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JERUSALEM (CNS) – Booklets claiming that the Vatican helped organize tours of the Auschwitz concentration camp for Hezbollah members to teach them how to wipe out Jews were distributed to Israeli soldiers for several months before Israeli military officials suspended the distribution.

WASHINGTON – If coverage of abortion is not excluded in health care reform legislation, Catholics should refuse to pay their taxes, anti-abortion activist Randall Terry said.

WASHINGTON – Pope Benedict XVI “has a vision of the human person that transcends seeing us as economic units or raw units to be used for biotechnical development,” said John Haas, president of the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Philadelphia.

Too often we hear people saying that we are in a crisis of vocations, and that the number of priests is too small for the huge needs of the church. Is that true? Well, it depends how one sees reality.

The Catholic Church in her Catechism teaches, “Among the Christian faithful by divine institution there exist in the Church sacred ministers, who are also called clerics.” (#934). The exact meaning of priestly titles and offices in this divine institution, however, would develop over time. In the documents of the early church there are scattered references to priestly ministry, although the word “priest” was rarely used. In this period there was no clear distinction between what we would recognize today as priest and bishop. The ministry of this bishop/priest was understood as essential to the life of the faithful, guaranteed by its being handed down through the ceremony of ordination. During this period the leadership of each local Christian community was in the hands of one Bishop aided and advised by a body of priests.

In February, a religious portrait of African-Americans was released. Its major reference was the “Pew Forum U.S. Religious Landscape Survey.” The report’s overview discusses research that indicates that “while the United States is generally considered a highly religious nation, African-Americans are markedly more religious on a variety of measures than the U.S. populations as a whole, including level of affiliation with a religion, attendance at religious services, frequency of prayer and religion’s importance in life. Compared with other racial and ethnic groups, African-Americans are among the most likely to report a formal religious affiliation, with fully 87 percent of African-Americans describing themselves as belonging to one religious group or another, according to the survey, conducted in 2007 by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life.

Through the good graces of Bill and MaryAnn Albaugh I was invited to give the invocation before the Towson Fourth of July Parade. I received a number of requests for that prayer, so I thought I would reprint it, along with some additional commentary.

Natural Family Planning Awareness Week is July 19-25 highlighting the anniversary of the papal encyclical “Humanae Vitae” (July 25) which articulates Catholic beliefs about human sexuality, conjugal love and responsible parenthood.