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Are there places that should be off-limits to law enforcement? It's a question that some are raising in the wake of a recent incident in Pima county. The incident happened on March 23, in the community of Ajo, about 130 miles southwest of Tucson. The News 4 Tucson Investigators received a number of emails from people concerned that Sheriff's deputies and the Border Patrol stepped over a sacred line. According to a Pima County Sheriff's Department incident report obtained by the News 4 Tucson Investigators, a deputy passing by the Immaculate Conception Catholic Church spotted three Hispanic males on the...

The following outline shows that Jesus intended to create a holy, visible Church; complete with a prime minister, a hierarchy, binding authority, and perpetuity—the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. It is important for Protestants to understand some basic facts. Contrary to the modern belief that the Bible is a “blueprint” or “textbook” which explains how a church should be structured, it is a product of the Catholic Church—a compilation of writings that reflect a structure that was already present. As such, the “Bible alone” has no reason to provide fine details of proper ecclesiology; however, proper ecclesiology is detectable....

Details:   Having worked in Catholic church music ministry for nearly 40 years — basically his entire adult life — Mike McMahon thought he knew the landscape and his place in it. As a gay person, all was fine as long as he was “discreet.”And that worked for him even in the conservative Roman Catholic Diocese of Arlington, Va., where he was employed for about 30 of those years as music director at several parishes. In that time, McMahon, who has three graduate degrees in theology, also served as president of the National Association of Pastoral Musicians, the national body for...

A city board on Thursday gave a Muslim group the go-ahead to remove six crosses from the roof and spires of a century-old former Catholic church so the now-vacant Gothic structure can be used as a mosque. More than 200 people had signed an online petition calling on the Syracuse Landmark Preservation Board to deny an application by North Side Learning Center, the church’s new owner, to remove the crosses and build a six-foot chain-link fence. …

The lone clerical abuse survivor nominated by Pope Francis to sit on the new Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors said the commission needs to achieve concrete change in order to “show other survivors that the church is going to get it right.” Marie Collins, who was abused by a chaplain as a sick 13-year-old at Crumlin hospital in Dublin in the 1960s, told Catholic News Service that many survivors will be watching the new Vatican commission “with interest, but many will have written it off as merely a PR exercise.” “Survivors will not be satisfied with more words...

So says my colleague at The Week, Damon Linker, in an essay predicting that all churches would need to change doctrines to keep up with the modern world, especially the Catholic Church. Refusing to adapt doctrine to modern thought will force an exodus of people from their faiths, Damon writes, especially the Catholic insistence that ordination is limited to men: By contrast, the majority of Catholics who support women’s ordination are confronted on the altar with the all-male priesthood every time they go to church. At the moment, frustration about the issue is muted because Pope Francis has inspired so...

Jimmy Carter has blamed the Catholic and Southern Baptist churches for the abuse of women around the world. According to Carter, men around the world use the doctrine of those churches on the role of women as justification for abusing women. Appearing on today's Morning Joe, the former president said: "with the writing of St. Paul, you can selectively take verses out of the Bible and you can justify women not being able to be priests and so forth, so the Catholic church and the Southern Baptist Convention and others quite often say well women are not qualified to have...

CATECHISM OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH SECOND EDITION PART ONE THE PROFESSION OF FAITH SECTION TWO THE PROFESSION OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH CHAPTER THREE I BELIEVE IN THE HOLY SPIRIT ARTICLE 9 "I BELIEVE IN THE HOLY CATHOLIC CHURCH" Paragraph 6. Mary - Mother of Christ, Mother of the Church 963 Since the Virgin Mary's role in the mystery of Christ and the Spirit has been treated, it is fitting now to consider her place in the mystery of the Church. "The Virgin Mary . . . is acknowledged and honored as being truly the Mother of God and of the...

Nearly 200 scientists are attending the conference, called The Search for Life Beyond the Solar System: Exoplanets, Biosignature & Instruments, which runs from March 16-21 in Tucson, Arizona. The Vatican Observatory is co-hosting the conference with the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory. 'Finding life beyond Earth is one of the great challenges of modern science and we are excited to have the world leaders in this field together in Tucson,' said event co-chair Daniel Apai, assistant professor of astronomy and planetary sciences at the UA Steward Observatory.'But reaching such an ambitious goal takes planning and time. The goal of this meeting is...

It seems like every year Catholics are threatened by various homosexual groups because they have declared war on our religion and the secular world helps them any way they can. This year the phonies who sell beer have joined them. Subgroups within the homosexual community take the occasion of St. Patrick’s Day to try to force Catholics to violate deeply held religious doctrines against the celebration of homosexuality. They delight in their attempts to pressure the organizers of St. Patrick’s Day Parades around the country to allow them to march under a banner proclaiming their sexuality. As often as they...

“Like Pope Francis? You’ll love Jesus.” It was a well-circulated Washington Post headline in December, but it could have been the tagline for the March 18 Francis Factor event held at Loyola University Maryland in Baltimore. As a cardinal, archbishop and four Catholic expert panelists shared insights from Pope Francis’ first year, they repeatedly shifted the attention away from the pope and onto the Son of God. Pope Francis would have done no less. “The pope is a true companion of Jesus,” said Cardinal Seán P. O’Malley, a Capuchin Franciscan and archbishop of Boston, in the evening’s keynote address. Speaking...

I was asked to go to a neighboring parish and address some fundamental questions related to the necessity of the Church. Many today question the need for a church or The Church and claim they can have Jesus without the Church. And thus the fundamental question “Who needs the Church?” ought to be addressed.I propose here a rather more doctrinal answer to the question and hope tomorrow to offer a more personal answer. But, the fundamental answer I offer to “Who needs the Church?” is that everyone does, because the Church is the Body of Christ.To the related questions “Why...

Are you ready for a crazy statistic? Pope Francis, who just completed his first year as pope, had a favorability rating of 79 percent midway through his reign. Surprisingly, Pope Benedict XVl about halfway through his reign in April 2008 had a favorability rating of 83 percent. It’s shocking that the pope demonized and held to be unpopular by almost everyone in the media had a higher approval rating at one point than the pope celebrated daily in the news. Least, I seem dishonest. Benedict’s average for his entire reign was around 74 percent and Francis’s average over the entire...

Bill Gates, the richest man in the world, revealed in a recent interview that his family goes to a Catholic church and that religious morality inspires a lot of his charity work. He also shared his personal thoughts on God and the biggest issues facing the world today. "The moral systems of religion, I think, are super important. We've raised our kids in a religious way; they've gone to the Catholic church that Melinda goes to and I participate in. I've been very lucky, and therefore I owe it to try and reduce the inequity in the world. And that's...

Guinness pulls out of St. Patty’s parade over LGBT ban Guinness beer has pulled its sponsorship from New York’s famed St. Patrick’s day parade over a controversial policy that prohibits gays and lesbians from marching openly, according to reports. “Guinness has a strong history of supporting diversity and being an advocate for equality for all,” the company said in a statement on the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation website. “We were hopeful that the policy of exclusion would be reversed for this year’s parade. As this has not come to pass, Guinness has withdrawn its participation. We will continue...

In an article which may be found here, Dr. William Oddie notes that, "Pope Francis has now once again (though to judge by the so far sparse coverage, you’d think he’d never said or done anything before) expressed his abhorrence of clerical sex abuse. Previous popes—indeed most senior clergy—are normally too reticent, however, to do what he has now done as well, that is to say, he has defended the Catholic Church’s record on tackling the sexual abuse of children by priests, by declaring what is now the simple truth: that “no one else has done more” than the Church...

Leaders from the Evangelical Immigration Table and U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops joined in a letter to Congress asking for passage of a bill this year that fixes the immigration system. "Common sense fixes to our immigration policies are long overdue. As a nation founded upon the principles of the rule of law and the centrality of family, we can no longer delay fixing this system," the letter states. The leaders note that they encounter the difficulties caused by the nation's immigration system through interactions they have with people in their faith communities. "As leaders in our respective faith communities,...

Los Angeles, Calif., Feb 21, 2014 / 12:58 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- L.A. Archbishop José H. Gomez has called for “interim measures” such as a moratorium on immigration raids and help for undocumented minors in order to bypass immigration reform’s apparent “political dead end.” “These two proposals are no substitute for true immigration reform — but they would make a big difference in the lives of millions of our neighbors,” Archbishop Gomez said in his Nov. 21 column for the Los Angeles archdiocese’s newspaper The Tidings. He voiced disappointment in the House of Representatives’ recent decision not to move forward with...

In the Arab countries they are fewer and fewer, driven to exodus by growing hostility. An up-to-date map of how many and who they are, three months before the pope's voyage to the Holy Land by Sandro Magister ROME, February 11, 2014 – Behind the scenes preparations are in full swing for the voyage of Pope Francis to the Holy Land, scheduled for May 24-26. When half a century ago Pope VI went to Jerusalem - the first pope in history to do do so - almost all of the holy places of the city were within the boundaries of...

Anti-Religion: Ignoring abhorrences such as China's one-child policy and atrocities condoned by Shariah law, a U.N. committee tells the Vatican to deal with abusive priests and change its teachings on abortion, contraception and homosexuality. That the report issued by the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child would mention the instances of abuse of children by priests in the United States is not surprising. What is surprising and unfortunate is that the U.N. would act as if the Catholic Church had done nothing about it and use the report as a springboard to attack the core doctrines of a...