Signs Of the Times

On Oct. 20 the Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI) Vatican Foundation will honor the American Jesuit Brian E. Daley, a professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame.

There are few issues in the 2012 presidential campaign on which the major candidates have more clearly differentiated opinions.

The 2012 Farm Bill became a casualty of this election season’s often rancorous budget debate.

The German bishops’ conference defended a decree that said Catholics who stop paying a church membership tax cannot receive sacraments.

Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga called young people between 18 and 24 “an amazing pool of talent we must tap into if we are to relieve poverty in our lifetime.”

In a speech to the UN, President Obama argued that in protecting free speech, even blasphemy must be tolerated.

A spiritual absence within Western secularism underlies the global economic crisis, Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, head of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, told Canada’s bishops on Sept. 25. • On Sept. 25 Lebanese Christian and Muslim leaders called for the formation of a legal committee

Archbishop Dominique Mamberti called for the creation of a nuclear weapons free zone in the Middle East and elsewhere to demonstrate that “global security must not rely on nuclear weapons.”

When Pope Benedict XVI stepped off the plane in Beirut on Sept. 14, he said he had come to Lebanon as a “pilgrim of peace.”