Associated Press

The Maui County Council voted 9-0 to pass a resolution opposing the project. The measure said Haleakala's summit was a sacred place used for religious ceremony, prayer and connecting to ancestors.

The 1959 Castro-led revolution installed an atheist, Communist government that sought to replace the Catholic Church as the guiding force in the lives of Cubans. But 65 years later, religion seems omnipresent in Cuba, in dazzling diversity.

Since he took power in 2018, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has avoided direct confrontation with cartels and violent gangs controlling and terrorizing local communities. His " hugs, not bullets " policy has drawn extensive criticism from faith leaders, human rights organizations and journalists who have echoed victims' fears and anger.

Pope Francis apologized Tuesday after he was quoted using a vulgar and derogatory term about gay men to reaffirm the Catholic Church's ban on gay priests. Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni issued a statement acknowledging the media storm that erupted about Francis' comments, which were delivered behind closed doors to Italian bishops on May 20.

A retired Canadian judge said Tuesday he couldn’t find any reliable evidence of sexual misconduct by the archbishop of Quebec, after the purported victim refused to cooperate with his investigation and the cardinal strongly denied the claim.

The Vatican made another big overture to China on Tuesday, reaffirming the Catholic Church poses no threat to Beijing's sovereignty and admitting that Western missionaries had made “errors” in past centuries in their zeal to convert the Chinese faithful.

A decades-old landslide that’s rapidly accelerating has forced the dismantling of Wayfarers Chapel, an iconic Southern California church that was designed by one of famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright's sons and built among soaring redwoods and sweeping Pacific Ocean views.

Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker railed against Pride month, working women, President Biden’s leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic and abortion during a commencement address at Benedictine College last weekend.

Forty-nine employees of the Vatican Museums have filed a class-action complaint with the Vatican administration demanding better seniority, leave and overtime benefits in an unusual, public challenge to Pope Francis' governance.

The Catholic church is refusing to cooperate with a Washington state investigation into whether it unlawfully used charitable trust funds to cover up sexual abuse by priests, Attorney General Bob Ferguson said Thursday, asking a court to force the Seattle Archdiocese to turn over decades of records.

A Catholic school in North Carolina had the right to fire a gay teacher who announced his marriage on social media a decade ago, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday, reversing a judge's earlier decision.

Generations of Catholics who embraced the modernizing tide sparked in the 1960s by Vatican II are increasingly giving way to religious conservatives who believe the church has been twisted by change, with the promise of eternal salvation replaced by casual indifference to church doctrine.

Authorities have expanded an investigation of clergy sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church in New Orleans to include senior church officials suspected of shielding predatory priests for decades and failing to report their crimes to law enforcement.

A retired Roman Catholic bishop who was famous for trying to mediate between drug cartels in Mexico was located and taken to a hospital after apparently being briefly kidnapped, the Mexican Council of Bishops said Monday.

Even for a place that prides itself on its culture of unusual encounters, Pope Francis' visit Sunday stood out.

By mid-2024, Claudia Sheinbaum will most likely become Mexico's first female president. She would also be its first leader with a Jewish background in a country that's home to nearly 100 million Catholics.

The patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church has suspended a priest who participated in services for the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

Australian police say a knife attack in Sydney that wounded a bishop and a priest during a church service as horrified worshippers watched online and in person, and sparked a riot was an act of terrorism.

Cardinal Álvaro Ramazzini's unflinching focus on the poor, the Indigenous and the migrant has garnered him great affection from the marginalized, and many threats of violence amid Guatemala's political turmoil.

A prominent Iraqi Christian religious leader who left Baghdad amid a political dispute last year returned to the capital this week at the invitation of the country's prime minister after nine months of self-imposed exile in northern Iraq's Kurdish region.