Botha's blunder
MORE THAN 40 South African theologians have replied to State President Botha's recent attack on churchmen when he called them "Marxist atheists". The theologians wrote a letter which appeared in a Cape Town newspaper insisting that there was a "clear Biblical basis for protesting against apartheid".
FOUR inmates seized two priests and two nuns as hostages during Mass in a prison in Recife, northern Brazil earlier this week and threatened to kill them if they were not let out of jail.
FOLLOWING recent reports of infidelity in Italian marriages, Roman artist Angelo Greccio said last weekend that he has received seven orders for medieval-style chastity belts, complete with padlocks. All of the orders have come from men.
THE DATE of the Turin shroud is to be announced by the end of the year. Tests will be performed in Oxford, Arizona and Zurich and each laboratory will be given a piece of the shroud and two other pieces of cloth whose age is already known.
THE CATHOLIC Institute of International Relations is holding a conference on "Death Squads and Vigilantes as a Block to Third World Development". Speakers from the Philippines, Southern Africa and Central America will address the conference, which takes place on May 18 and 19 at Regent's College in London.
THE CATHOLIC University in Washington DC has failed in its attempt to have a lawsuit filed against them by dismissed theologian Fr Charles Curran dismissed. Fr Curran is suing the university for breach of contract after he was fired following a Vatican ruling which stated that he was not eligible to teach as a Catholic theologian because of his dissent on certain Church issues.
THE QUEEN of Peace Church in the Lithuanian city of Klaipeda is to be reopened as a Church by July 1, Soviet authorities confirmed this week. The Church was originally built in the 1950s but was confiscated soon afterwards by Soviet officials, who demolished the steeple and turned it into a concert hall.