Argentina ordered a British bishop who has questioned the truth of the Holocaust to leave the country last night or face expulsion, reigniting a controversy which has dogged the Vatican. The interior ministry said Richard Williamson, a conservative Catholic who headed a seminary near Buenos Aires, h...

A homophobic American cleric who runs a website called God Hates Fags and was allegedly planning to picket a play showing in the UK has been banned from Britain by the home secretary, Jacqui Smith. Fred Phelps had vowed to come to Britain with his daughter, Shirley, to picket a school play in Basing...

Welcome to a long-overdue edition of Islamophonic. We've been tucked away for a while but we're back – bigger and juicier than your average pod. In this programme we talk to people who have converted to Islam. I am told that people don't actually convert - that's what happens with lofts, see – t...

Prominent British Muslims are being recruited to star in a government-backed advertising campaign aimed at preventing people in Pakistan from engaging in extremist activity, the Guardian has learned. The three-month public relations offensive, called I Am the West, consists of television commercials...

A Roman Catholic bishop who said he does not believe the Nazis murdered millions of Jewish people in gas chambers has been removed from his seminary. Richard Williamsom caused outrage with his remarks, which surfaced shortly after the Vatican's decision to welcome him back into the Catholic church l...

Only birdsong and muttered prayers disturb the tranquil cloisters where men dressed in long, black cassocks make their way to daily mass said in Latin; seminary students with hoes tend the vegetable allotments and check the wooden beehives that shelter beneath a copse of pine trees. Yet the neo-clas...

In the beginning, there was the atheist bus campaign. And it was good. Unless, that is, you were one of the many God-fearing folk who considered it blasphemy. They, however, are planning to get their own back. A trinity of Christian groups have created their own series of advertisements to run acros...

The Vatican today told a Holocaust-denying bishop he must publicly recant before being readmitted into the Roman Catholic church. In a statement, officials also said Pope Benedict XVI did not know about Bishop Richard Williamson's views when he agreed to lift his excommunication, and those of three ...

The cardinal in charge of the Vatican's relations with Jews has admitted that the Pope's decision to rehabilitate an ultra-conservative bishop who denies the Holocaust was dealt with poorly and was the result of bad management in the Vatican hierarchy. In a frank interview with the German service of...

Half of British adults do not believe in evolution, with at least 22% preferring the theories of creationism or intelligent design to explain how the world came about, according to a survey. The poll found that 25% of Britons believe Charles Darwin's theory of evolution is "definitely true", with an...