A Dec. 16 Catholic News Service story looks at a new book released at the Vatican that “shows how the very idea of such apparitions has been met with skepticism and preoccupation within the church, from early Christian times to the present.” In fact, as few as nine of the 2,400 recorded Marian apparitions have been approved […]

Read a December 2011 story published in the Huffington Post about Pope Benedict XVI’s connection between the world economic crisis and the lack of religious faith.

Read a Sept. 24, 2008, Catholic News Service story about an article in L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican’s official newspaper, citing failed governmental policies in Washington as the cause of the meltdown and calling for a more transparent system with better regulation to make the economy more equitable.

See the text of Pope Benedict XVI’s Nov. 7, 2008, address on organ donation and defining death.

Pope Benedict XVI delivered an address to a Vatican conference on organ donation in which he said that “where certainty has not been reached the principle of precaution must prevail.” Read about the address in an Nov. 7, 2008, article posted by Reuters.

Catholic teaching on the definition of death and the ethics of organ harvesting appears to be in flux. In the latter half of 2008 the issue came to the fore when the Vatican newspaper published a front-page column calling for a re-examination of the definition of brain death. Read an article about the letter posted by the […]

Read the  a Feb. 2010 story on the pope’s 2010 message for Lent from Catholic News Service.

Justice was the central theme of the pontiff’s Lenten message for 2010. Read the text of the message at the Vatican’s website.

Pope Benedict XVI focused on the the traditional themes of fasting, almsgiving and prayer in his Lenten message for 2011. “The practice of almsgiving is a reminder of God’s primacy and turns our attention towards others,” Benedict writes.