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Regulars
Friday, December 04 2009
To call Shlomo Sand's book "challenging" would be an understatement.
The challenge begins with the English title: it goes further than a
literal translation of the original Hebrew, which would be "When and
How Was the Jewish People Invented?" What is undoubted is that what
Sand is attempting to expose has wide appeal: it is unusual to find a
book by a university academic labelled "International Bestseller". -
Emma Klein, The Tablet
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Regulars
Thursday, November 05 2009
The heart of Allen's study describes ten critical trends the church
must navigate if it is to retain market share. Otherwise, "Catholicism
won't rise to the occasion of these new challenges - it'll be
steamrolled by them." - Patrick Jordan reviews John L. Allen Jr's The Future Church @ Commonweal Magazine
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Regulars
Tuesday, October 20 2009
Author and Opus Dei member Marie Oates has just published her book attempting to show how women live the Opus Dei charism. She explains her motivation in this interview. - Marie Oates @ ZENIT
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Regulars
Wednesday, September 30 2009
The story of a Roman Catholic bishop who resigned his bishopric to run in a presidential election was always going to be a fairly unique one. Even more so when, having won the election, he was welcomed by the Vatican as a legitimate president and sent a present by the Pope.
Fernando Lugo is the man in question and his country of Paraguay the beneficiary of his decision. - Fr Michael Campbell-Johnston, Thinking Faith
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Regulars
Wednesday, September 16 2009
Women cannot be official leaders or teachers in the Catholic Church
- roles reserved for ordained men. Not only are women barred from
being ordained as priests or bishops, but the question of their
ordination is not even to be discussed, as Pope John Paul II stated in
1994. And in case there were any lingering doubts, Cardinal Ratzinger
(the future Pope Benedict XVI) added that this teaching is infallible. To say that huge numbers of American Catholics were stunned would be an understatement. It is precisely this reaction that Dan Brown has been able to exploit. - Eric Plumer @ Washington Post
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Regulars
Monday, September 14 2009
One of the more vicious substruggles of the Cold War was the Soviet Union's attempt to obliterate the Catholic Church, intensified when Pope John Paul II pushed for freedom for his native Poland. The KGB
coopted Vatican officials of many levels, employing blackmail and agents who became priests for the sole purpose of getting high church assignments. - John A. Koehler's Spies in the Vatican reviewed by Joseph Goulden @ Washington Times
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Regulars
Tuesday, September 08 2009
If I had passed over Rembert Weakland's autobiography, I would have
missed a marvelous read; it is at once a crash course on monastic life,
a record of inside stories of Vatican dealings, and insights into the
struggles of some church officials to reconcile conscience with
reality. It is about one man's personal journey from working class
Pennsylvania to the heights of ecclesial power. But it is also about
the kind of scandal, moral and social, that can unmake a career. - Mary
E. Hunt, Religion Dispatches
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Regulars
Tuesday, August 18 2009
As with so much about Pius XII, it was his seemingly ambiguous attitudetowards fascism that did so much to foster the suspicion that he musthave helped its exponents. But the good news for Catholics is that PiusXII must be treated as innocent. - Guy Walters @ Catholic Herald
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Regulars
Wednesday, August 12 2009
Busted Halo's Freshman Survival Guide is five years old as an online publication. Now for the first time it is appearing in a print edition. - Busted Halo's Freshman Survival Guide 09
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Regulars
Thursday, August 06 2009
Austrian Catholic Franz Jagerstatter was executed by the Nazis in Germany in 1943, a martyr to the faith. He believed that his Catholicism and Nazism were antithetical and that the German war of aggression against Europe was not a just war. His soul, he felt, would be imperiled by mortal sin if he participated in the evils being perpetrated by the Nazis. The advice he got from the priests and even his bishop was that despite his scruples he should do his duty and serve in the military. - Eugene J. Fisher @ Catholic San Francisco Online
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