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CRUX
Bishop says deadly mine collapse exposes deep economic sins
By Ngala Killian Chimtom, August 23, 2026
After a deadly accident in an off-limits mine in South Africa earlier this month, Bishop Thulani V. Mbuyisa of Kokstad says writing the victims off as “illegal miners” is a moral failure that allows the true culprits to escape scrutiny. Mbuyisa is calling for accountability. Tens of thousands of so-called “artisanal” miners work illegally in disused gold and platinum mines formerly operated by mining outfits, or else dig their own mines in search of deposits, often working without proper safety equipment. Over 100 people perished in an August 18 incident, when a landslide struck an open-pit gold mine in Zamboyé. The government of the Central African Republic (CAR) closed the site on Saturday, citing non-compliance with regulatory procedures. Many of the miners who work these dangerous sites are undocumented immigrants. Sometimes, miners spend weeks underground. Fourteen such workers died on August 10, after a disused mine gave way in the Nkaneng informal settlement near Rustenburg and Marikana, South Africa.
National Catholic Register
100 years of ‘Winnie-the-Pooh’: Virtues in the 100-acre wood
By Alyssa Murphy, August 24, 2026
A century after A.A. Milne first introduced a ‘Bear of Very Little Brain’ to the world, the tales of the Hundred Acre Wood continue to resonate far beyond the realm of children’s literature. For former Anglican chaplain to the Queen of England and Catholic convert Gavin Ashenden, Milne’s classic work continues to inspire not only as timeless storytelling, but as a subtle reflection of profound Christian truths. “A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh endures not merely as whimsy but as a quiet catechesis in the virtues,” Ashenden told the Register. “The Hundred Acre Wood is populated by souls each marked by a besetting weakness — Eeyore’s despondency, Piglet’s timidity, Owl’s vanity, Rabbit’s officiousness — and yet none is ever mocked out of the community or reformed by force. They are loved as they are, which is itself a very Catholic instinct: charity does not wait for our neighbor to become likable before extending itself.”
EWTN News
Massachusetts high court rules against saints statues
By Matt McDonald, August 21, 2026
Two statues of Catholic saints will remain off of a Massachusetts city’s new public safety building for the foreseeable future now that the state’s highest court has upheld a lower court order prohibiting them from being erected. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled Thursday that the $850,000, 10-foot-tall bronze statues of St. Michael and St. Florian are so closely allied with Catholicism that putting them on a public building would amount to “government preferential treatment of a particular religion,” thus violating the state constitution. “The likelihood that these statues of religious figures closely associated with the Catholic faith could be viewed by the public as endorsement of a particular religion, and thus subordination of others, is enhanced by the fact that the statues are not part of a larger collection of statues and monuments that includes nonreligious ones, or statues of figures of particular importance to other religions.”
PIMA asia news
Women-only buses to combat harassment and overcrowding
By Sumon Corraya, August 22, 2026
This week, a bright pink bus traveled along streets in the Bangladeshi capital, driven by 28-year-old Khadija Akhter and carrying more than just passengers. For many women in Dhaka, in fact, public transport has long been virtually unusable due to safety concerns arising from overcrowding and the harassment they face – now daily worries. For this reason, the new service represents a small but equally significant step towards safer travel and greater visibility and presence of women in public life. On 18 August, the Bangladesh Road Transport Corporation (BRTC) officially launched its new women-only bus service, putting 10 buses into service on the capital’s main routes. Further buses serving the same purpose have also been introduced in Chittagong, Bogura and other districts. What makes this initiative unique is the fact that the buses are operated entirely by women. Both the drivers and the ticket collectors are women – a rare sight in Bangladesh’s public transport sector.
The Pillar
What awaits Archbishop Gallagher in Russia?
By Luke Coppen, August 20, 2026
The Vatican’s Secretary for Relations with States is expected to embark next week on a highly sensitive foreign trip. Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher, often described as the Vatican’s “foreign minister,” is scheduled to travel to Russia Aug. 24-28, according to Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova. The planned trip is the English archbishop’s first to Russia since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. He is likely to find a country much changed since his last visit in November 2021. Russia today is reeling from long-range Ukrainian drone strikes on its military infrastructure, energy facilities, and logistics hubs. The nation has suffered an estimated 1.4 million military casualties in Ukraine, an unprecedented array of sanctions, gas shortages, surging food costs, and a dramatic deterioration of commercial and diplomatic ties with much of the Western world.
Zeale
UK asks immigrants ‘not to rape women and children’
By S.A. McCarthy, August 21, 2026
Amidst widespread concern over mass immigration in the United Kingdom, the government is publishing pamphlets urging refugees not to rape women and children. The UK’s Home Office (the nation’s equivalent to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security) published a series of pamphlets for “asylum seekers” earlier this week, designed to assist purported asylum seekers and refugees to “understand what is expected of you when living in the UK. These rules and expectations are not just for people seeking asylum; they apply to everyone living here.” The document warns that under British law, “men and women have equal rights” and that men cannot “stop a woman from working or studying,” “control what a woman wears or where she goes,” “stop a woman from seeing friends or family,” or “make decisions for a woman without her agreement.”
Aleteia
The Vatican’s medieval garden is now fully organic
By D. R. Esparza, August 24, 2026
Inside the Vatican Gardens, next to the Mater Ecclesiae monastery where Benedict XVI spent his last years, a vegetable garden of about 400 square meters (0.1 acres) is divided into four cultivation zones. It has been producing food for the papal table since the 13th century. As Vatican News reported, it is now fully organic. The garden traces its origins to Pope Nicholas III Orsini, who moved the papal residence from the Lateran to the Vatican between 1277 and 1280 and immediately commissioned a fruit garden and a viridarium within the new walls. Eight centuries later, the same plot is still producing food. The transition to fully organic management means production follows the soil's and the seasons' natural rhythms. Certified pelletized fertilizer, selected by season and plant needs, has replaced the manure previously brought from the Pontifical Villas at Castel Gandolfo. Crop rotation preserves soil fertility.
Zenit
New platform to help clergy turn sermons into books
By ZENIT Staff, August 21, 2026
Your Book Pro, a British book-writing and publishing platform, lets Christian leaders upload sermon recordings, transcripts, notes, and existing documents. It identifies the main messages, stories, quotations and recurring themes, then suggests the strongest concepts around which a book could be built. These ideas form the backbone of a book plan. Authors can then write or dictate new material, fill gaps and respond to editorial feedback as the manuscript develops. Your Book Pro founder Tom said: “Too many sermons are preached once and then left in dusty archives. Yet anyone who has prepared a sermon knows how much thought, research and experience it can contain. A minister may already have the substance of a valuable book. What is often missing is the time, confidence and editorial structure needed to uncover it.”
Keep informed - 8/24/26 news for Catholics:
Snippets: EWTN News, Catholic World Report, & Catholic World News
EWTN News
EWTN’s top headlines — August 24, 2026
EWTN News provides reliable, free, up-to-the-minute news affecting the Universal Church, with updates on the Holy Father's words and the Holy See.
Why the Church should promote religious tourism: An expert explains - By Diego López Marina - Religious tourism is far from reaching its full potential, according to Adrián Lomello, director for the Americas of the World Religious Tourism Network. He said the situation represents an opportunity the Church should not let slip by.
‘An unborn child is a child’: Lawyer questions lack of empathy regarding pregnancy loss - By Diego López Marina - Ecuadorian lawyer Pablo Proaño questioned the lack of empathy for families who lose a child during pregnancy and called for protocols to support them. His remarks followed the death due to a pregnancy complication of Stefano, the son of Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa and his wife, Lavinia Valbonesi.
How the skull of St. Rose of Lima is preserved - By Walter Sánchez Silva - “St. Rose’s skull has been here in the basilica since the late 1800s, around the time this neoclassical altarpiece was created,” the priest explained, standing before the reliquary housing the first-class relic. Her bones “have been divided into minuscule fragments, and relics of St. Rose of Lima are found in a great number of places all over the world.”
Catholic World Report
CWR’s Columns, Analysis, & Features
Catholic World Report is a free online magazine that examines the news from a faithful Catholic perspective.
Unbroken: News from the Church in China - Anthony E. Clark, Ph.D., August 23, 2026 - Sitting in the room with Chinese priests and nuns is always an exercise of patient listening and reading between the lines. Sometimes—it is not typically characteristic of Chinese culture to speak directly—someone is blunt. Wen Kang (1850) describes China’s Catholics today. “Bend a hundred times but never break.”
“Adore Him” combines history and testimony in promoting Eucharistic adoration - Jim Graves, August 21, 2026 Spirit Filled Hearts Ministry, a Catholic evangelization apostolate founded and led by Deacon Steve Greco, director of evangelization and formation for the Diocese of Orange in California, has produced a film titled “Adore Him.”
Faith over fear: The Church’s response to the escalating Ebola crisis in Congo - Ngala Killian Chimtom, August 15, 2026 - The Democratic Republic of the Congo is grappling with the fastest-growing Ebola outbreak in its history. It’s already killed over 2,100 people out of more than 4,500 cases, according to government figures released August 11.
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.
What I saw in Israel—Part 1 - Peter Wolfgang - If you are over a certain age and hail from a blue state, there is a feeling you get when visiting, say, Ron DeSantis’s Florida. You know the one. “Oh my goodness, people are happy here. They’re vibrant. They’re young! The America I remember from the 1980s, it’s still out there somewhere!” Tel Aviv and Jerusalem have a very similar vibe.
How can lay Catholics spur bishops into action? - Phil Lawler - Again and again, for 40 years or more, I have been involved in the same conversation. What will it take to prompt our bishops into decisive action? I don’t know.
St. Leo the Great vs. Manichaean Pedophiles - This is the first of several installments about Pope St. Leo the Great, a profoundly important figure in the development of the papacy, canon law, Christology, and more - not to mention that he saved Rome from being sacked by Attila the Hun. We begin with his local activities as bishop of Rome and metropolitan of the Roman Province, including fighting Manichaeism and correcting abuses of the sacraments of Holy Orders, Baptism, and Penance.
August 24, 2026 - USCCB Daily Mass Readings
You can listen HERE — or read HERE:
Feast of Saint Bartholomew, Apostle
Today’s Catholic commentary:
First Things
Ignorance and conviction at Columbia
By Shai Goldman, August 21, 2025
Darializa Avila Chevalier—upper Manhattan’s new congressional candidate, backed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and endorsed by Mamdani—is shaping up to be one of the most dangerous students I overlapped with at Columbia University. Although she graduated from our alma mater in 2016, she later returned to become a key presence on campus as a leader of the Gaza encampment, which took place during my senior year. After winning her primary election in June, she is practically guaranteed to enter Congress, bringing to the national conversation policy positions ranging from barring all aid to Israel to abolishing prisons and national borders. Her opinions are shared by many of my fellow alumni. At graduation, my entire class stood up to applaud the tentifada leadership. My peers—supposedly among the best and brightest young minds in the country—overwhelmingly believe in a set of absurd and repulsive anti-Semitic ideas.
Christian Post
Socialist movement is the result of abandoned Christian values
By Joe Toly, August 23, 2026
As a young conservative living in Michigan, it is both bewildering and incredibly alarming to see the sinister specter of socialism — which Winston Churchill aptly described as “the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance and the gospel of envy” — become more corporeal daily in my home state. Clearly, the eerie fervor amongst many young voters surrounding millionaire senatorial candidate Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed and the DSA brigade of malcontents isn't just some spontaneous eruption of misinformed idealism. Rather, it's the fruit of a decades-long institutional harvest, and conservatives unwittingly planted the seeds by refusing to tend the field. Christian intellectual C.S. Lewis warned us in The Abolition of Man, published in 1943, that education without moral formation produces “men without chests” — people with heads (intellects) and bellies (desires), but no chest — no moral center wherein one might recognize what is truly good and defend it with conviction, or where one might see what is truly evil and
combat it with vigor.
Our Sunday Visitor
‘A Catholic Guide to Being Human’ in a time of confusion
By Charlie Camosy, August 10, 2026
Is society forgetting what it means to be human? In this time of artificial intelligence and new technology, John S. Grabowski, professor of moral theology/ethics at The Catholic University of America, has a new book, “A Catholic Guide to Being Human,” about how an identity in Christ addresses the lack of self-knowledge and confusion in the world over our own humanity. “It would be an understandable reaction to think that this topic and a book devoted to it is rather strange. After all, we don’t have to do anything to be human — it’s just what we are. Why indeed would we need some kind of guide? But, in point of fact, we are deeply confused about what it means to be human.” He explained, “As a result, we don’t know how to think about these technologies and how to use them well. The passage of decades and the emergence of new and still more powerful technologies have not changed this situation. It has compounded it.
The Catholic Thing
Synodality will kill Catholicism
By Brad Miner, August 24, 2026
The Catholic Church has always distinguished itself from other Christian bodies by its claim to possess, and be bound by, a deposit of faith handed down from the Apostles. The Church comes from Christ, and the Church doesn’t invent, revise, or vote on its Magisterium, its authoritative application of that depositum fidei. It receives, guards, and transmits that ancient faith. Doctrine can develop in the sense that St. John Henry Newman described it, growing in clarity and application, as an acorn becomes an oak tree. But it cannot be renegotiated – or reversed! – by majority sentiment or contemporary enthusiasm. The claim of having received the Truth and of guarding it is the Church’s entire reason for existing and makes it something other than a voluntary religious association. But synodality, no matter what its defenders suggest, introduces a mechanism capable of dissolving that claim: a standing, undefined, participatory process for generating endless, contemporary ecclesial consensuses that increasingly function as rival sources of authority alongside, and ahead of the settled deposit of faith and, therefore, the Magisterium meant to guard it.
Image of Coconut by Celio Nicoli from Pixabay
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