in the pilgrimage’s full route, which begins May 24 in Florida and reaches Maine before ending in Philadelphia July 5 for U.S. semiquincentennial celebrations.

The apostolic vicar of Southern Arabia warned that the current military escalation in the Persian Gulf amid the U.S. and Israel-Iran war is a conflict with “ancient roots” that poses a serious threat to the Middle East and the wider world.

Among the belongings Asma Isyed, 68, brought from her West Bank village of Zababdeh in October were a small Bible and a booklet of prayers by St. Mariam Baouardy, a Palestinian saint.

The Catholic Church is both a community made up of fragile and limited human beings and a divine reality, Pope Leo XIV said at his weekly general audience.

Today, in a global culture dominated by the notion that everything in the human condition is plastic, malleable, and changeable by acts of human will — the insistence that nothing is given — the question on which the future of Christian mission and service to the world depends is, “Who are we?” Are we simply congealed stardust, the happy but accidental byproduct of billions of years of random cosmic biochemical forces?