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Three Of Nation's Highest-Ranking Catholic Leaders Warned Congress Hundreds More Closures Likely Without Federal SupportNEW YORK (CBSNewYork/AP) – As the new academic year arrives, school systems across the United States are struggling to cope with the coronavirus pandemic. Roman Catholic educators have an extra challenge — trying to forestall a relentless wave of closures of their schools that has no end in sight. Already this year, financial and enrollment problems aggravated by the pandemic have forced the permanent closure of more than 140 Catholic schools nationwide, according to officials who oversee Catholic education in the country. Three of the nation’s...

On arrival in La Paz, Pope Francis was presented by Bolivian President Evo Morales with a wooden crucifix carved in the form of a hammer and sickle, the symbol of Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Fidel. Had Pope John Paul II been handed that crucifix, he might have cracked it over Evo’s head. For John Paul II had seen up close what communism did — to his country, his church and his people in 45 years of Bolshevik rule. On his arrival in the Nicaragua of Daniel Ortega in 1983, Pope John Paul castigated a priest-collaborator who dared to serve that...

The most anticipated papal letter for decades will be published in five languages on Thursday. It will call for an end to the ‘tyrannical’ exploitation of nature by mankind. Could it lead to a step-change in the battle against global warming?Pope Francis will call for an ethical and economic revolution to prevent catastrophic climate change and growing inequality in a letter to the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics on Thursday. In an unprecedented encyclical on the subject of the environment, the pontiff is expected to argue that humanity’s exploitation of the planet’s resources has crossed the Earth’s natural boundaries, and that...

The grounds of St. Patrick’s Seminary & University boast row upon row of broccoli, Swiss chard, kale, and strawberries this spring, products of a new parish Catholic workers cooperative created in a venture among the seminary, Guadalupe Associates, and the parish of St. Francis of Assisi, East Palo Alto. “I was actually surprised we yielded so much the first year,” said Sulpician Father Gladstone Stevens, rector of the seminary who, along with San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone, approved the use of seminary grounds to grow the crops as part of NanoFarms USA’s pilot project. The website is nanofarms.com....

Pope Francis has warned “the powerful of the Earth” they will answer to God if they fail to protect the environment to ensure the world can feed its population. “The planet has enough food for all, but it seems that there is a lack of willingness to share it with everyone,” Francis said at a mass to mark the opening of the general assembly of the Catholic charitable organisation Caritas. “We must do what we can so that everyone has something to eat, but we must also remind the powerful of the Earth that God will call them to judgment...

In his address to the Italian Confederation of Cooperatives Saturday, Pope Francis employed muscular language in speaking about money — while acknowledging its importance to business. “Money,” he said, “is the devil’s dung.” “It is not easy to talk about money,” Francis said. Quoting Saint Basil the Great, the Pope said: “Money is the dung of the devil! When money becomes an idol, it rules over a person’s choices. And then it ruins a person and condemns him, turning him into a slave.” The Pope called for “creative imagination” to find new methods, attitudes and tools to combat the “culture...

There are few things more frustrating than writing a book, and then being confronted with a ceaseless stream of arguments you?ve already answered while you?re waiting for it to be published. That?s what has happened, though, with Thomas Storck?s recent attack on my Lou Church Memorial Lecture in Religion and Economics, which stirred some controversy and healthy discussion at the time but which was in general far better received than I could have expected. My book-length treatment of the subject will be available next year, but in the meantime I offer one last installment in the ongoing debate over Catholic...