Religion News

The Vatican on Monday declared gender-affirming surgery and surrogacy as grave threats to human dignity, putting them on par with abortion and euthanasia as practices that violate God’s plan for human life.

Pope Francis has accepted the resignation of a Polish archbishop accused of covering up the sexual abuse of minors, a Vatican statement said on Saturday.

A woman in a trenchcoat opened fire with a long gun inside celebrity pastor Joel Osteen's megachurch in Texas before being gunned down by two off-duty officers who confronted her, sending worshippers rushing from the building between busy Sunday services, authorities said.

The latest rejection follows that of the African bishops, who last week issued a collective “no” to the provision, saying that such blessings would cause confusion in Africa and will not be administered. It has also been flatly rejected by conferences of bishops in Hungary, Poland and Kazakhstan.

Others downplayed the policy approved this week by Francis as merely reaffirming the Vatican's long-standing teaching about marriage being only a union between a man and a woman.

Pope Francis has formally approved allowing priests to bless same-sex couples, with a new document explaining a radical change in Vatican policy by insisting that people seeking God's love and mercy shouldn't be subject to "an exhaustive moral analysis" to receive it.

Pope Francis says he wants to be buried in the Rome Basilica of St Mary Major, not in the grottoes of the Vatican like other popes, so he can be near his favourite icon of the Madonna.