Our Takes Daily

Pope opens Year of St. Paul

Reuters

Pope Benedict XVI called for Christian unity as he launch a year dedicated to St. Paul on Saturday at the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls in Rome. The jubilee year will run until June 29, 2009. (For OSV resources on the Year of St. Paul, click here.) The pontiff was joined by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, the spiritual head of worldwide Orthodoxy, which split from the Roman Catholic Church in 1054. More info here>>

U.S. archbishop to head Vatican court

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Archbishop Raymond Burke, who up until Friday headed the Archdiocese of St. Louis, has been named to the Vatican’s highest judicial court — Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura. He is the second American prelate picked by Pope Benedict XVI to help govern the Church. In 2005, the pope named Archbishop William Levada of San Francisco to head the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and then elevated him to cardinal. More info here>>

Disposing of dads

MercatorNet

In this essay, commentator Jennifer Roback Morse reports on the efforts in Canada and Britain to make fatherhood redundant. In the UK, Parliament revoked a rule requiring fertility clinics to consider a child’s need for a father before inseminating unmarried women. In British Columbia, birth certificates have spaces for the biological mother, but not for the father. Rather, the documents lists “other parent.” Making same-sex parenting equally acceptable as opposite-sex parenting requires that the public believe that mothers and fathers are interchangeable. And when that happens, she says, fathers are pushed aside. This has dire consequences for boys and girls alike, including early sexual activity and juvenile delinquency. More info here>>