A court in central India has sentenced a Catholic priest and a nun to two months each in jail for defying a court order to reinstate two students their school expelled two years ago.

The district court in Ujjain town of Madhya Pradesh state also asked Father Sebastian Mullamangalam, the then manager of St. Paul Convent School, and school principal Sister Archana to pay 1 million rupees (US$16,000) compensation to the students.

The court’s Jan. 6 order, made public three days later, also requires them to pay legal compensation to the state of US$3,200. The court, however, has kept its order in abeyance for a month to help the convicts appeal against the order in a higher court, failing which they will have to accept the sentence. Church officials have removed the accused priest and nun from the school and appointed new officials but maintained they committed no offence. The school is accused of illegally terminating three students at the end of academic year 2015, with a remark in their transfer certificate that their parents’ “behaviour was not good.”

Indian Dalits, former-ly known as untouchables, are challenging the supre-macist ideology of hard-line Hindu groups. But rights activists are blaming Hindu fundamenta-lism for a recent attack on Dalits celebrating victory in a 19th century battle against their upper-caste overlords. A series of violent clashes between Dalits and higher-caste Maratha people were reported in several parts of western Maharashtra state in early January.

This follow a Jan. 1 attack on Dalit people marking the centenary of an 1818 battle between local rulers and forces of the British East India company. The battle in Bhima Koregaon village resulted in the British curtailing the dominance of local Maratha ruler Peshwa Bajirao II.

The rout has been celebrated by Dalits ever since.

However, this centenary year it turned violent, with one person killed and hundreds injured.

Media reports suggested that right-wing groups carrying saffron flags pelted Dalits with stones, prompting them to retaliate.

A note said the next bomb would be ‘in your cassock.’ Three Catholic churches in the Chilean capital have been bombed just days before Pope Francis begins his tour of the country. The perpetrators placed incendiary devices in all three churches in Santiago, and in one church left a direct threat to the Pope, saying the next bombs would be “in your cassock”.

Chile’s outgoing president Michelle Bachelet said the events were “very strange, because it is not something that can be identified with one specific group”.

She added: “What I’ve been told is that, for example, [when the Pope visited] Colombia, there were groups there with a little sign [in protest]. In a democracy, people can express themselves as long as they do so in a peaceful and appropriate way.”

Authorities expect some protests over clerical sexual abuse during the Pope’s visit, however this is the first direct threat of violence.

The message in the church was written in Spanish, but with “x”s replacing all letters that signify grammatical gender, a practice typical among activists on the radical left.

The message reads: “We will never submit to the dominion you want to exercise over our bodies, our ideas and actions, because we were born free to chose the path we want to take. Against every monk and nun and against every preacher.Bodies free, impure and wild.” The perpetrators said they would attack the Pope’s “disgusting morals” with the “fire of combat”.Pope Francis is due to visit Chile from 15 to 18 January.

The survey used a nationally representa-tive sample of 1,507 self-identified American Catholics and was administered online by polling firm GfK. The data collection was partly funded by the Louisville Institute, the National Catholic Reporter, and other donors.

Women have been the backbone of the Catholic Church in the U.S. and other Western countries since at least the beginning of the 20th century. Despite disagreeing with various elements of church teaching, they have long maintained a higher degree of participation than men have in the church’s sacramental and communal life, and have also been instrumental in keeping men within the fold.

Our survey was not designed to explore any “Francis effect” on American Catholics – and indeed any study with that intent would be very complex and difficult to execute. But four years into Francis’ papacy, our survey’s replication of questions asked of American Catholics at previous intervals can help pinpoint new trends that may be coincidental with his tenure.

In the case of women’s commitment, the overall story is one of stability, and even slightly increased commitment, rather than further decline. Catholic women’s weekly Mass attendance has stabilized. In 2011, continuing a pattern of sharp decline from the late 1980s, 31% of women went to Mass weekly, and a similar proportion reported weekly Mass in 2017. Today, women are just slightly more likely than men to go to Mass at least weekly.

On two other indicators of commitment, women show more of an uptick since 2011.

An increase in the proportion of women who say that the church is among the most important things in their life, from 35% in 2011 to 39 % today. This finding is a reversal of the steady long-term trend of decline in the church’s importance to women. Until 2011, the church had consistently been less important to men, and its level of importance remains remarkably steady.

Part of the surprise in 2011 was the discovery that for the first time in 25 years, fewer women than men were saying that the church was among the most important parts of their life. With the 2017 data, women are once again more likely than men to regard the church as among the most important parts of their life.