VATICAN CITY - In what the Vatican bank described as recognition that it has established serious measures to prevent money laundering, it announced the Italian government has promised to return 23 million euros (U.S. $29 million) that had been blocked for more than three years.

ROME - Half a dozen men stand nonchalantly in front of a grubby building on one of Rome’s busiest streets as cars whizz past. They stiffen whenever a stranger approaches.

ROME - Like many Roman Catholic immigrant families from southern Italy, I grew up with a devotion to the patron saint of my family’s ancestral town. Every Italian city, town and village has one. As a general rule, the smaller the village, the more obscure the saint.

ROME - The Italian bishops' conference has sent a message of solidarity to Fr. Luigi Ciotti, founder of Libera, a network of Italian anti-Mafia associations, following an apparent threat to his life from a Sicilian Mafia boss.

TRAVESIO, ITALY - It’s not every Sunday you’re escorted to Mass by a procession. Upon arriving in Travesio in northern Italy, a marching band and about a dozen people carrying banners representing various comunes (or municipalities) in the region come into view. As they lead us through the winding streets to the parish of St. Quirino for a Mass celebrated by the regional bishop, we wave back at onlookers. With a backdrop of bells ringing atop the stone tower beside the church, it’s time for the celebration to begin. 

ROME - Meriam Ibrahim, the Sudanese woman sentenced to death for refusing to renounce her Christian faith and then spared after an international campaign, left Italy on July 31 on a flight for the United States, where she plans to build a new life.

ROME - As the Catholic Church wrestles with changing community attitudes on key social issues, a new Italian survey finds more support for abortion, gay rights and euthanasia than for cosmetic surgery.

VATICAN CITY - His voice breaking with emotion, Giovanni Traettino, a Pentecostal pastor in southern Italy and longtime friend of Pope Francis, welcomed the Pope, "my beloved brother," to his partially built church in Caserta.

VATICAN CITY - The godfather who stands up for a child's baptism one day and spends the rest of the week running a brutal crime ring unfortunately is not the stuff of movies.

VATICAN CITY - It began with the murder of an innocent three-year-old boy who burned to death in his grandfather’s car in a Mafia ambush in January. Pope Francis was so shaken by the death of Nicola “Coco” Campolongo that he spoke out against the ferocity of the crime and those behind it.

VATICAN CITY - Although Pope Francis planned to make a short, private visit to Caserta in southern Italy specifically to visit a Pentecostal pastor he knows from Argentina, the 200-km trip has taken a new form — two forms, to be exact.

VATICAN CITY - A bishop in Calabria has ordered an end to all religious processions in his diocese after 30 men carrying a large statue of Mary and hundreds of people accompanying the statue paused and bowed in front of the house of a presumed mafia boss.

ROME - Only two weeks after Pope Francis announced he was excommunicating the Mafia, a religious procession in southern Italy has provoked uproar after paying homage to a convicted mobster.

VATICAN CITY - The tragic deaths of thousands of men, women and children who die while searching for a better future should trigger compassion and action, not indifference, Pope Francis said.

VATICAN CITY - Pope Francis will travel to the heartland of the Italian mafia for the first time June 21, visiting the southern town where a three-year-old was murdered in a local drug war earlier this year.