(RNS) Boston Cardinal Sean O’Malley on Thursday kicked off an ambitious, four-year project to reorganize the archdiocese’s 288 parishes into approximately 135 ``parish collaboratives,'' each headed by a single pastor and served by a ministry team. By G. Jeffrey MacDonald. 

The Rev. Benedict Groeschel, a Franciscan friar from New York who appears often on EWTN, a conservative Catholic TV channel, said that priests who abuse children "on their first offense" should not go to jail. 

(RNS) The Orthodox Church in America announced that it forced its controversial leader, Metropolitan Jonah, to resign earlier this month chiefly because Jonah had failed to remove a priest accused of rape. By David Gibson.

VATICAN CITY (RNS) The sexual abuse scandal has tarnished the image of the priest and contributed to a crisis of priestly vocations in the Roman Catholic Church, the Vatican said Monday (June 25), while also faulting a widespread “secularized mentality” and parents' ambition for their children. By Alessandro Speciale.

A Philadelpia jury convicted Monsignor William Lynn on one charge of endandering the welfare of a child, the first time a member of the Catholic hierarchy in the U.S. was found guilty of covering up the sexual abuse of minors. Here's what people had to say on Twitter. 

(RNS) A Philadelphia priest was convicted Friday of one count of child endangerment, becoming the first cleric in the Catholic Church’s long-running clergy abuse scandal to be tried and found guilty of shielding molesters. By David Gibson.

(RNS) The advice columnist for the online magazine Slate has said that a famed Jesuit priest and onetime Democratic congressman, the Rev. Robert Drinan, who died in 2007, tried to kiss and fondle her in the 1970s when she was 18 or 19 years old. By David Gibson.