VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – The president of El Salvador met Pope Francis on Thursday to urge his fellow Latin American to put Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was murdered by a right-wing death squad in 1980, on the road to Roman Catholic sainthood.

The sainthood process for Romero was effectively stalled under former popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI because they saw him as too close to Liberation Theology, a radical movement which emphasized helping the poor and opposing injustice.

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – The Vatican’s new financial watchdog said on Wednesday it had detected six possible attempts to use the Holy See to launder money last year, citing this as proof of its commitment to transparency.

The head of the Vatican’s Financial Intelligence Authority (FIA), presenting its first annual report, also said it would soon have stronger supervisory powers over the Vatican’s scandal-plagued bank, the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR), dubbed the world’s most secretive bank by Forbes magazine.

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – Pope Francis shared personal moments with 200,000 people on Saturday, telling them he sometimes nods off while praying at the end of a long day and that it “breaks my heart” that the death of a homeless person is not news.

Francis, who has made straight talk and simplicity a hallmark of his papacy, made his unscripted comments in answers to questions by four people at a huge international gathering of Catholic associations in St. Peter’s Square.

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – Gauchos, the legendary Argentine cowboys from the vast Pampas of Pope Francis’s homeland, are being celebrated in a rare exhibition in no less a place than St. Peter’s Square.

Called “Argentina – The Gaucho, Tradition, Art and Faith,” it opened on Friday in the Braccio Carlo Magno exhibition space under the square’s left colonnade.

VATICAN CITY, May 16 (Reuters) – The Vatican Bank, a centre
of scandals for decades, is to launch its own website and
publish its annual report in an effort to increase transparency,
its new president said.

Ernst von Freyberg told the bank’s employees of the changes,
which should be in place by the end of the year, this week,
according to Vatican Radio.

VATICAN CITY, May 16 (Reuters) – Pope Francis issued a
strong call for world financial reform on Thursday, condemning a
heartless “dictatorship of the economy” and saying the economic
crisis had made life worse for millions in rich and poor
countries.

“Money has to serve, not to rule,” he told ambassadors in
the first major speech about finance since his election in March
in which he also urged states to take greater control of their
economies and protect the weakest.

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – The Vatican Bank, a center of scandals for decades, is to launch its own website and publish its annual report in an effort to increase transparency, its new president said.

Ernst von Freyberg told the bank’s employees of the changes, which should be in place by the end of the year, this week, according to Vatican Radio.

VATICAN CITY, May 15 (Reuters) – Disgraced Cardinal Keith
O’Brien, who resigned as head of the Roman Catholic Church in
Scotland after admitting to sexual misconduct, will leave his
country for months of “prayer and penance”, the Vatican said on
Wednesday.

A brief Vatican statement did not say where O’Brien, once
Britain’s most senior Catholic cleric, was going, or spell out
why he was quitting Scotland.