From the pulpit where he stood one day last week, Richard James Cardinal Cushing, 68, looked down not at the familiar Irish faces of his own Boston congregation but rather into the docile and questioning gaze of brown Peruvian eyes. The occasion was the blessing of a new brick-and-concrete Roman Catholic church in a slum suburb of Lima. "Mindful of the fact that you live in an agricultural country," rumbled Cushing, "I presume you know what an ass is. ...

The most important social statement of the Roman Catholic Church in recent centuries has been a document known as Rerum Novarum * issued on May 15, 1891 by 81-year-old Leo XIII as a papal encyclical—an open letter to the bishops of the church. Dealing directly and forcibly with the social ills facing the world at the turn of the century, it condemned socialism as immoral but supported trade unions and higher wages, state regulation of industry and broader distribution of property and wealth. Brought up to ...

When Christopher Wartmann set his heart on going to the University of Dayton, a private Catholic college in Ohio, he was less worried about getting in than about how his family would come up with the more than $20,000 a year it was going to cost. Thomas Wartmann, Christopher's dad and a route salesman in the Frito-Lay division of PepsiCo, earned just $38,000 last year, and Christopher's mother Eva earned $17,000 as a tennis coordinator at a country club. They ...

It was an awkward situation: There I was, stuck in a windowless conference room, talking sex with a Catholic priest. Not just any priest — an Archbishop, sitting under a portrait of the Pope. It was April 2008, and His Excellency Paciano Aniceto and I had met in Manila to discuss his position on contraception. As a member of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines, Aniceto has been a prominent anticondom campaigner, denouncing all forms of "artificial" ...

For the iPod generation, it doesn't get more radical than wearing a veil. The hijab worn by traditional Muslim women might have people talking, but it's the wimple that really turns heads. And in the U.S. today, the nuns most likely to wear that headdress are the ones young enough to have a playlist. Over the past five years, Roman Catholic communities around the country have experienced a curious phenomenon: more women, most in their 20s and 30s, are trying ...

ROME has spoken," runs an ancient proverb of the Roman Catholic Church. "The case is closed." No longer true. Last week Pope Paul VI formally promulgated his encyclical on birth control, which condemns all methods of contraception, except rhythm, as against the will of God. The pronouncement caused perhaps the most serious outburst of dissent the Catholic Church has experienced in centuries. Innumerable Catholics made clear that they would refuse to heed the words of a reigning Pontiff. Theologians defied ...

The Year of Our Lord 1962 was a year of American resolve, Russian orbiting, European union and Chinese war. In a tense yet hope-filled time, these were the events that dominated conversation and invited history's scrutiny. But history has a long eye, and it is quite possible that in her vision 1962's most fateful rendezvous took place in the world's most famous church—having lived for years in men's hearts and minds. That event was the beginning of a ...

Alta Jacko is the mother of eight children. She is also an ordained priest in the Roman Catholic Church. Jacko, 81, who earned her master's degree in pastoral studies from Loyola University, a Jesuit Catholic school, says being a priest is what she was called to do. Officially, of course, the Catholic Church's Canon Law 1024 says that only baptized men can receive holy orders. But there is a movement against the no-women rule; it began eight ...

A fortnight hence in the Vatican, 2,600 bishops of the Roman Catholic Church will meet in a gathering so rare that only 20 others like it have been convened in the 20 centuries of Christian history. The purpose of the Second Vatican Council is what His Holiness Pope John XXIII, who has the Catholic prelate's traditional wariness of words that suggest drastic change, calls an aggiornamento—a modernization. This self-reform will affect the life, the worship and the discipline ...

The mass this Sunday at Holy Name of Jesus Catholic Church in West Palm Beach will be offered on behalf of five people. Only one of them is a recently deceased head of a global terrorist network. Parishioner Henry Borga requested the mass intention, on behalf of one Osama bin Laden, which is a long-standing tradition in the Catholic Church in which masses are offered for souls in purgatory or to remember someone who has died or in ...