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These 40 days prior to Easter are a time for Christians to sit with the messiness of life and then transform it through the three pillars of Lent: prayer, fasting and almsgiving.

Lent is a journey of purification and penance, a movement that should bring one tearfully back to the loving arms of the merciful Father, Pope Francis said at an Ash Wednesday Mass that began with a procession on Rome's Aventine Hill.

The Catholic Church cannot call itself church if it is a "closed caste" where the sick, the wounded and sinners are shunned, Pope Francis told the 20 new cardinals he created.

A nationwide measles outbreak that began at an amusement park in Southern California has fostered an ongoing debate about people's social obligation to have themselves and their children vaccinated against measles, mumps and rubella and other diseases.

In the 10 years since U.S.-born Sr. Dorothy Stang was killed by ranchers in the Amazon, the risks have not decreased with 106 people assassinated due to land conflicts in Para state alone, said one of the coordinators of the Brazilian bishops' Pastoral Land Commission.

They come in search of a better life, but hundreds perish in the rugged desert near the U.S.-Mexico border every year.

Many prisoners, once released, are poorly equipped to shake off the conditions that led them to commit the crimes which put them in jail in the first place. A two-year-old program in five states is changing that.

Pope Francis made a surprise stop at a shantytown on his way to visit a Rome parish Feb. 8.

Saying their letters had touched his heart, Pope Francis wrote a personal response encouraging teens in southern Arizona in their work aiding migrants.

Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero will be beatified in San Salvador "certainly within the year and not later, but possibly within a few months," said Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, the postulator or chief promoter of the archbishop's sainthood cause.