Friday’s roundup

Supreme Court Justice John Stevens, for decades a fixture of the court’s liberal block, will retire this summer. (That’s him in the Cubs jersey at top left.) Joining him in retirement will be Rep. Bart Stupak, the anti-abortion Dem and ardent Catholic who is under fire for his vote for the health care bill last […]

Supreme Court Justice John Stevens, for decades a fixture of the court’s liberal block, will retire this summer. (That’s him in the Cubs jersey at top left.) Joining him in retirement will be Rep. Bart Stupak, the anti-abortion Dem and ardent Catholic who is under fire for his vote for the health care bill last month.

Pope Benedict XVI‘s spokesman said the pontiff is willing to meet with more victims of clergy sexual abuse. Norway’s Catholic Church has received new allegations of clergy sex abuse.


The U.S. Catholic Church, particularly the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, the epicenter for accusations of sexual abuse cover-ups, is facing a “crisis of empty pews and empty coffers,” Reuters reports. The Diocese of Fargo will close its seminary at the end of the 2010-2011 school year because of finances, and a small college in Georgia run by the Legionaries of Christ, a conservative order under Vatican investigation, is closing a month early for similar reasons.

Extraditing a Catholic priest from India accused of sexually assaulting a teenage girl in Minnesota may take several years, a prosecutor said. New Jersey’s Supreme Court ruled that conversations between a man accused of sexual abuse and his priest are protected by the clergy-penitent privilege.

Tariq Ramadan, the Muslim scholar banned the U.S. since 2004, spoke in NYC last night, and says he looks forward to entering the country without having to tell authorities what he plans to talk about. A man entered a Sikh temple in Cleveland and raised a meat cleaver near two men before being shot and killed by police. Several dozen Sikhs in NYC protested a speech by an Indian official who they say instigated a 1984 riot that left 3,000 Sikhs dead.

Environmental regulators in New Jersey don’t know what to do with 2,000 trash bags full of Jewish texts and clothing that Orthodox Jews say their faith forbids them to discard. Westboro Baptist Church is protesting at the site of the West Virginia mine explosion. A prominent Baptist pastor says the SBC has not kept its promise to eradicate racism.

A Catholic school President Obama attended as a youth wants him to visit when he travels to Indonesia later this year. A Methodist bishop who was the first black prime minister of the white-dominated government before Zimbabwe’s independence, died Thursday.

Donate to Support Independent Journalism!

Donate Now!