By Carol Glatz Catholic News Service VATICAN CITY — Blessed John XXIII struggled to shake off many formalities that came with the papacy and often conspired with his valet to sneak out of the Vatican. One covert road trip in the Alban Hills outside of Rome got Guido Gusso, the pope’s valet, in …

By Navar Watson Catholic News Service  WASHINGTON — A small group of Teresian Carmelites from India are quickly adjusting to their new life in the Diocese of Bismarck, N.D., helping out in the Catholic Indian Mission and teaching at St. Bernard Mission School in Fort Yates.

By Cindy Wooden Catholic News Service  VATICAN CITY — “They call me Holy Father and that is what I must be,” the future St. John XXIII wrote in his diary. A nun who worked in the papal apartments with the future St. John Paul II saw him tired one day …

By Carol Zimmermann Catholic News Service  WASHINGTON — Responding to concerns about Catholic involvement with Girl Scouts, a U.S. bishops’ committee released key points from its dialogue with Girl Scout leaders outlining major concerns of church leaders and the national organization’s responses.

By Cindy Wooden Catholic News Service  VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis said the assassination of “my confrere,” a 75-year-old Dutch Jesuit in Syria, “filled me with deep sadness and made me think again of all the people who suffer and are dying in that martyred country.”

By Catholic News Service  WASHINGTON (CNS) — The number of allegations of sexual abuse by clergy declined in 2013 while diocesan spending on child protection programs increased under the U.S. Catholic Church’s “Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People,” according to a church-sponsored audit.

  By Francis X. Rocca Catholic News Service  VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis received U.S. President Barack Obama at the Vatican March 27. In what was their first encounter, the two leaders spoke in private for more than 50 minutes, an extraordinarily long time for such a meeting.

By Carol Zimmermann Catholic News Service WASHINGTON — Oral arguments in two cases before the U.S. Supreme Court March 25 focused on whether for-profit corporations have religious grounds to object to the new health care law’s requirement that most employers provide contraceptive coverage in their employee health plans.

By John Mulderig Catholic News Service  NEW YORK — A classic bit of impertinence from 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche notwithstanding, it seems that “God’s Not Dead” (Freestyle).

By Francis X. Rocca Catholic News Service  VATICAN CITY — As leader of the universal church, a pope must direct his ministry in both of the ways traditionally described by the Latin terms “ad intra” and “ad extra”: inwardly to the church itself, and outwardly to the rest of the …