He was the reluctant pope, a shy bookworm who preferred solitary walks in the Alps and Mozart piano concertos to the public glare and majesty of Vatican pageantry. When Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI and was thrust into the footsteps of his beloved and charismatic predecessor, he said he felt a guillotine had come down on him.

So it should have come as little surprise that with a few words uttered in Latin on a Vatican holiday in 2013, Benedict ended it all, announcing that he would become the first pope in 600 years to resign.

The Catholic Church’s decades-long sex abuse scandal caught up with a Nobel Peace Prize winner Thursday, with the Vatican confirming that it had sanctioned the East Timor independence hero, Bishop Carlos Ximenes Belo, following allegations that he sexually abused boys there during the 1990s.

The Vatican admission came a day after a Dutch magazine, De Groene Amsterdammer, exposed the claims against the revered Catholic bishop, citing two of Belo’s alleged victims and reporting there were others who hadn’t come forward in East Timor, where the church wields enormous influence.

Appearing on Italian state-run television RAI2, Cardinal Parolin confirmed the return of a Holy See delegation from China as well as the probable renewal this fall of the agreement on the appointment of bishops.

Parolin said that the provisional agreement first signed by the Holy See in 2018 with the CCP and renewed for two years in 2020 seeks to ensure that all bishops are in communion with the Pope, fully Chinese and fully Catholic. He acknowledged that there is still a long way to go, requiring patience to move forward and see the “seeds germinate.”

The Vatican press office confirmed that Pope Francis made a visit to the Russian Embassy to the Holy See to express his concern about the fighting in Ukraine on Friday morning.

The Russian Embassy to the Holy See is a short distance outside of Vatican City situated on the road leading into St. Peter's Square, and this was seen by most as a strong personal papal initiative.

The Vatican said Tuesday that Pope Francis has signed off on a rewrite of the universal Catholic Church's internal penal system, updating a version in place since the 1980s and laying out clearer penalties for the sexual abuse of minors.

The changes, years in the making, are in part a response to the church’s raft of abuse and financial scandals — which have often been magnified by secretive, highly subjective decision-making about how and whether to apply punishments.

The leader of the Roman Catholic Church was speaking at his Easter vigil service on Saturday evening in an almost empty St Peter's Basilica.

Members of the world's 1.3 billion Catholic community could follow a live stream of the service.

Pope Francis has announced sweeping changes to the way the Roman Catholic church deals with cases of sexual abuse of children, abolishing the rule of pontifical secrecy that previously covered them.

Two documents issued by the pope back practices that have been in place in some countries, particularly the US, such as reporting suspicion of sexual abuse to civil authorities where required by law.

The documents, which put the practices into universal church law, also forbid imposing an obligation of silence on those who report sexual abuse or allege they have been a victim.

ROME–Just when you thought the Vatican‘s image problem couldn’t get any worse, what with endemic clerical child abuse and a near bankrupt American arm of the church, it does. A new report pulls back the red velvet curtain on a bizarre new tidbit about the Vatican‘s other dirty little secret: its finances.

When Colleen Fay of Mount Rainier, Maryland, came out as transgender 12 years ago to her parish music director, she was fired from her position on the choir. She later described feeling like she was in “doctrinal limbo” because there is no universal teaching on gender from the church.

“I’m hurt by the Catholic Church every single day,” she said. “They want me and they don’t want me.”

The Vatican on Monday rejected the idea that people can change or choose their genders.

The document issued on the topic is the Vatican's first on gender theory, and insists on the sexual "complementarity" of men and women to make babies.

Published during LGBTQ Pride Month, the document, titled "Male and Female He Created Them," calls for a "path of dialogue" and listening on the issue of "gender theory" in education.