The Vatican’s rehabilitation of liberation theology is continuing under Pope Francis with the movement’s founder appearing at an official Vatican event next week talking about “a poor church for the poor.”
Peruvian theologian the Rev. Gustavo Gutierrez will be one of the main speakers at a gathering of the Vatican’s charity arm, Caritas Internationalis, and will appear at an official Vatican press conference launching the assembly Tuesday. MORE
A shallow magnitude 3.1 earthquake was reported six miles from Corona, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The temblor occurred at 9:11 a.m. at a depth of about 4 miles.
Earlier, a magnitude 2.7 earthquake was reported two miles from San Jacinto. It was originally reported as a magnitude 3.1. The temblor occurred at 2:19 a.m. at a depth of about 9 to 10 miles. MORE
Men in Iran wanting to get a spiky haircut, a tattoo or a good ol’ eyebrow plucking from barbers are out of luck. Officials have banned such styles, describing them as “devil-worshipping” and “homosexual.”
“Devil-worshipping hairstyles are forbidden,” Iranian barbershop union head Mostafa Govahi told the semiofficial Iranian Students’ News Agency, according to Britain’s Guardian newspaper. “Any shop that cuts hair in the devil worshipping style will be harshly dealt with and their licence revoked.” MORE
Politics. What best way to get conservative Catholics under one umbrella. And away they go.
Bishop Bernard Fellay, the SSPX’s Superior General, will be offering for the funeral of Fr. Nicholas Gruner a Pontifical Requiem Mass at 9:30am on Saturday, May 9. It will be held at the Scotiabank Convention Centre in Niagara Falls (6815 Stanley Avenue, Ontario), Canada. The burial rites will follow at St. Michael Cemetery in Ft. Erie (Stonemill Road, Ontario).
Popularly known as the “Fatima Priest”, Fr. Nicholas Gruner (b. 1942) passed away during the evening of April 29, 2015 while working at his apostolate to spread awareness about the message of Our Lady of Fatima. MORE
When walking into the front vestibule of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Church in the seaside town of Scituate, Mass. it doesn’t look or sound like the average church.
“What the hell are you doing?” an actor from The Young and the Restless says on a big-screen TV with two recliners set up in front of it. They’re all arranged right next to a stained-glass window. MORE
Jerusalem’s Latin Patriarchate on Wednesday hailed the upcoming canonisation by Pope Francis of two nuns who will become the first modern-day Palestinian saints.
One 66-year-old Nebraska woman is determined to fight against LGBT equality any way she can, including filing a federal lawsuit against homosexuals. All of them. According to the Lincoln Journal Star, Sylvia Driskell filed her suit, Driskell v. Homosexuals, as an “Ambassador for Plaintiff’s God MORE
Class-action lawsuits continue to pile up for Manny Pacquiao and his promoters for failing to disclose his injury before consumers purchased tickets and pay-per-view telecasts for his fight against Floyd Mayweather.
The first lawsuit was filed in Nevada on Tuesday, but others were filed later in the day, including two in Calfornia, and one each in Texas and Illinois. MORE
“The bottling plant that Starbucks uses for its Ethos customers in the western United States is located in Merced, California, which is currently ranked in the ‘exceptional drought’ category by the US Drought Monitor,” writes Anna Lenzer at Mother Jones.
“Its residents face steep water cuts in their homes, and surface water for the region’s many farms is drying up.” MORE
Italy has slashed the time it takes to get a divorce to six months from three years in the latest sign of the Catholic Church’s waning influence over life and politics here.
The change is part of Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s efforts to tame the country’s much-hated bureaucracy. “Another promise kept. Let’s move forward,” he tweeted after the law passed in parliament late Wednesday. MORE
I don’t see the public rioting over the death of this police officer.A 25-year-old police officer shot in the head while attempting to stop a man suspected of carrying a handgun died Monday from his injuries, the third New York City officer slain on duty in five months.
Brian Moore, who was in a coma after undergoing brain surgery following the Saturday evening shooting, was pronounced dead at a Queens hospital with his family, including his police officer father, uncle and cousin, at his bedside. MORE
But the main topic of conversation was Peres’s idea to create a UN-like organization he called “the United Religions.”
Peres said the Argentina-born pontiff was the only world figure respected enough to bring an end to the wars raging in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world. MORE
Dozens of police and protesters have been hurt after a protest by Ethiopian Israelis against alleged police brutality turned violent in Tel Aviv.
Thousands of Israeli Jews of Ethiopian origin had taken part in a rally before some demonstrators tried to storm the city’s municipality building.
Police fired tear gas and stun grenades as protesters threw bottles and bricks. MORE
44 cars were torched, some say 200 buildings. People lost their jobs and homes to the rioters.
Rioters looted stores and hurled rocks and bricks at Baltimore police Monday, injuring several officers just hours after thousands mourned the man who died after suffering a severe spinal injury in police custody. MORE
An Episcopal bishop in Maryland who is facing manslaughter charges in the drunk-driving death of a bicyclist has been defrocked and “will no longer function as an ordained person in the Episcopal Church.”
Heather Cook was a suffragan (assistant) bishop in the Diocese of Maryland when she was charged with manslaughter in the December 27 hit-and-run death of cyclist Tom Palermo, a 41-year-old husband and father of two, in Baltimore. Within a month of the accident, the diocese that she had helped lead for just three months asked her to resign. MORE