From the London Times The Vatican has defended its moves towards beatifying Pope Pius XII saying that they reflected the piety of the wartime pontiff and not his ldquo historical importance rdquo nbsp Pope Benedict XVI sparked anger among Jewish groups on Saturday by bestowing the title ldquo

Exciting news Archeologists have discovered nbsp the remains of nbsp first-century house in Nazareth from the time of Jesus s boyhood nbsp While there s no way of telling whether it s Jesus s Home as The New York Post with its typical ridiculousness reported today the find will help

Cathy Kaveny nbsp makes a good point over at Dotcommonweal Saints don rsquo t have to be perfect And in canonizing Pope Pius XII the Church really doesn rsquo t mean to endorse his approach to nbsp Nazism And in canonizing Pope John Paul II the Church really doesn rsquo t mean to endorse his h

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas. And it's starting to bug me just a little bit.

Lots of news from the Congregation of the Causes of the Saints today Pope John Paul II has been declared Venerable which nbsp had nbsp been nbsp expected for some time nbsp So has Pope Pius XII which was not expected though is not nbsp terribly surprising given the comments coming from the V

As a companion piece to the Of Many Things nbsp this week here s a nbsp briefer and more business-oriented op-ed in The Wall Street Journal today called Merry Marketing which takes aim at corporations who use and abuse religious themes in their Christmas sorry holiday campaigns nbsp Happi

It s funny how much a movie can influence your spiritual life nbsp Jennifer Jones who died yesterday at 90 won an Academy Award for her performance as St Bernadette Soubirous in the 1943 film The Song of Bernadette nbsp At the time of its release Catholic schoolchildren were taken

Michael Sandel the wildly popular Harvard professor whose courses on justice have drawn SRO crowds for two decades is the subject of a PBS series called Justice What s the Right Thing to Do which is also available for online viewing nbsp His book of the same title has just been published

The Seattle Times nbsp has picked up the story of the Rev Michael Ryan s piece on the new Mass translations What If We Just Said Wait which appeared in last week s edition of the magazine and generated a raft of responses both here 133 comments and counting and on other websites A new t

From Robert Mickens at The London Tablet Pope Benedict XVI has said that a Marxist-driven liberation theology is continuing to cause great harm to the Church in Brazil 25 years after he first tried to crack down on its proliferation ldquo Its consequences more or less visible in the form of rebe