Catholic Nutshell News: Monday 3/30/26
Topics include: Dialogue between Orthodox & Catholic churches; 20 more killed in Nigeria; After Eucharistic encounter, dying baby thrives; & Young atheists and agnostics are tuning out
“Worth your weight in walnuts”
Today's sources are Crux, Graphs about Religion, Aleteia, Zeale News, OSV News, Catholic Culture, & EWTN News. (Catholic Nutshell is a subscription service for faithful, hopeful, & curious Catholics willing to exercise the Catholic News Muscle)
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EWTN News
Dialogue between Orthodox & Catholic churches may be opening
By Madalaine Elhabbal, March 30, 2026
In a conference marking the 80th anniversary of Soviet Russia’s suppression of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, John Paul II’s official biographer argued that Orthodox-Catholic relations could see a revival. While previous popes had carried experiential “baggage” regarding the Orthodox church into their pontificates, Weigel said Pope Leo XIV “gets it in terms of what is actually going on” and predicted renewed promise for Orthodox-Catholic relations under his pontificate. Only pope for 11 months, Weigel said: “This is a deliberate man. I believe that he will work deliberately to try to reformulate this, but we’re going to have to give him time.” Weigel has suggested to Pope Leo that the approach to dialogue with Orthodox churches should not center on theological primacy as heavily as in the past. Rather, he said, it should focus on the fact that Orthodoxy “does not have a credible 21st-century church,” with a fully formed approach to church-state relations, particularly in light of the Russia-Ukraine war. “It needs to get one,” he said.
CRUX
Gunmen kill at least 20 in nighttime attack in Nigeria
By Dyepkazah Shibayan, AP, March 30, 2026
A night attack on a community in Nigeria’s north-central region left at least 20 people dead, residents and authorities said. The attack occurred on Sunday night in Gari Ya Waye community in the Jos North area of Plateau state, Joyce Lohya Ramnap, the state commissioner for information, said in a statement. She did not give the number of casualties, but Ibukun Falodun, a resident, said that 20 people were confirmed dead. The state government imposed a 48-hour curfew to prevent further attacks, Ramnap said. No group has claimed responsibility, but residents told The Associated Press that many gunmen on bikes shot sporadically into the community. Attacks in Plateau State are part of a long-running cycle of violence in north-central Nigeria, where disputes over land and grazing between mostly Muslim Fulani herders and largely Christian farming communities frequently escalate into deadly clashes. Criminal gangs are also active.
Aleteia
Holy Week access secured in Jerusalem
By Daniel Esparza, March 30, 2026
Church leaders in Jerusalem have confirmed that Holy Week and Easter celebrations at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre will proceed this year, following coordination with Israeli authorities amid ongoing regional conflict. In a joint press release issued on Holy Monday, March 30, 2026, the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem and the Custody of the Holy Land announced that arrangements have been finalized to allow official Church representatives access to the site for liturgies and ceremonies. The agreement, reached with the Israel Police, ensures that core Easter traditions — some dating back centuries — will be maintained inside Christianity’s most sacred shrine, revered as the site of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. This new statement comes after the strong statement issued Palm Sunday morning, when Israeli police turned back the two most senior Church officials as they were en route to celebrate a simple Mass
OSV News
After Eucharistic encounter, dying baby is now thriving
By Katie Yoder, March 22, 2026
As a fourth grader, Andrea Artz remembers praying that she would experience a Eucharistic miracle one day. She never imagined that, years later, she might witness one with her newborn daughter. “We didn’t think she was going to make it,” Andrea said of her daughter, Catherine, who nearly died after being born last year. “But we, my husband and I, were praying the rosary throughout the night, and I just felt God’s presence.” “I felt like (God) said, ‘You know what? It’s going to be OK,’” she added. “And it was.” Andrea, 24, and her husband, Wyatt, 25, spoke with OSV News about little Catherine’s incredible recovery in 2025 after a priest placed a Eucharistic host on her. Today, Catherine is a healthy, thriving 1-year-old who is learning how to walk — and be a big sister. Wyatt and Andrea spoke days after welcoming their fourth baby (a fourth daughter) in early March. They remembered Catherine’s birth that happened just one year earlier.
EWTN News
Catholic apostolate drive to get prosthetic limbs for kids in Gaza
By Elise Winland, March 30, 2026
The Vulnerable People Project (VPP), a U.S.-based Catholic human rights apostolate, has launched a fundraising drive to help produce and deliver prosthetic limbs to hundreds of orphaned children injured in the war in Gaza. VPP says Gaza now has one of the world’s highest concentrations of child amputees, with thousands of children having lost limbs since the war began. About 18,000 children in Gaza have no surviving immediate family members, leaving many injured children to navigate their recovery alone, according to VPP. “Since the beginning of the war, tens of thousands of civilians have been caught in the crossfire, many of them children,” the group stated in a campaign video included in a press release. “Most child amputees in the world — the majority of them — live in that little strip of land that we call Gaza,” VPP President and Founder Jason Jones said.
National Catholic Register
Criminals pose as Catholic Charities in ‘nationwide’ scam
By Daniel Payne/EWTN News, March 30, 2026
Criminals are posing as representatives of Catholic Charities in order to target and steal money from immigrants in the United States, making off with sometimes tens of thousands of dollars after promising immigration services to desperate migrants. The scams have appeared in multiple states, with advocates scrambling to protect immigrants from being robbed by thieves posing as Catholic service providers. Cecilia Baxter, an attorney with Hogar Immigrant Services at Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Arlington, Virginia, told EWTN News that the crimes have been running at least as far back as the summer of 2025. “Scammers are using the name, images, and likeness of Catholic Charities USA — or just the name Catholic Charities in general — to scam immigrants by promising them services and then not following through.”
Graphs about Religion
Young atheists and agnostics are tuning out
By Ryan Burge, March 23, 2026
The share of folks who are watching NBC News from 2020 to 2024 is 33-35% of the country, and for ABC is just a bit higher (from 36-to 38%). In the 2020 data, 39% said that they watched CNN. That dropped to 35% in the 2022 and 2024 data. The data indicates that a majority of Gen Z are watching Fox News! Look how MSNBC fares compared to this — very low. This tracks well with Nielsen ratings data. Black Protestants are more likely to watch ABC, CBS, or NBC compared to other Christian groups. Right-leaning groups prefer Fox News, and those on the left are partial to MSNBC. CNN saw big losses across the entire religious spectrum. Among white evangelicals, Fox News has a 49-point advantage. Only five religious groups are more inclined to watch MSNBC. Atheists lead this category at +32 for MSNBC, followed by agnostics at +21. Atheist/agnostic Millennials favor MSNBC over Fox News but only by a small margin (13-14%). Fox News seems like it will be doing just fine for decades to come.
The Pillar
The Vatican Bank’s once scandalized board has a new president
By The Pillar, March 25, 2026
The Institute for Works of Religion (IOR) announced March 25 that the long-serving president of the bank’s Board of Superintendence, Jean-Baptiste de Franssu, will step down on April 28 after a final meeting to approve the bank’s financial statements from the previous year, marking a turnover in leadership at the top of the Vatican bank for the first time in more than a decade. De Franssu presided over a period of significant regulatory reform at the bank. De Franssu will be succeeded by François Pauly, a current board member, in what the bank described in a press notice as a “carefully managed succession process” aimed at “ensuring continuity in the governance of the Institute.” The IOR has been at the center of almost every major Vatican financial story for the last half century, for better and for worse. This move matters after more than a decade of reform at the once scandal-plagued bank, the Vatican’s only commercial financial institution
EWTN, UCA, and CW News for 3/30/26
EWTN News
EWTN’s top headlines — March 30, 2026
EWTN News provides reliable, free, up-to-the-minute news affecting the Universal Church, emphasizing the words of the Holy Father and the activities of the Holy See, and is available to anyone with internet access.
Pope names Vatican diplomats to key positions in Secretariat of State, papal household - By Victoria Cardiel - Archbishop Paolo Rudelli is the new head of the general affairs section of the Secretariat of State and Archbishop Petar Rajič is the new prefect of the Papal Household.
EU appoints McGuinness as special envoy for religious freedom after 16-month vacancy - By Grace Camara - EU bishops and lawmakers welcomed the appointment of veteran Irish politician Mairead McGuinness to lead the blocʼs global religious freedom diplomacy, a post left unfilled for more than a year.
Pope Leo XIV says God ‘does not listen’ to prayers of those who wage war - By Victoria Cardiel - “We turn our gaze to Jesus, who reveals himself as King of Peace, even as war looms abounds him,” the pope said. “He remains steadfast in meekness, while others are stirring up violence.”
UCA News
The Union of Catholic Asian World News - 3/30/26
UCA News (UCAN) is the leading independent Catholic media service from Asia, with a convergent media approach that couples traditional journalistic practices with multimedia and social media
Changes to India’s transgender rights law spark protests - March 30, 2026 | UCA News reporter - The older 2019 law defined a transgender person broadly — including trans men, trans women, and genderqueer individuals — regardless of whether they had undergone medical procedures, lawyers said. The revised law removes that definition and replaces it with a narrower list of categories, largely rooted in Indian socio-cultural identities.
China stages secret trial for artist who satirized Mao Zedong - March 30, 2026 | AFP, Beijing - Chinese artist Gao Zhen faces charges of insulting “heroes and martyrs” over works that criticized former leader Mao Zedong. He was tried behind closed doors at a court in the northern city of Sanhe, though no verdict has yet been announced.
Indian court jails two Hindu men for vandalizing Jesus statue - March 30, 2026 | UCA News reporter - - Sandeep Kumar and Ravinder Singh, both residents of Ambala Cantonment, were convicted of committing house trespass, defiling a place of worship, and promoting enmity by Judicial Magistrate First Class Akshay Arora. The court rejected the duo’s plea for leniency, despite their claims to be the sole breadwinners for their families.
Catholic World News
CatholicCulture.org from Trinity Communications
Catholic World News (CWN) is an independent Catholic news service staffed by lay Catholic journalists, dedicated to providing accurate global news from a distinctly Catholic perspective.
St. Teresa of Avila: La Madre - St. Teresa of Avila (1515 - 1582) was already being called a saint and a doctor within her lifetime. She was a visionary who suffered greatly from physical illness and spiritual disappointment, when even some of her friends didn’t believe that her mystical experiences were real. She founded 17 convents and reformed the Carmelite order, all in the face of extreme opposition, even from the Spanish Inquisition.
On good men, good women, and marriage…after longer courtships -Today’s Catholics may well be more aware than in previous generations of the need for a long and controlled preparation when pursuing a religious vocation, for the simple reason that such a commitment is expected to be very difficult—and hard to reverse. When it comes to a man and a woman's mutual commitment to each other, we tend not to consider the dangers of inadequate preparation or of a whirlwind romance.
The Resurrection: Mere attraction to truth is not enough - There is a dramatic difference between a motivation to be interested in, attracted to, or impressed by Christianity, or even to be convinced of the institutional benefits of the Catholic Church, and a compelling reason to believe that all this was actually started and has been conserved by God Himself, in the Person of Jesus Christ, true God and true man. My point is that the Resurrection is more than a mere motive of credibility. It is a reality check. It demands a change of life.
Nutshell reflections for 3/30/26:
USCCB Daily Reflection AUDIO - March 30, 2026
Monday of Holy Week
Word on Fire
Landmark gender-transition surgery lawsuit & the future
By Henry T. Edmondson III, March 30, 2026
It was only a matter of time before the youthful victims of irreversible “gender-affirming care” began to turn on their caregivers. In January, a young woman who underwent gender-transition surgery at age sixteen was awarded a landmark $2 million jury verdict in her malpractice lawsuit against the medical practitioners who encouraged her into life-changing “treatment.” The monetary award may be cold comfort: She will not get her breasts back. The jury decision is a promise that psychologists, psychiatrists, hospitals, and urological surgeons will pay a price for their misadventure into a brave new gender world. Expect them to lose their malpractice insurance as well. This is not the first litigation by those who have been damaged: Dozens of other individuals have also filed suits, but this is the most public and most significant.
Dominicana
Jesus’s profound grief in the Garden of Gethsemane
By Br. John Metilly, O.P., March 21, 2026
Palm Sunday, the first day of Holy Week, will culminate in the Holy Triduum and Easter, the holiest day of the year, when Our Lord, thought dead and buried, conquered sin and death forever through His Resurrection (Matthew 26:14-27:66). Last week, for Passion Sunday, we heard the shortest verse in the Bible: “And Jesus wept.” (Jn 11:35) Together, these passages show that Our Lord was truly and unmistakably human, contrary to the Gnostic, Monophysite and Monothelite heretics of the early Church. Because of His divinity, He assumed not only one human being but humanity itself, thus He felt the full weight of pain and grief that men have experienced since the Fall, every injury and illness, loss and betrayal, abuse and exploitation, hatred and prejudice, derision and mockery — all in the Garden of Gethsemane, even before enduring many of these personally in His Passion.
National Catholic Register
Holiness is the best defense of the faith
By Matt D’Antuono, March 29, 2026
Church scandals, stories about the history of the Church, encounters with bad Catholics, stories about the Church’s interaction with science, sound bites and headlines that cast Catholics and Church teaching in a bad light, and a host of logical fallacies, like chronological snobbery, have built up in most people an automatic negative reaction to Catholicism. Some of these things may, in fact, be accurate, but most people have probably gotten only “straw men,” which are not the full story and do not accurately represent the Church, Church teaching, or the Church’s role in events. Defending the faith puts us in the position of Socrates, who said at his trial that he had to box with shadows. You cannot box with a shadow, but you can dispel the shadow by shining a light on it. That light must be the light of love and mercy — the light of holiness; not holiness as self-righteous, holier-than-thou superciliousness (which is not really holiness, anyway), but the true joyful and humble holiness that comes from an encounter and the unwavering love for Christ.
Bishop Barron Reflections
That will not be the end of their surprise
By Bishop Robert Barron, March 30, 2026
Friends, in today’s Gospel, Mary of Bethany anoints Jesus for his death and burial. By this act, she anticipates the visit of three women to Jesus' tomb. Early on the morning of the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome will bring spices to anoint the body of Jesus. They will look in and see a young man—and be frightened out of their wits. Can you imagine? You walk into a tomb, fully expecting to see a dead body, and you see instead someone alive and well—someone different than the man who was buried there! But that will not be the end of their surprise. From this grave of Jesus, we will learn that everything we took to be the case is not the case. God is the enemy of death, and he has shown us his power over death in the most unambiguous way. Our lives no longer need to be dominated by the fear of death, and we see the proof of this in the most vivid way imaginable.
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