catholicism

Beyond a growing distaste for the rancor around hot-button issues like human sexuality, gender equity, and reproductive choice, people seem to be put off church because they are able to do the kind of work—tending the sick, advocating for the oppressed, caring for the earth, comforting those in trouble or need—that was long the stock in trade of local churches, mosques, synagogues, and temples, but which, through the modern corporatizing of mainstream religions, was largely outsourced to separate agencies. This is why you’ll probably find more people volunteering in any given week at Martha’s Kitchen food pantry in downtown San Jose, California than at Sunday services at the church across the street. If Facebook is killing the church, that is, it’s probably more accurate to call it an assisted suicide.

In his new book the pope rejects violence… but what of his statements on gays and lesbians?

The Catholic Church subsidizes the event so significantly they should just call it the Catholic March for Life.

As Catholic sex abuse scandals once again dominate headlines from Boston to Belgium, and even the fast-track canonization of Pope John Paul II is marred by questions of culpability, the role of the Catholic hierarchy in enabling clergy abuse seems indisputable, admitted even by die-hard church partisans like the Catholic League. But what’s less understood is how these same patterns persist in today’s Church, where demographic shifts and a dwindling priesthood may be creating a new set of scenarios for abuse. The story of Katia Birge is a case in point.

On numerous occasions Pope Benedict has ignored the connection between Christian anti-Semitism and Nazi racial anti-Semitism, and when posed a question about German responsibility for the Holocaust he fails to address it directly.

The Orthodox Jewish community in the U.S. has treated allegations of sexual abuse with the same secrecy and refusal to include secular authorities as the Catholic Church. Now, however, more Orthodox abuse victims are coming forward than ever before.

Sullivan praises God for homosexuality, while Gallagher demands pro-LGBT rights Catholics repent.

Benedict’s remarks, clarified today, represent a “big shift.”

Archbishop Dolan is a fighter for the orthodoxy that has become central to the Catholic Church since Dorothy Day’s death in 1980—sex and gender.

Cuba gets its first seminary since the 1959 revolution.