For me, all-news radio at a minimal volume is a not-too-demanding sound that covers distracting noises. If you don't have such a station locally, just stream it over the net; WTOP in Washington is pretty good for this.

Sorry, but you don't have the name right -- I mean the official name: it's "Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith". The term "Inquisition" went out about three name-changes ago.

That's mistaken about the history. Cdl. Ratzinger's department did not start out with jurisdiction over these cases. Most were handled (or mishandled) by local bishops, and the few that were appealed to Rome went to canon-law tribunals. But in 2001 Pope John Paul II changed the church's internal laws to make all credible accusations go to Rome; and to have them go to Ratzinger's department (CDF). Ratzinger read the dossiers on virtually every sex-abuse case in the world and came out of that with a thorough understanding of the problem. No wonder he later spoke about the "filth" in the priesthood.

Source (article by expert reporter John Allen, 2010): http://ncronline.org/news/accountability/will-ratzingers-past-trump-benedicts-present

The post says: "There was no historical Adam and Eve, no serpent, no apple, no fall that toppled man from a state of innocence."

Two points:

(1) How is genomic research going to prove that there was no fall from a state of innocence? It's not within the competency of the field. Regardless of whether the Fall was a historical event, I doubt we'll be seeing any proof on the issue published in Nature any time soon.

(2) The text in Genesis doesn't say that the "tree of knowledge of good and evil" had apples hanging from it.

Mr. Venema is not helping his case by overstating it.

It must be the silly season for the Telegraph newspaper: the Vatican didn't say anything about satanism.

The statement didn't come from any Church office, or any cardinal, bishop, or spokesman for the Church. The speaker, Carlo Climati, is a journalist who spoke at a conference at the Catholic university where he works in Rome.

Some reporters can't tell the difference between an official church spokesman and Some Guy in Rome, or even Some Priest in Rome, but what do you expect from the press: distinctions? We don't need no stinking distinctions!

Besides, the guy's probably right! If the net has made communication and collaboration easier for jihadist bombers, white supremacists, Democrats, and other horrible people, who's to say it didn't help satanists too?

Let's refer this puppy to the Poynter Center, hm?

One of the Catholic Church's arguments during the Reformation was that people needed help interpreting scripture. Now they went further to say that because of this regular people shouldn't have access to the text,

Can you find any Church document to support that claim?

Sure, the Catholic Church has regulations about publishing Scripture -- requiring that the footnotes be orthodox and that the translation be correct.

But those are quality regulations, not real restrictions. The Church has encouraged bible reading and publishing for hundreds of years. Gutenberg's printing project was a Catholic bible. Popes have written worldwide letters encouraging people to read Scripture. In medieval churches, hand-copied bibles were chained down for the same reason why banks chain down pens -- to keep them available for shared use.

Incredulous? Nah, I'm used to people who 'want to do things differently from' me. But I have to wonder at cases of hostility from non-Catholics over a policy that doesn't affect them. Why would a person from a non-Catholic family get so mad as to want to swear at the Abp. over it? Obviously the conflict between his likes and the Church's policy bothers him. Perhaps he wants to be more at peace with the Church.

In conclusion, fuck that Archbishop.

Keep your fucking to yourself, please.

The Archbishop didn't tell you or anyone else what to do in secular funerals, so you have no business complaining if you're not a practicing Catholic.

Really, I think people just don't get the picture about how Catholic funerals are designed. There's the wake and there's the funeral service.

The wake has plenty of room for nostalgia, sentiment, story-telling, and goofy songs, if you want.

The funeral service in church is (gasp!) a religious service. It's not a party. It's not for telling stories how Uncle Bob could drink us all under the table. It's about God and about praying for the deceased. We Catholics believe in doing that. If you have a problem with that, you don't have to attend it.

Be happy!

While religion has never occupied as much bandwidth on the internet as, say, saucy photos (what topic does?), it's been here for a long time. The newsgroups system of the 1980s ("Usenet", "alt.", etc.) included several forums on religion: Christian, Jewish, Hindu, and atheistic. At the time, the TCP/IP-based net hadn't been implemented much, and the average internet link may have consisted of two tin cans connected by a string, but those newsgroups circulated to most systems participating in the internet. Google's partial archive of just one newsgroup, "soc.religion.christian", has 41,000 discussion threads. So, if you're under the impression that religious dialogue on the net happens within a "small community or closed channel", you're living a bit of a sheltered life.