President Obama paid a call on ailing evangelist Billy Graham on Sunday — son Franklin Graham described the visit as “very friendly, very cordial.” In a statement marking the 1915 slaughter of Armenians at the hands of Ottoman Turks, Obama again refuses to use the word “genocide.”
Arizona‘s harsh new immigration law is creating political headaches for Obama; the Rev. Al Sharpton compares the bill to apartheid and Nazi Germany.
The NYT’s Ross Douthat takes a dim view after South Park’s “knuckles under swiftly to totalitarianism and brute force” and refuses to include an image of the Prophet Muhammad. Obama will host an entrepreneurship summit for Muslim leaders in DC today.
NPR takes a close look at how the Archdiocese of Los Angeles handled (or mishandled) abuse cases, and also gives a helpful timeline on how the scandal unfolded. There’s also a look at abuse cases in the Netherlands. A Chilean cardinal is promising a full investigation into abuse allegations that are spreading through the Catholic heartland in South America. The Vatican is mulling the future of the Legion of Christ after a high-level probe into abuse allegations involving founder Marcial Maciel; the AP looks at the tough road ahead for a Wisconsin lawsuit that seeks to hold the Vatican responsible for abuse. Catholic bishops in India are considering ways to standardize how abuse allegations are processed.
The queen is not amused, meanwhile, about a document from the British government that suggested the pope could preside at a gay wedding, and sing with the queen, during his upcoming visit to the UK in September. The Catholic Church in France is trying to improve its image and recruit new clergy for a church in crisis. The BBC takes a look at celibacy, or as they put it, “a life without sex.”
In a story that proves all these abuse reports don’t involve some quaint old institution, a study in Chicago found that the Catholic Church in the Windy City is responsible for some 75,000 jobs in the region. Graduation season will soon be upon us, and with it the perennial debate over whether to hold public graduations in religious facilities. A Utah man is fighting a court order not to discuss his fundamentalist beliefs about polygamy with his children. Christianity Today looks at the growth of online seminary education.
Fox News’ own Glenn Beck is this year’s pick to give the commencement address at Liberty University, although it might be his faith (Beck’s a Mormon) more than his politics that raises eyebrows in Lynchburg. Nadia Bloom, the Florida girl who was lost in a swamp for four days, went to church to thank the man who found her; he said God led him to the spot where the girl was located. AOL profiles Jim Daly, the new head of Focus on the Family, and Guideposts profiles the mother who gave the world the Jonas Brothers. Supporters in Idaho rallied for Laura Silsby, the last remaining Baptist missionary who’s still being held in a Haitian jail on charges of trying to illegally smuggle children into the Dominican Republic.
Tibetan writer Zhogs Dung has been detained after criticizing China’s response to the earthquake that killed more than 2,000 people in rural China (government officials say they plan to rebuild all 87 monasteries that were damaged in the quake). Iranian gays find an uneasy refuge in Turkey (but the swimsuits, not so much). And Mac geeks in Israel breathed a sigh of relief when the government lifted its ban on the iPad.
