The story included a quote by Cardinal Napier seemingly challenging the right of Pope Francis to appoint members of a commission to draft the synod on the family's final document.

But after Cardinal Napier protested, examination of a recording of an interview he gave revealed a journalist was speaking while the cardinal was saying a key word.

Cardinal Napier was stressing he was not challenging the Pope's right to appoint members.

The quote was removed from the story after the cardinal's protest.

While Allen did not write the article, he oversaw its publication and had listened to the interview before the story went public.

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This year Easter remains the spiritual linchpin, but in popular terms it's more like a warm-up act for next Sunday's double-play canonisations of Popes John XXIII and John Paul II.

This will be the first time two popes have been declared saints in the same ceremony, and although projections vary, well over a million people could turn out in Rome to watch history being made, with millions more following the event on TV or over the Internet.

Here are five things to know about the biggest Vatican happening of early 2014.

First, putting these two popes together amounts to a call for unity between the church's liberal and conservative wings.

In the Catholic street, John XXIII is an icon of the left, remembered as the pope who launched the reforming Second Vatican Council and opened the Church to the modern world.

John Paul II is a hero to the right, the pope who brought down Communism, who fought what he called a "culture of death" behind liberalising currents on abortion and other life issues, and who insisted on strong Catholic identity vis-à-vis secular pressures to water down the faith. Continue reading.

Source: The Boston Globe

Image: Jeunes-Cathos

One wonders, however, if an accountant would reach the same conclusion.

When it comes to the financial dimension of Catholic life, there are certainly some deep pockets out there. Just to offer a few examples:

• The University of Notre Dame, America's flagship Catholic university, has an annual budget of $1.2 billion and an endowment estimated at $7.5 billion.
• The Archdiocese of Chicago last year reported cash, investments and buildings valued at $2.472 billion.
• The Knights of Columbus has more than $85 billion of life insurance in force, with $8 billion in annual sales.
• In Rome, the Institute for the Works of Religion, known popularly (if, some say, inaccurately) as the "Vatican Bank," administers assets in excess of $6 billion.
• American Catholics drop more than $8 billion every year into the Sunday collection plate, which works out to more than $150 million a week.
• In Germany, the Catholic church netted $8.8 billion in 2010 from the national "church tax," allowing it to remain the country's largest private employer after Volkswagen.

Simply ticking off those dollar amounts, however, two points are easy to miss. Read more

Sources

• John L Allen Jr in National Catholic Reporter
• Image: Web Gallery of Art

Yet whenever the church tries to say something on economics, it faces a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" dilemma about whether or not to get concrete.

If the church sticks to abstract principles, it's accused of being pie in the sky and irrelevant. If it endorses specific policy proposals, it's accused of exceeding its competence, blurring the lines between church and state, and confusing prudential judgment with dogmatic certainty.

Too much specificity courts other risks too:

• Ideological criticism from the left or the right, depending upon whose ox is being gored. (A variant is ideological cherry-picking; sort of like Kennedy and the Khrushchev letter, both conservatives and liberals tend to focus on what they like in Catholic social teaching and pretend the other stuff doesn't exist.)
• Media focus on the most sensational policy stance, usually distorting the big picture. (Remember reaction to Benedict XVI's call for global governance in his 2009 encyclical Caritas in Veritate? To read paranoid anti-globalist blogs, you might have started scanning the horizon for black helicopters bearing the papal coat of arms.)

Given that this briar patch seems basically unavoidable, what's the church to do? As it happens, a new document from the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, entitled "Vocation of the Business Leader", hints at an intriguing solution.

In a sound-bite, the idea is to be didactic on principle but interrogatory on policy. The church may not have to offer specific answers; perhaps it's enough to frame the right questions. Think of it as Catholic social teaching, Socrates-style.

The 32-page document is designed as a vade-mecum, or practical handbook, for business leaders trying to integrate their faith with their work. It was presented on March 30 by Cardinal Peter Turkson, a Ghanian who serves as president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, at an assembly of 2,000 Catholic businesspeople in Lyon, France. Continue reading

Sources

• John L Allen Jr. in National Catholic Reporter
• Image: Catholic News Agency