Bishop

Retired Bishop Carroll T. Dozier, 74, suffered a stroke and was in critical condition on Friday, Roman Catholic Church officials said.

A shallow magnitude 3.4 earthquake was reported Sunday morning six miles from Dixon Lane-Meadow Creek -- a community just outside Bishop --  according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The temblor occurred at 5:02 a.m. Pacific time at a depth of 5.0 miles. According to the USGS, the epicenter was 83 miles from Sanger, Calif., and 138 miles from Carson City, Nev. In the past 10 days, there has been one earthquake magnitude 3.0 and greater centered nearby. Read more about Southern California earthquakes .

Reporting from Bishop, Calif. Two redheads got the feathers flying. Lucy and Goose were just tending to their business of clucking, laying eggs and pecking up bugs in Laura Smith's backyard. "They're like vacuum cleaners," Smith said. "There isn't a bug or a spider out here." But not everyone was enamored of the industrious exterminators. A neighbor of Smith's in the J Diamond mobile home park complained to city officials, pointing to a 1966 ordinance that prohibits "any poultry or animal yard" within 100 feet of a residence.

SACRAMENTO - One word represented the kind of night it was for Los Angeles Windward on Saturday. Physicality. That was the obvious difference between unbeaten Windward and Oakland Bishop O'Dowd, the state's top two girls' basketball teams. Bishop O'Dowd (30-3) ended a 32-game Windward winning streak with a 60-45 victory on Saturday in the first CIF state championship Open Division game at Sleep Train Arena. "I think the physicality of the game combined with their athleticism was the difference," Windward Coach Vanessa Nygaard said.

Re "Atonement for the Violence," opinion, June 9: I applaud Bishop Tod Brown's zero-tolerance policy for clergy and lay diocesan employees who abuse children, and hope that all U.S. bishops will follow his lead at their meeting in Dallas. As a Jewish member of the Catholic-Jewish dialogue sponsored by the Diocese of Orange and the American Jewish Committee, I have met a number of outstanding priests and lay Catholics and have been inspired by their integrity and their commitment to interfaith understanding.

At least six people were killed and 12 others injured Monday night in a fiery collision near Bishop involving a van carrying athletes from California Baptist University in Riverside, authorities said. The van was one of three university vehicles heading northbound on U.S. Highway 395 about five miles south of Bishop when a Ford SUV traveling in the opposite direction lost control shortly after 8 p.m. The SUV smashed into one of the vans and burst into flames, said Officer Dennis Cleland of the California Highway Patrol.

Bishop's girls' basketball team made its trip to Vancouver, Canada, worthwhile by winning the Killarney Invitational, a round-robin event, with a 2-1 record. There was a three-way tie for first, but Bishop's won on point total with 192. To remain in contention after losing its first of two games on Saturday, Bishop's had to beat undefeated Vancouver Killarney in the afternoon.

Drink to safe sex with a glass of brandy from, er, Condom. It's a small southwestern French town known both for Armagnac brandy and the giggles its name provokes among passing American tourists. Now Condom is to cash in on the two--distilling a special vintage called Bishop of Condom for the 60th birthday celebrations of Durex contraceptive sheaths.

Leontine T.C. Kelly, a daughter and wife of ministers who followed her own calling and became the first black woman bishop in a major Christian denomination when the United Methodist Church elevated her to the position in 1984, has died. She was 92. Kelly, who oversaw Northern California and Nevada for the church from 1984 to 1988 while based in San Francisco, died June 28, the denomination announced. She had been in poor health for some time while living at a retirement home in Oakland.

Paraguayan President-elect Fernando Lugo has received unprecedented permission from the pope to resign as bishop, Papal Nuncio Orlando Antonini said. Church officials earlier insisted that Lugo, 57, would always be a bishop under church law. Lugo made history in April with his presidential election victory, which ended the 61-year rule of the Colorado Party. The former "bishop of the poor" takes office Aug. 15. Church rules bar priests from political office.

When it comes to making three-point shots, no girls' basketball player in Southern Section history has had a better season than senior Courtney Jaco of Los Angeles Windward High. She enters the Open Division state championship game Saturday in Sacramento against Oakland Bishop O'Dowd as the single-season Southern Section record-holder with 142 three-pointers, according to CalHiSports.com. She has 408 three-pointers in her career. "Practice makes perfect," Jaco said of her success.

For those who have never seen what a No. 1 team in the country looks like, go watch the Los Angeles Windward girls' basketball team. Thirty-two consecutive victories. A guard duo destined for the college ranks. A point guard whom commentators one day will be talking about on ESPN. It's all there and more for the unbeaten Wildcats (32-0), who shot the ball so well Saturday night it was as if they were playing in a gym instead of a challenging arena setting en route to an 81-71 victory over Santa Ana Mater Dei in the CIF Southern California Open Division championship game at Citizens Business Bank Arena.

The election of a new pope is primarily of interest to Roman Catholics, for whom the bishop of Rome is the Vicar of Christ and the keeper of the keys to heaven. But there is a reason, other than a fascination with history and pageantry, that the wider world will watch expectantly as Pope Francis, the former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, begins his ministry. Although Stalin famously mocked the papacy by asking, "How many divisions does the pope have?," the institution remains hugely influential, with reach well beyond the church.

LAS VEGAS - Coach Ben Howland has said UCLA is here on a "business trip" this week. For Bruins swingman Shabazz Muhammad, business is also pleasure. Muhammad, like every other Pac-12 player encamped at the MGM Grand Hotel this week, is here to win the conference tournament. UCLA's fortunes depend a great deal on him. Yet Muhammad is also home. This is where he made his bones as a high school player. "Midway through his freshmen season he was outplaying seniors who were getting college scholarships," Las Vegas Bishop Gorman Coach Grant Rice said.

With the CIF championship riding on every dribble, Ashleigh Sparks knew precisely what to do in the closing moments of Friday night's Southern Section Division 1A final. The 5-5 senior guard caught the inbounds pass, broke to the sideline, drove the length of the court and made a layup as time expired to lift Moreno Valley Canyon Springs to a 48-46 victory over La Puente Bishop Amat at the Anaheim Convention Center. Cheyenne Greenhouse had 24 points and eight rebounds and sank a free throw to give the second-seeded Cougars (20-9)

London bookmakers see a contest among Nigeria's Cardinal Francis Arinze, Marc Ouellet of Canada and Peter Kodwo Appiah Turkson of Ghana, each of whom would present a smiling face of Catholicism as the next pope. (Either of the Africans might also guide the church to a future in the developing world.) Liberals hope for someone like Christoph Schoenborn of Vienna, who seems open to sharing power with laypeople. Some longtime Vatican watchers say the Italians seek to reassert their control, in order to fix the management problems inside the bureaucracy.

Re "O.C. Diocese Will Slash Costs by 20%," April 11: "In a sign of tougher financial discipline, [Bishop of Orange Tod D.] Brown met last week with four pastors of parishes in poor communities who he said were habitual deficit spenders and told them to balance their budgets." Is anyone else disheartened and dismayed at the inequity implicit here in a church which claims that "we are all one body?" I recognize the importance of fiscal responsibility and I think we have to ask what fiscal responsibility means in a church which purports to be the body of Christ.

An Episcopal bishop was found guilty by a church panel of covering up his brother's assaults of a teenage girl in the 1970s at a church in Upland. Charles E. Bennison Jr., 64, was convicted of two counts of engaging in conduct unbecoming of a member of the clergy, according to his attorneys and the church verdict, dated Tuesday and released Thursday. He could be reprimanded, suspended or ousted from the church. The victim, now 50, testified during a four-day ecclesiastical trial this month in Philadelphia that the abuse by the bishop's brother, John Bennison, happened three to four times a week for several years.

In Pittsburgh, where I was born and lived for most of my life, Ash Wednesday was a powerful reminder of just how Catholic that city was. On the first day of Lent, downtown streets and office buildings teemed with people with dusky foreheads, a kind of religious census by smudge. But ashes aren't just for Roman Catholics anymore . When I emerged from the Foggy Bottom Metro station Wednesday morning, I encountered a bishop in miter and flowing purple cope affixing ashes to passersby, a reminder to them that from dust they came and to dust they will return.  I knew it wasn't a Roman Catholic rite because the bishop was a woman, the Rt. Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde of the Washington Episcopal Diocese.

Time and again in his papacy, Pope Benedict XVI spoke out against the scourge of child sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests, using words that would have been scarcely imaginable by his predecessors. It was, he said, "evil," "gravely immoral," "a terrifying sign of the times. " He spoke of the "deep shame" and "humiliation" the scandal had brought on the Catholic Church. He apologized to victims. Not long into his tenure, Benedict essentially banished an influential Mexican priest, Father Marcial Maciel, who had long been suspected of sexually abusing seminarians and boys in his care and had fathered at least three children.