Word: church
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...fiercely secular nation, France has always had an awkward relationship with religious groups. Officials often find themselves struggling to strike the delicate balance between maintaining church-state separation and honoring the right of citizens to express their faith. But in the current case against the U.S.-based Church of Scientology, authorities have abandoned their usual attempts at fine-tuning religion's standing in French society - instead, they want to ban Scientology from France altogether...
...courts are part of a larger governmental structure that remains legitimate," he told TIME. "So long as there is a democratic recourse to change [decisions that Christians consider extreme], I would counsel the church to continue to see the courts as legitimate. Should the California supreme court invalidate Prop 8, it would put that court in direct defiance of the people of California." As long as the initiative process exists, there is a political solution, he said...
...view of public," said Mohler, who is president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky. But he also said that thanks in part to the democratic nature of amendment processes like those in play in California, even the most outrageous rulings can be absorbed by the church...
...that formal rules were established forbidding clergymen to have sex. According to the Gospel of Matthew, Peter himself had a mother-in-law (which would usually imply a wife as well). The ban had theological roots--abstaining from pleasures of the flesh to demonstrate one's commitment to the church--but there was a practical reason too: celibacy meant no offspring vying to inherit church property. That's not to say the rules were always followed, however. Many priests' spirits proved weak and their flesh willing--notably the sybaritic Pope Alexander VI, who installed his teenage son as an Archbishop...
...Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s, hopes that the church would abandon celibacy were dashed by the election of the conservative Paul VI. A severe shortage of priests may prompt the church to reconsider. Since Vatican II, seminary enrollment has dropped 75%. Cutié, suspended from clerical duties, is grappling over whether to wed his girlfriend of two years. If he takes the secular path, he won't be alone: an estimated 25,000 former priests are married and living in the U.S. today...