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OTTAWA (CNA/EWTN News) — As Canada moves toward legalizing assisted suicide, Catholic bishops and a large Protestant coalition — along with Jewish and Muslim leaders — have joined together to reaffirm the need to help the suffering without killing them.

“Unbelievable,” “goosebumps,” “breathtaking,” “ecstatic,” “once in a life time,” “amazing,” “tears to my eyes”: these were some of the words and phrases inmates used to describe their encounters with Pope Francis at the Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility in northeast Philadelphia Sept. 27.

I was still coming down off the high of the papal visit and engrossed in Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted’s exhortation to men when the news broke of yet another school shooting. This time, it was at a community college in a small town in Oregon where Chris Harper-Mercer, 26, killed nine people and wounded nine others.

This year the bishop zeroed in on who it is Christ calls the faithful to be.

Families bring needed values and a humanizing spirit to society and, when they mirror God's love for all, they teach the church how it should relate to all people, including the "imperfect."

He asked that they not be afraid to experience God's "boundless mercy, so that in turn you may become apostles of mercy by your actions, words and prayers in our world, wounded by selfishness, hatred and so much despair."

NEW YORK (CNS) — During an Evening Prayer service at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, Pope Francis thanked the nation’s priests, brothers and women religious for their service and gave particular thanks to women religious saying, “Where would the Church be without you?”

The Holy Father lands on U.S. soil Sept. 22. Check out where he will be and when and key into how to follow his apostolic journey virtually.

In an extraordinary gesture for the Year of Mercy, Pope Francis has extended to priests worldwide the authority to absolve women for the sin of abortion and has decreed the full validity during the year of the sacrament of confession celebrated by priests of the traditionalist Society of St. Pius X.

Authorities had repeatedly blocked a father from the prison following his daughter's 2012 conviction for blasphemy.