On Saturday Aug. 12, 2017, a “Unite the Right” rally was organized by white nationalists in Charlottesville, Va., in opposition to the planned removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee by the city of Charlottesville. Participants in the rally, many drawn from far distances, chanted Nazi-inspired slogans like “Blood and Soil” and “Jews will not replace us!” A day fraught with tension was then tragically punctuated by bloodshed, when a driver, later identified as a member of a white supremacist movement, drove his car into a crowd of peaceful counterprotesters and one person died, while more than two dozen were injured.

Pope Francis will be visiting Myanmar and Bangladesh beginning on Monday Nov. 28. He is the first pope to visit Myanmar, a majority Buddhist country of some 55 million people. Under Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and the country’s top civilian leader, Myanmar has been the target of human rights groups who say the country is engaged in a campaign of ethnic cleansing against some one million Rohingya migrants. How Francis addresses this issue will be closely watched. On Nov. 30, Pope Francis will fly to neighboring Bangladesh. Eighty-seven percent of its 156 million people are Muslim. Christians are a tiny minority of 600,000 believers, 350,000 of whom are Catholic.

An outspoken champion for the people who were suffering during El Salvador's brutal civil war, Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador, was murdered on March 24, 1980.