Catholics (including the Pope) are joining other faith leaders in calling for clemency for Troy Davis, a Georgia man sentenced to die next Tuesday. Davis was convicted of murdering a police offer in 1989 and has been on death row for 19 years. Supporters say that there isn’t enough evidence to prove he’s guilty, let alone kill him for it. Oh yeah, and unlike Tea Partiers, we’re against the death penalty.
SNAP (Surviors Network of those Abused by Priests) has presented a petition to the International Criminal Court officially asking the court to investigate Pope Benedict XVI and other top Vatican officials for “systematic and widespread concealing of rape and child sex crimes throughout the world.” John Allen reports that Cardinal Crescenzio Sepe of Naples, a former prefect of the Vatican’s missionary department, said that the appeal amounts to “the usual anti-Catholic attempt, which tends to obscure an image [of the church] that, from a human point of view, is about the most prestigious we have in our society.” SNAP says the petition is not a stunt.
Moving onto less glib news, the ladies over at A Nun’s Life (where I go for a refreshing breath of joy in the Catholic blogosphere) are talking about how Heidi Range, a member of the female band Sugababes (I cannot attest to the goodness nor badness of this music) said in an interview that she used to want to be a nun. The sisters at A Nun’s Life praise her for not getting into any lame nun stereotypes. (Also: Sugababes? Didn’t the world get enough female English pop group with the Spice Girls?)
And there’s this:
(Via the Orthodox blog Pitiless Thoughts who captioned this masterpiece Orthodox Parades in the Old Country)
