Tag: Pope

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.

The Vatican said Tuesday that moving Pope Pius XII closer to sainthood is not a hostile act against Jews, even though the wartime pontiff has been criticized for not speaking out enough against the Holocaust.

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.

Raymond Lahey, an outspoken Catholic Bishop who rose though the scholarly and religious ranks to represent children who were abused in the 1950’s and 1960’s, now charged for possession of child pornography.

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.

A fascinating new poll conducted by the Irish radio station Newstalk has found that attitudes to Catholicism have shifted significantly since the publication of the Ryan report into child abuse in Catholic-run institutions.

Pope Benedict XVI’s scientists have given their blessing to genetically modified crops as a possible solution to world hunger and poverty

The love of money has caused politicians to “fall from grace”, according to the head of the Roman Catholic church in Scotland.

Cardinal Keith O’Brien also warned that society has become “amoral” because those in power refuse to tell the public how to behave.

As Pope Benedict XVI wends his way across the Holy Land this week, he is addressing a dwindling and threatened Christian population driven to emigration by political violence, lack of economic opportunity and the rise of radical Islam.

Praises coexistence between Islam, Christianity to huge crowd in Cameroon

Pope Benedict XVI has has said British Bishop Richard Williamson must recant his views on the Holocaust before being readmitted to the Church.