Religion News Service

Signs of the Times: As Pope Francis said, concern for the environment can no longer be an optional or secondary aspect of Christianity. It must be central to who we are as Christians.

Despite Pope Francis' words in Laudato Si', millions of Catholics, including bishops, are ignoring the looming climate apocalypse and the individual and systemic conversion needed to address it.

Vatican athletes might never compete in the Olympic Games, but the small Catholic state still hopes to have an influence on the global sporting event through the promotion of human fraternity and lasting friendships.

The White House announced a slate of nominations and appointments for top religious affairs roles, including the first Muslim American nominated to be the U.S. ambassador-at-large for International Religious Freedom.

Signs of the Times: Since the pope has no wife or children, he needs to designate someone who can make medical decisions for him, and the rest of the church needs to know who this is.

The state of California has found that the Los Angeles public school district violated federal law in the manner it slashed funding for low-income and disadvantaged students who attend Catholic schools.

Pope Francis' first foreign trip since his recovery from surgery will be to the Eastern European countries of Hungary and Slovakia from Sept. 12-15. While Slovakian citizens eagerly anticipate the papal visit, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic continues to generate conflicts and challenges.

A new survey finds vaccine hesitancy has fallen among Americans overall and among all religious subgroups in just three months, with many who once balked saying they embraced inoculation against COVID-19 at the urging of faith leaders.

Commentary: I buck myself up with a reminder that Catholicism is much bigger than the latest scandal or headline. The church is an ancient, beautiful and flawed vessel that has carried the best and worst of humanity over the centuries. 

Signs of the Times: Despite the recent decision of Pope Francis to curtail celebration of the Latin Mass, we are not going to see it disappear anytime soon for a simple reason: Local bishops can and will still permit it.

Commentary: The hook on which this story hangs is a long-discredited link between sexual abuse and homosexuality.

An estimated 8,000 people came July 17 to attend the unveiling of what is the first major stand-alone shrine to the La Vang virgin in the United States.

Parishes in the Tokyo archdiocese have canceled all the plans they had made to 'address the spiritual needs of the many people who would come to Japan' for the upcoming Summer Olympics.

Washington, Colorado and Oregon are now among the U.S. states that have legalized the process of converting human bodies into soil, a procedure the Catholic Church said fails to show “respect for the body of the deceased.”

Shovels in hand, descendants of the Georgetown University 272, a group of enslaved persons the Jesuits sold to Louisiana plantations in 1838, are volunteering at an archaeological dig on a former plantation in Maryland.

In the wake of the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., organizers envisioned the festival as a way to honor King.

Italian LGBTQ citizens angered by what they considered undue interference by the Vatican in its attempt to stall a controversial bill being debated in the Italian Senate that would criminalize homophobia.

In a recently published book, Texas A&M historian Felipe Hinojosa gives a new look into the 1960s and early '70s movement of Latino activists who occupied church buildings across the country as a way of taking back control of their communities and calling attention to local residents' poverty.

 Last week's announcement of indictments by Vatican prosecutors is not a scandal but a sign of progress.