JOHN WATERS wrote tellingly in The Irish Times last Friday that he would personally find it difficult to discuss transubstantiation with his best friend, “not because I have problems with the doctrine but because such matters are impossible to discuss in the language we use for politics, shopping and sex”.

The Church of England and Roman Catholic bishops of England and Wales formally objected Tuesday to the government's proposal to permit gay marriages, both asserting that their historic understanding is that marriage is the union of a woman and a man.

The Church of England faces its biggest rupture with the State in 500 years under government plans to legalise gay marriage.

“IT MUST be borne in mind,” Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer told the House of Commons in his budget speech, “that in every case exemption means a relief to A at the charge of B.”

Muslim prisoners are bullying inmates to convert to Islam at a top-security jail, provoking fear of a campaign to radicalise prisoners.

A vast new sanctuary is emerging for al-Qaeda’s African followers in the desert wastelands of northern Mali, where Tuareg secessionists, allied with extremist Muslim guerrillas, have shaken off government rule and declared an independent Islamist state.

The consensus has been broken. Leopoldo González-Echenique, an attorney general who was part of the previous Popular Party (PP) administration, has been put forward as the government’s choice to chair Radio Televisión Española (RTVE), the embattled public broadcaster.

sitting at a Warsaw sidewalk café with her long dreadlocks wrapped in a colorful turquoise and orange scarf — said she first learned of her Jewish roots about a decade ago.

The people who live in the trim row houses with well-tended gardens that line the streets of this spa town along the Rhine like to boast of their city's tolerance, which dates to its time as the capital of West Germany and home to dozens of foreign embassies.

As the West sought to pressure the Kremlin recently to help stop the killing in Syria, diplomats from Damascus were ushered into the heart of one of Russian Orthodoxy's main shrines.

The biggest scandal to rock the Vatican in decades widened Monday with the pope's butler, arrested for allegedly having confidential documents in his home, agreeing to cooperate with investigators — raising the specter that higher-ranking ecclesial heads may soon roll.

The church at the centre of the threatened schism in the Kirk over gay clergy was accused of encouraging the worship of ‘false idols’ on church property on the opening day of the General Assembly.

The Vatican has denounced as "criminal" a new book of leaked internal documents that shed light on power struggles inside the Holy See and the thinking of its embattled top banker, and warned that it would take legal action against those responsible.