"vatican"

Women met with the Pope in Rome after he announced plans for a commission to study whether a woman could be a priest.

There is next to no documentation for the seven masks besides a note that says “from Holy Cross.” The Yukon village was the location of a Jesuit orphanage and mission.

A synod of Catholic bishops gathered at the Vatican has decided to eliminate a landmark opening to gays that had appeared in an interim summary of discussions made public earlier this week that had appeared to signal a possible shift in the tone of the church.

The New York Times sums up the committee’s conclusions by saying that the panel “sharply criticized the Vatican … for putting the reputation and interests of the Holy See above the interests of children who had been sexually abused by priests, effectively allowing priests to continue abuse and escape prosecution.”

The Vatican came in for tough public scrutiny over its handling of the clergy sex abuse scandal at a United Nations hearing Thursday in Geneva.

In his first Christmas Eve Mass as pontiff, Pope Francis spoke of Jesus as an infant in keeping with the first months of his papacy that have been dedicated to the most vulnerable in society.

Around the world today, the powerful “feed upon the powerless” and too many people are treated as “consumer goods to be used and then discarded,” Pope Francis writes in his first major paper since becoming leader of the Roman Catholic church last May.

Pope Francis, in a wide-ranging interview with 16 Jesuit publications, says “the moral edifice of the church is likely to fall like a house of cards” if it continues to focus on narrow issues such as abortion, gay marriage and contraception.