What percentage of China’s population considers itself Christian is a question that has come to the fore here recently, in part because that number may have grown to nearly equal the membership of the Communist Party of China.The C.C.P. operates “patriotic” churches that are headed

Immediately after his election on March 13, 2013, Pope Francis told himself, “Jorge, do not change, continue being yourself because to change at your age would be ridiculous.” He revealed this interesting personal detail in a wide-ranging exclusive multi-part interview with Elisabetta Pi

Citing a lack of funding, the World Food Program announced on Dec. 1 that it was suspending food vouchers for more than 1.7 million Syrian refugees, a move its president called “disastrous for many already suffering families.” • The final report of a Vatican-ordered study of co

History was made in the Vatican on Dec. 2, when Pope Francis and other leaders of the world’s main religions—Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Judaism—signed a joint declaration to work together to eradicate modern slavery in its various forms by the year 2020. Pope Franc

The shooting of Michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson, Mo., exposed long-ignored, long-simmering tensions in the United States. Ferguson amounts to a kind of national Rorschach test on race. Polls show blacks and whites hold decidedly different views about the unarmed teenager’s death.

The Catholic Church seemed to throw its support behind what is, in Europe at least, an accelerating movement toward the abolition of nuclear weapons during the first day, Dec. 8, of the Vienna Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons.In a message to the conference participants from P