An activist group hoping to pressure the Catholic Church into dropping its long-standing prohibition of female priests says it has ordained three American women.

America’s largest Roman Catholic archdiocese is to pay out $60m to settle 45 sex abuse cases.

They renamed the Taoiseach on St Patrick’s Day in the United States.

For decades, the Los Angeles Archdiocese ignored parishioners' sex abuse complaints and shipped accused priests between therapy and new assignments, according to newly released personnel records involving 126 clergymen.

CONSERVATIONISTS are threatening to occupy disused churches in a bid to prevent their sale to private investors for millions of euro.

A CANON lawyer seeking to have Senator John Kerry excommunicated by the Roman Catholic Church because of his support for abortion rights said on Monday that he had ammunition in the form of a letter issued at the request of a senior Vatican official.

PEOPLE who say they were sexually abused by priests could receive more than $1.5 billion in damages — $3.1 million per claimant - from the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles — more than any other US diocese has paid.

CARDINAL Bernard Law said he hoped his resignation would bring "healing, reconciliation and unity" to the Boston Archdiocese, after an agonising year of revelations of sexual abuse

BELEAGUERED Boston Cardinal Bernard Law and more than five bishops have been ordered to appear before a grand jury which is investigating church officials who supervised priests accused of paedophilia.

THOUSANDS of newly released personnel files show that the Archdiocese of Boston went to great lengths to hide priests accused of abuse, including clergy who allegedly snorted cocaine and had sex with girls aspiring to be nuns.

The Archdiocese of Boston has reached a multi-million dollar settlement with dozens of people who claimed they were sexually molested by a former Catholic priest.