Religious Facilities

Palestinians threw stones and bottles at Israeli police Tuesday to protest Israel's opening of a controversial tunnel near several of the holiest sites in this disputed city.

Pennsylvania Avenue slopes upward through suburban La Crescenta, runs past neatly ordered ranch-style homes and ends at the lush greenery of the snow-capped San Gabriel Mountains. There, at the foothills, sits the Temple of the Universal Spirit. "It was strange to see something like this here," said Scott Francis, 53, of Silver Lake. "I was just hiking around and saw it."

Archeologists working near Stonehenge in England have discovered what appears to be an ancient religious complex containing a wealth of artifacts that may finally illuminate the lives and religious practices of the people who built the mysterious monument 4,600 years ago.

Mansur Escudero knew the answer before he asked. Approaching the guard at Cordoba's majestic once-a-mosque, now-a-cathedral, Escudero posed the question: May I say Muslim prayers inside? The slightly startled Spanish guard gave an emphatic no. This is a Catholic church, he said, and as such it is absolutely prohibited to pray in any other faith. Escudero persisted, but the guard was firm. This is a cathedral, the guard repeated, growing more agitated: "A CA-THO-LIC CHURCH."

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston will sell its 90-year-old headquarters for $65 million to free up money for settlements linked to a scandal over pedophile priests. Boston College will buy 18 acres of land and buildings from the archdiocese, whose administrative center will move from Boston's Brighton district to suburban Braintree, the archdiocese said.

The gunshots were so loud that Jeanne Assam thought the shooter was already in the building. A former police officer, Assam, 42, was on security duty Sunday morning at New Life Church here. Hours earlier, a 24-year-old who had been rejected from a missionary school in a Denver suburb had shot and killed two staffers there. Now he was spraying New Life's parking lot with gunfire and pushing through the doors to the sanctuary.

A judge Thursday reiterated his previous rulings that the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles has no legal claim on church buildings and other property owned by three conservative breakaway parishes. "The court has nothing further to add" in support of its earlier rulings, Orange County Superior Court Judge David C. Velasquez wrote in response to new amendments made to complaints he had rejected in August and December. The diocese tried to seize the property of the churches -- St.

Hundreds of thousands of Hindu pilgrims, saints and politicians flooded the Indian capital Thursday in the largest single show of force by the Hindu revivalist movement that has been sweeping once-secular India. Shouting "Long live Lord Rama!"

A Catholic diocese in Newfoundland plans to sell all its churches and missions to raise money to pay the victims of sexual assault by a priest, Bishop David Douglas Crosby said. The Diocese of St. George's will sell about 150 properties to raise $10.5 million as part of a settlement for 36 victims of Father Kevin Bennett, who was convicted in 1990. The diocese has asked its 32,000 parishioners for donations to buy back core properties, Crosby said.

As another day of fighting killed nearly 40 Iraqis in southern Iraq, U.S. military leaders Thursday raised the possibility of using Iraqi police forces to forcibly enter shrines where they believe militants have taken refuge. Military patrols have been battling daily with militants believed affiliated with Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada Sadr, whose private militia seized key parts of the holy cities of Najaf and Kufa in April, occupying mosques and police stations.