Latinos in the Catholic Church make up more than a third of the denomination's flock in the United States, and they tend to be more conservative and more closely aligned with its teachings, a new poll suggests.
Here are five facts that will help acquaint you with Pope Francis to better understand why his arrival and impending address to Congress gives cause for excitement.
Thousands of people greeted Pope Francis at the Plaza of Revolution in Holguin Monday morning, celebrating his first visit to Cuba's third largest city.
As recently as 2006, around eight in 10 Latinos who were raised in the church and maintained the tradition as adults. According to the The Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA), a Catholic research center, this number has gone down to seven in 10 last year.
Testimony is expected to begin on Thursday in a case involving a suspended Roman Catholic priest charged with traveling to Honduras to have sex with poor children during missionary trips.
Pope Francis is allowing priests to absolve the sin of women who have had an abortion. Pope Francis, who has been making waves by reaching out to atheist communities and being vocal about environmental issues, is allowing priests to absolve the "sin" of abortion.
More than half of young Catholic families (53 percent) identify themselves as Latino or Hispanic compared with 32 percent of all Catholics, according to a recent survey. Could the presence of Hispanic families in the Catholic Church indicate Latino congregational growth, or at least the slowing of a once-persistent decline?
During his visit to Bolivia, Pope Francis on Thursday apologized for the "many grave sins" committed against native peoples of Latin America during colonial times.
Having ended the first part of his three-nation tour, Pope Francis arrived in Bolivia on Wednesday. During his flight, the Pope drank coca tea, a local remedy that helps alleviate altitude sickness.
Today, Pope Francis leads the world's estimated 1.2 billion Roman Catholics and serves as absolute monarch of the Vatican City State. But when the pontiff was still known as Jorge Bergoglio, his fame was largely due to the tasty barbecue he prepared for his fellow seminarians.
In a long-awaited encyclical, Pope Francis on Thursday called for a "revolution" on climate change, a threat the leader of the world's 1.2 billion Catholics warned had brought the planet to the verge of a perilous "breaking point."
Pope Francis will call on governments to curtail the use of fossil fuels use and on people around the globe to alter their lifestyles in order to avoid "unprecedented destruction of the ecosystem," Vox reported based on the leaked first draft of an encyclical the pontiff is set to publish on Thursday.
While expressing his belief that homosexuality was not a sin at a university conference on gay marriage and adoption this past Thursday, Colombian Bishop Juan Vicente Cordoba managed to offend traditional Catholics, as well as the homosexuals he was trying to welcome into the church.
Pope Francis on on Tuesday accepted the resignation of a Kansas City, Missouri, bishop who had for years had remained in office despite having been convicted of a sex-abuse cover-up.
Pope Francis on Sunday called the 1915 killings of up to 1.5 million Armenians under the Ottoman Empire a "genocide," upsetting Turkey, which has long sought to downplay the massacre, The leader of the world's more than 1 billion Catholics minced no words when he celebrated a Mass at St. Peter's Basilica.
On Friday the U.N. Secretary-general Ban Ki-moon praised U.S. President Barack Obama and Cuban leader Raul Castro for striving to restore diplomatic relations between the two nations.
Despite allegations that Monsignor Juan Barros had covered up for a pedophile priest, the Vatican is defending Pope Francis' appointment of the Chilean bishop.
Opening Holy Week services with Palm Sunday Mass in St. Peter's Square, Pope Francis brought his attention recent tragic events by stressing his congregation strive toward humility and take time to remember the dead in the Germanwings crash.
