A Vatican investigation into allegations that St. John Paul II’s longtime top aide was negligent in handling sex abuse claims in his native Poland has cleared him of wrongdoing.

Pope Francis is urging Slovakia’s Roma to integrate better into the mainstream as he meets with the country’s most socially excluded minority group, who have long suffered discrimination, marginalization and poverty.

U.S. Catholic bishops are holding their annual fall assembly virtually this week with the Vatican's recent report on the rise and fall of disgraced ex-Cardinal McCarrick one of their main topics for discussion. Released last week after a two-year investigation, the report found that three decades of bishops, cardinals, and popes dismissed or downplayed reports McCarrick shared his bed with seminarians. Released last week after a two-year investigation, the report found that three decades of bishops, cardinals and popes dismissed or downplayed reports McCarrick shared his bed with seminarians. Pope Francis defrocked McCarrick last year after a Vatican investigation determined he sexually abused children and adults. Instead, the Vatican’s bishops office urged McCarrick to keep a low profile and minimize his travel.

In a sunlit ceremony of ancient ritual in St. Peter's Square, Pope John Paul II installed a record number of cardinals - 44 new princes of the Roman Catholic Church. The head of the Polish bishops conference, Archbishop Stanislaw Gadecki, said in a statement that John Paul had been “cynically deceived” by McCarrick as well as other U.S. bishops. It was the Polish bishops’ first response to the publication this week of the Vatican’s two-year investigation into McCarrick, which implicated John Paul and his secretary in covering up McCarrick's sexual abuse. The 449-page report determined that John Paul had received credible reports about McCarrick's misconduct from authoritative prelates in the late 1990s. Yet even after commissioning an inquiry that recommended against a promotion, John Paul in 2000 named McCarrick archbishop of Washington D.C., and later a cardinal.