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Byline: Stefano Pitrelli ROME - In a historic first, Pope Francis announced his intention to include two women on the committee advising him on the selection of bishops, in an [...]

Byline: Chico Harlan ROME - The Vatican said Tuesday that Pope Francis has signed off on a rewrite of the universal Catholic Church's internal penal system, updating a version in [...]

Byline: Chico Harlan ROME - The Vatican said Tuesday that Pope Francis has signed off on a rewrite of the universal Catholic Church's internal penal system, updating a version in [...]

Byline: Ruby Mellen Pope Francis delivered a blow to Catholic LGBT communities Monday, with a decree reaffirming that priests could not bless same-sex unions. The move stood in contrast to [...]

ROME -- Pope Francis has issued a highly anticipated law for Vatican City officials and diplomats overseas to tackle sexual abuse, setting up what is intended to be a model [...]

Byline: Julie Zauzmer As the Catholic Church quakes through one sexual abuse scandal after another, Pope Francis recently announced a policy he wants to implement on a worldwide scale: No [...]

Byline: Julie Zauzmer As the Vatican's much-anticipated first summit on the abuse of children got underway Thursday, Pope Francis said he hoped 'concrete and effective measures' would emerge from the [...]

Byline: Anthony Faiola, Chico Harlan and Stefano Pitrelli LUJAN DE CUYO, Argentina -When investigators swept in and raided the religious Antonio Provolo Institute for the Deaf, they uncovered one of [...]

Pope Francis has expelled Theodore E. McCarrick, a former cardinal and archbishop of Washington, from the priesthood, after the church found him guilty of sexually abusing minors and adult seminarians [...]

Byline: Chico HarlanROME -- Pope Francis accepted the resignation of a Los Angeles auxiliary bishop after an archdiocese oversight board found 'credible' an allegation of sexual misconduct with a minor, [...]

Byline: Elizabeth Bruenig On Thursday, the Vatican announced that Pope Francis has revised the catechism to hold that the death penalty is 'inadmissible' in all cases, and that the church [...]

ROME -- For the second time in three days, Pope Francis on Monday accepted the resignation of a powerful prelate -- this time, an Australian archbishop -- in a sexual [...]

On Feb. 1, the same day that new repressive regulations of religion went into force in China, the Vatican took a deep bow before Beijing. After long resisting, it finally [...]

ROME -- It has been a question of theological debate and liturgical interpretation for years, and now Pope Francis has joined the discussion: Does the Lord's Prayer, Christendom's resonant petition [...]

This appeared in Monday's Washington Post: --- Pope Francis, who pledged a policy of 'zero tolerance' for sexually abusive clergy in the Catholic Church, has turned out to be all [...]

Byline: Anthony Faiola and Sarah Pulliam Bailey VATICAN CITY - As politicians around the world including President Donald Trump take an increasingly hard line on immigration, a powerful force is [...]

''This is not normal'' -- so say Donald Trump's critics as he prepares to assume the presidency. But the American republic is only the second-oldest institution facing a distinctively unusual [...]

BEIJING -- Pope Francis has spoken of his admiration for Chinese culture. He has greeted a delegation from China, accepting a silk imprint of an ancient inscription about Christianity. And [...]

CORRECTION APPENDEDWhen Pope Francis ascended to the chair of St. Peter in March 2013, the world looked on in wonder. Here at last was a pope in line with the [...]

LAST weekend Tim Kaine, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee and a churchgoing Catholic, briefly escaped obscurity by telling an audience of L.G.B.T. activists that he expects his church to eventually bless [...]

Pope Francis has created a commission to study the possibility of ordaining women as deacons in the Roman Catholic Church. On Tuesday, he named 12 experts -- six men and [...]

Byline: Michelle Boorstein Pope Francis on Monday overhauled the staff that presents the public face of the Vatican, naming a former Fox and Time correspondent from St. Louis as his [...]

Byline: Michelle Boorstein Three months ago, Pope Francis released a church teaching about the family, a document that both empathized heavily with the challenges of modern life and left major [...]

Byline: Editorial Board The following editorial appears in Sunday's Washington Post: THREE YEARS ago, Pope Francis charted a new course in compassion for the Roman Catholic Church when, in response [...]

Byline: Editorial Board Pope Francis has made empathy for the downtrodden and the powerless a hallmark of his papacy, but he has been less deft in dealing with the Roman [...]

CORRECTION APPENDEDROME -- Pope Francis said Thursday that he would set up a commission to study whether women could serve as deacons in the Roman Catholic Church, a move hailed [...]

Byline: Julie Zauzmer, Anthony Faiola and Michelle Boorstein Pope Francis on Thursday told an international conference of nuns that he wants to create a commission to study the possibility of [...]

Byline: Julie Zauzmer Pope Francis said on Thursday that he would support a study of the historical role of women as deacons, a member of the clergy in the Catholic [...]

Byline: Julie Zauzmer and Anthony Faiola Pope Francis told an international conference of nuns that he will start a commission to study whether women can serve as deacons in the [...]

ROME -- In a broad proclamation on family life, Pope Francis on Friday called for the Roman Catholic Church to be more welcoming and less judgmental, and he seemingly signaled [...]

Pope Francis' commission on the clergy's sexual violation of children had a timely private screening in Rome last week of ''Spotlight,'' the Oscar-nominated film about the pedophilia scandal in Boston. [...]

Byline: Lonnie Shekhtman In the first scandal to hit the Vatican since Pope Francis took over in 2013, two advisors who served on the pope's financial reform commission have been [...]

Byline: Anthony Faiola;Sarah Pulliam Bailey VATICAN CITY -- As politicians around the world including President Trump take an increasingly hard line on immigration, a powerful force is rallying to the [...]

VATICAN CITY -- After a three-week global assembly on family issues that exposed their deep divisions, Roman Catholic bishops produced a consensus document on Saturday that reinforced church doctrine but [...]

HAS the cool pope left the building? For days after the revelation that Pope Francis met the Kentucky county clerk and anti-gay-marriage activist Kim Davis during his visit to Washington, [...]

Pope Francis challenged Americans last week to accept ''the stranger in our midst'' and reject a ''mind-set of hostility'' toward newcomers. But his invocation of the millions of Syrian and [...]

Gay Marriage and Homosexuality Francis has approached the question of homosexuality with a lighter touch than those of his predecessors, but he has not changed Catholic teaching that homosexuality is [...]

MERCED, Calif. -- More than 5,000 parishioners packed the pews, the choir loft and the vestibule on a recent weekend at Sacred Heart Church here in California's Central Valley for [...]