Showing posts with label Vatican. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Vatican. Show all posts
Saturday, 5 March 2011
Sunday, 3 October 2010
US judge asks Vatican to serve court paper to pope.
"MILWAUKEE — A federal U.S. judge is asking the Vatican to cooperate in serving the pope and two other top officials with court papers that stem from decades-old allegations of priest sexual abuse in Wisconsin.
The request is an incremental step in a lawsuit that accuses the officials of conspiring to keep the allegations against a Milwaukee priest quiet."
Read more:- US judge asks Vatican to serve court paper to pope - chicagotribune.com
Read more:- US judge asks Vatican to serve court paper to pope - chicagotribune.com
Friday, 17 September 2010
Stephen Fry on the Catholic Church
A wonderful, impassioned speech. Surely Stephen's best on this subject. How any catholic possessed of the smallest trace of moral conscience can listen to this and remain in their church is a complete mystery.
Sunday, 8 August 2010
Monday, 22 March 2010
The Pope blames secularism
Extract from the Pope's letter to Irish Catholics:-
"In recent decades, however, the Church in your country has had to confront new and serious challenges to the faith arising from the rapid transformation and secularization of Irish society. Fast-paced social change has occurred, often adversely affecting people's traditional adherence to Catholic teaching and values. All too often, the sacramental and devotional practices that sustain faith and enable it to grow, such as frequent confession, daily prayer and annual retreats, were neglected. Significant too was the tendency during this period, also on the part of priests and religious, to adopt ways of thinking and assessing secular realities without sufficient reference to the Gospel. The programme of renewal proposed by the Second Vatican Council was sometimes misinterpreted and indeed, in the light of the profound social changes that were taking place, it was far from easy to know how best to implement it. In particular, there was a well-intentioned but misguided tendency to avoid penal approaches to canonically irregular situations. It is in this overall context that we must try to understand the disturbing problem of child sexual abuse, which has contributed in no small measure to the weakening of faith and the loss of respect for the Church and her teachings."
We secularists really must stop getting Catholic priests into these 'canonically irregular situations'. Most inconsiderate of us.
"In recent decades, however, the Church in your country has had to confront new and serious challenges to the faith arising from the rapid transformation and secularization of Irish society. Fast-paced social change has occurred, often adversely affecting people's traditional adherence to Catholic teaching and values. All too often, the sacramental and devotional practices that sustain faith and enable it to grow, such as frequent confession, daily prayer and annual retreats, were neglected. Significant too was the tendency during this period, also on the part of priests and religious, to adopt ways of thinking and assessing secular realities without sufficient reference to the Gospel. The programme of renewal proposed by the Second Vatican Council was sometimes misinterpreted and indeed, in the light of the profound social changes that were taking place, it was far from easy to know how best to implement it. In particular, there was a well-intentioned but misguided tendency to avoid penal approaches to canonically irregular situations. It is in this overall context that we must try to understand the disturbing problem of child sexual abuse, which has contributed in no small measure to the weakening of faith and the loss of respect for the Church and her teachings."
We secularists really must stop getting Catholic priests into these 'canonically irregular situations'. Most inconsiderate of us.
Sunday, 11 October 2009
Friday, 2 October 2009
Thursday, 14 May 2009
Tony Blair's Foundation inspires ridicule
"The wheels are coming off the Tony Blair Faith Foundation following his demands for wholesale changes in Catholic belief and practice. He, his wife Cherie and the foundation were firmly rebuffed in Rome this month at a meeting of the Pontifical Academy for Social Sciences where he was compared to Cromwell and his good faith was impugned."
(From an article by Hugh O'Shaughnessy in the Guardian's Cif belief)
The attack was spearheaded by Professor Michel Schooyans of the Catholic University of Louvain, a specialist in anthropology and political philosophy. Speaking uncompromisingly, Schooyans accused Blair and his wife of supporting a messianic US plan for world domination.
The Belgian all but ridiculed the former prime minister. "The fresh 'convert' does not hesitate to explain to the pope not only what he must do, but also what he must believe! Is he a Catholic? ... So now we are back in the time of Hobbes, if not of Cromwell: it's civil power that defines what one must believe."
"Given the hostility expressed towards Blair in Rome he will be lucky to recruit the outgoing archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor, to the foundation as he promised. The hostility – and ridicule – that the Blairs and their associates stir up mean he is increasingly unlikely to achieve his ambition of becoming president of the EU."
Saturday, 11 April 2009
Preacher says atheist ad campaign backfired
"Suffering is certainly a mystery for everyone, especially the suffering of innocent people, but without faith in God it becomes immensely more absurd".
On the contrary, by the standards of any reasonably sane person the appalling suffering that is visited at random on some helpless, innocent people make the idea of a loving god completely absurd.
Ah, say the priests, "The ways of god are too mysterious for us to know". I prefer to rely on the principle of Occam's Razor and opt for the more obvious explanation. There is no god that has ever taken the slightest interest in the human race or ever will.
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