Monday’s Religion News Roundup: Super Sin * Papal Honeymoon * POTUS Passover

Bill Maher's not a fan of the new pope, we're not sure if we're fans of Passover matzo (probably not) and we're DEFINITELY not fans of snow in D.C. on March 25. All that and more in today's Religion News Roundup.

seder-12131(RNS) As SCOTUS prepares to take up two gay marriage cases this week, Focus on the Family president Jim Daly says homosexuality isn’t some kind of “super sin,” but gay marriage is nonetheless “outside of God’s design for human sexuality.”

Our own Michael O’Loughlin reports that Missouri Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill is coming out in support of gay marriage, in part because of her faith.

A federal court — like 15 other courts before it in similar cases — ruled that Franciscan University of Steubenville’s challenge to the Obama administration’s contraception mandate is premature.


Pope Francis, the first Latin American pope, is neither fully Latino nor fully Italian. Discuss.

Francis met his predecessor, B16, at Castel Gandolfo on Saturday and said the two are “brothers” in arms.

Francis celebrated his first Palm Sunday as pope in St. Peter’s Square, and his propensity to jump out of his open-topped popemobile is sending his security detail into fits.

Bill Maher (surprise, surprise) isn’t a fan of the new pope: “He’s a 76-year-old executive who just got a promotion. You act like he’s a baby who just made a boom-boom.”

Maybe that’s what our own David Gibson had in mind when he wondered how long the pope’s honeymoon would last.

POTUS and FLOTUS and the rest of the Obama clan will mark Passover tonight at the White House — and no, that’s not manna falling on the ground in Washington; it’s snow. Wonder if they’re serving matzo granola.


You’ve got one more week to catch the end of “The Bible” series on The History Channel, and you might learn something: some 69% of viewers said they learned something new, according to a new Barna survey.

Justin Welby, the new Archbishop of Canterbury (or ABC, if you’re into acronyms like we are) says his tenure will focus on “reconciliation,” but not “fuzzy-wuzzy” agreement where everyone pretends to get along.

Remember the Orthodox Israeli girl who was suspended for singing on an Israeli version of American Idol? She lost in the final round.

Omid Safi mourns the loss of Shaykh Muhammad Sa’id Ramadan al-Bouti, Syria’s most senior Muslim cleric, who was killed in a bomb blash on Thursday.

Quasimodo has a new set of bells at Notre Dame in Paris, and hopefully the new ones won’t turn him deaf.

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