Friday, July 31, 2026

U.S. Dioceses Struggle to Keep Foreign Priests Under Trump Travel Ban

National Catholic Register

Pope Leo XIV on what he loves about America

by Gerard O’Connell July 30, 2026

Pope Leo XIV speaks at the "Canticle of Peace" event in the Vatican Gardens in Castel Gandolfo on the evening of July 29, 2026, featuring a performance by Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli and a 164-member children's choir. Credit: OSV News photo/Matteo Pernaselci, Vatican Media

Leo XIV, the first American pope, spoke about his immigrant roots, his love for the United States and the possibility of visiting the country soon in a brief, exclusive interview with NBC News on the evening of July 29.

He spoke after participating in a concert for peace at Borgo Laudato Si’ on the grounds of the papal summer residence at Castel Gandolfo, overlooking Lake Albano, south of Rome. The concert featured Andrea Bocelli together with an interfaith choir of 200 children from conflict-affected regions, including the Holy Land, celebrating peace and hope in the year that commemorates the 800th anniversary of the death of St. Francis of Assisi.

Elon Musk at the Viva Technology conference in Paris on June 16, 2023 (OSV News photo/Gonzalo Fuentes, Reuters).

Earlier this summer, Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire. It’s hard to imagine a person being so rich; there are only about twenty countries able to produce that amount of economic output annually. Musk’s net worth has since ticked down a bit, owing to a slide in the share prices of his company SpaceX after its July IPO. Still, he remains nearly three times as rich as the billionaires closest behind him, Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Globally, there are three thousand other billionaires, including Donald Trump, who has enriched himself to the tune of $2.2 billion (and counting) since returning to office. Today, the combined wealth of the world’s billionaires is $20.1 trillion. That number, which has risen rapidly from $14.2 trillion in 2024 and just $4.5 trillion in 2011, is equal to one-fifth of the world’s total economic output, according to the International Tax Observatory.

Opinion

Thursday, July 30, 2026

Why can’t Democrats seem to have the right conversations?

For years, much of the Democratic Party’s energy has been consumed by bickering between its center and left factions (CNS photo/Mike Segar, Reuters).

In the aftermath of Kamala Harris’s 2024 loss, the consensus on the left was that Democrats no longer stood for anything. They needed to use their “time in the wilderness” to develop some “fresh ideas” and “real solutions” to Americans’ manifold and growing problems. There’s been some evidence that this is happening. A number of successful campaigns from both the center and left wings of the party—most famously Zohran Mamdani’s—have foregrounded the issue of affordability. Congressional Democrats, moreover, have made a number of substantive policy proposals on a range of issues: from Jon Ossoff’s anticorruption platform to Bernie Sanders’s recent proposal on AI to a much-discussed New York Times op-ed on Israel by Chris Van Hollen.

Illinois bishop bars family eulogies, same-day vigils under new funeral policies

News

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Brian Fraga

Wednesday, July 29, 2026