Free Republic

Justice Thomas's Life A Tangle of Poverty, Privilege and Race By Kevin Merida and Michael A. FletcherWashington Post Staff WritersSunday, April 22, 2007; A01 Adapted from the book "Supreme Discomfort:The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas" by Kevin Meridaand Michael A. Fletcher, Doubleday, New York, © 2007. Drugs have been a persistent problem in Pin Point, Ga., a tiny rural settlement best known as the birthplace of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Neighborhood leaders tried everything to chase the scourge away -- a march, a warning sign along the main drag, even a pilgrimage by the local church congregation, which prayed...

BOSTON - To hear Mitt Romney talk on the campaign trail, you might think the Republican presidential candidate had a gun rack in the back of his pickup truck. "I purchased a gun when I was a young man. I've been a hunter pretty much all my life," he said this week in Keene, N.H., to a man sporting a National Rifle Association cap. Yet the former Massachusetts governor's hunting experience is limited to two trips at the bookends of his 60 years: as a 15-year-old, when he hunted rabbits with his cousins on a ranch in Idaho, and last...

Updated:2007-03-05 14:55:26 Giuliani Estranged From His Children Some Say Personal Problems May Hurt Prospects CBS News NEW YORK (March 5) -- It doesn't look like Rudy Giuliani's two children will have a role in his presidential campaign. According to press reports, the GOP frontrunner's third marriage has alienated his son, Andrew, 21, and daughter, Caroline, 18, from their father. Giuliani's 21-year-old son, Andrew, told the New York Times that he would be too busy working on his golf game to participate in his father's presidential campaign. "There's obviously a little problem that exists between me and his wife," the younger...

Romney's Changing Views: Candid or Convenient? As Candidate Builds Support From Conservatives, He Confronts Accusations He's a Flip-Flopper By MARCUS BARAM Feb. 23, 2007 — - One candidate believes abortion should be legal, endorses embryonic stem cell research, supports a minimum wage increase, believes gays and lesbians deserve full equality and should be allowed to serve openly and honestly in the military, and opposes capital gains tax cuts. The other candidate is firmly against abortion, opposes stem cell research, vetoed a minimum wage increase as governor of his state, vehemently opposes gay marriage and wants to maintain the "don't...

This past Sunday, thanks to Mayor David Cohen, the city of Newton paid special tribute to Father Robert Drinan, who was our Congressman for ten years until the Pope asked him to retire from Congress and Barney Frank replaced him. He had been the Dean of the Boston College Law School and a well-known theologian, author and educator. Since his retirement from Congress, he had been teaching at the Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, and he passed away on January 28. He was a frequent visitor to his sister-in-law and nieces, who currently live in Newton. At the remembrance,...

James and Kathleen Pfeiffer were devoted to their parish and pastor, attending Mass every Sunday and helping pay for new bells at their church in southwestern Virginia. So when their priest was charged in January with stealing $600,000 from the church, the couple was devastated. "I would feel better about all this if he wasn't a priest and was just some con man who conned us," Kathleen Pfeiffer said. "He was loved by us. He knew everybody would do anything for him." The past year saw several cases where clerics were accused of stealing from their faithful. Some churchgoers say...

We hear it from some religious pulpits, and we think it’s the ‘gospel’ truth. But the real truth is you never really know what a Catholic believes, unless you are one. Unfortunately the majority religion of Congress is Catholic, but you’d never know by the legislation delivered. Currently, well over 100 members of Congress claim to be Catholic. Catholicism has five “non-negotiables” which are inherently evil. Those include abortion, euthanasia, same-sex marriage, cloning, and embryonic stem cell research(not adult stem cell research). Those few tend to eliminate a number of congress people from the practice of Catholicism. A few of...

Homosexual rights campaigners have gained permission from the head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales to hold Mass for gay parishioners. While the Church has allowed celibate gays to receive holy communion, traditionalist Catholics believe that practising homosexuals should be barred from the sacramental rite because their way of life defies Church teaching. Now, however, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor has taken the controversial step of allowing fortnightly Masses in his Westminster diocese specifically for homosexuals. A statement from the diocese stressed that the move did not represent a shift in Church teaching, which says that homosexual practice is a...

SAN DIEGO -- The Roman Catholic Diocese of San Diego said in a letter to parishioners this weekend that it is considering declaring bankruptcy to avoid going to trial on more than 140 lawsuits alleging sexual abuse by priests. The pastoral statement, signed by Bishop Robert Brom, said if fair settlements can't be reached with abuse victims, "the diocese may be forced to file a Chapter 11 reorganization in bankruptcy court." The diocese is concerned "that settlements not cripple the ability of the Church to accomplish its mission and ministries," the letter said. The letter was included in the regular...

Kenneth Briggs, former religion editor of The New York Times and author of Double Crossed: Uncovering the Catholic Church's Betrayal of American Nuns, shares the fruits of an eight-year study which brings to light possible reasons for the diminishing numbers of American sisters in our time. Tracing a detailed history of events from the 1950s until the present, Briggs provides specific examples of typical religious communities and interviews with individual sisters. Well documented and fairly presented, the book describes the struggles and misunderstandings between the church's hierarchy and the sisters who took seriously the mandate for renewal directed to religious...

MILWAUKEE - Bishop Raymond Burke's recent announcement that Wisconsin lawmakers who support abortion rights can no longer receive communion ignited a firestorm in the American Roman Catholic Church, especially among those U.S. bishops who wished they'd thought of the idea first. Burke cited Vatican doctrine and canon law when he instructed diocesan priests to withhold communion from all Catholic senators and congressmen until they "publicly renounce" their support of abortion rights. Burke's decision left other American bishops scrambling to regain the moral high ground in a church torn by scandals. In Burlington, Vt., the Most Rev. Kenneth A. Angell threatened...

web] Every now and then, you get to see a reporter gently suggest that a major religious leader - take Pope Benedict XVI, example - has tried to pull a fast one. That may be what's happening in this story earlier this week by New York Times reporter Ian Fisher about the pope's complicated address on faith and reason, which included a highly significant illustration linked to Islam. Actually, I think that Fisher did a good job of getting at the heart of this one. Let's face it: Popes are not sound-bite-friendly speakers. They have been known to float a...

The Vatican's official newspaper on Tuesday decried media images of Saddam Hussein's hanging as a "spectacle" violating human rights and harming efforts to promote reconciliation in Iraq. The Vatican, which opposes the death penalty, was among the first voices abroad to denounce Saddam's execution Saturday, saying then that it was "tragic news," even in the case of someone guilty of grave crimes, and expressing worry that it could fuel revenge and fresh violence. Also Tuesday, the Italian government said it will take "formal steps" in a renewed push for a U.N. call for a moratorium on the death penalty. The...

He hardly seems the obvious candidate for Catholic approval, but the Irish author who was once a byword for decadent behaviour is quoted in a new book by a Roman priest as an example to 21st-century Christians. "I can resist everything except temptation," Oscar Wilde once famously said. He was speaking for us all. Even for the Church of Rome, it turns out. For that very remark is quoted, with approbation, by a leading Vatican writer, Fr Leonardo Sapienza - a member of the protocol department of the Pontifical Household of Pope Benedict XVI - in a book out yesterday....

Jan. 5, 1066: Edward the Confessor, the English king responsible for the construction of Westminster Abbey, died. Edward is the only English king revered as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church. Jan. 5, 1527: Felix Manz, a Swiss Anabaptist is executed by drowning. Manz’s conflict with Lutheran and Reformed Protestants stemmed from his denouncement of the continued practice of infant baptism. Jan. 6, 548: the Jerusalem church observed the Christmas feast for the last time on the older date before switching, with the rest of the Western Church, to the now traditional date of December 25. Jan. 6, 1850:...

BRIGHTON -- In a non descript cardboard file box, in an ordinary cabinet, inside the modest building that houses the archives of the Archdiocese of Boston, is a manila folder with a name written in small, neat letters on its tab: Matthew. The folder contains an aged document and a small tarnished metal ornament, displaying a fragment of bone about the size of the capital O in this sentence. The certificate, signed by a long-forgotten Vatican official, asserts that the chip is a relic, nearly 2,000 years old and taken from the body of St. Matthew -- one of the...

WASHINGTON (CNS) – A federal judge in Louisville, Ky., has denied a Vatican request to dismiss a sex abuse lawsuit seeking damages from the Holy See. U.S. District Judge John G. Heyburn II ruled Jan. 11 that U.S. bishops and priests are employees of the Vatican within the terms of the Federal Sovereign Immunity Act. The act generally exempts other sovereign states from the jurisdiction of U.S. courts, but it allows U.S. courts to adjudicate lawsuits seeking monetary damages from a foreign country for personal injury caused in the United States by an employee of that country "while acting within...

ROME – An Italian group on Thursday asked Pope Benedict to order the removal of all religious works of art and Catholic traditions that still smack of anti-Semitism. The Roman Association of Friends of Israel sent a letter to the Pope asking him for a 'clear and strong signal' that he would not tolerate any residual or resurgent forms anti-Semitism in religious art or popular culture, such as processions. The group sent the letter to protest against an exhibition in a church in the Umbrian city of Orvieto which includes several old paintings depicting Jews desecrating a consecrated communion host,...

NEW YORK (AP) — Cardinal Edward Egan faced the faithful on Friday to explain a word that will change the lives of Roman Catholics in the nation's second-largest archdiocese: realignment. Translated into action, it means the Archdiocese of New York — more than 2.5 million people living from Manhattan to the Catskill mountains — is closing churches where services are poorly attended. "The decision is not based on economics at all — it's because of the shifting numbers of Catholics," said archdiocese spokesman Joseph Zwilling. "One hundred years ago, 80 percent of New York's Catholics lived in Manhattan, the Bronx...

Christianity 101 stipulates that the body of Jesus isn't available for viewing. Other religions have it easier. Several hundred people turned out in 2005 to view a touring collection of Buddhist relics at the Thousand Buddha Temple in Quincy. The exhibition displayed relics of Siddhartha, the religious figure most outsiders know simply by his title -- Buddha. The relics included flakes of dried blood, fragments of bone, and cremated remains believed to be those of Buddhism's founder, who died about 2,500 years ago. For Buddhists, viewing a relic is an intense experience. "I can attain pure mind at the moment...