Panic buying in Australia, the United States and Britain saw leaders appeal for calm over the virus that has infected over 138,000 people globally and killed more than 5,000.

The investigation focuses on the Vatican prelate who signed the contracts for the deal.

Pope Francis staged a surprise visit to admonish the IMF chief and several finance ministers to help alleviate the debt burden of struggling countries, calling for “a new financial architecture” to ensure social justice.

We are confronted by a US presidential second-term election cycle. We all must contend too with various interests. Do we have in play a version of ‘operation boot’? The 1952 US/UK regime-change operation in Iran. And do people regionally also view the late, recently murdered Major General Qasem Soleimani as an Iranian Che Quevara? Would Iran’s supreme Ayatollah be viewed as an Iranian Fidel Castro? How annoying for a rightist US administration: a Cuba in the Middle East. How much more death and devastation will flow out of our fossil-fuel dependency and the military powers of the main players, the chief one being the US?

Clerical abuse victims have welcomed the decision by Pope Francis to abolish the Vatican’s strict secrecy rules covering sex abuse proceedings.

JONATHAN Pryce has not slept. He is fresh off a plane from New York, where he is appearing in a play on Broadway, and is due to fly back to perform again the following day.

The Association of Catholic Priests received many messages from people applauding the organisation for coming out strongly in support of Co Cavan priest Fr Oliver O'Reilly after it emerged that businessman Sean Quinn complained about him to the Vatican.

The Association of Catholic Priests, who represent over 1,000 clergymen in Ireland, says reform is urgently needed to prevent parishes from closing across the country.

The three-week conference in the Vatican is working on how to develop the faith in the Amazon, and will discuss whether it is time to loosen the Church's tradition of celibacy.

In August 1969, headlines were dominated by Northern Ireland and the beginnings of what was to become known as “the Troubles”.

Hopes of finding the remains of a missing Vatican teenager in the tombs of two 19th-century German princesses have been dashed.

After his resignation in 2013, Pope Benedict chose to live in the Vatican in silence. But his presence, his influence, and a growing campaign is causing problems for Pope Francis and threatens to undermine his papacy, writes TP O’Mahony.

Yesterday’s statement to the Oireachtas communications committee from Eir chief executive Carolan Lennon that her company could complete the National Broadband Plan for less than €1bn, a third of the figure the State has agreed to

Orla O'Byrne is excited about embarking on a new career in art, having always maintained her interest in it while working as a baker and running her three cafés in Cork since founding the Natural Foods Bakery in 2002.

The Renaissance polymath may have died on this day in 1519, but his memory has lived on through all sorts of representations over the past 500 years, writes Donal O’Keeffe.

The Vatican has for the first time opened its own investigation into the case of Emanuela Orlandi, a 15-year-old Vatican citizen who disappeared in the summer of 1983.

Eoin English Promises to open dialogue with the young — ‘future of the Church’

His Holiness Pope Francis has appointed Fr Fintan Gavin, Chancellor of the Archdiocese of Dublin, as the new Bishop of Cork and Ross.

Michael Murphy enjoys a grand Russian adventure filled with opulence, culture and history

Pope Francis has declined to accept the resignation of French Cardinal Philippe Barbarin as archbishop of Lyon after he was convicted of failing to report a known predator priest to police, the Vatican said.

A new book paints a picture of rampant homosexuality in the Catholic Church but builds castles on the sands of rumours and innuendo, writes TP O’Mahony.

Philip Pullella Pope Francis, ending a landmark conference on sexual abuse of children by clergy, has called for an “all-out battle” against a crime he said should be “erased from the face of the Earth”.

Apart from achieving independence, joining the European Union, and almost unlimited access to education, nothing has changed this society as dramatically as the Catholic Church’s spectacular loss of power.

His stated intention to decentralise the Catholic Church’s power and reform its central bureaucracy, the Curia, has not endeared Francis to traditionalists, says TP O’Mahony

The three-monkeys principle — see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil — was, in the areas of physical or sexual abuse, close enough to convention for many generations. Its application, however, was uneven.

Pope Francis has urged politicians of all faiths to safeguard the rights of the unborn and has exhorted abortion opponents to also assure that children are born into a world where they can live with dignity.

Pope Francis has said fear of migration is "making us crazy" as he began a trip to Central America amid a standoff over President Donald Trump's promised wall at the US-Mexico border and a new caravan of migrants heading north.

Just build the damn thing.

Every generation has a tiny coterie of sportsmen or women whose career is a persistent exercise in dominance.

Here's all you need to know this lunchtime.

The Tuam Home Survivors Network has savaged the appeal to the Pope by Children's Minister Katherine Zappone for funds for the Mother and Baby Home site, calling it "nothing more than a publicity stunt".

It’s over. Two thousand years of power and authority, of intellectual superstructure designed to continuously create learned helplessness and obedience may not have ended during the papal visit to Ireland, 2018, but the decline accelerated.

A major security operation swings into action today as Pope Francis arrives in

Campaigner and abuse survivor Marie Collins has called on Pope Francis to face down the senior clerics in the Vatican who are resisting change in the Catholic Church’s response to perpetrators and their victims.

The steady separation of church and State in recent years is good for both, the Agriculture Minister has said ahead of the Pope's visit to Ireland.

There is scarcely a country in this world that has suffered more oppressively and horrendously, and been morally corrupted so egregiously under the tyranny of the Papacy than Ireland.

It was only in the years afterwards that the burden of the project really became apparent. 

Pope Francis has admitted he made "grave errors" in judgment in Chile's sex abuse scandal and invited the abuse victims he had discredited to Rome to beg their forgiveness.

It’s an unlikely pairing, I know, but my mind has been drifting between former president Mary McAleese and former footballer Jamie Carragher.

Latest: Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has said that he will consider a call from the former President Mary McAleese for an inquiry into the church's handling of child abuse allegations against Fr Malachy Finnegan.