Vatican

An archbishop who tussled with singer Sheryl Crow, college basketball coach Rick Majerus, and 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry over their support for abortion rights has been named to lead the Vatican supreme court. Archbishop Raymond Burke, an expert in church law and perhaps the most outspoken of conservative U.S. bishops, will probably be made a cardinal. The supreme court is traditionally headed by a cardinal.

If you can identify the five smallest countries in Continental Europe you get a gold star. If you know where they are on the map, you should be on "Jeopardy." And if you have visited them you don't get anything else; you have already been rewarded. The tiniest, Vatican City, is undeniably the most influential. The next smallest, Monaco, gets very noisy in May. The third most diminutive, San Marino, was the hilltop hide-out of an escaped slave.

Telecommunications technology of the early 21st century has produced a phenomenon known as "phone hell": an audio inferno where callers are tormented either by mechanized voices or human ones with less soul than the machines. But the opposite exists. It can be found here in a simply furnished second-floor room where multilingual nuns in gray habits answer phones with an unfailingly sweet-voiced greeting: "Pronto, Vaticano" (Hello, Vatican).

A Vatican bioethics document Friday condemned artificial fertilization and other techniques used by many couples and also said human cloning, embryonic stem-cell research and "morning after" drugs were immoral. The long awaited document from the Vatican's doctrinal body marks a major step by the Vatican into biotechnology, an area in which many governments are struggling to formulate legislation.

Three men who accuse Roman Catholic priests of sexually abusing them in childhood can pursue damages from the Vatican in a negligence lawsuit, a federal judge ruled. The ruling lets the men pursue their claim that top church officials should have warned the public or authorities about priests in the Louisville Archdiocese who were suspected of abusing children.

An olive branch extended by the Vatican to the Chinese government over the weekend opens the door for rapprochement between church leaders in Rome and their fractured following in the world's most populous country. But before the decades-long rift can be closed, a number of thorny issues must be resolved, including Beijing's control over church activities, China's family planning policies and the Vatican's relationship with Taiwan, which Beijing considers a renegade province.

A 450-year-old receipt has provided proof that Michelangelo kept a private room in St. Peter's Basilica while working as the pope's chief architect, Vatican experts said. While going through the basilica archives for an exhibit on the 500th anniversary of the church, researchers recently came across an entry for a key to a chest "in the room in St. Peter's where Master Michelangelo retires."

The Vatican is preparing to discipline Father Jon Sobrino, a well-known proponent of liberation theology who worked for decades in El Salvador even as fellow priests were murdered, church sources said Tuesday. Sobrino will be sanctioned for alleged errors in his teachings and writings about the divinity of Jesus, according to members of his Jesuit order in Rome. A Vatican spokesman this week confirmed to reporters that an investigation was underway.

The Vatican has dismissed two former Boston archdiocese priests who were accused of sexually abusing children. Anthony J. Laurano, 82, and W. James Nyhan, 61, were cut off from receiving any financial support from the archdiocese and may no longer function as priests except to offer absolution for the dying, the archdiocese said.

WALK through the Vatican at night and you can hear your footsteps on the marble floors, echoing down the centuries, along corridors where great artists once trod, through the opulent apartments where popes plotted stratagems for power. On through the loggias, vaults and galleries where a succession of pontiffs surrounded themselves with regal splendor.