JUBA, Southern Sudan — Breaking away from a government that imposes Islamic law may be a strong motivation in southern Sudan’s secession vote this week.

But the region, which has a significant Catholic population, may have a difficult future as an independent country. Nine out of 10 people live on less than $1 a day. Most of the land is either scrub or swamp. Half the people receive some form of international humanitarian assistance. And most people are illiterate.

Twenty-two years of war with the largely Islamic north of Sudan have taken a toll, not to speak of the 2 million civilians killed in the conflict. Cynical as it sounds, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir has a point when he...READ MORE

Audrey Assad, a 27-year-old Phoenix-based singer-songwriter, isn’t afraid to lay bare her soul in music and in her relationship with God. It’s from that point of vulnerability that her success as a Catholic/Christian musician was born. Assad’s love of literature, the works of Catholic intellectual writers and poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins and Francis Thompson, and feelings even today of “not quite fitting in” form the basis for her surprise hit CD, The House You’re Building, released last July by Sparrow Records. The standout track “Restless” comes from St. Augustine’s Confessions and addresses her own restlessness and that of a generation whose “relationships have increased in numbers and...READ MORE

Dr. Vincent Fortanasce knows the field of medicine as well as anyone. He has studied psychiatry at Yale, neurology at the University of Southern California and orthopedic rehabilitation at Rancho Los Amigos Hospital, one of the top rehab centers in the country. He has spent decades treating thousands of patients, including world-class athletes and celebrities.

Many people have become familiar with Fortanasce by reading bestselling books, the most recent of which is The Anti-Alzheimer’s Prescription, released in 2008. Others know him from his shows on bioethics for St. Joseph Radio Presents. He fought against California’s pro-embryonic stem-cell research Proposition 71 and has debated...READ MORE

This past November, President Obama signed an executive order that continues the so-called Charitable Choice program, which permits federal monetary grants to social-service organizations without regard to religion.

The program, which was begun during the Clinton administration, was a brainchild of Professor Carl Esbeck, a law professor at the University of Missouri School of Law. The program allows religious groups to compete for federal grants with other, secular institutions. It has endured, essentially with no changes, through the Bush and Obama administrations.

Among other features, the new executive order clarifies that in applying for federal grants, religious organizations may...READ MORE

ELKTON, Md. — A priest who exemplified the Church’s task of bringing both truth and love to those with same-sex attraction, Father John Harvey, has died at the age of 92.

Father Harvey died Dec. 27, the feast of St. John the Evangelist, at Union Hospital in Elkton, Md. A Philadelphia native, he was an Oblate of St. Francis de Sales for 73 years and a priest for 66.

Father Harvey in 1980 founded Courage, a ministry of the Archdiocese of New York that grew into an apostolate with support groups in 13 countries. He stepped down as executive director just two years ago.

Father Harvey, a moral theologian by training, became controversial in spite of himself by urging those with homosexual...READ MORE

LAHORE, Pakistan — Archbishop Lawrence Saldanha, president of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Pakistan, has joined the mourners paying tributes to Salman Taseer, the governor of Punjab province who was assassinated today for his opposition to the Islamic blasphemy law.

Taseer, 66, was shot by his security guard when he emerged from lunch at a restaurant in Lahore, the capital of Punjab province.

After pumping nine bullets into the governor, Malik Mumtaz Hussain Qadri lay down his gun, claiming that he carried it out to avenge his stand on the controversial blasphemy law.

“I killed the governor because he termed the blasphemy law as kala kanoon (black law),” Qadri told the police...READ MORE

WASHINGTON — While health-care reform legislation and other policies out of Washington in 2010 present new threats to unborn life, people who are working to give women alternatives to abortion are facing new obstacles.

The majority of obstacles are legislative, such as cuts to abstinence-education funding under the Obama administration, and governors’ vetoes of state-level pro-life legislation.

There are also new attempts to regulate crisis-pregnancy centers, such as a bill in New York City that has been held up in committee. New York Int. 0371-2010 would require each crisis-pregnancy center to disclose to clients that it does not provide “abortion or FDA-approved contraceptive drugs and...READ MORE

Resilience.

This single word aptly describes the Catholic clergy and faithful of Chicago, particularly at Holy Name Cathedral.

In just two years, this community has twice endured the closing of their church for months at a time.

In February of 2008, a large piece of the cathedral’s decorative ceiling fell to the floor and required every square foot of the roof to be restored and refitted (23,000 pieces in all). 

Not even a year later, an early-morning fire ravaged the church’s roof, destroying many recent repairs and leaving more than a foot of water in the sanctuary.

Amidst the utter destruction, however, hid a silver lining.

Engineers and firefighters later relayed that without...READ MORE