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.

One hundred and thirty-three cardinals are sequestering themselves behind the Vatican’s medieval walls for the start of a conclave to elect a successor to Pope Francis.

Black smoke has poured out of the Sistine Chapel chimney, indicating no pope was elected on the first ballot of the conclave to choose a new leader of the Catholic Church.

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.

The Vatican is grieving the first head of the Catholic Church from the Americas and Saturday marks the beginning of the Novendiales, nine days of mourning. It also marks the fifth day of national mourning in Italy.

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.

Pope Francis is bringing his Holy Year to Rome’s main prison.

For one conservative Catholic family in Ohio, activism begins at home.

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.

What do Venezuelans believe in.

Another 400,000 people formally have left the Catholic Church in Germany last year.

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.

Pope Francis’ apology for using a vulgar term to refer to gay men was the latest comment to make headlines about the Catholic Church’s teachings on homosexuality.

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 clergy sexual abuse scandal is slowly gathering steam in Italy.

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.

Actor Shia LaBeouf has converted to Catholicism.

Pope Francis has formally approved allowing priests to bless same-sex couples.

Pope Francis is marking a birthday.

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.

Pope Francis has removed from office the bishop of Tyler, Texas.

Pope Francis’ big meeting on the future of the Catholic Church is heading into its final stretch.

For many Catholic Poles, their country’s heart beats in Czestochowa.

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.

Pope Francis has blasted the “backwardness” of some conservatives in the U.S. Catholic Church.

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 beginning a five-day trip to Portugal for World Youth Day.

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.

Pope Francis' weekly general audience often gives ordinary people rare access to the pope.

As Republican-governed states across the nation advance numerous bills targeting transgender young people, America’s faith leaders are starkly divided in their assessment.

Pope Francis has decided to give women the right to vote at an upcoming meeting of bishops.

During the “Burning of Judas” celebrations that take place every Holy Saturday in some Mexican neighborhoods, people gather to light fireworks that destroy colorful figures embodying evil.

A “stable share” of Americans has participated in religious services in some way – virtually or in person – during the coronavirus pandemic, but in-person attendance is slightly lower than it was before the COVID-19 outbreak.

The Vatican has closed its embassy in Nicaragua after the country's government proposed suspending diplomatic relations.

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.

Pope Francis is marking the 10th anniversary of his election as pope on Monday.

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.

Pope Francis says there's a risk that a reform process in the German church could become “ideological."

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.

Pope Francis joined tens of thousands of faithful in bidding farewell to Benedict XVI at a rare requiem Mass for a dead pope presided over by a living one.

Rapa Nui – the remote Chilean territory in the mid-Pacific widely known as Easter Island – is home to a Catholic church featuring artwork that reflects that islanders’ ancestral culture as well as Christian beliefs.

In many ways, the service at the Catholic Church of Our lady of the Rosary feels like a standard Sunday Mass.

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.

U.S. Catholic bishops plan to elect new leaders as they gather in Baltimore this week.

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.

Pope Francis is calling for unity in the Catholic Church as he marks the 60th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council.

Pope Francis has expressed worry about the situation in Nicaragua following the detention of a Roman Catholic bishop and several priests.

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.

Pope Francis has come face-to-face with a long-standing demand from Indigenous peoples during his Canada pilgrimage.

Pope Francis has arrived in Quebec at a time when many French Canadians are not only continuing to move away from religion but explicitly rejecting it.

Pope Francis plans to apologize to Indigenous groups on Canadian soil for harms inflicted at church-run residential schools.

Pope Francis has named three women to serve as members of the Vatican office that vets bishop nominations.

A few dozen people met on Monday night at the Our Lady of Charity National Shrine to pray for freedom in Cuba as they marked the first anniversary of the historic July 11 protests.

Pope Francis has taken another step to reign in and regulate new religious groups in the Catholic Church.

The new president of the Italian Conference of Bishops says he would launch an independent inquiry on sex abuse by Catholic clergy in Italy.

Pope Francis has named a bishop in his own image as the new head of the Italian bishops conference.

A Roman Catholic bishop in Nicaragua has begun an “indefinite fast” inside a church to protest increasing harassment from national police, who he said followed him throughout the entire previous day.

One of the oldest Catholic dioceses in the United States has announced a settlement agreement to resolve a bankruptcy case in New Mexico that resulted from a clergy sex abuse scandal.

The top Catholic clergyman in the Holy Land says Israel's police attack on mourners during a funeral for an Al Jazeera journalist was a “severe” violation of human rights.

Rwandans have begun a solemn commemoration of the 1994 genocide in which more than 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu who tried to protect them were killed.

Pope Francis has made a historic apology to Indigenous Peoples for the “deplorable” abuses suffered in Canada’s residential schools.

Spain's Roman Catholic bishops have asked a private law firm to investigate past and present sexual abuse committed by clergy, members of religious orders and others associated with the church.

By the thousands, Americans have been seeking religious exemptions in order to circumvent COVID-19 vaccine mandates.

A report on decades of sexual abuse in Germany that shone an unflattering spotlight on retired Pope Benedict XVI has come on top of already strong pressure in Germany to reconsider Catholic rules on issues including homosexuality and women’s roles.

Broward Sheriff’s Office units followed the subject to the parking lot of St. Monica’s Catholic Church at 3490 Northwest 191st Street in Miami Gardens.

The Catholic Church in Rome is strongly condemning a funeral procession outside a local church in which the casket was draped in a Nazi flag and mourners gave the fascist salute.