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Originally from Woburn, Massachusetts, Coyne worked as a bartender for two years before entering seminary. He was ordained a priest for the Archdiocese of Boston at the age of 27. After ordination, he studied in Rome at the Pontifical Liturgical Institute, where he earned a doctorate in sacred liturgy in 1994. He became the director of the archdiocese’s Office of Worship in 2000. Cardinal Bernard Law appointed Coyne as a spokesman for the Archdiocese of Boston in 2002, a role he held for three years at the height of the archdiocese’s sex abuse scandal. He later served as the chairman of communications for the U.S. bishops’ conference from 2015 to 2018 and as a member of the U.S. bishops’ Evangelization and Catechesis Committee and the Committee on Divine Worship. Next year, Coyne is expect...

Apostolic visitation completed in Tyler diocese Skip to content The Vatican’s Dicastery for Bishops has undertaken an apostolic visitation to the Diocese of Tyler, Texas, whose Bishop Joseph Strickland has been in recent weeks the subject of controversy in the Church. Bishop joseph Strickland. Courtesy photo. Several sources in the Tyler diocese confirmed the visitation to The Pillar on Saturday, after rumors surfaced on social media, and the visitation was reported on the Church Militant website. An apostolic visitation is an official review of diocesan leadership and governance, usually convened at the behest of a Vatican congregation.  One priest interviewed said the visitation’s questions focused on Strickland’s administrative leadership in the diocese, rather than on his outsized...

Piché to return to ministry in Minnesota archdiocese Skip to content A Minnesota bishop is set to be assigned to a pastoral ministry role in his archdiocese, eight years after he resigned from the office of auxiliary bishop amid scandal in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis. Bishop Lee Piché, who resigned as an auxiliary bishop at the age of 57 in 2015, will become vicar for retired priests in the Minnesota archdiocese next month, the archdiocese confirmed to The Pillar June 22. Bishop Lee Piche preaches at a 2011 Mass. Credit: Graner via Flickr CC BY SA 2.0 In a statement posted online after questions from The Pillar June 22, the archdiocese said that Hebda had invited Piché “to return to the Archdiocese to serve as his Vicar for Retired Priests.” The statement said that in the e...

She spent the final 50 years of her life in a Carmelite convent in Coimbra, Portugal. As the only Fatima visionary who spoke with the Virgin Mary during the series of apparitions, her written memoirs have provided an important account of the Fatima message. Lucia’s canonization cause opened in 2008, three years after her death, after Benedict XVI granted a dispensation for the usually required five-year waiting period. More than 15,000 letters, testimonies, and other documents were collected during the diocesan phase of her cause, which concluded in 2017. Pope Francis is planning to visit Fatima this summer when he travels to Portugal for World Youth Day. The pope will spend the morning of Aug. 5 at the Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima, about 75 miles northeast of Lisbon, where he will pray th...

The kidnappers shot the parish security guard, who died on the way to the hospital. In his June 20 statement, Klaver appealed for prayers for the soul of the late security guard and for the complete healing of Nwaohuocha.  “Let us pray for the full recovery of his health and for the repose of the soul of the deceased, who leaves [behind] a family [wife and children],” he said. The kidnapping and release of Nwaohuocha is the latest in a series of abductions that have targeted members of the clergy, seminarians, and other Christians in Africa’s most populous nation. On June 11, Father Jeremiah Yakubu, a priest of Kafanchan Diocese, was kidnapped and later released. On June 7, Father Charles Onomhoale Igechi, a member of the clergy of the Archdiocese of Benin City who was set to mark his...

In 2017, Pope Francis ordered reforms of both the order’s religious life and its constitution. He approved the order’s new constitutional charter and regulations last year. Burke, a 74-year-old American cardinal, had served as the Order of Malta’s cardinal patron since 2014. However, when then-Archbishop Angelo Becciu was appointed in 2017 as the pope’s special delegate to oversee the order’s reform, he effectively supplanted the role of the order’s cardinal patron, with Burke remaining in the post only nominally. Pope Francis made Ghirlanda a cardinal in 2022, one of the few men to be given a red hat as a priest without being first a bishop. Ghirlanda was given the Jesuit Church of the Gesù as his titular church. The Italian cardinal and canon lawyer is the former rector of the Pontifical...

The Los Angeles Dodgers‘ Pride Night arrived on Friday, with the protester and police presence you would expect after weeks of controversy stirred up around the guests invited to the event. The Dodgers received criticism from Catholic and conservative figures when they announced they would be giving an award to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a group of people who dress in drag as nuns who were among the first people to offer support to AIDS patients at a time when such help was severely lacking. The team reacted to the backlash by uninviting the Sisters from Pride Night, leading to an opposing backlash from its other Pride Night partners. It eventually apologized and re-invited the Sisters, drawing further condemnation from the likes of former vice president Mike Pence and U.S....

(OSV News) — Franciscan priests have returned to pastoral ministry at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, two months after the center decided to end their contract. The priests and brothers of Holy Name College Friary of Silver Spring, Maryland, resumed their service at the medical center June 13, according to a June 15 press release issued by the U.S. Archdiocese for the Military Services, which exercises pastoral jurisdiction over the center. The U.S. Defense Health Agency (DHA) has awarded a five-year contract to the Franciscans that is renewable annually. On March 31, the Franciscans had been advised their contract — which was set to expire but had routinely been upheld for close to 20 years — would not be renewed. The center instead assigned the ministr...