Nicole Winfield

The Vatican signed an agreement Wednesday with German carmaker Volkswagen AG to gradually replace its auto fleet with electric vehicles as part of the Vatican's efforts to reduce its carbon emissions.

The converted monastery in the Vatican gardens that served as Pope Benedict XVI’s retirement home will once again house a small community of nuns.

Pope Francis has ordered the Vatican to reopen the case of a well-known priest-artist accused of sexually, psychologically and spiritually abusing adult women, and removed the statute of limitations on their claims, the Vatican said Oct. 27.

A famous priest-artist who was thrown out of the Jesuits after being accused of sexual, spiritual and psychological abuse of women has been accepted into a diocese in his native Slovenia, the latest twist in a case that has implicated the pope and laid bare the limits of the Vatican’s in-house legal system.

The pope on Oct. 24 accepted the resignation of a Polish bishop whose diocese has been rocked for weeks by reports of a gay orgy involving a male prostitute in a priest's apartment.

Two Vatican trials are coming to a head this week and posing uncomfortable questions for the Holy See, given they both underscore Pope Francis' power as an absolute monarch and the legal, financial and reputational problems that can arise when he wields it.

Clergy sexual abuse survivors on Oct. 2 unveiled a proposed new church law calling for the permanent removal of abusive priests and superiors who covered for them, as they stepped up their outrage over Pope Francis' choice to head the Vatican office that investigates sex crimes.

A few years ago, Pope Francis told the head of the main Vatican-backed Catholic women's organization to be "brave" in pushing for change for women in the Catholic Church.

Five conservative cardinals from Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas have challenged Pope Francis to affirm current Catholic teaching on homosexuality and women's ordination ahead of a big Vatican meeting where such hot-button issues are up for debate.

Women who say they were abused by a once-prominent Jesuit artist said Sept. 19 they had been revictimized by his superiors, saying Pope Francis' recent gestures and an apparent effort to exonerate him publicly showed church pledges of "zero tolerance" were just a "publicity stunt."

Newly discovered correspondence suggests that World War II-era Pope Pius XII had detailed information from a trusted German Jesuit that up to 6,000 Jews and Poles were being gassed each day in German-occupied Poland. The documentation undercuts the Holy See’s argument that it couldn’t verify diplomatic reports of Nazi atrocities to denounce them.

Russia’s new ambassador to the Vatican met Sept. 18 with Pope Francis for a protocol visit, as signs emerged that the Vatican's Ukraine peace envoy could soon be undertaking a second mission to Moscow.

Pope Francis’ Ukraine peace envoy discussed the need to resume Ukraine grain exports to feed the world's hungry during a meeting Sept. 14 with a Chinese official while on a mission to Beijing, the Vatican said.

Researchers have discovered new documentation that substantiates reports that Catholic convents and monasteries in Rome sheltered Jews during World War II, providing names of at least 3,200 Jews whose identities have been corroborated by the city's Jewish community, officials said Sept. 7.

Ukraine’s Greek Catholic bishops told Pope Francis on Sept. 6 that his words praising Russia’s imperial past had pained the Ukrainian people, bringing complaints about the Vatican’s diplomatic neutrality in Moscow's war on their country to the heart of the Holy See.

The Vatican on August 29 sought to tamp down an uproar that erupted after Pope Francis praised Russia’s imperialist past during a video conference with Russian Catholic youths, insisting that he never intended to encourage modern-day Russian aggression in Ukraine.

Pope Francis challenged young people on Thursday to make the world a more just and inclusive place, as he focused the second day of his Portugal trip on inspiring students to use their privilege to combat global warming and economic inequalities.

The Vatican prosecutor asked a court July 26  to convict 10 people, including a cardinal, of a range of financial crimes, sentence them to three to 13 years in prison and order the confiscation of some 415 million euros ($460 million) to pay the Holy See back for bad investments and financial losses over the past decade.

The Jesuits said that a famous artist priest is definitively expelled from the religious order for sexually, spiritually and psychologically abusing women, and lamented they couldn't prosecute him more vigorously under the Vatican's internal procedures.

The Vatican prosecutor insisted July 18 that his indictments of 10 people, including a cardinal, for alleged financial crimes held up under two years of testimony, criticism and defense motions, as he began closing arguments in a trial that exposed the unseemly financial underbelly of the Holy See.