Associated Press

The majority of Venezuelans are religious — just like parts of the country's political history. But as they prepare for the upcoming presidential election, it's hard to say exactly how religious Venezuelans are and what specifically they believe.

New Zealand’s independent inquiry into decades of abuse of children and vulnerable adults released a blistering final report Wednesday finding the country’s state agencies and churches failed to prevent, stop or admit to the mistreatment of those in their care.

The Knights of Columbus, the world’s largest Catholic fraternal group, has covered up defining features of the mosaics in its Washington D.C. shrine after the famous ex-Jesuit artist who designed them was accused of abusing women.

It took the Holy See more than a half-century to sanction Maciel, and even more for it to acknowledge he was a religious fraud and con artist who molested his seminarians, fathered three children and built a secretive, cult-like religious order to hide his double life.

A legendary French priest and a lifelong advocate of the homeless has been accused of committing acts that would amount to “sexual assault or sexual harassment,” his foundation said Wednesday, in the latest instance of a Catholic spiritual leader facing allegations of abusing his power to harm women.

A legal complaint says a 10-foot aquatic statue of the Greek god of the sea Poseidon in the Gulf of Mexico offended the beliefs of local Maya Indigenous groups who prefer their own local god of water, known as Chaac.

Religion and politics frequently overlap in Reading, an old industrial city in one of the most pivotal swing states of this year’s presidential election.

Spain’s Catholic bishops approved Tuesday a plan to compensate the victims of sexual abuse inside the Church whose alleged aggressors have died or whose possible crimes have been proscribed, an initiative the government and victims’ associations called lacking in real guarantees.

The Vatican’s chief prosecutor has strongly defended the integrity and fairness of the city state’s justice system following criticism that Pope Francis' absolute power and his interventions in the so-called “trial of the century” last year violated the defendants’ fundamental rights.

Mayreu is one of the smallest inhabited islands of St. Vincent and the Grenadines. It's so small that it's barely visible — a dot on the map of the Caribbean. Hurricane Beryl nearly erased it from the map.

Pope Francis’ chief of staff became one of the highest-ranking Holy See officials to testify in a foreign court Thursday, telling a British tribunal about the negotiations at the heart of the Vatican’s so-called “trial of the century,” admitting he filed a false invoice and pointing a finger at his one-time deputy who escaped the scandal unscathed.

A French bishop has put off any decision on whether to remove mosaics by an ex-Jesuit artist accused of abusing women, saying that they’ll stay for now on the Lourdes shrine but that eventually they should be removed.

The country's Catholic Church had around 20.35 million members at the end of last year. In an annual summary of statistics, the bishops’ conference didn’t detail reasons for the departures.

The Vatican went on trial in a London court Wednesday, as a British financier sought to recover from the harm he said he suffered to his reputation as a result of a Vatican investigation into its 350 million euro (around $375 million) investment in a London property.

The Oklahoma Supreme Court on Tuesday stopped what would have been the first publicly funded religious charter school in the U.S., turning back conservatives and the state's GOP governor who have welcomed religious groups into public education.

The Supreme Court on Monday rejected a challenge to a 2021 Connecticut law that eliminated the state’s longstanding religious exemption from childhood immunization requirements for schools, colleges and day care facilities.

It’s just a snapshot of a wider project. Catholic pilgrims are in the middle of a two-month journey on four routes across the United States. They're planning to converge on Indianapolis in mid-July for a climactic stadium gathering called the National Eucharistic Congress, the first such event in more than 80 years.

The coastal Nigerian community of Ayetoro was founded decades ago and nicknamed "Happy City," meant to be a Christian utopia that would be sinless and classless. But now its remaining residents can do little against the rising sea.

Among many faith leaders nationwide, the pain unleashed on June 20, 2022 — when the Revs. Javier Campos Morales, 79, and Joaquín César Mora Salazar, 80, were murdered by a local gang leader — has not faded. Nor their quest for peace.

Louisiana has become the first state to require that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom, the latest move from a GOP-dominated Legislature pushing a conservative agenda under a new governor.