“I think you could compare it to a hostile takeover,” says reporter, author, and Vatican observer David Gibson. Might the Leadership Conference of Women Religious simply disband and reorganize on its own?

Catholic Cubans have strong lay networks, says Catholic News Service staff writer Patricia Zapor, but they still need and want "a little bit more of everything—more freedom, more services, more priests."

We discuss the major religion and ethics stories of the past year in the U.S. and abroad with Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, Religion News Service editor Kevin Eckstrom and Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly managing editor Kim Lawton.

Father Larry Janowski says the new, more literal translation of the words of the Mass from the original Latin are “like sawdust in the mouth. They’re difficult to say.”

“There is no such thing as a perfect translation. Every translation is in some ways an experiment, and there are many parts of the new translation [of the Roman Missal] that are much better,” according to this professor of liturgy and music at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago.

A new survey finds that Catholics in the US are making up their own minds about social and moral concerns. As one of the authors of the survey, William D’Antonio, said, American Catholics like being Catholic but they like to do it on their own terms.

Despite having sustained a serious head injury three years ago, Father Andrew Greeley is still a priest. “We know that he is blessed, and he’s blessing us, and it means a lot,” says Greeley’s niece, Eileen Durkin.

Church attendance in Ireland has been dropping precipitously, and the number of priests being ordained at the country's only Catholic seminary is at an all-time low. "The young people, the under 40s, have largely deserted the church in Ireland now," says Rev. Tony Flannery of the Association of Catholic Priests.

A new study by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice rules out celibacy and homosexuality as causes of the Catholic sexual abuse crisis.

The Catholic Church’s complex system for declaring someone a saint has evolved since the thirteenth century.