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When it comes to salaries among some church leaders, the policy seems to be "don't ask, don't tell," even though tithes from parishioners pay those salaries. While Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches have no qualms about revealing pastors' salaries, many local Protestant churches do not reveal salaries to nonmembers. Salaries of pastors at Protestant churches tend to be set by overarching religious associations or by a church board or both. The figure is often based on the church's location and parish size. Salaries tend to fall within the lower to upper middle-class range. A general rule among Protestant churches may...

Terry Villaire, 69, has a neatly trimmed black goatee, pudgy expressive hands and penetrating dark eyes that are hard to avoid, even from the back pew.During a recent Mass at Holy Angels Parish in Fort Lauderdale, Villaire seemed more like a party host than a presiding bishop as he circulated, distributing kisses on ready lips and cheeks. Just as effortlessly, he slipped into the solemnity of a centuries-old ritual, singing over a wine chalice and wafers.''Our motto is love without judgment, and that's piqued some curiosity,'' said Villaire, a former Roman Catholic priest who's now a bishop in an independent...

Has anyone noticed the almost complete disappearance of Protestants from our nation? "What!" I can hear my readers exclaim, "Storck has really gone off his rocker this time. Why, just down the street there's an Assembly of God church and two or three Baptist churches and the Methodists and so on. My cousin just left the Catholic Church to become a Protestant and my niece just married one. Moreover, evangelical Protestants have many media outlets of their own and they have great influence in the Bush Administration. They're everywhere." All this, of course, is true. Except that for some...

Reformation Day October 31, 1517 It was a Wednesday. It was a Wednesday, October 31, 1517. It was not really all that much different from the thousands of other Wednesdays that had come before. It was fall, of course, and the air had cooled down and the leaves were putting on a wonderful show of color along the River Elbe on the hillside. It was nice time to be a German. It was a nice time to live in rural Germany. The harvest had been plentiful. That is, it had been as plentiful as the white sand fields surrounding the...

Elaine Pagels, the famous historian of early Christianity, once told a revealing story about the social world behind the scenes of high-powered biblical scholarship. As a young up-and-coming professor at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, she was invited to a closed-door, after-hours smoker. The men there (Pagels was the only woman) were all prominent Bible scholars. Many of them didn't even believe in God, and those who still called themselves Christian were anything but orthodox. The liquor flowed freely, and as these men got in their cups, they began to sing old gospel songs. To her...

The surprising origins of "We Gather Together," a Thanksgiving standard. Its mention of God makes it verboten in schools today. But not too many years ago this was the season when teachers would lead their students in the great ecumenical Thanksgiving hymn, "We Gather Together to Ask the Lord's Blessing." It's a singable melody, and the stirring lyrics speak directly of the Pilgrims' experience in overcoming religious persecution.

'Megachurches' draw big U.S. crowds By Joyce Kelly and Michael Conlon CHICAGO (Reuters) - On a recent Sunday at Willow Creek Community Church, a Christian rock band joined by dancing children powered up in the cavernous main hall, their images ablaze on several gigantic screens. Thousands of worshipers from the main floor to the balcony and mezzanine levels were on their feet rocking to a powerful sound system. Outside cars filled a parking lot fit for a shopping mall. Inside some people drifted into small Bible study groups or a bookstore and Internet cafe for lattes, cappuccinos and seats by...

It is not often that I commend the writings of a liberation theologian. And I'm not about to do so now, at least not in totality. But Native American liberationist Vive Deloria's thirtieth anniversary edition of God Is Red: A Native View of Religion has some important insights about the state of mainline Protestantism. Deloria, in the midst of the typical revisionist proposals for Christian theology, offers the idea that Hugh Hefner should be pronounced "Protestant saint of the century." This is because, he suggests, of the ways in which the mainline bureaucracies have embraced "almost every kind of sexual...

Fight Breaks Out At Catholic Festival Fights broke out during the annual Feast of the Assumption pilgrimage in Carey Sunday afternoon at the Our Lady of Consolation Shrine. The religious event is supposed to bring thousands of people together to honor the Virgin Mary, which falls on every Aug. 15. The annual event was interuppted after a group, known as the "Minister of Annoyance," told the numerous Catholics in attendance to not believe in God and disown their faith. It sparked a fight between the group and a few teenagers. Carey police were called and arrested three teens and one...

BELFAST, August (LifeSiteNews.com) – After a concerted effort by Christian and pro-family groups to put a stop to Belfast’s annual “Gay Pride” event, on Thursday the Northern Ireland Parades Commission gave the homosexual group the go-ahead to hold the event. The Northern Ireland Police Service requested that the Parades Commission – originally set up to decide on whether parades held by warring Catholics and Protestants be allowed to proceed – rule on the matter, after receiving complaints about the lewd nature of the parade from concerned Christian groups. A Christian coalition, Stop the Parade Coalition, originally complained that the event...

In Pakistan, Catholics, Protestants and Muslims celebrated Saint Anthony of Padua in Lahore’s Sacred Heart Cathedral on June 14. Some 500 people gathered for the solemn mass and the rejoicing. A solemn mass was also held in the churches of Karachi and Multan.In his homily, Fr Andrew Nasari, vicar general for the diocese of Lahore, spoke about Saint Anthony, calling him the “Saint of the poor”. He also explained why he was venerated by people of different faiths.“Saint Anthony does not only listen to the prayers of Catholics and other Christians but also to those of other religions,” Father...

A Jewish scholar says that over the past half-century, Christian churches have been undergoing a remarkable theological revolution in their attitude towards Judaism and their relationship with the Jewish people. Moshe Auman, who served 35 years in Israel's foreign ministry, devoted the last four years of that time largely to extensive study of Jewish-Christian and Israeli-Christian relations. He feels many of the so-called "mainline" Protestant churches have had trouble coming to grips with the rebirth of the Israeli nation over 50 years ago. By looking closely at the Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Lutheran, and Methodist denominations, Auman says, one finds that these...

SAO PAULO, Brazil (AP) - At least 1.5 million evangelical Protestants rallied in the heart of this city's financial district Thursday, demonstrating their growing clout in the world's largest Roman Catholic country. Brazil's 13th "March for Jesus" began Thursday morning as hundreds of thousands of faithful from several evangelical sects walked more than 1 mile from the University of Sao Paulo's School of Medicine to skyscraper-lined Avenida Paulista. The number hymn-singing marchers swelled and by the time they reached Avenida Paulista the crowd had grown to 2 million, according to the Reborn in Christ Church that organized the event. Sao...

Orthodox Catholics love to praise the new Pope for putting the "smackdown" on heresy. While most would resist the same tight control on doctrine that Pope Benedict exercises, it's time for Protestants to get serious about rank heresy and fraud perpetuated in the church, as well as the disunity that has sprung up in the body of the Christ. Start With the Basics In taking action against out of control clergy, it's important that it be done in a spirit of love but that resolve be firm and action be decisive. The focus of those concerned with liberal clergy has...

Evangelical Protestants pray that the next pope will be in their biblical corner. First, they pray he will be the defender of babies in the womb. In being that defender, he will forcefully speak out against those who murder infants in females’ bodies. And he will state such forthrightly, in no uncertain terms, just as Pope John Paul II held such convictions. Second, evangelicals pray that the next pope will defend the culture of life by opposing euthanasia. That oft soft-pedaled issue cannot afford to be sidelined by both evangelical Protestants and the Vatican; therefore, it is prayed that the...

NPR.org, April 2, 2005 · "Tip O'Neill was correct," says Father Tom Reese, editor in chief of America, the Catholic weekly magazine. "All politics is local... even in the Catholic Church." Reese suggests that instead of focusing on the possible papal candidates as a bookie would look at horses in the starting gate, try to think about the election from the point of view of the electors, the cardinals who cast the votes. "Each cardinal is thinking, how will this candidate go over in my diocese?" Reese says. "If you're from the Third World, you're concerned with people who are...

BELFAST, Northern Ireland (Reuters) -- The United States has demanded that the IRA disband after the guerrilla group's astonishing offer to shoot the killers of a murdered Northern Ireland Catholic man. "It's time for the IRA to go out of business," U.S. special envoy Mitchell Reiss said Wednesday. For the IRA's political ally Sinn Fein, Northern Ireland's biggest Irish nationalist party, the U.S. demand was yet another blow to its democratic credentials. Reiss told BBC radio: "It's time for Sinn Fein to be able to say explicitly, without ambiguity, without ambivalence, that criminality will not be tolerated. "You can't sign...

Eight years ago, a handful of Roman Catholic families in Huntersville, a suburb of Charlotte, N.C., started a new parish. The home of their church, St. Mark, was a bowling alley. Our Lady of the Lanes, as they jokingly called it, was an apt symbol of the scarcity--and supple ingenuity--of Catholics in a region known as the buckle of the Protestant Bible Belt. Soon St. Mark was gaining a family a day. Now its almost 2,800 families hear Mass in a cavernous gymnasium as they await completion of a new church. Among the newcomers is Ben Liuzzo, 54, a financial-services...

Roughly half of America dislike everything George Bush says, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t the President of the United States. This is a point too few people keep in mind. Take, for instance, the example of Stas, a very nice Orthodox man, who read my recent piece on concerning the Muslim reporter who implicitly threatened to kill me and nuke America. He thought the piece excellent except for my statement that the Pope was the head of Christianity: “As for the Pope, 1 billion various protestants and 300 million Orthodox don't follow his words and that's half of Christianity.”...

Protestants in north-eastern Turkmenistan have been threatened for holding services and preaching Christianity, Forum 18 News Service has learned.  "The head of the village administration, the police, the National Security Ministry (NSM) secret police and Muslim clergy in the person of the mullah started to put pressure on them," local believers who wished not to be named told Forum 18. As well as threatening to deport the Protestants from their village if they continue to hold services, local officials threatened to cut off gas and electricity supplies to the family home and withhold pensions, a serious threat in impoverished Turkmenistan.