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...church's sexual-abuse scandal has also taken its toll. Catholics felt that the bishops--many of them accused of enabling pedophile priests--were arrogantly evading the same kind of penance they demand from their flocks. "The very teachers of the sacrament of confession seemed to be ignoring a constitutive part of that sacrament," says the Rev. James Martin, associate editor of the Jesuit-run magazine America. "It made the confession crisis worse." Wuerl, who in fact was praised for taking a hard line on abusive priests, concedes that those are "significant issues." But he also believes that Catholics...
Dioceses in Philadelphia, Phoenix and Toledo, Ohio, say they're planning similar Lenten campaigns for 2008--and some priests are even hearing confessions in venues likes shopping malls. Church watchers like Martin applaud all this as a sign that "the church, like Jesus, is capable of being creative about getting these things across to people." Others, like Gregory Baum, emeritus professor of theology at McGill University in Montreal, call it a belated Hail Mary pass. "Traditional confession," he says, "just isn't part of Catholic spirituality anymore." Maybe, but for now the church is keeping the light on, just...
When a recently leaked e-mail revealed that Focus on the Family founder and Christian Right titan James Dobson had ruled out supporting Fred Thompson (who admitted he doesn't go to church), God-o-Meter's counter nearly bottomed out. But in the days following the leak, heavyweight Evangelicals like former presidential candidate Gary Bauer and the Southern Baptist Convention's Richard Land have come to Thompson's aid. Will religious conservatives remain divided or rally around Thompson? With the Christian Right élite anxious to get behind a candidate, we hear that the next few weeks are make...
...Before televangelism got so complicated--before Jim Bakker had sex with a church clerk and Jerry Falwell entered politics--there was Rex Humbard, a wide-eyed guitar-playing, TV-loving revival preacher from Little Rock, Ark. In the early '50s, the self-described "electronic evangelist," who helped eulogize fan Elvis Presley, began to develop a following with TV broadcasts that for a time reached more parts of the globe than any other religious show and claimed 20 million viewers. Among the hallmarks of his 5,400-seat, marble-and-glass Cathedral of Tomorrow, a onetime movie theater near Akron, Ohio...
...them to reclaim lost power. But the Sandinistas had other ideas: After seizing power in the insurrection of 1979, they systematically dismantled the power of the oligarchy in subsequent years. The coup de grace, Nunez says, came last year when the Sandinistas formed a political alliance with the Catholic Church, the oligarchy's last institutional bastion...