Word: vatican
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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PRESIDENT REAGAN ended 117 years of official silence between the United States and Vatican City last week when he extended diplomatic recognition to the Holy See. Though American Presidents since Franklin Delano Roosevelt '04 have sent personal representatives to the Vatican, there have not been any official diplomatic exchanges since 1867. It was then that Congress, responding to a wave of anti-Catholicism and American sympathy for Italian efforts to reunify their country at the expense of the Papal States, passed a resolution barring the government from spending federal money on missions to the Holy...
These opponents of recognition have, however, misapplied the First Amendment, which prohibits government actions that foster the establishment of a state religion. Diplomatic exchanges with the Vatican are not an endorsement of Roman Catholicism, and they do not require the United States to do anything more than receive an ambassador. Vatican City is a sovereign nation and John Paul its head of state independent of his role as the spiritual leader of the world's Roman Catholics. In fact, the United States has long sent an ambassador to the Court of St. James, despite English monarchs' dual roles as head...
Once again you have succeeded in spelling the name of our 33rd President incorrectly (January 11, 1984, "Reagan Opens Relations with Vatican ..., " p. S, last paragraph of article...
...synod of bishops, not only because he stresses the sacrament's importance but because its practice nowadays is in a state of flux and confusion. Theologians disagree over what sort of sins require absolution, and whether young children should confess before making their First Communion, as the Vatican desires, or a few years later when they may have a better understanding of the nature of sin. A majority of U.S. parishes now offer face-to-face confession with a priest as an alternative to the austere, anonymous meeting in a booth. The Vatican allows a communal rite of "general...
After the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), American Catholics "walked away in droves from the sacrament of penance," says Russell Shaw, a layman who is public affairs secretary of the U.S. Catholic Conference. Shaw speculates that some of the defectors are married couples who use birth control, and "they don't want to confess it, but they don't want to not confess it." More generally, though, the dwindling attendance at confession seems to suggest that lay Catholics have a diminishing sense of their own sinfulness and of the redemptive power of the sacrament. As Shaw puts...