In his recent encyclical letter Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home, Pope Francis issued a moral appeal to the global community for swift action on climate change. However, social science research suggests a complex relationship between religious concepts and environmental attitudes, raising the question of what influence the pope’s position may have on public opinion regarding this polarizing issue.

In Secrets of the Vatican, PBS Frontline tells the epic, inside story of the collapse of the Benedict papacy and illuminates the extraordinary challenges facing Pope Francis as he tries to reform the powerful Vatican bureaucracy, root out corruption and chart a new course for the troubled Catholic Church and its 1.2 billion followers.

Pope Francis appeared on Wednesday to back Native Americans seeking to halt part of the Dakota Access Pipeline, saying indigenous cultures have a right to defend "their ancestral relationship to the earth". The Latin American pope, who has often strongly defended indigenous rights since his election in 2013, made his comments on protection of native lands to representative of tribes attending the Indigenous Peoples Forum in Rome.

Pope Francis delivered another criticism of some members of his own Church on Thursday, suggesting it is better to be an atheist than one of "many" Catholics who he said lead a hypocritical double life. In improvised comments in the sermon of his private morning Mass in his residence, he said: "It is a scandal to say one thing and do another. That is a double life."

Pope Francis has asked for forgiveness for the Catholic church’s role in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, in which 800,000 people were slaughtered in 100 days of violence. The “sins and failings of the church and its members” had “disfigured the face” of Catholicism, he said. Speaking after meeting the Rwandan president, Paul Kagame, the Vatican acknowledged that some Catholic priests and nuns had “succumbed to hatred and violence” by participating in the genocide.

The Vatican is celebrating the big-bang theory. That's not as out of this world as it sounds. The Vatican Observatory has invited some of the world's leading scientists and cosmologists to talk black holes, gravitational waves and space-time singularities as it honours a Jesuit cosmologist considered one of the fathers of the idea that the universe began with a gigantic explosion.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Monday urged Pope Francis to visit Canada to apologize to indigenous peoples for the Catholic Church's treatment of aboriginal children in schools it ran there. Starting in the late 19th century, about 30 percent of children of Canada's native peoples, or about 150,000 children, were placed in what were known as "residential schools" in a government attempt to strip them of their traditional cultures and ancestral languages.

The Vatican is looking to develop a new doctrine that calls for excommunicating Catholics for mafia association and corruption. That’s the decision reached this week after the Vatican hosted its first-ever conference on fighting corruption and organized crime. The meeting gathered 50 prosecutors, bishops, victims and U.N. officials for a day of talks.

Venezuela’s Catholic Church on Friday blasted President Nicolás Maduro for trying to impose a “dictatorship” by pushing forward an unpopular plan to overhaul the constitution. Speaking at a public event, Archbishop Diego Padron, the president of Venezuela’s Episcopal Conference, said the government’s decision to elect more than 500 delegates on July 30 to rewrite the constitution is illegitimate.

It says new rules are needed because Communion bread can now be bought in supermarkets and online.

Pope Francis has weighed in on the matter of religious bread-making by reminding his flock that the Body of Christ is not gluten-free.

Pope Francis issued a stark warning against “dangerous” international alliances, including between the U.S. and Russia, on Saturday. The Pope said that he was afraid of "very dangerous alliances among [foreign] powers that have a distorted vision of the world: America and Russia, China and North Korea, [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and [Syrian President Bashar] Assad in the war in Syria."

An article written by two close associates of the Pope has criticised some right-wing American Christian groups accusing them of practicing “apocalyptic” politics. In an essay published Thursday (13 July), Fr Antonio Spadaro SJ, editor-in-chief of the Jesuit’s theological journal Civiltá Cattolica, and Marcelo Figueroa, a Protestant pastor who worked closely with Francis in Buenos Aires, have criticised what they see as an “apocalyptic geopolitics” that has taken hold of the American right-wing.

Pope Francis urged political leaders on Monday to defend migrants, saying their safety should take precedence over national security concerns and that they should not be subjected to collective deportations. His challenge to politicians, made in a comprehensive position paper on migrants and refugees, again appeared to put him at odds with the restrictive policies of a number of governments dealing with growing popular anti-immigrant sentiment.

In a tell-all conversation with a French sociologist, Pope Francis opened up about his visits to a psychoanalyst during his time in Argentina, the importance of Christian roots and of Arab heritage in Europe, the resistance to his apostolic letter on marriage 'Amoris Laetitia' and social issues like abortion and gay marriage.

Pope Francis, who has a strong belief in the science of climate change, called upon world leaders on Wednesday to "listen to the cry of the Earth and the cry of the poor, who suffer most because of the unbalanced ecology." Francis and Patriarch Bartholomew I, the head of the Orthodox Christian Church, will issue a joint message to commemorate the annual "World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation" on Friday, the Associated Press reported.

A high-ranking priest working in the Vatican's embassy in Washington has been recalled after U.S. prosecutors asked for him to be charged there and face trial in a child pornography investigation, Vatican and U.S. officials said Friday. The diplomat was suspected of possessing, but not producing or disseminating, child pornography including images of pre-pubescent children, a U.S. source familiar with the case said. The source was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Several dozen conservative Catholic scholars and clergy have charged Pope Francis with spreading heresy, a bold but perhaps futile salvo against Francis and his reform-minded papacy. The widely publicized, theologically dense letter was delivered to the Pope with 40 signatures on August 11, according to its organizers. It has since gained 22 more signatures and was released to the public on Saturday. In a press release, the organizers say they speak for "a large number" of clergy and lay Catholics who "lack freedom of speech."

Pope Francis called Wednesday for categoric opposition to capital punishment to be written into an update of the most important guide to Catholic teaching. His comments, which will be controversial with many fundamentalist Christians and some Catholics, came in a speech to clerics attending a conference in Rome to mark the 25th anniversary of the publication of the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Pope Francis on Monday, October 13, elicited a standing ovation at the United Nations after his speech at the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) after he channelled Elvis Presley when calling for global action on hunger, climate change and migration. He was speaking on the occasion of World Food Day 2017, and touched on the three topics the FAO had focused on when aiming for "Zero Hunger."