Word: vaticans
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...them U.S. Ambassador to Italy Maxwell Rabb and Archbishop Justin Rigali, representing Pope John Paul II, gathered in the chapel of Rome's North American College for the funeral of Natasha Simpson, 11, the American schoolgirl who was the youngest of the airport victims. The Rev. Diarmuid Martin, a Vatican official and family friend, summarized the shared sense of sorrow and shock. Noting that many of the mourners were journalists, including Natasha's father Victor, an editor for the Associated Press in Rome, Father Martin observed, "We've written or spoken about suffering, about anguish, about tragedy, about natural disasters...
...part of Pope John Paul II's determined campaign to enforce orthodoxy, the Vatican has taken action against a number of nonconformist theologians. First it ruled that Hans Küng of West Germany could no longer call himself a Catholic theologian; next Dominican Edward Schillebeeckx of the Netherlands was summoned to Rome for an inquiry into his theological writings; and Brazilian Franciscan Leonardo Boff is undergoing enforced silence for advocating Marxist-tinged liberation theology...
...turn of the Rev. Charles Curran, 51, a moral theologian at the Catholic University of America in Washington. Last week, after meeting in Rome with Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, head of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Curran told a press conference that the Vatican has judged his views on sexual ethics unacceptable. That could lead to his dismissal from the university and widen a growing rift between Rome and the Americans...
...Vatican first contacted Curran in 1979, sending a 16-page list of the "principal errors and ambiguities" in his writings. After several exchanges, Ratzinger last year wrote Curran that he must recant (which he refuses to do) or no longer be deemed a teacher of Catholic theology. A formal Vatican statement to that effect would end Curran's post at the university, where theologians work under church mandate because graduate religion degrees are granted under a papal charter...
Other differences abound. The church vehemently opposes all abortions; Curran argues that they might be justifiable in extreme cases. Rome rejects sterilization on any grounds; Curran does not. The Vatican insists that "every genital act must be within the framework of marriage"; Curran thinks that premarital sex is acceptable under some circumstances and that loving homosexual acts can be morally licit in the context of a permanent commitment. He believes that the church should alter its ban on remarriage after divorce...