Word: vatican
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...anymore. "We are losing the notion of sin," Pope Benedict XVI warns, as attendance at confession plummets. The culture celebrates what once it sanctioned: parents encourage pride as essential to self-esteem; a group of self-rising French chefs has petitioned the Vatican that being a gourmand is no sin. Envy is the engine of tabloid culture. Lust is an advertising strategy; anger, the righteous province of the aggrieved. Most days I'd give anything for some sloth. It was the moral philosopher Mae West who observed that "to err is human, but it feels divine." (She also advised, "When...
...understand the impulse of the Vatican to stress a broader range of sins for the modern age. Gianfranco Girotti, the No. 2 Catholic official in charge of confessions and penitence, told the Vatican's newspaper, "You offend God not only by stealing, blaspheming or coveting your neighbor's wife" but also by polluting, cloning, taking drugs, promoting social injustice or becoming obscenely rich. Where the standard sins are individual failings, in a global culture sin is social. "Attention to sin is a more urgent task today," Girotti said, "precisely because its consequences are more abundant and more destructive...
...began in the heart. Yet modern research does not seem wicked to many suffering patients or the doctors who hope to cure them; the church's sin is their salvation. Likewise the accumulation of excessive wealth: leave aside the historical irony of this charge issuing from the Vatican. What do we make of Bill Gates, the Great Acquisitor, who, as a philanthropist, is now arguably the greatest individual force for good around the world? Does it not seem as if he has grasped the eternal somewhere along...
Staunchly pro-life, Glendon was the first woman to lead a Vatican delegation to a major U.N. conference after Pope John Paul II appointed her head of the Vatican delegation to the 1995 U.N. Conference on Women in Beijing. The Church's stance on reproductive policy has been criticized for its absolute ban on condoms, even in its missionary work with AIDS victims. The mother of three insists that she's a committed feminist, "If you let me define the term." She says she is focused on issues that are "of particular interest to women and that wouldn...
...last summer was a "total surprise" but she didn't even need a moment to mull the offer of the ambassadorship. "Why sure, I'd love to do that!," she recalled, with a hearty laugh, was her instant response to Rove. Becoming the leading American government representative at the Vatican has required Glendon to give up her post at the Pontifical academy. She denied there was any conflict of interest in having served the Vatican in the past. "Like others I have done volunteer work for the Church; mine has been as an academic," Glendon said. "I understand my role...