Catholicism

Cathars and Their Legacy
Heretics, as considered by the dominant Catholic Church Cathars were burned alive for heir heresy - which indeed is contrary to the Bible. However, today’s Catholicism embraces elements from the Cathars’ heretic beliefs, quite strange, isn’t it?

Roman Catholic Saints
The custom of making Roman Catholic saints can be traced back to the early period of the history of the religion. Here are some of the most famous and accomplished saints who are venerated by the followers of the religion.

Catholic Churches
Read on to know more about some of the most famous catholic churches in the world…

Stalking the Divine: Contemplating Faith with the Poor Clares
"I had made my annual checklist of things I wanted to accomplish in the coming months, and sidling up to faith, as usual, was one of them—it had been on the list for several years, along with lifting weights and reading Proust."

Catholic Church: History of Catholicism
As with all major world religions, the Web is an excellent source for information about the history of the Catholic religion.

Cardinal Newman's Same-Sex Resting Place Upsets Catholic Saint Makers
In deciding to move Cardinal Newman's body, the Catholic Church is violating Newman's publicly stated wish to be buried next to Ambrose St. John "for eternity."

Repercussion Of Faith
Religion, politics, and economy are connected to each other; any change in one will surely reverberate and induce changes in the others.

The da Vinci Syndrome
The history of the Catholic Church reads like the annals of a global crime concern.

Vatican Rules Firmly Against Gay Priests
· Pope's first order rejects active homosexuals · Move may cause problems in number of seminaries

Vatican Rules Against Gay Priests
The Vatican has today published its long-awaited statement on homosexuals and the priesthood, affirming that those with "deep-seated" gay tendencies should not be ordained.

Obituary: Father Luigi Giussani
Italian priest and founder of the controversial Catholic pressure group, Communion and Liberation.

Catholic Saints and Our Lady: A Mystic’s Journal: Entry February 9, 2005
The Blessed Virgin Mary: 'A Mystic's Journal' Entry February10, 2005 by Laurie Conrad.

Catholic Prayers: A Mystic’s Journal Entry February 6, 2005: The Hail Mary
Daily prayer: A Mystic’s Journal Entry February 6, 2005 by the author of "The Spiritual Life of Animals & Plants". Her new books "Realms of Light" and "Meetings with Angels & Other Divine Beings" are scheduled to be published in 2005.

Vatican Hit By New Row Over War Role
Pope kept Jewish families apart. The Vatican secretly issued instructions to the Catholic church in France not to return Jewish children to their families after the second world war, it emerged yesterday.

Vatican Steps Up Criticism of China Over Arrests of Catholics
The Vatican has issued a strong denunciation of religious repression in China because of fears that 23 Roman Catholics - including eight priests - have been arrested, and some ordered to undergo enforced re-education. One aged bishop is understood to have died in prison.

Lourdes Needs Manna From Heaven
The Catholic shrine of Lourdes yesterday opened a special bank account and appealed for donations from the faithful after it emerged that last weekend's visit by the Pope had left it with a €1.2m (£812,000) deficit. "The figures are bad," admitted Monsignor Jacques Perrier, the...

A Woman's Place is to Wait and Listen, Says the Vatican
The Vatican yesterday depicted what it claimed were women's characteristic traits: 'Listening, welcoming, humility, faithfulness, praise and waiting.' In its most important statement on the role of women in almost a decade, the Roman Catholic Church said these virtues of the Virgin Mary...

Austrian Bishop Derides Orgy Claims
The powerful Austrian Catholic church was plunged into its second big sex scandal in a decade yesterday when a seminary run by arch-conservatives was alleged to be the site of orgies among young priests and their teachers. The seminary in St Pölten, west of Vienna, comes under the...

Papal Envoy Breaks Ranks on Gay Couples
The Pope's ambassador to one of Europe's leading Catholic countries has hinted that the church should "acknowledge" gay partnerships - a significant crack in the Vatican's resolute opposition to "evil and deviant" gay relationships. Monsignor Manuel Monteiro de Castro told a conference of...

Vatican Rebuff to Spanish Muslims
The Vatican will not allow Muslims to pray once more in the Mezquita, the former mosque that is now the cathedral of Cordoba, telling them they must "accept history" and not try to "take revenge" on the Catholic church. "We, too, want to live in peace with persons of other religions,"...

Pope to Beatify 'buffoon' Who Was Austria's Last Emperor
Critics suspect political agenda behind campaign. In the ranks of his admirers nostalgic for the old empire, he was a pacifist cast among warmongers, a gentle soul out of his depth among backstabbing diplomats, ministers, and generals.

Papal Envoy Shot Dead in Burundi Ambush
The Vatican's ambassador to Burundi was shot dead yesterday when his car was raked with gunfire in an apparent ambush which government and rebel forces blamed on each other. Archbishop Michael Courtney, a 58-year-old Irishman and mediator in peace talks, was wounded in the head, shoulder...

Vatican Accused of Skewing Conference on Food Production
The Vatican looks set to lend its vast moral authority to the cause of genetically modified crops, despite a row over the alleged "packing" with pro-GM delegates of a conference convened to help the Pope's officials make up their minds. A thumbs-up from the Vatican would have far-reaching...

Anger at Vatican Plan to Ban Altar Girls
A heated battle has been joined in the Vatican between moderates and conservatives over a directive, called for by the Pope, that would bar altar girls and stop millions of Roman Catholics around the world dancing, or even clapping, in their churches.

Church Used in Porn Film May Need Reconsecration
The bishop of a diocese in the uplands of central Italy was last night mulling over whether to reconsecrate one of his churches following the discovery that it had been used to film a hardcore pornographic movie five years ago. Couples from all over Italy are married in the picturesque...

$85m for church's sex victims
The Catholic Church in Boston, the starting-point of the child sex abuse scandal which spread across the United States, has agreed to pay $85m (£53m)to settle more than 500 lawsuits brought by people who accuse priests of molesting them.

Polish Catholics urge sainthood for EU founding father
It's enough to make a Eurosceptic blanch, but Robert Schuman, one of the founding fathers of the European Union, may be heading for sainthood.

Row Over Vatican Order to Conceal Priests' Sex Abuse
A confidential order issued by the Vatican 40 years ago instructing Roman Catholic bishops to conceal cases of sex abuse is set to reignite controversy over the church's treatment of suspect priests.

Vatican Told Bishops to Cover Up Sex Abuse
Expulsion threat in secret documents. The Vatican instructed Catholic bishops around the world to cover up cases of sexual abuse or risk being thrown out of the Church.

Vatican Backing Sparks Gm Row
Report set to anger Catholics in developing world. Plans being laid at the Vatican to throw the Pope's vast moral influence behind the cultivation of genetically modified crops have sparked a row within the church.

Pope's Plea to Serb Bosnia's Orthodox, Catholics and Muslims
The unlikely sound of Catholic choirs echoed across the Serb Orthodox stronghold of Banja Luka yesterday as the Pope delivered a plea for live-and-let-live. Hobbling up to an altar under a papal yellow canopy and a blistering sun, he appealed for a reversal of the ethnic cleansing of a...

Bishop Charged With Hit-and-run Resigns
The Pope has accepted the resignation yesterday of the Bishop of Phoenix, the Most Rev Thomas O'Brien, who has been charged with leaving the scene of a fatal car accident. He was arrested on Monday after the investigation of a hit-and-run-incident which killed Jim Reed, 43, led the police...

Investigator Into Us Church Sex Abuse Quits
America's Catholic church, hoping to lay to rest a year-old scandal of sexual abuse by its clergy, faced fresh charges of cover-ups yesterday after the forced resignation of an outspoken investigator. Frank Keating, who led a panel of lay Catholics investigating the abuse by priests,...

Morality Pact Boosts Vatican's Power in Slovakia
Slovakia is planning to seal a pact with the Vatican on conscientious objection, vastly increasing the influence of Roman Catholicism in the country's schools, hospitals, courts, and security structures. The law on freedom of conscience would be the first such pact between a European...

Tension mounts on Athos as extremist monks defy eviction
The battle to remove rebel monks from a monastery on Mount Athos spilled outside the all-male republic yesterday when thousands of Orthodox faithful took to the streets to protest at an unprecedented land-and-sea blockade of the sanctuary.

Mischievous saint gets to the bottom of parishioners' woes
If another church had not grabbed the name, it might be called the Church of Moonies. For a small chapel at Murtosa, northern Portugal, is the only Roman Catholic church where it is acceptable to drop your trousers and show your bum.

'A code of silence that goes back years'
Father Christopher Coyne was struggling for words. After a year of tumult, pain and scandal in this most Roman Catholic of cities, how would he remember Cardinal Bernard Law, and the ignoble exit of the man who was once the most influential prelate in America?

The Catholic church must make its own confession
To be a liberal and a Roman Catholic always risked a life of masochism. How could the liberal aspirations for tolerance, fairness and individual decency ever coexist with a body of revealed truth and command morality, handed down from the Vatican with the fearsome injunctions Lenin deployed to impose the command economy?

Would this be a "just war"?
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' statement on Iraq.

Pope plans makeover for the rosary
The Pope is today to give the rosary - the most distinctive prayer tool in Catholicism - its first makeover for 900 years in his latest attempt to increase the devotions of the faithful.

Church clears Archbishop of Sydney of sex abuse charges
Sydney's Catholic archbishop George Pell returned to work this morning after being cleared last night of charges of child abuse. He said that he had forgiven his accuser. "After a little interval of time I was able to pray for him, I continue to do so and I bear him no ill will."

Churches Squabble Over Moscow Monks' Missionary Position
The Vatican yesterday responded to allegations of sexual misbehaviour by Franciscan friars in Moscow by denouncing a "despicable operation" to discredit the Roman Catholic church by accusing it of setting up a brothel in a Moscow flat. Anti-Catholic elements had set up a brothel in order...

Sainthood Beckons for Priest Linked to Franco
Controversial founder of Opus Dei will be canonised tomorrow. Three Spanish ministers and a host of senior officials were due in Rome tomorrow for the canonisation of Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer, founder of the Catholic church's controversial, powerful and conservative Opus Dei group.

Jesuits pay $7.5m to two men abused for 30 years
The Jesuits have agreed to pay $7.5m (£4.8m) to two men who say they were sexually molested for 30 years at the Californian retirement home for priests where they worked as dishwashers.

LA cathedral stirs wrath of the faithful
$200m wasted as city's poor suffer, say Catholic protesters. The first cathedral built in the United States for three decades opened yesterday amid protests from Roman Catholics who say that the $200m cost of the building should have been spent on the poor.

Church in crisis as seminary shuts down
As an endangered species, Catholic bishops may need a rethink on celibacy. They used to be one of Ireland's most familiar exports, but Roman Catholic priests are facing the prospect of extinction after the country's oldest seminary shut its doors last week because of its failure to attract a single new recruit.

Sydney Archbishop Faces Sex Abuse Inquiry
The Archbishop of Sydney announced yesterday that he will step aside during an investigation into allegations that he abused a 12-year-old boy while he was a trainee priest.

Vatican casts out 'ordained' women
Excommunicated Danube Seven remain defiant in the name of religious equal rights. The Vatican tried to crush an international movement for the ordination of women yesterday when it excommunicated seven women who claimed to be priests.

US Catholic bishops ready to crack down on abusers
After months of wriggling, the US's Roman Catholic bishops appeared yesterday to be close to agreeing a policy which fell just short of zero tolerance for priests who commit sexual abuse.

Condemned to a life in purgatory for falling prey to a sinner in the Vatican
Rory Carroll in Rome reports on the cathartic memoirs of a Catholic writer whose life was blighted by an amoral 'Iago' at the heart of the Holy See.