The church is near the cradle of U.S. Catholicism, a few miles from St. Clement’s Island, where Jesuit Father Andrew White celebrated the first Mass in the English-speaking colonies March 25, 1634, after colonists from England made landfall there.

With Venerable Father Michael McGivney, the parish priest who founded the Knights of Columbus in 1882, to be beatified Oct. 31 at St. Joseph’s Cathedral in Hartford, Conn., Archbishop William E. Lori was looking forward to witnessing history and honoring the man he referred to as “the parish priest of my soul.”

Poland’s bishops’ conference decried attacks on churches by demonstrators protesting a near-total ban on abortions by the country’s Constitutional Court and urged restraint from violence and dialogue.

A former priest who had been an early spiritual adviser to the alleged visionaries of Medjugorje, Bosnia-Herzegovina, has been excommunicated, according to an announcement by the Diocese of Brescia, Italy, where he lives.

On a day of history for the U.S. Catholic Church, Washington Archbishop Wilton D. Gregory — who four hours earlier had learned Pope Francis had named him a cardinal — celebrated his first Mass as a cardinal-designate Oct. 25 at Holy Angels Church in Avenue in Southern Maryland.