Word: vatican
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Benedict pointedly called it a "scandal" that a majority of us 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...
...admires America's blending of faith and reason. And yet it's this very facet of our religion that is itching powder to a church that insists that only it can be trusted in the end to exercise reason on moral questions - don't try theology at home, the Vatican always seems to tell us - because it inevitably invites the laity to come to its own informed and conscientious conclusions about when human life begins or whether women should be priests. Vatican II, the modernizing church council of the 1960s, emboldened that lay assertiveness among U.S. Catholics as never before...
Cardinal William Levada, a high-ranking Vatican official whom Pope Benedict XVI hand-picked to succeed him in his old job as head of the Vatican's doctrinal office, offered early signs on Friday that the Vatican will change its internal, or canon, laws concerning the church's response to sexual abuse allegations - a matter that has become the main topic of the Pope's American visit. The changes would follow adjustments made some time ago involving the church's statute of limitations with regard to some particularly egregious offenses. The Cardinal suggested that laws meriting amendment may involve statutes...
Asked whether the Vatican should consider such changes to canon laws, Levada said, "It's possible. There are some things under consideration that I'm not able...
...American-born Cardinal, who was Archbishop of San Francisco before Benedict brought him to Rome, said that there have already been some abuse cases in which the Vatican had "made exceptions" to canon laws - cases in which victims may not have spoken up until years later. "We found that many of the cases go back over quite a number of years, and [victims] don't feel personally able to come forward until they reach a certain level of maturity. Some canon norms are like statutes of limitations, and if the case warrants...we've been able to make exceptions...