Vatican

A Baltimore nun said she will abide by a Vatican order to end her ministry to gay and lesbian Roman Catholics, but will work to have the ban overturned.Sister Jeannine Gramick, who said until recently she had not decided whether she would obey the Vatican, said she felt it was wiser in the long run to work within the structures of the Roman Catholic Church."While I see no benefits for lesbian and gay Catholics and their parents if I passively accept the [Vatican] decision, I believe it is more beneficial to minister on their behalf with the blessing of Church leadership than without it," she said in a statement.

ROME - Many Vatican officials, conservative and liberal alike, say that it will take a sweeping reform of the priesthood to stop pedophile scandals such as those in the United States recently. The liberals want better psychological screening and revamped training in seminaries. The conservatives shift the focus elsewhere, saying that most victims are teen-age boys, not young children, and so the true solution is to make the priesthood less welcoming to gays. Priests who said this made clear they were not suggesting that gays were any more likely to be pedophiles.

For decades, the Roman Catholic Church has quietly tolerated closeted gay priests. But recent comments by Vatican officials indicate that they connect the scandal over sexual abuse of minors with a high number of homosexual priests because the victims are overwhelmingly male and adolescent. Experts say there is no proven connection between homosexuality and child abuse, and gay priests and lay Catholics worry that they are being targeted as scapegoats. Some fear a Vatican ban on admitting gay candidates to seminaries.

ROME - Acknowledging that the pontiff's recovery has been slow, the Vatican said yesterday that Pope John Paul II is now receiving nutrition through a feeding tube in his nose to give him strength. Public audiences with the pope will be canceled until further notice, the Vatican said. It was the Vatican's first public statement on the frail pope's health in nearly three weeks, amid growing concern over his ability to continue his papal duties. The announcement came shortly after Pope John Paul appeared at his apartment window above St. Peter's Square and, for the second time in four days, failed in an attempt to speak to the crowd below.

Everybody has an image of angels, those nice looking young people with wings who fly around in heaven and hobnob with the Holy Family and the saints in religious art.But what are angels? Where do they come from? What do they do? And why are they so popular now, as everything from recent books to TV series attests?Such questions are occasioned by "The Invisible Made Visible: Angels from the Vatican," the exhibit that opens at the Walters Art Gallery today. A traveling show selected to demonstrate the breadth of the Vatican collections, it contains 98 works of art dating from a ninth- century B.C. Assyrian stone carving to a 1977 painting by Salvador Dali.

Let's say the CEO of your company is retiring, but he's going to keep an office at headquarters and the services of the same secretary as the new guy. Awkward! Or how about working at a company where the boss just decided you can no longer work from home, a godsend once you had kids, even as she brings her baby to the nursery she built for him next to her office. Meow! This past week was a veritable schadenfreude-fest for those of us who love nothing more than complaining about our work — unless it's discovering how delightfully awful someone else's office must be. So, the Vatican: On top of the usual workplace issues that must plague the Roman Catholic Church's corporate offices — there's that impenetrable glass ceiling for any women employees, for one thing — this past week brought word of a leadership transition from, um, hell.

Oasta eaters have their own patron saint. So do tax collectors, beggars, seekers of lost articles, supporters of lost causes, students, people with sore throats or troubled marriages. St. Giles guides the disabled, St. Expedito aids the procrastinator, St. Raphael will get a friendship back on track. But cyberspace, so far, is saintless. Now, as more people spend more time surfing the captivating but sometimes soulless ocean of information on the World Wide Web, there's a movement under way urging the Vatican to name a patron saint of the Internet.

BEIJING - Catholics who want to attend Mass in China's capital can visit the government-sanctioned South Cathedral without fear of harassment. But Catholics who want to celebrate Mass without restrictions, or talk freely about the conclave in Vatican City that will choose the next pope, are better off going someplace else. South Cathedral is also not the place to hear their bishop take issue with government practices at odds with Vatican precepts, including China's one-child policy and the widespread use of the death penalty.

A Baltimore-based priest who, along with a nun, was ordered by the Vatican this week to end a ministry to gay and lesbian Catholics, said yesterday that he believes he has never flouted church teaching but will abide by the decision.The Rev. Robert Nugent, and Sister Jeannine Gramick, also of Baltimore, were ordered Tuesday to end their nearly 30-year ministry to gays and lesbians because they failed to explicitly state that a homosexual orientation is "disordered" and that homosexual acts are intrinsically evil.

It was just a year and a half ago that Pope John Paul II uttered his historic prayer of repentance in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, asking God for forgiveness for sins committed by Christians against Jews. Two weeks later, the pope prayed at the Western Wall in Jerusalem and, before leaving, placed a copy of that repentance plea in a crevice. The two events were profound symbols of how far, after centuries of acrimony and persecution, the Roman Catholic Church had come in its relationship to Judaism.