Word: vaticans
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Archbishop's outspoken comments did not go unnoticed in Rome. In June 2008, Burke was unexpectedly transferred to the Vatican. The move was widely interpreted as a way to put some distance between Burke and the political contest in the States. "It was not unrelated to issues of political timing," observes Mark Silk, a professor of religion at Trinity College...
Burke's new assignment came with an impressive title: Prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura - essentially chief justice of the Vatican's highest court. But the job, which involves hearing appeals of lower-canon-court rulings on issues like annulment requests, did not stop him from commenting on American politics. In January he charged that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops was responsible for Obama's victory because it overwhelmingly approved a document suggesting that Catholics could consider issues besides abortion when deciding how to vote. The conference's in-house news service, he added, failed...
...Vatican, whose influence in Italy has helped maintain a role for Catholicism in public schools, including hiring church-approved teachers for religion hour, lashed out at what it called the latest "ideological" ruling from Strasbourg. "The court wanted to ignore the role of Christianity in forming Europe's identity, which was and remains essential," Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said in a statement on Nov. 3. "Religion gives a precious contribution to the formation and moral growth of people, and it's an essential component in our civilization. It's wrong and myopic to try to exclude it from education...
...Czech Republic and all of Scandinavia responded "No" to the question of whether religion was important to them. The 82-year-old Benedict has made it a centerpiece of his papacy to reverse the decline of Christianity on the Continent, where the faith originated. Last month, he used a Vatican meeting with the new E.U. envoy to the Holy See to recall the church's lingering bitterness over the failure of the European Parliament to include a reference to the "Christian roots" of Europe in the E.U. constitution a few years back. In 2004, a committee of the same parliament...
...recurring flare-ups between Italy and Strasbourg are both anomalous to and emblematic of the continental shift in faith. The Vatican's presence within its borders keeps Catholicism a part of the public life and social fabric in Italy, where only 23% of respondents answered "No" to the Gallup poll question. But the largely rhetorical battles like the one over crucifixes mask the reality that Italian life is ever more secular, and the ethnic and religious fabric is in fact undergoing major changes with the arrival of immigrants, including many from Muslim-majority countries. Buttiglione, who called the court...