Latin’s revival

VATICAN CITY — Surprisingly, the pope’s own Latinist had nothing to do with the recent birth of Latin on the Vatican’s official Web site.
Wisconsin native Carmelite Father Reginald Foster told CNS the other day he didn’t have a hand in the birth of the new “Sancta Sedes” section on www.vatican.va, but he said he was thrilled [...]

Revisiting ‘do space aliens have souls?’

This week’s comments by the Vatican’s astronomer on whether space aliens would need Christ’s redemption is not the first time the church has examined the topic. Our Carol Glatz in Rome wrote a story two and a half years ago headlined “Do space aliens have souls? Inquiring minds can check Jesuit’s book.”
VATICAN CITY (CNS) — [...]

Water for life

VATICAN CITY — The Vatican has just announced a press conference next Monday to unveil its pavilion at this summer’s Expo Zaragoza 2008. Like the international exposition, the theme of the Vatican pavilion will be water.
It’s a topic that has appeared with increasing frequency on the Vatican’s radar in recent years, with Vatican agencies and academies [...]

Pick a pope calendar

VATICAN CITY — The Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, has just released its 2009 calendar. Well, actually, it’s just released two calendars for 2009.
One features what the newspaper calls “the most beautiful photographs of His Holiness Benedict XVI” – strolling while praying the rosary, kissing babies, kneeling in prayer – and the other, “the most beautiful photographs of [...]

Chinese at the Vatican

It’s not every day that the Vatican newspaper runs its lead story in Chinese.
Yet there it was in today’s edition of L’Osservatore Romano, a top-of-the-front-page treatment of Pope Benedict’s speech to members of China’s Philharmonic Orchestra and the Shanghai Opera House Chorus — in a Chinese translation.
It was the first time the newspaper had published a papal text so [...]

Judges and Catholic teaching

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, probably the best known Catholic judge in the country, recently sat down for an interview with Tim Russert at MSNBC, saying among other things that his religion had “nothing at all” to do with strict interpretation of the Constitution.
Over at dotCommonweal, David Gibson started an interesting discussion about Scalia’s argument that there’s no such [...]

Manna from heaven

VATICAN CITY — The Vatican Press Office has been making some notable upgrades recently: high-def plasma televisions in the newsroom, a big digital wall clock, a coffee machine, and now a vending machine (right) that dispenses sugary sweets and fizzy drinks — all at LOW LOW prices.
Many Vatican journalists spend a large chunk of their day at [...]

The Vatican’s big red book

VATICAN CITY — The Annuario Pontificio is the Vatican’s bureaucratic bible. It lists every diocese and bishop in the world, all Roman Curia offices and their personnel, the diplomatic corps at the Holy See, the world’s religious orders, pontifical academies and universities, a statistical summary and much, much more.
This year’s Annuario weighed in at 3 pounds and 2,511 [...]

Rocking the Mormon world

Sometimes it is easy to predict when a CNS story is going to stir a huge buzz in the blogosphere, and that was certainly the case with our story last week on the Vatican’s effort to block posthumous rebaptisms by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as the Mormon or LDS church. [...]

No ‘Time’ for the pope

Time magazine has published its annual list of the 100 people it believes are most influential in the world. The Dalai Lama, leader of the world’s Tibetan Buddhists, is there. So is Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople. But Pope Benedict XVI was not among the Time editors’ choices.
He was, however, 60th in the poll [...]