Help “de-weaponize” the way language is used in the media by being respectful to others and fostering greater understanding and peace between people, Pope Francis told a group of Catholics journalists from Germany.

The Biden administration cannot use a 1986 emergency health care law to require hospitals in Texas to perform emergency abortions, a federal appeals court in New Orleans ruled Jan. 2.

Jesuit Father Francis M. O’Connor, who served at St. Ignatius in Baltimore and was a former rector at what is now Loyola University Maryland, died Dec. 23. He was 99.

A funeral Mass for Redemptorist Father Andrew W. Carr was offered Dec. 11 at Sacred Heart of Jesus-Sagrado Corazón de Jesús in Highlandtown. Father Carr, whose last assignment was at Sacred Heart of Jesus, died Dec. 7 at the St. John Neumann Community at Stella Maris in Timonium. He was 94.

U.S. Catholicism’s intellectual life is robust, dynamically orthodox, and culture-enriching — unlike Catholic intellectual life in those large swathes of western Europe where “Follow the Zeitgeist to Mordor” is the order of the day.