Wednesday’s religion round-up

President Obama traveled to Fort Hood, Texas to memorialize the 13 victims of last week’s shooting. Obama said “not faith justifies these murderous and craven acts,” and promised that “the killer will be met with justice – in this world and the next.” The accused killer, Maj. Malik N. Hasan, was met with bureaucratic indifference […]

President Obama traveled to Fort Hood, Texas to memorialize the 13 victims of last week’s shooting. Obama said “not faith justifies these murderous and craven acts,” and promised that “the killer will be met with justice – in this world and the next.”

The accused killer, Maj. Malik N. Hasan, was met with bureaucratic indifference while in the Army, Time reports, amid questions about whether his Muslim faith led military bureaucrats to handle him with kid gloves. Nearly a year before the shooting, terrorism investigators judged that he did not pose a threat, now they are looking in Yemen for the American imam who corresponded with Hasan and called him a hero.

Catholic bishops have emerged as a potent force in the health-care debate, a Connecticut judged ordered the Diocese of Bridgeport to turn over sex abuse documents by Dec. 1, and an FLDS child rapist was sentenced to 10 years in prison. U.S. Rep. Patrick Kennedy (Teddy’s son) said a bishop’s questioning of his Catholic faith is “very disconcerting.”


The Mormon church announced its unprecedented support for gay rights legislation in Salt Lake City, the Vatican has removed some controversial questions from the questionnaires it’s sending to American women religious, and a Buddhist in New York doused himself with gasoline but was taken to the hospital before ignition.

Orthodox Jews decamped to South Dakota in a show of support for the former manager of an Iowa kosher slaughterhouse. A Marine reservist who attacked a Greek Orthodox priest was defending himself after being sexually assaulted, the Marine’s lawyer says.

Pope Benedict XVI urged Europeans to “rediscover” it’s religious roots, the Vatican is looking for aliens, and Benedict’s musical album is set to be released later this month (just in time for Christmas). SSPX Bishop Richard Williamson will fight his fine for denying the Holocaust in a German court. An investigative journalists who wrote a novel about Catholic sexual abuse won one of Canada’s most prestigious literary prizes.

Photo of Obama at Fort Hood by Reuters.

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