Following Jesus means belonging to the Church, the community that gives Christians their identity, Pope Francis said.

The Romanian Catholic bishop of St. George, based in Canton, Ohio, no longer ministers just to Romanian Catholics in the United States, he also has formal responsibility for all Romanian Catholics of the Byzantine rite across Canada.

Pope Francis may publish his first encyclical this year, the Vatican spokesman said.

A priest from Honduras says the United States is repeating the same errors in Central America as it did in the 1980s, and his country is suffering as a result.

Even with modern scientific technology, the Shroud of Turin continues to baffle researchers.

The Belgian bishops’ conference criticized an attack on its president, Archbishop André-Joseph Léonard of Mechelen-Brussels, during which he was soaked with water by half-naked women.

Visiting Rio de Janeiro, the chief organizer of papal trips confirmed Pope Francis will participate in the key events of World Youth Day July 23-28, and he said other parts of the papal trip are being tailor-made for the new pope.

Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, president of the Pontifical Council for the Family and the official promoter of the sainthood cause of the late Archbishop Oscar Romero of San Salvador, said the process to beatify and eventually canonize the slain Salvadoran archbishop has been unblocked.

Bishop Stephen Blaire of Stockton, Calif., said the U.S. Senate’s failure “to support even modest regulations on firearms” is “a failure in moral leadership to promote policies which protect and defend the common good.”

All ideological interpretations of Christianity falsify the Gospel by looking at it purely through the intellect, without regard to love or beauty, Pope Francis said April 19.

New Zealand’s Catholic bishops described as “bizarre” parliament’s vote that discards the understanding of traditional marriage when it approved a same-sex marriage law.

Marriage “is a unique relationship between a man and a woman” and it’s not the government’s place to “define or redefine” it, Bishop Francis Malooly of Wilmington, Del., said in an April 15 letter to Delaware legislators.

Young Chinese adults born under the nation’s one-child policy are planning their families based on personal experience as Chinese government officials debate the future of the state’s population control strategy.

Kansas and Virginia have joined the growing list of states that this year have passed new restrictions on abortion.

Pope Francis embraces one of the 10 priests he ordained in St. Peter’s Basilica.

Women embrace after an April 19 interfaith prayer service at the Church of the Assumption in West, Texas.

Finding safe and effective cures to disease and illness does not have to go against moral and ethical principles; that was the message of a three-day conference at the Vatican on adult stem-cell therapies.

The Catholic faith is not centred simply on a book – the Bible – but on Jesus Christ, the Word of God made flesh, Pope Francis said.

A major European regulator will conduct an expanded evaluation of the Vatican’s latest efforts to prevent money laundering and the funding of terrorism.

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