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The Episcopal Church’s bishops said Wednesday (March 18) that they have been too “preoccupied” with internal disputes to pay adequate attention to suffering caused by the deepening economic recession. Gathered in Hendersonville, N.C., March 13-18, for their annual spring retreat, about 125 Episcopal bishops unanimously approved the pastoral letter, the bishops’ first joint statement on…

Luanda, Angola – In Africa, some Roman Catholic priests have children and nuns counsel patients to use condoms against the scourge of AIDS. Faithful consult medicine men even though the church condemns that as witchcraft. As Pope Benedict XVI makes his first pilgrimage this week to the continent that has the world’s fastest-growing congregation of…

(RNS) A Kentucky museum that advocates creationism unveiled an exhibit on Sunday (March 15) that affirms Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection even as they reject his teachings on evolution. “All we’re doing is helping people to understand that natural selection is not evolution (even though) it’s portrayed that way in public schools,” said Ken…

YAOUNDE, Cameroon – The Vatican defended Pope Benedict XVI’s rejection of condoms as a way to stop HIV after international criticism Wednesday that he was weakening the fight against the disease. France and Germany sharply critiqued Benedict’s declaration that distributing condoms “increases” the AIDS problem. The French foreign ministry said the statement could “endanger public…

(UNDATED) When the economy heads downward, pastors sometimes expect the pews to get a little more crowded. But an analysis of polling data by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life indicates that, in general, worshippers are not reporting a corresponding increase in attendance as the stock market has fallen. While the stock market…

A federal appeals court on Monday (March 16) upheld a Texas law that requires public school students to observe a daily minute of silence following the Pledge of Allegiance. “The statute is facially neutral between religious and nonreligious activities that students can choose to engage in during the moment of silence,” a three-judge panel of…

New Orleans — The staccato banging of dozens of hammers dispelled the morning quiet as college students, lawyers and nurses from Massachusetts clambered about four new houses rapidly taking shape at the hands of Habitat for Humanity and St. Charles Avenue Presbyterian Church. Meantime, across town, students from the University of Pennsylvania, Syracuse University and…

Vatican City — For the past two months, the Catholic Church has been overcome by one fairly straightforward question: Why didn’t the pope know that the ultra-traditionalist bishop he welcomed back into the church was a fervent and public Holocaust-denier? Last week, the pope had an answer. He hadn’t Googled it. “I have been told,”…

NEW YORK (RNS) Religious opponents of the death penalty hope a new book about a Texas death row case by a best-selling author can help their efforts to end the practice of state-sanctioned executions. Thomas Cahill’s just-published book, “A Saint on Death Row,” chronicles the life of Dominique Green, who at the age of 30…

VATICAN CITY — The Vatican’s top bioethics official said the two Brazilian doctors who performed an abortion on a 9-year-old rape victim do not merit excommunication, since they acted to save her life. The statement by Archbishop Rino Fisichella, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, appeared as the lead article in the Sunday (Mar.…
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