archives

By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
New York

Church/state relations are complicated everywhere, but perhaps nowhere more so than Italy, where the Catholic Church’s vast institutional structures afford it a high profile but also continually invite public scrutiny.

Two bits of bad news for the Vatican out of the Italian legal system in recent days make the point.

Last week, Italy’s top criminal court set aside the 2007 acquittals of two former officials of Vatican Radio, charged with endangering public health through excessive levels of electro-magnetic emissions. The two now face the prospect of another trial, which would be the third in the case.

By ADELLE M. BANKS
Religion News Service

WASHINGTON -- Presidential candidate Sen. John McCain on Thursday (May 22) renounced the endorsement of Texas megachurch pastor John Hagee after Hagee again came under fire, this time for controversial comments about the Holocaust.

Barely 30 minutes after McCain rejected Hagee's endorsement, Hagee himself withdrew his endorsement of McCain and vowed to no longer take "any active role" in the 2008 campaign.

By Daniel Burke
Religion News Service

A prominent lay Catholic group is presenting an award to retired Australian Bishop Geoffrey Robinson, whom U.S. bishops have barred from speaking on church property for questioning the church's authority.

Voice of the Faithful, a reform movement spawned by the Catholic sexual abuse crisis, is presenting its "Priest of Integrity Award" to Robinson on Thursday (May 22) in Manhasset, N.Y.

All Things Catholic by John L. Allen, Jr.
	Friday, May 23, 2008 - Vol. 7, No. 36

Though the parallel shouldn't be pushed too far, in some ways Christian/Muslim relations today might be compared to where things stood with personal computers back in the early 1980s. Everybody knew PCs were the future, but they wouldn't change the world until a simple, appealing, and reasonably standard way of making them work emerged.

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'Weapons that never stop killing'
An international conference taking place Dublin, Ireland, May 16-30, aims to ban the manufacture and use of cluster bombs, which Jacob Kellenberger, president of the International Red Cross, has called “weapons that never stop killing.” Tom Fox talks with Sister of Mercy Denise Coghlan who is attending the conference as a member of the Cluster Munitions Coalition is a global network of 200 civil society organizations working in over 70 countries to end the harm caused by cluster munitions.
Coghlan, an Australian, works in Cambodia, where the 26 million cluster bombs were dropped there in the 1970s are still claiming victims today. The Vatican and Catholic organizations, such as Jesuit Refugee Services, have been ardent supporters of efforts to ban cluster bombs.
Representatives of more than 100 states are attending the conference, although the United States, Russia and Britain -- some of the most prolific users of the small munitions -- are not attending.