The archbishop has been ferocious in fighting against marriage between same-sex couples, painting it as a perversity against nature.
If only his church had been as ferocious in fighting against the true perversity against nature: the unending horror of pedophile priests and the children who trusted them.

Attorneys for nearly 150 people who claim sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests made nearly 10 000 pages of previously sealed internal church documents public on Sunday, revealing at least one previously unknown decades-old case in which a priest under police investigation was allowed to leave the US after the Diocese of San Diego intervened.

After a three-year legal battle over the Diocese of San Diego's internal records, a retired San Diego Superior Court judge ruled late on Friday that they could be made public. The records are from the personnel files of 48 priests who were either credibly accused or convicted of sexual abuse or were named in a civil lawsuit.

Demonstrations are planned for Pope Benedict's four-day state visit to England and Scotland, with the main focus likely to be on a Protest the Pope campaign march in central London on Saturday, Sept 18.
Other separate protests are planned, including a bus poster campaign by a group supporting women's ordination and a silent witness by the Grand Orange Lodge of Scotland.

The regime in Cuba has agreed to the biggest release of political prisoners seen on the island nation in decades in a deal struck with the country's Catholic leader, Cardinal Jaime Ortega, church officials said last night.

Under a deal reportedly struck by Cuban leader Raul Castro and Cardinal Ortega, some 52 political prisoners will be released and thereafter leave the country for exile in Spain. Also at the meeting were the Spanish Foreign Minister, Miguel Angel Moratinos, and his Cuban counterpart, Bruno Rodriguez. The first five prisoners were reportedly set to be released last night, with the remainder expected to be freed over the coming weeks. Pressure on Havana to release the prisoners has been growing since the death of a prominent political dissident in February after a hunger strike to protest his continuing incarceration.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has issued an official letter opposing the passage of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which would add sexual orientation to the nation's anti-discrimination laws that have existed for two generations. That letter was sent to all 545 members of Congress urging them to vote against the law. As you might expect, it's full of the same kind of nonsense rhetoric we always hear from the anti-gay crowd.
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There's that same old obsession with gay sex. Like all other anti-gay bigots, they define the entire person by their sexual acts -- but only gays, of course, not straights. Anti-discrimination laws have nothing to do with protecting "homosexual conduct." And the claim that the church's position can't be considered discriminatory because it's "based on fundamental truths" is simply laughable.

An archbishop has defended the child sex scandal that has engulfed the Roman Catholic Church by claiming it reflects the behaviour of society at large.
Brazilian priest Dadeus Grings also said adolescents are 'spontaneously homosexual' and in need of guidance.
He said: 'Society today is paedophile, that is the problem. So people easily fall into it. And the fact it is denounced is a good sign.'

The issue of population control is the environmental elephant in the room. We can buy hybrid cars, we can urge people to shop for organic food -- heck, we can even push elaborate carbon trading schemes through Congress -- but there's one solution that would stop climate change dead in its tracks: We could stop having children.

It was indeed outrageous that Reverend Raniero Cantalamessa, in his Good Friday homily at St. Peter's Basilica, with Pope Benedict in eyeshot, compared the public denunciation of the Catholic Church hierarchy for harboring child molesting priests to the homicidal viciousness of anti-Semitism.

But there was another reason to be troubled by that homily: Cantalamessa also talked about the need to end violence against women, which is crucial, but he did so without any acknowledgment of the Church's own culpability in the abuse, endangerment, and intimidation of women.

On the morning of January 14 in Seattle, Ken Roosa and a small group Alaska Natives stood on the sidewalk outside Seattle University to announce a new lawsuit against the Jesuits, claiming a widespread conspiracy to dump pedophile priests in isolated Native villages where they co …

A letter sent in 1963 to Pope Paul VI by a senior American priest who outlined the "problem of the problem priest" suggests that the Vatican was fully aware – or at least should have been aware – of the extent of sexual abuse within the US Catholic Church almost five decades ago.

The missive, unearthed and made public yesterday by lawyers representing victims of alleged sexual abuse in Los Angeles, argued even then that the best solution for dealing with priests found to have violated young men and boys was to defrock them, rather than shuffle them to other dioceses, as was the practice of the Catholic Church for so long.