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The Vatican said on Thursday that priests and lay Catholics who are part of a breakaway right-wing Catholic group that ordained bishops without Pope Leo's approval were in schism with the wider Church and now excommunicated.
As Cuba continues to face severe blackouts, economic crisis, and political pressure, Christians on the island and their allies in the U.S. are working to save lives and advocate for Cuban freedom.
In recent months, the nation of Cuba has been experiencing blackouts so severe that journalists at the New York Times have mapped the effects in satellite photos taken from space. The island’s economy, which had been in crisis for several years, has all but come to a standstill since January’s U.S.-led capture of Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro, a key ally of the island’s government. Later that month, the Trump administration also renewed and hardened a longstanding comprehensive embargo on the island, citing “actions of the Government of Cuba directly threaten the safety, national security, and foreign policy of the United States.”
More so than ever, U.S. pressure on the island has made daily life difficult. Jorge González Núñez, president of the Movimiento Estudiantil Cristiano de Cuba, spoke to Sojourners in voice messages over the course of three days, originally in Spanish.
“We’ve had only two hours of electricity each day for a week, or more,” González Núñez said.
The Supreme Court backed on Monday state laws that allow mail-in ballots received after Election Day to be counted, rejecting a Republican-led challenge to a five-day grace period in Mississippi and dealing a setback to President Donald Trump.
The justices in a 5-4 ruling overturned a lower court’s decision that had deemed Mississippi’s law inconsistent with U.S. statutes that set the timing of federal elections—for the presidency, Senate, and House of Representatives. Trump last year vowed to end the use of mail-in ballots nationwide before this November’s congressional elections, when his fellow Republicans are seeking to retain control of Congress.
The court has a 6-3 conservative majority. Conservative Chief Justice John Roberts and fellow conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the court’s three liberals in the majority. Barrett wrote the opinion.
Texas elementary and middle school students will likely see redesigned social studies and reading lessons that minimize racial, geographic, and cultural diversity while emphasizing the Bible — but changes for high schoolers have suddenly hit a pause.
The Republican-led State Board of Education decided Thursday evening to allow final votes on a rewrite of Texas’ K-8 social studies lessons and a mandatory reading list for all public schools that includes Christian stories. Those votes are expected Friday.
However, the board delayed proposed changes to high school U.S. history, world history, geography and government.
Political theorist Stephen Wolfe, along with ministers Zachary Garris and Sean McGowan, all believe the government has a role to “promote true religion.”
Wolfe is a self-avowed Christian nationalist. However, Garris and McGowan don’t use that title.
The three men teamed up to write a book that presents an alternative view on religious liberty for peers within the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), which just advanced a report denouncing Christian nationalism.
“Many American Christians assume a secular form of government,” Garris, a New Mexico pastor in the PCA, said in an interview. “And our book challenges that. It’s rather simple.”
The U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way on Thursday for President Donald Trump's administration to strip hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian immigrants of a humanitarian status that protects them from deportation, giving another boost to his hardline approach toward immigration.
Sarah Mullally, the Archbishop of Canterbury, apologized for the Church of England’s coercive adoption practices and treatment of pregnant mothers during the post-World War II period through 1976.
“We are profoundly sorry for the pain, trauma and stigma experienced—and still carried—by many people because of historical adoption practices in homes linked to the Church of England,” said Mullally in a video released online on June 18.
In its own report, the church acknowledged that leadership knew pastoral guidance to keep mothers and babies together was disregarded in some cases and muddled with other language in church records, including “dehumanising and dismissive attitudes, falling short of what would be expected towards anyone in the church’s care, not least people who were rendered especially vulnerable by their circumstances.”
In New Jersey on Saturday, Catholic activists gathered near the front gates of Delaney Hall to pray the rosary in solidarity with those detained in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility.
It was the latest act of Catholic witness at Delaney Hall, where several hundred detainees initiated a hunger and labor strike in May to protest the facility’s inhumane conditions. Outside the facility, ICE agents deployed pepper spray and shoved protesters into the street, leading to the deployment of state police, the establishment of protest perimeters and curfews, and dozens of arrests While those measures have been lifted, the situation within and outside Delaney Hall remains in flux, with mutual aid organizers—including many people of faith—adapting daily to support the families of those detained.
On June 13, about 50 people gathered to pray near a colorful chalk drawing of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Catholic sisters distributed rosaries outside the “radical hospitality tent,” where mutual aid organizers once provided food and toys to families visiting those detained inside before the facility instituted “draconian” rules to dissuade visitations. Now there were no families, and few protesters or news cameras in sight.
The Episcopal Diocese of Spokane, Washington, has maintained Camp Cross—a 130-acre property on the west side of Lake Cœur D’Alene, Idaho—for more than a century. Each week throughout summer, the church hosts themed retreats, from Arts and Music Camp to Clergy Camp.
One of those retreats is Queer Camp, a session for LGBTQ+ people and allies of all ages that the church has hosted since 2024. Registration is now open for Queer Camp’s third year, which will run August 28 to 31.
“My hope is folks can know there is a place where they can be Christian and be their full self,” said camp director Alex Flannagan. “It’s not conditional, no one’s trying to change you, you’re fully welcome.”
Resounding Love, a diverse interfaith choir, is bringing a message of love and hope to its Juneteenth concert in Seattle.
The group offers the most powerful and uplifting elements of church gospel music to people of many faith backgrounds, the Rev. Angela Farrar Small, director of chaplains, said. Resounding Love’s Juneteenth performance will center on African American identity, culture, history and social justice.
Juneteenth commemorates June 19, 1865, when enslaved African Americans in Texas learned of their freedom, more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. Now it’s a federal holiday celebrating the end of slavery in the United States.
African American gospel and spiritual music has brought people together “from the deepest depression to the biggest joys,” Small said.
On “Moral Mondays,” a group of locals—sometimes 10, sometimes 100—gather on the town square in Brevard, N.C., holding signs advocating for voting rights, economic justice, and more. Carter Heyward, an Episcopal priest and vice president of the Transylvania NAACP, which organizes the events, will “often come in her collar with a bright stole on,” said Diane Livingston, an NAACP member. “That's how I always picture her, with a clergy collar on.”
Heyward’s clergy collar and her advocacy for a more democratic society did not come easily. She was one of the first women to be ordained in the Episcopal Church in 1974. It was an “irregular” ordination: The 11 women ordained at the predominantly Black Church of the Advocate in Philadelphia, prefiguring the Episcopal Church officially ordaining women in 1976, became known as the Philadelphia Eleven.
An Orthodox Christian group sued Phoenix over a new law restricting free food distribution and medical care to people in need at parks, continuing a regional battle over how cities should respond to homelessness in public spaces.
Lance Brace, founder of St. Herman’s Table, a ministry of Exaltation of the Holy Cross Orthodox Church, said a Phoenix ordinance passed in early May and set to take effect June 5 criminalizes his evangelism and makes it impossible for him to provide food, water, Bibles and small hygiene products to unhoused people in city parks.
The ministry provides those items with the ultimate goal “to introduce Jesus Christ to the people it serves,” the complaint says.
Pope Leo had a brief private meeting with Puerto Rican singer Bad Bunny at Madrid’s Bernabeu stadium on Monday evening as both were touring Spain, the Vatican said on Tuesday, adding that it did not expect to release any photos of the meeting.
As Catholics from all over the world observed Corpus Christi by processing through the streets to celebrate the Eucharist, about 300 parishioners in Washington, D.C., did the same—with a specific focus on honoring the dignity of immigrants.
Going back to the 13th century, Corpus Christi is the Catholic Church’s celebration of Jesus Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist. For Bishop Evelio Menjivar-Ayala, who led the immigrant-focused procession in Washington and serves as bishop of the Diocese of Wheeling-Charleston in West Virginia, the day is a reminder to stand in solidarity with those who are suffering, especially immigrants who live in fear of deportation.
“The mystery we celebrate today is a mystery of unity,” he told Sojourners on Sunday. “We share one bread, one cup, and then we become the body of Christ … But the Eucharist has to go beyond just receiving Jesus at Mass or adoring Jesus in the blessed sacrament.”
Across Latin America, faith-based organizations have a long history of accompanying and serving migrants traveling northward. But as the U.S. grows increasingly aggressive in its immigration enforcement, these ministries find themselves serving migrants flowing south, away from the U.S.
Pope Leo XIV named an executive with U.S. Catholic media conglomerate EWTN as the new head of the Vatican’s communications department on Tuesday, in the first appointment of a woman to the senior Church role.
Zondervan will put Alan Chambers’s book My Exodus: From Fear to Grace out of print following the news of Chambers’ arrest for solicitation of a minor.
Chambers, a leader and later renouncer of ex-gay ministry Exodus International, was arrested by the Orlando Police Department on May 19. According to case details first reported by ABC affiliate Channel 9 Orlando News, Chambers is charged with three felonies he messaged a detective posing as a 14-year-old boy. The Advocate reported that he “frequently discussed meeting up and engaging in sexual activity during that time, as well as concerns about their age difference and if he would get in trouble.”
Chambers joined Exodus International in 2001, leading the ministry until 2013 when Chambers gave a public apology for the organization’s efforts to promote sexual orientation change. He later supported bans on “conversion therapy” for minors and spoke at Pride events. In 2015, he told Religion News Service that he believed same-sex relationships could be holy.
Two teenage gunmen opened fire on Monday at the Islamic Center of San Diego, California, killing a security guard and two other men outside the mosque before the suspects were found dead, apparently from self-inflicted gunshot wounds, police said.
San Diego Police Chief Scott Wahl said local law enforcement and the FBI were investigating the attack on the largest mosque in San Diego County as a hate crime.
Pope Leo will address the rise of artificial intelligence in his first in-depth text outlining his concerns, the Vatican said on Monday, adding that it would be unveiled on May 25 by the pontiff himself.
The document, known as an encyclical, is likely to decry the use of AI in warfare and address how the technology is challenging workers’ rights, according to sources.
This Saturday, Black leaders are inviting Americans of all races and faith traditions to rally across the nation to protect minority voting rights in the aftermath of a recent Supreme Court decision weakening the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
“We believe that the gutting of the Voting Rights Act is the latest of many red flags and alarms that the state of our country is not well,” California pastor Rev. Michael McBride told Sojourners this week.
McBride, one of the key organizers for Saturday’s National Day of Action for Voting Rights, said churchgoers in particular “have a moral responsibility … to lift up our voice, that this injustice not be unmet by the faithful among us.”