Hiroshima marks 66th anniversary of bombing

Ceremony comes as Japan is still dealing with nuclear plant meltdown
HIROSHIMA – Echoing over the crowd of some 50,000 gathered here from around the world, the bell rang eight times. The clock read 8:15 a.m. -- sixty-six years to the minute from the world’s first dropping of the atomic bomb.
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Staking their lives

El Norte still a magnet for desperate migrants, despite increasing dangers on the journey through Mexico
By Barbara Fraser
PALENQUE, MEXICO -- José María Ortiz had forgotten that May 10 was his 23rd birthday until the train pulled into Palenque and he heard mariachis playing “Las Mañanitas” to mark Mexican Mother’s Day. Perched atop a tank car on a train carrying scores of migrants north, his brother, Wilson, 20, gave him the only birthday hug he would get from his family that day.
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Paving stones tell time in St. Peter's Square

By Carol Glatz, Catholic News Service
VATICAN CITY Hidden among the paving stones of St. Peter's Square there is a simple clock and calendar. All you need is a sunny day. The 83-foot stone obelisk in the middle of the square acts as a sundial that can accurately indicate midday and the two solstices thanks to a granite meridian and marble markers embedded in the square.
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Christians nearly absent in Holy Land

LONDON -- By now, the threat facing Christianity in its birthplace is depressingly clear. Christians represented 30 percent of British Mandate Palestine in 1948, while today in Israel and the Palestinian Territories they’re 1.25 percent. The Catholic patriarch of Jerusalem, Fouad Twal, warns that the Holy Land risks becoming a “spiritual Disneyland” -- full of glittering rides and attractions, but empty of its indigenous Christian population.
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Sacrificing children for Catholic identity

By Brian Cahill
COMMENTARY For almost 10 years as the executive director of San Francisco Catholic Charities, I was directly involved in efforts to manage the tension between what our church teaches in the area of sexuality, and how we carried out our mission to serve the poor, the vulnerable and the marginalized. We dealt with many challenges, but the most complex, significant and painful issue was same-sex adoption. Catholic Charities provides a broad range of services to all in need regardless of their faith. Following the 1906 earthquake, finding adoptive homes for orphans was our first program.
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Leading committee authorized rebuke

The U.S. bishops' administrative committee last March unanimously authorized publication of a controversial doctrinal committee statement rebuking Quest for the Living God: Mapping Frontiers in the Theology of God, a book by Catholic theologian Elizabeth Johnson of Fordham University in New York. According to a July 7 letter, the administrative committee "discussed both the content of and the procedure leading up to the statement," which was issued by the bishops' doctrine committee in April.
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More than 3,100 musicians gather to 'sing a new song'

By Marnie McAllister, Catholic News Service
LOUISVILLE, KY. -- More than 3,100 Catholic pastoral musicians from around the United States, Canada and Mexico gathered at the Kentucky International Convention Center in downtown Louisville to prepare for the implementation of the new English translation of the Roman Missal. Parishes around the United States will begin using the new text -- and some new music with it -- for the celebration of Mass Nov. 27, the first Sunday in Advent.
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Study finds US Catholic parishes growing larger, more complex

WASHINGTON -- A new nationwide study of Catholic parish life has found that U.S. parishes continue to get bigger, more complex and more diverse. It reinforces earlier studies on the growth of lay ecclesial ministries and confirms that parish life is increasingly multicultural. In just the past 10 years the average number of registered parishioners per parish has grown 45 percent, from 2,260 in 2000 to 3,277 in 2010, said the study, titled “The Changing Face of U.S. Catholic Parishes.”
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LCWR begins next step in reexamination of religious life

By Monica Clark
Religious life for the majority of U.S. sisters is at a crossroads. An aging membership and a decline in new vocations have communities probing what to do next to sustain their ministries and their way of life. These women sense a new era is emerging and they have decided to embark together on a new way of discerning that future.
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Paving stones tell time in St. Peter's Square

By Carol Glatz, Catholic News Service
VATICAN CITY Hidden among the paving stones of St. Peter's Square there is a simple clock and calendar. All you need is a sunny day. The 83-foot stone obelisk in the middle of the square acts as a sundial that can accurately indicate midday and the two solstices thanks to a granite meridian and marble markers embedded in the square.
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Editorial: Holy Land's Christians need our action and advocacy

By An NCR Editorial
French intellectual Régis Debray, a committed progressive who once fought alongside Che Guevara, has observed that the embattled Christian minority in the Middle East represents a "blind spot" in the West's view of the world -- too Christian to concern the left, too foreign to engage the right.
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The John Jay Study: What it is and what it isn't

By Mary Gail Frawley O'Dea
The publication of the most recent John Jay study of sexual abuse in the church has been met by predictably impassioned binary responses. It is always difficult to speak dispassionately about sexual abuse; the crimes at issue involve passion, denial by perpetrators is standard fare, and brittle experiences of new betrayal are at the ready for victims expecting their suffering to be minimized. It is worth trying, however, to put passion aside temporarily to make room for reason. I hope to do a little of that here.
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