Saint Joseph Catholic Church

Ozarks First, the digital news platform of two television stations in Springfield, Missouri, examined the history of The Menace, a Missouri-based anti-Catholic weekly newspaper founded in 1911.

“By September 1913, circulation surpassed 1 million,” Kathryn Skopec wrote in her article, published yesterday. “In comparison, the New York World reported 383,000, the Chicago American 363,000 and the New York Times 250,000.”

Skopec reported that “from 1917 to 1919, internal disputes and America’s entry into World War I deepened the Menace’s decline.” The newspaper’s offices, based in the town of Aurora, were destroyed in a 1919 fire.

The National Commission for Justice and Peace, a lay body within the Portuguese Episcopal Conference, lamented the domestic, regional, and international rise in military spending.

“An unprecedented increase is expected for our country and for the other members of the European Union,” the commission stated on December 29. “This union of states born as an alternative to a past of continuous wars seems to prepare for the inevitability of war. And it does so through deterrence.”

“There are alternatives that serve to build this authentic peace, which certainly does not rest on surrender to injustice,” the commission continued. “This authentic peace is built by the implementation of international law, cooperation between states, the development of peoples, [and] regime changes by peaceful means (changes that recent history also records).”

Armed bandits broke into a Nigerian parish residence at 2:30 AM yesterday and attacked two priests, the Lagos-based Vanguard reported. One of the priests, Father Chris Pever, underwent surgery after suffering an arm fracture.

The attack took place in Mararaba, a town in Nasarawa State.

A Latin-rite bishop in Ukraine criticized the Trump administration’s position on the Russo-Ukrainian war.

“I remember how we listened to the Voice of America radio station when I was a child under Soviet rule, and always knew it presented the truth, standing up for human rights and suffering people,” Bishop Stanislav Szyrokoradiuk, OFM, of Odesa-Simferopol said in an interview with OSV News. “To hear this same voice today defending the evildoer and demanding we reward him for his crimes is deeply shocking and hurtful. Yet we know this isn’t the true voice of Americans.”

Bishop Szyrokoradiuk said that those “who’ve taken power” in the US aren’t “interested in truth and justice.”

“Wickedness should be punished—to ensure its perpetrators no longer steal and kill,” the prelate added. “How can we trust people to defend us and uphold our rights when they’re clearly pursuing quite different interests of their own and are ready to do business with criminals? In the end, we can only pray for their conversion.”

The secretary of the Dicastery for Evangelization strongly criticized the Nigerian government for its inability to protect Christians and called on Muslims to “denounce and reject the use of their religion to commit acts of violence.”

In an interview with the Fides News Agency, Archbishop Fortunatus Nwachukwu, a native of Nigeria, said that “numerous indications suggest that there are groups determined to systematically attack Christian communities”—a far different assessment from that of Nigerian Archbishop Matthew Hassan Kukah, who recently dismissed claims of persecution there.

Archbishop Nwachukwu also suggested that the recent US strikes in Nigeria might be justified. Asked to comment on whether the strikes were “appropriate and viable,” he said:

A country can find itself unable to cope with its own crises and divisions without external help. I see many Muslim friends who do not know how to react to what is happening, and the government’s inaction is evident. In this situation, external intervention, even indirect, to support the state and the government against extremist groups and help the country eliminate the causes of widespread violence, might not be entirely unjustified or out of place.

The Vatican is commemorating the third anniversary of the death of Pope Benedict XVI with two memorial Masses.

Cardinal Gerhard Müller, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith from 2012 to 2017, was the principal celebrant at the memorial Mass last evening at the Altar of the Chair in St. Peter’s Basilica (video). Cardinal Kurt Koch, prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity, celebrates Mass today at the late Pontiff’s tomb.

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The mayor of Rome expressed a “very positive” assessment of the jubilee year, which draws to a close on January 6.

The jubilee “has been—and continues to be—an extraordinary jubilee in terms of the level of participation and in terms of the spirit of genuine, tangible hope we have seen in the millions of pilgrims who have come, and who continue to come, to Rome,” Roberto Gualtieri said in an interview with Vatican News. “Rome gave the jubilee great commitment and many volunteers, but we must not forget that the city received an enormous amount from this jubilee, thanks to which the face of the city has improved.”

In his 2023 year-end homily, Pope Francis criticized the city of Rome for its deficient functionality. In his 2024 year-end homily, Pope Francis thanked the city’s mayor for “moving the city forward” through construction projects.

In an unsigned, front-page editorial in its December 30 edition, the Vatican newspaper said that this image by illustrator Filippo Sassoli “perfectly summarizes the meaning of a year that is about to end.”

“The dove of peace invites us to look upwards, towards that star that leads to Life and Truth,” according to L’Osservatore Romano. “But the man-machine, instead, stubbornly turns its gaze downwards, closed in on itself and its own selfishness.”

The editorial continued:

It is a machine with human features, increasingly human, with ever greater potential, almost without limits. And it looks (with astonishment?) at the being it holds in its hands: the dove of peace. Peace is in its hands. It can suffocate it or release it to realize its dream of hope.

Citing Pope Leo’s Message for the World Day of Peace, the Vatican newspaper added that while AI has had promising results in health care, there have also been “disturbing signs: let us think of its use in the military field.”

The Prefecture of the Papal Household announced that 3,176,620 people attended papal Masses, audiences, and other events at the Vatican in 2025: 262,820 during the last months of Pope Francis’s papacy, and 2,913,800 during the beginning of Pope Leo’s.

In 2024, 1,682,100 people attended papal events at the Vatican, according to ZENIT News’s compilation of data from the Prefecture. The last time the attendance figure surpassed 3 million was in 2016.