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The icon is on display in two locations — the Catholic University of America’s Columbus Law School in Washington, D.C., and at The Episcopal Church of the Holy Communion near St. Louis. In November, The Daily Signal, a conservative news outlet, published a story about the CUA edition of the painting. Since then Kelly Latimore has been receiving death threats.

Pope Francis said on Monday that migrants were being exploited as “pawns” on a political chessboard in an apparent reference to the crisis at the Belarus border.

Thousands of migrants are stuck on the European Union’s eastern frontier in what the EU says is a crisis Minsk (Belarus’ capital city) engineered by distributing Belarusian visas in the Middle East, flying them in and letting them go to the border.

A federal jury in Charlottesville, Va., looking into the “Unite the Right” white nationalist rally in 2017 found defendants liable in four out of six counts and awarded $25 million in damages, according to media reports on Tuesday.

The jury awarded the money to nine people who suffered injuries, the New York Times and the Associated Press reported.

Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt accepted a recommendation from the state’s parole board on Thursday to grant Julius Jones clemency, sparing the life of the man who was set to be executed later that day. Jones was convicted of killing Paul Howell during a 1999 carjacking, but Jones maintained his innocence during the nearly two decades he spent on death row.

“After prayerful consideration and reviewing materials presented by all sides of this case, I have determined to commute Julius Jones’ sentence to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole,” said Stitt in a statement issued on Thursday around noon in Oklahoma.

Last week, Archbishop José H. Gomez assailed “new social justice movements” as “dangerous substitutes for religion.”

Gomez, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, spoke to the Congress of Catholics and Public Life, an international conference held in Madrid, but his comments spread beyond the direct audience. His remarks focused on “the new social movements and ideologies” that he said were “seeded and prepared for many years in our universities and cultural institutions;” movements that were “unleashed” on society after George Floyd was killed in May 2020.

“In denying God, these new movements have lost the truth about the human person,” he said. “This explains their extremism, and their harsh, uncompromising, and unforgiving approach to politics.”

While the archbishop acknowledged that “racial and economic inequality are still deeply embedded in our society,” the comments seemed, to many, to be an effort to delegitimize social justice efforts within the church despite past and present commitments to social justice from Catholic leaders.

Sojourners asked Catholic leaders and thinkers across the United States why social justice is important to their faith. Here’s what they had to say.

Supreme Court justices on Tuesday appeared divided over a bid by a man sentenced to death to have his pastor lay hands on him during his execution in Texas in a case testing how far states must go to accommodate religious requests by condemned inmates.

The justices heard more than 90 minutes of oral arguments in John Henry Ramirez’s appeal after Texas officials refused his request to let his Christian pastor touch him and audibly pray as he dies from the lethal injection and lower courts refused to issue a stay of execution.

The court, which has wrestled in recent years over the religious rights of death row inmates, has a 6-3 conservative majority. Some of the conservative justices raised questions about the sincerity of Ramirez’s religious request and how siding with him might affect future cases. The court’s liberal justices appeared to sympathize with Ramirez, who was not contesting his guilt in the appeal.

Holding aloft crosses bearing the names of murdered women, hundreds of people marched in Mexico’s capital on Wednesday to protest violence against women amidst a steady nationwide increase in femicides.

Chanting “we are your voice,” organizers used megaphones to read out the names of murdered women in downtown Mexico City.

The “Day of Dead Women” march took place a day after Mexico’s national holiday Day of the Dead. About 500 people took part in the protest, according to a Reuters witness.

The two world leaders met behind closed doors to discuss “working together on efforts grounded in human dignity,” with Biden praising the pope’s advocacy in fighting climate change ahead of next week’s United Nations conference on climate change (COP26) in Glasgow, Scotland, according to a White House news release. During their meeting, Biden called the pope “the most significant warrior of peace I’ve ever met,” and gave the pope a “challenge coin” with the U.S. seal on the front. The president also made several jokes, about the two men’s ages, his own sobriety, and said it was “good to be back,” as he was greeted at the Vatican.

In a hearing on Capitol Hill last week, leaders from humanitarian nonprofits and resettlement agencies asked the House Homeland Security Committee to pressure the Biden administration to do more to help resettle evacuated Afghans into U.S. communities.

Their demands come as thousands of Afghans who had initially been housed at U.S. military bases in Virginia, Wisconsin, Texas, New Jersey, New Mexico, and Indiana are moving into communities in the United States. At least an additional 55,000 Afghans remain at the military bases.