From CNS:  Both the number of abortions and the rate of abortion is dropping, according to figures released in the third annual “State of Abortion in America” report issued by the National Right to Life Committee. The number of abortions, which had peaked at about 1.6 million in 1989, is now down to 1 million, according to federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention statistics quoted in the report, which was issued Jan. 14. The abortion rate for all women... Read more

From Philly.com comes this account by Orlando R. Barone of Bill Atkinson, man who endured a devastating injury and became a priest—and is now on the path to sainthood: He was the finest athlete I ever saw up close, certainly the best I ever played against. I got to know him in high school, where he was a varsity baseball player. I sat right behind him in homeroom for two of our four years at Monsignor Bonner High School in... Read more

Last month, a lot of journalists were doing their big end of the year wrap-ups. You had Time magazine with its Person of the Year, Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany. There was Barbara Walters with her Most Fascinating People of the Year—her top choice being Caitlyn Jenner. And there was the annual Gallup poll, which for the 20th year in a row declared that the most admired woman in the United States is Hillary Clinton. But then in the... Read more

From the pages of People, no less, a report on the princess’s conversion and her commitment to her new religion:   “Charlene has embraced the Catholic religion and is inspired by it,” a Monaco observer tells PEOPLE. “She is devoted to it and impressive in her fidelity.” Shortly before her July 2011 wedding, Charlene, 37, who was born and raised Protestant, converted to Roman Catholicism “of her own free will and choice” in April of that year. In part because it... Read more

From The New York Times: Sister Veronica Mendez adjusted her glasses and tried to remember the last time someone joined the religious order here. “Joined and stayed?” she pondered. “It would have been the 1970s.” That stark fact, and the concomitant drop in the number of nuns to 17 from 72, explains why the Sisters of Our Lady of Christian Doctrine decided to do some estate planning. “It’s looking at the fact that we’re not going to live forever,” Sister... Read more

It took them a while, but he finally spoke out about violence in his own backyard: A week after hundreds were attacked in Cologne on New Year’s Eve, Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Munich and Freising, the president of the German Conference of Catholic Bishops, condemned the attacks in a press release and called for more vigilance in the future. “[T]he excesses in Cologne and other large cities are deeply disturbing for our society and can in no way be tolerated,” Cardinal... Read more

From AP: Presiding Bishop Michael Curry said Friday the U.S. Episcopal Church will not roll back its acceptance of gay marriage despite sanctions imposed this week by Anglican leaders. In a phone interview from England, where he attended the gathering of top Anglican archbishops, Curry said he told his fellow leaders they should expect no change. The top Episcopal legislative body, called General Convention, last year voted overwhelmingly to authorize same-sex marriage ceremonies in church. In response, Anglican leaders Thursday... Read more

From Catholic News Service and Northwest Catholic, the newspaper  in western Washington: A well-known personality in Colombia, he fled to Canada to stay alive. Uprooted, new to the French language, he lived in precariousness in Quebec City, drawing strength to live from his family and his faith. Now he is in charge of the Latino community of the Archdiocese of Quebec. Here is the exceptional story of a refugee. Deacon Arismendy Lozada glanced at his cellphone. News alerts flashed on his... Read more

Details:  A California Catholic hospital is not engaging in sex discrimination by denying a woman’s request for the sterilization procedure known as tubal ligation, a San Francisco judge said in a tentative ruling. Superior Court Judge Ernest Goldsmith said in his decision Wednesday that Rebecca Chamorro could get the procedure at another hospital, and that Mercy Medical Center’s policy against sterilization on religious ground also applies to men. Health care provider Dignity Health, which operates Mercy Medical and 38 other... Read more

Via The Washington Post:  Planned Parenthood filed a federal lawsuit Thursday against the maker of a series of undercover videos released last year that sought to prove that the women’s health organization illegally profits by selling tissue from aborted fetuses. In a complaint filed with the U.S. District Court in San Francisco, officials with the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and its California affiliates alleged that the Center for Medical Progress broke multiple federal laws as part of its campaign,... Read more