the vatican

According to Vatican representative Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, ending discrimination against gays, lesbians, and transgender persons would make those who oppose such human rights the real victims.

The decision of Episcopal churches like St. Luke’s to convert en masse to Roman Catholicism while retaining a quasi-medieval Anglican liturgy is not, however, a decision to move into this ever-emerging ecclesial reality. It is a solemn retreat into an imagined past where a priest’s sacramental office itself, his back turned to the congregation, protects him from the conflicted desires and diverse stirrings of the wider church.

Human rights, the role of the Church, and politics aren’t the whole story.

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.

While the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has denied that there is a national strategy for the Church to fight sex abuse cases more aggressively, even the Church’s staunchest defenders see the pattern. As William Donohue, the pugilistic president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, told the New York Times this week, bishops are going after SNAP because “SNAP is a menace to the Catholic Church.”

Do Italian hackers truly hold the Vatican responsible for events that look place 500 years ago?

Anonymous claims responsiblity for site blackout.

When the last non-Italian pope until John Paul II, a Dutch pope (Adrian VI), came to Rome for the first time. The cardinals proudly gave him a tour of the Belvedere. He was shocked and outraged, informing them (in Latin no less) that “these are nothing but pagan idols!” He threatened to sell off the whole collection, and in the interim built cabinets for them, locked the doors, and kept the key to himself.

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 a relatively unprecedented move, Greek police arrested the Rector of the thousand-year-old Vathipedi Monastery, Father Ephraim, on Christmas Eve. He had just returned to the Monastery, which is located on the most sacred ground in all of Orthodox Christendom, which we have now discovered to be the only semi-autonomous region of Mount Athos.