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Pontifications

So the Diocese of Rome (that’d be the pope’s diocese) has barred Ron Howard and Tom Hanks and the production team filming “Angels & Demons,” the “Da Vinci Code” prequel/sequel, from shooting inside two churches in the Eternal City. At the risk of committing pop culture heresy, I can only say: Bravo! I don’t necessarily…

Barack Obama’s meeting last week in Chicago with a high-profile group of Christian leaders from across the spectrum–T.D. Jakes, Franklin Graham, among others–was a coup of sorts for the candidate, as it gave some of his most important critics, and potentially make-or-break allies, a chance to take their measure of the man and his faith…

The death of Tim Russert last Friday was not only a shock to the journalistic world, but also to the wider American community, judging by the reactions across the blogosphere and in my own anecdotal experience with friends and family. His passing is truly a great loss, above all because he was a family man,…

Tom Reese is a Jesuit priest and a political scientist of the Church whose balanced insights into the complex workings of the engine room of the Barque of St. Peter have made him an invaluable resource to journalists–and something of a bane to the Vatican (especially a fellow named Joseph Ratzinger). But I suspect for…

Can this be true? Catholic World News reports that an Italian bishop has refused to allow a church wedding for a paraplegic man because the impotence resulting from his crippling automobile accident would be grounds for an annulment. A spokesman for Bishop Lorenzo Chiarinelli of Viterbo explained that although the bride was aware of her…

Among all the tainted food (especially meat) tragedies that are cropping up these days–enough to make Sinclair Lewis rise up and write again–the tale of an outbreak of E.coli in apparently tainted beef served at a Lutheran church social in Minnesota is one of the saddest. One churchgoer, Carolyn Hawkinson, died after eating meatballs made…

No, not an incursion into the Middle East. Neither the Vatican, nor the Pope (current or past), nor the bishops, nor church teaching or tradition supported the American invasion of Iraq. But when President Bush, the author of that terrible tragedy, meets his new BFF, Pope Benedict XVI, in the Vatican later this week, the…

Whenever someone tickles the hair-trigger of my seemingly congenital guilty conscience, the response to my reflexive mea culpa is that I am s-o-o-o Catholic. Well, yes, I hope so. Then again, the Pilgrim tradition of my youth is no slouch when it comes to guilt, so I can’t say as I took that on with…

…Especially if it’s the Pope’s Risotto. Sure, we’re sweltering here in New York, and it’s likely worse elsewhere. But summer is still a few days away–officially–so before it gets hotter or later, let’s whip up a steaming plate of the risotto that Lidia Bastianich made for Benedict XVI when he visited in April. I can’t…
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