Inspiration Faith & Prayer Health & Wellness Entertainment Love & Family
Newsletters Special Offers

Via Media

Over the past week, I worked my way through The Spiritual Franciscans: From Protest to Persecution in the Century after Saint Francis. Not an easy book if you’re not already conversant in the period – took me a while to get my bearings, and then I had to go re-read big chunks of it. If…

Yesterday, the Pope took a little trip: An unscheduled pilgrimage for Benedict XVI who, yesterday afternoon, in a "strictly private visit", went to Nemi in the heart of the Castelli Romani [name given to the cluster of towns in the Alban Hills near Rome, among them Castel Gandolfo and the tourist towns of Tivoli and…

To Stephen Brady of the controversial watchdog group Roman Catholic Faithful,and his family, on the death of their son due to injuries received in an accident last week.

A few weeks ago I was digitally pumelled by some around here for venturing vague, yet (I thought ) cheerful reservations about the Baroque, which then morphed into my typical idle musing about ambiguities of the relationship between majestic art and structures and the corrupt patrons and sometimes tragic history that produced them.  With that…

Bishop Pilla is implicated in the Cleveland Diocese CFO case. The defense brings him up as a means of showing that the whole thing was above board, it’s not what you think, and everyone knew about it: Smith is accused of being paid $270,000 in a secret church account. Lawyers for Zgoznik said that their…

A Vatican observer writes to remark on how things have changed around the place: An interesting sign of the way things are done now at the Vatican.  Today the Message for World Tourism Day was released (probably won’t make the NBC news). In 2004, the Message was signed by Pope John Paul II. In 2005,…

In Lebanon: A group of 10 Maronite men assaulted Baptist Pastor Raymond Abou-Mekhael and another church member at 6:30 p.m. as they were on their way to retrieve items from their parked cars. The Maronites broke the unidentified church member’s rib and both men’s glasses, smashed the car windows and then dumped the two men…

A reader writes: Our Catholic school has required parents to complete a ‘"Safe Enviroment" training for the past couple of years.  I have had very mixed feelings about the program.  I completely agree that volunteers who work regularly with children should be trained in recognizing and preventing child abuse (the need for which was exemplified…

Every day, Wikipedia features one of its articles on the front page of the site. Today the featured article is on Gregorian Chant – Jeffrey Tucker of the New Liturgical Movement and, of course, many others have been involved in compiling the entry. He says of the experience: To me this entry alone is enough…

The big bioethics/research story today is the possibility of extracting stem cells from embryos without destroying the embryos. The new technique would be performed on a two-day-old embryo, after the fertilized egg has divided into eight cells, known as blastomeres. In fertility clinics, where the embryo is available outside the woman in the normal course…
archives most recent
search this blog
More from Beliefnet and our partners