Among the hubs for climate scientists, activists and fossil fuel lobbyists at the United Nations climate summit is a new addition this year: a place to pray. The first-ever Faith Pavilion, inaugurated by Pope Francis and the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, Ahmed Al-Tayeb, in a video message on Sunday, offers a space for meditation, daily […]
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For years, Purdue Pharma, the maker of the prescription painkiller OxyContin, had been entangled in lawsuits seeking to hold it to account for its role in the spiraling opioid crisis. A pathbreaking settlement reached last year appeared to signal the end to thousands of those cases, funneling billions of dollars toward fighting the epidemic in […]
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Pope Francis, who reluctantly canceled his trip to the annual United Nations climate summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, because of a lung infection, sought on Saturday to lend his voice to the world’s destitute facing the brunt of climate disruption. In an address written by the pope and delivered at the summit by the […]
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Pope Francis’s relationship with the conservative wing of the American Catholic church was already on shaky ground when reports surfaced this week of his plan to evict one of his most prominent critics from a Vatican-subsidized apartment in Rome. Cardinal Raymond Burke, who led dioceses in St. Louis and Wisconsin before moving to Rome, is […]
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As Pope Francis smiled warmly at the circus performers spinning and flipping in front of him at his weekly general audience in the Vatican on Wednesday, he looked every bit the grandfatherly figure who has for the last decade sought to make the church a kinder, gentler and more inclusive place. Except for the people […]
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Almost as soon as Pope Francis became the head of the Roman Catholic church in 2013, Raymond Burke, an American cardinal, emerged as his leading critic from within the church, becoming a de facto antipope for frustrated traditionalists who believed Francis was diluting doctrine. Francis frequently demoted and stripped the American cleric of influence, but […]
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Pope Francis, following his doctor’s orders, will not attend the United Nations climate summit in Dubai later this week, the Vatican said Tuesday. Although the pontiff’s general health was improving after a bout of flu and lung inflammation, his doctors had asked Francis to take it easy, the Vatican said in a statement. “Pope Francis […]
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Inside a windowless hotel ballroom on the Baltimore waterfront on Wednesday, more than 250 American bishops were trying to pilot through the choppy waters of the increasingly contentious relationship between Pope Francis and conservative American Catholics, many of them in their own ranks. But the most visible sign of that struggle was outside on the […]
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Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas, one of the loudest American voices against Pope Francis within his own church, recently responded to a Vatican investigation into his leadership and talk of his potential resignation with a public letter stating, “I cannot resign as Bishop of Tyler because that would be me abandoning the flock.” He […]
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Pope Francis, who has made reaching out to L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics a hallmark of his papacy, has made clear that transgender people can be baptized, serve as godparents and be witnesses at church weddings, furthering his vision of a more inclusive church. The pope’s embrace of transgender people’s participation in the church was revealed in a […]
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When climate activists protesting the building of a huge church complex in a natural park in the South of France scaled the construction site, the nuns gave chase. One sister grabbed an environmentalist climbing an excavator, but lost her grip and fell rolling into a pit. Two other nuns tried to hold down a protester, […]
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Nearly 15 years ago, Mary Nepomuceno separated from her husband. She remains in limbo because divorce — and the possibility of a new marriage and a clean slate in life — is forbidden by her country’s laws. Thousands of people like Ms. Nepomuceno are trapped in long-dead marriages in the Philippines, the only country in […]
Read MoreWanda Poltawska, a Polish psychiatrist and author who after World War II sought spiritual help to cope with the horrors she had experienced in a Nazi concentration camp and became a lifelong friend of her counselor, a priest who would one day be Pope John Paul II, died on Oct. 24 at her home in […]
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A monthlong meeting convened by Pope Francis to determine the future of the Roman Catholic Church ended Saturday night with a document that said it was “urgent” that women have a larger role but postponed discussion of major issues such as ordaining women as deacons and failed to address outreach to L.G.B.T.Q.+ Catholics. Vatican officials […]
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When Helena Jeppesen-Spuhler, an advocate for the ordination of women, joined a major Vatican meeting this month, she was skeptical that an institution dominated by men for 2,000 years was ready to listen to women like her. The gathering of some 300 bishops from around the world also included for the first time nuns and […]
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When the Rev. John Trout heard that Pope Francis wanted feedback from parishes before a major Vatican gathering this month on the church’s future, he decided that his suburban Chicago congregation would go all in. St. Joseph Catholic Church hung banners about the meeting, distributed surveys, and invited an expert from Loyola University Chicago to […]
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Javier Milei, a far-right libertarian leading the polls in Argentina’s presidential election this month, has made a lot of contentious statements in recent years: Humans did not cause climate change; people should be able to sell their organs; his nation’s currency “is not even good as manure.” But, to many Argentines, he has done something […]
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The Italian Alps are renowned for their stunning scenery, fine wine and good food. But many travelers are unaware that the region also hosts exquisite Renaissance and Baroque art. Nestled in the mountains and hills of northwestern Italy, just an hour’s drive from Milan, a cluster of Catholic sanctuaries brim with sculptures and frescoes by […]
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Rome is a Catholic menagerie these days. An excommunicated woman dressed in red bishop’s robes is marching toward the Vatican behind a procession of would-be female priests. Conservative culture warriors are headlining theaters, delivering screeds against Pope Francis before marginalized cardinals and exorcists sitting in velvet seats. The abortion-rights leader of Catholics for Choice is […]
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The Francis era in Roman Catholicism is a good example of how the abnormal and even extraordinary can come to feel, with enough repetition, old hat and status quo. The wildness of the last decade is undeniable: the first papal resignation in centuries, the elevation of a new pope who began casting about for the […]
Read MoreIn 2015, Pope Francis offered a sprawling meditation on man’s place on Earth and the spiritual implications of human-caused global warming. Eight years later, he appears to have little patience for such ruminations. In an updated environmental treatise published this week, the pope names and shames the countries and industries he sees as bad actors […]
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Pope Francis on Wednesday implored the world to protect the “suffering” planet, lamenting that scant progress had been made in the eight years since he refocused the Roman Catholic Church more fully on environmental issues in a landmark and widely praised treatise. “With the passage of time, I have realized that our responses have not […]
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The New York Times Audio app is home to journalism and storytelling, and provides news, depth and serendipity. If you haven’t already, download it here — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter. The Headlines brings you the biggest stories of the day from the Times journalists […]
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Sitting under the bright house lights of a theater near the Vatican, Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke, the de facto leader of the Roman Catholic Church’s opposition to Pope Francis, displayed a theatrical sense of timing on Tuesday for the adoring conservatives in the red velvet seats. The day before, Cardinal Burke and other traditionalist prelates […]
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Throughout his decade as leader of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Francis has allowed debates on previously taboo topics and set in motion subtle shifts toward liberalizing changes that have enraged conservatives for going too far and frustrated progressives for not going far enough. This month, starting on Wednesday, Francis’ desire for the church to […]
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Even for a Roman Catholic Church rife with esoteric terminology that often defies comprehension by the uninitiated, this month’s Synod on Synodality at the Vatican — essentially a major workshop for church leaders and lay people on how to work together for the good of the church — has proved mystifyingly meta for many of […]
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This year alone, Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas, has accused the pope of undermining the Catholic faith, has suggested that other Vatican officials have veered so far from church teaching that they are no longer Catholic, and has warned that a landmark global gathering that opens this week at the Vatican could threaten “basic […]
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The archdiocese of Baltimore, the oldest in the United States, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Friday, two days before a new state law goes into effect that will allow child sexual abuse victims to sue organizations no matter how long ago the abuse took place. Archbishop William E. Lori attributed the filing directly to […]
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It was the morning of May 1, and the Italian village of Cocullo was almost unrecognizable. The typical placidity of its quiet alleys and muted central square had given way to several thousand people: religious travelers, musicians, young women in ornate costumes, tourists from the far corners of the country and beyond. A group of […]
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Pope Francis met with President Emmanuel Macron of France on Saturday on the second day of a whirlwind trip to Marseille, a port city in the country’s south where the pontiff reiterated his forceful condemnation of the world’s indifference toward the deaths of migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean to Europe. Thousands of police officers […]
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A letter found among the private papers of Pope Pius XII suggests that the Holy See was told in 1942 that up to 6,000 people, “above all Poles and Jews,” were being killed in furnaces every day at Belzec, a Nazi death camp in Poland. Though news of the atrocities being perpetrated by Hitler was […]
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