The pope meets with children every year about this time, taking a few questions and providing rare–and affecting–personal insights that he doesn’t offer up elsewhere. Last Saturday he met with 7,000 children from the Holy Childhood Association, which is affiliated with the Vatican’s Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples. Benedict chose from three pre-screened questions. (He’s…

“Liberal Catholicism is an exhausted project,” Chicago Cardinal Francis George famously said more than a decade ago. As noted earlier, the eminent church historian John O’Malley argues that Barack Obama could be reviving the “spirit of Vatican II” that is associated with a “progressive” Catholicism currently out of favor in Rome. At PoliticsDaily, the much less eminent journalism hack, David…

That Scott Roeder is mentally unstable, a devotee of right-wing, anti-government extremism, and a fierce opponent of abortion seem to be a few of the hard facts  we have on him. But the suspect in the killing of Kansas abortion doctor George Tiller is also being portrayed as a religious wingnut, apparently of a Christian variety.…

There have been several efforts to tease out connections between Barack Obama and Catholicism–not surprising given many clear affinities, if clearly not a wholesale overlap. Some have been more adept than others. John O’Malley, the Jesuit historian of the church whose writings I like very much, takes a new tack in an essay at America‘s site, titled…

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