Associated Press

It was no ordinary Sunday on Mexico City’s famed Xochimilco canals. Instead of tourists and locals hanging out with friends, the brightly painted boats known as “trajineras” were filled with Catholics honoring a relic of St. Jude Thaddeus, one of Jesus’ 12 apostles and patron saint of impossible causes.

Two activists from animal rights group PETA interrupted Pope Francis’ general audience on Wednesday, shouting and holding up banners against bullfighting before being escorted out of Paul VI Hall. The two were wearing t-shirts reading “Stop blessing corridas” and holding banners saying “Bullfighting is a sin.” PETA has been pleading with the Pope to cut the Catholic Church’s ties with bullfighting and condemn the “despicable blood sport.”

The suit was filed in June by parents of Louisiana public school children with various religious backgrounds who contend the law violates First Amendment language forbidding government establishment of religion and guaranteeing religious liberty. Proponents of the law argue that it is not solely religious but that the Ten Commandments have historical significance to the foundation of U.S. law.

Already known to many as “St. Romero of the Americas,” San Salvador’s archbishop was beloved among the working class and poor for defending them against repression by the army. But he was loathed by conservative sectors who saw him as aligned with leftist causes as the country descended into a 1980-1992 civil war.

The investigation commissioned by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland found marked and unmarked graves at 65 of the more than 400 U.S. boarding schools where Native American children were forcibly assimilated into white society. The findings don't specify how each child died, but officials said the causes of death included disease and abuse during a 150-year period that ended in 1969.

Among their bold performances was a scene that seemed to evoke Leonardo da Vinci’s "The Last Supper," featuring the drag queens and other performers in a configuration reminiscent of Jesus Christ and his apostles. Thomas Jolly, the artistic director of the opening ceremony, afterward drew attention away from "The Last Supper" references, saying that hadn't been his intention.

Sixty people allege in new lawsuits filed in Missouri that they were abused as children by dozens of Catholic priests, nuns and others, and the man who now leads the Archdiocese of Omaha, Nebraska, is among the accused.

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.