The Associated Press

A mammoth crowd of mostly barefoot Filipino Catholics prayed for peace in the Middle East on Thursday at the start of an annual procession of a centuries-old black statue of Jesus Christ in one of Asia's biggest religious events.

A Catholic priest has pleaded guilty to two counts of "unnatural acts" with a minor for accusations of sexual abuse dating back to the 1970s.

A proposal aimed at banning private schools that discriminate against gay employees and students from receiving Indiana voucher program money is being backed by the state’s Republican school superintendent.

Victims' advocates had long criticized the Roman Catholic Church for not making public the names of credibly accused priests. Now, despite the dioceses' release of nearly 5,300 names, most in the last two years, critics say the lists are far from complete.

The lawsuit charges that Donald McGuire, a globe-trotting Jesuit with ties to St. Teresa of Calcutta, abused Robert J. Goldberg "more than 1,000 times, in multiple states and countries," during sojourns to spiritual retreats throughout the United States and Europe.

A Catholic diocese in North Carolina on Dec. 30 published a list of 14 clergy who it says have been credibly accused of child sexual abuse in the nearly 50 years since the diocese was established.

A knife-wielding man stormed into a rabbi's home and stabbed five people as they celebrated Hanukkah in an Orthodox Jewish community north of New York City, an ambush the governor said Dec. 29 was an act of domestic terrorism fueled by intolerance and a "cancer" of growing hatred in America.

Rhode Island's Roman Catholic diocese is challenging a lawsuit filed after a state law gave sex abuse victims more time to sue their abusers or the institutions they worked for.

Nearly two decades after the Vatican assumed responsibility for reviewing all cases of abuse, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is today overwhelmed, struggling with a skeleton staff that hasn't grown at pace to meet the four-fold increase in the number of cases arriving in 2019 compared to a decade ago.

In a letter to the president of Christianity Today magazine, more than 100 evangelicals chided the magazine for penning an anti-Trump editorial that they portrayed as a dig at their characters as well as the president's.

Pope Francis warned Dec. 21 that "rigidity" in living out the Christian faith is creating a "minefield" of hatred and misunderstanding in a world where Christianity is increasingly irrelevant.

The Legion of Christ religious order, which was discredited by its pedophile founder and the cult-like practices he imposed, says an internal investigation has identified 33 priests and 71 seminarians who sexually abused minors over the past eight decades.

The April 15 fire at Notre Dame cathedral has stopped the Paris cathedral from celebrating Midnight Mass this year, for the first time in over two centuries.

President Donald Trump is blasting a prominent Christian magazine that published an editorial arguing that he should be removed from office.

A handful of people who have gone public as survivors of Catholic clergy sexual abuse in Japan, where values of conformity and harmony have resulted in a strong code of silence.

Tennessee won't stop resettling refugees, Republican Gov. Bill Lee said December 18, rejecting the option offered to states by President Donald Trump's administration.

The Supreme Court said December 18 it will consider expanding protections for churches against job-discrimination claims.

The Roman Catholic bishop of Erie has announced the opening of the canonization process for Gertrude Barber, founder of what is now called the Barber National Institute for adults and children with disabilities.

Protests spread December 17 across India against a new law that provides a path to citizenship for non-Muslims entering illegally from several neighboring countries, with angry demonstrators clashing with police.

Assailants attacked several protest camps in north and south Lebanon early Dec. 17, according to state-run media, demolishing tents and burning down others as anger boiled over in the capital following a video deemed offensive to the country's Shiites.