Pope Benedict XVI is planning to make the first general apology for the abuse of children and minors by Roman Catholic priests when he meets thousands of clergymen from around the world in June at the climax of the International Year for Priests, Vatican sources say.

In the past there have been papal or church apologies for individual cases of paedophilia or for abuse in specific countries, for example during the German pontiff’s recent visit to Malta. What is being prepared now would be the first time a pope seeks to atone publicly for the extent to which paedophilia has been a major stain on the modern history of the church touching a constellation of countries, say the sources at the Vatican’s Congregation for the Clergy. It could be considered comparable to the historic step that the previous pope, John Paul II, took in apologising to the Jews for historic church anti-Semitism and for misdeeds during the Crusades, they say.

Vatican officials hope such an unprecedented act of penance by Benedict, together with thousands of clergymen in St Peter’s Square, 9-11 June, will do much to lay to rest the scandal and defuse protests that might disrupt his trip to Britain in September. The encounter will form the climax of the special year of events designed in part to encourage vocations to the cloth but which instead has been marred by the mushrooming paedophile scandal.

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The sexual-abuse crisis which has engulfed the Catholic Church is, above all, an occasion of profound regret at the damage done to the victims. But it is also an occasion of anger at the way the Church has treated those victims. The pain caused by clerics has been exacerbated by the misgovernance of bishops. So deep is the hurt that the victims feel, that it is understandable that attention has turned to the role of the Pope himself in the crisis. Calls for Pope Benedict’s resignation have come from victims and groups representing them, for only such a cathartic action would be proportionate to the anger and hurt they feel. Nevertheless, Archbishop Vincent Nichols of Westminster was right to say on television last weekend that there were “no strong reasons” for Pope Benedict to resign.

Contrary to the impression given by recent, increasingly aggressive coverage by the media, Pope Benedict’s actions have reflected concern for the victims and a deep desire to clean up the Catholic Church. The Pope’s letter to the Catholic Church in Ireland was unsparing in his condemnation of offenders and of bishops who failed in their leadership and made grave errors of judgement….

A serious question about the CDF [the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith] does remain unanswered. Why did it take the Congregation in particular and the Vatican in general so long to realise that such an instruction about reporting all cases to Rome was necessary? By then, hundreds of priests had been dealt with on a pastoral or administrative basis, and were subsequently reinstated, often after reference to a therapist, but many then resumed their abuse of children. What triggered the change of approach?

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When he was a young boy growing up in a rural rectory in East Anglia, Diarmaid MacCulloch’s parents used to drive him around to look at churches. His father, one of a line of Scottish Protestant Anglican ministers, didn’t really encourage stops at Catholic churches. But humans are always most interested in what is forbidden, and in the due course of time, MacCulloch grew up to be interested in the multiple ways in which Christianity has morphed, clashed, invented and re-invented itself.

MacCulloch, who teaches the history of the Church at Oxford University, has put his interest into a massive new book called Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years.

That subtitle isn’t an error. MacCulloch says it was important to look back over the thousand years that preceded Jesus’ birth to see how Christianity shaped itself, and at the timelines of the two cultures that influenced what the religion would become.

“It’s really two different sets of thousand years, one of them a Jewish thousand years and the other is a Greek thousand years. And both those lie behind Christianity,” MacCulloch says. “These two cultures — Jewish culture, Greek culture — they’ve got entirely different views of what God is. And then you get a man coming along who people regard as God: Jesus.”

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There is a whiff of exuberance around the world economy these days. Financial markets are buoyant, business confidence is rising and global growth seems increasingly robust. In its latest forecasts, released on April 21st, the IMF predicts that global output will grow by 4.2% this year on a purchasing-power basis, a full percentage point more than it foresaw six months ago. Other seers are even more optimistic, predicting growth of more than 4.5%””or close to the average pace of the boom years before the recession. The level of global output is now back to where it was before the downturn. And given the scale of the financial crisis, the recovery is surprisingly brisk. With global business investment accelerating and consumer spending strong, there is growing optimism that the recovery is becoming self-sustaining.

Some of this optimism is justified. Just as financial stress worsened the recession, so healthier financial markets are now reinforcing the recovery. Higher asset prices have propped up consumer spending and narrower corporate bond spreads have eased firms’ borrowing costs. Economic recovery, in turn, has helped ease financial pain. The IMF has reduced its estimate of banks’ total losses from the crisis by $500 billion, to $2.3 trillion, two-thirds of which has already been written off.

The trouble is that the good fortune has not been shared equally….

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No pool coverage of today’s visit by President Obama to Billy Graham, just White House statements about the meeting first arranged when Obama called Graham in November to wish him a happy 91st birthday.

“The president had a private prayer and conversation with Rev. Graham,” said White House spokesman Bill Burton. “He is extraordinarily gratified that he took the time to meet with him.”

White House spiritual adviser Josh DuBois also attended the session in Graham’s mountaintop cabin in Montreat, N.C.

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Parishioners at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church received a welcome surprise on Easter Sunday, a surprise that helped them put their 100-year-old church’s history in perspective.

Suddenly adorning a courtyard leading to the sanctuary they found beautiful stained-glass windows dating back to about 1890.

The windows, commissioned in memory of George Kelly Dunlop, the Episcopal Bishop for Arizona and New Mexico, had been featured in the original Trinity Cathedral in Phoenix, but they didn’t fit when the new church moved to its present location.

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Opposition to the Pill among conservative Catholics was consistent from the beginning, but it was only after it had been in widespread use for years that some conservative Protestants began rethinking their views on contraception in general and the Pill in particular. “I think the contraceptive revolution caught Evangelicals by surprise,” observes Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. “We bought into a mentality of human control. We welcomed the polio vaccine and penicillin and just received the Pill as one more great medical advance.”

But beginning in the 1990s, many conservative Christians revisited the question of what God intends in marriage and pondered the true nature of the gift of sexuality. The heart of the concern, in this view, is that using contraception can weaken the marital bond by separating sex from procreation. The ideal of marriage as a “one-flesh union” places the act of intercourse, with the possibility of creating new life, at the center of the relationship. “Go back a hundred years,” Mohler says. “The biblical idea you’d have adults who’d intend to have very active sex lives without any respect to the likelihood of children didn’t exist. And it’s now unexceptional.” This is not to say that everyone has an obligation to have as many children as possible; Mohler has two, not 12, he notes, and as long as a couple is “not seeking to alienate their sexual relationship from the gift of children, they can seek to space or limit the total number of children they have.” But the ability to control human reproduction, he says, has done more to reorder human life than any event since Adam and Eve ate the apple.

Steinem disputes this whole framework, noting that sex and procreation have never been as tightly connected as Mohler suggests. “Most animals seem to have periods of heat, in which sexual activity is most concentrated and they are most likely to conceive,” she says. “Human beings uniquely don’t. So for us, sexuality is a mark of our humanity, like our ability to reason or remember or think about thinking. Sexuality is not only a way we procreate but also a way we communicate and express love and caring and community.”

Women’s-rights leaders see multiple agendas at work in the counterrevolution: an attempt not just to roll back access to contraception but also to return women to more traditional roles. “The cynic in me says, Hmm, they are winning the abortion fight, so they need to raise money some other way, which means go somewhere else. They go to contraception,” says NOW president O’Neill of social conservatives. “If the project is to re-establish patriarchal structures, where women are subordinate to male family members, they have to end women’s access to contraception.”

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Losing a life partner or two could happen to anyone, but going through seven requires some effort. The vast majority of Americans ”” about 97% ”” wimp out and do not wed more than three times. As an octospouse, the 76-year-old [Larry] King is in rarefied company. Elizabeth Taylor has also hatched and dispatched eight unions. (Recent reports of a ninth have proved erroneous.) So has Mickey Rooney. Zsa Zsa Gabor has been married nine times. William Shatner has an impressive number of exes, as do Billy Bob Thornton and Joan Collins. Like news anchoring, the field of extreme spouse collecting is dominated by women who were once considered very good-looking and men who almost never were.

The official record holder until recently, it’s gratifying to note, was not a celebrity. The late Linda Wolfe of Indiana had 23 ex-husbands, although she admitted she married the last one as a publicity stunt. The other 22 were thus completely, totally genuine and heartfelt, and when last contacted by the press, Wolfe said she wouldn’t mind marrying again. She was hoping for a straight man; on the two occasions she married a gay guy, it didn’t take….

All of which raises the question: How many marriages are too many? Statistics show that more second marriages break up than first ones and more third marriages ”” about 75% ”” break up than second ones. Given that trajectory, shouldn’t a referee step in after the third or fourth and suspend play for the good of all?

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In the first decade of the American nation, a former slave turned itinerant minister by the name of Richard Allen found himself preaching to a growing number of blacks in Philadelphia. He came to both a religious and organizational revelation. “I saw the necessity,” he later wrote, “of erecting a place of worship for the colored people.”

Allen’s inspiration ultimately took the forms of Bethel African Church, founded in 1794, and the African Methodist Episcopal denomination, established in 1799. As much as it can be dated to anything, the emergence of a formal African-American Christianity can be dated to Allen’s twin creations.

Over more than two centuries since then, the Black Church has become a proper noun, a fixture, a seeming monolith in American society. Its presence is as prevalent as film clips of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivering the “I Have a Dream” speech and contestants on “American Idol” indulging in the gospel style of melisma.

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As Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of the Central Gulf Coast, the Right Rev. Philip M. Duncan, II, is faith leader for 62 churches with approximately 22,000 parishioners.

Traveling through the diocese – stretching from west Florida through south Alabama – Duncan, alongside parish priests, preaches, teaches, confirms new members, baptizes and celebrates the Eucharist.

“My position,” he says, “is not only to serve in the diocese but also in the church and ultimately in the worldwide Anglican community.”

An affable, philosophical man with a buoyant sense of humor, Duncan was consecrated as bishop in May 2001.

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Death is eternal, but burial is not.

That is what relatives of 46 former worshippers of Christ Church on the Green are learning after a decision by the Episcopal Diocese of Connecticut to remove cremated remains from a memorial garden on the church grounds. The historic chapel was put up for sale last year after half its membership broke away in late 2007 over the national church’s stance on homosexuality and other issues.

“You have a situation here, where, by virtue of a sale, the diocese will no longer be responsible for the land, its use, or any care of anything in it,” said the Rev. Stanley Kemmerer, priest-in-charge. “It’s really an effort to be pastoral.”

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What has been exercising the minds of Anglicans in recent years, as the culture wars over human sexuality have raged, is the relationship of Unity and Truth. How to reconcile radically divergent opinions in a single communion?

Some have put a premium on Truth ”“ and so have been prepared to take unilateral action or to cross ecclesial boundaries in order to uphold it. Others have openly preferred Unity. Heresy, as one American bishop tersely put it, is to be preferred to schism.

And there has been no respite. No sooner had the crisis over women in the episcopate subsided than another conflict took its place ”“ over the blessing of same-sex unions and the ordination of practising homosexuals….

The Windsor Report (2004), instead of addressing this pressing issue head on, chose by procedural sleight of hand to avoid it:
”˜The mandate of this Commission has been to examine, and make recommendations in relation to, the formal results, in terms of our Communion one with another within Anglicanism, of the recent events which have been described. We repeat that we have not been invited, and are not intending, to comment or make recommendations on the theological andethical mailers concerning the practice of same sex relations and the “blessing or ordination or consecration of those who engage in them [italics theirs].

Having outlined the problems, and sketched the deeper symptoms we believe to lie beneath them, it is time to examine more fully, in this Section, the nature of the Communion we share, the bonds which hold it together, the ways in which all this can be threatened and how such threats might be met.’

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The aliens are out there and Earth had better watch out, at least according to Stephen Hawking. He has suggested that extraterrestrials are almost certain to exist ”” but that instead of seeking them out, humanity should be doing all it that can to avoid any contact.

The suggestions come in a new documentary series in which Hawking, one of the world’s leading scientists, will set out his latest thinking on some of the universe’s greatest mysteries.

Alien life, he will suggest, is almost certain to exist in many other parts of the universe: not just in planets, but perhaps in the centre of stars or even floating in interplanetary space.

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Now appear manifold fruits of the miracle, for God comforted the poor, a godly matron was restored to the Church, in whose death it suffered great loss, and many are called unto the faith; for although Peter were [had been] a minister of so great power, yet he keepeth not the men in [on] himself; but doth rather direct them unto Christ.

–John Calvin, in his commentary on Acts, speaking about the healing of Dorcas which was the New Testament reading appointed for this morning

Finally, a footnote about the impact of the Castrillón episode: Ironically, resurrecting that 2001 letter may have doomed Castrillón, but it could actually help Pope Benedict XVI.

Throughout the most recent round of media coverage, there’s been a serious mismatch between Pope Benedict’s actual record on sex abuse — as the senior Vatican official who took the crisis most seriously since 2001, and who led the charge for reform — and outsider images of the pope as part of the problem.

While there are many reasons for that, a core factor is that the Vatican had the last ten years to tell the story of “Ratzinger the Reformer” to the world, and they essentially dropped the ball. That failure left a PR vacuum in which a handful of cases from the pope’s past, where his own role was actually marginal, have come to define his profile.

One has to ask, why didn’t the Vatican tell Ratzinger’s story?

At least part of the answer, I suspect, is because to make Ratzinger look good, they’d have to make others look bad — including, of course, Castrillón, as well as other top Vatican officials. Lurking behind that concern is a deeper one, which is that to salvage the reputation of Benedict XVI it might be necessary to tarnish that of Pope John Paul II.

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My Dear Spanish-Speaking Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

Today is a sad day in the struggle to see all God’s people treated in a humane and compassionate manner. I had hoped that our Governor and law-makers would listen to their consciences and not be swayed by the voices of bigotry and racism. With the Governor’s signing of SB 1070, it seems that for now the advocates of fear and hatred have won over those of charity and love. Arizona claims to be a Golden Rule State. We have not lived up to that claim.

I know that the passage of this law is deeply troubling to many of you, especially those of undocumented status. I know that many of you fear for your jobs, your families, and your future in this state and in this country.

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[Q.] Where is the Episcopal Diocese of California going with Same Sex Blessings and Gay marriage? Will the Diocese of California support a measure at the national General Convention on this matter? Has a statement been formulated on the subject? Will you comment and broadly state answers to questions regarding your Pastoral Letter on Gay Marriage?

[A.] At its recent General Convention, an every-three-year legislative gathering for the whole Episcopal Church, among the many pieces of legislation passed was two that pertain to inclusion of LGBT people. Together, these two resolutions affirm the access that all people have to the full life of the church.

[Q.] If there is a key Bible vision that supports Gay Marriage & Same Sex Blessing, please give a Biblical example and explain something of your vision on interpretation? Who else shares this sensibility and understanding we might know or recognize?

[A.] The story of the anointing of David by Samuel in which it editorially says that God does not judge as human’s judge, human’s judge by outward appearances, but god sees the human heart. When The Episcopal Church is looking at a human couple who seeks the blessing of the church on their relationship, we humbly attempt to see as God sees, which reveals certain characteristics ”“ love, fidelity, forgiveness, mutuality, humility ”” all of which The Episcopal Church considers more important than external considerations.

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In an aging population, the elderly are increasingly being taken care of by the elderly. Professional caregivers ”” almost all of them women ”” are one of the fastest-growing segments of the American work force, and also one of the grayest.

A recent study by PHI National, a nonprofit organization that advocates on behalf of caregivers, found that in 2008, 28 percent of home care aides were over age 55, compared with 18 percent of women in the overall work force.

The organization projects that from 2008 to 2018, the number of direct care workers, which includes those in nursing homes, will grow to 4.3 million from 3.2 million. The percentage of older caregivers is projected to grow to 30 percent from 22 percent.

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Although Gordon Brown is famously a son of the manse and refers often to the importance of his upbringing, David Cameron has described his Anglicanism (in a quote he attributed to Boris Johnson) as “a bit like the reception for Magic FM in the Chilterns: it sort of comes and goes”. They all contributed thoughtful pieces to our recent discussion on citizen ethics, putting their political beliefs into an ethical and moral framework independent of religious belief. Yet like ancient earthworks in the early morning light, the outlines of Britain’s religious past remain discernible even among those who would only describe themselves as cultural Christians. Their shadows explain, for example, why Mrs Thatcher’s most prominent defeat was on Sunday trading, and Tony Blair felt he could not formally convert to Catholicism until after he left office.

The danger is that Anglicanism’s privileges, woven into national institutions, increasingly provoke demands for parity from other faiths. In some constituencies, religious influence is rising. Their demands will be a challenge for the next prime minister, the more pressing if constitutional renewal ”“ and the removal of the bishops from the second chamber ”“ is as high on the agenda as we hope. Dr Rowan Williams observed (before he became archbishop of Canterbury): “We have a special relationship with the cultural life of our country and we must not fall out of step with this if we are not to become absurd and incredible.” It is time to step out, not of public life, but from the legislature.

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The Rev. Fernando Karadima is one of Chile’s most respected and influential priests. Some go so far as to call him a “living saint,” who for half a century trained dozens of priests and helped mold thousands of young Catholics from Santiago’s elite.

Now four men who were once devoted followers have filed a criminal complaint alleging that Father Karadima, now 80, sexually abused them in secret for years.

One man said he had reported the abuse to Father Karadima’s superiors in the archdiocese of Santiago as many as seven years ago, but they took no action. All four men filed formal complaints last year with the archdiocesan tribunal and, receiving no response, spoke publicly for the first time this week.

But the allegations have been largely met not with anger at Father Karadima but with outrage at the accusers by many of his parishioners, a prominent conservative politician and church officials. They say a man so respected over so much time could not possibly have abused his followers, though as the news broke this week, a cardinal here confirmed that the church has been secretly investigating claims of sexual abuse leveled against the priest.

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[BOB] ABERNETHY: The church is a very top-down organization. Are there things that Catholics in the pews can do from the bottom up that might be helpful?

[MARGARET] STEINFELS: Of course it’s top-down, but it’s not the Marine Corps, and I do think that at the parish level, and my own parish, for example, the pastor has dealt with this forthrightly and directly, and I think the people in our pews anyway have a feeling, well, here’s somebody who really understands the problem and who’s prepared to talk about it from the pulpit. I think that is a great benefit to those Catholics who actually still go to Mass. Of course, those who don’t don’t hear that message.

ABERNETHY: So what should Pope Benedict do?

STEINFELS: Well, I think the whole Vatican needs to come to grips with this. They need to get the truth out insofar as they know it. They should get it out quickly, and I guess they should stop blaming the messengers, whoever they may be.

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[University of Illinois basketball coach Bruce] Weber says college coaches are getting involved with possible recruits at an ever-earlier age. “So if it means going to seventh- and eighth-grade games, we are starting to do that,” he says.

But it wasn’t always this way. “I’ve been involved in Division I basketball for 31 years now, and when I first started, we were worried about seniors in high school and that was it,” he says.

“Now there’s the early signing period. It went to juniors, then sophomores — we’ve even had a commitment from a freshman in the last four years, so everything’s accelerated.”

No school wants to lose out on recruits. “I’m not sure it’s good, but it is there,” Weber says. “If you don’t do it, it’s going to hurt you.”

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For the first time, in a meaningful way, the wink-wink, nudge-nudge acceptance of the professional athlete and his murky late-night encounters with women has been replaced by a demand for maturity and accountability. In a shift, it appears that if the boys club is not completely closed, its existence is far less reputable than it once was.

Roethlisberger’s employers, the Steelers, reacted to the incident in Georgia with displeasure even though no criminal charges were filed. Roethlisberger was in the clear legally, but with an organization-wide grimness that underscored the anger of owner Dan Rooney and Art Rooney II. The Steelers acknowledged that the star quarterback had embarrassed the organization. The Rooneys said his behavior would not be tolerated; escaping an arrest did not mean Roethlisberger would escape punishment.

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell handed that down Wednesday. Roethlisberger will be suspended without pay for the first six games and will be required to undergo a comprehensive behavioral evaluation by medical professionals, something that announced publicly should embarrass him to no end.

In the past, players could rely both on their reputations, earned or not, and the reflex of their employers and the public to think the worst of the women involved. It is an advantage players have counted on for years that seems to be diminishing.

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One of the odd features of the Democratic Party is its inability to learn what politics is about. It’s not about winning arguments. It’s about deciding which arguments you are going to have. In the first year of the Obama administration, the Democrats, either wittingly or unwittingly, decided to put the big government-versus-small government debate at the center of American life.

Just as America was leaving the culture war and the war war, the Democrats thrust it back into the government war, only this time nastier and with higher stakes.

This war is like a social script. Once it was activated, everybody fell into their preassigned roles.

As government grew, the antigovernment right mobilized. This produced the Tea Party Movement ”” a characteristically raw but authentically American revolt led by members of the yeoman enterprising class.

As government grew, many moderates and independents (not always the same thing) recoiled in alarm. In 2008, the country was evenly split on whether there should be bigger government with more services or smaller government with fewer services. Now, according to a Pew Research Center poll, the smaller government side has a 10-point edge. Since President Obama’s inauguration, the share of Americans who call themselves liberals (24 percent) has remained flat, but the share who call themselves conservatives (42 percent) has risen by as much as 10 percentage points, according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll, as former moderates have shifted to the antigovernment side.

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Luis Malagon felt blessed when he, his wife and their daughter were offered $11,000 a month to work at a new religious social service agency being planned in Brooklyn. He quit his job as a building inspector in South Carolina in February, put his house up for sale and borrowed money to move to Sunset Park.

Settling into a cramped apartment, they waited for the project to begin on March 1. When it did not, they said, they were summoned to daylong religious services presided over by its leader, the Rev. Isidro Bolaños, who offered harangues and excuses.

Today, the Malagons are out of work, money and time. The paychecks they had been assured were in the mail never arrived, putting them on the verge of eviction. Their New York sojourn has gone from blessing to curse, and they are moving to a relative’s apartment in Florida.

“I have nothing,” said Mr. Malagon, 61. “I feel like an ant. Look at everything we gave up to come here.”

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