This could make for some fascinating reading: The Vatican plans to make some of its World War II archives available on the Internet soon to calm down the controversy over Pope Pius XII’s actions during the Holocaust. The Vatican’s newspaper announced the plan, saying it will “render service to the historic truth,” and officials said…

This has been reported before, but the details revealed today are raising a lot of eyebrows: Pope John Paul II always took penitence seriously, spending entire nights lying with his arms outstretched on the bare floor, fasting before ordaining priests or bishops and flagellating himself, said the promoter of his sainthood cause. Msgr. Slawomir Oder,…

It happened this morning in Turkey: Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turkish man who shot and wounded Pope John Paul II in 1981, was released from a Turkish prison on Monday proclaiming that he was “the Christ eternal” after serving jail terms totaling 29 years. Under heavy guard and with his car flanked by a huge…

Not as many as you may think — and David Gibson raises a few interesting issues in his New York Times piece: When Pope Benedict XVI approved a decree last month that nudged nearer to sainthood his controversial wartime predecessor, Pius XII, he sparked another round of the sort of Jewish-Catholic disputations that have marked…

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