Trying to balance public health and religious liberty, the Obama administration announced a plan to calm anger over a new rule that would require health insurance plans, including those offered by Roman Catholic hospitals, universities, and charities, to provide free birth control to female employees.

As the South Carolina Republican primary approaches and candidate Rick Santorum claims a belated victory in the Iowa caucuses, watch excerpts from a 2010 speech Santorum, a Catholic, delivered on the role of religious faith in public life.

"Religion isn’t bad, but until religion becomes actual spiritual experience, it is just religion," says this sometimes controversial Franciscan priest and author.

Actor Martin Sheen says walking the Camino de Santiago is “a journey of the spirit as well as the flesh” and a search for ritual as well as transcendence.

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.

Catholic Charities in Illinois refuses to accept same-sex and unmarried couples for adoption or foster parenting. The state recognizes civil unions, and it wants to withdraw the charity's funding for such placements.

It was the Bible of the speeches of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr., says author Jon Sweeney. “It’s the basis of cultural identity in the United States more than any other book.”

Watch more about the history surrounding the 1611 publication of the King James Version of the Bible.

"We live by the work of our hands and also have some left for helping out those who are maybe less fortunate," says the abbess of St. Mary's, Ireland's only Cistercian monastery for women.

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.