Nicole Winfield

The top-ranked tennis player visited the new pope on Wednesday, gave him a tennis racket and offered to play, during an off day for Sinner at the Italian Open.

The women who have worked closely with Pope Leo XIV in recent years have praised his leadership style, ability to listen and respect for their opinions. In interviews with The Associated Press, they say they expect that as pope, Leo will continue to promote women in church governance positions, albeit with limits.

Leo said he will follow in the modernizing reforms of Pope Francis to make the Catholic Church inclusive, attentive to the faithful and a church that looks out for the "least and rejected.”

Over 12 years, Francis has sought to impose a kind of normality on the papacy with his informal style and disdain for pomp. During his five-week hospitalization for pneumonia, he has followed that same playbook.

Gemelli Hospital medical director Dr. Sergio Alfieri said Saturday (March 22) that Francis will require at least two months of rest and rehabilitation as he continues recovering at the Vatican. 

Doctors said it would take a day or two to evaluate how and if an alarming Friday afternoon episode impacted Francis’ overall clinical condition. His prognosis remained guarded, meaning he wasn’t out of danger.

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.