President Donald Trump’s inaugural benediction on the federal holiday that celebrates Martin Luther King Jr. included an homage to the civil rights leader’s legacy.

Pope Francis has taken the remarkable step of dissolving a Peruvian-based Catholic movement, the Sodalitium Christianae Vitae.

One of the Israeli hostages freed on the first day of the Gaza ceasefire said Monday in her first comments since being released that she has “returned to life.”.

Pope Francis says Donald Trump’s plans to impose mass deportations of immigrants would be a “disgrace.”.

Israel’s far-right national security minister resigned from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Cabinet to express his disapproval of the Gaza ceasefire deal.

Thousands of Russians celebrating the Orthodox Christian feast day of Epiphany, where worshippers bathe in the icy waters of frozen lakes and rivers, have been forced to cancel their traditional ceremonies due to unusually warm winter temperatures.

Israel has freed 90 Palestinian prisoners and detainees.

Qatar says the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas will go into effect at 8:30 a.m. local time (0630 GMT) on Sunday.

Behaving at their best, a dozen dogs attended Mass at Mexico City’s cathedral, waiting for their turn to de doused with holy water.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has visited the site of Nazi German extermination camp of Auschwitz.

Hundreds of Guatemalan faithful found the sounds and colors of their tropical homeland during the biggest-yet celebration of the Black Christ of Esquipulas in the heartland farming town of Worthington, Minnesota.

Israel’s Cabinet has approved a deal for a ceasefire in Gaza and the release of dozens of hostages that will pause the 15-month war with Hamas for six weeks.

Pope Francis has fallen and hurt his right arm.

Many colleges accused of tolerating antisemitism on their campuses have been settling with federal civil rights investigators in the weeks before the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump, who urged a tougher response to campus protests against the war in Gaza.

Pope Francis' autobiography is being released Tuesday.

Tens of thousands of naked Hindu ascetics and millions of pilgrims are taking dips in sacred rivers in the first of a series of major baths in the Maha Kumbh festival, the largest religious congregation on Earth.

Israel and Hamas have been holding indirect talks for more than a year aimed at ending the war in Gaza and returning scores of militant-held hostages in exchange for Palestinians imprisoned by Israel.

Millions of Hindu devotees and mystics have gathered in the northern Indian city of Prayagraj for the Maha Kumbh festival, which is the largest religious congregation on earth.

President Joe Biden has honored Pope Francis with the Presidential Medal of Freedom with distinction.

Conservative lawmakers across the U.S. are pushing to introduce more Christianity to public school classrooms, testing the separation of church and state.

Among the thousands of buildings destroyed in the Los Angeles wildfires were a mosque, a synagogue, a Catholic parish and a half-dozen Protestant churches.

Anita Bryant, a former Miss Oklahoma and popular singer who became known over the second half of her life for her outspoken opposition to gay rights, has died.

Jimmy Carter has been remembered at his funeral as a man of “character” and “something of a miracle” with “prophetic” vision.

Pope Francis has told ambassadors accredited to the Holy See that he wasn’t up to delivering his annual foreign policy speech and asked an aide to deliver it instead.

At least 1.8 million mostly barefoot Catholic worshippers are marching in an annual procession in the Philippines that venerates a centuries-old black statue of Jesus.

Three years ago, a Somali-American mom in Minneapolis founded a group for Muslim women who want to enjoy the great outdoors.

Pope Francis has denounced the “scourge” of child labor and other abuses suffered by children, saying anyone who harms or exploits a child will have to answer to God.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran pastor and theologian from Germany executed by the Nazis in 1945 at age 39 for his role in a resistance movement.

Shortly before he was hanged by the Nazis in 1945 at age 39, Dietrich Bonhoeffer reportedly told a fellow prisoner: “This is the end — for me the beginning of life.”.

Jimmy Carter's state funeral has moved to Washington after observances in his native Georgia.

Gunmen opened fire on a bus carrying Israelis in the occupied West Bank on Monday, killing at least three people and wounding seven others.

Pope Francis has named the first woman to head a major Vatican office.

A soccer-loving nun from Brazil is believed to have become the world’s oldest living person at nearly 117 years old following the recent death of a Japanese woman.

Syria’s new foreign minister has met with his Qatari counterpart and Qatar’s prime minister in Doha on Sunday.

Pope Francis has warned that bullying in schools prepares students for war rather than peace.

Jimmy Carter’s long public goodbye began in Georgia, where the 39th U.S. president’s life started more than 100 years ago.

Six days of funeral observances for former President Jimmy Carter are set to take place in Georgia, where he died on Dec. 29 at the age of 100.

It never got old.

Pope Francis ushered in the New Year with an appeal for the faithful to reject abortion, calling for a “firm commitment” to protect and respect life from conception to natural death.

Former President Jimmy Carter was widely known as a man of faith, a born-again Christian who defined himself as a progressive evangelical.

Sarah McBride made history in Delaware, as the first openly transgender state senator in the United States.

U.S. Rep.-elect Sarah McBride will be sworn in as the first openly transgender member of Congress on Jan. 3.

From Sydney to Mumbai to Paris to Rio de Janeiro, communities around the world are welcoming 2025 with spectacular light shows, embraces and ice plunges.

Amada Cardenas, a Mexican American woman who lived in the tiny border town of Mirando City in South Texas, played an important role in the history of the peyote trade.

The Native American Church is the most widespread religious movement among the Indigenous people of North America.

Peyote, a cactus that contains mescaline, a hallucinogen, grows naturally in South Texas and northern Mexico.

Pope Francis is bringing his Holy Year to Rome’s main prison.

Pope Francis in his traditional Christmas message has urged “all people of all nations” to find courage during this Holy Year “to silence the sounds of arms and overcome divisions” plaguing the world, from the Holy Land to Ukraine, Africa to Asia.

Pope Francis has opened the great Holy Door of St. Peter's Basilica.

A network of faith-based organizations minister to seafarers in hundreds of the world’s ports.

Jake Bates was standing on the turf in his hometown of Houston when asked to reflect on an unlikely journey from learning how to sell bricks to making game-winning kicks for the Detroit Lions.

Bethlehem is marking another somber Christmas Eve under the shadow of war in Gaza.

This holiday season, some religious congregations across the U.S. are holding events designed to be accomodating to and inclusive of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

The city of Bethlehem in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, the traditional birthplace of Jesus, will not have the usual trappings of the city's favorite holiday: no public Christmas tree, no raucous scouts march, no decorations and no twinkling lights, in deference to the ongoing war in Gaza.

Pope Francis is formally inaugurating the 2025 Holy Year, reviving an ancient church tradition encouraging the faithful to make pilgrimages to Rome.

About 7 in 10 U.S. adults say they believe in angels, but what, exactly, is an angel.

Hanukkah, Judaism’s eight-day Festival of Lights, begins this year on Christmas Day.

Hanukkah — also spelled Chanukah or other transliterations from Hebrew — is Judaism’s “festival of lights.”.

Pope Francis has told Vatican bureaucrats to stop speaking ill of one another.

Thirty years after Florida required schools to teach African American history, how the subject is taught remains inconsistent across Florida classrooms, a review by The Associated Press has found.

For Christians around the world, Christmas is the joyful celebration of the birth of Jesus.

President-elect Donald Trump says he’s nominating the president of the advocacy group CatholicVote to be the U.S. ambassador to the Vatican.

Federal education officials say the Philadelphia school district failed to show it protected Jewish students from harassment despite “repeated, extensive notice” that students, teachers and administrators were engaging in antisemitic behavior.

The U.S. Department of Education said Friday it has reached an agreement with the University of California system resolving complaints from Jewish and Muslim students of discrimination and harassment during protests last spring over the war in Gaza.

The Madison, Wisconsin, police chief has been named as the chief of police in Seattle.

Born in Ghana, Sister Seyram Mary Adzokpa had never encountered a nun until adulthood.

Fewer than 1% of nuns in the U.S. today are under 30.

Less than 1% of nuns in the United States today are 30 or younger.

When Pope Francis formally opens the Holy Year next week, he will launch a dizzying 12-month calendar of events that include special Jubilee Masses for the faithful from all walks of life.

An official at the Wisconsin school where a student shot and killed a teacher and a fellow student says the 15-year-old was in her first semester there.

When Israel seized the strategic Golan Heights from Syria in 1967, many families were separated by a buffer zone created between the Israeli-controlled region and the rest of Syria.

Police say the shooter who killed a student and teacher at a religious school in Wisconsin this week brought two guns to the school.

The oldest known stone tablet inscribed with the Ten Commandments has been sold at an auction for more than $5 million.

A New Orleans judge has sentenced a 93-year-old former Catholic priest to spend the rest of his life behind bars for raping a teenage boy in the 1970s.

As the war in Gaza rages, Syria's government transforms, and the Israeli-occupied West Bank seethes, Armenian residents of the Old City of Jerusalem fight a different battle.

Community members in Wisconsin are continuing to wrestle with grief and calling for change in the aftermath of a school shooting that killed a teacher and a student and wounded six others.

United Methodist News Service reports that a religious schism has turned deadly in Nigeria, with a church member fatally shot and two young children killed as homes were set ablaze.

A former leader of the Church of England has resigned as a priest following allegations that he failed to properly handle the case of a priest accused of sexual misconduct.

Moravian missionaries named the Pennsylvania city of Bethlehem after the biblical birthplace of Jesus on Christmas Eve in 1741.

Investigators in Wisconsin are trying to determine a motive in a school shooting that left a teacher and a student dead and two other children in critical condition.

For decades, a little-known Christian sect has dealt with its abusive ministers and spiritual elders mostly in secret, shunning legal action and urging victims to simply forgive the predators in their midst.

A small Christian sect that for decades was little noticed by the outside world has found itself riven by a very public child sex abuse scandal.

Pope Francis on the first papal visit ever to the French island of Corsica on Sunday called for a dynamic form of laicism, promoting the kind of popular piety that distinguishes the Mediterranean island from secular France as a bridge between religious and civic society.

The reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral was a solemn celebration of cultural and spiritual renewal.

Have you ever watched a holiday rom-com on Hallmark Channel or Lifetime — or any of the other many networks and streaming services that now air them — and thought, “I could write that”.

The African Methodist Episcopal Church, one of largest Black Protestant denominations in the world, has been wrestling with whether to change a policy that threatens to punish any of its clergy who recognize same-sex marriages.

More than 600,000 people annually visit Santa Claus Village, a winter-themed amusement park in the small town of Rovaniemi in Finland.

One of the Vatican's Nativity scenes raised eyebrows when it was unveiled because it featured a keffiyeh, the Palestinian headscarf.

President Joe Biden designated a national monument at a former Native American boarding school site in Pennsylvania to commemorate the resilience of tribes whose children were forced to attend the school and similar abusive institutions.

The oldest known stone tablet inscribed with the Ten Commandments, dating from 300 to 800 A.D., will be sold in New York this month.

A polygamist leader in Arizona has been sentenced to 50 years in prison.

Australian law enforcement authorities have declared an arson attack on a synagogue last week a terrorist act in a decision that increases resources available to the investigation.

One of the largest statues of the Buddha in the United States springs up unexpectedly in the middle of a backyard just off a busy New Jersey state highway.

Notre Dame Cathedral has hosted its first Mass since the catastrophic fire of 2019.

Notre Dame is reopening its doors for the first time since a fire five years ago nearly destroyed the beloved 12th-century cathedral.

Pope Francis is installing 21 new cardinals, many of whom are key figures in his reform agenda.

The reopening this weekend of Notre Dame is a succession of ceremonies to breathe life back into the iconic cathedral and celebrate the recovery from its devastating fire in 2019.

Arsonists have extensively damaged a Melbourne synagogue in what Australia’s prime minister has condemned as an antisemitic attack on Australian values.

Shortly before he was to be flogged and imprisoned for eight years, Mohammad Rasoulof fled Iran.

The day after an inferno struck Notre Dame cathedral in 2019, its chief architect, Philippe Villeneuve, walked despondently into its remains.