Faith

As Spain mourns the death of over 200 victims of the biggest peacetime disaster in decades, volunteers poured into the country's Valencia region to give a helping hand in cleaning up and to offer support to the devastated community.

The recovery across the South from Hurricanes Helene and Milton, powerful storms that struck back to back in early autumn, are among 177 open disasters nationwide that Catholic Charities has been addressing.

Before the synodal process began in 2021, "We were a church on a mission, now we are a synodal church on a mission," Cardinal Leonardo Steiner of Manaus, Brazil, said at a Vatican briefing Oct. 15. "The synod on the Amazon helped open up this experience (of synodality) and the participation of everyone."

As the second and final session of the synod on synodality continues at the Vatican, the roots of that meeting trace back to the Synod of Bishops for the Pan-Amazon region held a half-decade earlier.

A symposium at Siena College in New York looked at the ethical and spiritual implications of the global environmental crisis, and heard messages from Pope Francis and U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres.

The tremendous response from people across the diocese and the region is inspiring but not surprising to the bishop. That's how most people are, because we are made in the image and likeness of a loving and generous God, he said.

"Sometimes I wonder how I can possibly weave Francis' difficult and often uncomfortable lessons into my exceedingly comfortable existence," writes Mary DeTurris Poust. "How do those of us with warm homes and busy jobs and nice clothes make St. Francis into something more than a decoration or a mascot?"

In the wake of Hurricane Helene a small mission parish in Tennessee has been providing relief effort as it mourns the deaths of two parishioners from the storm.