Associated Press

Religion and politics frequently overlap in Reading, an old industrial city in one of the most pivotal swing states of this year’s presidential election.

Spain’s Catholic bishops approved Tuesday a plan to compensate the victims of sexual abuse inside the Church whose alleged aggressors have died or whose possible crimes have been proscribed, an initiative the government and victims’ associations called lacking in real guarantees.

The Vatican’s chief prosecutor has strongly defended the integrity and fairness of the city state’s justice system following criticism that Pope Francis' absolute power and his interventions in the so-called “trial of the century” last year violated the defendants’ fundamental rights.

Mayreu is one of the smallest inhabited islands of St. Vincent and the Grenadines. It's so small that it's barely visible — a dot on the map of the Caribbean. Hurricane Beryl nearly erased it from the map.

Pope Francis’ chief of staff became one of the highest-ranking Holy See officials to testify in a foreign court Thursday, telling a British tribunal about the negotiations at the heart of the Vatican’s so-called “trial of the century,” admitting he filed a false invoice and pointing a finger at his one-time deputy who escaped the scandal unscathed.

A French bishop has put off any decision on whether to remove mosaics by an ex-Jesuit artist accused of abusing women, saying that they’ll stay for now on the Lourdes shrine but that eventually they should be removed.

The country's Catholic Church had around 20.35 million members at the end of last year. In an annual summary of statistics, the bishops’ conference didn’t detail reasons for the departures.

The Vatican went on trial in a London court Wednesday, as a British financier sought to recover from the harm he said he suffered to his reputation as a result of a Vatican investigation into its 350 million euro (around $375 million) investment in a London property.

The Oklahoma Supreme Court on Tuesday stopped what would have been the first publicly funded religious charter school in the U.S., turning back conservatives and the state's GOP governor who have welcomed religious groups into public education.

The Supreme Court on Monday rejected a challenge to a 2021 Connecticut law that eliminated the state’s longstanding religious exemption from childhood immunization requirements for schools, colleges and day care facilities.

It’s just a snapshot of a wider project. Catholic pilgrims are in the middle of a two-month journey on four routes across the United States. They're planning to converge on Indianapolis in mid-July for a climactic stadium gathering called the National Eucharistic Congress, the first such event in more than 80 years.

The coastal Nigerian community of Ayetoro was founded decades ago and nicknamed "Happy City," meant to be a Christian utopia that would be sinless and classless. But now its remaining residents can do little against the rising sea.

Among many faith leaders nationwide, the pain unleashed on June 20, 2022 — when the Revs. Javier Campos Morales, 79, and Joaquín César Mora Salazar, 80, were murdered by a local gang leader — has not faded. Nor their quest for peace.

Louisiana has become the first state to require that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom, the latest move from a GOP-dominated Legislature pushing a conservative agenda under a new governor.

A lawyer for Raffaele Mincione, a London-based financier, submitted a complaint last week to the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights via a special procedure that allows individuals or groups to provide the U.N. with information about alleged rights violations in countries or institutions.

One list suggested at least 550 people died during the five-day Hajj. A 2019 study found that even if the world succeeds in mitigating the worst effects of climate change, the Hajj would be held in temperatures exceeding an "extreme danger threshold" from 2047 to 2052, and from 2079 to 2086.

The Hajj rites have taken place under the soaring summer heat, which has reached 118 degrees Fahrenheit in Mecca and the sacred sites in and around the city, according to the Saudi National Center for Metrology.

With no vehicles at hand, Maribel Estrada runs to pick up her children from school, to attend Mass and to visit her mother, who lives 160 miles away.

U.S. bishops approved new guidelines for ministering to Indigenous Catholics, a long in-the-works effort to reinvigorate the ministry and assure those communities that they don't need to feel torn between their Native identity and their Catholic one.

Officially reversing a controversial March ruling, Louisiana's highest court Wednesday gave childhood victims of sexual abuse a renewed opportunity to file damage lawsuits.