pope benedict xvi

A report from the principally Catholic anti-contraception rally in Maryland reveals a constituency whose calls for religious freedom appear to be at the cost of freedom for all others.

For the poet Javier Sicilia, a grieving father whose son was murdered by thugs last year, the pope’s visit is historic as well. Yet for him, and for those wounded voices he seeks to amplify, the pontiff’s arrival has less to do with pushing back secularism than with long-overdue attention to the ravages of Mexico’s drug wars.

In 2002, Catholic theologian Christine Gudorf predicted that “within a generation or two,” Catholic hierarchical teaching will change to encourage contraception in marriage and to allow some abortions.

Macho, blind, dishonest, kidnapped by aliens. In recent years, detractors have spat plenty of venomous words at Beatriz Paredes, former national director of Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). “I abort you, Beatriz,” one editor even wrote in his takedown. A known feminist, Paredes stood by while her PRI colleagues in various states approved constitutional reforms declaring life as the moment of conception and penalizing the practice of abortion, leading to more investigations and arrests of women. While abortion was illegal before, it was practiced clandestinely without prosecutions in most places. Since 2008, 19 states have passed similar measures— most recently in Baja and San Luis Potosi just last month.

The creation of the Ordinariate is about sex, and resoundingly so. It affirms, not questions or challenges, the Catholic teaching on priestly celibacy and procreative marital sexuality.

In their new book, Women Deacons: Past, Present, Future, Gary Macy, William T. Ditewig, and Phyllis Zagano revisit the question of women’s ordination to the diaconate in the Roman Catholic Church. Unlike ordination to the priesthood, women’s ordination to the diaconate has unambiguous roots in the Christian New Testament, where Phoebe is named as a deacon of the church.

What do Pope Benedict XVI and celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain have in common? They both have a thing for Krampus.

A Kansas City Bishop and his Diocese were indicted for failure to report an egregious case of child abuse. Still?

With an economy in freefall, the Greek PM is broaching the subject of making the Church pay its share.

If you are the Catholic parent of LGBT daughter or son, you know firsthand that it is your child’s sexual identity, and not a belief in the Immaculate Conception, that puts them at risk for beatings and taunting. We find it reprehensible when a legacy of discrimination is invoked by those who themselves advocate repression. Archbishop Dolan and his colleagues should stop pretending that they face anything like the intolerance that our children do.