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LOS ANGELES, April 8 - Lily Velazquez, who turned 18 on Thursday, is the sixth of 12 children of Mexican immigrants in a poor suburb of Los Angeles. She considers herself both a devoted Catholic and a hopeless sinner. She attends Mass every Sunday but has had two children out of wedlock. She thinks abortion is murder but chafes at the Vatican's ban on birth control. She mourns the death of Pope John Paul II but hopes his successor will be "new and different." "My mom gets mad if I don't go to church," Ms. Velazquez said, as her 2-year-old...

OP-ED COLUMNIST Here's my prophecy about the next pope: He will allow married men to become priests. This is simply a matter of survival: all over the world, the Catholic Church is running out of priests. In the United States, there was one priest for every 800 Catholics in 1965, while now there is one for every 1,400 Catholics - and the average age is nearly 60. In all the United States, with 65 million Catholics, only 479 priests were ordained in 2002. The upshot is that the Catholic Church is losing ground around the world to evangelical and especially...

What papal name do you think the next pope will take? As I search the list there have never been 3 popes taking the same name in a row. Bookies are giving 7-4 that the next pope will take John Paul III. There was never a double name before John Paul I. Not interested in this thread who will become Pope, just what name do you think he will take? Is there some Pope that the next Pope will want to pattern after besides John Paul II that any new Pope would see the Church in need of? If it...

Jeff Robbins/Associated Press John Paul II's teachings on social issues resonated with the conservative shift in American opinion in the 1980's and 1990's. He celebrated a World Youth Day Mass in Aurora, Colo., in 1993. IT is hard to remember now that when Pope John Paul II was elected 27 years ago, the church he inherited was destabilized and dispirited. His immediate predecessor, John Paul I, had been found dead in bed one morning after only 34 days in office. The pope before that, Paul VI, spent his last years melancholy and withdrawn, his accomplishments overshadowed by the uproar...

ST PETER'S CHAIR AT ROME Feast: January 22 [See Phaebeus, de Cathedra in qua St. Petrus Rome sedit, & de antiquitate et praestantia solemnitatis Cathedrae Romanae. Romae 1666, 8vo., also Chatelain, Notes on the Martyrology, p. 326] St Peter having triumphed over the devil in the East, pursued him to Rome in the person of Simon Magus. He who had formerly trembled at the voice of a poor maid now feared not the very throne of idolatry and superstition. The capital of the empire of the world, and the centre of impiety, called for the zeal of the prince...

I received this question: How should a person who seeks the truth act in a period when bad Popes are reigning, as, for example, during such a time in the Renaissance? Infallibility in the Extraordinary Papal Teaching This question is not very difficult to answer in terms of Catholic doctrine. The source of truth is Revelation, that is Scriptures and Tradition. The Catholic Magisterium gives us the correct interpretation of Revelation. The Popes are infallible only when they teach a doctrine ex cathedra, when they officially invoke their prerogative of infallibility over that doctrine. In such a case, one cannot...

Prophecy of St Malachy When I read The Year of Three Popes by Peter Hebblethwaite (about the events of 1978 which saw the death of Paul VI, the election and death of John Paul I, and then the election of John Paul II) he mentions the spate of editorials in the Osservatore Romano and the spate of letters to the editor in the Times of London at the time of the conclaves about what the mottos attributed to the dead pope or the next pope by St Malachy in his prophecies. Enthralled, I went to the library and looked through...

Vatican papers offering the first direct evidence that Pope Pius XII tried to help Jews during the Second World War have been discovered by an Italian expert. The documents undermine critics' claims that Pius - condemned by critics as "Hitler's Pope" - put the interests of Rome first and did not protest about the fate of Jews during the Holocaust. A letter, signed by the Pope in October 1940 and sent to Giuseppe Palatucci, Bishop of Campagna in southern Italy, instructed him to give money "in aid to interned Jews", to whom Pius also referred in an earlier letter as...

Everyone assumes that John Paul II's successor will be a conservative. Don't bet on it. The Vatican, the 109-acre inter-national headquarters of Roman Catholicism, works at the leisurely pace of an institution that has seen it all over 2,000 years of history. This is a place that closes shop every day at 1 p.m., where decisions that might take weeks in other organizations can be "studied" for years, awaiting an "opportune" moment to be announced. It is not accustomed to working under pressure of tight deadlines, as it showed in late April, when all 13 American cardinals were summoned for...