VATICAN CITY - The Vatican approved new statutes and bylaws for the U.S. Leadership Conference of Women Religious, ending a seven-year process of investigating the group and engaging in dialogue with its officers to ensure greater harmony with church teaching.

MONTREAL - “Something died in all of us today,” said Montreal city councillor Mary Deros as she surveyed the burned-out shell of Koimisis Tis Theotokou Church.

BAYAMO, Cuba - In 2004, with the divorce rate looming around 70 percent in Cuba, the Catholic Church called for a "year of the family."

MIAMI - Some of the Church’s most ancient traditions and rituals are witnessed during Holy Week, including the preparation, blessing and distribution of oils central to the Catholic Church’s sacraments and rites.

TORONTO - Construction has become the soundtrack of daily life at St. Basil’s parish.

VATICAN CITY - Having so much world-famous art housed in Rome's churches and chapels has risked turning the city's sacred spaces into sightseer circuses. A hushed prayerful atmosphere for the faithful is often broken by clicking cameras and tourists exchanging guidebook details.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - Bishop Launay Saturne of Jacmel has a simple vision that he believes could change the future of Haiti.

VATICAN CITY - In a joint statement, representatives of more than 50 countries have recognized that Christians are particularly endangered in the Middle East, and they called on the international community to reaffirm the human right to freedom of religion.

All presidents beseech God to bless the United States of America. Many pray for divine aid for themselves or their policies. Some can only wonder at the inscrutable ways of the Almighty.

Then there’s Frank Underwood, who spits in God’s face.

As I wrote last week from Jerusalem, just months after the massacre at a synagogue in Har Nof, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighbourhood, I felt a duty to make a visit, to pray for the dead and to offer, in a small way, solidarity with those who suffered the desecration of their house of worship.

VATICAN CITY - A 10th-century Armenian monk has been named among the doctors of the Church.

One of the dynamics of last year’s Synod on the Family was the contrast between the German-speaking bishops, who have been preoccupied with finding a way for those in invalid marriages to receive Holy Communion since Joseph Ratzinger and Walter Kasper were young theologians, and the African bishops. The latter, not to put too fine a point on it, objected that it was not possible for the Church to teach that simultaneous polygamy was immoral for poor black Catholics in Africa while serial polygamy was okay for rich, white Catholics in Europe.

If God brought all this snow, He also made it very hard to get to church.

New Englanders, clobbered by four major storms in the past month and bracing for a fifth, are finding it difficult to travel anywhere, including to services on Sundays.

VATICAN CITY - Throughout history, the Catholic Church has reviewed and reformed its structures to free them from "a worldly mentality and earthly models of the exercise of power," leading to a necessary spiritual renewal, said the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

HONG KONG - Bishop Cosmas Shi Enxiang of Yixian, 94, a member of the so-called underground Catholic Church who has not been seen since his arrest in 2001, has died, a relative said.