Simone Biles made history Sunday by breaking the world record for medals earned by a gymnast. In winning the 24th medal of her career, a gold on the balance beam, the 22-year-old Biles surpassed Belarusian Vitaly Scherbo’s record of 23 medals, which he has held since 1996. Biles expanded her repertoire to include two new technically difficult, original skills that are now known in the official Code of Points as the “Biles dismount on beam” and the “Biles II on floor.” Her path to success hasn’t been without obstacles, and it has been her Catholic faith that has helped her surmount Them. Read More

Throughout the year, pilgrims come to pay homage to this statue of Christ carrying a cross, in its permanent home in Iglesia de San Felipe, a Roman Catholic parish church located in Portobelo, a city along the Caribbean coast of Panama. But it is on Oct. 21 each year that the major celebration takes place. As many as 60,000 pilgrims from Portobelo and beyond travel for the festival, in which 80 men with shaved heads carry the black Christ statue on a large float through the streets of the city. Read More

The Archdiocese of Denver recently welcomed its new director for the Office of Black Catholic Ministry and Community Outreach Specialist for the Office of Catholic Schools, Kateri Williams. Born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in a Catholic family, Williams moved to Colorado in the 1970s when she was still a child. She grew up attending St. Thomas More Parish, where she married her husband, Dwayne. They’ve now been married for 19 years. Her family members were some of the founding members of the parish. Read More

Young people leaving the Church is "one of the things that cause me to lose sleep at night," he says. Read More

In 2019, the city will spend $258 million to arrest, prosecute, and incarcerate people, but just $1.8 million to provide these same people with their constitutionally guaranteed representation. Read More

With flags flying and chants of “On to New Orleans, Freedom or Death,” marching in tandem to the sound of African drumbeats, New York-based visual artist Dread Scott plans to lead more than 500 reenactors of the 1811 German Coast Slave Uprising in period costume with sugarcane knives, sickles, sabers, muskets and horseback riders from LaPlace to Kenner on Nov. 8 and 9. “The Slave Rebellion Reenactment project is about freedom and emancipation not about slavery,” Scott said. “It actually is about people who had a bold and audacious vision to seize all of Orleans Territory and end slavery in the region.” The 1811 uprising is named after the German settlers who built sugarcane plantations along the Mississippi River in St. John and St. Charles parishes with the sugarcane being harvested and processed by slave labor. Read More

This week the country marked National HBCU Week to recognize the accomplishments of historically black colleges and universities throughout the United States. Earlier this month, leaders from the country’s 101 HBCUs convened in Washington, D.C. for the annual National HBCU Conference, where they spoke to Congress of the ongoing importance of HBCUs, and where President Donald Trump announced that religiously affiliated HBCUs would now receive full federal funding. Read More

Globally speaking, black people have been practicing Catholicism since the earliest days of the church. Additionally, black people were practicing Catholicism in North America for more than 200 years before the United States was founded. Yet, African-American Catholics are constantly required to justify their existence. People like the Rev. Augustus Tolton, Charles Randolph Uncles, S.S.J., Thea Bowman, F.S.P.A., and Cyprian Davis, O.S.B., spent their lives working to make sure the church hierarchy and the people in the pews knew something as basic as that there are black people who are Catholic. Enough! Read More