Word: vaticans
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...deeds. The inauguration last week of Qatar's first Christian church - a small Catholic chapel bearing neither bells nor visible crosses - has been hailed as a welcome step forward in relations between Catholicism and Islam. But an even more dramatic development is under discussion just across the border: The Vatican has confirmed that it is negotiating for permission to build the first church in Saudi Arabia...
...prayer in a country where the strict Wahhabi version of Sunni Islam dominates. But Archbishop Paul-Mounged El-Hachem, the papal envoy to the smaller countries on the Arabian peninsula, such as Kuwait and Qatar, has confirmed that talks are under way to establish formal diplomatic relations between the Vatican and Saudi Arabia, and to eventually allow for Catholic churches to be built there. Pope Benedict XVI is believed to have personally appealed to King Abdullah on the topic during the Saudi monarch's first ever visit to the Vatican last November...
...Palace—four square miles surrounded by high cement walls on the banks of the Tigris River—soon became known as the Green Zone. Today, the Green Zone houses Iraq’s new U.S. Embassy, which cost $600 million and is roughly the size of Vatican City...
...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...