The Vatican has doubled down on the value of monogamous marriage between a man and woman.
The Vatican’s child protection board says the Catholic Church has a moral duty to help victims of clergy sexual abuse heal.
For the Boy Scouts of America — recently renamed Scouting America — the past 12 years have been challenging.
Pope Leo XIV has met with one of the most prominent advocates for greater LGBTQ+ inclusion in the Catholic Church.
Investigators in Minneapolis say the shooter who killed two Catholic school students and wounded 18 other people inside a church was obsessed with the idea of killing defenseless children.
Authorities say a shooter opened fire with a rifle through the windows of a Minneapolis Catholic church and struck children celebrating Mass during the first week of school.
Islamic State-backed rebels have attacked a Catholic church in eastern Congo, killing at least 34 people.
In his first words directed specifically to Americans, Pope Leo XIV told young people on Saturday how to find hope and meaning in their lives through God and in service to others.
Sub-Saharan Africa has the world's highest school dropout rates and a driving factor is that parents are being crushed by unpredictable school fees.
The Archdiocese of New Orleans has agreed to pay nearly $180 million to victims of clergy sexual abuse under a settlement announced Wednesday.
When Cardinal Robert Prevost was elected Pope Leo XIV, many around the world wondered: Who is this man now leading the Catholic Church? For one Houston woman, the answer is deeply personal.
Pope Leo XIV's choice of name signals a commitment to social justice, very much in line with the late Pope Francis’ global ministry.
Robert Prevost may have made history Thursday by becoming the first pope from the United States.
Cardinals have wrapped up their pre-conclave meetings before they enter the conclave to elect a new pope.
Before he died, Pope Francis donated one of his popemobiles to be converted into a mobile health unit to serve the children of Gaza, officials said Monday.
All Vatican personnel involved in supporting the upcoming papal conclave must take an oath of secrecy — under penalty of automatic excommunication.
With the upcoming canonization of its first millennial saint, the Catholic Church has turned to police in Italy to investigate the online sale of some purported relics of Carlo Acutis.
Packed pews, rollicking singing and emotional devotions have marked Lent worship services at Notre Dame d'Haiti, the Catholic church at the heart of the largest Haitian diaspora in the United States.
Cardinal Robert McElroy, the bishop of San Diego who is preparing to take over as archbishop of Washington, D.
Thousands of people have gathered in St. Peter’s Square to pray for an ailing Pope Francis, expressing sorrow for his suffering, hope for his recovery and gratitude for his efforts to steer the Catholic Church in new directions.
Pope Francis has accepted the resignation of an influential Peruvian bishop, who has come under criticism for not doing enough to stop abuses committed by a conservative Catholic movement that was recently disbanded by the Vatican.
The Supreme Court has agreed to take on a new culture war dispute: whether the nation’s first publicly funded religious charter school should be allowed to open in Oklahoma.
Hundreds of Bolivian devotees have arrived at the municipal cemetery of La Paz carrying human skulls adorned with flowers for the Ñatitas festival.
The Archdiocese of Los Angeles has agreed to pay $880 million to hundreds of victims of clergy sexual abuse dating back decades.
Pope Francis' big Catholic reform project has opened with widespread calls for women to take up more positions of responsibility in the church topping the agenda.
Pope Francis will be visiting Belgium on a trip starting Thursday, facing a flock ravaged by countless scandals of priest sexual abuse and dwindling in the face of modernity, where women and gays insist on an equal role and rights.
Flying back to Rome from a lengthy trip to Asia, Pope Francis criticized both U.S. presidential candidates for what he called anti-life policies on abortion and migration.
Mexico’s Catholic leaders have raised their concerns over a controversial judicial reform pushed by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
Pope Francis has called for the Catholic Church in Papua New Guinea to be particularly close to women who have been abused and marginalized.
When the Vatican acknowledged in 2022 that the Nobel Peace Prize-winning, East Timorese independence hero Bishop Carlos Ximenes Belo had sexually abused young boys, it appeared that the global clergy sexual abuse scandal that has compromised the Catholic Church’s credibility around the world had finally arrived in Asia’s newest country.
A couple of decades ago, when Claudia Santos felt the need for spiritual shelter, she dug into her countries’ history and there she found it: Her ancestors, the Mexica.
The congregation at St. Joseph Apache Mission in the Mescalero Reservation in New Mexico, is struggling to deal with the hurt caused by their priest removing a cherished painting called the Apache Christ, which portrays Jesus as an Indigenous holy man.
Two years have passed since a leader of one of Mexico’s organized crime gangs stormed into a Catholic church in the remote Tarahumara mountains and fatally shot two Jesuit priests.
A top U.S. bishop says government officials would be infringing on religious freedom if they were to restrict the Catholic Church’s work serving migrants along the U.S.-Mexico border.
A long-planned series of Catholic pilgrimages is getting underway across the United States this weekend, with pilgrims embarking on four different routes.
The 1959 revolution led by Fidel Castro installed an atheist, Communist government that sought to replace the Catholic Church as the guiding force in the lives of Cubans.
Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker may have stirred controversy for his proclamations of conservative politics and Catholicism, but he received a standing ovation at the May 11 commencement ceremony at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas.
The city of Baltimore has agreed to pay $275,000 toward the legal fees of a far-right Catholic media group to settle a lawsuit over the city’s unsuccessful attempt to block a rally in 2021.
Five years ago this week, Pope Francis convened an unprecedented summit of bishops from around the world to impress on them that clergy abuse was a global problem and that they needed to do something about it.
Nineteen priests kicked out of the country, dozens of incidents of harassment and church desecrations, rural areas lacking worship and social services.
Black survivors have been nearly invisible in the Catholic Church sexual abuse crisis — even in Baltimore, home to a historic Black Catholic community.
Rio de Janeiro’s Christ the Redeemer statue was illuminated with a welcome to Brazil message for Taylor Swift.
Catholic leaders called for peace in a war-torn world and unity amid strife within their own ranks as U.S. bishops gather in Baltimore.
The head of the Catholic church in China has begun a trip to Hong Kong at the invitation of the city’s pope-appointed Roman Catholic cardinal, marking the first official visit by a Beijing bishop in history.
In Italy, centuries-old churches dot the landscape, sanctuaries and processions draw crowds, and nearly 80% of the population profess themselves Catholic.
Pope Francis will open this week a global gathering of Catholic bishops and laypeople to discuss the future of the church.
The archive of the Vicariate of Solidarity gives an account of a painful episode in Chile’s history: 47,000 instances of human rights violations during the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, who took power after a military coup that deposed President Salvador Allende 50 years ago.
An Australian court has allowed a civil case to proceed against a Catholic archdiocese involving child sex abuse allegations against late Cardinal George Pell.
Pope Francis is making a five-day visit next week to Portugal, where a scandal that erupted earlier this year over Catholic Church sex abuse is still simmering.
The Black Catholic nun who founded the United States’ first African American religious congregation has advanced another step toward sainthood.
The leader of the nation’s Catholic bishops weighed in on ongoing immigration issues during their spring meeting in Florida.
As Republican-governed states across the nation advance numerous bills targeting transgender young people, America’s faith leaders are starkly divided in their assessment.
Spain’s ombudsman says an independent commission set up a year ago to investigate historic sex abuse by the Catholic church has collected testimonies from 445 victims, as the nation tackles an issue other European countries acted on long ago.
Nicaragua ’s government says it has proposed suspending relations with the Vatican days after Pope Francis compared President Daniel Ortega’s administration to a communist or Nazi dictatorship amid a crackdown on the Catholic Church in the country.
Dozens of priests, nuns, seminarians and church workers have fled Nicaragua in recent years, or been exiled by President Daniel Ortega’s government, which considers them a threat.
A new complex erected on the shores of the Persian Gulf, in the capital of the United Arab Emirates, houses a Catholic church, a Jewish synagogue and an Islamic mosque.
A committee looking into historic child sex abuse in the Portuguese Catholic Church says 512 alleged victims have come forward, but a report by the expert panel warned that the true number is likely higher than 4,800.
Sri Lanka’s Supreme Court has ruled that inaction by the country’s former president and four others led to Easter Sunday bomb attacks in 2019 that killed nearly 270 people and ordered them to pay compensation for violating the basic rights of the victims and their families.
Germany’s Catholic bishops are vowing to continue their controversial reform process after a week of tense meetings with Vatican officials seeking to put the brakes on proposals to ordain women, bless gay unions and rethink church teaching on sexuality.
The Vatican has decided to launch a preliminary sex abuse investigation into French Cardinal Jean-Pierre Ricard, after he admitted to having behaved in a “reprehensible way” with a 14-year-old girl 35 years ago.
One of France’s high-ranking prelates of the Catholic Church, Cardinal Jean-Pierre Ricard, says that he had abused a 14-year-old girl 35 years ago and is withdrawing from his religious duties.
The head of a lay committee looking into historic child sex abuse in the Portuguese Catholic Church says the problem in the past had been “widespread” and on some occasions reached “truly endemic” proportions.
The Vatican says a preliminary church investigation into sexual assault allegations by a Canadian woman against a top cardinal has determined the case doesn’t warrant further investigation.