Provides facts and information about the Catholic Church, and includes listings for Catholic associations and web site addresses.

As always, Our Sunday Visitor's Catholic Almanac is more than just the facts. It's 640 pages of facts, reports, articles, and background analyses. Yes, it's 640 pages of information you'll want to have on hand because it's the information that matters, information you can use. This is the book for the original browser. For the reader who wants to know more about the Faith, about the Church, about the world. And it's still the first choice among students, teachers, and homilists. The "always online and available" resource for media professionals.

Focuses on the developmental process of religion and spirituality across the human life span.This encyclopedia joins a recent trend in research and scholarship aimed at better understanding the similarities and differences between world religions and spiritualities, between expressions of the divine and between experiences of the transcendent.

The Catholic church has been in decline for several decades. Whether one examines the priest sexual abuse crisis, Mass attendance, leadership failures, or the worldwide priest shortage, Dr. Kinkels message is clear: reform is needed. There is a sexual abuse problem and leaders did not deal with it effectively. We find a 'code of silence', missed reform opportunities, and the underlying mismanagement of the chaos. After documenting the cover-up by bishops and others, The Decline of the Catholic Church points out the contradiction: bishops protect the devious priests and the church's reputation versus the need to protect children and prevent molestation in the future. The book developes a very plausible explanation as to how the sex scandal mushroomed in the 1970s and why it is now apparently declining. There is a priest shortage (the church is short 150,000 priests worldwide based on 2002 statistics). Instead of seriously examining data on church problems, bishops attack research analysts who predict what the shortage of priests will look like in 2015, if nothing is done to alleviate the problem. Kinkel suggests that the bishops ordain married deacons to the priesthood when feasible (there are 13,000 currently). Secondly, married men and women should be considered for ordination. Instead the bishops import foreign priests (Chicago's data: 50% of incardinated priests are foreign born) as a stop-gap measure while praising celibacy. There is an organizational problem in the church. The church is run by old men who espouse conservative ideologies that fail to address modern problems. The book compares global retirement trends in corporations versus church practice and finds that the Catholic church is about 15 years out of sync. They must retire church leaders earlier, and have term limits for bishops and popes. There is a need for regular general councils which have historical precedence. This is so because the present power structure of the pope and curia makes too many mistakes, e.g., birth control, bishops' cover-up of sex abuse, Banco Ambrosiano scandal which cost all parties millions, 10 years to agree on English translation for scripture readings at Mass, etc. Regular calling of councils can shake up this lazy monopoly. Lastly, Kinkel gives the most comprehensive analysis of the priest shortage in the U. S. and why this is the most serious problem the church faces, not the sex abuse crisis. The church is in the antechamber of Reformation II. Catholics are losing faith.

Clergy are pillars of local religious communities, and Roman Catholic priests are perhaps the quintessential examples of pastors functioning as political elites. The political science literature demonstrates that priests (indeed, clergy more generally) are well-positioned to influence the faithful, even if this influence is somewhat inconsistent. At their core, priests are opinion leaders and representatives of their church to both the faithful and their local communities. But exactly how Catholic priests determine the political acts and attitudes associated with their elite role remains a puzzle. We suggest it is the product of an interactive institutional, social, and psychological milieu, the complexity of which has not been fully assessed in the extant literature. Though some might prefer to think of priests as profiles in courage operating above the political fray, the institutional and personal realities of priest life often forces them to deal with the political realm. In doing so, priests are variably responsive to different principals, or reference groups, that represent specific dimensions of their professional context. Drawing on a series of randomized experiments on samples of Roman Catholic priests in the US and Ireland, we find that priests cognitively draw on varying professional and personal cues in responding to their employer’s institutional preferences. Furthermore, how priests represent their church's political preferences to parishioners appears to be a matter of individual-level discretion.

This latest edition includes important events of the last year, Catholic Web sites, and a concise outline of Church history.

Introduces teens to Catholic beliefs, art, culture, and history as expressed in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, discussing Church teachings on social issues of today and providing ideas for putting faith into action.