FaithWorld

Security worker opens the door of a government job center as people wait to enter in Marbella, Spain, December 2, 2011. REUTERS/Jon Nazca

In the nearly five years since the worst financial crash since the Great Depression, the remedy for the world’s economic doldrums has swung from full-on Keynesianism to unforgiving austerity and back.

The initial Keynesian response halted the collapse in economic activity. But it was soon met by borrowers’ remorse in the shape of paying down debt and raising taxes without delay. In the last year, full-throttle austerity has fallen out of favor with those charged with monitoring the world economy.

Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, has been urging German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has been imposing singeing public spending cuts on her neighbors, and George Osborne, Britain’s finance minister, who has been doing the same to the Brits, to ease up. The IMF is now urging fiscal measures beyond monetary easing “to nurture a sustainable recovery and restore the resilience of the global economy.”

Earlier this month, Lagarde criticized America’s automatic sequester cuts for being too deep, too soon. The United States, she said, “should consolidate less in the short term, but give … economic actors the certainty that there will be fiscal consolidation going forward.”

(Eniko Kovacs Hegedus, parliamentary member of Hungary’s far-right Jobbik party, delivers a speech to hundreds of far-right supporters during a rally against the World Jewish Congress Plenary Assembly in Budapest May 4, 2013. REUTERS/Laszlo Balogh)

German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle told Jewish leaders on Monday that the European Union needed better legal means to fight racism in member states.

Speaking amid growing racism against Jews and Roma in Hungary, he told the World Jewish Congress (WJC) assembly that the EU’s legal options to curb violations of democratic norms were either as weak as toothpicks or as strong as bazookas.

(A sign reading ‘Arbeitsgerichte’ (Labour courts) is pictured in the late evening in Hamburg September 1, 2012. REUTERS/Morris Mac Matzen )

Germany’s top labor court ruled on Thursday the country’s Catholic charity network had the right to fire an employee who quit the Church in protest against the sexual abuse crisis and disputed decisions by ex-Pope Benedict.

The 60-year-old teacher, challenging his 2011 dismissal, had claimed his constitutional right to freedom of opinion trumped the Church’s right to employ only Catholics who agreed with the religious mission of their jobs.

(Coptic Christians run from tear gas fired by police inside the main cathedral during clashes with Muslims standing outside the Cathedral in Cairo, April 7, 2013. REUTERS/Asmaa Waguih)

When Egyptian Christian Kerollos Maher watched on television as petrol bombs and rocks rained on Cairo’s Coptic Orthodox Cathedral he had only one thought – emigration.

“Egypt is no longer my country,” said the 24-year-old construction worker, standing in the courtyard of the country’s largest cathedral where one Copt and one Muslim died in sectarian clashes this week.

(A filing cabinet containing original documents with information about prisoners of the former concentration camp of Auschwitz is seen at the International Tracing Service (ITS) in the central German town of Bad Arolsen May 10, 2006. REUTERS/Alex Grimm)

George Jaunzemis was three and a half years old when, in the chaotic weeks at the end of World War Two, he was separated from his mother as she fled with him from Germany to Belgium.

He grew up in New Zealand with no memory of his early years, unaware the Latvian woman who had emigrated with him was not his real mother.

(Sacro Monte (Ort ). Chapel 14 – Saint Francis rejects the money offered by the Sultan of Egypt, 31 July 2010/Wolfgang Sauber)

Muslims in Europe see hope for better relations with Roman Catholicism after the new pope took the name Francis, recalling the 13th-century saint known for his efforts to launch Christian dialogue with Islam.

Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio chose the name after his election on Wednesday in honor of St. Francis of Assisi, who is revered for his radical poverty and humility. Francis met the sultan of Egypt in 1219 on a peace mission during the Fifth Crusade.

(A broken window is seen at the Lauder Chabad School in Vienna November 26, 2006. Austrian police on Sunday detained a man suspected of breaking into a Jewish community school overnight and systematically smashing windows and porcelain with a crowbar, officials said. REUTERS/Herwig Prammer )

Marina Plistiev, a Kyrgyzstan-born Jew, has lived in Vienna for 34 years but still doesn’t like to take public transport.

She recalls the day in 1986 as a teenager when she and her four-year-old brother, whom she’d collected from school with a fever, were told to get off a tram for having the wrong tickets, and nobody stuck up for them, apparently because they were Jews.

(Pope Benedict XVI (R) is greeted by Cardinal Marc Ouellet, Archbishop of Quebec and Primate of Canada during a meeting with seminarians outside St. Pantaleon Church in Cologne, Germany, in this August 19, 2005 file photo. REUTERS/Pier Paolo Cito)

Canadian Cardinal Marc Ouellet, one of the leading candidates to succeed Pope Benedict, suggested in an interview with Canada’s national broadcaster that other candidates for pope might do a better job.

“I have to be ready even if I think that probably others could do it better,” Ouellet, 68, one of a handful of cardinals seen as papal material, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp in an interview published late on Sunday.

(Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, head of Germany’s bishop’s conference gives a media statement before the German bishop’s annual meeting in Trier, February 18, 2013. REUTERS/Wolfgang Rattay)

The Roman Catholic Church in Germany said on Thursday it would permit certain types of “morning-after pill” for raped women, after two hospitals provoked an outcry for refusing to treat a rape victim.

The German Bishops’ Conference said church-run hospitals would now ensure proper medical, psychological and emotional care for rape victims – including administering pills that prevent pregnancy without inducing an abortion.

(People are gathered in St Peter’s Square as Pope Benedict XVI leads his Sunday Angelus prayer at the Vatican February 17, 2013. REUTERS/Tony Gentile )

After Pope Benedict’s papacy of almost eight years, the cardinals who will elect the next Catholic pontiff are more European, more conservative and more “Roman” than the conclave that chose him in 2005.

Benedict has handpicked more than half the men who will elect his successor. The rest were chosen by the late Pope John Paul, a Pole with whom the German pope shared a determination to reassert a more orthodox Catholicism in the new millennium.