Memorial Service Held for Gregory Peck

INDEPENDENT CATHOLIC NEWS, June 16 — Los Angeles' new Our Lady of the Angels Cathedral hosted a June 16 memorial service for screen legend Gregory Peck, who died June 12, Independent Catholic News reported.

Peck, who was 87, died in his sleep at home, leaving Veronique, his wife of 48 years, four children and several grandchildren. The frequent movie hero starred in 52 films.

Peck was born in La Jolla, Calif., in 1916. At age 10, he entered St. John's Roman Catholic Military Academy in Los Angeles, where he briefly considered becoming a priest.

In his second film, The Keys of the Kingdom (1944), Peck won an Academy Award nomination for his performance as a Scottish priest working as a missionary in China.

Pulitzer to Holocaust Denier Might Be Revoked

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, June 11 — In 86 years, no Pulitzer Prize for journalism has ever been revoked — but that might soon change, according to the Associated Press.

The most controversial Pulitzer ever awarded was given in 1932 to New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty, who covered the Soviet Union and doggedly denied the forced famine imposed by Josef Stalin on the Ukraine, which killed approximately 7 million people.

In April, a Pulitzer subcommittee launched its review of Duranty's prize. The 1990 book Stalin's Apologist documents the charge that Duranty knew about famines but did not report on them, fearing it would cut off his personal access to Stalin, whom he famously interviewed years before.

The Times' credibility has been in the spotlight since the Jayson Blair affair earlier this spring. Catholic Eye, a weekly bulletin published by the National Committee of Catholic Laymen, reminded readers May 29 that when Cardinal Bernard Law resigned, the Times editorialized the Boston archbishop had presided over a “disgraceful cover-up.”

But the “newspaper of record” had its own Cardinal Law, Catholic Eye intimated — editor Howell Raines, whose “imperial meddling, diversity obsessions and mercurial management style all made Blair possible.”