Day: November 1, 2025

Scene from Nov. 1, 2025 Mass outside the Broadview facility in Chicago where immigration advocates allege federal authorities inhumanely treat detainees. / Credit: Kathleen Murphy/CNA

Chicago, Illinois, Nov 1, 2025 / 17:29 pm (CNA).

Bishop Jose María García-Maldonado celebrated a Mass Nov. 1 outside the Broadview facility in Chicago where immigration advocates allege federal authorities inhumanely treat detainees.

Maldonado, an auxiliary bishop in Chicago, and a group of eight spiritual leaders sought to bring Holy Communion to detainees and were not admitted. Mass organizers said they followed the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s guidelines to obtain access and submitted the request weeks in advance.

An estimated 2,000 Catholics attended the outdoor Mass including Sister JoAnn Persch, 91, a Sister of Mercy and longtime advocate for immigrant rights in the Chicago area.

Persch said in previous years she was granted access to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility and brought communion to detainees, but access has ceased. Obtaining access initially took time when she first began visiting the facility a decade ago, she said.

“Our motto is peacefully, respectfully, but never take no for an answer, so we kept working with ICE,” Persch said. “Finally, we got inside.”

Father David Inczauskis, S.J., who worked with the Coalition for Spiritual and Public Leadership and Broadview, Illinois’ mayor to request access, said, “On a day of All Saints, people should be able to receive communion. That’s a reasonable request to make, fitting with our Constitution and with the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.”

A full slate of information about who is inside the facility is lacking, he said. But family members of detainees say their loved ones are inside desiring communion, he said. Authorities cited “safety reasons” for denying the group access, Inczauskis said.

“The Eucharist is the source and summit of our faith. It’s such an important thing for people to be able to receive communion. To be denied that right, that opportunity, as Catholics, is devastating,” Inczauskis said.

Michael Okinczyc-Cruz, executive director of the Coalition for Spiritual and Public Leadership, cited media reports saying people are being kept at the Broadview facility for days, sleeping on floors, having medications withheld, with no showers.

The American Civil Liberties Union and Marshall Justice Center sued the federal government Oct. 31, saying migrants are housed in inhumane conditions at Broadview and denied their right to access counsel. The Department of Homeland Security has vigorously denied the allegations of subprime conditions.

Alexa Van Brunt, director of the MacArthur Justice Center’s Illinois office and lead counsel on the suit said in a statement, “Community members are being kidnapped off the streets, packed in hold cells, denied food, medical care, and basic necessities, and forced to sign away their legal rights. This is a vicious abuse of power and gross violation of basic human rights by ICE and the Department of Homeland Security. It must end now.”  

The suit alleges ICE agents at Broadview deny detainees sufficient food, water, hygiene, and medical care. The suit alleged detainees are deprived of sleep, privacy, menstrual products, and the ability to shower.   

President Donald Trump expanded use of deportations without a court hearing this year and ramped up federal law enforcement efforts to identify and arrest immigrants lacking legal status. The administration set a goal of 1 million deportations this year.

Genin De la Peña is a Chicago resident who said she attended the Mass at Broadview “because others cannot, I want to support,” she said.

Displaced Sudanese who fled El-Fasher after the city fell to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), arrive in the town of Tawila war-torn Sudan's western Darfur region on October 28, 2025. / Credit: AFP via Getty Images

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Nov 1, 2025 / 12:58 pm (CNA).

Graphic evidence emerged Friday of large-scale massacres of civilians in Sudan, including satellite imagery of bodies and blood-stained ground taken outside a hospital in Darfur.

More than 460 patients and their family members were reported shot and killed in the Saudi Maternity Hospital in El Fasher, Tuesday, after the Sudanese army surrendered the city to paramilitary fighters on Sunday following an 18-month siege.

The government’s forces remain in control of the capital city of Khartoum, according to news reports.

The massacre is the latest tragedy in the conflict that has consumed the western Darfur region since full-scale civil war broke out in 2023. 

The war between rival military factions, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), has claimed the lives of an estimated 150,000 people and displaced as many as 14 million, according to the Council on Foreign Relation’s Global Conflict Tracker.

UN: It’s the world’s ‘most devastating’ humanitarian crisis

In January, the U.S. State Department declared that the RSF had committed genocide against non-Arab ethic groups in Sudan. The United Nations has described the situation in Sudan as “most devastating humanitarian and displacement crisis in the world.” 

Former Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, earlier this year, said that “men and boys ¾ even infants ¾ on an ethnic basis” had been killed and that the RSF fighters “deliberately targeted women and girls from certain ethnic groups for rape and other forms of brutal sexual violence,” CNN reported.

The atrocities that have taken place in Sudan constitute ethnic cleansing, according to Human Rights Watch, which in its 2024 report said “crimes against humanity and widespread war crimes were committed in the context of an ethnic cleansing campaign against the ethnic Massalit and other non-Arab populations.” 

The Republic of Sudan, in northeastern Africa, has a population of about 50 million people, 90.7% of whom are Muslim, with Christians forming the largest minority. In 2019, a revolution toppled President Omar al-Bashir, ending decades of authoritarian rule. Two years later, military leader Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and paramilitary commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo ousted civilian leaders and seized power. Their forces turned on each other in April 2023, plunging the country into war.

In September, Pope Leo XIV called on Sudan’s warring leaders to end the violence in the country in order to get much-needed humanitarian assistance to the 260,000 people said to be trapped in camps for internally displaced people (IDPs) in el-Fasher. 

“Dramatic news is coming from Sudan, particularly from Darfur,” Pope Leo said. “In el-Fasher many civilians are trapped in the city, victims of famine and violence. In Tarasin, a devastating landslide has caused numerous deaths, leaving behind pain and despair. And as if that weren’t enough, the spread of cholera is threatening hundreds of thousands of people who are already exhausted.”

“I make a heartfelt appeal to those in positions of responsibility and to the international community to ensure humanitarian corridors are open and to implement a coordinated response to stop this humanitarian catastrophe,” the Pope said.

“It is a forgotten war because the people are really forgotten,” Bishop Christian Carlassare of Bentiu in South Sudan told OSV News.

“Unfortunately, it’s a forgotten war for the international community, but it’s not forgotten for the weapon merchants, who are making a lot of profits out of this war,” he told the outlet.

According to the United Nations, Sudan is becoming “the world’s largest hunger crisis in recent history.” As many as 24.6 million people ¾ more than half the population ¾ are “food insecure,” according to the U.N.

In February of this year, Catholic Relief Services and Caritas agencies warned that the Trump administration’s freezing of assistance through U.S. Agency for International Development would exacerbate an already dangerous situation.

This story was first published by the National Catholic Register.

Ryan Marr is an expert on the English saint and is a former associate editor of the Newman Studies Journal. / Credit: Courtesy of Ryan Marr

Vatican City, Nov 1, 2025 / 11:50 am (CNA).

St. John Henry Newman, the Anglican clergyman who converted to Catholicism but whom many in both London and Rome distrusted for years, stands today as a beacon that continues to inspire many to embrace the Catholic faith as he did.

“I am personally grateful for the testimony of Newman’s life, because without his legacy I might not be Catholic today,” confesses Ryan “Bud” Marr, a renowned scholar of the English saint, upon whom Pope Leo XIV conferred Saturday the title of doctor of the Church.

Newman’s memorable quote — “to be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant” — was pivotal in Marr’s personal conversion. When he first read it, “I was studying to be a Protestant pastor,” he revealed in a conversation with ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner.

“I immediately understood that I had to read the rest of Newman’s essay to put to the test the truth of his statement. I couldn’t simply ignore that challenge and continue on the path I was on,” he explained.

The expert, a former associate editor of the Newman Studies Journal, added that “there are countless similar testimonies” to his and that they will continue to grow in the coming years in light of Newman’s designation as the 38th doctor of the Church.

For Marr, Newman possessed a singular gift: “Expressing fundamental truths in brief and memorable phrases,” capable of transcending time and touching consciences. This is why so many people, over more than a century, have found in his writings a path to conversion.

Development of doctrine, a decisive contribution

For Marr, Newman’s most significant contribution to contemporary Catholic theology is on the subject of the development of doctrine. “It’s not that Newman wrote something entirely new,” he explained.

“Other Catholic theologians, especially St. Vincent of Lérins, had already addressed the topic of doctrinal development. But Newman synthesized diverse ideas into a unified and compelling theory, so that any subsequent theologian has had to start from his “Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine” when addressing this topic,” he pointed out.

This vision, he added, was decisive for 20th-century thought. Newman showed that “the Church’s understanding of revealed truths deepens over time.” “In some cases, the Church offers new formulations — as happened with the Nicene Creed — but these developments always affirm and clarify what has been handed down,” he emphasized.

“The deposit of faith is immutable, but our understanding of that deposit actually expands,” he added. Each generation, Marr emphasized, must “proclaim the truth of the faith within its own linguistic categories,” but always preserving the “essential while facing the challenges of its time.”

Conscience and the sensus fidei as means of Christian discernment

When it was announced that Newman would be proclaimed a doctor of the Church, Marr recalled, “some observers predicted that Pope Leo XIV might bestow upon him the title of Doctor of Conscience.” This is no coincidence. Newman, he noted, dedicated some of his most influential writings to the “centrality of conscience in the journey to God,” both during his Anglican period and in his new life as a Catholic.

Like St. Thomas Aquinas, Marr explained, “Newman believed that a person should never act against the dictates of their conscience,” because doing so “would undermine the very coherence of the moral life.”

However, the former champion of Anglicanism, who converted to Catholicism at the age of 45, also warned about the human tendency toward “self-deception,” Marr explained. The scholar noted that Newman insisted on the need to “form the conscience according to divine and natural law.”

In his 1874 “Letter to the Duke of Norfolk,” one of his most celebrated essays, Newman cautioned against a “false notion of conscience,” identified with the right to one’s own will, an idea that, according to Marr, “reflects the modern mindset” that values ​​subjective independence over objective truth.

He therefore pointed out that “as Catholics, we must work to restore the true vision of conscience, in line with the teaching of theological giants like Aquinas and Newman.”

The sensus fidei is not ‘a populist counterweight to the hierarchy’

This theme is intertwined with the concept of the sensus fidei, the supernatural sense of the faith bestowed upon the baptized: “Newman was ahead of his time in recognizing that the lay faithful have an essential role in the defense and transmission of tradition. The priesthood of all believers means, in part, that the baptized possess a special sense of the faith, a capacity that we must strengthen through devotion and study.”

Marr noted that, for Newman, this sense also had a communal dimension, the sensus fidelium, or sense of the faithful. “He did not understand it as a populist counterweight to the hierarchy,” he clarified. “He knew that the pope and the bishops exercise a divinely instituted authority, but he remembered that there have been times in history — such as during the Arian controversy — when the laity defended the faith, even when some pastors wavered.”

A prophet in the face of modern apostasy

With prophetic clarity, the expert noted, Newman “foresaw the growing irreligion of the modern world.” In his 1873 sermon “The Infidelity of the Future,” Newman warned that the trials of the future would be so great “that they would shake even hearts as valiant as those of St. Athanasius or St. Gregory the Great,” Marr said.

Newman, he explained, perceived that the greatest danger of modernity would be precisely the spread of unbelief, a society that is “simply irreligious.”

However, faced with this bleak outlook, “Newman neither called for retreat nor proposed authoritarian strategies.” He courageously confronted the philosophical ideas of his time and offered a compelling explanation of the “reasonableness of the Christian faith,” deeply rooted in Catholic tradition and in dialogue with modern philosophy, he noted.

Newman and the intellectual mission of the laity

Newman, the expert continued, understood the life of the Catholic Church as something “dynamic,” where “all members of the Body of Christ have an active role in the proclamation of the truth.”

The fathers of the Second Vatican Council took up this vision, presenting it as an urgent call to contemporary Catholics. The expert warned that it is important to understand this call well: “The laity do not fulfill their vocation by becoming more clerical, but by sanctifying the world according to their own specific mission, bringing the Gospel to education, law, medicine, and culture.”

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