Nicole Winfield

A British court on Friday largely backed the Vatican in refusing to declare that a London-based financier acted in "good faith" in his dealings over the Holy See's 350-million euro (US$375 million) investment in a London property.

The pope looms so large in everyday Italian life that there are lots of expressions that make light of even a dark event like his death.

Here's a look at Pope Francis' health history from a partial lung removal in 1957 to his entering the hospital on Feb. 14. 

Another woman is taking over a top management job in the Vatican: Sr. Raffaella Petrini, an Italian nun, was named president of the Vatican City State, making her essentially the governor of the 44-hectare territory in Rome that is home to the Catholic Church.

The Vatican bank fired a newlywed couple, with three young children between them, after a new internal bank regulation went into effect barring workplace marriages.

Pope Francis on Christmas Eve formally inaugurated the 2025 Holy Year, reviving an ancient church tradition encouraging the faithful to make pilgrimages to Rome. What that means and what it will look like is addressed in this AP explainer.

Francis has long been sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. He recently called for an investigation to determine if Israel's attacks in Gaza constituted genocide.

Pope Francis, who has imposed a series of cost-cutting measures across the cash-strapped Vatican, warned Nov. 21 that the city state's troubled pension fund needs urgent reform to guarantee future obligations. 

The U.S. norms, adopted at the height of the abuse scandal there, say a priest will be permanently removed from church ministry based on even a single act of sexual abuse that is either admitted to or established under church law.

Thanks to an automatic function on X, formerly Twitter, the team’s fleur-de-lis emoji is automatically added to the hashtag #Saints. That has given the impression that the @Pontifex account on X, which has 18.4 million followers and happens to be tweeting a lot about saints lately, was talking about the team when in fact the pope was extolling how actual saints “are precious pearls and are always living and relevant.”

Pope Francis' child protection board called Tuesday for victims of clergy sexual abuse to have greater access to information about their cases and the right to compensation, in the first-ever global assessment of the Catholic Church’s efforts to address the crisis.

The move against the leadership of the Sodalitium Christianae Vitae, or Sodalitium of Christian Life, followed Francis’ decision last month to expel the group’s founder, Luis Figari, after he was found to have sodomized his recruits.

Vatican spokesperson Matteo Bruni said the cancellation only concerned Monday's audiences. He spoke to reporters before the official start of his Vatican briefing to illustrate details of the trip.

Pope Francis will come face to face with the Timorese faithful on his first trip to the country, a former Portuguese colony that makes up half of the island of Timor off the northern coast of Australia. But so far, there is no word if he will meet with victims or even mention the sex abuse directly, as he has in other countries where the rank-and-file faithful have demanded an accounting from the hierarchy for how it failed to protect their children.

According to the decree by the Vatican's department for religious orders, which was posted on the website of the Peruvian bishops conference, Francis gave his explicit authorization to expel Figari from the movement, even though canon law didn’t precisely cover his alleged misconduct.

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.

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.

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.