More than half of Catholic priests convicted of sexually abusing children in the last decade are still listed as members of the clergy, it was reported.

A Channel 4 News investigation said that of 22 priests convicted and jailed for more than a year for child sex abuse since 2001, 14 were yet to be laicised or sacked from the Catholic Church of England and Wales.

Last night programme said some were still even receiving financial support from the Church and living in Church-owned property.

The revelations follow recommendations made in 2001 by senior Judge Lord Nolan, who suggested that any priest sentenced to a year or more in prison for sex offences against children should face “laicisation” – the stripping of their title, priesthood and privileges.

The British government and the Roman Catholic Church colluded to protect a priest suspected of involvement in a 1972 bombing in Northern Ireland that killed 9 people, an official report said on Tuesday.

The Police Ombudsman’s report revealed that an Irish cardinal was involved in transferring Father James Chesney out of British-ruled Northern Ireland, highlighting again the role of the Church hierarchy in protecting priests against allegations of criminal activity.

Justice must be served for nine people killed in NI bombings who were “failed” by a cover-up of a priest’s suspected role, victims’ relatives have said.

Thousands of Roman Catholic pilgrims have been evacuated from Lourdes in south-west France after a bomb threat, officials are reported as saying.

The threat came as 30,000 worshippers were in the town to celebrate the annual Feast of the Assumption, the French news agency AFP said.

Lourdes is famous for what many Roman Catholics believe was a vision of the Virgin Mary by a local girl in 1858.

For residents of Rome, the sight of courting priests is hardly an anomaly. The phenomenon is a well-known secret here, and one that was largely ignored until last weekend, when the Italian weekly magazine Panorama published a shocking exposé called “Le Notti Brave Dei Preti Gay,” or “Good Nights Out for Gay Priests.”

Investigative journalist Carmelo Abbate spent 20 days undercover posing as the boyfriend of a man who ran in gay clerical circles, secretly videotaping the sexual escapades of three Rome-based priests.

Abbate caught the priests on hidden camera dirty dancing at private parties and engaging in sex acts with male escorts on church property. He also caught them emerging from dark bedrooms in time to celebrate mass. In one postcoital scene, “Father Carlo” parades around seminaked, wearing only his clerical vestments. Abbate’s “date” even had sex with one of the priests to corroborate the story.

“This is not about homosexuality,” Abbate, who is not gay, told NEWSWEEK. “This is about private vices and public virtues. This is about serious hypocrisy in the Catholic Church.”

The Catholic Church in Italy was embroiled in a fresh scandal on Friday when photographs apparently showing homosexual priests attending gay nightclubs and engaging in casual sex were published in a magazine.

A journalist from Panorama, a conservative weekly news magazine owned by Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister, used a hidden camera to film interviews with three gay priests, who introduced the journalist to the gay clubs they apparently frequent, and allowed the journalist to film their sexual encounters with strangers, including one in a church building.

The Catholic Church insists on celibacy for priests and sees homosexuality as a sin. In 2008 the Vatican issued guidelines which said that any would-be trainees should not join if they had “deep-seated homosexual tendencies.”

Panorama editor Giorgio Mule said: “This was a two week investigation and was not aimed at creating a scandal but showing that a certain section of the clergy behaves very differently.”

The British Government has moved to prevent the possibility of an arrest warrant being issued against the Pope during his state visit this autumn.

Sky News understands that Whitehall officials have been “seriously concerned” that campaigners would use international criminal rules to try to detain the Pontiff while he is in the UK.

Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC were among those campaigners reported to be looking at the options for bringing a private prosecution in relation to the Pope’s alleged cover-up of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.

Now Justice Secretary Ken Clarke has proposed changes to the rules on universal jurisdiction, a law that allows individuals to be prosecuted in the UK for serious offences such as war crimes, crimes against humanity and torture even if they were carried out abroad.

The plans would mean the Director of Public Prosecutions would need to give his consent to any arrest warrant issued under universal jurisdiction.

Vienna’s archdiocese has ruled that a confessional — the box-like structure where Catholic believers confess their sins — cannot be turned into a sauna.

Bidding on a confessional described on eBay as ideal for conversion into a one-person sauna, a small bar or a children’s playhouse was ended when the archdiocese stepped in, AP reports.

On July 18, 1536, the English Parliament passed an act declaring the authority of the pope void in England, says AP.

Catholics are outraged after discovering rosary beads – sacred jewellery used in prayer – are being flaunted as a fashion statement.

The strings of beads with a cross are now as likely to be found in cheap jewellery stores as they are in a church, with fashion franchise Diva selling three styles of a rosary necklace with a silver cross pendant for $14.99 each.

The beads are a hit with teenagers, but national president for the Catholic Women’s League Australia, Madge Fahy, said it was inappropriate for people to wear them as jewellery.

As a fully authorized exorcist of the Catholic Church, Fr. Thomas Euteneuer has performed dozens of full exorcisms over the last seven years.

He recently told a congregation in Florida the ritual is methodical and precise: The demon is required to name itself, indicate the sign of its departure and state what retains it in the possessed body.

“It’s kind of like a prosecution in a courtroom a criminal interrogated in the name of Jesus,” he said. “You work patiently and undo whatever has been done one by one.”

A Catholic priest in New Hampshire plans to visit a Candia water park to see if he can see the face of Jesus in the park’s lifeguard flag.

Incidentally, the ability of people to recognize familiar patterns in random images, such as cartoon characters in the clouds, is a phenomenon of perception called pareidolia.

A married man was ordained as a Catholic priest in the southern German city of Regensburg this week in a rare exception to the church’s rules of celibacy for men of the cloth, the diocese reported.

Peter Kemmether, a 62-year-old father of four children, took part in the ceremony led by Bishop Gerhard Ludwig Müller on Tuesday evening in the Bavarian city.

He had been a protestant pastor, but converted to Catholicism, The Local reports.

A Roman Catholic priest in Connecticut was charged Tuesday with stealing $1.3 million in church money over seven years to use for male escorts, expensive clothing and luxury hotels and restaurants.

The Rev. Kevin J. Gray, former pastor at Sacred Heart/Sagrado Corazon Parish in Waterbury, was arrested and charged with first-degree larceny.

A Catholic priest in Australia has been sentenced to nearly 20 years in jail for sex attacks on 25 children over nearly two decades.

John Sidney Denham, 67, pleaded guilty to a range of charges relating to attacks on boys at schools in New South Wales between 1968 and 1986.

Pope Benedict XVI is creating a new Vatican office to fight secularization and “re-evangelize” the West — a tacit acknowledgment that his attempts to reinvigorate Christianity in Europe haven’t succeeded and need a new boost.

Benedict said parts of the world are still missionary territory, where the Catholic Church is still relatively unknown. But in other parts of the world like Europe, Christianity has existed for centuries yet “the process of secularization has produced a serious crisis of the sense of the Christian faith and role of the Church.”

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