Free Republic

BALTIMORE (AP) _ Carrying puppets, signs and roses, hundreds accompanied a pickup truck carrying the coffin of peace activist Philip Berrigan as it wound its way Monday through the rough neighborhood where he once served as a priest. Family members stood in the back of the truck along with the plain wooden coffin, hand-painted with red roses, as bagpipers played ``Amazing Grace'' while the procession marched to the funeral at St. Peter Claver Catholic Church in west Baltimore. ``He was bigger than life _ extremely human and heroic and committed,'' said actor Martin Sheen, who marched in the funeral...

Leftist theologian attacks late pontiffMUNICH (ChurchMilitant.com) - A Marxist philosopher and dissident ex-priest is denigrating the theological legacy of Pope Benedict XVI. On Tuesday, the German magazine Publik-Forum published an article by Brazilian Liberation Theology proponent Leonardo Boff, who shared his Marxist perception of the late Pontiff. Boff declared that Benedict "proved to be the enemy of the friends of the poor." He berated the pope emeritus for focusing too heavily on traditional theology and not enthusiastically embracing Marxist theory. The laicized Brazilian has a long history of conflicts with Pope Benedict XVI, going back decades to when Benedict was...

The Rev. Albert Cutie saw a lot of things in his 14 years as a Catholic priest while church officials looked the other way: priests who got caught with prostitutes, priests who lived with their gay partners, and men of the cloth who kept one bed in the rectory and another with their mistress. "In the Roman Catholic Church, a scandal is not really a scandal until it becomes public," Cutie writes in his new book, Dilemma: A Priest's Struggle with Faith and Love.

Equipped with gummy bears, lubricant and gay porn, a defrocked Pennsylvania priest was ready for sex with a boy but instead got busted by an undercover cop, police said. Thomas Bender, 72, of Macungie, Pa., was arraigned yesterday in First District Court in Hempstead on five counts of first-degree disseminating indecent material to a minor and one count of attempting to commit a criminal sexual act. Since September 2004, cops said, he engaged in online conversations with a detective who was posing as a teenager. "During that year, he was grooming the boy - or who he thought was a...