Religious Leaders & Institutions

Despite Pope Francis’ overwhelming popularity, few U.S. Catholics say they turn to the pope “a great deal” for guidance on difficult moral questions.

Six-in-ten Catholics say the church should allow those who are divorced and have remarried without obtaining an annulment to receive Communion, according to a 2015 Pew Research Center Survey.

Standard lists of history’s most influential religious leaders – among them Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha) – tend to be predominantly, if not exclusively, male. Many religious groups, including Roman Catholics and Orthodox Jews, allow only men to be clergy, while others, including some denominations in the evangelical Protestant tradition, have lifted that restriction only in recent decades. Yet it often appears that the ranks of the faithful are dominated by women.

We looked at nine major religious organizations in the U.S. that both ordain women and allow them to hold top leadership slots.

From 1965 to 2015, more than 16 million Mexicans migrated to the U.S. in one of the largest mass migrations in modern history. But Mexican migration to the U.S. has slowed in recent years. Today, Mexico also increasingly serves as a land bridge for Central American immigrants traveling to the U.S.

A historic event within global Christianity is set to take place Friday as Pope Francis meets Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill in Cuba – the first-ever meeting between the leaders of the Catholic and Russian Orthodox churches since the Orthodox tradition broke away from Catholicism nearly 1,000 years ago.

Since 2010, Millennials' rating of churches and other religious organizations has dipped 18 percentage points. Their views of the national news media also have grown more negative.

Pope Francis has generated goodwill toward the Catholic Church among many Americans across the political spectrum. But Democrats and liberals are especially likely to say they have a more positive view of the Church because of Francis.

On his first papal trip to the U. S., Pope Francis will visit three Northeastern cities that are within a few hundred miles of each other. But while New York City, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., may be geographically close, their Catholic populations look different from one another in several ways.

When Pope Francis arrives in the U.S., he will find a Catholic public that is remarkably accepting of a variety of non-traditional families, according to a new survey on family life, sexuality and Catholic identity.