Tag: Catholic

A TIME correspondent—and Catholic—examines his church’s criminalization of attempts to ordain women as priests

Suits name the Vatican as a respondent on grounds that it employed clergy suspected of abuse. Papal spokesmen say it is a sovereign entity and immune from the American court system.

A senior Catholic Church official has threatened controversy by saying that it would be safer not to “defrock” priests who had been convicted of sexually abusing children.

The growing scandal about child abuse reaches the top of the Vatican.

An atheist group in the Irish Republic has defied a new blasphemy law by publishing a series of anti-religious quotations on its website. Atheist Ireland says it will fight any action taken against it in court. The quotations include the words of writers such as Mark Twain and Salman Rushdie, but also Jesus Christ, the Prophet Muhammad and Pope Benedict XVI.

Pope Benedict XVI moved two of his predecessors closer to possible sainthood Saturday, signing decrees on the virtues of the beloved Pope John Paul II and controversial Pope Pius XII, who has been criticized for not doing enough to stop the Holocaust.
The decrees mean that both men can be beatified once the Vatican certifies that a miracle attributed to their intercession has occurred. Beatification is the first major step before possible sainthood.

The European Court of Human Rights has ruled against the use of crucifixes in classrooms in Italy. It said the practice violated the right of parents to educate their children as they saw fit, and ran counter to the child’s right to freedom of religion.

Abuse victims across Northern Ireland are to launch a landmark legal case against several religious orders, the Belfast Telegraph can reveal.

Decades after suffering horrific abuse at the hands of nuns and priests in church-run industrial schools and orphanages a growing number of victims are now turning to the courts for retribution and closure. They are also planning legal action against the government bodies that were responsible for child welfare at the time, for failing to protect them.

Congregations around the U.S. are modifying their rituals to help prevent the spread of the H1N1 virus. A little vodka on the Communion chalice helps.

Pope Benedict has warned that a form of colonialism continues to blight Africa

Thousands of people are expected to attend York Minster later as the relics of a 19th Century French nun arrive in the city.

Four years ago the Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, a monk who popularised Buddhism in the West, was invited by the Vietnamese government to return home after 39 years in exile.

A new independent panel to investigate cases of alleged abuse where the police have taken no action has been unveiled by the Catholic Church in England and Wales.

A former Los Angeles priest convicted of molesting two boys has been called before a federal grand jury investigating how the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and Cardinal Roger M. Mahony handled priest abuse cases, a source told The Times. Former priest Michael Stephen Baker said he informed Mahony two decades ago that he sexually abused children, but he was allowed to remain in the ministry and victimized others.

Latinos are changing the nature of American religion. The church of La Placita, “the little square”, formally called Nuestra Señora Reina de Los Angeles, was founded under Spanish rule at around the same time as the pueblo bearing the same name, the future Los Angeles.

A church in Belfast, Ireland, which gave sanctuary to more than a hundred Romanians when they fled from racist violence, has been attacked by vandals. The Romanians had sheltered in the church after being driven from their homes in south Belfast by “disturbances” earlier in the month. Now, all but 14 of them have asked to return to Romania, and the government of Northern Ireland is paying to send the back.

Leaders of the UK’s main religions appeal to their followers to support a campaign to register as organ donors. The Church of England, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, the head of the U.K. Hindu Council and the Chief Rabbi have all said that organ donation after death is both permitted and encouraged by their respective religions. The Church of England went farther, calling it a “Christian duty.”

A former altar boy sued the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles on Thursday, alleging that he was sexually abused by a priest in 1987 shortly before the priest fled to his native Mexico to avoid criminal prosecution over other molestation allegations. The plaintiff, 32, said that when he was 9 or 10, the priest molested him repeatedly at a Catholic church near downtown Los Angeles. An archdiocesan official says the priest was removed from service in 1988.

A majority in the U.K. think offering school places on religious grounds could undermine community cohesion, claims a survey.

The Catholic orders responsible for abusing Ireland’s poorest children say they’re struggling to produce money to help their victims. Yet investigations into their net worth paint a very different picture — that of nuns and brothers with billions’ worth of carefully sheltered assets worldwide.