Faith Digest: Catholics agree with pope’s direction

Most American Catholics agree with pope about church’s obsession. Pope Francis rocked the Catholic world last month when he gave a wide-ranging interview in which he declared the church had become “obsessed” with a few hot-button moral issues and needed to find a “new balance.” A new poll indicates American Catholics think he’s right. The survey, released by Quinnipiac University, shows two in three (68 percent) adult Catholics questioned said they agreed with the pontiff’s observation the church has become too focused on issues such as homosexuality, abortion and contraception. Just 23 percent disagreed, and the breakdown was virtually the same across age groups and among both weekly Mass-goers and those who attend church less frequently. The national poll—conducted the last week of September—also showed American Catholics have a favorable (53 percent) or very favorable (36 percent) opinion of Francis, and just 4 percent view him negatively.

Yale’s humanists lose bid for campus recognition as faith group. A newly formed humanist group at Yale University suffered a setback when the school’s broader religious community declined to grant it recognition as a faith organization. The Yale Humanist Community, founded last year to support humanists, atheists, agnostics and other nontheists on the campus in New Haven, Conn., was denied membership in Yale Religious Ministries, an umbrella group of religious groups that serve the university’s students, faculty and staff. The group was denied membership because it is explicitly nonreligious. Yale Religious Ministries includes Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Sikh, Muslim and other organizations. Chris Stedman, the Yale Humanist Community’s coordinator and assistant humanist chaplain at Harvard University’s well-established humanist community, said the Yale group wanted to officially join the campus’ religious community because its members share many of that group’s values, including fostering compassion and morality and working for the greater good.