“We should never get used to violence or lose our respect for the sacredness of human life,” said Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan of New York, following a deadly mass shooting in that city that claimed four lives, including that of a New York City police officer.

The question was simple and familiar to many in religious life: How does one deal with a curmudgeon – someone who is set in his ways, resistant to change and vocal about it?

A funeral Mass for School Sister of Notre Dame Rose Sylvia Lindner was offered July 2 at Villa Assumpta in Baltimore. Sister Rose Sylvia died June 18. She was 91.

During the Second Vatican Council, a mysterious voice began reporting from inside the closed-door sessions — exposing tensions and calling for reform. That voice belonged to Xavier Rynne, the pseudonym of Father Francis Xavier Murphy, a Redemptorist priest who risked everything to write anonymously about the council’s inner workings.

At least 43 people, including children, were killed July 27 in a brutal overnight attack on a Catholic church in Komanda in eastern Congo.