Religion, Vatican | featured news

More than 140 Catholic cardinals met Monday at the Vatican, where the process of selecting a new pope edged toward beginning. The cardinals gathered in the morning, but had not decided when the conclave to select Pope Benedict XVI's successor would start, Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi told reporters.

When someone becomes pope — God’s representative on Earth to Catholics — he dons all white, takes the title “his holiness,” and is greeted even by top cardinals with a kiss of his ring. Can a cardinal who pals around with Stephen Colbert fill such a vaunted role? How about one with a style so simple that he serves tuna sandwiches and chips to even his most important guests?

To a chorus of bells and a ripple of applause from his closest advisers, Pope Benedict XVI departed the Vatican for the last time as pontiff Thursday. He emerged from the Apostolic Palace and was saluted by Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican secretary of state, and other senior staff members in the St. Damaso Courtyard before being driven to his helicopter for the journey to his lavish temporary residence.

A few minutes after Benedict XVI gave his last public address as pope Wednesday morning, Vatican spokesmen in the Holy See’s news media office asked reporters if they had any questions about the pope’s farewell message. After some moments of silence, a hand shot up in the back of the room.

Pope Benedict XVI will keep the name Benedict XVI and become the Roman pontiff emeritus or pope emeritus, the Vatican announced on Tuesday, putting an end to days of speculation on how the pope will be addressed once he ceases to be the leader of the world’s 1.1 billion Roman Catholics on Thursday.

If evidence was ever needed that the next pope must urgently overhaul the powerful Vatican bureaucracy called the Curia, the scandal over Pope Benedict XVI's private papers is Exhibit A....

When he became pope at age 78, Benedict XVI was already the oldest pontiff elected in nearly 300 years. He's now 85, and in recent years he has slowed down significantly, cutting back his foreign travel and limiting his audiences.

Anyone left on your Christmas list just aching for a 65-inch Samsung 3D flat-screen television? Just your luck. The Vatican's duty-free department store has one on sale for €2,899 ($3,840) — a nifty savings over the €3,799 ($5,032) it costs at Italy's main electronics chain Euronics.

A Vatican court on Saturday sentenced the pope’s former butler, Paolo Gabriele, to 18 months in prison for leaking confidential documents to a journalist in one of the most serious breaches of vaunted Vatican secrecy in modern history.

Paolo Gabriele took the stand Tuesday in a Vatican courtroom to defend himself against accusations of his role in one of the most damaging scandals of Benedict's pontificate. Prosecutors say Gabriele stole the pope's letters and documents alleging power struggles and corruption inside the Vatican and leaked them to a journalist in an unprecedented papal security breach.