NCR’s John Allen reports that dissatisfaction is growing among U.S. Catholic leaders over the church’s zero-tolerance approach to accused priests; victims’ advocates slap down New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan‘s perception that most new accusations turn out to be false. Meanwhile, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia is reopening the cases of 37 accused priests at the center of a scathing grand jury report.
Up in Massachusetts, there’s a lot of confusion over the Vatican‘s recent directive to re-open three closed churches, and that order is sowing seeds of hope for similar appeals in Cleveland. Out in Green Bay, the bishop doesn’t want his parishes to belong to social justice organizations that aren’t church-run.
House Homeland Security Chairman Peter King says he doesn’t want his upcoming hearings on Muslim radicalization to turn into a circus, and doesn’t want people’s eyes to “glaze over” so he’s bringing in new faces. Our poll yesterday with PRRI detected broad support for the hearings, even though many Americans think they should be expanded beyond just Muslims.
In the never-ending battle over California’s Prop 8, the California Supreme Court agreed to decide who has legal standing (California’s governor and AG have both washed their hands of it) in the case now before a federal appeals court. U.K. authorities said gay couples can get civil-unionized in churches and Hawaii offered the beach in Waikiki.
The feds have charged an Amish man in Ohio with running a Bernie Madoffesque Ponzi scheme in which he lost nearly half of the $33 million he raised from would-be Amish investors.
Studio execs tried to scrub the Bible (literally) out of the upcoming faith-friendly film “Soul Surfer” about teen surfing phenom Bethany Hamilton. WaPo’s Jonathan Capehart didn’t like the Bieb’s answer to why he doesn’t support abortion, even in cases of rape: “everything happens for a reason.”
The (first) imam behind New York’s Ground Zero mosque tells NPR he’d be “receptive” to moving his controversial interfaith center elsewhere, but no one’s offered him an alternative site.
India is trying to woo their friends in Sri Lanka (away from China) with the Buddha‘s bones. In Egypt, the newly revived Muslim Brotherhood is taking it slow in courting voters (and the West, specifically Washington); U.S. intel chiefs conceded they actually don’t know all that much about the Brotherhood.