"We need to imagine a world in which the needless deaths of nearly 10 million children a year are an abomination that cannot be tolerated. ...We're witnessing a world being created where the greediness of a few is leaving the majority on the margin of history."
Honduran Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga, speaking at the UN on September 26.
Finding funds
"This rescue (of Wall Street) of enormous proportions, which amounts to many times the whole of international aid, cannot but raise a pressing question. How are we able to find funds to save a broken financial system yet remain unable to find the resources necessary to invest in the development of all regions of the world, beginning with the most destitute?"
Archbishop Celestino Migliore, the Vatican's permanent observer to the United Nations.
No to death penalty
"Despite everything, the Church has always and will always defend the sacredness of human life from conception to natural death as a universal value. ...The death penalty increasingly appears to be an unacceptable instrument even more than being a useless and dangerous one. ...As Christians, how can we accept that someone be denied the hope of redemption? A man or a woman who made a mistake, who committed a crime, no matter how brutal, must have the possibility of being forgiven - while serving a tough sentence - and of living in hope."
Archbishop Agostino Marchetto, secretary of the Pontifical Council for Migrants and Travellers.
Civil partnerships
A Civil Partnership Bill was introduced in the Irish Parliament in June. It allows legal status for same-sex unions. In a recent statement, the Irish Catholic bishops observed that while the Irish Constitution recognises the unique importance of marriage and the duty of the state to protect that institution, the special status of marriage does not prevent just and appropriate measures being taken in relation to the diversity of other forms of dependent relationship which exist in society.
It may, in certain circumstances, be in the public interest to provide legal protection to the social, fiscal and inheritance entitlements of people who support caring relationships which generate dependency, provided always that these relationships are recognised as being qualitatively different from marriage and that their acceptance does not dilute the uniqueness of marriage.
Fighting abortion
English and Welsh bishops have urged the faithful to contact their MPs about pending abortion legislation in the House of Commons. "If conscientious people do not act," said Archbishop Peter Smith, chair of the Department of Christian Responsibility and Citizenship of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales, "there is a very real danger that the law on abortion will become even worse than it is now."
A Catholic Queen?
The British government plans to amend the 1701 Act of Settlement, which bars Catholics (and the children or spouses of Catholics) from the throne. The proposed reform would also allow a first-born daughter to assume the monarchy, rather than giving preference to a male heir. The existing law requires a new British king or queen to denounce the Catholic faith in a statement before Parliament.