Catholic Leader and Religious Liberty Advocate Takes on Key Vatican Role We offer our heartfelt congratulations to Montse Alvarado on her appointment to serve as Prefect of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Communication. Montse is supremely qualified for the job, having run the largest religious media…
By Andrea Picciotti-Bayer The Vatican dismissed the former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick from the clerical state for his sexually abusive behavior. Has the Catholic Church put the great scandals of 2018 behind it? Hardly. The McCarrick case is about more than McCarrick’s grave failings as a…
More petitions for annulments are opened by Catholics in the U.S. than in any other country, but the number has dropped in the past two decades amid declining numbers of marriages, fewer divorces and perceptions of a stigma from the church, analysts say. Often misunderstood…
Catholic leaders will begin discussing this weekend a host of family-related matters, including same-sex marriage, birth control and other pressing issues in an ever-changing world. Cardinal Donald W. Wuerl, the archbishop of Washington, who is attending the Extraordinary Synod of Bishops at the Vatican, said…
The Vatican investigation of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious is not a ‘nunquisition,’ as one Time magazine writer has said, but an effort to renew the Church, according to a senior fellow with The Catholic Association. “Is there a great ‘Nunquisition’? No, there’s not,”…
Pope Francis on Monday pledged zero tolerance and pleaded for forgiveness from a group of sex abuse victims invited to the Vatican. This was the first meeting of its kind during Francis’ papacy, and during his homily the pontiff decried the “toxic” effect that decades…
The Vatican on Tuesday for the first time detailed how it has handled more than 3,400 cases of sexual abuse reported since 2004, vowing to learn from its mistakes and potentially opening itself to more lawsuits by accepting that such abuse could fall under a…
The Vatican told critics of its sexual abuse record on Tuesday that it had developed model child protection policies over the last decade and that its accusers should not stay “fossilized in the past” when attitudes were different. Addressing the United Nations Committee on Torture,…
A U.N. committee on torture grilled the Vatican on the Catholic Church’s child sexual abuse crisis on Monday, urging a permanent investigation system to end a “climate of impunity” prevailing for decades. In a two-hour hearing in Geneva, the Committee Against Torture launched a barrage…
GENEVA — The Vatican has dismissed more than 800 priests for sexual abuse of children in the past decade and paid billions of dollars in compensation, senior Vatican officials told a United Nations panel on Tuesday, presenting the Roman Catholic Church as a model of…