The News You May Have Missed: July-August 2026

A Typical Day in Detroit

Rev. Canon Jean-Baptiste Commins was in the parking lot of St. Joseph Shrine in Detroit when he heard tires squeal and a loud crash. He then saw a man running away with only one shoe on. Somebody yelled, “Stop him!” — and, in full clerical attire, the French priest tackled the man and restrained him until police arrived. “He was resisting a lot, trying to run away,” Fr. Commins said, “so I had to, unfortunately, give him a few punches…making sure that there was no threat, since I didn’t know if he had a gun.” Once the suspect was subdued, Commins turned his attention to a woman inside the car, “to make sure, you know, if she needed the Anointing of the Sick or a blessing or something,” he said. “She was not very responsive. But her eyes were twitching a little bit.” The man was arrested, and three other people detained. Police believe the vehicle they crashed was stolen. Afterward, Commins went “to do my prayers as usual and have dinner with the community.” It was, he quipped, “just another day in the D” (Fox News, June 2).

Turkish Delight

Archeologists in Turkey discovered the best-preserved early image of Jesus Christ ever unearthed: a fresco portraying Him as the Good Shepherd inside a well-preserved, oxygen-depleted underground tomb in the city of Iznik. The pigments are in virtually perfect condition — exactly as they were painted some 1,800 years ago. The fresco, which dates to the third century A.D., is among the five oldest images of Christ as an adult found anywhere in the world. It is so complete that His facial features, the individual folds of His tunic, His hands, and the outline of the ram across His shoulders remain clearly visible and sharp. Notably, this Jesus is beardless, has short-cropped hair, and is dressed in upper-class Roman clothes. “Anatolia — what is now Turkey — was in many ways the cradle of early Christianity,” explained Candida Moss, professor of theology at the University of Birmingham. “The region — visited by the apostles Peter and Paul and other very early missionaries — is of huge importance…. When Christianity became the official religion of the empire, the Romans moved their capital from Rome to what is now Istanbul” (The Independent, May 30).

Book Marks

An international team of academics recovered 42 lost pages from one of the most important early New Testament manuscripts: Codex H. This sixth-century copy of the letters of St. Paul was disassembled in the 13th century at the Great Lavra Monastery on Mount Athos, Greece, and its pages re-inked and re-used as binding material and flyleaves for other manuscripts. “Researchers used multispectral imaging to process images of the extant pages, in order to recover ‘ghost’ text that no longer physically exists, effectively retrieving multiple pages of information from every single physical page,” explained Garrick Allen, professor of divinity at the University of Glasgow. The discovery offers unique insight into how the New Testament evolved through the centuries. Key findings include ancient chapter lists that differ from modern ones, and fragments that show how scribes corrected and annotated texts. “Given that Codex H is such an important witness to our understanding of Christian scripture, to have discovered any new evidence — let alone this quantity — of what it originally looked like is nothing short of monumental,” Allen said (Zenit News, May 5).