reuters
Supreme Court justices on Tuesday appeared divided over a bid by a man sentenced to death to have his pastor lay hands on him during his execution in Texas in a case testing how far states must go to accommodate religious requests by condemned inmates.
The justices heard more than 90 minutes of oral arguments in John Henry Ramirez’s appeal after Texas officials refused his request to let his Christian pastor touch him and audibly pray as he dies from the lethal injection and lower courts refused to issue a stay of execution.
The court, which has wrestled in recent years over the religious rights of death row inmates, has a 6-3 conservative majority. Some of the conservative justices raised questions about the sincerity of Ramirez’s religious request and how siding with him might affect future cases. The court’s liberal justices appeared to sympathize with Ramirez, who was not contesting his guilt in the appeal.
France’s Catholic Church said on Monday it would sell its real estate and, if needed, take out loans to set up a fund to compensate thousands of people sexually abused by clergy.
A major investigation found in October that French clerics sexually abused more than 200,000 children over the past 70 years.
Holding aloft crosses bearing the names of murdered women, hundreds of people marched in Mexico’s capital on Wednesday to protest violence against women amidst a steady nationwide increase in femicides.
Chanting “we are your voice,” organizers used megaphones to read out the names of murdered women in downtown Mexico City.
The “Day of Dead Women” march took place a day after Mexico’s national holiday Day of the Dead. About 500 people took part in the protest, according to a Reuters witness.
The Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a bid by a Catholic hospital in California to avoid a lawsuit over its refusal to let its facilities be used to perform a hysterectomy on a transgender patient who sought the procedure as a part of gender transition from female to male.
The justices turned away an appeal by Mercy San Juan Medical Center, a Sacramento-area hospital owned by Dignity Health, and let stand a lower court ruling that revived Evan Minton’s lawsuit accusing it of intentionally discriminating against him in violation of California law because he is transgender.
The justices on Monday also bolstered a Roman Catholic-led challenge to a New York state requirement that health insurance policies provided by employers cover abortion services. The justices told a lower court to reconsider its decision to throw out a bid by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany and other plaintiffs to widen an existing religious exemption to a 2017 state regulation that requires health insurance policies to cover “medically necessary” abortions.
Cypriot artist George Gavriel almost lost his job as a high school headmaster after his works depicting Jesus in unconventional settings and also taking a swipe at politicians drew the wrath of religious and government leaders.
Gavriel, 62, uses his art as a protest medium to take aim at what he considers the ills of society.
President Joe Biden will meet with Pope Francis on Oct. 29 before attending a two-day summit of G-20 leaders in Rome where he hopes to reach agreement on a Global Minimum Tax of 15 percent, White House officials said on Thursday.
On the second foreign trip of his presidency, Biden will then attend the U.N. climate conference known as COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland, from Nov. 1-2 and announce “key actions” on the conference's top themes, including goals for fighting climate change and forest and land use, one White House official told Reuters.
Pope Francis on Sunday launched a two-year worldwide consultative process that could change the way the Roman Catholic Church makes decisions and leave its mark long after his pontificate is over.
Proponents see the initiative called “For a Synodal Church: Communion, Participation and Mission” as an opportunity to change the church’s power dynamics and give a greater voice to lay Catholics, including women, and people on the margins of society.
Conservatives say the three-stage process is a waste of time, may erode the hierarchical structure of the 1.3 billion member church, and in the long run could dilute traditional doctrine.
The church had shown "deep, total and even cruel indifference for years," protecting itself rather than the victims of what was systemic abuse, said Jean-Marc Sauve, head of the commission that compiled the report.
The Supreme Court’s new nine-month term, which begins on Monday, promises to be among the most momentous in generations. The justices are poised to decide major cases that could roll back abortion rights and broaden gun and religious rights.
Here is a look at some of cases the court will decide during the term, which runs through the end of next June.
The House of Representatives passed HR 4, known as the John Lewis Voting Rights Advacement Act, 219-212, which faith leaders and other voting rights advocates believe is a crucial step in voter protection.
“Tireless hours by members of Congress and civil rights leaders have brought the issue of federally mandated voter suppression to the forefront of conversations around American democracy,” Rev. Al Sharpton said in a news release through March On For Voting Rights. “This is only the start of the fight to move farther and farther away from the Jim Crow Era.”
The United Nations panel on climate change told the world on Monday that global warming was dangerously close to being out of control – and that humans were “unequivocally” to blame.
Already, greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere are high enough to guarantee climate disruption for decades if not centuries, the report from the scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned.
Former Roman Catholic Cardinal Theodore McCarrick has been charged with sexual assault, Massachusetts court records show, the first time that the defrocked priest has faced criminal prosecution after multiple claims of sexual abuse.
A lengthy Vatican report released in November 2020 found that McCarrick had risen through the church's ranks despite persistent rumors of sexual misconduct, including a 2000 promotion to the position of archbishop of Washington, D.C, by Pope John Paul II.
A Reuters analysis of emergency applications over the past 12 months offers a glimpse into the full range of parties seeking urgent relief from the top U.S. judicial body through the shadow docket. The justices have increasingly relied upon this process to make rulings in a wide array of cases without the normal deliberative process involving public oral arguments and extensive written decisions.
“Let us put a halt to the frantic running around dictated by our agendas. Let us learn how to take a break, to turn off the mobile phone,” Pope Francis said in his weekly address from a window overlooking St. Peter’s Square.
A federal judge found the U.S. government 60 percent responsible for a 2017 mass shooting that killed 26 people at a rural Texas church, where a former Air Force serviceman used firearms he should not have been allowed to purchase.
U.S. District Judge Xavier Rodriguez ruled on Tuesday that the Air Force did not use reasonable care when it failed to record Devin Patrick Kelley's plea to domestic violence charges in a database used for background checks on firearms purchases.
He said the government bears "significant responsibility" for harm to victims of the Nov. 5, 2017 massacre at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, TX.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday endorsed two Republican-backed ballot restrictions in Arizona that a lower court found had disproportionately burdened Black, Latino and Native American voters, handing a defeat to voting rights advocates and Democrats who had challenged the measures.
The 6-3 ruling, with the court's conservative justices in the majority, held that the restrictions on early ballot collection by third parties and where absentee ballots may be cast did not violate the Voting Rights Act, a landmark 1965 federal law that prohibits racial discrimination in voting.
A different type of participant dropped in on Pope Francis' general audience at the Vatican on Wednesday: Spider-Man.
A man dressed in a full, skin-tight, red, black and blue costume of the comic book and film character — including head cover — sat in the VIP section of the audience in Vatican's San Damaso Courtyard.
Indigenous leaders and school survivors on Sunday dismissed Pope Francis' expressions of pain at the discovery of 215 children's remains at a former Catholic residential school in Canada, saying the church needed to do much more.
In his weekly blessing in St. Peter's Square on Sunday, Francis said he was pained by the news about the former school for indigenous students and called for respect for the rights and cultures of native peoples. But he stopped short of the direct apology some Canadians had demanded.
My professors in journalism school taught me to avoid passive voice as often as possible. They taught me that passive voice gets in the way of giving readers a clear view of who did what. Passive voice may be innocuously overlooked in many instances (for example, in this sentence, I didn’t tell you who was doing the overlooking), but more often using it risks confusion and obscurity — and these aren’t exactly journalistic values.
“If we say that God is love, I cannot tell people who embrace loyalty, unity, and responsibility to each other that theirs is not love, that it's a fifth-or sixth-class love” said Christian Olding, a priest in the western city of Geldern.