FaithWorld

(South African Archbishop and Nobel Laureate Desmond Tutu speaks in New Delhi February 8, 2012. Picture taken February 8, 2012. REUTERS/B Mathur)

South African anti-apartheid campaigner Desmond Tutu has won the 2013 Templeton Prize worth $1.7 million for helping inspire people around the world by promoting forgiveness and justice, organizers said on Thursday.

A leading human rights activist of the late 20th century, the former Anglican archbishop of Cape Town played a pivotal role in the downfall of apartheid and subsequently worked to heal wounds in South Africa’s traumatized society.

Tutu, 81, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for standing up against white-minority rule. He remains a prominent campaigner for peace and human rights.

The Templeton award was announced as his friend and fellow Nobel laureate Nelson Mandela was fighting pneumonia in a third health scare in four months for South Africa’s first black president.

(Hopi tribesmen wearing ritual masks during a rain dance in the village of Shonghopavi, Arizona before 1900)

Plans by a top Paris auction house to sell scores of antique tribal masks revered as sacred ritual artifacts by a traditional Arizona Native American tribe has triggered a furor and calls for their return.

The Hopi Tribe, living in a dozen scattered villages in on the Hopi Reservation northeastern Arizona, is calling on auctioneer Neret-Minet Tessier & Sarrou to cancel its sale of 70 objects including the sacred Katsinam masks on April 12.

“Women are the witnesses of the Resurrection and they have a paramount role,” Pope Francis said on Wednesday in his address to tens of thousands of people in St. Peter’s Square.

The evangelists did no more than write down what the women saw on the day of Christ’s resurrection, the pope - former cardinal Jorge Bergoglio - told the cheering crowd. He also said that women play a special role in the Church: they “open the doors to the Lord,” the Italian daily La Repubblica reported.

It was an important statement by the newly elected head of the Catholic Church – a tribute to the fair sex and a recognition of the key role women can and should play in the religious sphere of life.

(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.

(Dubai’s police chief Dhahi Khalfan poses at his office during an interview with Reuters in Dubai April 2, 2013. REUTERS/Ahmed Jadallah)

Sunni Muslim-ruled Gulf Arab states are often wary of subversion from their powerful Shi’ite neighbour Iran, but Dubai’s veteran police chief reserves most of his wrath for the “dictators” of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Dhahi Khalfan’s suspicions focus mostly on the Egyptian branch of the Sunni Islamist organisation, propelled to power in the most populous Arab country in elections since the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak in a popular uprising in 2011.

(Pope Francis gestures as he speaks during the weekly general audience in Saint Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican April 3, 2013. REUTERS/Stefano Rellandini)

Pope Francis emphasised the “fundamental” importance of women in the Roman Catholic Church on Wednesday, saying they were the first witnesses of Christ and have a special role in spreading the faith.

The pontiff’s decision a week ago to include women in a traditional foot-washing ritual drew ire from traditionalists, who see the custom as a re-enactment of Jesus washing the feet of his apostles and said it should therefore be limited to men.

“Go into the street, and give one man a lecture on morality, and another a shilling, and see which will respect you most.” Samuel Johnson said that in the 18th century, but the general preference for money over preaching is sufficiently strong and timeless that his wry quip remains pertinent. Most economists take Johnson’s sentiment too seriously. They assume that people always want more shillings and always resist wealth-denying morality. That is a serious error.

Consider, for example, the enthusiastic response from around the world to the material renunciations of Pope Francis. The crowds cheered when the new leader of the Catholic Church said he wanted a “poor Church for the poor”. His decision to stay in simple lodgings and wear simple clothes amounted to turning down shillings for the sake of giving a morality lecture, but few observers were bothered. On the contrary, it was welcomed as a pertinent comment on the excessively materialist values of modern society.

The need to be “for the poor” is eternal and universal. In every society there will always be people who cannot thrive without help from others. Despite Dr Johnson’s comment, the need for conscience-pricking discourses on the topic, papal and otherwise, is equally timeless. Otherwise, it would be too easy to find plausible but ultimately selfish reasons not to help out.

Whatever the Supreme Court decides, it seems same sex marriage is here to stay. As the cover of Time put it, “Gay Marriage Already Won. The Supreme Court Hasn’t Made Up Its Mind – But America Has.”

Even some social conservative rabble-rousers have conceded defeat. Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly, who in the past has compared gay unions to marrying a goat or a dolphin, has flipped, saying his views have “evolved.” “The compelling argument is on the side of homosexuals,” O’Reilly said last week. “The other side hasn’t been able to do anything but thump the Bible.” Rush Limbaugh, too, is reluctantly resigned to the change. “I don’t care what the Supreme Court does, this is now inevitable,” he said.

Few social liberals thought marriage equality would be as easy as this, but public support has been so swift that politicians of both stripes have rushed to endorse the legitimacy of same sex marriage. Even President Barack Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton were left playing catch-up.

(A wall fresco from a Jewish synagogue in Syria’s national museum shows
the hand of God reaching out to the people. REUTERS/Khaled al-Hariri)

Theft and shelling have damaged a 2,000 year-old synagogue in Damascus, one of the oldest in the world, Syrian government and opposition activist sources said on Monday.

Syria’s historic monuments have increasingly become a casualty of the civil war has killed more than 70,000 people. Parts of Aleppo’s medieval stone-vaulted souk have been reduced to rubble, and many ancient markets, mosques and churches across the country are threatened with destruction.

(St Peter Basilica is seen over Sant’Angelo bridge on the Tiber river in Rome December 12, 2008. REUTERS/Alessandro Bianchi)

Pope Francis, who has said he wants the Catholic Church to be a model of austerity and honesty, could restructure or even close the Vatican’s scandal-ridden bank as part of a broad review of its troubled bureaucracy, Vatican sources say.

Francis, who inherited a Church mired in scandals over priests’ sexual abuse of children and the leak of confidential documents alleging corruption and infighting in the Vatican’s central administration, is mulling his options as he sets the tone for a reformed and humbler Holy See.