Nicole Winfield

The Vatican on April 15 replaced the director of its financial watchdog agency, completing a coup that began in October with controversial police raids on the watchdog offices and an investigation into a London real estate deal.

Christians around the world celebrated Easter Sunday isolated in their homes by the coronavirus while pastors preached the faith's joyous news of Christ's resurrection to empty pews.

The Vatican is under pressure to let more employees work from home as its offices remain open two weeks after the Italian government ordered Italians home and shut down all non-essential businesses in an urgent attempt to contain the coronavirus.

Italy mulled imposing even tighter restrictions on daily life and announced billions in financial relief March 11 to cushion economic shocks from the coronavirus, its latest efforts to adjust to the fast-evolving health crisis that also silenced the usually bustling heart of the Catholic faith, St. Peter’s Square.

Pope Francis on March 6 accepted the resignation of a French cardinal who was convicted and then acquitted of covering up for a pedophile priest in a case that fueled a reckoning over clergy sexual abuse in France.

The Vatican confirmed the walled city-state's first case of the new coronavirus March 6 and closed some offices as a precaution while Pope Francis continued recovering from a cold.

The Vatican is sending its top two sex crimes investigators to Mexico on a fact-finding and assistance mission as the Catholic hierarchy in the world's second-largest Catholic country begins to reckon with decades of clergy sex abuse and cover-up.

Pope Francis told the Legion of Christ religious order Feb. 29 it still has a long road of reform ahead, making clear that 10 years of Vatican-mandated rehabilitation hadn't purged it of the toxic influences of its pedophile founder.

More than 150 historians and researchers have signed up to access the soon-to-open Vatican archives of Pope Pius XII, evidence of the intense scholarly interest into the World War II-era pope and his record during the Holocaust, officials said Feb. 20.

Yolanda Martínez's son had been sexually abused by a priest of the Legion of Christ, a disgraced religious order. But when she called Cardinal Valasio De Paolis — the Vatican official appointed by the pope to lead the Legion and to clean it up — to report the settlement the group was offering and to express her outrage, he laughed.

Nine priests and brothers of a Catholic group recently shut down by the Vatican are under investigation by Italian authorities for allegedly sexually abusing two brothers, officials and news reports said Wednesday.

A Vatican cardinal at the center of a storm over a book about celibacy and the Catholic priesthood is denouncing the "brutality" of criticism directed at him and his collaborator, Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI.

The Vatican women's magazine is blaming the drastic drop in the number of nuns worldwide in part on their wretched working conditions and the sexual abuse and abuses of power they suffer at the hands of priests and their own superiors.

A global network of financial intelligence units has readmitted the Holy See after a two-month suspension sparked by a Vatican police raid on the Vatican's financial watchdog agency.

Ana Lucia Salazar's horrific story, which has been corroborated by other victims and the Legion of Christ itself, has sparked a new credibility crisis for the once-influential order, 10 years after the Holy See took it over after determining that its founder was a pedophile.

The Legion of Christ religious order, already discredited because of its pedophile founder, announced a joint Vatican investigation Monday into the botched handling of a priest who sexually abused girls as young as 6 and suffered no punishment.

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.

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.

Pope Francis has tapped a Bank of Italy executive to take over the Vatican's financial intelligence unit following a scandal that resulted in the Vatican being suspended from an international anti-money laundering network.