FaithWorld

(Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone (L) and Cuba's Vice President Jose Ramon Machado meet at the Revolution Palace in Havana March 27, 2012. REUTERS/Adalberto Roque)

Amid all the rivalries and gossip exposed by a growing Vatican crisis, Pope Benedict’s deputy Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone has emerged as the chief target of an unprecedented campaign of leaks.

The publication of embarrassing details about men he has appointed or moved out and projects he has promoted or opposed suggests a concerted effort to force him out of his post as secretary of state, or Vatican prime minister.

Benedict ruffled feathers in 2006 by choosing the theologian and canon law expert to head the Vatican bureaucracy known as the Curia, which is normally run by an experienced papal diplomat.

A series of mishaps embarrassing the pope and Bertone’s increasingly authoritarian management style finally prompted his critics to launch the campaign to discredit him, according to Vatican insiders.

(A gust of wind blows Pope Benedict XVI's mantle during the weekly audience in St. Peter's Square at the Vatican May 30, 2012. REUTERS/Alessandro Bianchi )

When Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger became Pope Benedict in 2005, epithets like “God’s Rottweiler” and “Panzerkardinal” suggested he would bring some German efficiency to the opaque Vatican bureaucracy, the Curia.

Instead, as the “Vatileaks” scandal has revealed, the head of the Roman Catholic Church can’t even keep his own private mail secret. His hand-picked deputy, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, faces a “monsignors’ mutiny” by prelates in the halls of power.

The French Catholic television channel KTO invited me to comment on the role of the U.S. Catholic bishops in American politics, especially their criticism of the Obama administration’s health care reform, in its series Eglises du Monde (Churches of the World). Here’s the half-hour program on Wednesday (in French).

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(Eugene van Deutekom inspects statues stored in the basement of the Museum for Religious Art in Uden, Netherlands, 20 March 2012/Tom Heneghan)

When Christianity fades, it doesn’t just leave empty pews behind. With each church that shuts, the statues, crucifixes, chalices, paintings or vestments that were part of regular Sunday services suddenly have no liturgical home.

In the Netherlands, where faith has faded more dramatically than in many other parts of Europe, two churches close down on average every week. The sacred art left over is piling up in cellars and storerooms around the country.

(Our Lady of the Rosary Roman Catholic church in Doha, the first Christian church built in Qatar, before the first Mass celebrated there on March 15, 2008. REUTERS/Fadi Al-Assaad )

Turkey’s top Muslim cleric has stepped into an international row over Christianity on the Arabian Peninsula, rejecting comments attributed to the Saudi grand mufti that all churches there should be destroyed.

Mehmet Görmez, head of the Religious Affairs Directorate in Ankara, told a Turkish newspaper that Islam respected the rights of other faiths and calls for the destruction of churches went against centuries of tolerance.

(Packaged halal turkey and beef salami at the Paris Halal Expo fair, 3 April 2012/Tom Heneghan)

Some French politicians have seized on the spread of halal food to win votes. Producers selling their wares at Paris’s annual Muslim food fair are much more sure it will bring something else: profit.

(Halal ravioli at Paris Halal Expo, 3 April 2012/Tom Heneghan)

France’s halal market, now estimated at 5.5 billion euros with about 10 percent annual growth, became a political issue in recent weeks as President Nicolas Sarkozy used it in an unabashed pitch for votes from the anti-immigrant far-right.

(Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi reads during a mass prayer during a celebration to mark the birthday of Prophet Mohammed in Agadez March 30, 2007. REUTERS/Samuel De Jaegere)

On a tidy campus in his capital of Tripoli, dictator Muammar Gaddafi sponsored one of the world’s leading Muslim missionary networks. It was the smiling face of his Libyan regime, and the world smiled back.

The World Islamic Call Society (WICS) sent staffers out to build mosques and provide humanitarian relief. It gave poor students a free university education, in religion, finance and computer science. Its missionaries traversed Africa preaching a moderate, Sufi-tinged version of Islam as an alternative to the strict Wahhabism that Saudi Arabia was spreading.

(Sheikh Abdul Aziz Al-Asheikh, the Kingdom's grand mufti, prays at the Grand Mosque in Riyadh February 6, 2008. REUTERS/Ali Jarekji)

Christian bishops in Germany, Austria and Russia have sharply criticized Saudi Arabia’s top religious official after reports that he issued a fatwa saying all churches on the Arabian Peninsula should be destroyed.

In separate statements on Friday, the Roman Catholic bishops in Germany and Austria slammed the ruling by Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdulaziz Al al-Shaikh as an unacceptable denial of human rights to millions of foreign workers in the Gulf region.

(A Polish pub in Edinburgh, Scotland, May 22, 2008 REUTERS/Quentin Webb)

Christians far outnumber Muslims as migrants around the world, including in the European Union where debates about immigration usually focus on new Muslim arrivals, according to a new study issued on Thursday.

Of the world’s 214 million people who have moved from their home country to live in another, about 106 million (49 percent) are Christians while around 60 million (27 percent) are Muslims, the study by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life said.

Only 3.6 million Jews around the world have moved across international borders, the study said, but that is 25 percent of the world’s Jewish population, by far the highest proportion on the move of any faith group.

(Kosher butcher shop in Choisy-le-Roi near Paris, 10 April 2011/Djampa)

France’s prime minister urged Muslims and Jews to consider scrapping their halal and kosher slaughter laws on Monday as President Nicolas Sarkozy and his allies stepped up their efforts to woo far-right voters.

Prime Minister Francois Fillon made the suggestion after Sarkozy called at the weekend for butchers to clearly label meat slaughtered according to religious laws and his allies warned immigrants might impose halal meat on French schoolchildren.

Fillon and other conservative leaders linked this tough stand on ritually prepared meat to issues such as immigration and French identity that the far-right National Front uses to tap into resentment against Europe’s largest Muslim minority.