(RNS) In its new Sunday night series, The Borgias, Showtime has found the magic combination for ultimate crowd appeal in a scintillating soap opera about a bad-boy pope. The Borgias follows the quasi-historic story of the Spanish noble family who, with the ascent of Rodrigo Borgia as Pope Alexander VI in 1492, brought a nighttime-television-style…

ROCHESTER, N.Y. (RNS) At Spiritus Christi Church, the choir sings the lyrics of “Amazing Grace” to the tune of “House of the Rising Sun” — a song about a brothel. Surely, such a tune for a sacred service would never meet the approval of the Rochester Roman Catholic Diocese. Then again, nothing about Spiritus Christi…

CLEVELAND (RNS) In days long gone, Roman Catholic priests regularly made deathbed house calls, even in the middle of the night with little notice, to pray over the dying and anoint them with holy oils. The candlelight ritual, popularly known as last rites, continues in hospitals, nursing homes, hospice houses and private homes. But it…

WASHINGTON (RNS) The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops condemned a book by Sister Elizabeth Johnson, a prominent feminist theologian, charging that her attempts to forge new understandings of God depart from traditional Catholic theology. The bishops’ Committee on Doctrine on Wednesday (March 30) said Johnson’s 2007 book, Quest for the Living God: Mapping Frontiers in…

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