Through the crisis, he has advised the church youth group on Zoom, celebrated Mass in English and Spanish on Facebook via livestream, and taken calls from worried parishioners.

The death toll has neared 40 among the roughly 400 congregants who join Spanish-language services at Saint Peter's Church, a Lutheran congregation, in midtown Manhattan.

Anti-Semitic attacks rose worldwide by 13% in 2018 compared to the previous year, according to a report by Tel Aviv University's Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary Jewry.

Pope Francis' role in Argentina's most famous case of priestly sex abuse is coming under renewed scrutiny as he faces the greatest crisis of his papacy over the Catholic Church's troubled legacy of cover-up and allegations he himself sided with the accused.

A police official in Buenos Aires province said officers seized documents from the archives of the Antonio Provolo Institute in the city of La Plata dating back more than 30 years.

A grassroots movement came closer than ever to achieving the decriminalization of the procedure in the homeland of Pope Francis.

Advocates of priestly abuse victims question how Francis could have been unaware of the allegations.