In “The Deep Places,” Ross Douthat relates how an experience of illness and suffering can lead to a search for answers to more transcendent questions, including the meaning of suffering and the gift of perseverance.

Is the church really interested in listening and learning from former Catholics? Or is it only “listening” to get them to come back to Catholicism?

This week on “Inside the Vatican,” host Colleen Dulle and veteran Vatican correspondent Gerard O’Connell discuss Gerry’s interview with Hans Zollner, S.J., a leading abuse prevention expert based at the Vatican.

Father Zollner is the president of the Pontifical Gregorian University’s Center for Child Protection. He has been one of the few people in Rome willing to speak on the record about the Munich report.

Behind (almost) every tattoo is a story. The church should start listening to them.

The report landed on French Catholics like a bomb. French bishops had never considered sexual abuse a serious problem. “We have been in denial for 20 years,” Father Goujon said. “The bishops said that [that kind of abuse] could never happen here.”

It is horrifying to think that some people would believe we are living in a simulation. But even more horrifying is the reality that we all actually spend most of our lives behaving like we are.

Akash Bashir, a 20-year-old volunteer security guard who was killed by a suicide bomber in 2015, is the first Pakistani to be given the title “servant of God,” an initial step on the path to sainthood.

Since the end of U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan, much of the world has turned its attention away from geopolitical conflicts in the region. But these issues have not disappeared.