Word: vaticans
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...Vietnam -- perhaps Asia's most spiritual country (it is overwhelmingly Buddhist) -- is entering the fifth decade of the communist government's campaign to eradicate all independent worship. Authorities still persecute religious leaders who dare to organize outside government-controlled churches. Roman Catholicism is decapitated by Hanoi's blocking the Vatican's appointment of bishops and imposing tight restrictions on those allowed to attend seminaries. Protestant church leaders who hold unauthorized meetings have been hit with staggering fines. In the past three years, the Puebla Institute, a human-rights group focusing on religious-freedom issues, has documented the detention of more...
...Vatican in particular is exceptionally cautious about granting an event the imprimatur of the church. "Nobody is more demanding than the Roman authorities when it comes to miracles," notes Father John Meier, Bible professor at Catholic University of America in Washington, whose new book, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, Volume II (Doubleday; $35), represents the latest scholarly attempt to meld science and faith. Too often over the centuries, Meier admits, the Catholic Church was taken in by charlatans. When reports spread of statues weeping or crosses bleeding or Jesus appearing on a tortilla, the church is often slow...
MONSIGNOR MICHELE DI RUBERTO SITS IN AN OFFICE IN THE VATICAN surrounded by 250 red-bound books, each of them a would-be miracle. Of all the faiths that recognize the continuing eruption of the divine in human affairs, Catholicism has gone farthest to systematize that belief; and Di Ruberto, the Under Secretary at the Vatican's Congregation for the Causes of Saints, sits near the pinnacle of miracle verification...
...Inexplicable," or inspiegabile, is the happy label that Di Ruberto, the doctors and several other clerics in the Vatican's "medical conference" give to a case if it survives their scrutiny. It then passes to a panel of theologians, who must determine whether the inexplicable resulted from prayer. If so, the miracle is usually approved by a caucus of Cardinals and the Pope...
...ascribed to the intercession of the Virgin Mary, it is not caught up in the saint-making process, which some believe the Pope has running overtime. Roger Pilon, the head of Lourdes' committee, notes that he and his colleagues have not approved a miracle since 1989, while the Vatican recommended 12 in 1994 alone. "Are we too severe?" he wonders out loud. "Are they really using the same criteria...