The Archdiocese of Cincinnati has released the most comprehensive list of rules to date addressing behavior between priests and children. Among other changes is the requirement of those who have contact with kids to get background checks. Victim advocates support the new rules but realize they're not a panacea.
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Right now Church and State aren't looking so separate in the US. Both the Catholic Church's opposition to birth control as well as the Bush Administration's similar attempt to limit access to contraception by defining it as abortion, have been openly criticized this week by contraception advocates.
An open letter, written by over 50 international Catholic dissent groups, asks the Pope to lift the Church's ban on birth control.
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If you were wondering what the Pope was doing driving around Sydney in the Pope mobile, his Holiness is in town for World Youth Day. The world's largest youth event, organized by the Catholic Church, has brought almost 125,000 international visitors to Sydney, more than the 2000 Olympics!
Every two or three years the Pope invites young pilgrims to celebrate their faith's international counterparts. Pope John Paul II started the event in 1984.
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Tom Hanks is a persona non grata in all of the churches of the Vatican and Rome. The Vatican has banned the filming of Angels and Demons, Dan Brown's sequel to The Da Vinci Code because it is "an offense against God."
The head of the Vatican's Prefecture For Economic Affairs said: [The stories] turned the Gospels upside down to poison the faith. It would be unacceptable to transform churches into film sets so that his blasphemous novels can be made into mendacious films in the name of business.
The Church did not even read the script, as the name Dan Brown was enough to merit a ban.
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The leader of the Catholic Church in Scotland plans on lambasting Gordon Brown this Easter Sunday for the prime minister's proposal to use animal-human hybrid embryos for medical research. Supporters of the bill believe that the fusion will lead to significant advances in combating multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer's disease.
In his sermon on Sunday, Cardinal Keith O'Brien will call the bill "grotesque," "hideous," and an approval of "Frankenstein" experiments.
If you had a family member suffering from a life-threatening disease, would you want all avenues of research pursued, even if you initially opposed the techniques in the abstract.
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Thieves are figuring if they're already committing a sin, they might as well go large. A recent spate of church robberies is forcing some Russian priests to consider bearing arms to protect their religious icons. One such attack inside the Golden Ring in Russia (near Moscow, with long historical ties to orthodox Christianity) ended with thieves holding a priest at automatic gunpoint while they relieved the church of its prized medieval icon.
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Osama bin Laden took a break from condemning America, instead taking aim at the European Union and the Catholic Church. In an audio tape tentatively attributed to the fugitive terrorist, his first message of 2008, bin Laden threatened the European Union "grave punishment" for publishing offensive cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. His new single is titled: "The Response Will Be What You See, Not What You Hear."
In 2006, 50 people were killed after a Danish newspaper republished cartoons of the Prophet with a bomb as a turban.
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