An Indigenous Tzotzil priest and peace activist was murdered after celebrating Sunday Mass in Mexico’s southern Chiapas state, where the Catholic Church has denounced government inaction in the face of rising violence.

The Vatican’s safeguarding commission has “an opportunity and obligation to make the church a more Samaritan church,” Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley, president of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, told commission members during its plenary assembly.

Former President Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, said he “will look at” a religious exemption to his proposed mandate to cover in vitro fertilization treatments, commonly known as IVF — a procedure the church condemns as linked to the “abortion mentality” and destructive of human life — in an interview with a Catholic television host.

Even if some members of the Synod of Bishops end up feeling disappointed by the results of the synod, “God’s providence is at work in this assembly, bringing us to the Kingdom in ways that God alone knows,” the spiritual adviser to the synod on synodality told them.

As members of the Synod of Bishops entered the last week of their meeting in Rome, the synod’s secretary-general urged them to resist the temptation of “covetousness” — the desire “to keep everything for ourselves, to possess, to hoard, to define, to close.”