A Russian air attack on Kyiv and the surrounding region killed two people on Monday, marking what appeared to be the first reported fatalities from strikes on the Ukrainian capital this year.

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The Latin American and Caribbean Episcopal Council (CELAM) expresses its closeness to the Church and the Venezuelan people in their struggle for peace, justice, and reconciliation. In a message of hope, it reaffirms its commitment to the most vulnerable and to building a future of dignity for all.

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Over 5,000 Jubilee volunteers, who have accompanied over 33 million pilgrims during the Jubilee of Hope, cross the Holy Door in St. Peter’s Basilica, symbolically bringing the Holy Year to a close.

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Pope Leo XIV prays the Angelus on the Solemnity of the Epiphany of the Lord, reflecting on the Magi adoring the Christ Child, and invites us to be 'weavers of hope' where 'in the place of inequality, there may be fairness,' and where 'the industry of war be replaced by the craft of peace.'

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On the Solemnity of the Epiphany of the Lord, Pope Leo XIV presides over Holy Mass in St Peter’s Basilica for some 5,800 faithful and closes the last Holy Door - marking the official end of the Jubilee Year of Hope.

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Jan 5, 2026 / 18:52 pm (CNA).

Twenty years ago, Lauri Hauser, a Catholic mom of two and high school math teacher from Madison, Wisconsin, started a chant with her children — something simple and fun that would keep God and their faith at the forefront of their minds.

“I would chant ‘IC’ and they would respond, ‘2KG,’” Hauser told CNA in an interview.

“IC2KG,” which stands for “I choose to know God,” would be chanted around the Hauser household as chores would be done, while the kids played, and after flag football games in the backyard.

Fast forward 20 years and the family chant is now being shared with children in Catholic schools and, most recently, at the SEEK 2026 conference in Denver, which took place Jan. 1–5.

Hauser explained that it was her youngest son, Joe, who inspired his mother to start her IC2KG ministry. While in college, Joe was a part of an Athletes in Action group and asked his mom if she could make IC2KG shirts for the young men in the group.

“I said, ‘No. We don’t do T-shirts and this is just kind of a family thing and I’m kind of private with my faith,’” she recalled.

After breaking his arm before his senior year of college, Joe took it upon himself to create a T-shirt design with the “IC2KG” phrase printed on the front. One hundred shirts were made and they were a huge hit among the athletes. It was after this that Hauser thought this could become a ministry.

Despite attending a Catholic grade school and college, Hauser never felt completely comfortable sharing her faith publicly. After the success of the T-shirts, she began to think that “maybe these are the words, or the saying, that somebody needs to be bold and be brave and stand up and be strong and be courageous to share our faith.”

“I thought maybe this could be something that kids could catch on to or kids could keep in their heart — I choose to know God. We need to make that choice every day that we get up,” she added.

Using her background in education, Hauser created a program that she now takes to Catholic schools in Wisconsin and neighboring states, as well as through Zoom, in order to speak with schools that are further away.

The program aims to teach kids how to know, love, serve, and share God with others. Some of the elements of the program include testimonies from older kids to young children, teaching kids the IC2KG chant, pairing younger kids with an older IC2KG buddy, and playing games such as IC2KG bingo. Many elements of the program vary from school to school.

The program also includes a powerful demonstration where a child is asked to stand on a ball. The other kids observe and then share what they see, such as the child on the ball is wobbly, unsure of himself, or is shaky. That child then goes and stands on a prop Bible.

“Then the kids will observe and say, ‘Oh yeah, when you’re standing on the Bible, you are steadfast, you’re strong, you’re solid. This is the foundation,’” Hauser said.

Hauser has also designed more apparel with the IC2KG message. Her website includes T-shirts, hats, stickers, and wristbands with the hope that people will join her movement to inspire the faithful everywhere to know, love, serve, and share God with others.

During the SEEK 2026 conference, Hauser greeted college students from all over the country at the IC2KG booth. She called her first experience at SEEK “beautiful” and that her heart was “booming.”

“The response has been amazing. They’re all excited,” she added. “I’ve had conversations with kids and they’re like, ‘Yeah, I'm not really great at sharing.’ I said, ‘You know, neither am I, but it’s kind of time to take the duct tape off the word share — just take it off like a Band-Aid and let’s just do it because now is the time ... It’s just going to be a more beautiful world if we all share our faith.’”

She said that as she folds each piece of clothing, she recites a prayer over it: “Bless the person who wears this shirt and help them spread your message.”

Hauser said she hopes her ministry will “help people to just take that little step forward” and act as a “little life raft to help us go to the public square and share our faith.”

Jan 5, 2026 / 18:32 pm (CNA).

The Archdiocese of New Orleans released a letter written to child sexual abuse claimants apologizing for the “inexcusable harm” they suffered.

“On behalf of the clergy, religious, and laity of the Archdiocese of New Orleans,” Archbishop Gregory Aymond of New Orleans expressed in the Dec. 26, 2025, letter his “profound regret over the tragic and inexcusable harm” child abuse survivors suffered.

The letter was made public on Jan. 4 and emphasized that the Archdiocese of New Orleans “takes responsibility for the abuse.” Aymond said the archdiocese “pledges to keep children and all vulnerable people safe in our ministry.”

“I sincerely apologize to you for the trauma caused to you and to those close to you as a survivor of sexual abuse perpetrated by a member of the clergy, a religious sister or brother, or a lay employee or volunteer working within the Catholic Church,” Aymond said.

“I am ashamed that you or anyone should have been sexually abused by someone working within the Catholic Church. Sexual abuse is an inexcusable evil, and I am ashamed that you or anyone should have been sexually abused by someone working within the Catholic Church.”

“Please know that you are not to blame for the abuse perpetrated on you,” Aymond said. “You were and are completely innocent and did nothing to deserve the pain you have suffered because of the hideous crime of sexual abuse of a minor.”

‘Recognition’ provisions

The public release of the letter is a part of an “extensive media outreach” to express the Archdiocese of New Orleans’ “commitment to the nonmonetary provisions laid out in its Chapter 11 settlement plan,” according to the Clarion Herald, the official newspaper of the archdiocese.

The letter follows the October 2025 approval for a $230 million bankruptcy settlement to pay out over 650 victims after five years of litigation.

The Chapter 11 case filed in 2020 highlights a number of procedures in its nonmonetary provisions “to foster child protection and prevent child sexual abuse.” Within its “recognition” section, the document calls for individual apology letters and a public apology letter.

“It is my fervent hope that as we bring these Chapter 11 proceedings to a close, you will achieve some sense of peace, justice, and healing,” Aymond wrote in the letter. “I hold you and all survivors of abuse in prayer daily and encourage all to join me in prayer for you.”

The letter will be shared through multiple media outlets over the upcoming days and weeks.

Jan 5, 2026 / 18:02 pm (CNA).

Cardinal José Francisco Robles Ortega, archbishop of Guadalajara, Mexico, said that authorities have a “mandate to protect us” from violence and therefore encouraged the population to “demand” that they fulfill their duty.

“Bringing to justice those who commit violence, those who commit homicides or injustices, that is the responsibility of the authorities,” he said at a Jan. 1 press conference, according to the Archdiocese of Guadalajara’s press office.

The cardinal also denounced the fact that small-business owners are being extorted, pointing out that they “now don’t earn” enough “even to pay the protection money” demanded by criminals, which is why “many are closing their small businesses.”

Furthermore, to confront the violence, the cardinal reminded everyone that “peace is born and nurtured in the heart of each and every person,” since all forms of violence have the same point of origin, “from those who commit violence with an offensive word to those who commit violence by firing a weapon at a brother.”

In this way, each citizen’s contribution to ending violence begins with “being at peace in our own hearts, in harmony with God and his loving and merciful plan.”

It is also important “that families pay attention to what their children are doing, who they are associating with, and what opportunities they are being offered,” said the archbishop, who considered it “distressing that organized crime is recruiting teenagers who often do not find acceptance, support, or protection within their families.”

Despite a significant decrease in homicides in 2025, reaching the lowest figure in a decade, Mexico remains a country heavily affected by violence, especially from organized crime.

Impunity is one of the most serious factors in the fight against crime in Mexico. According to the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI), in 2024, “93.2% of the 33.5 million crimes that occurred were not reported, or the authorities did not open an investigation file. This underreporting is known as the dark figure of crime.”

In the list of the 50 most violent cities in the world in 2024, 20 cities were in Mexico.

Cristero centennial

Robles also spoke about the activities planned to commemorate on July 31 the 100th anniversary of the entry into force of the so-called “Calles Law,” the legislation that severely restricted Catholic worship in Mexico and triggered the spontaneous armed uprising of believers in various parts of the country, known as the Cristero War.

Jalisco was one of the regions where Catholics offered the most resistance to the violence and anticlerical measures of the Mexican federal government.

The centennial was noted by the Mexican Bishops’ Conference in its Nov. 13, 2025, message to the people of God titled “The Church in Mexico: Memory and Prophecy — Pilgrims of Hope Towards the Centenary of Our Martyrs.”

On that occasion, the conference expressed its desire to honor “the memory of the more than 200,000 martyrs who gave their lives defending their faith: children, young people, and the elderly; farmers, laborers, and professionals; priests, religious, and laypeople.”

The archbishop of Guadalajara recalled that failing to respect the “fundamental right” to religious freedom “was the cause of the uprising of the Cristero War.”

Referring again to organized crime, the cardinal pointed out that “violence does not solve anything, violence makes things worse, violence opens wounds that do not heal even with the passage of time.”

This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.

Jan 5, 2026 / 17:32 pm (CNA).

Bishop Robert Barron, founder of the Word on Fire ministry, criticized New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani for promising constituents “the warmth of collectivism” in his Jan. 1 inaugural address.

Mamdani, who defeated two candidates with nearly 51% of the vote in the November election, won on a democratic socialist platform. His plans include free buses, city-owned grocery stores, no-cost child care, raising the minimum wage to $30 per hour, and freezing the rent for people in rent-stabilized apartments.

“We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism,” Mamdani said in his inaugural address.

“If our campaign demonstrated that the people of New York yearn for solidarity, then let this government foster it,” he said. “Because no matter what you eat, what language you speak, how you pray, or where you come from — the words that most define us are the two we all share: New Yorkers.”

Barron, bishop of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota, said in a post on X that this line “took my breath away.”

“Collectivism in its various forms is responsible for the deaths of at least 100 million people in the last century,” Barron said.

“Socialist and communist forms of government around the world today — Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, etc. — are disastrous,” he added. “Catholic social teaching has consistently condemned socialism and has embraced the market economy, which people like Mayor Mamdani caricature as ‘rugged individualism.’ In fact, it is the economic system that is based upon the rights, freedom, and dignity of the human person.”

“For God’s sake, spare me the ‘warmth of collectivism,’” Barron concluded.

Catholic teaching on socialism

Both socialism and communism have been condemned by many popes, first by Pope Pius IX in his 1849 encyclical Nostis et Nobiscum, just one year after Karl Marx published “ The Communist Manifesto.”

The foundation of Catholic social teaching rests on Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum.

In the encyclical, Leo denounced socialism and communism, and also condemned poor labor conditions for the working class and employers “who use human beings as mere instruments for moneymaking.”

“Each needs the other: Capital cannot do without labor, nor labor without capital,” the 19th century pontiff wrote. “Mutual agreement results in the beauty of good order, while perpetual conflict necessarily produces confusion and savage barbarity.”

Pope Pius XI, in his 1931 encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, wrote of the importance of private property, that man must be able to “fully cultivate and develop all his faculties unto the praise and glory of his Creator; and that by faithfully fulfilling the duties of his craft or other calling he may obtain for himself temporal and at the same time eternal happiness.”

Socialism, he said, is “wholly ignoring and indifferent to this sublime end of both man and society, affirms that human association has been instituted for the sake of material advantage alone.”

“Religious socialism, Christian socialism, are contradictory terms; no one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist,” Pius XI wrote.

Pope Benedict XVI differentiated socialism and democratic socialism. In 2006, he wrote: “In many respects, democratic socialism was and is close to Catholic social doctrine and has in any case made a remarkable contribution to the formation of a social consciousness.”

Though, in his 2005 encyclical Deus Caritas Est, Benedict XVI wrote that government should not control everything but that society needs a state that, “in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, generously acknowledges and supports initiatives arising from the different social forces and combines spontaneity with closeness to those in need.”

Pope Francis has criticized Marxist ideology but also “radical individualism,” which he said in his 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti “makes us believe that everything consists in giving free rein to our own ambitions, as if by pursuing ever greater ambitions and creating safety nets we would somehow be serving the common good.”

In 2024, Francis encouraged cooperation and dialogue between Marxists and Christians.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches: “The Church has rejected the totalitarian and atheistic ideologies associated in modem times with ‘communism’ or ‘socialism.’ She has likewise refused to accept, in the practice of ‘capitalism,’ individualism and the absolute primacy of the law of the marketplace over human labor.”

Jan 5, 2026 / 17:02 pm (CNA).

Bishop David L. Ricken of Green Bay, Wisconsin, has issued an edict formally announcing a diocesan inquiry into the life of Servant of God Adele Brice, the 19th-century Belgian immigrant who received the only Church-approved Marian apparitions in the United States.

The edict, made on Dec. 28, 2025, during Mass on the feast of the Holy Family at St. Francis Xavier Cathedral in Green Bay, Wisconsin, invites the faithful to submit testimonies that could support her cause for beatification and canonization, including personal experiences, documents, or accounts of intercessions attributed to Brice.

The edict stems from a formal petition, or Supplex libellus, submitted on May 24, 2024, by Valentina Culurgioni, the appointed postulator for the cause, on behalf of the National Shrine of Our Lady of Champion, the actor of the cause.

The apparitions of Our Lady

Adele Brice, born in Belgium in 1831, immigrated to Wisconsin with her family in 1855 and reported three apparitions of a lady dressed in white in 1859 near what is now Champion, Wisconsin.

Brice spoke about the apparitions to her parish priest, who instructed her to ask the lady if she saw her again: “In God’s name, who are you and what do you want of me?”

Brice fell on her knees and asked the lady the question the third time she appeared, and the lady identified herself as the “Queen of Heaven who prays for the conversion of sinners” and told Brice to do the same.

The lady, who wore a flowing white garment with a yellow sash and whose head was surrounded with stars, told the young Belgian immigrant to “make a general confession and offer Communion for the conversion of sinners. If they do not convert and do penance, my Son will be obliged to punish them.”

She also instructed Brice to “gather the children in this wild country and teach them what they should know for salvation.”

In response to Brice’s question: “But how shall I teach them who know so little myself?” the lady responded: “Teach them their catechism, how to sign themselves with the sign of the cross, and how to approach the sacraments; that is what I wish you to do. Go and fear nothing, I will help you.”

Brice went on to dedicate her life to the mission, gathering other women to help her and establishing a schoolhouse and convent. The women endured hardship, traveling great distances in all types of weather and often facing uncertainty about how they would afford the food for their next meal.

Brice’s father built a chapel at the site of the apparitions, which eventually became a shrine to Our Lady of Good Help. The name was taken from the words the Blessed Mother said to Brice: “I will help you.”

In Oct. 8, 1871, the day before the 12-year anniversary of Our Lady’s final appearance to Brice on Oct. 9, 1859, the Great Peshtigo Fire, known as the most devastating fire in U.S. history, killed between 1,200 and 2,400 people and burned 1.2 million acres.

Brice and people from the countryside took shelter in the chapel, where they lifted a statue of Mary and processed through the sanctuary. In the morning, the area surrounding the shrine was devastated, yet the shrine’s grounds remained untouched.

Thousands of people still celebrate this miracle today on Oct. 8, where they participate in an all-night prayer through Oct. 9, the day of Our Lady’s final appearance to Brice.

In 2022, the Vatican gave its formal stamp of approval to the apparitions Brice witnessed, recognizing the newly named National Shrine of Our Lady of Champion in Champion, Wisconsin, as an approved apparition site.

The cause for Brice’s canonization gained momentum in June 2024 when the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops unanimously voted to advance it at the diocesan level during its spring assembly in Louisville, Kentucky.

Ricken, who has long championed the shrine, which attracts over 200,000 pilgrims annually, told CNA in 2024 that “the Blessed Mother is calling people to come to the shrine to experience the peace there, the simplicity; the basics of the Gospel, the catechism are exposed there.”

“She’s really current for now because we’re facing the same problems — people not knowing the faith, people having fallen away from the Church. She’s a model for us of what it means to be an evangelizing catechist. She’s very pertinent for today as well,” Ricken said in June 2024.

Testimonies must be either handwritten or digitally composed and printed, include a declaration of truthfulness, and bear a signature. The diocese stresses that unsigned or typed-only submissions will not be accepted as formal evidence.

This inquiry marks the first phase of the canonization process, potentially leading to Brice being declared “venerable” if her heroic virtues are confirmed.

Candidates for beatification and canonization normally require two miracles attributed to their intercession as well as evidence that they were holy and virtuous.

In 2024, Ricken told CNA about two possible miracles being investigated: a woman named Sharon said that while hospitalized for depression, she saw a vision of a woman she believed to be Brice, who gave her the will to live a joyful life of faith.

The second person to testify, a man named John, was diagnosed in 2018 with colorectal cancer, which had metastasized to his lungs. He received what he believes to be a miraculous cure after he prayed for Brice’s intercession.

“As of January 2022, I was declared with no evidence of disease, and I have been without cancer detected through my last scans all the way through April 2024,” Ricken quoted the man’s testimony.

Our Lady of Champion was the patroness of the Northern Marian Route of the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage. The pilgrimage stopped at the shrine on June 16, 2024, on its way to the National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis.

Zelda Caldwell and Zoe Romanowsky contributed to this report.