Bureaucratic overreach, a fundamental misunderstanding of the interplay of canon law with secular authority, a headline-grabbing “food fight”: these are just some of the criticisms of a recent broadside from a United Nations committee reviewing the Vatican’s global record on the pr

The global pope-apalooza continued in January as Pope Francis was featured on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine and in “superpope” graffiti that sprouted up on buildings around Vatican City. • It was announced on Jan. 27 that Pope Francis has accepted the resignation of Melkite Ar

Number of unaccompanied minors apprehended at U.S. border doubled last year.

The U.N.’s International Labor Organization in January offered a sobering review of global labor conditions and projections for the future that were not much more heartening. According to I.L.O. researchers, almost 202 million people around the world were unemployed during 2013, an increase of

The Vatican Congregation for Religious hopes to release its final report on the 2009-10 visitation of U.S. women’s communities “soon.” Speaking to reporters on Jan. 31 at the Vatican, Archbishop José Rodríguez Carballo, O.F.M., secretary of the Congregation for Institutes of Cons

The House finally passed a five-year farm bill on Jan. 29, more than a year after the previous agriculture program expired and two days before a stopgap extension was itself set to expire. While Catholic groups and other rural advocates had been urging passage of a farm bill, their enthusiasm for th