The Associated Press

Pope Francis will travel to Thailand and Japan in November for a visit expected to highlight his call for complete nuclear disarmament and honor the small Catholic communities in each country.

A Roman Catholic diocese in upstate New York filed for bankruptcy protection Thursday amid a wave of lawsuits over alleged sexual abuse of children.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman met Tuesday with a delegation of American evangelical Christians in the Red Sea city of Jiddah.

Pope Francis received a victim's letter in 2015 regarding sexual abuse by a priest and a cover-up by Chilean clergy, contradicting the pope's insistence that no victims had come forward.

The faces of the men half-buried in the mass graves had been burned away by acid or blasted by bullets. Noor Kadir finally recognized his friends only by the colors of their shorts.

The retired cardinal of Hong Kong has revealed the behind-the-scenes drama of the Vatican's efforts to improve relations with China, including its request for a legitimate bishop to retire in favor of an excommunicated one who is recognized by Beijing.

Pope Francis said Jan. 29 that countries have a responsibility to fight anti-Semitism and the "virus of indifference" that threatens to erase the memory of the Holocaust.

The Virginia Senate has passed legislation aimed at allowing guns in church in response to a deadly church shooting in Texas.

The Vatican was so concerned about the fallout from Chile's most notorious pedophile priest that it planned to ask three Chilean bishops accused of knowing about his decades-long crimes to resign and take a year's sabbatical.

The Supreme Court is refusing to intervene in a legal fight over a Mississippi law that lets government workers and private businesspeople deny services to LGBT people.

At least 10 people, including eight Coptic Christians, were killed after unidentified gunmen opened fire outside a church in a south Cairo suburb, Egypt's Health Ministry spokesman said Friday. It was the latest attack targeting the mostly Muslim country's embattled minority.

An attorney for victims for clergy sex abuse said Thursday that a judge has ordered all sides back to mediation in the years-long bankruptcy case of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis.

A brutal attack claimed by the Islamic State group devastated a two-story Shiite Muslim cultural center in the Afghan capital on Thursday, killing at least 41 people and wounding another 84.

Israel's transportation minister is pushing ahead with a plan to dig a railway tunnel under Jerusalem's Old City ending at the Western Wall with a station named after President Donald Trump.

Vatican City -- Cardinal Bernard Law, the disgraced former archbishop of Boston whose failures to stop child molesters in the priesthood sparked what would become the worst crisis in American Catholicism, died early Wednesday, the Vatican said. He was 86.

An Australian inquiry into child abuse recommended Friday that the Catholic Church lift its demand of clerical celibacy and that priests be prosecuted for failing to report evidence of pedophilia.

The man accused of carrying out a bomb attack in New York City's subway system was influenced by the sermons and writings of a radical Muslim preacher but appeared to have no known links to local radical groups, Bangladeshi officials said.

A jury on Friday sentenced an 85-year-old former priest to life in prison for the 1960 killing of a schoolteacher and former beauty queen who was a member of the parish he served.

Dressed in black tactical-style gear and armed with an assault weapon, 21-year-old Devin Kelley opened fire at the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, Texas, killing 26 people and wounding about 20 others.

The Trump administration moved toward a condemnation of "ethnic cleansing" against Myanmar's Rohingya Muslims, as officials were preparing a recommendation for Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to unequivocally use the term for the first time.