In a seriously buzzkill message, Bishop Thomas Tobin issued a pastoral letter to his brothers and sisters in the Ocean State suggesting they might want to decline invitations once same-sex marriage becomes official in August. "It is important to affirm the teaching of the Church, based on God’s word, that 'homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered,' (Catechism of the Catholic Church, #2357)," he writes, "and always sinful. And because 'same-sex marriages' are clearly contrary to God’s plan for the human family, and therefore objectively sinful, Catholics should examine their consciences very carefully before deciding whether or not to endorse same-sex relationships or attend same-sex ceremonies, realizing that to do so might harm their relationship with God and cause significant scandal to others."

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In the last century, no one icon has improved the Catholic brand as much as the small woman who founded the Missionaries of Charity, whose image aligns beautifully with that of the new pope. In March a team of Canadian researchers noted the opportunity: “What could be better than beatification followed by canonization of [Mother Teresa] to revitalize the Church and inspire the faithful, especially at a time when churches are empty and the Roman authority is in decline?”

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Hale worked as a physical education teacher at Bishop Watterson High School for close to 20 years, and when news of her termination spread, students started a petition to have her job reinstated. Hale has also filed a legal claim seeking her job back, and a city ordinance may put the law on her side.

As the Columbus Dispatch reports:

A Columbus city ordinance makes it a misdemeanor for an employer to discriminate against an employee based on sexual orientation. City law also states that an employer cannot have a policy that discriminates based on sexual orientation. Those who are found guilty could face up to 180 days in jail and a $1,000 fine...

Napoleon Bell, executive director of the city’s Community Relations Commission, said the city law has no exemption for religious organizations.

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After years of operating on campus without incident, the group, Boston College Students for Sexual Health, received a letter in March from the administration, ordering them to stop giving out free condoms and sexual health education kits to students.

According to The New York Times, the letter explained that "the distribution of condoms is not congruent" with the values and traditions of Boston College:

While we understand that you may not be intentionally violating university policy, we do need to advise you that, should we receive any reports that you are, in fact, distributing condoms on campus, the matter would be referred to the student conduct office for disciplinary action by the university.

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The role that American religious right leaders have played in fomenting anti-gay bigotry in Uganda has been well-documented, but never before with the emotional punch delivered by God Loves Uganda, a new documentary by Academy Award-winning director Roger Ross Williams that premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

“I love Uganda,” says Kapya Koama in the film’s opening words. But, “something frightening is happening that has the potential to destroy Uganda.”

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Mortensen’s non-plan looks a lot like a plan to me, although maybe not an entirely conscious one. He has used the worldwide fame he earned for playing Aragorn (son of Arathorn) in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy to declare his independence from the celebrity economy and follow his own idiosyncratic career path, which has included painting, poetry, music and three films with David Cronenberg, including an Oscar-nominated turn as a brutal Ukrainian mobster in “Eastern Promises.”

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But the church is not just the hierarchy, and as the spectacle of the last several days has demonstrated, there are millions or billions of people around the world -- Catholics and non-Catholics alike -- who wish the newly elected Pope Francis well and yearn to see in him the possibility of hope and renewal for this ancient, powerful and heavily tarnished institution that claims direct succession from the apostles of Jesus. As the first Latin American pope and the first Jesuit pope, Francis represents a break with tradition in several ways. Both the name he has chosen and his personal modesty and humility are meant to recall St. Francis of Assisi, one of the most adored figures in the Christian tradition, and no doubt also St. Francis de Sales, a 17th-century mystic, author and ascetic known for his devotion to the poor.

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The videos were compiled by the editors of The I Files, the new investigative channel on YouTube. But this is just our take. We’d like to hear from you about any stories that you think we’ve overlooked.

For news on the latest breaking investigations, you can subscribe to The I Files channel. You’ll get up-to-date notices on the best stories from a range of established and independent news sources. No spam or cat videos. We promise.

“NSA Whistle-Blower Tells All,” Laura Poitras

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If you'd been holding your breath hoping for a fresh new bro pope, a younger dude with a marginally less offensive attitude toward some of the most deeply controversial and divisive issues among Catholics today, your ship did not come in on Wednesday. The 76-year-old Argentine Bergoglio, the first pope to hail from the Americas, has reportedly called same-sex marriage "a machination of the Father of Lies that seeks to confuse and deceive the children of God." So that'd be a no. He's not down with abortion under any circumstances, which he says contributes to a "culture of death," and has publicly clashed with Argentina's President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner over the country's plan to distribute free birth control. But according to a report in the Guardian, he is, however, open to contraception as a form of preventing disease. And though he's firmly denied it, he's been accused of complicity in a 1976 kidnapping of two priests during the country's military regime.

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It's been a fun rumspringa. We popeless hordes spent this past Friday eating roast beef like it wasn't even Lent. We've been forgetting every word of the Nicene creed. We've had impure thoughts. So, so many impure thoughts. We've worn black patent leather shoes that gleamed right up to our underpants. We might even have been gay for a few minutes there on Saturday. Talk about your joyful mysteries. We haven't rocked like that since 2005, and before that, 1978. (Remember that, the year we had two popes? And it was the disco era? We'll be in purgatory a long time for that one.)

But now, with the emergence of white smoke from the Vatican – which, by the way, tells you exactly how metal we Catholics truly are – it's back to business. We hope the new guy is all right, tough but fair. We hope the Cardinals don't notice how much sacramental wine is missing, and that they buy it when we say the True Cross was always splintered like that. Coming soon: the ensemble comedy based on our adventures. It's called "POPE BREAK." So thanks for the good times, everybody. And see you again in 10 years or so. I'll bring the incense.

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A Catholic organization has set up a website, www.popealarm.com, that lets people register to receive a text or email notification when a pope has been selected.

While the process of selecting a new pope is as old as the ages, there are enough changes to the media to make the last papal conclave — in 2005 — seem like ancient history.

The text service was set up by the Fellowship of Catholic University Students, or FOCUS, and had proven so popular with more than 40,000 respondents that the popealarm website said Monday it was accepting no new registrants. The site hopes to increase its capacity before the cardinals begin voting, said Jeremy Rivera, spokesman for the Christian campus ministry.

"When the smoke goes up, you'll know what's going down" is the website's motto.

FOCUS paid nearly $10,000 to set up the free service, figuring it was good publicity. Now the group's leaders are sifting through co-sponsorship offers from other organizations impressed with the amount of online traffic it has generated and hoping for their own exposure, he said.

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Frank Bruni’s recent op-ed on clerical celibacy states in no uncertain terms that “celibacy is a bad idea with painful consequences.”

“The pledge of celibacy that the church requires of its servants is an often cruel and corrosive thing,” he writes. “It runs counter to human nature.” People need companionship, including bodily companionship, and it’s plainly unnatural to ask them to forego it for an entire lifetime. He also sees it as a sort of spiritual neon sign that attracts people who are uncomfortable with their sexuality, usually because it falls outside the one-man-one-woman pattern. “It’s a trap” for those who stray from cultural norms, whether gay men or pedophiles, “falsely promising some men a refuge from sexual desires that worry them.” Thus he concludes that celibacy is a large factor in the sexual abuse of children within the Church.

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CARDINAL ANGELO SCOLA: Scola is seen as Italy's best chance at reclaiming the papacy, following back-to-back pontiffs from outside the country that had a lock on the job for centuries. He's also one of the top names among all of the papal contenders. Scola, 71, has commanded both the pulpits of Milan's Duomo as archbishop and Venice's St. Mark's Cathedral as patriarch, two extremely prestigious church positions that together gave the world five popes during the 20th century. Scola was widely viewed as a papal contender when Benedict was elected eight years ago. His promotion to Milan, Italy's largest and most influential diocese, has been seen as a tipping point in making him one of the leading papal candidates. He is known as a doctrinal conservative who is also at ease quoting Jack Kerouac and Cormac McCarthy.

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It's been a week since Cardinal Keith O'Brien stepped down as the head of the Catholic Church in Scotland, amid accusations by three priests and one former priest of "inappropriate" contacts with them, some of which dated back 30 years. His resignation spared him the deeper scrutiny that would have ensued had he chosen to go to Rome to choose the next pontiff, a spotlight-shunning optimism he made obvious when he stated, "I do not wish media attention in Rome to be focused on me — but rather on Pope Benedict XVI and his successor." Though O'Brien didn't address the charges in his public statement of resignation, the Scottish Catholic Media Office announced that he "contests these claims and is taking legal advice." He later dismissed "their anonymous and non-specific nature."

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Laura Miller dug into Candida Moss' scholarly work on Christianity's obsession with martyrdom, titled "The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom." She writes:

"Moss is thorough, strives for clarity and is genuinely fired up in her concern for the influence of the myth of martyrdom on Western societies. 'The idea of the persecuted church is almost entirely the invention of the 4th century and later,' she writes. This was, significantly, a period during which the church had become 'politically secure,' thanks to Constantine. Yet, instead of providing a truthful account of Christianity’s early years, the scholars and clerics of the fourth century cranked out tales of horrific, systemic violence. These stories were subtly (and not so subtly) used as propaganda against heretical ideas or sects. They also made appealingly gruesome entertainment for believers who were, personally, fairly safe; Moss likens this to contemporary suburbanites reveling in a horror film."

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If you’re expecting a polemic, you might get a quiet one, but you won’t get much in the way of bombast or grandstanding. Wills is a scholar, and his opposition is rooted in a position firmly inside the church. The book is dedicated to the memory of a priest, Henri de Lubac, S.J., and it begins with a long appreciation of the priests Wills has known and loved in a professional lifetime of reading and writing about religion, which itself began in a Jesuit seminary, where Wills studied for five years in hopes of becoming a priest.

This brief memoiristic opening quickly gives way to a historical account of the rise to prominence and power of the priestly class in the Roman Catholic tradition, which begins with the first generation of a priestless movement that hadn’t yet begun to call itself Christianity, and it is here that the reviewer of the audiobook edition begins to experience a special pleasure. So often the better audiobooks get their traction and build their momentum through their narrative qualities — the urgency of scene-making, the building tension of information that the listener is gaining alongside the speaker, the carefully modulated rising and falling of carefully shaped juxtapositions of events.

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We are at a moment in history when the leadership of the Catholic Church is at once both transparently in need of serious reform and obviously deeply clueless about itself. As the New York Times describes the College of Cardinals, this is one seriously "fallible" group, a gathering of men widely "reviled" for their grotesque behavior – and it doesn't even include Keith O’Brien, who hastily stepped down Monday after reports that he had made inappropriate sexual advances to subordinates. Of course he did. The remaining lot, however, still includes Roger Mahony, the Los Angeles leader who is known for his long and well-documented work in shielding serial abusers from justice; Sean Brady, the Irish leader who refused to resign even after mounting evidence he'd failed to turn over critical information in one of the country's most appalling sex abuse cases; and Francisco Javier Errázuriz, the former archbishop of Santiago who's been accused of covering up abuse and refusing to meet with victims.

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The paper says that Benedict made his decision to step down on Dec. 17, just one day after he received a revealing 300-page dossier from a trio of elderly cardinals. He'd assigned them to investigate last year's scandal involving a slew of leaked confidential Vatican documents and letters that purported to show corruption and internal conflict within the Holy See.  The "Vatileaks" mess was just another of the embarrassments the church has faced during Benedict's reign -- including a money laundering investigation and record-breaking settlements in sex abuse lawsuits. But the leaks were a particularly personal humiliation to the pontiff -- the documents in question had allegedly been stolen by his own butler Paolo Gabriele. Gabriele later told investigators he released the documents "for the good of the Church." "I was sure that a shock, perhaps by using the media, could be a healthy thing to bring the Church back on the right track," he explained in his earnest pretrial testimony.

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