pastoral letter

In a pastoral letter last week, Zimbabwe's Catholic Bishops Conference warned that the 2030 debate was a distraction from the things that truly mattered - business closures, high unemployment, rampant corruption and economic policies that favour the wealthy at the expense of ordinary Zimbabweans.

Dame Esther said she was concerned that the most senior Catholic in England and Wales, Cardinal Vincent Nichols, had issued a pastoral letter urging parishioners to take action with MPs.

In 1992, when the National Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a draft of a pastoral letter that condemned sexism but affirmed the Vatican’s teaching that women could not serve as priests, Ms. Fitzpatrick told The New York Times, “They continue to sin the sin of sexism by claiming that women cannot be ordained.”

The church in Ireland, once a fortress for Catholicism, was so decimated by abuse scandals that Benedict in 2010 wrote the first pastoral letter from a pope on the issue of abuse.

Benedict apologized for the abuse in a pastoral letter to the Catholics of Ireland in 2010.