Tag: Catholicism

The Roman Catholic Church in Italy is under growing pressure to start paying taxes on its massive property portfolio, in a move that could raise up to 800 million euros (£680 million) a year and help bail the country out of its economic crisis.

A few conservative Roman Catholics are pointing to a dozen Bible verses and the church’s original teachings as proof that Earth is the center of the universe, the view that was at the heart of the church’s clash with Galileo Galilei four centuries ago.

A look at an iPhone app, approved by the Catholic Church, which acts as your electronic Christian conscience.

A newly revealed 1997 letter from the Vatican warned Ireland’s Catholic bishops not to report all suspected child-abuse cases to police.

Watch a meme complex evolve in real time as Catholicism in Haiti mutates and evolves under new selection pressure caused by the catastrophic earthquake of January 2010.

Under pressure from critics, Pope Benedict XVI grudgingly rules that condom use can be justified in some cases to help stop the spread of AIDS, the Vatican’s first exception to a long-held policy banning contraceptives.

American bishops are holding a conference to educate priests and bishops on the techniques of exorcism.

The number of priestly ordinations in Ireland has dipped below England and Wales for the first time in living memory, new figures reveal.

The recruitment crisis is a clear indication of how low the church has sunk in a country that once used to export Catholic missionaries to all corners of the globe and often provided Britain with a significant proportion of its priests.

Ignore the bells and the smells and the lovely Raphaels, the Pope’s visit to Britain is nothing to celebrate

Gordon Brown is ‘delighted’, David Cameron is ‘delighted’. I am ‘repelled’.

In his actions on child abuse and Aids, Joseph Ratzinger has colluded in the protection of paedophiles and the deaths of millions of Africans. As Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (Pope John Paul II’s chief enforcer), it was Ratzinger’s job to investigate the child abuse scandal that plagued the Catholic church for decades. And how did he do it? In May 2001 he wrote a confidential letter to Catholic bishops, ordering them not to notify the police – or anyone else – about the allegations, on pain of excommunication. He referred to a previous (confidential) Vatican document that ordered that investigations should be handled “in the most secretive way . . . restrained by a perpetual silence”. Excommunication is a joke to me, perhaps to you, but to a Catholic it means exclusion and perhaps hellfire – for trying to protect a child. Well, God is love.

Even though the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has lobbied the federal government in favor of universal health insurance for 30 years, a growing number of bishops are now opposing President Obama’s plan.

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.

It’s popularly imagined that the history of science and religion is one of violent conflict, but the facts don’t bear this out.

Don’t look away: it’s unbelievable that we still haven’t learnt the lessons from systematic child abuse in Ireland

Should the Catholic priesthood be restricted to single, celibate men? Do clergy restrictions based on gender, marital status or sexual orientation make sense these days?

Conservative Catholics angered by president’s abortion rights record

Praises coexistence between Islam, Christianity to huge crowd in Cameroon

Plans by the Spanish Catholic Church to build a ‘mini Vatican’ in Madrid have left residents furious over the loss of one of the city’s best loved views.

An Indian nun has stunned the Catholic Church with a confessional autobiography claiming widespread sexual abuse and bullying within its cloisters.

The British bishop who caused outrage and sparked a public relations disaster for the Vatican by denying the Holocaust has been sacked as head of an Argentinian church.