archives

By Francis X. Rocca
Religion News Service

VATICAN CITY -- Intelligent life may exist on other planets and has no need of redemption through Jesus Christ, the Vatican's top astronomer said.

Fr. Jose Gabriel Funes, director of the Vatican Observatory, was quoted in the Wednesday (May 14) edition of the official Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano.

By Daniel Burke
Religion News Service

The Catholic archbishop of Kansas City, Kan., said he hopes Gov. Kathleen Sebelius will abide by his request to stop receiving Communion before he has to take further punitive measures because she supports abortion rights.

"There are a number of pastoral alternatives open to me at this time" if Sebelius refuses, including barring the governor from Communion or excommunicating her from the church, Archbishop Joseph Naumann said in an interview late Monday (May 12).

Oh, love is handsome, and love is fine. The old British ballad “The Water is Wide” manages, in a brief space, to etch finely all the phases of love. Love is handsome, fine, a jewel. Love grows old and cold and fades like morning dew. Love is the sturdy oak against which we rest our back, only to find the tree snaps.

And we cannot help what love does to us. In love, we know not when we sink or swim. We find ourselves “in” love, without our devising or without knowing how we have come to be there, its waves long since over our heads.

By Dennis Coday, NCR staff writer

Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church Reclaiming the Spirit of Jesus By Bishop Geoffrey Robinson; Foreword by Donald Cozzens Liturgical Press, 320 pages, $24.95

Days before Australian Bishop Geoffery Robinson was to begin a U.S. tour promoting his book about church reform, Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church: Reclaiming the Spirit of Jesus, the Australian bishops’ conference released a statement saying they had found “doctrinal difficulties” with the book.

Here’s a Catholic News Service story:

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By Dan McAloon, Catholic News Service

SYDNEY, Australia -- The Australian Catholic Bishops' Conference has listed its concerns with a retired bishop's book that critiques sexual and authoritarian abuses in the church.

The 2007 book, Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church: Reclaiming the Spirit of Jesus, was written by Bishop Geoffrey Robinson, retired auxiliary bishop of Sydney and former head of the church's abuse panel.

The bishops said that "after correspondence and conversation" with Bishop Robinson, "it is clear that doctrinal difficulties remain." Central to these, they said, is Bishop Robinson's "questioning of the authority of the Catholic Church to teach the truth definitively."