A daily news briefing from Catholic News Agency, powered by artificial intelligence. Ask your smart speaker to play “Catholic News,” or listen every morning wherever you get podcasts.
www.catholicnewsagency.com
A child’s tip led police to arrest a Catholic youth leader in McLean, Virginia, on nine counts of aggravated sexual battery on November first. Antonio Pérez-Alcalá, seventy five, is accused of sexually assaulting minors while serving as a local leader for Secular Institute Stabat Mater, a program dedicated to the “formation of young people toward integrating the spiritual with the secular” through Ignatian spiritual exercises with Marian devotion. Authorities say he ran the group from his home until a child revealed to an adult that he was sexually assaulted by a leader there.
A student from Loyola Marymount University, a Catholic university in California, has restarted the school’s inactive prolife program after the university hosted a Planned Parenthood fundraiser on campus. Two days before the fundraiser took place, Megan Glaudini made the decision and also held a rosary rally before the Planned Parenthood event. The rosary rally pulled in over 20 people including faculty, Jesuit priests on campus, and students.
During his weekly Angelus, Pope Francis said the sacred things of our Catholic faith must be freed from their ties with money. In a reflection on the Gospel of the “widow’s mite”, the pope praised the woman for giving everything she had, without concern for how it would look to others.
Today the Church honors saint Elizabeth of the Trinity. She was born in France, became a discalced carmelite and died at the age of twenty six of Addison’s disease.