All posts tagged: Catholic

Catholic school caught up in row over abolition of 50% cap

Catholic school caught up in row over abolition of 50% cap

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Education secretary criticised for launching faith reforms at school with fewer pupils on free school meals Education secretary criticised for launching faith reforms at school with fewer pupils on free school meals More from this theme Recent articles Gillian Keegan has been criticised for launching her faith school reforms at “one of the most socially and religiously segregated schools in the country”. But the headteacher of the Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School in Holland Park, London, has hit back at critics, pointing to the ethnic diversity of its student body and the high performance of its disadvantaged pupils. Speaking at the Cardinal Vaughan school last Wednesday, Keegan announced a change to the rules governing faith-based selection.  At present, oversubscribed free schools can select half of their pupils on the basis of their faith, and special academies are not allowed to be based on faith. According to government records, 15.3 per cent of pupils at Cardinal Vaughan are eligible for free school meals, compared with over 33 per cent across the borough of Kensington and Chelsea, and …

Court rules North Carolina Catholic school could fire gay teacher who announced his wedding online

Court rules North Carolina Catholic school could fire gay teacher who announced his wedding online

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RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — A Catholic school in North Carolina had the right to fire a gay teacher who announced his marriage on social media a decade ago, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday, reversing a judge’s earlier decision. A panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, reversed a 2021 ruling that Charlotte Catholic High School and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Charlotte had violated Lonnie Billard’s federal employment protections against sex discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. The school said Billard wasn’t invited back as a substitute teacher because of his “advocacy in favor of a position that is opposed to what the church teaches about marriage,” a court document said. U.S. District Judge Max Cogburn determined Billard — a full-time teacher for a decade until 2012 — was a lay employee for the limited purpose of teaching secular classes. Cogburn said a trial would still have to be held to determine appropriate relief for him. A 2020 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court declared Title …

Baltimore Catholic parish closures a ‘punch in the stomach’ with long-term impact

Baltimore Catholic parish closures a ‘punch in the stomach’ with long-term impact

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BALTIMORE (RNS) — Patrice Ellerbe, a 65-year-old parishioner at St. Veronica, had come to the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen on April 30 for a public forum on the Archdiocese of Baltimore’s proposed plan for closing about two-thirds of parishes in the city. She knew the bad news already: Two weeks before, the archdiocese had announced that her 79-year-old Black Catholic parish was among those proposed to close. “It felt like a punch in the stomach,” she said, a feeling the more than 1,000 Catholics gathered at the cathedral to give their feedback seemingly shared. As the plan was read out, the high arched ceilings of the nave began to echo with boos. The closures, in the nation’s oldest Catholic diocese, are part of a nationwide trend of restructuring in response to falling Mass attendance and priest shortages. In explaining the need to close Baltimore parishes, the archdiocese has focused on the first reason, pointing to weekend Mass attendance that has fallen below 8,000 in a city that used to have 250,000 active Catholics. At …

Silicon Valley bishop, two Catholic AI experts weigh in on AI evangelization

Silicon Valley bishop, two Catholic AI experts weigh in on AI evangelization

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(RNS) — It took a little more than a day for Father Justin, an artificial intelligence avatar posing as a priest, to be defrocked. After Catholic Answers, a site devoted to evangelizing for Catholicism, introduced the character to answer questions about the faith, Catholics on social media called the character a “scandalizing mockery of the sacred priesthood” that offered only “a substitute for real interaction.” On April 24, Catholic Answers apologized for the experiment, and Justin was reintroduced as a lay theologian. Catholics close to the Vatican’s work on artificial intelligence say that Justin captures the possible problems with AI evangelization and the reasons for caution in Pope Francis’ and other church officials’ attempts to tackle AI, even as the technology is becoming an increasingly buzzy topic at the Vatican. The Rev. Philip Larrey. (Photo courtesy Boston College) The Rev. Philip Larrey, a professor in the department of formative education at Boston College, said that while he thinks Catholic Answers are a good group, “they were a little bit too quick to enter into something …

New crop of Swiss Guards prepares to serve the pope through hard work and listening

New crop of Swiss Guards prepares to serve the pope through hard work and listening

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VATICAN CITY (RNS) — With a determined gaze, Renato Peter clenched the flag of the Swiss Guard in his fist while holding up three fingers of his other hand in a salute to the Holy Trinity. When called upon, the 24-year-old from a tiny Swiss town near Lake Constance yelled his oath to protect the pope and his legitimate successors with his life.  Peter is one of 34 young Catholic men who became members of the Swiss Guard Monday (May 6) at a ceremony held in St. Damaso courtyard at the Vatican. Though the young men, all actually Swiss, committed to the imposing task of defending the spiritual leader of the world’s 1.5 billion Catholics, becoming a Swiss Guard today is less about combat and more about empathy, charity and listening. A few days before, on a sunny afternoon outside the guards’ Vatican barracks, a number of the new recruits trained for Monday’s ceremony, clicking their heels to the sound of battle drums. Officers watched their every move as they turned and marched, ordering the …

Catholic Bishop joins cease-fire prayer vigil protesting weapons for Israel

Catholic Bishop joins cease-fire prayer vigil protesting weapons for Israel

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WASHINGTON (RNS) — Calling the White House “a symbol of ongoing support for destruction of human lives,” Catholic Bishop John Stowe appeared at a prayer vigil outside the presidential mansion on Friday (May 3), joining a group of religious demonstrators as they urged President Joe Biden to back a permanent cease-fire in Gaza and halt offensive weapons shipments to Israel. Stowe said the protesters hoped to appeal to Biden’s Catholicism, saying the group intended to deliver a new letter signed by more than 200 U.S. Catholic leaders, including a cardinal, an archbishop and several nuns, to the president, urging him to do more to stop the violence. Activists read the letter aloud during the demonstration. It is rare in recent years for an active American Catholic bishop to participate in a political demonstration. The Catholic hierarchy more commonly expresses its views as a group as the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, most often in written statements. Stowe, who heads the Catholic diocese of Lexington, Kentucky, is president of Pax Christi USA, a Catholic anti-war advocacy …

Expanding clergy sexual abuse probe targets New Orleans Catholic church leaders

Expanding clergy sexual abuse probe targets New Orleans Catholic church leaders

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NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Authorities have expanded an investigation of clergy sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church in New Orleans to include senior church officials suspected of shielding predatory priests for decades and failing to report their crimes to law enforcement. Louisiana State Police carried out a sweeping search warrant last week at the Archdiocese of New Orleans, seeking a long-secreted cache of church records and communications between local church leaders and the Vatican about the church’s handling of clergy sexual abuse. The search signaled a new phase of the investigation that will seek to determine what particular church leaders, including Archbishop Gregory Aymond and his predecessors, knew about claims that the warrant describes as “ignored and in many cases covered up.” “The Archdiocese of New Orleans has been openly discussing the topic of sex abuse for over 20 years,” Bill Kearney, an archdiocese spokesman, said in a statement. “In keeping with this, we also are committed to working with law enforcement in these endeavors.” The warrant contained several new details about the sex-trafficking …

America’s Catholic Church sees an immense shift toward the old ways

America’s Catholic Church sees an immense shift toward the old ways

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MADISON, Wis. (AP) — It was the music that changed first. Or maybe that’s just when many people at the pale brick Catholic church in the quiet Wisconsin neighborhood finally began to realize what was happening. The choir director, a fixture at St. Maria Goretti for nearly 40 years, was suddenly gone. Contemporary hymns were replaced by music rooted in medieval Europe. So much was changing. Sermons were focusing more on sin and confession. Priests were rarely seen without cassocks. Altar girls, for a time, were banned. At the parish elementary school, students began hearing about abortion and hell. “It was like a step back in time,” said one former parishioner, still so dazed by the tumultuous changes that began in 2021 with a new pastor that he only spoke on condition of anonymity. It’s not just St. Maria Goretti. Across the U.S., the Catholic Church is undergoing an immense shift. Generations of Catholics who embraced the modernizing tide sparked in the 1960s by Vatican II are increasingly giving way to religious conservatives who believe …

Abducted retired Catholic bishop who mediated between cartels in Mexico is located, hospitalized

Abducted retired Catholic bishop who mediated between cartels in Mexico is located, hospitalized

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MEXICO CITY (AP) — A retired Roman Catholic bishop who was famous for trying to mediate between drug cartels in Mexico was located and taken to a hospital after apparently being briefly kidnapped, the Mexican Council of Bishops said Monday. The church leadership in Mexico said in a statement earlier that Msgr. Salvador Rangel, a bishop emeritus, disappeared on Saturday and called on his captors to release him. But the council later said he “has been located and is in the hospital,” without specifying how he had been found or released, or providing the extent of his injuries. Uriel Carmona, the chief prosecutor of Morelos state, where the bishop disappeared, said “preliminary indications are that it may have been an ‘express’ kidnapping.” In Mexico, regular kidnappings are often lengthy affairs involving long negotiations over ransom demands. “Express” kidnappings, on the other hand, are quick abductions usually carried out by low-level criminals were ransom demands are lower, precisely so the money can be handed over more quickly. Earlier, the council said Rangel was in ill health, …

The Catholic Church wants to have a say on the future of AI

The Catholic Church wants to have a say on the future of AI

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VATICAN CITY (RNS) — In office buildings in Silicon Valley, at closed-door meetings in Rome and in private audiences with Pope Francis at the Vatican, programmers pushing the boundaries of artificial intelligence are mining the church’s insight on what makes human beings tick. The rapid development in the field of AI “is asking us to think again fundamentally about what it is that makes us human. What distinguishes humans from machines?” said Bishop Paul Tighe, secretary of the Vatican Council for Culture and among a handful of Catholic clergy who are bridging the divide between scientific knowledge and the church’s spiritual and theological tradition. In conversations with AI programmers and experts, Tighe said he talks about consciousness and “relationality” as key prerogatives of human beings that distinguish us from machines. But the creators of AI are not trying to re-create humans, he said in a recent interview with Religion News Service. “They are creating another type of entity.” As Silicon Valley fills with wannabe gods, they are turning to the Catholic Church’s 2,000-year-old study of …