Word: pope
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...favor even limited legalized abortion. Yet we're not the Da Vinci Code heretics the Vatican suspects. We look instead to the Boccaccio Code, especially in the wake of the abuse crisis. We've learned to conform to the Catholic faith instead of the Catholic hierarchy. And if the Pope's visit and its aftermath indicate anything, it's that we aren't likely to change that stance until the church, with deeper structural and doctrinal reform, changes its own. As the Pope returns to Rome, a common question here will be, Did he make American Catholics feel any better...
...Murray, who defended democracy against doctrine. Aquinas and Murray figure prominently in books like Faithful Dissenters, by Robert McClory, which chronicle how such independent souls have not only questioned the church but helped save it from the kind of glaring errors - like its acceptance of slavery, a stance that Pope Leo XIII finally ended in 1888 - that underscore what a human and fallible institution the church...
...church is there to help us teach our kids that sex should be shared in a context of love, respect and responsibility. While many of us may object to the Vatican's blanket condemnation of stem cell research, it's still good to have powerful global voices like the Pope's warning us not to play Frankenstein. And it's not as if we don't get along with our clerics: as a Catholic journalist, I've learned that if any two groups of people can drink with each other, even if they don't agree with each other...
Still, the love most U.S. Catholics have for their church may never again be unconditional. It has to be earned, and simply wearing a collar or a habit won't do the trick anymore. Pope Benedict XVI took some positive steps toward earning it last week. But he needs to realize that his American flock, as good Catholics like Boccaccio did before us, follows a religion more than it follows a church...
Healing has become the keyword of Pope Benedict XVI's visit to the United States. On Saturday, not only did the Pope speak again about the priest sex abuse crisis, but he also addressed festering Church divisions in the wake of the Second Vatican council and reflected on his native country's Nazi past...