Word: vaticans
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...rent the Methodist meeting in May: the place of gay people in its pews. In March the organization of Reform Jewish rabbis agreed that its members could perform gay-holy-union ceremonies if they chose. The group was then castigated for it by other Jewish branches. Last month the Vatican, which had earlier ordered an American nun and priest to end a ministry to gays and their families because it did not stress the "intrinsically disordered" nature of homosexuality, further prohibited the nun and priest from talking about what they used to do. Even the small Mennonite and General Conference...
Papal politics, unlike presidential politics, is never a winner-takes-all scenario. And that makes the Vatican unlikely to abandon its effort to beatify Pope Pius IX, despite protests by liberal and Jewish groups. The latter are incensed that the current pontiff, so deeply committed to healing the church's relationship with the Jews, would propose sainthood for a man who in the mid-19th century forced Rome's Jews back into the ghetto and stripped them of their civil rights after having initially allowed them greater freedom. Further fueling the protests is the case of Edgardo Mortara...
...neither side can afford to drive their opponents entirely from the fold - a church that suffered life-threatening breakaways first by the Eastern Orthodox and then by the Protestants can afford no further splits, which is why there's plenty of subtle and symbolic give-and-take in the Vatican's corridors of power...
That much is reflected in the fact that Pius IX's beatification process, first mooted in 1907, is now proceeding in parallel time with the beatification of Pope John XXIII, one of the most liberal pontiffs in the church's history, who presided over the Second Vatican Council beginning in 1962 and inaugurated a modern, more liberal church. John XXIII, needless to say, is not a favorite of theological conservatives, who've spent much of John Paul II's papacy trying to undo his legacy. The liberal pope was to have been beatified in parallel with Pius XII, but with...
...Western Europe. Some of Washington's closest European allies had, last week, expressed grave misgivings about Clinton's proposed missile-defense system during the President's visit, and Putin moved to widen the gap by unveiling his own missile-defense proposals while on a visit to Italy and the Vatican. Putin proposed the joint development of a missile-defense scheme that would protect the U.S., Russia and all of Europe from attacks by "rogue states." But unlike Washington's plan to build an umbrella to intercept incoming missiles before they reach U.S. soil, the Russians propose the joint development...