AFP
Pope draws 200,000 pilgrims to Portugal's Fatima shrine
Clement Melki and Levi Fernandes
Sat, August 5, 2023 at 9:17 AM CDT
Around 200,000 pilgrims flooded the shrine of Fatima in Portugal on Saturday to attend a service held by Pope Francis at one of Catholicism's most revered sites devoted to the Virgin Mary.
Worshippers waved and called out "Viva!" as the 86-year-old pontiff, wearing a white cassock, slowly drove past on his popemobile.
He paused several times to have babies brought to him and kissed them on the head.
The pope then recited the rosary with 112 sick youths, people with disabilities and prisoners at the chapel built on the spot where the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared to three shepherd children in 1917.
In an address to the crowd estimated by local authorities at around 200,000 people, he reinforced calls made many times during his trip to Portugal for an inclusive Church.
"This little chapel where we find ourselves, is like a beautiful image of the Church, welcoming, without doors," he said in improvised remarks.
"The Church does not have doors, so that everyone can enter," he added to applause from the crowd.
It is the second day in a row that the pope, who is in increasingly fragile health and now uses a wheelchair or walking stick to get around, has not followed his prepared remarks.
Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni told reporters the pope had improvised one of his speeches on Friday due to "discomfort of vision", but that in Fatima it had been "a choice".
The pope solemnly prayed in silence for several minutes before a statue of the Virgin Mary in the chapel.
In a text published later on Twitter, which is being rebranded as 'X', the pontiff said he had prayed for the "church and the world, especially for countries at war".
- 'Very beautiful' -
Francis arrived in Portugal on Wednesday for World Youth Day, a six-day international Catholic jamboree.
After the service in Fatima, about 150 kilometres (90 miles) north of Lisbon, he returned by helicopter to the capital, where on Saturday evening he will lead a vigil at the waterfront Parque Tejo.
Church organizers expect one million faithful will attend the vigil at the park that has been built for the occasion on a former landfill site.
Fatima draws millions of pilgrims from around the globe.
Many pilgrims walk to the town and some complete the final stretch on their knees to demonstrate their devotion.
Others toss wax limbs or organs into a fire beside the chapel as they recite prayers for healing.
Thousands of worshippers had already gathered in Fatima on Friday on the eve of the pope's arrival, many setting up folding chairs in the shrine's vast square to mark their spot.
Many slept in sleeping bags or floor mats on the esplanade of the shrine.
"I found the ceremony very beautiful," said Carlos Fuastino, a 56-year-old Portuguese urban planner, adding he decided at the "last minute" to attend.
- Red alert -
Susana Marino, a 48-year-old Portuguese psychologist, said she had come to Fatima because "it really will be the last chance we have to see the pope".
The leader of the world's 1.3 billion Roman Catholics will deliver a final open-air mass on Sunday morning at the Parque Tejo when a heatwave is forecast to peak.
Portugal's state weather agency has issued a "red" alert -- its highest level -- for Lisbon on Sunday due to the heat, with the mercury predicted to hit 41 degrees Celsius (105.8 degrees Fahrenheit).
Local authorities have repeatedly urged pilgrims to drink plenty of water.
Registered participants received rucksacks containing reusable water bottles and sunhats, along with a rosary.
World Youth Day, created in 1986 by John Paul II, is the largest Catholic gathering in the world and will feature a wide range of events, including concerts and prayer sessions.
This edition, initially scheduled for August 2022 but postponed because of the pandemic, will be the fourth for Francis after Rio de Janeiro in 2013, Krakow in 2016 and Panama in 2019.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/te ... 01559.html
Christianity
Re: Christianity
ILAN BEN ZION
Updated Tue, August 15, 2023 at 7:16 AM CDT
TEL MEGIDDO, Israel (AP) — An ancient Christian mosaic bearing an early reference to Jesus as God is at the center of a controversy that has riled archaeologists: Should the centuries-old decorated floor, which is near what's believed to be the site of the prophesied Armageddon, be uprooted and loaned to a U.S. museum that has been criticized for past acquisition practices?
Israeli officials are considering just that. The proposed loan to the Museum of the Bible in Washington also underscores the deepening ties between Israel and evangelical Christians in the U.S, whom Israel has come to count on for political support, tourism dollars and other benefits.
The Megiddo Mosaic is from what is believed to be the world's earliest Christian prayer hall that was located in a Roman-era village in northern Israel. It was discovered by Israeli archaeologists in 2005 during a salvage excavation conducted as part of the planned expansion of an Israeli prison.
The prison sits at a historic crossroads a mile south of Tel Megiddo on the cusp of the wide, flat Jezreel Valley. The compound is ringed by a white steel fence topped with barbed wire and is used for the detention of Palestinian security inmates.
Across a field strewn with cow-dung and potsherds, the palm-crowned site of a Bronze and Iron Age city and ancient battles is where some Christians believe a conclusive battle between good and evil will transpire at the end of days: Armageddon.
For some Christians, particularly evangelicals, this will be the backdrop of the long-anticipated climax at the Second Coming, when divine wrath will obliterate those who oppose God's kingdom; it serves as the focus of their hopes for ultimate justice.
The Israel Antiquities Authority said that it will decide about the move in the coming weeks, following consultations with an advisory body.
“There’s an entire process that academics and archaeologists are involved with,” said IAA director Eli Eskozido. The organization said that moving the mosaic from its original location was the best way to protect it from upcoming construction at the prison.
Jeffrey Kloha, the Museum of the Bible’s chief curatorial officer, said a decision on the loan would be made solely by the IAA.
The museum “of course would welcome the opportunity to educate our thousands of visitors on important pieces of history such as this mosaic,” he told The Associated Press via email.
Several archaeologists and academics have voiced vociferous objections to the notion of removing the Megiddo Mosaic from where it was found — and all the more so to exhibit it at the Museum of the Bible.
Cavan Concannon, a religion professor at the University of Southern California, said the museum acts as a “right-wing Christian nationalist Bible machine” with links to “other institutions that promote white evangelical, Christian nationalism, Christian Zionist forms.”
“My worry is that this mosaic will lose its actual historical context and be given an ideological context that continues to help the museum tell its story,” he said.
Others balk at the thought of moving the mosaic at all before academic study is complete.
“It is seriously premature to move that mosaic," said Matthew Adams, director of the Center for the Mediterranean World, an non-profit archaeological research institute, who is involved in digs at Tel Megiddo and the abutting Roman legionary camp of Legio.
Asked about criticisms of the Washington museum’s practices, Kloha said, “Major museums and distinguished institutions committed to preserving history have had to grapple with cultural heritage issues, particularly in recent years.”
“To be clear: Museum of the Bible is proud to have proactively launched research and a thorough review of items in its collections,” he added. “The museum initiated returns where appropriate to countries of origin without obligation to do so and encourages other institutions to do the same.”
Based on other finds found in the dig and the style of the letters in the inscriptions, IAA archaeologists have dated the mosaic floor to the third century — before the Roman Empire officially converted to Christianity and when adherents were still persecuted. Nonetheless, one of the donors who paid to decorate the ancient house of worship was a centurion serving in the adjacent Roman legionary camp.
The mosaic bears Greek inscriptions, among them an offering “To God Jesus Christ.”
Since opening its doors in 2017, the Museum of the Bible has faced criticism over its collecting practices and for promoting an evangelical Christian political agenda. In 2018, it had to repatriate an ancient Mesopotamian tablet looted from Iraq and admit that several of the Dead Sea Scroll fragments in its collection were modern forgeries. American authorities also seized thousands of clay tablets and other looted antiquities from the museum’s founder, Hobby Lobby president and evangelical Christian Steve Green, and returned them to Iraq.
The mosaic loan would reinforce ties between Israel and the museum. The museum sponsors two archaeological digs in Israel, has a gallery curated by the IAA. Kloha said the museum also is planning a lecture series featuring IAA archaeologists.
Evangelical Christians, whose ranks have been growing worldwide, have become some of Israel's most fervent supporters, donating large sums of money and visiting the country as tourists and pilgrims. In the U.S., they also lobby politicians in Congress in support of Israel.
Evangelicals, who make up more than a third of the world's estimated 2 billion Christians, say their affinity for Israel stems from Christianity’s Jewish roots.
Some view the founding of Israel as fulfilling biblical prophecy, ushering in an anticipated Messianic age when Jesus will return and Jews will either accept Christianity or die. That tenet has generated unease among some Israelis, but politicians have embraced evangelical support for the state nonetheless.
Since its discovery, the mosaic has remained buried beneath the grounds of the Megiddo Prison. But in recent years the Israeli government has started advancing a multi-year plan to move the prison from its current location and develop a tourist site around the mosaic.
The Tel Megiddo archaeological site is already a major attraction for evangelical Christians visiting the Holy Land. Busloads of pilgrims stop on their way to or from the Galilee to see the ruins of a biblical city and pray at the site where they believe the apocalypse will take place.
Neither the IAA nor the museum would discuss the exact terms of the loan proposal, but Eskozido suggested something similar to the decade-long global tour of a Roman mosaic found in the central Israeli city of Lod until Israel had completed a museum to house it.
Experts remain skeptical of uprooting the mosaic.
“Once you take any artifact outside of its archaeological context, it loses something, it loses a sense of the space and the environment in which it was first excavated,” said Candida Moss, a theology professor at University of Birmingham who co-wrote a book about the Museum of the Bible.
Rafi Greenberg, a professor of archaeology at Tel Aviv University, said the proposal smacked of colonialism, where historically dominant powers have extracted archaeological discoveries from colonies.
“Even if Israel doesn’t ever recognize itself as being a colony, it is actually behaving like one, which I find odd,” he said. Greenberg said that archaeological finds “should stay where they are and not be uprooted and taken abroad to a different country and basically appropriated by a foreign power.”
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/is ... 11401.html
Updated Tue, August 15, 2023 at 7:16 AM CDT
TEL MEGIDDO, Israel (AP) — An ancient Christian mosaic bearing an early reference to Jesus as God is at the center of a controversy that has riled archaeologists: Should the centuries-old decorated floor, which is near what's believed to be the site of the prophesied Armageddon, be uprooted and loaned to a U.S. museum that has been criticized for past acquisition practices?
Israeli officials are considering just that. The proposed loan to the Museum of the Bible in Washington also underscores the deepening ties between Israel and evangelical Christians in the U.S, whom Israel has come to count on for political support, tourism dollars and other benefits.
The Megiddo Mosaic is from what is believed to be the world's earliest Christian prayer hall that was located in a Roman-era village in northern Israel. It was discovered by Israeli archaeologists in 2005 during a salvage excavation conducted as part of the planned expansion of an Israeli prison.
The prison sits at a historic crossroads a mile south of Tel Megiddo on the cusp of the wide, flat Jezreel Valley. The compound is ringed by a white steel fence topped with barbed wire and is used for the detention of Palestinian security inmates.
Across a field strewn with cow-dung and potsherds, the palm-crowned site of a Bronze and Iron Age city and ancient battles is where some Christians believe a conclusive battle between good and evil will transpire at the end of days: Armageddon.
For some Christians, particularly evangelicals, this will be the backdrop of the long-anticipated climax at the Second Coming, when divine wrath will obliterate those who oppose God's kingdom; it serves as the focus of their hopes for ultimate justice.
The Israel Antiquities Authority said that it will decide about the move in the coming weeks, following consultations with an advisory body.
“There’s an entire process that academics and archaeologists are involved with,” said IAA director Eli Eskozido. The organization said that moving the mosaic from its original location was the best way to protect it from upcoming construction at the prison.
Jeffrey Kloha, the Museum of the Bible’s chief curatorial officer, said a decision on the loan would be made solely by the IAA.
The museum “of course would welcome the opportunity to educate our thousands of visitors on important pieces of history such as this mosaic,” he told The Associated Press via email.
Several archaeologists and academics have voiced vociferous objections to the notion of removing the Megiddo Mosaic from where it was found — and all the more so to exhibit it at the Museum of the Bible.
Cavan Concannon, a religion professor at the University of Southern California, said the museum acts as a “right-wing Christian nationalist Bible machine” with links to “other institutions that promote white evangelical, Christian nationalism, Christian Zionist forms.”
“My worry is that this mosaic will lose its actual historical context and be given an ideological context that continues to help the museum tell its story,” he said.
Others balk at the thought of moving the mosaic at all before academic study is complete.
“It is seriously premature to move that mosaic," said Matthew Adams, director of the Center for the Mediterranean World, an non-profit archaeological research institute, who is involved in digs at Tel Megiddo and the abutting Roman legionary camp of Legio.
Asked about criticisms of the Washington museum’s practices, Kloha said, “Major museums and distinguished institutions committed to preserving history have had to grapple with cultural heritage issues, particularly in recent years.”
“To be clear: Museum of the Bible is proud to have proactively launched research and a thorough review of items in its collections,” he added. “The museum initiated returns where appropriate to countries of origin without obligation to do so and encourages other institutions to do the same.”
Based on other finds found in the dig and the style of the letters in the inscriptions, IAA archaeologists have dated the mosaic floor to the third century — before the Roman Empire officially converted to Christianity and when adherents were still persecuted. Nonetheless, one of the donors who paid to decorate the ancient house of worship was a centurion serving in the adjacent Roman legionary camp.
The mosaic bears Greek inscriptions, among them an offering “To God Jesus Christ.”
Since opening its doors in 2017, the Museum of the Bible has faced criticism over its collecting practices and for promoting an evangelical Christian political agenda. In 2018, it had to repatriate an ancient Mesopotamian tablet looted from Iraq and admit that several of the Dead Sea Scroll fragments in its collection were modern forgeries. American authorities also seized thousands of clay tablets and other looted antiquities from the museum’s founder, Hobby Lobby president and evangelical Christian Steve Green, and returned them to Iraq.
The mosaic loan would reinforce ties between Israel and the museum. The museum sponsors two archaeological digs in Israel, has a gallery curated by the IAA. Kloha said the museum also is planning a lecture series featuring IAA archaeologists.
Evangelical Christians, whose ranks have been growing worldwide, have become some of Israel's most fervent supporters, donating large sums of money and visiting the country as tourists and pilgrims. In the U.S., they also lobby politicians in Congress in support of Israel.
Evangelicals, who make up more than a third of the world's estimated 2 billion Christians, say their affinity for Israel stems from Christianity’s Jewish roots.
Some view the founding of Israel as fulfilling biblical prophecy, ushering in an anticipated Messianic age when Jesus will return and Jews will either accept Christianity or die. That tenet has generated unease among some Israelis, but politicians have embraced evangelical support for the state nonetheless.
Since its discovery, the mosaic has remained buried beneath the grounds of the Megiddo Prison. But in recent years the Israeli government has started advancing a multi-year plan to move the prison from its current location and develop a tourist site around the mosaic.
The Tel Megiddo archaeological site is already a major attraction for evangelical Christians visiting the Holy Land. Busloads of pilgrims stop on their way to or from the Galilee to see the ruins of a biblical city and pray at the site where they believe the apocalypse will take place.
Neither the IAA nor the museum would discuss the exact terms of the loan proposal, but Eskozido suggested something similar to the decade-long global tour of a Roman mosaic found in the central Israeli city of Lod until Israel had completed a museum to house it.
Experts remain skeptical of uprooting the mosaic.
“Once you take any artifact outside of its archaeological context, it loses something, it loses a sense of the space and the environment in which it was first excavated,” said Candida Moss, a theology professor at University of Birmingham who co-wrote a book about the Museum of the Bible.
Rafi Greenberg, a professor of archaeology at Tel Aviv University, said the proposal smacked of colonialism, where historically dominant powers have extracted archaeological discoveries from colonies.
“Even if Israel doesn’t ever recognize itself as being a colony, it is actually behaving like one, which I find odd,” he said. Greenberg said that archaeological finds “should stay where they are and not be uprooted and taken abroad to a different country and basically appropriated by a foreign power.”
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/is ... 11401.html
Re: Christianity
The Daily Beast
‘Dangerously Rebellious’ Texas Nuns Ban Bishop From Monastery for ‘Spiritual Safety’
AJ McDougall
Sat, August 19, 2023 at 6:14 PM CDT
A group of nuns in Texas has declared that they no longer recognize the authority of an embattled Fort Worth bishop, the latest twist in a saga that began when he accused one of their order of violating her vow of chastity.
In a statement, the Monastery of the Most Holy Trinity of the Discalced Carmelite Nuns alleged that, over the past four months, they had been “subjected to unprecedented interference, intimidation, aggression, private and public humiliation and spiritual manipulation” by Bishop Michael Olson.
They claimed that Olson had shouted at nuns, violated their privacy, and humiliated them “in private and in public when they protest that their rights have been ignored.”
“No one who abuses us as has the current Bishop of Fort Worth, has any right to our cooperation or obedience,” the nuns said. “For our own spiritual and psychological safety, and in justice, we must remain independent of this Bishop until such time as he repents of the abuse to which he has subjected us, apologizes in person to our community for it and accepts to make due public reparation.”
Olson and his representatives are also banned from coming onto the property of the order’s 70-acre Arlington monastery, they added.
The Catholic Diocese of Fort Worth said in response that it was aware of the “dangerously rebellious decision” by the nuns and called for prayers to stop the “open disobedience,” according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
In their statement, the order said they had been “caught off-guard” by Olson’s behavior towards them in recent months. Olson is the fourth bishop to oversee the Diocese of Fort Worth, and was appointed to the role in 2014.
In April this year, Olson launched an “ecclesiastical investigation” into a rumor that the head of the order, the Reverend Mother Teresa Agnes Gerlach, had violated her vow of chastity with a priest outside the Fort Worth diocese. He dismissed her in June.
The feud had taken several bizarre detours by then. Most notably, in late May, religious officials told police the nuns were hiding “marijuana paraphernalia” at the monastery. Photos of the supposed paraphernalia were supplied to local news outlets by the diocese the next month.
“That’s inside the cloister. I think that’s what they call it, the craft room,” an unnamed diocese source told WFAA at the time.
Matthew Bobo, the nuns’ attorney, called the anonymously-sourced photos “without merit.” He told KERA News, referring to Olson, “It’s pretty typical, it’s his M.O., you know. He just throws a picture out there and says, ‘I’ve got this confidential informant,’ but he doesn't ever provide any proof or backup as to where it came.”
In an eight-minute YouTube video uploaded in June, Olson shot back that any claims that he or the diocese had planted the drugs were “false and baseless.”
That same month, Gerlach and another nun from the order, Sister Francis Therese, filed a $1 million civil lawsuit claiming defamation and invasions of privacy. They alleged that the bishop had illegally seized Gerlach’s personal electronic devices in an effort to dig up dirt on the alleged affair.
“Please pray for the sisters at the Monastery,” the diocese sniffed in response. Olson warned the order he would restrict their access to Mass and confession until they yanked the suit, but restored their access to the sacraments soon after, according to The Pillar, a Catholic news site.
At a court hearing in the case on June 27, the vicar general of the diocese, the Very Rev. Jonathan Wallis, testified that she’d told him of the affair. A 40-minute audio recording of an alleged conversation between Gerlach and Olson in which she appeared to admit to breaking her vow of chastity was also played in court.
She told Olson that the medications she had been taking at the time of the affair had scrambled her judgment, according to KERA News. “Bishop, at the time, I was having seizures, and I was in a very difficult position, and I think my brain just got really messed up,” she said, calling it a “horrible mistake.”
The nuns maintained that Gerlach had been in poor health and under the influence of painkillers when she spoke to both Wallis and Olson. Sister Francis Therese told the Star-Telegram in July that Olson had approached the nuns in January to request that the reverend mother step down from her post over health concerns.
“We told him, ‘Bishop, we don’t want her to step down,’” she said, recalling that he’d thrown a “temper tantrum.” Elsewhere, the order floated the idea that Olson’s actions were motivated by greed, and that he was trying to get their donor list.
On June 30, a judge dismissed the nuns’ lawsuit, saying the civil court didn’t have the jurisdiction to rule on a church matter. “This is a difficult, emotional matter,” the judge said, according to the Dallas Morning News. “I hope everyone respects that.”
The same day, Arlington police closed their criminal investigation into drug use at the monastery, telling NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth that there had been no probable cause to pursue an inquiry any further.
After initially announcing plans to file an appeal in their civil suit, Bobo said at the end of July that the nuns were reversing course, leaving the matter up to the Vatican. Church leaders in Rome had told the order they would not act on Gerlach’s appeal of her dismissal until civil litigation was concluded, he said.
Meanwhile, a petition calling for Olson’s dismissal had been circulated by the nonprofit Laity in Unity Foundation, amassing more than 800 signatures. The petition has been sent to the Vatican, according to the foundation’s president.
“What he has done to the nun is identical to how he has harmed other parishes and priests,” Steve Knobbe told the Star-Telegram. The petition accuses Olson of “misuse of his ordained office,” going against canon law, using abusive language, and leveraging his power to act vindictively towards others.
A canonical investigation into the matter by the Vatican’s Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of the Apostolic Life remains ongoing. Gerlach remains on administrative leave, according to the diocese.
“Only divine power can cause the bishop to reverse his actions,” Sister Francis Therese told the Star-Telegram in July. “He certainly owes the reverend mother a public apology, but I know that will never come.”
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/da ... 06806.html
‘Dangerously Rebellious’ Texas Nuns Ban Bishop From Monastery for ‘Spiritual Safety’
AJ McDougall
Sat, August 19, 2023 at 6:14 PM CDT
A group of nuns in Texas has declared that they no longer recognize the authority of an embattled Fort Worth bishop, the latest twist in a saga that began when he accused one of their order of violating her vow of chastity.
In a statement, the Monastery of the Most Holy Trinity of the Discalced Carmelite Nuns alleged that, over the past four months, they had been “subjected to unprecedented interference, intimidation, aggression, private and public humiliation and spiritual manipulation” by Bishop Michael Olson.
They claimed that Olson had shouted at nuns, violated their privacy, and humiliated them “in private and in public when they protest that their rights have been ignored.”
“No one who abuses us as has the current Bishop of Fort Worth, has any right to our cooperation or obedience,” the nuns said. “For our own spiritual and psychological safety, and in justice, we must remain independent of this Bishop until such time as he repents of the abuse to which he has subjected us, apologizes in person to our community for it and accepts to make due public reparation.”
Olson and his representatives are also banned from coming onto the property of the order’s 70-acre Arlington monastery, they added.
The Catholic Diocese of Fort Worth said in response that it was aware of the “dangerously rebellious decision” by the nuns and called for prayers to stop the “open disobedience,” according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
In their statement, the order said they had been “caught off-guard” by Olson’s behavior towards them in recent months. Olson is the fourth bishop to oversee the Diocese of Fort Worth, and was appointed to the role in 2014.
In April this year, Olson launched an “ecclesiastical investigation” into a rumor that the head of the order, the Reverend Mother Teresa Agnes Gerlach, had violated her vow of chastity with a priest outside the Fort Worth diocese. He dismissed her in June.
The feud had taken several bizarre detours by then. Most notably, in late May, religious officials told police the nuns were hiding “marijuana paraphernalia” at the monastery. Photos of the supposed paraphernalia were supplied to local news outlets by the diocese the next month.
“That’s inside the cloister. I think that’s what they call it, the craft room,” an unnamed diocese source told WFAA at the time.
Matthew Bobo, the nuns’ attorney, called the anonymously-sourced photos “without merit.” He told KERA News, referring to Olson, “It’s pretty typical, it’s his M.O., you know. He just throws a picture out there and says, ‘I’ve got this confidential informant,’ but he doesn't ever provide any proof or backup as to where it came.”
In an eight-minute YouTube video uploaded in June, Olson shot back that any claims that he or the diocese had planted the drugs were “false and baseless.”
That same month, Gerlach and another nun from the order, Sister Francis Therese, filed a $1 million civil lawsuit claiming defamation and invasions of privacy. They alleged that the bishop had illegally seized Gerlach’s personal electronic devices in an effort to dig up dirt on the alleged affair.
“Please pray for the sisters at the Monastery,” the diocese sniffed in response. Olson warned the order he would restrict their access to Mass and confession until they yanked the suit, but restored their access to the sacraments soon after, according to The Pillar, a Catholic news site.
At a court hearing in the case on June 27, the vicar general of the diocese, the Very Rev. Jonathan Wallis, testified that she’d told him of the affair. A 40-minute audio recording of an alleged conversation between Gerlach and Olson in which she appeared to admit to breaking her vow of chastity was also played in court.
She told Olson that the medications she had been taking at the time of the affair had scrambled her judgment, according to KERA News. “Bishop, at the time, I was having seizures, and I was in a very difficult position, and I think my brain just got really messed up,” she said, calling it a “horrible mistake.”
The nuns maintained that Gerlach had been in poor health and under the influence of painkillers when she spoke to both Wallis and Olson. Sister Francis Therese told the Star-Telegram in July that Olson had approached the nuns in January to request that the reverend mother step down from her post over health concerns.
“We told him, ‘Bishop, we don’t want her to step down,’” she said, recalling that he’d thrown a “temper tantrum.” Elsewhere, the order floated the idea that Olson’s actions were motivated by greed, and that he was trying to get their donor list.
On June 30, a judge dismissed the nuns’ lawsuit, saying the civil court didn’t have the jurisdiction to rule on a church matter. “This is a difficult, emotional matter,” the judge said, according to the Dallas Morning News. “I hope everyone respects that.”
The same day, Arlington police closed their criminal investigation into drug use at the monastery, telling NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth that there had been no probable cause to pursue an inquiry any further.
After initially announcing plans to file an appeal in their civil suit, Bobo said at the end of July that the nuns were reversing course, leaving the matter up to the Vatican. Church leaders in Rome had told the order they would not act on Gerlach’s appeal of her dismissal until civil litigation was concluded, he said.
Meanwhile, a petition calling for Olson’s dismissal had been circulated by the nonprofit Laity in Unity Foundation, amassing more than 800 signatures. The petition has been sent to the Vatican, according to the foundation’s president.
“What he has done to the nun is identical to how he has harmed other parishes and priests,” Steve Knobbe told the Star-Telegram. The petition accuses Olson of “misuse of his ordained office,” going against canon law, using abusive language, and leveraging his power to act vindictively towards others.
A canonical investigation into the matter by the Vatican’s Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of the Apostolic Life remains ongoing. Gerlach remains on administrative leave, according to the diocese.
“Only divine power can cause the bishop to reverse his actions,” Sister Francis Therese told the Star-Telegram in July. “He certainly owes the reverend mother a public apology, but I know that will never come.”
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/da ... 06806.html
Pope Says a Strong U.S. Faction Offers a Backward, Narrow View of the Church
In unusually sharp remarks published this week, Pope Francis said some conservative American Catholics wrongly ignore much of the Church’s mission and reject the possibility of change.
His comments were an unusually explicit statement of the pope’s longstanding lament that the ideological bent of some leading American Catholics has turned them into culture warriors rather than pastors, offering the faithful a warped view of Church doctrine rather than a healthy, well-rounded faith. It has become a major theme of his papacy that he sees himself as bringing the church forward while his misguided conservative critics try to hold it back.
In 2018, in a major document called an apostolic exhortation on the subject of holiness, Francis explicitly wrote that caring for migrants and the poor is as holy a pursuit as opposing abortion. “Our defense of the innocent unborn, for example, needs to be clear, firm and passionate,” he wrote. “Equally sacred, however, are the lives of the poor, those already born, the destitute, the abandoned.”
He has urged priests to welcome and minister to people who are gay, divorced and remarried, and he has called on the whole world to tackle climate change, calling it a moral issue. Francis is set to travel on Thursday to Mongolia for a trip that will highlight interreligious dialogue and the protection of the environment — issues far from the top of the priority list for many American conservatives.
Image
Pope Francis greeting children and their families during his weekly general audience at the Vatican on Tuesday.
Pope Francis greeting children and their families during his weekly general audience at the Vatican on Tuesday.Credit...Filippo Monteforte/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
For nearly a decade, Francis’ conservative critics have accused him of leading the church astray and of diluting the faith with a fuzzy pastoral emphasis that blurred — or at times erased — the Church’s traditions and central tenets. Some U.S. bishops have issued public warnings about the Vatican’s direction, with varying degrees of alarm, and clashed with the pope over everything from liturgy and worship styles, to the centrality of abortion opposition in the Catholic faith, to American politics.
In the preface of a book published this month, Cardinal Raymond Burke, an American former archbishop and Vatican official who is considered a leader of Catholic conservatives, wrote that Francis risked driving the church into a schism, a definitive rupture. The danger, he wrote, was an upcoming synod of bishops in October, convened by Francis to promote inclusivity, transparency and accountability, which will include lay people, including some women.
In the book, which suggests that the meeting will open a “Pandora’s box” of problems, Cardinal Burke wrote that such from-the-ground-up collaboration leads to “confusion and error and their fruit — indeed schism.”
Bishop Joseph Strickland, who heads a small diocese in East Texas and has become one of the pope’s loudest critics, has accused the pope of undermining the Catholic faith and has invited Francis to fire him. The bishop is under investigation by the Vatican over his leadership of the diocese.
In a public letter released last week, Bishop Strickland warned that many “basic truths” of Catholic teaching would be challenged at the synod, and hinted ominously at an irrevocable break. Those who would “propose changes to that which cannot be changed,” he warned, “are the true schismatics.”
Conservative bishops have at times directly confronted American politicians, particularly Catholic Democrats. In 2021, they pushed to issue guidance that would deny the sacrament of Communion to Catholic politicians who publicly support and advance abortion rights, like President Biden — a regular churchgoer and the first Catholic president since the 1960s — and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Image
Catholic bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas, joins a protest against the Los Angeles Dodgers for honoring a pro-LGBTQ group, Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, during Pride Night at Dodger Stadium in June.
Catholic bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas, joins a protest against the Los Angeles Dodgers for honoring a pro-LGBTQ group, Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, during Pride Night at Dodger Stadium in June.Credit...Kirby Lee/USA Today Sports, via Reuters
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops backed away from a direct conflict on that issue, after the Vatican warned against using the Eucharist as a political weapon. Francis has preached that communion “is not the reward of saints, but the bread of sinners.”
But some individual bishops have persisted. Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone of San Francisco, an outspoken critic of the pope, said last year that Ms. Pelosi would not be permitted to receive communion in his archdiocese unless she was willing to “publicly repudiate” her stance on abortion.
Clashes between the Vatican and conservative American bishops are often amplified and encouraged by conservative media outlets. Popular radio hosts and podcasters regularly question the pope’s leadership and raise questions about his legitimacy. Combative independent websites like Church Militant and LifeSite News cover Francis’ perceived missteps closely, and skewer church institutions they depict as corrupt and profane.
Many of today’s conservative leaders were promoted in the more doctrinaire church of Saint John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. They have accused Francis, an Argentine, of being anti-American and anticapitalist, and leading the church away from its core teachings.
But he has consistently argued in his decade as pope that the church was part of history, and not a fortress from it, and that it needed to open up and be amid the people to reflect and respond to their challenges.
Speaking to the Portuguese priests this month, he noted that over the centuries the church had changed its positions on issues like slavery and capital punishment.
Image
Portuguese cardinals wait for Pope Francis before a meeting with civic leaders and diplomats in Lisbon in early August.
Portuguese cardinals wait for Pope Francis before a meeting with civic leaders and diplomats in Lisbon in early August. Credit...Ana Brigida/Associated Press
“The vision of the doctrine of the church as a monolith is wrong,” he said. “When you go backward, you make something closed off, disconnected from the roots of the church,” eroding morality.
His comments were in response to a question from a Jesuit who said he was taken aback, when he spent a year in the United States, by harsh criticism of the pope from some Catholics, including bishops.
To some people, “the situation of migrants, for example, is a lesser issue,” the pope said. “Some Catholics consider it a secondary issue compared to the ‘grave’ bioethical questions.”
But focusing on issues of sexual morality and downgrading issues of social justice, he said, clashes with his vision of the true church.
“That a politician looking for votes might say such a thing is understandable,” he added. “But not a Christian.”
Francis has steadily thinned out and isolated the most vocal, and in some cases aggressive, American conservative clergy, declining to promote some archbishops to cardinals and so denying them voting rights in the conclave that chooses the pope. In other cases he has simply waited them out and accepted their resignations when they reached mandatory retirement age.
But the American bishops’ conference remains a redoubt of Catholic conservatism, much more conservative than Francis and many of the other national churches.
On a flight to Africa in 2019, Francis seemed to acknowledge a well-financed and media-backed American effort to undermine his pontificate, saying it was an “an honor that the Americans attack me” when asked about the American conservative-media complex.
On the return flight, he was asked about the sustained opposition from Catholic conservatives in the United States who had accused him of driving traditionalists to break with the church. Francis said he hoped it didn’t come to that, but wasn’t necessarily terrified at the prospect either.
“I pray there are no schisms,” Francis said at the time. “But I’m not scared.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/30/worl ... tives.html
His comments were an unusually explicit statement of the pope’s longstanding lament that the ideological bent of some leading American Catholics has turned them into culture warriors rather than pastors, offering the faithful a warped view of Church doctrine rather than a healthy, well-rounded faith. It has become a major theme of his papacy that he sees himself as bringing the church forward while his misguided conservative critics try to hold it back.
In 2018, in a major document called an apostolic exhortation on the subject of holiness, Francis explicitly wrote that caring for migrants and the poor is as holy a pursuit as opposing abortion. “Our defense of the innocent unborn, for example, needs to be clear, firm and passionate,” he wrote. “Equally sacred, however, are the lives of the poor, those already born, the destitute, the abandoned.”
He has urged priests to welcome and minister to people who are gay, divorced and remarried, and he has called on the whole world to tackle climate change, calling it a moral issue. Francis is set to travel on Thursday to Mongolia for a trip that will highlight interreligious dialogue and the protection of the environment — issues far from the top of the priority list for many American conservatives.
Image
Pope Francis greeting children and their families during his weekly general audience at the Vatican on Tuesday.
Pope Francis greeting children and their families during his weekly general audience at the Vatican on Tuesday.Credit...Filippo Monteforte/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
For nearly a decade, Francis’ conservative critics have accused him of leading the church astray and of diluting the faith with a fuzzy pastoral emphasis that blurred — or at times erased — the Church’s traditions and central tenets. Some U.S. bishops have issued public warnings about the Vatican’s direction, with varying degrees of alarm, and clashed with the pope over everything from liturgy and worship styles, to the centrality of abortion opposition in the Catholic faith, to American politics.
In the preface of a book published this month, Cardinal Raymond Burke, an American former archbishop and Vatican official who is considered a leader of Catholic conservatives, wrote that Francis risked driving the church into a schism, a definitive rupture. The danger, he wrote, was an upcoming synod of bishops in October, convened by Francis to promote inclusivity, transparency and accountability, which will include lay people, including some women.
In the book, which suggests that the meeting will open a “Pandora’s box” of problems, Cardinal Burke wrote that such from-the-ground-up collaboration leads to “confusion and error and their fruit — indeed schism.”
Bishop Joseph Strickland, who heads a small diocese in East Texas and has become one of the pope’s loudest critics, has accused the pope of undermining the Catholic faith and has invited Francis to fire him. The bishop is under investigation by the Vatican over his leadership of the diocese.
In a public letter released last week, Bishop Strickland warned that many “basic truths” of Catholic teaching would be challenged at the synod, and hinted ominously at an irrevocable break. Those who would “propose changes to that which cannot be changed,” he warned, “are the true schismatics.”
Conservative bishops have at times directly confronted American politicians, particularly Catholic Democrats. In 2021, they pushed to issue guidance that would deny the sacrament of Communion to Catholic politicians who publicly support and advance abortion rights, like President Biden — a regular churchgoer and the first Catholic president since the 1960s — and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Image
Catholic bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas, joins a protest against the Los Angeles Dodgers for honoring a pro-LGBTQ group, Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, during Pride Night at Dodger Stadium in June.
Catholic bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas, joins a protest against the Los Angeles Dodgers for honoring a pro-LGBTQ group, Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, during Pride Night at Dodger Stadium in June.Credit...Kirby Lee/USA Today Sports, via Reuters
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops backed away from a direct conflict on that issue, after the Vatican warned against using the Eucharist as a political weapon. Francis has preached that communion “is not the reward of saints, but the bread of sinners.”
But some individual bishops have persisted. Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone of San Francisco, an outspoken critic of the pope, said last year that Ms. Pelosi would not be permitted to receive communion in his archdiocese unless she was willing to “publicly repudiate” her stance on abortion.
Clashes between the Vatican and conservative American bishops are often amplified and encouraged by conservative media outlets. Popular radio hosts and podcasters regularly question the pope’s leadership and raise questions about his legitimacy. Combative independent websites like Church Militant and LifeSite News cover Francis’ perceived missteps closely, and skewer church institutions they depict as corrupt and profane.
Many of today’s conservative leaders were promoted in the more doctrinaire church of Saint John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. They have accused Francis, an Argentine, of being anti-American and anticapitalist, and leading the church away from its core teachings.
But he has consistently argued in his decade as pope that the church was part of history, and not a fortress from it, and that it needed to open up and be amid the people to reflect and respond to their challenges.
Speaking to the Portuguese priests this month, he noted that over the centuries the church had changed its positions on issues like slavery and capital punishment.
Image
Portuguese cardinals wait for Pope Francis before a meeting with civic leaders and diplomats in Lisbon in early August.
Portuguese cardinals wait for Pope Francis before a meeting with civic leaders and diplomats in Lisbon in early August. Credit...Ana Brigida/Associated Press
“The vision of the doctrine of the church as a monolith is wrong,” he said. “When you go backward, you make something closed off, disconnected from the roots of the church,” eroding morality.
His comments were in response to a question from a Jesuit who said he was taken aback, when he spent a year in the United States, by harsh criticism of the pope from some Catholics, including bishops.
To some people, “the situation of migrants, for example, is a lesser issue,” the pope said. “Some Catholics consider it a secondary issue compared to the ‘grave’ bioethical questions.”
But focusing on issues of sexual morality and downgrading issues of social justice, he said, clashes with his vision of the true church.
“That a politician looking for votes might say such a thing is understandable,” he added. “But not a Christian.”
Francis has steadily thinned out and isolated the most vocal, and in some cases aggressive, American conservative clergy, declining to promote some archbishops to cardinals and so denying them voting rights in the conclave that chooses the pope. In other cases he has simply waited them out and accepted their resignations when they reached mandatory retirement age.
But the American bishops’ conference remains a redoubt of Catholic conservatism, much more conservative than Francis and many of the other national churches.
On a flight to Africa in 2019, Francis seemed to acknowledge a well-financed and media-backed American effort to undermine his pontificate, saying it was an “an honor that the Americans attack me” when asked about the American conservative-media complex.
On the return flight, he was asked about the sustained opposition from Catholic conservatives in the United States who had accused him of driving traditionalists to break with the church. Francis said he hoped it didn’t come to that, but wasn’t necessarily terrified at the prospect either.
“I pray there are no schisms,” Francis said at the time. “But I’m not scared.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/30/worl ... tives.html
In Marseille, Francis Urges Europe to Heed the Plight of Migrants
Pope Francis said the migrant route through the Mediterranean had become a “graveyard of dignity.”
People waiting for Pope Francis to arrive on Saturday at the Vélodrome Stadium in Marseille, France, to preside over Mass.Credit...Alessandra Tarantino/Associated Press
Tens of thousands of faithful were drawn on Saturday to a soccer stadium in the south of France, not for a match, but for a Mass presided over by Pope Francis, who was on the second day of a whirlwind trip to the port city of Marseille.
As he was driven to the stadium, Marseille’s famed Vélodrome, Francis waved from the popemobile to the crowds thronging a sunny avenue. French church authorities estimated the crowds in the stadium at 57,000 people. And when he arrived onstage, he greeted those in attendance: “Bonjour, Marseille! Bonjour, la France!” he said to loud cheers before leading a prayer in French.
“It gives us a great feeling of joy,” Jean-Fernand Leyouka mi Bambiri, 47, a hospital security guard in Marseille, said of the pope’s visit.
At a meeting earlier Saturday, the pope, who focused much of his two-day trip on the plight of migrants looking for better lives in Europe by crossing the Mediterranean, condemned the world’s indifference to the deaths of many of those who try to make that treacherous journey. Over 2,300 migrants trying to cross the sea from North and sub-Saharan Africa to reach Europe have been recorded as dead or missing so far this year, according to the International Organization for Migration, a United Nations agency.
The Mediterranean, Francis said, is being transformed from “the cradle of civilization” into a “graveyard of dignity.”
Mr. Leyouka mi Bambiri, who attended the Mass with his wife and teenage son, said the pope’s urgent speeches on migration, in Marseille and elsewhere, resonated. “Many don’t want to talk about those issues,” he said near the stadium afterward as the crowd spilled out. “But it’s important for us as Christians — you have to help others.”
Image
President Emmanuel Macron, left, shakes hands with Pope Francis.
President Emmanuel Macron of France greeting Pope Francis on Saturday at the Palais du Pharo, a 19th-century palace overlooking Marseille’s old port.Credit...Andreas Solaro/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
While the pope’s trip was not an official state visit, Francis did meet with President Emmanuel Macron on Saturday at the Palais du Pharo, a 19th-century palace overlooking Marseille’s old port. There, the two leaders attended the closing session of the Mediterranean Meetings, a weeklong gathering of bishops and other representatives, and then met privately for half an hour — their fourth one-on-one meeting since Mr. Macron was first elected in 2017.
The Rev. Vito Impellizzeri, a professor at the Pontifical Theological Faculty of Sicily, who also attended the gathering, said the pope wanted to shift perceptions of the Mediterranean.
“It should not simply be the tomb and clash of civilizations,” he said, but also “a space of reciprocity and encounters.”
Francis also met on Saturday with members of SOS Méditérannée, an aid group that rescues shipwrecked migrants, who offered him a life vest used to rescue babies.
“The unfathomable death toll in the Mediterranean this year could have been prevented if the political will was there,” Sophie Beau, a founder of the group, said at a news conference this past week.
“Those who risk their lives at sea do not invade, they look for welcome,” Francis said on Saturday, calling migration “a reality of our times” that European governments needed to handle with greater cooperation, more legal routes to entry, and better integration.
“Here, also, the Mediterranean mirrors the world, with the South turning to the North,” he said, adding that many developing countries plagued by instability, conflict and desertification were “looking to those that are well-off, in a globalized world in which we are all connected, but one in which the disparities have never been so wide.”
Image
A crowd of migrants on an Italian coast guard ship.
Migrants sat on the deck of an Italian coast guard vessel after being rescued at sea this month. The pope has focused much of his trip to the south of France on the plight of migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean to Europe.Credit...Cecilia Fabiano/LaPresse, via Associated Press
At the Vélodrome, hundreds of faithful hoisted giant banners representing the pope and Notre-Dame de la Garde, the basilica that overlooks the city. Devotion to the local soccer team is a faith of its own in Marseille, and Mr. Macron, while not from the city, is also a supporter.
“By coming here, it is as though you had gone into the home of each Marseillais,” Cardinal Jean-Marc Aveline, the archbishop of Marseille, told the pope at the end of the Mass, as the stadium roared in approval.
Francis has long preferred traveling to the world’s fringes rather than its power centers. Cardinal Aveline said in an interview this past week with the daily Le Parisien that Francis had told him, “If I go to Paris, I will see protocol; in Marseille, I will see the people.” And in Marseille, he met privately early Saturday with people “in a situation of economic hardship” at a charity house, according to the Vatican.
Marseille, a gritty, sprawling city of about 870,000, is France’s second largest. It is plagued by pockets of extreme poverty, strained social services and deadly drug-related violence. But it is also one of France’s oldest and most cosmopolitan cities, a predominantly working-class patchwork of ethnic and religious communities that has been shaped by waves of immigration from Europe and Africa.
Mr. Macron’s office said the president and Francis had a free-ranging discussion, mostly on international issues like the environment, the war in Ukraine and the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh.
Mr. Macron is a disrupter of French politics who has long been fascinated by Francis’ willingness to shake things up in the church, but he does not see eye to eye with the pope on a number of issues.
His government has hardened its stance on the issue of migrants as it seeks support from the right on an upcoming immigration bill, and it is expected to unveil legislation on assisted dying this fall — a policy that the Roman Catholic Church rejects. In his speech, Francis criticized “the false pretenses of a supposedly dignified and ‘sweet’ death.’”
The last papal visit to Marseille was in 1533, when Pope Clement VII married his niece Catherine de Medici to the future King Henry II of France.
Roman Catholicism has dwindled significantly in power and influence in France since then, even though it is still the main religion in the country, representing about 29 percent of the population.
Today, half of French adults 18 to 59 say they have no religion at all, according to official statistics, and the concept of laïcité — a nondiscriminatory society where the state upholds strict religious neutrality — is widely approved.
That led some, especially on the left, to criticize Mr. Macron’s decision to attend the Mass in Marseille, even though he stressed that he was there only “out of courtesy and respect,” not to participate.
But in Marseille, Francis, not Mr. Macron, was the main attraction.
Image
Throngs of people waving at Francis in the popemobile.
Tens of thousands of people gathered at the Vélodrome to see the pope.Credit...Daniel Cole/Associated Press
Elisabetta Povoledo contributed reporting from Rome.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/23/worl ... 778d3e6de3
People waiting for Pope Francis to arrive on Saturday at the Vélodrome Stadium in Marseille, France, to preside over Mass.Credit...Alessandra Tarantino/Associated Press
Tens of thousands of faithful were drawn on Saturday to a soccer stadium in the south of France, not for a match, but for a Mass presided over by Pope Francis, who was on the second day of a whirlwind trip to the port city of Marseille.
As he was driven to the stadium, Marseille’s famed Vélodrome, Francis waved from the popemobile to the crowds thronging a sunny avenue. French church authorities estimated the crowds in the stadium at 57,000 people. And when he arrived onstage, he greeted those in attendance: “Bonjour, Marseille! Bonjour, la France!” he said to loud cheers before leading a prayer in French.
“It gives us a great feeling of joy,” Jean-Fernand Leyouka mi Bambiri, 47, a hospital security guard in Marseille, said of the pope’s visit.
At a meeting earlier Saturday, the pope, who focused much of his two-day trip on the plight of migrants looking for better lives in Europe by crossing the Mediterranean, condemned the world’s indifference to the deaths of many of those who try to make that treacherous journey. Over 2,300 migrants trying to cross the sea from North and sub-Saharan Africa to reach Europe have been recorded as dead or missing so far this year, according to the International Organization for Migration, a United Nations agency.
The Mediterranean, Francis said, is being transformed from “the cradle of civilization” into a “graveyard of dignity.”
Mr. Leyouka mi Bambiri, who attended the Mass with his wife and teenage son, said the pope’s urgent speeches on migration, in Marseille and elsewhere, resonated. “Many don’t want to talk about those issues,” he said near the stadium afterward as the crowd spilled out. “But it’s important for us as Christians — you have to help others.”
Image
President Emmanuel Macron, left, shakes hands with Pope Francis.
President Emmanuel Macron of France greeting Pope Francis on Saturday at the Palais du Pharo, a 19th-century palace overlooking Marseille’s old port.Credit...Andreas Solaro/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
While the pope’s trip was not an official state visit, Francis did meet with President Emmanuel Macron on Saturday at the Palais du Pharo, a 19th-century palace overlooking Marseille’s old port. There, the two leaders attended the closing session of the Mediterranean Meetings, a weeklong gathering of bishops and other representatives, and then met privately for half an hour — their fourth one-on-one meeting since Mr. Macron was first elected in 2017.
The Rev. Vito Impellizzeri, a professor at the Pontifical Theological Faculty of Sicily, who also attended the gathering, said the pope wanted to shift perceptions of the Mediterranean.
“It should not simply be the tomb and clash of civilizations,” he said, but also “a space of reciprocity and encounters.”
Francis also met on Saturday with members of SOS Méditérannée, an aid group that rescues shipwrecked migrants, who offered him a life vest used to rescue babies.
“The unfathomable death toll in the Mediterranean this year could have been prevented if the political will was there,” Sophie Beau, a founder of the group, said at a news conference this past week.
“Those who risk their lives at sea do not invade, they look for welcome,” Francis said on Saturday, calling migration “a reality of our times” that European governments needed to handle with greater cooperation, more legal routes to entry, and better integration.
“Here, also, the Mediterranean mirrors the world, with the South turning to the North,” he said, adding that many developing countries plagued by instability, conflict and desertification were “looking to those that are well-off, in a globalized world in which we are all connected, but one in which the disparities have never been so wide.”
Image
A crowd of migrants on an Italian coast guard ship.
Migrants sat on the deck of an Italian coast guard vessel after being rescued at sea this month. The pope has focused much of his trip to the south of France on the plight of migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean to Europe.Credit...Cecilia Fabiano/LaPresse, via Associated Press
At the Vélodrome, hundreds of faithful hoisted giant banners representing the pope and Notre-Dame de la Garde, the basilica that overlooks the city. Devotion to the local soccer team is a faith of its own in Marseille, and Mr. Macron, while not from the city, is also a supporter.
“By coming here, it is as though you had gone into the home of each Marseillais,” Cardinal Jean-Marc Aveline, the archbishop of Marseille, told the pope at the end of the Mass, as the stadium roared in approval.
Francis has long preferred traveling to the world’s fringes rather than its power centers. Cardinal Aveline said in an interview this past week with the daily Le Parisien that Francis had told him, “If I go to Paris, I will see protocol; in Marseille, I will see the people.” And in Marseille, he met privately early Saturday with people “in a situation of economic hardship” at a charity house, according to the Vatican.
Marseille, a gritty, sprawling city of about 870,000, is France’s second largest. It is plagued by pockets of extreme poverty, strained social services and deadly drug-related violence. But it is also one of France’s oldest and most cosmopolitan cities, a predominantly working-class patchwork of ethnic and religious communities that has been shaped by waves of immigration from Europe and Africa.
Mr. Macron’s office said the president and Francis had a free-ranging discussion, mostly on international issues like the environment, the war in Ukraine and the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh.
Mr. Macron is a disrupter of French politics who has long been fascinated by Francis’ willingness to shake things up in the church, but he does not see eye to eye with the pope on a number of issues.
His government has hardened its stance on the issue of migrants as it seeks support from the right on an upcoming immigration bill, and it is expected to unveil legislation on assisted dying this fall — a policy that the Roman Catholic Church rejects. In his speech, Francis criticized “the false pretenses of a supposedly dignified and ‘sweet’ death.’”
The last papal visit to Marseille was in 1533, when Pope Clement VII married his niece Catherine de Medici to the future King Henry II of France.
Roman Catholicism has dwindled significantly in power and influence in France since then, even though it is still the main religion in the country, representing about 29 percent of the population.
Today, half of French adults 18 to 59 say they have no religion at all, according to official statistics, and the concept of laïcité — a nondiscriminatory society where the state upholds strict religious neutrality — is widely approved.
That led some, especially on the left, to criticize Mr. Macron’s decision to attend the Mass in Marseille, even though he stressed that he was there only “out of courtesy and respect,” not to participate.
But in Marseille, Francis, not Mr. Macron, was the main attraction.
Image
Throngs of people waving at Francis in the popemobile.
Tens of thousands of people gathered at the Vélodrome to see the pope.Credit...Daniel Cole/Associated Press
Elisabetta Povoledo contributed reporting from Rome.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/23/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Re: Christianity
The Telegraph
Children ‘forced into marriage’ in doomsday cult on remote island
Sarah Newey
Fri, September 22, 2023 at 12:06 PM CDT
Socorro Bayanihan Services reportedly has at least 3,500 members
Children are allegedly being sexually abused on a remote Filipino island at the hands of a doomsday cult headed by a leader who claims to be a reincarnation of Jesus.
Save the Children has urged the Filipino government to take immediate action to free the estimated 1,500 children allegedly held by Socorro Bayanihan Services within a heavily guarded enclave on one of the archipelago’s southern islands, close to an internationally renowned surfing spot.
The group was originally a civic organisation. But according to politicians it morphed into an exploitative, quasi-religious cult known as Omega de Salonera in 2017 – and used a powerful earthquake two years later to lure people into the mountains under the threat of eternal damnation.
There, the cult’s leaders were able to escape scrutiny and commit “monstrous” abuses while running a covert drugs operation protected by a private army, according to Filipino lawmakers.
The group reportedly has at least 3,500 members and is led by Jey Rence B Quilario, who is referred to as “The Messiah”.
In a speech on Monday, the chairman of the senate committee on women and children used congressional privilege to accuse Mr Quilario and his close associates of widespread exploitation and demand action from the country’s government.
“This is a harrowing story of rape, sexual violence, child abuse, forced marriage perpetrated on minors by a cult in the municipality of Socorro, Surigao del Norte,” Senator Risa Hontiveros said.
“We are talking about over a thousand young people in the hands of a deceitful, cruel, and abusive cult… real children are in danger, and time is of the essence. We cannot, we must not, look away.”
Fellow senator Ronald Dela Rosa, meanwhile, accused the group’s leaders of using cult members as “human shields” to avoid prosecution for drug trafficking and demanded an immediate probe into their activities.
He said he had received reports the group was running a methamphetamine laboratory from an underground bunker situated close to the so-called “White House”, where Mr Quilario and fellow leaders live.
Mr Dela Rosa said the laboratory was guarded by a private army cultivated by the group, which he claimed received support from a local extremist group.
Echoing the senators’ calls for action, Save the Children on Friday urged authorities to protect minors exposed to “horrific violence”.
“We urgently call upon the government, specifically our law enforcement agencies, to conduct immediate and thorough investigations into these incidents, secure the protection of the affected children, and bring the perpetrators to justice,” said Alberto Muyot, chief executive of the organisation’s Philippines branch.
Allegations of rape
Senator Hontiveros cited testimony from children and adults who have recently escaped, including a 15-year-old given the pseudonym Chloe. She alleged that the cult’s leader forced her into a marriage with a 21-year-old man when she was just 13.
Chloe said that on several occasions, Mr Quilario locked her in a room with her new husband and forced her to have sex, telling her spouse “he had the right to rape her” because they were married.
In the speech, Senator Hontiveros also accused Mr Quilario of raping children himself. She added that he prevented minors from attending school, demanded up to 60 per cent of member’s pensions and welfare payments, and smuggled drugs to earn money.
Senator Dela Rosa said he had been informed by local authorities that young girls trapped within the cult were forced to have sex with Mr Quilario before being married at the age of 12.
Other testimony from Anna Fionah L. Bojos, a member of the Cebu for Human Rights NGO who visited the region in 2023, documented alleged forced labour with children forced to haul sand and rocks eventually used to build a swimming pool and basketball court.
“Although the cult said it was voluntary labour on their part, they were actually monitored and disciplined for failure to do work,” Ms Bojos said in an opinion piece for The Philippine Star newspaper.
She alleged that children were physically assaulted if their work was deemed unsatisfactory, and in some cases sent to “foxholes” for up to a week of solitary confinement.
“Children were [also] required to do ‘masi-masi’ every day. These are physical exercises where they jog with a heavy sack filled with rocks, undergo obstacle challenges, firearm and bladed weapons handling, learn martial arts, swim, and crawl in the mud full of waste and urine,” Ms Bojos said.
More former cult members testify
Socorro Bayanihan Services has categorically denied all of the accusations, and claimed the children cited had been taught to “fabricate” their stories.
But the accusations have dominated headlines in the Philippines this week, and Senator Hontiveros said more former cult members have come forward since the speech, including Karl – a 28-year-old former member of the Agila Squad, which is alleged to be the armed wing of Socorro Bayanihan Services.
He reportedly claimed that the squad had more than 100 members, including children as young as 12, and they underwent combat training in the belief that they were “soldiers of God” with a divine mission.
There are mounting concerns that eight children who escaped this summer are at risk of being lured back into the mountains, Save the Children warned.
“Time is of the essence and we fear that there could be more affected children who are unaccounted for and whose lives and futures are at risk,” said Mr Muyot.
Mr Muyot added that recently introduced laws must be rigorously enforced.
“Our work to protect children doesn’t end with the passage of laws; it begins there. It is of utmost importance that laws around protecting children from abuse and early marriage are not merely words on paper but are instead, rigorously implemented and enforced,” he said.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/do ... 36271.html
Children ‘forced into marriage’ in doomsday cult on remote island
Sarah Newey
Fri, September 22, 2023 at 12:06 PM CDT
Socorro Bayanihan Services reportedly has at least 3,500 members
Children are allegedly being sexually abused on a remote Filipino island at the hands of a doomsday cult headed by a leader who claims to be a reincarnation of Jesus.
Save the Children has urged the Filipino government to take immediate action to free the estimated 1,500 children allegedly held by Socorro Bayanihan Services within a heavily guarded enclave on one of the archipelago’s southern islands, close to an internationally renowned surfing spot.
The group was originally a civic organisation. But according to politicians it morphed into an exploitative, quasi-religious cult known as Omega de Salonera in 2017 – and used a powerful earthquake two years later to lure people into the mountains under the threat of eternal damnation.
There, the cult’s leaders were able to escape scrutiny and commit “monstrous” abuses while running a covert drugs operation protected by a private army, according to Filipino lawmakers.
The group reportedly has at least 3,500 members and is led by Jey Rence B Quilario, who is referred to as “The Messiah”.
In a speech on Monday, the chairman of the senate committee on women and children used congressional privilege to accuse Mr Quilario and his close associates of widespread exploitation and demand action from the country’s government.
“This is a harrowing story of rape, sexual violence, child abuse, forced marriage perpetrated on minors by a cult in the municipality of Socorro, Surigao del Norte,” Senator Risa Hontiveros said.
“We are talking about over a thousand young people in the hands of a deceitful, cruel, and abusive cult… real children are in danger, and time is of the essence. We cannot, we must not, look away.”
Fellow senator Ronald Dela Rosa, meanwhile, accused the group’s leaders of using cult members as “human shields” to avoid prosecution for drug trafficking and demanded an immediate probe into their activities.
He said he had received reports the group was running a methamphetamine laboratory from an underground bunker situated close to the so-called “White House”, where Mr Quilario and fellow leaders live.
Mr Dela Rosa said the laboratory was guarded by a private army cultivated by the group, which he claimed received support from a local extremist group.
Echoing the senators’ calls for action, Save the Children on Friday urged authorities to protect minors exposed to “horrific violence”.
“We urgently call upon the government, specifically our law enforcement agencies, to conduct immediate and thorough investigations into these incidents, secure the protection of the affected children, and bring the perpetrators to justice,” said Alberto Muyot, chief executive of the organisation’s Philippines branch.
Allegations of rape
Senator Hontiveros cited testimony from children and adults who have recently escaped, including a 15-year-old given the pseudonym Chloe. She alleged that the cult’s leader forced her into a marriage with a 21-year-old man when she was just 13.
Chloe said that on several occasions, Mr Quilario locked her in a room with her new husband and forced her to have sex, telling her spouse “he had the right to rape her” because they were married.
In the speech, Senator Hontiveros also accused Mr Quilario of raping children himself. She added that he prevented minors from attending school, demanded up to 60 per cent of member’s pensions and welfare payments, and smuggled drugs to earn money.
Senator Dela Rosa said he had been informed by local authorities that young girls trapped within the cult were forced to have sex with Mr Quilario before being married at the age of 12.
Other testimony from Anna Fionah L. Bojos, a member of the Cebu for Human Rights NGO who visited the region in 2023, documented alleged forced labour with children forced to haul sand and rocks eventually used to build a swimming pool and basketball court.
“Although the cult said it was voluntary labour on their part, they were actually monitored and disciplined for failure to do work,” Ms Bojos said in an opinion piece for The Philippine Star newspaper.
She alleged that children were physically assaulted if their work was deemed unsatisfactory, and in some cases sent to “foxholes” for up to a week of solitary confinement.
“Children were [also] required to do ‘masi-masi’ every day. These are physical exercises where they jog with a heavy sack filled with rocks, undergo obstacle challenges, firearm and bladed weapons handling, learn martial arts, swim, and crawl in the mud full of waste and urine,” Ms Bojos said.
More former cult members testify
Socorro Bayanihan Services has categorically denied all of the accusations, and claimed the children cited had been taught to “fabricate” their stories.
But the accusations have dominated headlines in the Philippines this week, and Senator Hontiveros said more former cult members have come forward since the speech, including Karl – a 28-year-old former member of the Agila Squad, which is alleged to be the armed wing of Socorro Bayanihan Services.
He reportedly claimed that the squad had more than 100 members, including children as young as 12, and they underwent combat training in the belief that they were “soldiers of God” with a divine mission.
There are mounting concerns that eight children who escaped this summer are at risk of being lured back into the mountains, Save the Children warned.
“Time is of the essence and we fear that there could be more affected children who are unaccounted for and whose lives and futures are at risk,” said Mr Muyot.
Mr Muyot added that recently introduced laws must be rigorously enforced.
“Our work to protect children doesn’t end with the passage of laws; it begins there. It is of utmost importance that laws around protecting children from abuse and early marriage are not merely words on paper but are instead, rigorously implemented and enforced,” he said.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/do ... 36271.html
Vatican Assembly Puts the Church’s Most Sensitive Issues on the Table
Pope Francis’ calls for open-minded discussion will be tested this week as bishops meet with lay people, including women, to debate topics such as married priests and the blessing of gay couples.
Throughout his decade as leader of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Francis has allowed debates on previously taboo topics and set in motion subtle shifts toward liberalizing changes that have enraged conservatives for going too far and frustrated progressives for not going far enough.
This month, starting on Wednesday, Francis’ desire for the church to discuss the concerns of its faithful, even the most sensitive topics, will culminate at the Vatican in an assembly of bishops from around the world that will allow, for the first time, lay people, including women, to attend and vote.
The issues under discussion will include priestly celibacy, married priests, the blessing of gay couples, the extension of sacraments to the divorced and the ordination of female deacons.
Detractors are wary of the very nature of the assembly, known as a synod, and have criticized it as a bureaucratic talkathon or as an insidious Trojan horse for progressives to erode the church’s traditions under the cloak of collegiality.
//What Is a Synod in the Catholic Church? And Why Does This One Matter? https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/02/worl ... 778d3e6de3
//Oct. 2, 2023
Supporters see a chance to put into practice the pope’s bottom-up view of the church as an inclusive institution that upends the traditional hierarchy and forces bishops to listen to and work with their flock more.
For them, more than any single issue on the table — and more even than culture war favorites like abortion, same-sex marriage or euthanasia, which were left off it — it is the process of bishops and lay people working and voting together that amounts to the most potentially transformative change.
“It is an amazing moment,” said Renée Köhler-Ryan, the dean of the School of Philosophy and Theology at the University of Notre Dame Australia, who will be a voting participant in the meeting, one of the first women ever to do so.
Still, many church watchers say, it remains to be seen whether the gathering becomes an instrument for the transformation that traditionalists dread or another opportunity for the papal punting that has left the church’s liberals disappointed.
Image
A crowd of hundreds around a two-tiered stone fountain.
Awaiting the appearance of Francis in St. Peter’s Square in October 2022. For the first time ever, the coming synod will allow lay people, including women, to attend and vote.Credit...Gregorio Borgia/Associated Press
It may end up as neither, and in any case, it is only the first phase of a two-year process. The participants will reconvene in Rome in October 2024, after which the pope is expected to issue a document endorsing or rejecting any recommendations.
“Hopes and fears for the synod are overinflated to the point where it’s hard to see a resolution or an outcome from either this October or next October that doesn’t leave at least one large part of the church feeling not just disappointed but deceived,” said Stephen P. White, a fellow in Catholic studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a think tank in Washington.
There are other reasons the assembly — formally called the Synod on Synodality, essentially a working meeting on how to work together — may disappoint.
It follows two years spent canvassing local churches to better understand the concerns of rank-and-file faithful around the globe. But, as Mr. White pointed out, only a tiny fraction, perhaps a few percent, participated in the canvassing process.
Many of the issues to be discussed are contentious because the faithful themselves had put them on the table, Ms. Köhler-Ryan said, adding that she hoped the inclusion of lay people would lend a more quotidian perspective — a “kind of grittiness” — to the synod. But, she noted, her vote was not part of a democratic process because the decisions rested with the pope alone.
“The big question becomes,” she said of the issues, “how does the synod deal with them?”
The answer is slowly and in secret. “This is not a TV program where they talk about everything,” Francis said last month. He has conceded that the process may appear obscure.
“I am well aware that speaking of a ‘synod on synodality’ may seem something abstruse, self-referential, excessively technical and of little interest to the general public,” Pope Francis said in August. But, he added, it “is something truly important for the church.”
Image
People kneeling and praying at wooden pews in a church with brick walls and stained-glass windows.
A Mass at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Odessa, Texas, in April. The Vatican spent two years canvassing local churches to better understand the concerns of rank-and-file faithful around the globe.Credit...Desiree Rios for The New York Times
But Francis is relying heavily on what Jesuits, the order to which he belongs, call discernment, a deliberately pensive decision-making process that creates the space and time for a spiritual dimension to enter the equation — and perhaps for wider support for important changes to coalesce.
Critics of Francis often roll their eyes at the mention of the word. And church observers have noted that his reliance on discernment has allowed him to delay on big decisions, either out of a lack of boldness or to build support and perhaps political cover among his bishops. The Synod on Synodality is built, experts say, to do just that.
Yet the process has prompted some bewilderment.
“I’ve been trying to explain this one to myself and others for the last little while,” Ms. Köhler-Ryan said. In her understanding, synodality referred to different members of the church working shoulder to shoulder. “It’s a moment in the church where we practice what we’re trying to become,” she said.
The assembly’s leading officials have characterized it as reflecting the church’s diversity and its diversity of concerns.
Some participants were coming with the hope of important shifts.
The Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest and an advocate for L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics who was personally invited by Pope Francis to participate, said he hoped that the assembly would listen to their experiences.
Image
A rainbow flag hangs from the balcony of an ornate brick building above a clock face.
A church in Vienna in March 2021 after the Vatican ruled that the church could not bless same-sex partnerships.Credit...Alex Halada/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
“That’s enough of a change, because in many parts of the world, they’re not listened to,” he said, pointing out that many are kicked out of parishes for being gay or have to worship under church leaders who support laws criminalizing homosexuality.
He said assembly officials had told him that, in the surveys, half of the dioceses in the world mentioned the welcoming of L.G.B.T.Q. people as important. Asked whether he thought the synod would lead to concrete changes, such as to the official Catholic teaching that homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered,” Father Martin said that, although he did not expect any alterations to doctrine, for more bishops “to hear how that language is received by L.G.B.T.Q. people would be very important.”
Helena Jeppesen-Spuhler, who works for the Swiss Catholic Lenten Fund, a Catholic relief agency, will also participate in the assembly. She said that the church required change to survive, adding that she would “pragmatically” argue for women to be ordained as deacons as a first step to becoming priests and bishops (which was, she acknowledged, a bridge too far for now).
“That’s what I’m carrying here to this assembly, to the worldwide church,” she said, arguing that the focus on women in all of the continental surveys showed that there was a desire for such a change, and “I really see a chance.”
But she also recalled the disappointment and frustration in 2019, at a previous synod, when Francis balked at allowing some married men to become priests and women to become deacons, despite receiving an overwhelming vote of support from bishops.
“The question is, ‘Will he do that probably again?’” she said. Or perhaps a “consultation from all over the world and the reports from all over the world” would demonstrate the support he needed to follow through.
That is the conservative nightmare.
Image
Pope Francis in the center of St Peter’s Basilica, with clergy gathered all around in vestments of various colors, mostly green.
Pope Francis offering a Mass at the opening of the Synod of Bishops at the Vatican in October 2021.Credit...Tiziana Fabi/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
On Monday, five of the church’s most conservative cardinals made public a letter they had sent Francis asking for a clarification on his thinking about the ordination of women, the blessing of gay unions, and whether the synod had the power to change doctrine, among other points.
Later in the day, the Vatican released a response, dated Sept. 25, written in Spanish and bearing Francis’ signature, that seemed to reverse a 2021 Vatican note that came down hard against the blessing of gay unions because “God cannot bless sin.”
In Francis’ new letter, he clearly upheld the church position that marriage could exist only between a man and a woman, but added that priests should exercise “pastoral charity” when it came to requests for blessings. Instead of acting as naysaying judges or following new protocols — such as those in liberal parts of the German church that support same-sex blessings — priests should be open to “channels beyond norms” and the possibility that “there are forms of benediction, requested by one or more persons, that do not transmit a mistaken conception of marriage.”
Advocates for gay Catholics welcomed the response as a major step forward, while conservatives suggested that Francis had dodged the issue.
Francis said that while it wasn’t always wise to respond to such direct questions, he wanted to because of the upcoming synod.
Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, a former leader of the church’s doctrinal office whom Francis dismissed from his position but surprisingly invited to take part in the synod, has warned that the assembly could be used as a “hostile takeover.”
In an interview, he said forces “obsessed with the ideology” and those who believe the church no longer “fits with the modern world” were hoping to exploit the synod.
The assembly was not “a parliament or a constituent assembly, which like a sovereign could change or even replace the Constitution of the church,” he said. The fact that women and lay people had been granted the right to vote “doesn’t change anything,” he said, because the doctrine could not be touched
He said criticism of abuse of power by clerics, what Francis calls clericalism, had become a “fixation” and a convenient disguise for prejudice against priests. The ordination of women, even as deacons, was a nonstarter, he added, and blessing gay couples was “not only a blasphemy, but also a fraud.”
Officials running the synod have sought to defend it from accusations of politicization.
“We have no agenda,” Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich of Luxembourg, a Jesuit who is the relator general for the synod, said in June. “There was not a conspiratorial meeting with some people to come up with how we could add some progressive points of the church. That is the very bad imagination of some people.”
Elisabetta Povoledo contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/02/worl ... 778d3e6de3
*********
‘Two Trains Charging at Each Other’: A Texas Bishop Takes On the Pope
Bishop Joseph Strickland, a hero to the emboldened traditionalist wing of American Catholicism, is in open warfare with the Vatican as it hosts a landmark gathering.
Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas, at a protest against the Los Angeles Dodgers for honoring an L.G.B.T.Q. group at the Dodger Stadium in June.Credit...Kirby Lee/Usa Today Sports, via Reuters
This year alone, Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas, has accused the pope of undermining the Catholic faith, has suggested that other Vatican officials have veered so far from church teaching that they are no longer Catholic, and has warned that a landmark global gathering that opens this week at the Vatican could threaten “basic truths” of Catholic doctrine.
With a savvy instinct for inserting himself into theological disputes and culture-war dust-ups across the country, Bishop Strickland has become a leading voice in the emboldened traditionalist wing of American Catholicism.
Now, he is at the center of what is shaping up to be an unusually personal clash in an escalating conflict between Pope Francis and American conservatives: The Vatican, in a relatively rare move, has investigated the bishop’s leadership and is reported to be privately considering asking for his resignation. The bishop, in a rarer one, has publicly refused.
“I cannot resign as Bishop of Tyler because that would be me abandoning the flock that I was given charge of by Pope Benedict XVI,” he wrote in an open letter to Catholics in his diocese in September. He said that he would comply if the pope removes him from office.
The conflict poses a delicate challenge for the Vatican, given Bishop Strickland’s popularity among conservative Catholics. Many see him as standing up for their values in the face of secular culture and a dangerously liberal Catholic hierarchy. Bishop Strickland has a weekly radio show, and more than 145,000 followers on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter — vastly more than most Catholic church leaders and more than twice the number of Catholics in his diocese.
He speaks at conferences across the country and posts prolifically on social media on topics ranging from the ethics of Covid-19 vaccines (which he has questioned) to the Latin Mass favored by traditionalists (and discouraged by Pope Francis) to local conflicts between priests and bishops.
This makes Bishop Strickland, 64, an unusual figure within the Roman Catholic church. He is a clergyman charged by the Vatican with leading one of the country’s nearly 200 geographically defined dioceses — in this case, a rather small and remote one in East Texas. But he is also a free-ranging provocateur who is nationally known for his brazen rhetorical attacks on Pope Francis.
Critics say that in his open defiance, he embodies Francis’ recent comments about “a very strong, organized, reactionary attitude” that opposes him within the American church, one that he says places ideology above faith.
Pope Francis waves to a crowd in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican.
Pope Francis in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican on Wednesday.Credit...Guglielmo Mangiapane/Reuters
This summer, the bishop was subject to a quiet investigation by the Vatican. The Vatican and its representatives in the United States have said nothing in public about the reasons for the investigation, or even acknowledged its existence. But Bishop Strickland has confirmed it took place, saying the investigators seemed to have “an agenda.”
In an interview that streamed live on YouTube on Friday, Bishop Strickland compared himself to an English bishop — now a saint — who was beheaded in the 16th century for resisting King Henry VIII’s break with the Catholic Church. “I don’t necessarily want to volunteer to lose my head," he said, “but I’d honestly rather lose my head than lose my faith.”
Resignation is the usual path offered to bishops nudged from office by the Vatican. The Pillar, a conservative-leaning independent Catholic media outlet, reported that American officials met with the pope in September to discuss whether the bishop should be encouraged to resign.
A spokeswoman for Bishop Strickland declined a request to interview him. A representative for the Vatican’s ambassador to the United States did not respond to a request for comment.
Bishop Strickland has for years criticized the pope and his advisers for, in his view, diluting the church’s core teachings around social and theological issues, including communion, divorce, abortion and same-sex marriage.
In June, Bishop Strickland left his own diocese to lead a high-profile protest against the Los Angeles Dodgers over the team’s honoring of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, an L.G.B.T.Q. activist group that includes members who dress in drag as nuns. Bishops in California declined to appear at the protest, which was sponsored by right-wing Catholic media outlets and activist groups.
For those who see Bishop Strickland as defending the faith, the event epitomized his willingness to speak boldly even in places he is not welcome.
“He went out there and stood up for us,” said Oscar Delgado, a film producer in Minnesota who supports Bishop Strickland.
Mr. Delgado warned that firing Bishop Strickland would only turn him into a martyr in the eyes of his fellow traditionalists. “They have no idea what they’d unleash,” he said. “It’s like the American Revolution: When you start antagonizing a population, there’s going to be a backlash.”
At a conference this summer hosted by the right-wing Coalition for Canceled Priests, Jesse Romero, a radio host, led a crowd in chanting “STRICK-LAND, STRICK-LAND” in support of the bishop. “We’re not going to take this sitting down!” he announced, to cheers and applause from the audience.
“I am always going to stand on the side of Jesus, and if that means I stand on the side of Bishop Strickland and oppose the Vatican, then he and I will go down together,” said Amelia Monroe Carlson, a Catholic writer who lives in a small town in Tennessee. She says Bishop Strickland better represents her views than her own local bishop.
Ms. Carlson said she fears the Catholic church under Pope Francis is drifting from its foundations, compromising its own teaching on issues like salvation and repentance by emphasizing openness at the expense of orthodoxy.
The tension has tightened in the lead-up to the Synod on Synodality, a gathering of bishops and others — including women and laypeople, a historical first — convened by Pope Francis to discuss a wide range of issues facing the church.
With its broad mandate, collaborative process and open-ended topics, the gathering has alarmed many conservatives, including in the United States. They fear the conference could result in the church ordaining women as deacons, or blessing same-sex unions, among other possibilities.
The gathering opens in Rome on Wednesday, the same day the pope will release a second part of his environmental encyclical Laudato Si.
In a letter last week that focused primarily on his views of the church’s opposition to the “L.G.B.T.Q. agenda,” Bishop Strickland warned that the synod was “emerging as an attempt by some to change the focus of Catholicism from eternal salvation of souls in Christ, to making every person feel affirmed regardless of what choices they have made or will make in life.”
The pope has the clear authority to remove Bishop Strickland from office if he chooses, said Robert Flummerfelt, a canon lawyer based in Las Vegas. Typically, a bishop relieved of his duties would be moved to a position of little power, or effectively forced into retirement.
Pope John Paul II removed the authority of Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen of Seattle in the 1980s, for example, after the progressive archbishop was found to have exercised “weak doctrinal leadership” over issues including improperly allowing children to receive communion. As recently as this summer, the bishop of Knoxville, Tenn., Richard Stika, retired after an investigation into turmoil into his diocese.
But Bishop Strickland’s high profile and vocal supporters make the situation in Texas challenging. Mr. Flummerfelt said he hopes that if the Vatican dismisses Bishop Strickland, the reasons are laid out clearly and publicly.
“There’s no winning here,” Mr. Flummerfelt said. “They’re two trains charging at each other.”
Ruth Graham is a Dallas-based national correspondent covering religion, faith and values. She previously reported on religion for Slate. More about Ruth Graham
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/02/us/p ... 778d3e6de3
Throughout his decade as leader of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Francis has allowed debates on previously taboo topics and set in motion subtle shifts toward liberalizing changes that have enraged conservatives for going too far and frustrated progressives for not going far enough.
This month, starting on Wednesday, Francis’ desire for the church to discuss the concerns of its faithful, even the most sensitive topics, will culminate at the Vatican in an assembly of bishops from around the world that will allow, for the first time, lay people, including women, to attend and vote.
The issues under discussion will include priestly celibacy, married priests, the blessing of gay couples, the extension of sacraments to the divorced and the ordination of female deacons.
Detractors are wary of the very nature of the assembly, known as a synod, and have criticized it as a bureaucratic talkathon or as an insidious Trojan horse for progressives to erode the church’s traditions under the cloak of collegiality.
//What Is a Synod in the Catholic Church? And Why Does This One Matter? https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/02/worl ... 778d3e6de3
//Oct. 2, 2023
Supporters see a chance to put into practice the pope’s bottom-up view of the church as an inclusive institution that upends the traditional hierarchy and forces bishops to listen to and work with their flock more.
For them, more than any single issue on the table — and more even than culture war favorites like abortion, same-sex marriage or euthanasia, which were left off it — it is the process of bishops and lay people working and voting together that amounts to the most potentially transformative change.
“It is an amazing moment,” said Renée Köhler-Ryan, the dean of the School of Philosophy and Theology at the University of Notre Dame Australia, who will be a voting participant in the meeting, one of the first women ever to do so.
Still, many church watchers say, it remains to be seen whether the gathering becomes an instrument for the transformation that traditionalists dread or another opportunity for the papal punting that has left the church’s liberals disappointed.
Image
A crowd of hundreds around a two-tiered stone fountain.
Awaiting the appearance of Francis in St. Peter’s Square in October 2022. For the first time ever, the coming synod will allow lay people, including women, to attend and vote.Credit...Gregorio Borgia/Associated Press
It may end up as neither, and in any case, it is only the first phase of a two-year process. The participants will reconvene in Rome in October 2024, after which the pope is expected to issue a document endorsing or rejecting any recommendations.
“Hopes and fears for the synod are overinflated to the point where it’s hard to see a resolution or an outcome from either this October or next October that doesn’t leave at least one large part of the church feeling not just disappointed but deceived,” said Stephen P. White, a fellow in Catholic studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a think tank in Washington.
There are other reasons the assembly — formally called the Synod on Synodality, essentially a working meeting on how to work together — may disappoint.
It follows two years spent canvassing local churches to better understand the concerns of rank-and-file faithful around the globe. But, as Mr. White pointed out, only a tiny fraction, perhaps a few percent, participated in the canvassing process.
Many of the issues to be discussed are contentious because the faithful themselves had put them on the table, Ms. Köhler-Ryan said, adding that she hoped the inclusion of lay people would lend a more quotidian perspective — a “kind of grittiness” — to the synod. But, she noted, her vote was not part of a democratic process because the decisions rested with the pope alone.
“The big question becomes,” she said of the issues, “how does the synod deal with them?”
The answer is slowly and in secret. “This is not a TV program where they talk about everything,” Francis said last month. He has conceded that the process may appear obscure.
“I am well aware that speaking of a ‘synod on synodality’ may seem something abstruse, self-referential, excessively technical and of little interest to the general public,” Pope Francis said in August. But, he added, it “is something truly important for the church.”
Image
People kneeling and praying at wooden pews in a church with brick walls and stained-glass windows.
A Mass at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Odessa, Texas, in April. The Vatican spent two years canvassing local churches to better understand the concerns of rank-and-file faithful around the globe.Credit...Desiree Rios for The New York Times
But Francis is relying heavily on what Jesuits, the order to which he belongs, call discernment, a deliberately pensive decision-making process that creates the space and time for a spiritual dimension to enter the equation — and perhaps for wider support for important changes to coalesce.
Critics of Francis often roll their eyes at the mention of the word. And church observers have noted that his reliance on discernment has allowed him to delay on big decisions, either out of a lack of boldness or to build support and perhaps political cover among his bishops. The Synod on Synodality is built, experts say, to do just that.
Yet the process has prompted some bewilderment.
“I’ve been trying to explain this one to myself and others for the last little while,” Ms. Köhler-Ryan said. In her understanding, synodality referred to different members of the church working shoulder to shoulder. “It’s a moment in the church where we practice what we’re trying to become,” she said.
The assembly’s leading officials have characterized it as reflecting the church’s diversity and its diversity of concerns.
Some participants were coming with the hope of important shifts.
The Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest and an advocate for L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics who was personally invited by Pope Francis to participate, said he hoped that the assembly would listen to their experiences.
Image
A rainbow flag hangs from the balcony of an ornate brick building above a clock face.
A church in Vienna in March 2021 after the Vatican ruled that the church could not bless same-sex partnerships.Credit...Alex Halada/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
“That’s enough of a change, because in many parts of the world, they’re not listened to,” he said, pointing out that many are kicked out of parishes for being gay or have to worship under church leaders who support laws criminalizing homosexuality.
He said assembly officials had told him that, in the surveys, half of the dioceses in the world mentioned the welcoming of L.G.B.T.Q. people as important. Asked whether he thought the synod would lead to concrete changes, such as to the official Catholic teaching that homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered,” Father Martin said that, although he did not expect any alterations to doctrine, for more bishops “to hear how that language is received by L.G.B.T.Q. people would be very important.”
Helena Jeppesen-Spuhler, who works for the Swiss Catholic Lenten Fund, a Catholic relief agency, will also participate in the assembly. She said that the church required change to survive, adding that she would “pragmatically” argue for women to be ordained as deacons as a first step to becoming priests and bishops (which was, she acknowledged, a bridge too far for now).
“That’s what I’m carrying here to this assembly, to the worldwide church,” she said, arguing that the focus on women in all of the continental surveys showed that there was a desire for such a change, and “I really see a chance.”
But she also recalled the disappointment and frustration in 2019, at a previous synod, when Francis balked at allowing some married men to become priests and women to become deacons, despite receiving an overwhelming vote of support from bishops.
“The question is, ‘Will he do that probably again?’” she said. Or perhaps a “consultation from all over the world and the reports from all over the world” would demonstrate the support he needed to follow through.
That is the conservative nightmare.
Image
Pope Francis in the center of St Peter’s Basilica, with clergy gathered all around in vestments of various colors, mostly green.
Pope Francis offering a Mass at the opening of the Synod of Bishops at the Vatican in October 2021.Credit...Tiziana Fabi/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
On Monday, five of the church’s most conservative cardinals made public a letter they had sent Francis asking for a clarification on his thinking about the ordination of women, the blessing of gay unions, and whether the synod had the power to change doctrine, among other points.
Later in the day, the Vatican released a response, dated Sept. 25, written in Spanish and bearing Francis’ signature, that seemed to reverse a 2021 Vatican note that came down hard against the blessing of gay unions because “God cannot bless sin.”
In Francis’ new letter, he clearly upheld the church position that marriage could exist only between a man and a woman, but added that priests should exercise “pastoral charity” when it came to requests for blessings. Instead of acting as naysaying judges or following new protocols — such as those in liberal parts of the German church that support same-sex blessings — priests should be open to “channels beyond norms” and the possibility that “there are forms of benediction, requested by one or more persons, that do not transmit a mistaken conception of marriage.”
Advocates for gay Catholics welcomed the response as a major step forward, while conservatives suggested that Francis had dodged the issue.
Francis said that while it wasn’t always wise to respond to such direct questions, he wanted to because of the upcoming synod.
Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, a former leader of the church’s doctrinal office whom Francis dismissed from his position but surprisingly invited to take part in the synod, has warned that the assembly could be used as a “hostile takeover.”
In an interview, he said forces “obsessed with the ideology” and those who believe the church no longer “fits with the modern world” were hoping to exploit the synod.
The assembly was not “a parliament or a constituent assembly, which like a sovereign could change or even replace the Constitution of the church,” he said. The fact that women and lay people had been granted the right to vote “doesn’t change anything,” he said, because the doctrine could not be touched
He said criticism of abuse of power by clerics, what Francis calls clericalism, had become a “fixation” and a convenient disguise for prejudice against priests. The ordination of women, even as deacons, was a nonstarter, he added, and blessing gay couples was “not only a blasphemy, but also a fraud.”
Officials running the synod have sought to defend it from accusations of politicization.
“We have no agenda,” Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich of Luxembourg, a Jesuit who is the relator general for the synod, said in June. “There was not a conspiratorial meeting with some people to come up with how we could add some progressive points of the church. That is the very bad imagination of some people.”
Elisabetta Povoledo contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/02/worl ... 778d3e6de3
*********
‘Two Trains Charging at Each Other’: A Texas Bishop Takes On the Pope
Bishop Joseph Strickland, a hero to the emboldened traditionalist wing of American Catholicism, is in open warfare with the Vatican as it hosts a landmark gathering.
Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas, at a protest against the Los Angeles Dodgers for honoring an L.G.B.T.Q. group at the Dodger Stadium in June.Credit...Kirby Lee/Usa Today Sports, via Reuters
This year alone, Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas, has accused the pope of undermining the Catholic faith, has suggested that other Vatican officials have veered so far from church teaching that they are no longer Catholic, and has warned that a landmark global gathering that opens this week at the Vatican could threaten “basic truths” of Catholic doctrine.
With a savvy instinct for inserting himself into theological disputes and culture-war dust-ups across the country, Bishop Strickland has become a leading voice in the emboldened traditionalist wing of American Catholicism.
Now, he is at the center of what is shaping up to be an unusually personal clash in an escalating conflict between Pope Francis and American conservatives: The Vatican, in a relatively rare move, has investigated the bishop’s leadership and is reported to be privately considering asking for his resignation. The bishop, in a rarer one, has publicly refused.
“I cannot resign as Bishop of Tyler because that would be me abandoning the flock that I was given charge of by Pope Benedict XVI,” he wrote in an open letter to Catholics in his diocese in September. He said that he would comply if the pope removes him from office.
The conflict poses a delicate challenge for the Vatican, given Bishop Strickland’s popularity among conservative Catholics. Many see him as standing up for their values in the face of secular culture and a dangerously liberal Catholic hierarchy. Bishop Strickland has a weekly radio show, and more than 145,000 followers on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter — vastly more than most Catholic church leaders and more than twice the number of Catholics in his diocese.
He speaks at conferences across the country and posts prolifically on social media on topics ranging from the ethics of Covid-19 vaccines (which he has questioned) to the Latin Mass favored by traditionalists (and discouraged by Pope Francis) to local conflicts between priests and bishops.
This makes Bishop Strickland, 64, an unusual figure within the Roman Catholic church. He is a clergyman charged by the Vatican with leading one of the country’s nearly 200 geographically defined dioceses — in this case, a rather small and remote one in East Texas. But he is also a free-ranging provocateur who is nationally known for his brazen rhetorical attacks on Pope Francis.
Critics say that in his open defiance, he embodies Francis’ recent comments about “a very strong, organized, reactionary attitude” that opposes him within the American church, one that he says places ideology above faith.
Pope Francis waves to a crowd in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican.
Pope Francis in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican on Wednesday.Credit...Guglielmo Mangiapane/Reuters
This summer, the bishop was subject to a quiet investigation by the Vatican. The Vatican and its representatives in the United States have said nothing in public about the reasons for the investigation, or even acknowledged its existence. But Bishop Strickland has confirmed it took place, saying the investigators seemed to have “an agenda.”
In an interview that streamed live on YouTube on Friday, Bishop Strickland compared himself to an English bishop — now a saint — who was beheaded in the 16th century for resisting King Henry VIII’s break with the Catholic Church. “I don’t necessarily want to volunteer to lose my head," he said, “but I’d honestly rather lose my head than lose my faith.”
Resignation is the usual path offered to bishops nudged from office by the Vatican. The Pillar, a conservative-leaning independent Catholic media outlet, reported that American officials met with the pope in September to discuss whether the bishop should be encouraged to resign.
A spokeswoman for Bishop Strickland declined a request to interview him. A representative for the Vatican’s ambassador to the United States did not respond to a request for comment.
Bishop Strickland has for years criticized the pope and his advisers for, in his view, diluting the church’s core teachings around social and theological issues, including communion, divorce, abortion and same-sex marriage.
In June, Bishop Strickland left his own diocese to lead a high-profile protest against the Los Angeles Dodgers over the team’s honoring of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, an L.G.B.T.Q. activist group that includes members who dress in drag as nuns. Bishops in California declined to appear at the protest, which was sponsored by right-wing Catholic media outlets and activist groups.
For those who see Bishop Strickland as defending the faith, the event epitomized his willingness to speak boldly even in places he is not welcome.
“He went out there and stood up for us,” said Oscar Delgado, a film producer in Minnesota who supports Bishop Strickland.
Mr. Delgado warned that firing Bishop Strickland would only turn him into a martyr in the eyes of his fellow traditionalists. “They have no idea what they’d unleash,” he said. “It’s like the American Revolution: When you start antagonizing a population, there’s going to be a backlash.”
At a conference this summer hosted by the right-wing Coalition for Canceled Priests, Jesse Romero, a radio host, led a crowd in chanting “STRICK-LAND, STRICK-LAND” in support of the bishop. “We’re not going to take this sitting down!” he announced, to cheers and applause from the audience.
“I am always going to stand on the side of Jesus, and if that means I stand on the side of Bishop Strickland and oppose the Vatican, then he and I will go down together,” said Amelia Monroe Carlson, a Catholic writer who lives in a small town in Tennessee. She says Bishop Strickland better represents her views than her own local bishop.
Ms. Carlson said she fears the Catholic church under Pope Francis is drifting from its foundations, compromising its own teaching on issues like salvation and repentance by emphasizing openness at the expense of orthodoxy.
The tension has tightened in the lead-up to the Synod on Synodality, a gathering of bishops and others — including women and laypeople, a historical first — convened by Pope Francis to discuss a wide range of issues facing the church.
With its broad mandate, collaborative process and open-ended topics, the gathering has alarmed many conservatives, including in the United States. They fear the conference could result in the church ordaining women as deacons, or blessing same-sex unions, among other possibilities.
The gathering opens in Rome on Wednesday, the same day the pope will release a second part of his environmental encyclical Laudato Si.
In a letter last week that focused primarily on his views of the church’s opposition to the “L.G.B.T.Q. agenda,” Bishop Strickland warned that the synod was “emerging as an attempt by some to change the focus of Catholicism from eternal salvation of souls in Christ, to making every person feel affirmed regardless of what choices they have made or will make in life.”
The pope has the clear authority to remove Bishop Strickland from office if he chooses, said Robert Flummerfelt, a canon lawyer based in Las Vegas. Typically, a bishop relieved of his duties would be moved to a position of little power, or effectively forced into retirement.
Pope John Paul II removed the authority of Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen of Seattle in the 1980s, for example, after the progressive archbishop was found to have exercised “weak doctrinal leadership” over issues including improperly allowing children to receive communion. As recently as this summer, the bishop of Knoxville, Tenn., Richard Stika, retired after an investigation into turmoil into his diocese.
But Bishop Strickland’s high profile and vocal supporters make the situation in Texas challenging. Mr. Flummerfelt said he hopes that if the Vatican dismisses Bishop Strickland, the reasons are laid out clearly and publicly.
“There’s no winning here,” Mr. Flummerfelt said. “They’re two trains charging at each other.”
Ruth Graham is a Dallas-based national correspondent covering religion, faith and values. She previously reported on religion for Slate. More about Ruth Graham
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/02/us/p ... 778d3e6de3
Vatican Deems Bigger Church Role for Women ‘Urgent,’ but Postpones Major Issues
Progressives who once hoped that the synod would create momentum for things like reaching out to L.G.B.T.Q.+ Catholics said the meeting had failed to move the institution.
Pope Francis convened a monthlong meeting of more than 400 clerics, nuns and laypeople that aimed to consider the future of the Roman Catholic Church.Credit...Alessandra Tarantino/Associated Press
A monthlong meeting convened by Pope Francis to determine the future of the Roman Catholic Church ended Saturday night with a document that said it was “urgent” that women have a larger role but postponed discussion of major issues such as ordaining women as deacons and failed to address outreach to L.G.B.T.Q.+ Catholics.
Vatican officials instead sought to emphasize common ground during the meeting, which was characterized by liberals and conservatives alike as a potential culmination of Francis’ 10-year pontificate and the vehicle through which he might make changes.
Instead, it echoed another characteristic of Francis’ tenure: kicking the can on major issues as he sought to build deeper support through the global church.
After the conclusion of the meeting, called the Synod on Synodality, which Francis attended and had about 450 participants (of which 365 could vote), Vatican officials said they had decided to cut sources of tension — “divergences,” as the meeting called them.
The participants then voted on a document that represented “a church on the move,” said Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich of Luxembourg, one of the top officials at the meeting. “And that’s the important thing, we move.”
But progressives who had high hopes that the meeting would create real momentum for change said the final document had failed to move the institution at all. Before the meeting, a variety of sensitive topics were on the table, including the blessing of same-sex unions, reaching out to L.G.B.T.Q.+ Catholics and the possibility of allowing married men to become priests. Those basically vanished.
//The Vatican’s Synod on Synodality
//A Multiyear Assembly: A seemingly obscure gathering of more than 400 bishops and lay Catholics at the Vatican, called by Pope Francis to discuss issues vital to the church’s future, has drawn every ideological stripe of Catholic activist, culture warrior and special interest group to Rome.
Joining the Conversation: For the first time this year, the gathering also included and gave voting rights to nuns and other women. But some critics have dismissed the move as window dressing.
//The Catholic Divide: In a moment when the American church is witnessing a growing rift between the pope and the traditionalist wing of American Catholicism, the Synod on Synodality is also laying bare the divide in the pews.
Instead, the document said that it was urgent for women to have more responsibilities and more say in the workings of the church. When it came to female deacons, though, it said more “theological and pastoral” study was necessary. It suggested that the work of two commissions created by Francis to study the female diaconate be re-examined and the results be presented when the assembly reconvenes next year — “if possible.”
Even that mild language drew the most opposition of any paragraph voted on in the document. One passage on women deacons passed by a vote of 277 to 69, and another by 279 to 67.
This Is the Ultimate Chocolate Cake
“I am full of wonder that so many people voted in favor,” said Cardinal Hollerich, who is considered a liberal. “It means that the resistance is not so great as people had thought before.”
Image
Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich sits at a table in front of a microphone on a table with paper cups and a glass bottle with water.
Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich of Luxembourg, one of the top officials of the meeting, expressed wonder at the lack of resistance from attendees to the more progressive passages in the document.Credit...Andrew Medichini/Associated Press
A paragraph addressing clerical celibacy — a theme that requires further study, the document said — also received substantial no votes, but passed 291 to 55.
But some topics, such as reaching out to L.G.B.T.Q.+ Catholics — something Francis has spoken often about in his 10 years as pope — were almost entirely expunged from the final summary.
“I am disappointed, but I’m not surprised,” said the Rev. James Martin, an advocate for such outreach and a meeting participant. “Given the wide divergence of opinions that were expressed, I wish that some of the discussions, which were open and honest and extensive, would have been included in the final synthesis.”
According to synod attendees, one church leader refused to sit next to Father Martin after he made positive remarks about L.G.B.T.Q.+ Catholics. The church leader then took his Synod-branded water bottle and left the hall, according to one participant.
Father Martin declined to comment.
The church sees its future in Africa, and many bishops there tend to strongly oppose any opening to L.G.B.T.Q.+ Catholics. That was in part why fuller discussions of those issues did not take place, according to some disappointed critics. The document called on the African bishop’s assembly to further study “how to accompany people in polygamous unions who are approaching the faith.”
Vatican officials who led the meeting nevertheless sought to portray it as a major leap forward.
“We earned space,” said Cardinal Mario Grech of Malta, the secretary general of the Synod of Bishops, who emphasized that the meeting, while “a learning curve for all of us,” had been a first step toward becoming a church in which clerics and lay people worked more closely together. He said he believed that participants would return to their local churches and continue the conversations.
The assembly will reconvene next October. At its conclusion, the participants will vote on another, final document that will include recommendations to Pope Francis. He is expected to then issue a major papal letter — possibly making concrete changes to church policy.
In recent years, the pope’s allies have billed the meeting as a major event in the papacy of Francis, who has allowed many previously taboo debates and has opened many doors for potential change. But as the meeting drew closer, Vatican officials sought to manage expectations, trying to balance the hopes of liberals and the fears of conservatives.
Image
The pope, dressed in white, stands amid a crowd of mostly male clergy dressed in dark clothes.
Pope Francis, center, attended sessions of the meeting and will receive a final document with recommendations from the attendees next October.Credit...Tiziana Fabi/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
On the day the document was released, the conservative National Catholic Register published an interview with Cardinal Gerhard Mueller, a participant in the meeting and the Vatican’s former top official on church teaching, whom Francis fired in 2017. He complained that the meeting was not a real Synod of Bishops because lay people took “away opportunities” from bishops to speak and was, instead, a theological amateur hour meant to dismantle church teaching.
“All is being turned around so that now we must be open to homosexuality and the ordination of women,” he said in the interview. “If you analyze it, all is about converting us to these two themes.”
But late Saturday night, it was the advocates for a church more open to L.G.B.T.Q.+ people who felt let down.
The Rev. Timothy Radcliffe, whom Francis had asked to provide spiritual reflections during the meeting, told reporters on Friday that Catholics in different parts of the world had different priorities. He suggested that looking at the assembly with “massive expectations of changes” was “perhaps not always looking for the right thing.”
But others noted that very few Catholics had actually weighed in on the topics to begin with.
Archbishop Timothy Broglio, president of the United States bishops’ conference, noted earlier in the week that less than 1 percent of the 1.375 billion Catholics in the world had participated in the survey that led up to this month’s meeting.
“We have to find ways to draw more people in the participation,” he told reporters in the Vatican.
Francis and his allies have argued that the most important part of the meeting was the process of working together, with high-ranking clerics required to listen to lay people on issues that bubbled up from the Catholic grass roots.
The pope closed the meeting by thanking its participants and reminding them that daylight saving time would go into effect overnight. “Don’t forget to turn your watches back,” he said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/28/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Pope Francis convened a monthlong meeting of more than 400 clerics, nuns and laypeople that aimed to consider the future of the Roman Catholic Church.Credit...Alessandra Tarantino/Associated Press
A monthlong meeting convened by Pope Francis to determine the future of the Roman Catholic Church ended Saturday night with a document that said it was “urgent” that women have a larger role but postponed discussion of major issues such as ordaining women as deacons and failed to address outreach to L.G.B.T.Q.+ Catholics.
Vatican officials instead sought to emphasize common ground during the meeting, which was characterized by liberals and conservatives alike as a potential culmination of Francis’ 10-year pontificate and the vehicle through which he might make changes.
Instead, it echoed another characteristic of Francis’ tenure: kicking the can on major issues as he sought to build deeper support through the global church.
After the conclusion of the meeting, called the Synod on Synodality, which Francis attended and had about 450 participants (of which 365 could vote), Vatican officials said they had decided to cut sources of tension — “divergences,” as the meeting called them.
The participants then voted on a document that represented “a church on the move,” said Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich of Luxembourg, one of the top officials at the meeting. “And that’s the important thing, we move.”
But progressives who had high hopes that the meeting would create real momentum for change said the final document had failed to move the institution at all. Before the meeting, a variety of sensitive topics were on the table, including the blessing of same-sex unions, reaching out to L.G.B.T.Q.+ Catholics and the possibility of allowing married men to become priests. Those basically vanished.
//The Vatican’s Synod on Synodality
//A Multiyear Assembly: A seemingly obscure gathering of more than 400 bishops and lay Catholics at the Vatican, called by Pope Francis to discuss issues vital to the church’s future, has drawn every ideological stripe of Catholic activist, culture warrior and special interest group to Rome.
Joining the Conversation: For the first time this year, the gathering also included and gave voting rights to nuns and other women. But some critics have dismissed the move as window dressing.
//The Catholic Divide: In a moment when the American church is witnessing a growing rift between the pope and the traditionalist wing of American Catholicism, the Synod on Synodality is also laying bare the divide in the pews.
Instead, the document said that it was urgent for women to have more responsibilities and more say in the workings of the church. When it came to female deacons, though, it said more “theological and pastoral” study was necessary. It suggested that the work of two commissions created by Francis to study the female diaconate be re-examined and the results be presented when the assembly reconvenes next year — “if possible.”
Even that mild language drew the most opposition of any paragraph voted on in the document. One passage on women deacons passed by a vote of 277 to 69, and another by 279 to 67.
This Is the Ultimate Chocolate Cake
“I am full of wonder that so many people voted in favor,” said Cardinal Hollerich, who is considered a liberal. “It means that the resistance is not so great as people had thought before.”
Image
Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich sits at a table in front of a microphone on a table with paper cups and a glass bottle with water.
Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich of Luxembourg, one of the top officials of the meeting, expressed wonder at the lack of resistance from attendees to the more progressive passages in the document.Credit...Andrew Medichini/Associated Press
A paragraph addressing clerical celibacy — a theme that requires further study, the document said — also received substantial no votes, but passed 291 to 55.
But some topics, such as reaching out to L.G.B.T.Q.+ Catholics — something Francis has spoken often about in his 10 years as pope — were almost entirely expunged from the final summary.
“I am disappointed, but I’m not surprised,” said the Rev. James Martin, an advocate for such outreach and a meeting participant. “Given the wide divergence of opinions that were expressed, I wish that some of the discussions, which were open and honest and extensive, would have been included in the final synthesis.”
According to synod attendees, one church leader refused to sit next to Father Martin after he made positive remarks about L.G.B.T.Q.+ Catholics. The church leader then took his Synod-branded water bottle and left the hall, according to one participant.
Father Martin declined to comment.
The church sees its future in Africa, and many bishops there tend to strongly oppose any opening to L.G.B.T.Q.+ Catholics. That was in part why fuller discussions of those issues did not take place, according to some disappointed critics. The document called on the African bishop’s assembly to further study “how to accompany people in polygamous unions who are approaching the faith.”
Vatican officials who led the meeting nevertheless sought to portray it as a major leap forward.
“We earned space,” said Cardinal Mario Grech of Malta, the secretary general of the Synod of Bishops, who emphasized that the meeting, while “a learning curve for all of us,” had been a first step toward becoming a church in which clerics and lay people worked more closely together. He said he believed that participants would return to their local churches and continue the conversations.
The assembly will reconvene next October. At its conclusion, the participants will vote on another, final document that will include recommendations to Pope Francis. He is expected to then issue a major papal letter — possibly making concrete changes to church policy.
In recent years, the pope’s allies have billed the meeting as a major event in the papacy of Francis, who has allowed many previously taboo debates and has opened many doors for potential change. But as the meeting drew closer, Vatican officials sought to manage expectations, trying to balance the hopes of liberals and the fears of conservatives.
Image
The pope, dressed in white, stands amid a crowd of mostly male clergy dressed in dark clothes.
Pope Francis, center, attended sessions of the meeting and will receive a final document with recommendations from the attendees next October.Credit...Tiziana Fabi/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
On the day the document was released, the conservative National Catholic Register published an interview with Cardinal Gerhard Mueller, a participant in the meeting and the Vatican’s former top official on church teaching, whom Francis fired in 2017. He complained that the meeting was not a real Synod of Bishops because lay people took “away opportunities” from bishops to speak and was, instead, a theological amateur hour meant to dismantle church teaching.
“All is being turned around so that now we must be open to homosexuality and the ordination of women,” he said in the interview. “If you analyze it, all is about converting us to these two themes.”
But late Saturday night, it was the advocates for a church more open to L.G.B.T.Q.+ people who felt let down.
The Rev. Timothy Radcliffe, whom Francis had asked to provide spiritual reflections during the meeting, told reporters on Friday that Catholics in different parts of the world had different priorities. He suggested that looking at the assembly with “massive expectations of changes” was “perhaps not always looking for the right thing.”
But others noted that very few Catholics had actually weighed in on the topics to begin with.
Archbishop Timothy Broglio, president of the United States bishops’ conference, noted earlier in the week that less than 1 percent of the 1.375 billion Catholics in the world had participated in the survey that led up to this month’s meeting.
“We have to find ways to draw more people in the participation,” he told reporters in the Vatican.
Francis and his allies have argued that the most important part of the meeting was the process of working together, with high-ranking clerics required to listen to lay people on issues that bubbled up from the Catholic grass roots.
The pope closed the meeting by thanking its participants and reminding them that daylight saving time would go into effect overnight. “Don’t forget to turn your watches back,” he said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/28/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Texas Bishop Loudly Critical of the Pope Is Removed
Bishop Joseph Strickland was a highly prominent figure among traditionalist American Catholics who see Pope Francis as too liberal.
Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas, leading a protest in June against the Los Angeles Dodgers for honoring a group that supports L.G.B.T.Q. rights. Credit...Kirby Lee/USA Today Sports, via Reuters
Pope Francis fired on Saturday a bishop in Texas who was one of his loudest American critics within the Catholic Church, a highly rare dismissal that appeared to reflect the growing rift between the Vatican and a more conservative wing of the church.
The Vatican did not cite a reason for the dismissal of the bishop, Joseph Strickland, saying in a statement only that the pope “relieved” Bishop Strickland from the governance of his diocese in Tyler, Texas.
Bishop Strickland had significant ideological differences with Pope Francis. He was arguably the most prominent figure representing traditionalist American Catholics who see Francis as dangerously liberal on social issues like divorce, abortion and same-sex marriage, and on theological issues including his discouragement of the Latin Mass. Ultraconservatives in the United States have emerged as the financial center and media megaphone of the resistance to Francis’ papacy.
In the past year, Bishop Strickland has accused the pope of undermining the Catholic faith, questioned whether Vatican officials even qualified as Catholics and warned that the global meeting of bishops and laypeople that the pope convened last month was a vehicle to threaten “basic truths” of Catholic doctrine.
In an interview with the arch-conservative LifeSiteNews on Saturday, Bishop Strickland said he was at peace. “I stand by all the things that were listed as complaints against me,” he said, mentioning his failure to implement the pope’s 2021 document restricting the Latin Mass. A spokeswoman for the diocese declined a request for an interview with the bishop.
The dismissal followed a formal investigation by the Vatican in June into the bishop’s leadership. Neither the Vatican nor the diocese has commented on the nature or purpose of the investigation. But Cardinal Daniel N. DiNardo of the archdiocese of Galveston-Houston said in a statement that as a result of the inquiry, investigators with the church had recommended that “it was not feasible” for the bishop to remain in his post.
In a radio interview after the inquiry, Bishop Strickland compared the process to “being called to the principal’s office” and said he had nothing to hide.
//The Vatican’s Synod on Synodality
//A Multiyear Assembly: A seemingly obscure gathering of more than 400 bishops and lay Catholics at the Vatican, called by Pope Francis to discuss issues vital to the church’s future, has drawn every ideological stripe of Catholic activist, culture warrior and special interest group to Rome.
Joining the Conversation: For the first time this year, the gathering also included and gave voting rights to nuns and other women. But some critics have dismissed the move as window dressing.
//The Catholic Divide: In a moment when the American church is witnessing a growing rift between the pope and the traditionalist wing of American Catholicism, the Synod on Synodality is also laying bare the divide in the pews.
Supporters of Francis, who considered Bishop Strickland’s frequent salvos against the pope beyond the pale and indicative of views that were too extreme, were likely to welcome the firing.
For some observers, the bishop’s jeremiads often went too far, even in a role whose duties include proclaiming truth.
“I don’t remember when a bishop had become so violent in his public attacks against the pope,” said Massimo Faggioli, a professor of theology at Villanova University. “He had become a real embarrassment for the church.”
Unlike the pope’s predecessors, who had censored high-ranking clergy with opposing ideological viewpoints, Francis has generally allowed dissent in the ranks in the interest of debate.
Bishop Strickland, 65 and well below the age of automatic resignation, tested the limits of that tolerance. On Oct. 31, he addressed the Rome Life Forum, a conference hosted by LifeSiteNews. He read what he described as a letter from an anonymous friend that suggested that Francis was a “usurper” in the role of pope, one who has “endangered souls by proclaiming that they are justified before God as they are, with no need of repentance.”
The speech shocked Rev. Timothy Kelly, the pastor of Holy Spirit Catholic Church in the diocese of Tyler. “How can you leave him in office after that?” he asked. “You can’t.”
Father Kelly, who has known Bishop Strickland since the 1990s, said that the bishop had grown imperious in his leadership over the past six or seven years, falling in with a group of clergy who pulled him to the right ideologically.
Conservatives moved quickly on Saturday morning to defend the deposed bishop. One hard-right organization, the Lepanto Institute, likened Francis to a “Soviet-era dictator.”
Tom Oglesby, the president of the board of the Coalition for Canceled Priests, a lay organization that supports clergy removed for what it considers unfair reasons, described Bishop Strickland in an interview as someone who “has touched people’s lives and been that light high on the hill.”
He also suggested Bishop Strickland was a “white martyr,” a concept distinguished from “red” martyrs killed for their faith. White martyrs, he said, “shed everything but blood.”
Bishop Strickland has an unusually powerful platform from which to voice his discontent with church leadership. He has a weekly radio show that is popular among conservatives, and he has more than 150,000 followers on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. That is more even than the number of Catholics in his former diocese, which the Vatican said would now be led by Bishop Joe S. Vásquez of Austin.
The removal of a bishop from office is highly unusual but not unheard of. Francis removed Bishop Martin Holley from the diocese of Memphis in 2018 after a Vatican-led investigation into accusations of mismanagement. Pope John Paul II dismissed a French bishop in the 1990s for challenging the church’s positions on homosexuality, abortion and other social issues.
More commonly, bishops take the chance to resign. Last summer, Francis accepted the resignation of Bishop Richard F. Stika of Knoxville, Tenn., who had been sued for his handling of sexual misconduct allegations and faced internal criticism of his leadership. Bishop Strickland declined to resign, according to the statement from Cardinal DiNardo.
Bishop Strickland is a much more high-profile figure than Bishops Stika or Holley, and his removal is likelier to stir more heated debate in the American church, where influential right-wing Catholic media outlets and activist groups regularly assail Francis’ leadership.
In a live broadcast online on Saturday morning, a conservative Catholic podcaster, Taylor Marshall, speculated whether the move meant Francis was purposefully undermining the church. “What if a man were to want to be pope not to build up the body of Christ but to divide the body of Christ?” he asked.
Mr. Marshall said he had spoken to Mr. Strickland about the dismissal and said the reason was “nothing salacious or scandalous.”
The dismissal is sure to be discussed next week when the American bishops gather at their annual meeting in Baltimore, where they will elect several leadership roles. Recent announcements by the pope seemed only to deepen the division with some conservative American Catholics, whom he described recently as “reactionary.”
Recently, the Vatican made clear that transgender people can be baptized, serve as godparents and be witnesses at church weddings. The move comes at the end of a year that Francis began by condemning “unjust” laws that criminalize being gay, urging bishops to welcome L.G.B.T.Q. people into the church. Both announcements were praised by L.G.B.T.Q. advocates, although Francis has not changed core church teaching, which says “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.”
Francis has also cracked down on the celebration of the Latin Mass, which was celebrated for centuries until the 1960s and is experiencing a resurgence among traditionalist Catholics. Francis has characterized the Mass as divisive and said that it is too often associated with a broader denial of the goals of the Second Vatican Council, which was intended to bring the church and its rituals into the modern world.
Bishop Strickland has said that a “spiritual journey” led him to discover and revere the old Mass, which he celebrated for the first time in 2020.
Mr. Strickland is a native Texan, the sixth child born to a Catholic family who were founding members of a parish in the diocese of Tyler. He is a trained canon lawyer and has spent almost his entire career in Texas.
His diocese in East Texas, one of nearly 200 in the United States, is remote and relatively small. He was appointed to his role there by Pope Benedict XVI in 2012. The diocese sits in a deeply conservative part of the country that voted overwhelmingly for Donald J. Trump in 2020. In a statement, the diocese said that “our work as the Catholic Church in northeast Texas continues.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/11/worl ... kland.html
Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas, leading a protest in June against the Los Angeles Dodgers for honoring a group that supports L.G.B.T.Q. rights. Credit...Kirby Lee/USA Today Sports, via Reuters
Pope Francis fired on Saturday a bishop in Texas who was one of his loudest American critics within the Catholic Church, a highly rare dismissal that appeared to reflect the growing rift between the Vatican and a more conservative wing of the church.
The Vatican did not cite a reason for the dismissal of the bishop, Joseph Strickland, saying in a statement only that the pope “relieved” Bishop Strickland from the governance of his diocese in Tyler, Texas.
Bishop Strickland had significant ideological differences with Pope Francis. He was arguably the most prominent figure representing traditionalist American Catholics who see Francis as dangerously liberal on social issues like divorce, abortion and same-sex marriage, and on theological issues including his discouragement of the Latin Mass. Ultraconservatives in the United States have emerged as the financial center and media megaphone of the resistance to Francis’ papacy.
In the past year, Bishop Strickland has accused the pope of undermining the Catholic faith, questioned whether Vatican officials even qualified as Catholics and warned that the global meeting of bishops and laypeople that the pope convened last month was a vehicle to threaten “basic truths” of Catholic doctrine.
In an interview with the arch-conservative LifeSiteNews on Saturday, Bishop Strickland said he was at peace. “I stand by all the things that were listed as complaints against me,” he said, mentioning his failure to implement the pope’s 2021 document restricting the Latin Mass. A spokeswoman for the diocese declined a request for an interview with the bishop.
The dismissal followed a formal investigation by the Vatican in June into the bishop’s leadership. Neither the Vatican nor the diocese has commented on the nature or purpose of the investigation. But Cardinal Daniel N. DiNardo of the archdiocese of Galveston-Houston said in a statement that as a result of the inquiry, investigators with the church had recommended that “it was not feasible” for the bishop to remain in his post.
In a radio interview after the inquiry, Bishop Strickland compared the process to “being called to the principal’s office” and said he had nothing to hide.
//The Vatican’s Synod on Synodality
//A Multiyear Assembly: A seemingly obscure gathering of more than 400 bishops and lay Catholics at the Vatican, called by Pope Francis to discuss issues vital to the church’s future, has drawn every ideological stripe of Catholic activist, culture warrior and special interest group to Rome.
Joining the Conversation: For the first time this year, the gathering also included and gave voting rights to nuns and other women. But some critics have dismissed the move as window dressing.
//The Catholic Divide: In a moment when the American church is witnessing a growing rift between the pope and the traditionalist wing of American Catholicism, the Synod on Synodality is also laying bare the divide in the pews.
Supporters of Francis, who considered Bishop Strickland’s frequent salvos against the pope beyond the pale and indicative of views that were too extreme, were likely to welcome the firing.
For some observers, the bishop’s jeremiads often went too far, even in a role whose duties include proclaiming truth.
“I don’t remember when a bishop had become so violent in his public attacks against the pope,” said Massimo Faggioli, a professor of theology at Villanova University. “He had become a real embarrassment for the church.”
Unlike the pope’s predecessors, who had censored high-ranking clergy with opposing ideological viewpoints, Francis has generally allowed dissent in the ranks in the interest of debate.
Bishop Strickland, 65 and well below the age of automatic resignation, tested the limits of that tolerance. On Oct. 31, he addressed the Rome Life Forum, a conference hosted by LifeSiteNews. He read what he described as a letter from an anonymous friend that suggested that Francis was a “usurper” in the role of pope, one who has “endangered souls by proclaiming that they are justified before God as they are, with no need of repentance.”
The speech shocked Rev. Timothy Kelly, the pastor of Holy Spirit Catholic Church in the diocese of Tyler. “How can you leave him in office after that?” he asked. “You can’t.”
Father Kelly, who has known Bishop Strickland since the 1990s, said that the bishop had grown imperious in his leadership over the past six or seven years, falling in with a group of clergy who pulled him to the right ideologically.
Conservatives moved quickly on Saturday morning to defend the deposed bishop. One hard-right organization, the Lepanto Institute, likened Francis to a “Soviet-era dictator.”
Tom Oglesby, the president of the board of the Coalition for Canceled Priests, a lay organization that supports clergy removed for what it considers unfair reasons, described Bishop Strickland in an interview as someone who “has touched people’s lives and been that light high on the hill.”
He also suggested Bishop Strickland was a “white martyr,” a concept distinguished from “red” martyrs killed for their faith. White martyrs, he said, “shed everything but blood.”
Bishop Strickland has an unusually powerful platform from which to voice his discontent with church leadership. He has a weekly radio show that is popular among conservatives, and he has more than 150,000 followers on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. That is more even than the number of Catholics in his former diocese, which the Vatican said would now be led by Bishop Joe S. Vásquez of Austin.
The removal of a bishop from office is highly unusual but not unheard of. Francis removed Bishop Martin Holley from the diocese of Memphis in 2018 after a Vatican-led investigation into accusations of mismanagement. Pope John Paul II dismissed a French bishop in the 1990s for challenging the church’s positions on homosexuality, abortion and other social issues.
More commonly, bishops take the chance to resign. Last summer, Francis accepted the resignation of Bishop Richard F. Stika of Knoxville, Tenn., who had been sued for his handling of sexual misconduct allegations and faced internal criticism of his leadership. Bishop Strickland declined to resign, according to the statement from Cardinal DiNardo.
Bishop Strickland is a much more high-profile figure than Bishops Stika or Holley, and his removal is likelier to stir more heated debate in the American church, where influential right-wing Catholic media outlets and activist groups regularly assail Francis’ leadership.
In a live broadcast online on Saturday morning, a conservative Catholic podcaster, Taylor Marshall, speculated whether the move meant Francis was purposefully undermining the church. “What if a man were to want to be pope not to build up the body of Christ but to divide the body of Christ?” he asked.
Mr. Marshall said he had spoken to Mr. Strickland about the dismissal and said the reason was “nothing salacious or scandalous.”
The dismissal is sure to be discussed next week when the American bishops gather at their annual meeting in Baltimore, where they will elect several leadership roles. Recent announcements by the pope seemed only to deepen the division with some conservative American Catholics, whom he described recently as “reactionary.”
Recently, the Vatican made clear that transgender people can be baptized, serve as godparents and be witnesses at church weddings. The move comes at the end of a year that Francis began by condemning “unjust” laws that criminalize being gay, urging bishops to welcome L.G.B.T.Q. people into the church. Both announcements were praised by L.G.B.T.Q. advocates, although Francis has not changed core church teaching, which says “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.”
Francis has also cracked down on the celebration of the Latin Mass, which was celebrated for centuries until the 1960s and is experiencing a resurgence among traditionalist Catholics. Francis has characterized the Mass as divisive and said that it is too often associated with a broader denial of the goals of the Second Vatican Council, which was intended to bring the church and its rituals into the modern world.
Bishop Strickland has said that a “spiritual journey” led him to discover and revere the old Mass, which he celebrated for the first time in 2020.
Mr. Strickland is a native Texan, the sixth child born to a Catholic family who were founding members of a parish in the diocese of Tyler. He is a trained canon lawyer and has spent almost his entire career in Texas.
His diocese in East Texas, one of nearly 200 in the United States, is remote and relatively small. He was appointed to his role there by Pope Benedict XVI in 2012. The diocese sits in a deeply conservative part of the country that voted overwhelmingly for Donald J. Trump in 2020. In a statement, the diocese said that “our work as the Catholic Church in northeast Texas continues.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/11/worl ... kland.html
Re: Christianity
Fox News
Birthplace of Jesus dismantling all Christmas decorations 'in solidarity with our people in Gaza'
Timothy Nerozzi
Fri, November 17, 2023 at 12:34 PM CST·
Birthplace of Jesus dismantling all Christmas decorations 'in solidarity with our people in Gaza'
City officials in the birthplace of Jesus Christ are tearing down Christmas decorations in solidarity with Palestinians amid Israel's continued invasion of Gaza.
Bethlehem, an ancient city located in the West Bank, declared via social media and official spokespeople that decorations installed in previous years are being removed amid the conflict between Israel and Hamas.
"Bethlehem Municipality crews announced the dismantling of Christmas decorations installed several years ago in the city's neighborhoods and removing all festive appearances in honor of the martyrs and in solidarity with our people in Gaza," the city wrote on Facebook, according to the Jerusalem Post.
A city spokesperson also acknowledged the campaign to remove Christmas decorations in a statement to the Telegraph.
"The reason is the general situation in Palestine; people are not really into any celebration, they are sad, angry and upset; our people in Gaza are being massacred and killed in cold blood," the spokesman said, according to the outlet.
They added, "Therefore, it is not appropriate at all to have such festivities while there is a massacre happening in Gaza and attacks in the West Bank."
The Christian population of Bethlehem has been in steady decline since the mid-20th century.
In 1950, Christians made up over 80% of the local population, but now hover around 10% in a Muslim-dominated region.
Additionally, low birth rates among Christian communities in Bethlehem have also contributed to the collapsing demographic in the West Bank.
Approximately 185,000 Christians live in Israel, where they make up just under 2% of the population, according to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics.
Original article source: Birthplace of Jesus dismantling all Christmas decorations 'in solidarity with our people in Gaza'
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/bi ... 29612.html
Birthplace of Jesus dismantling all Christmas decorations 'in solidarity with our people in Gaza'
Timothy Nerozzi
Fri, November 17, 2023 at 12:34 PM CST·
Birthplace of Jesus dismantling all Christmas decorations 'in solidarity with our people in Gaza'
City officials in the birthplace of Jesus Christ are tearing down Christmas decorations in solidarity with Palestinians amid Israel's continued invasion of Gaza.
Bethlehem, an ancient city located in the West Bank, declared via social media and official spokespeople that decorations installed in previous years are being removed amid the conflict between Israel and Hamas.
"Bethlehem Municipality crews announced the dismantling of Christmas decorations installed several years ago in the city's neighborhoods and removing all festive appearances in honor of the martyrs and in solidarity with our people in Gaza," the city wrote on Facebook, according to the Jerusalem Post.
A city spokesperson also acknowledged the campaign to remove Christmas decorations in a statement to the Telegraph.
"The reason is the general situation in Palestine; people are not really into any celebration, they are sad, angry and upset; our people in Gaza are being massacred and killed in cold blood," the spokesman said, according to the outlet.
They added, "Therefore, it is not appropriate at all to have such festivities while there is a massacre happening in Gaza and attacks in the West Bank."
The Christian population of Bethlehem has been in steady decline since the mid-20th century.
In 1950, Christians made up over 80% of the local population, but now hover around 10% in a Muslim-dominated region.
Additionally, low birth rates among Christian communities in Bethlehem have also contributed to the collapsing demographic in the West Bank.
Approximately 185,000 Christians live in Israel, where they make up just under 2% of the population, according to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics.
Original article source: Birthplace of Jesus dismantling all Christmas decorations 'in solidarity with our people in Gaza'
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/bi ... 29612.html
Why Christmas is canceled in Bethlehem
Palestinian scout bands parade through Manger Square at the Church of the Nativity, traditionally believed to be the birthplace of Jesus Christ, during Christmas celebrations in the West Bank town of Bethlehem, on Dec. 24, 2021. (Mahmoud Illean/AP)
In Bethlehem, Christmas is canceled. Palestinian Christian leaders across denominations in the West Bank city decided last week that they will forgo all festivities this year as a mark of solidarity with their brethren in Gaza. There will be no public celebrations, no twinkling Christmas lights and no decorated tree in Manger Square — not as long, they say, as a state of war reigns over the embattled Gaza Strip, and the majority of its residents cope with Israeli bombardments, the devastation of their homes and a spiraling humanitarian crisis.
“This is madness,” Munther Isaac, pastor of Bethlehem’s Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church, told me. “This has become a genocide with 1.7 million people displaced.”
Isaac was part of a small delegation of Palestinian Christians who came to Washington this week to lobby the Biden administration, U.S. lawmakers and religious leaders to support calls for a full-scale cease-fire. A six-day pause in hostilities between Israel and militant group Hamas is set to elapse Thursday, though negotiations with Hamas involving U.S., Israeli and Arab officials are ongoing to potentially extend the current truce. Israeli officials have vowed to continue their campaign against Hamas after hostages are released, while the Biden administration appears to be trying to restrain whatever next phase of the war Israel chooses to launch.
On Tuesday afternoon, the delegation went to the White House and delivered a letter for President Biden signed by the leaders of the Christian community in Bethlehem, including Isaac’s Protestant denomination and his Orthodox, Armenian and Catholic counterparts. They also went to the Hill to meet staff in the Senate and House of Representatives.
“God has placed political leaders in a position of power so that they can bring justice, support those who suffer, and be instruments of God’s peace,” reads the letter, which I got to see in advance of its delivery. “We want a constant and comprehensive cease-fire. Enough death. Enough destruction. This is a moral obligation. There must be other ways. This is our call and prayer this Christmas.”
Video shows aftermath of Gaza church blast
0:14
In footage geolocated by The Washington Post, people searched through rubble after the Church of St. Porphyrius in Gaza City was struck Oct. 20. (Video: X)
Palestinian Christians belong to the world’s oldest Christian communities, rooted in the historic cradle of Christianity. But they are diminished in number, at least in proportion to their neighbors of other faiths, and are represented in greater strength in the Palestinian diaspora around the world. Palestinian Christians comprise some 2 percent of the overall Palestinian population in the West Bank, concentrated mostly around Ramallah, Bethlehem and Jerusalem, and less than 1 percent of the population in Gaza.
The latter community, small but prominent, is in the midst of a potential extinction event. There are roughly fewer than 1,000 Christians in Gaza, who have lived there without much problem despite the de facto takeover of the territory in 2007 by Hamas. But Israeli airstrikes destroyed or damaged almost all the community’s homes in Gaza City while also hitting Gaza’s oldest active church, where some were sheltering. “The vast majority of the Christian community in Gaza are now homeless,” Isaac said.
That’s prompted perhaps as much as a fifth of Gaza’s Christians who also had foreign passports to abandon the territory altogether. The rest find themselves forsaken. “They are calling to us, saying, ‘Let us leave, we either die or we leave,’” said Tamar Haddad, a regional coordinator of the Lutheran World Federation who was also part of the visiting delegation.
Jack Sara, president of Bethlehem Bible College, pointed to how the plight of Palestinian Christians doesn’t seem to be heard by many U.S. evangelicals, who see in muscular Jewish supremacy over the Holy Land a pathway for their own messianic vision. Tennessee-based evangelical preacher Greg Locke, a vocal and oft-viral pro-Trump clergyman, called for Israel to reduce Gaza to a “parking lot” not long after the Oct. 7 attack. More than 13,000 Palestinians have been killed in the weeks since, including thousands of children.
//How Israel keeps hundreds of Palestinians in detention without charge
The ideology of Christian Zionism animated the agenda of the Trump administration and influences a vast segment of Republican lawmakers, from former vice president Mike Pence to current Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.). Sara, a leading Palestinian evangelical theologian, told me that their creed “is not the evangelical theology and its message of love of all humans, regardless of their background and ethnicity” in which he believes and practices.
Away from Gaza, the members of the delegation described a growing climate of intimidation and hostility toward Palestinian Christians in the West Bank and Jerusalem, fueled by the actions of Jewish extremists emboldened by Israel’s far-right government. “We feel Jewish extreme radicals want us out of Jerusalem and they’re working on it and they’re going unchecked,” Isaac said.
The delegation’s members condemned Hamas’s actions and deplored its killing of innocent civilians and abduction of hostages. But they questioned Israel’s declared intention to wipe out an organization that is part of the fabric of Palestinian society and seen as a standard-bearer of resistance to decades of Israeli military occupation and domination. “As horrifying as October 7 was, things did not start there,” Isaac said. “And you cannot just begin the story from there and as such, give a green light for Israel to do what it’s doing right now, which goes way beyond, which is a revenge campaign.”
Many leading foreign diplomats have stressed the underlying importance of reviving the long-stalled and moribund process of the two-state solution. Most Palestinians are cynical about this project, given the fecklessness of their own political leadership and the West’s inability to prevent Israel from further carving up the West Bank with settlements over the past two decades. Many Israeli politicians, including leading members of the current government, are also explicitly opposed to the creation of an independent Palestinian state.
The Israeli right hopes not just for victory in Gaza, but also conquest
But any postwar dispensation will have to reckon with the ground realities in Israel and the occupied territories. “One thing is clear: all my interlocutors in the Arab world have accepted Israel’s existence and want to engage with it,” wrote top E.U. diplomat Josep Borrell in a Financial Times op-ed that followed a recent trip to the Middle East. “They recognize the immense opportunity that lies in a peaceful neighborhood, cross-border cooperation and Israel’s potential role as a regional economic driver. But all agree that Arab-Israeli cooperation hinges upon resolving the Palestinian question.”
In recent statements, President Biden has also invoked the need to forge a two-state solution as a priority for the region. But talk is cheap. “America needs to prove to the Palestinians that they are serious about the two state solution because any talk from the Americans about a two-state solution right now feels empty, given the lack of action,” Isaac said. “No one has held Israel accountable.”
In their letter to Biden, the Palestinian clergymen reiterated their appeal: “This land has been crying for peace and justice for 75 years. It is time justice is served. It is time everybody can live with dignity in this land. The Palestinian and Israeli children deserve to live, hope and dream.”
When Isaac returns to Bethlehem at the end of the week for the start of the Advent season, he and his colleagues intend to set up a small Nativity scene with rocks and debris piled atop it. “This is what Christmas now means to us that we see Jesus being born among those who have lost everything, who are under the rubble,” Isaac said.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/20 ... re-cancel/
Pope Francis Tries to Settle Accounts
For years now, Pope Francis’ governance of the Roman Catholic Church has been seemingly designed to drive the church’s conservative and liberal wings ever further apart. Thus the persistent question hanging over his pontificate: How will he hold this thing together?
By opening debate on a wide array of hot-button subjects without delivering explicit changes, he has encouraged the church’s progressives to push the envelope as far as possible, even toward real doctrinal rebellion, in the hopes of dragging him along. At the same time, by favoring the progressives in his personnel decisions and making institutional war on the legacy of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, he has pushed conservatives toward crisis, paranoia and revolt.
On both fronts it’s unclear whether the papacy’s weakening authority can pull either group of rebels back. But in the last few weeks we’ve seen a clear attempt to use that authority, a real test of the pope’s ability to keep the church together.
On the one hand, Pope Francis has moved against two of his sharpest critics on the right: First, he removed Bishop Joseph Strickland from his diocese in Tyler, Texas; now he has stripped Cardinal Raymond Burke of his privileges at the Vatican, including an income and an apartment.
At the same time, the Vatican has tried to draw a bright line against the experiments of the German bishops, the leading progressive faction, by issuing a letter declaring that any reforms the Germans contemplate cannot change the church’s teaching on the all-male priesthood and the immorality of homosexual relations.
In each case you have an act of discipline seemingly tailored to the way that the rebellions are manifesting themselves. Among conservatives and traditionalists, specific critiques of the pope himself from prominent bishops and cardinals have now met with specific personal punishments. Among liberals and progressives, a broad attempt to liberalize the church’s moral teachings has now met with a general doctrinal rebuke.
But in each case one should be skeptical that the discipline will work. Both sides will note, for instance, that criticizing the pope earns you a sacking but that seeming doctrinal disobedience merits only a sternly worded letter. Unless the latter move is eventually backed up by something like the Strickland firing, progressives are likely to persist in the same line the German church is already pursuing, where the practices of the church are simply altered — via blessings for gay couples, say — without Rome granting formal permission. The assumption is that if liberalization becomes a fact on the ground, eventually the church’s laws will have to follow — and the more that assumption is entrenched, the harder it becomes for Rome to avoid some eventual rupture.
Meanwhile, those Catholics who admire Strickland and Burke are likely to be confirmed more deeply in a culture of conservative resistance, in which to remove a bishop from his real-world office only increases his potential influence in the magisterium of internet Catholicism. The idea that a bishop or cardinal could be somehow more orthodox than the Vatican would have seemed like an impossibility to the church’s conservatives just a few short years ago. But the world’s general crisis of authority, mediated by scandal and technological disruption, now extends through conservative Catholicism as well — a long, ragged crack that Francis’ unsteady leadership has opened in what was previously the papacy’s most secure base.
It’s a mistake to pin too much blame on this pope alone, however. He has worsened the church’s divisions and raised the likelihood of schism, but he’s also just exposed fissiparous tendencies that were present all along.
Consider just one important contrast between American and German Catholicism, two of the richest national churches and the major conservative and progressive camps in the church’s civil war. In the United States, a report from the Catholic University of America recently revealed, the theologically progressive priest is basically disappearing. Priests ordained in the 1960s were much more likely to call themselves progressive than theologically conservative or orthodox. But among priests ordained in the last 20 years, including the Francis era, a majority call themselves conservative or very conservative, and most of the rest call themselves middle of the road — leaving the 21st-century American priesthood’s progressive wing looking more like a feather.
This is the generational replacement that conservative Catholics have long predicted will marginalize liberal Catholicism. But then consider Germany, where Catholicism doesn’t have a large number of conservative or progressive priests coming along; instead it has almost no younger priests at all. There were only 48 new seminarians in Germany in 2022, for a church that still serves 21 million self-identified Catholics. Whereas the United States, with its 73 million Catholics, has almost 3,000 seminarians in training — a declining number that portends increasing shortages but not the existential crisis facing the German church.
And that existential crisis helps explain the intensity of the pressure for liberalization and Protestantization, because to many German Catholic leaders this seems like the only way for their church to survive at all — with the traditional model, the priestly model, having failed before their eyes.
Thus a conservative Catholic in the United States can feel reasonably secure in the future of the sacramental church — a future which the sacking of a conservative bishop by a more liberal pope can’t plausibly derail. In Germany, by contrast, the future that seemingly can’t be derailed is one of steep decline and increasing dominance by liberal-leaning laypeople: A new pope could be elected tomorrow and try to enforce greater orthodoxy within the German church, but without younger priests who embody those beliefs, the exercise could just lay Rome’s weakness even barer than today.
There is in God’s providence, presumably, a form of papal stewardship that can prevent a schism or separation between the Catholic trends embodied in Germany and America — and sometime soon a new pope may get the chance to try. But what he will inherit is not just specific messes made by his predecessor but an underlying reality of division that any policy made in Rome will need divine assistance to resolve.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/29/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Re: Christianity
Reuters
Pope Francis deplores Israeli killings of civilians in Gaza church
Philip Pullella
Updated Sun, December 17, 2023 at 3:18 PM CST·
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) -Pope Francis on Sunday again suggested Israel was using "terrorism" tactics in Gaza, deploring the reported killing by the Israeli military of two Christian women who had taken refuge in a church complex.
At his weekly blessing, Francis referred to a statement about an incident on Saturday by the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, the Catholic authority in the Holy Land.
The Patriarchate said an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) "sniper" killed the two women, whom the pope named as Nahida Khalil Anton and her daughter Samar, as they walked to a convent of nuns in the compound of the Holy Family Parish.
The Patriarchate statement said seven other people were shot and wounded as they tried to protect others.
"I continue to receive very grave and painful news from Gaza," Francis said. "Unarmed civilians are the objects of bombings and shootings. And this happened even inside the Holy Family parish complex, where there are no terrorists, but families, children, people who are sick or disabled, nuns."
Francis said they were killed by "snipers" and also referred to the Patriarchate's statement that a convent of nuns of the order founded by Mother Teresa was damaged by Israeli tank fire.
"Some would say 'It is war. It is terrorism.' Yes, it is war. It is terrorism," he said.
An Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesperson said the incident was still under review and had no immediate comment on the pope's words.
The Israeli military said that church representatives had contacted it early on Saturday regarding explosions in the area but did not report any casualties in the church complex.
"The IDF only targets terrorists and terror infrastructure and does not target civilians, no matter their religion," the military said.
The pope's remarks on Sunday marked the second time in less than a month that he used the word "terrorism" while speaking of events in Gaza.
On Nov. 22, after meeting separately with Israeli relatives of hostages held by Hamas and with Palestinians who have family in Gaza, he said: "This is what wars do. But here we have gone beyond wars. This is not war. This is terrorism."
Later that day, a messy dispute broke out over whether he used the word "genocide" to describe events in Gaza, with Palestinians who met him insisting that he did and the Vatican saying he did not.
Jewish groups criticised the pope for last month's "terrorism" comments.
Israel stepped up its bombardment of Gaza overnight and into Sunday, killing at least 40 people, Palestinians said, after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu argued the only way to secure the release of hostages was intense military pressure on Hamas.
(Additional reporting by Maayan Lubell in Jerusalem; editing by Giles Elgood and Paul Simao)
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/po ... 02900.html
Pope Francis deplores Israeli killings of civilians in Gaza church
Philip Pullella
Updated Sun, December 17, 2023 at 3:18 PM CST·
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) -Pope Francis on Sunday again suggested Israel was using "terrorism" tactics in Gaza, deploring the reported killing by the Israeli military of two Christian women who had taken refuge in a church complex.
At his weekly blessing, Francis referred to a statement about an incident on Saturday by the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, the Catholic authority in the Holy Land.
The Patriarchate said an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) "sniper" killed the two women, whom the pope named as Nahida Khalil Anton and her daughter Samar, as they walked to a convent of nuns in the compound of the Holy Family Parish.
The Patriarchate statement said seven other people were shot and wounded as they tried to protect others.
"I continue to receive very grave and painful news from Gaza," Francis said. "Unarmed civilians are the objects of bombings and shootings. And this happened even inside the Holy Family parish complex, where there are no terrorists, but families, children, people who are sick or disabled, nuns."
Francis said they were killed by "snipers" and also referred to the Patriarchate's statement that a convent of nuns of the order founded by Mother Teresa was damaged by Israeli tank fire.
"Some would say 'It is war. It is terrorism.' Yes, it is war. It is terrorism," he said.
An Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesperson said the incident was still under review and had no immediate comment on the pope's words.
The Israeli military said that church representatives had contacted it early on Saturday regarding explosions in the area but did not report any casualties in the church complex.
"The IDF only targets terrorists and terror infrastructure and does not target civilians, no matter their religion," the military said.
The pope's remarks on Sunday marked the second time in less than a month that he used the word "terrorism" while speaking of events in Gaza.
On Nov. 22, after meeting separately with Israeli relatives of hostages held by Hamas and with Palestinians who have family in Gaza, he said: "This is what wars do. But here we have gone beyond wars. This is not war. This is terrorism."
Later that day, a messy dispute broke out over whether he used the word "genocide" to describe events in Gaza, with Palestinians who met him insisting that he did and the Vatican saying he did not.
Jewish groups criticised the pope for last month's "terrorism" comments.
Israel stepped up its bombardment of Gaza overnight and into Sunday, killing at least 40 people, Palestinians said, after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu argued the only way to secure the release of hostages was intense military pressure on Hamas.
(Additional reporting by Maayan Lubell in Jerusalem; editing by Giles Elgood and Paul Simao)
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/po ... 02900.html
Pope Francis Allows Priests to Bless Same-Sex Couples
A church official said the blessings amounted to “a real development” that nevertheless did not amend “the traditional doctrine of the church about marriage.”
Pope Francis at the Vatican last year. The decision to allow blessings was based on his “pastoral vision,” officials said. Credit...Andreas Solaro/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The Vatican said Monday that Pope Francis had allowed priests to bless same-sex couples, his most definitive step yet to make the Roman Catholic Church more welcoming to L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics and more reflective of his vision of a more pastoral, and less rigid, church.
The Vatican had long said it could not bless same-sex couples because it would undermine church doctrine that marriage is only between a man and a woman.
But the new rule made clear that a blessing of a same-sex couple was not the same as a marriage sacrament, a formal ceremonial rite. It also stressed that it was not blessing the relationship, and that, to avoid confusion, blessings should not be imparted during or connected to the ceremony of a civil or same-sex union, or when there are “any clothing, gestures or words that are proper to a wedding.”
Blessings instead are better imparted, the Vatican says, during a meeting with a priest, a visit to a shrine, during a pilgrimage or as a prayer recited in a group.
The new rule was issued in a declaration, a rare and important Vatican document, by the church’s office on doctrine and introduced by its head, Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, who said that the declaration did not amend “the traditional doctrine of the church about marriage,” because it allowed no liturgical rite that could be confused with the sacrament of marriage.
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“It is precisely in this context,” Cardinal Fernández wrote, “that one can understand the possibility of blessing couples in irregular situations and same-sex couples without officially validating their status or changing in any way the church’s perennial teaching on marriage.”
In his introduction to the declaration, which was signed and approved by Pope Francis, Cardinal Fernández nevertheless acknowledged that broadening the scope of who could receive blessings amounted to “a real development” and an “innovative contribution to the pastoral meaning of blessings.” He said the decision was “based on the pastoral vision of Pope Francis.”
Image
A man waves a rainbow Pride flag in front of an ornate church.
A demonstrator waved a rainbow flag in front of the Basilica of Saint Mary Major in Rome during the annual Pride march in 2021.Credit...Gregorio Borgia/Associated Press
In recent decades, many Christian denominations have decided to allow blessings and marriages of same-sex couples, and to ordain openly gay clergy. But debates over the issue have led to conservative breakaways in Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian and other churches. The Roman Catholic Church has long been seen as among the least likely to change its stance.
But Francis, who turned 87 on Sunday, has in recent weeks sought to jump-start discussion on the church’s most sensitive topics as he has cracked down on his most incessant conservative critics. The new declaration is something akin to an executive order outside the more deliberative process he has favored.
//More on the Roman Catholic Church
//A High-Profile Case: A Vatican criminal court sentenced Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu, once one of the church’s most powerful officials, to five and a half years in prison for financial crimes.
//Cremation Rules: The Vatican said that Catholic families may ask to preserve “a minimal part of the ashes” of a relative in a place of significance to the deceased, softening a previous mandate that ashes could be kept only in “sacred spaces” like cemeteries.
//Running Out of Patience: Pope Francis, who recently moved against two of his most vocal critics in the United States, seems increasingly focused on settling scores and cleaning house.
//In the American Catholic Church: The pope’s increasingly open pushback against conservatives in the church has nurtured a deep wariness of his leadership in certain pockets of Catholic life in America.
“The request for a blessing,” the declaration states, “expresses and nurtures openness to the transcendence, mercy and closeness to God in a thousand concrete circumstances of life, which is no small thing in the world in which we live. It is a seed of the Holy Spirit that must be nurtured, not hindered.”
Supporters of a church more welcoming to same-sex couples agreed.
“This new declaration opens the door to nonliturgical blessings for same-sex couples, something that had been previously off-limits for bishops, priests and deacons,” said the Rev. James Martin, a prominent advocate for L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics, who has met frequently with Francis, a fellow Jesuit, and talked to him about the church’s need to better recognize L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics. “Along with many priests, I will now be delighted to bless my friends in same-sex unions.”
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The Rev. James Martin, a prominent advocate for L.G.B.T.Q. Catholic, at the World Meeting of Families in Dublin in 2018.Credit...Paul Faith/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
There has been a burst of activity on the L.G.B.T.Q. issue in recent months from the office of the Doctrine of the Faith, run by Cardinal Fernández. It comes after many advocates for L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics were frustrated by a lack of progress, or even recognition, during a major October meeting of bishops and lay people that will be repeated next year and could potentially lead to major changes in the church.
On Oct. 31, Francis approved another document by Cardinal Fernández’s department, making clear that transgender people can be baptized, serve as godparents and be witnesses at church weddings.
Earlier in October, the Vatican released Francis’ private response to doubts from conservative cardinals about the possibility of blessing same-sex couples. Francis instead suggested the blessings were a possibility, seemingly reversing a 2021 Vatican ruling that came down hard against the blessing of gay unions, arguing that God “cannot bless sin.”
While the pope then upheld the church position that marriage could exist only between a man and a woman, he said that priests should exercise “pastoral charity” when it came to requests for blessings. But Francis also made clear that he did not want the delivering of a blessing to a same-sex couple by an ordained minister to become a simple protocol, as had been the case in parts of the liberal German church that support same-sex blessings. He has urged priests to be open to “channels beyond norms.”
Indeed, the heart of the new declaration, “Fiducia Supplicans: On the Pastoral Meaning of Blessings,” is a resistance to a rigid church, one that excludes people from blessings because they fail doctrinal or moral litmus tests, but also one that turns blessings — including to same-sex couples — into another suffocating formality. Francis wants most of all a spontaneity and closeness to the faithful that he considers vital to the church’s survival.
The blessing “should not become a liturgical or semiliturgical act, similar to a sacrament,” the declaration states. “Such a ritualization would constitute a serious impoverishment because it would subject a gesture of great value in popular piety to excessive control, depriving ministers of freedom and spontaneity in their pastoral accompaniment of people’s lives.”
Image
Victor Manuel Fernández, in a cardinal’s attire, walks by a seated Pope Francis at the Vatican.
Victor Manuel Fernández being appointed cardinal by Pope Francis during a ceremony in September in Saint Peter’s Square in Vatican City.Credit...Giuseppe Lami/EPA, via Shutterstock
It also does not want the blessings to be seen as a substitute for the marriage sacrament for same-sex couples or other couples in “irregular situations.”
Conservatives from Africa, where bishops are highly skeptical of the church’s opening to L.G.B.T.Q. people, to North America, where much of the opposition to Pope Francis is financed, expressed reservations.
“After today’s statement,” John Oballa, the bishop of Ngong Diocese in Kenya, southwest of the capital, Nairobi, said in an interview Monday, “we are sure many questions will be coming from the congregation” about what all this means. “They will like to know how far this goes, what implications it will have and what it portends for the future.”
LifeSite News, a conservative outlet based in North America, wrote Monday that the document was issued “in contradiction to the unchangeable Catholic teaching that the church cannot bless sinful relationships.”
But the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which has a large conservative contingent, accepted the new rule, noting that it marked a distinction between sacramental blessings like marriage and a pastoral blessing for people seeing “God’s loving grace in their lives.”
“The church’s teaching on marriage has not changed,” said Chieko Noguchi, the conference’s spokesperson.
The rules are a clear opening toward L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics.
The declaration notes that the prior judgment from the Vatican, in 2021, stressed that the church did not have the power to bless human relationships that failed to conform with “God’s designs,” including sexual relations outside marriage and same-sex unions that presumed “to be a marriage.”
But the new Vatican declaration argued that this was an overly narrow view of blessings, which are intended to evoke God’s presence in all facets of life, and can be bestowed on people, objects of worship, places of work, ships and much else. It makes the case that blessings are a “a pastoral resource to be valued rather than a risk or a problem.”
In a secular era when the church is often on the defensive, the Vatican apparently did not want to deprive itself of one of its most effective tools for connecting with a popular piety that Francis sees as critical for the church’s future.
By restricting blessings, the new declaration states, “there is the danger that a pastoral gesture that is so beloved and widespread will be subjected to too many moral prerequisites,” and “overshadow” its intention to express God’s love.
It adds: “Thus, when people ask for a blessing, an exhaustive moral analysis should not be placed as a precondition for conferring it. For, those seeking a blessing should not be required to have prior moral perfection.”
The issue of blessing same-sex couples has exploded in recent years, especially in Germany, where priests have regularly offered blessings despite Vatican resistance.
Image
Roman Catholic clerics standing and holding hands in a public square in front of a church.
A public blessing ceremony for same-sex couples and remarried couples in September outside Cologne Cathedral in Germany.Credit...Martin Meissner/Associated Press
“It cannot be overstated how significant the Vatican’s new declaration is,” Francis DeBernardo, the executive director of New Ways Ministry, a Maryland-based group that advocates for gay Catholics, said in a statement. He welcomed the pope’s decision not to make blessings subject to a moral litmus test, which he called a step “to overturn the harsh policing of pastoral care” by his predecessors.
Francis, who has received official expressions of doubt on his teaching on the issue from conservative critics, but who is also under constant pressure from liberals in Germany on blessing same-sex unions, seemed done with the issue.
“Beyond the guidance provided above,” the declaration states, “no further responses should be expected about possible ways to regulate details or practicalities regarding blessings of this type.”
Abdi Latif Dahir contributed reporting from Kenya.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/18/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Pope Francis at the Vatican last year. The decision to allow blessings was based on his “pastoral vision,” officials said. Credit...Andreas Solaro/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The Vatican said Monday that Pope Francis had allowed priests to bless same-sex couples, his most definitive step yet to make the Roman Catholic Church more welcoming to L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics and more reflective of his vision of a more pastoral, and less rigid, church.
The Vatican had long said it could not bless same-sex couples because it would undermine church doctrine that marriage is only between a man and a woman.
But the new rule made clear that a blessing of a same-sex couple was not the same as a marriage sacrament, a formal ceremonial rite. It also stressed that it was not blessing the relationship, and that, to avoid confusion, blessings should not be imparted during or connected to the ceremony of a civil or same-sex union, or when there are “any clothing, gestures or words that are proper to a wedding.”
Blessings instead are better imparted, the Vatican says, during a meeting with a priest, a visit to a shrine, during a pilgrimage or as a prayer recited in a group.
The new rule was issued in a declaration, a rare and important Vatican document, by the church’s office on doctrine and introduced by its head, Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, who said that the declaration did not amend “the traditional doctrine of the church about marriage,” because it allowed no liturgical rite that could be confused with the sacrament of marriage.
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“It is precisely in this context,” Cardinal Fernández wrote, “that one can understand the possibility of blessing couples in irregular situations and same-sex couples without officially validating their status or changing in any way the church’s perennial teaching on marriage.”
In his introduction to the declaration, which was signed and approved by Pope Francis, Cardinal Fernández nevertheless acknowledged that broadening the scope of who could receive blessings amounted to “a real development” and an “innovative contribution to the pastoral meaning of blessings.” He said the decision was “based on the pastoral vision of Pope Francis.”
Image
A man waves a rainbow Pride flag in front of an ornate church.
A demonstrator waved a rainbow flag in front of the Basilica of Saint Mary Major in Rome during the annual Pride march in 2021.Credit...Gregorio Borgia/Associated Press
In recent decades, many Christian denominations have decided to allow blessings and marriages of same-sex couples, and to ordain openly gay clergy. But debates over the issue have led to conservative breakaways in Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian and other churches. The Roman Catholic Church has long been seen as among the least likely to change its stance.
But Francis, who turned 87 on Sunday, has in recent weeks sought to jump-start discussion on the church’s most sensitive topics as he has cracked down on his most incessant conservative critics. The new declaration is something akin to an executive order outside the more deliberative process he has favored.
//More on the Roman Catholic Church
//A High-Profile Case: A Vatican criminal court sentenced Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu, once one of the church’s most powerful officials, to five and a half years in prison for financial crimes.
//Cremation Rules: The Vatican said that Catholic families may ask to preserve “a minimal part of the ashes” of a relative in a place of significance to the deceased, softening a previous mandate that ashes could be kept only in “sacred spaces” like cemeteries.
//Running Out of Patience: Pope Francis, who recently moved against two of his most vocal critics in the United States, seems increasingly focused on settling scores and cleaning house.
//In the American Catholic Church: The pope’s increasingly open pushback against conservatives in the church has nurtured a deep wariness of his leadership in certain pockets of Catholic life in America.
“The request for a blessing,” the declaration states, “expresses and nurtures openness to the transcendence, mercy and closeness to God in a thousand concrete circumstances of life, which is no small thing in the world in which we live. It is a seed of the Holy Spirit that must be nurtured, not hindered.”
Supporters of a church more welcoming to same-sex couples agreed.
“This new declaration opens the door to nonliturgical blessings for same-sex couples, something that had been previously off-limits for bishops, priests and deacons,” said the Rev. James Martin, a prominent advocate for L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics, who has met frequently with Francis, a fellow Jesuit, and talked to him about the church’s need to better recognize L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics. “Along with many priests, I will now be delighted to bless my friends in same-sex unions.”
Image
The Rev. James Martin, a prominent advocate for L.G.B.T.Q. Catholic, at the World Meeting of Families in Dublin in 2018.Credit...Paul Faith/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
There has been a burst of activity on the L.G.B.T.Q. issue in recent months from the office of the Doctrine of the Faith, run by Cardinal Fernández. It comes after many advocates for L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics were frustrated by a lack of progress, or even recognition, during a major October meeting of bishops and lay people that will be repeated next year and could potentially lead to major changes in the church.
On Oct. 31, Francis approved another document by Cardinal Fernández’s department, making clear that transgender people can be baptized, serve as godparents and be witnesses at church weddings.
Earlier in October, the Vatican released Francis’ private response to doubts from conservative cardinals about the possibility of blessing same-sex couples. Francis instead suggested the blessings were a possibility, seemingly reversing a 2021 Vatican ruling that came down hard against the blessing of gay unions, arguing that God “cannot bless sin.”
While the pope then upheld the church position that marriage could exist only between a man and a woman, he said that priests should exercise “pastoral charity” when it came to requests for blessings. But Francis also made clear that he did not want the delivering of a blessing to a same-sex couple by an ordained minister to become a simple protocol, as had been the case in parts of the liberal German church that support same-sex blessings. He has urged priests to be open to “channels beyond norms.”
Indeed, the heart of the new declaration, “Fiducia Supplicans: On the Pastoral Meaning of Blessings,” is a resistance to a rigid church, one that excludes people from blessings because they fail doctrinal or moral litmus tests, but also one that turns blessings — including to same-sex couples — into another suffocating formality. Francis wants most of all a spontaneity and closeness to the faithful that he considers vital to the church’s survival.
The blessing “should not become a liturgical or semiliturgical act, similar to a sacrament,” the declaration states. “Such a ritualization would constitute a serious impoverishment because it would subject a gesture of great value in popular piety to excessive control, depriving ministers of freedom and spontaneity in their pastoral accompaniment of people’s lives.”
Image
Victor Manuel Fernández, in a cardinal’s attire, walks by a seated Pope Francis at the Vatican.
Victor Manuel Fernández being appointed cardinal by Pope Francis during a ceremony in September in Saint Peter’s Square in Vatican City.Credit...Giuseppe Lami/EPA, via Shutterstock
It also does not want the blessings to be seen as a substitute for the marriage sacrament for same-sex couples or other couples in “irregular situations.”
Conservatives from Africa, where bishops are highly skeptical of the church’s opening to L.G.B.T.Q. people, to North America, where much of the opposition to Pope Francis is financed, expressed reservations.
“After today’s statement,” John Oballa, the bishop of Ngong Diocese in Kenya, southwest of the capital, Nairobi, said in an interview Monday, “we are sure many questions will be coming from the congregation” about what all this means. “They will like to know how far this goes, what implications it will have and what it portends for the future.”
LifeSite News, a conservative outlet based in North America, wrote Monday that the document was issued “in contradiction to the unchangeable Catholic teaching that the church cannot bless sinful relationships.”
But the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which has a large conservative contingent, accepted the new rule, noting that it marked a distinction between sacramental blessings like marriage and a pastoral blessing for people seeing “God’s loving grace in their lives.”
“The church’s teaching on marriage has not changed,” said Chieko Noguchi, the conference’s spokesperson.
The rules are a clear opening toward L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics.
The declaration notes that the prior judgment from the Vatican, in 2021, stressed that the church did not have the power to bless human relationships that failed to conform with “God’s designs,” including sexual relations outside marriage and same-sex unions that presumed “to be a marriage.”
But the new Vatican declaration argued that this was an overly narrow view of blessings, which are intended to evoke God’s presence in all facets of life, and can be bestowed on people, objects of worship, places of work, ships and much else. It makes the case that blessings are a “a pastoral resource to be valued rather than a risk or a problem.”
In a secular era when the church is often on the defensive, the Vatican apparently did not want to deprive itself of one of its most effective tools for connecting with a popular piety that Francis sees as critical for the church’s future.
By restricting blessings, the new declaration states, “there is the danger that a pastoral gesture that is so beloved and widespread will be subjected to too many moral prerequisites,” and “overshadow” its intention to express God’s love.
It adds: “Thus, when people ask for a blessing, an exhaustive moral analysis should not be placed as a precondition for conferring it. For, those seeking a blessing should not be required to have prior moral perfection.”
The issue of blessing same-sex couples has exploded in recent years, especially in Germany, where priests have regularly offered blessings despite Vatican resistance.
Image
Roman Catholic clerics standing and holding hands in a public square in front of a church.
A public blessing ceremony for same-sex couples and remarried couples in September outside Cologne Cathedral in Germany.Credit...Martin Meissner/Associated Press
“It cannot be overstated how significant the Vatican’s new declaration is,” Francis DeBernardo, the executive director of New Ways Ministry, a Maryland-based group that advocates for gay Catholics, said in a statement. He welcomed the pope’s decision not to make blessings subject to a moral litmus test, which he called a step “to overturn the harsh policing of pastoral care” by his predecessors.
Francis, who has received official expressions of doubt on his teaching on the issue from conservative critics, but who is also under constant pressure from liberals in Germany on blessing same-sex unions, seemed done with the issue.
“Beyond the guidance provided above,” the declaration states, “no further responses should be expected about possible ways to regulate details or practicalities regarding blessings of this type.”
Abdi Latif Dahir contributed reporting from Kenya.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/18/worl ... 778d3e6de3
-
mahebubchatur
- Posts: 622
- Joined: Mon Jan 13, 2014 7:01 pm
Jesus Christ is accepted as a Prophet in Islam
All Islamic schools of thought accept it as a fundamental principle that for centuries, for thousands of years before the advent of Muhammad, there arose from time to time messengers, illumined by Divine Grace, for and among those races of the earth which had sufficiently advanced intellectually to comprehend such a message. Thus Abraham, Moses, Jesus and all the Prophets of Israel are universally accepted by Islam.
Imam Sultan Muhammad Shah Aga Khan III,
(Memoirs of the Aga Khan: World Enough and Time, 1954)
"They Killed Him Not": The Crucifixion in Shia Isma'ili Islam
By: Khalil Andani
They ile man notion muched mih sa lis mubarurto them."
(Holy Qur'an 4:157)
As observed by millions of Christians around the world, Good Friday marks the day when Jesus Christ was crucified.
For Christians, this event is the climax of sacred
history: the death of Christ on the Cross is believed to have redeemed and cleansed the sin of humanity. Indeed, the efficacy of the entire Christian doctrine - adhered to by the largest number of people in the world - depends upon the event of the Crucifixion.
Interestingly, the faith of Islam, the second largest religion in the world after Christianity, seems to offer a completely different understanding of this event - it appears to deny the Crucifixion altogether. The only verse of the Holy Qur'an which speaks of the Crucifixion is 4:157 quoted above.
Over the history of Islam, most Muslim commentators have come to deny that Jesus was ever crucified at all, with many holding that a substitute was crucified in his place. But does this view accurately reflect the Qur'anic position? It is necessary to examine the full context of the above verse - a verse which is too often referred to only in isolation. The group of verses which immediately precede the verse in question discuss the misdeeds of the People of the Book (ahl al-kitab):
In that they broke their covenant; that they rejected the signs of God. That they slew the Messengers in defiance of right; that they said, "Our hearts are the wrappings (which preserve God's Word; We need no more)";- Nay, God hath set the seal on their hearts for their blasphemy, and little is it they believe;- That they rejected Faith; that they uttered against Mary a grave false charge; That they said (in boast), "We killed the Messiah, Jesus the Son of Mary, the Messenger of God.";- but they killed him not, nor crucified him, but so it was made to appear to them, and those who differ therein are full of doubts, with no knowledge, but only conjecture to follow, for of a surety they killed him not:- Nay, God raised him up unto Himself; and God is Exalted in Power, Wise.
- Holy Quran 4:155-157
The Quranic denial of the crucifixion must be understood in its proper context: the Qur'an is only denying that the People of the Book crucified Jesus - and this appears to be in response to their boasting to have done so.
A neutral reader may easily conclude
that the Quran intends to say that the death of Jesus was ultimately due to God's will and not the desires of those who may have actually killed him. One then wonders: how did the view that Jesus was not crucified take root in the Islamic world?
more
https://www.themathesontrust.org/papers ... fixion.pdf
Imam Sultan Muhammad Shah Aga Khan III,
(Memoirs of the Aga Khan: World Enough and Time, 1954)
"They Killed Him Not": The Crucifixion in Shia Isma'ili Islam
By: Khalil Andani
They ile man notion muched mih sa lis mubarurto them."
(Holy Qur'an 4:157)
As observed by millions of Christians around the world, Good Friday marks the day when Jesus Christ was crucified.
For Christians, this event is the climax of sacred
history: the death of Christ on the Cross is believed to have redeemed and cleansed the sin of humanity. Indeed, the efficacy of the entire Christian doctrine - adhered to by the largest number of people in the world - depends upon the event of the Crucifixion.
Interestingly, the faith of Islam, the second largest religion in the world after Christianity, seems to offer a completely different understanding of this event - it appears to deny the Crucifixion altogether. The only verse of the Holy Qur'an which speaks of the Crucifixion is 4:157 quoted above.
Over the history of Islam, most Muslim commentators have come to deny that Jesus was ever crucified at all, with many holding that a substitute was crucified in his place. But does this view accurately reflect the Qur'anic position? It is necessary to examine the full context of the above verse - a verse which is too often referred to only in isolation. The group of verses which immediately precede the verse in question discuss the misdeeds of the People of the Book (ahl al-kitab):
In that they broke their covenant; that they rejected the signs of God. That they slew the Messengers in defiance of right; that they said, "Our hearts are the wrappings (which preserve God's Word; We need no more)";- Nay, God hath set the seal on their hearts for their blasphemy, and little is it they believe;- That they rejected Faith; that they uttered against Mary a grave false charge; That they said (in boast), "We killed the Messiah, Jesus the Son of Mary, the Messenger of God.";- but they killed him not, nor crucified him, but so it was made to appear to them, and those who differ therein are full of doubts, with no knowledge, but only conjecture to follow, for of a surety they killed him not:- Nay, God raised him up unto Himself; and God is Exalted in Power, Wise.
- Holy Quran 4:155-157
The Quranic denial of the crucifixion must be understood in its proper context: the Qur'an is only denying that the People of the Book crucified Jesus - and this appears to be in response to their boasting to have done so.
A neutral reader may easily conclude
that the Quran intends to say that the death of Jesus was ultimately due to God's will and not the desires of those who may have actually killed him. One then wonders: how did the view that Jesus was not crucified take root in the Islamic world?
more
https://www.themathesontrust.org/papers ... fixion.pdf-
mahebubchatur
- Posts: 622
- Joined: Mon Jan 13, 2014 7:01 pm
Article by The Ismaili
Muslims regard Jesus (peace be upon him) as one of the great prophets who brought divine guidance to humanity before Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him and his family).
His name is mentioned in the Holy Qur’an twenty-five times, often in the form ‘Isa ibn Maryam, meaning “Jesus, son of Mary.” In the Qur’an, he is referred to by the unique title of “Messiah” (al-masih in Arabic), meaning “anointed one.” He is regarded as one of many prophets from the hereditary lineage of Prophet Ibrahim, or Abraham (peace be upon him). Many Muslim traditions view him as an ideal exemplar of spirituality.
Descriptions of Jesus in the Qur’an include many aspects of the narrative found in the Gospels about Prophet ‘Isa’s life, including his virgin birth, the signs given to him by God, that he was raised by God into His presence, and it also suggests his future return. Prophet ‘Isa is also referred to in the Qur’an as the “Word” and the “Spirit” of God, a special honour. However, he is revered as a Prophet of great spiritual insight rather than as the literal son of God.
The Prophets of the Abrahamic Tradition
The Holy Qur’an frequently mentions that divine guidance was sent to humankind through various prophets. For example, it says:
“So [you believers], say, ‘We believe in God and in what was sent down to us and what was sent down to Ibrahim (Abraham), Isma’il (Ishmael), Ishaq (Isaac), Ya’qub (Jacob), and the Tribes, and what was given to Musa (Moses), ‘Isa (Jesus), and all the prophets by their Lord. We make no distinction between any of them, and we devote ourselves to Him’” (Q 2:136).
This view that all prophets are considered to be equal is also supported by a widely-reported hadith, in which Prophet Muhammad is believed to have said:
“Both in this world and in the Hereafter, I am the nearest of all the people to Jesus, the son of Mary. The prophets are paternal brothers; their mothers are different, but their religion is one.”
Many Qur’anic verses also describe the prophets as belonging to the same family. For example, there is a line of prophets descended from Prophet Ibrahim. Both of his sons, Ishaq and Isma’il were prophets, as was Prophet Ishaq’s son, Prophet Ya’qub, and his grandson, Prophet Yusuf, or Joseph (peace be upon them).
Thus, God chose certain families over others based on their devotion, faith and commitment towards the Divine, as reflected in the following two Qur’anic verses:
“Allah chose Adam and Nuh (Noah), the family of Ibrahim, and the family of Imran above all mankind: a progeny one from the other” (Q 3:33-34).
“We have already given the family of Ibrahim the Book and Wisdom and conferred upon them a great kingdom” (Q 4:54).
According to Islamic tradition, Prophet Muhammad was a descendant of Prophet Ibrahim through Prophet Isma’il, while the prophets Musa and ‘Isa were descendants of Prophet Ibrahim through Prophet Ishaq. For the Shia, this elevated status of Prophet Ibrahim’s family also extends to Prophet Muhammad’s family, including the first Shi‘a Imam, Hazrat Ali (peace be upon him), and the Imams descended from him.
The Life and Legacy of Prophet ‘Isa
The Qur’an mentions that angels announced the coming birth of Prophet ‘Isa, saying:
“The angels said, ‘O Maryam, Allah gives you good news of a Word [kalima] from Him. His name is [the Messiah], ‘Isa ibn Maryam, honoured in this world and in the next, and of those brought near [to God]’” (Q 3:45).
Throughout history, Prophet ‘Isa has been viewed by Muslims as someone who embodied the qualities of piety and a concern for the needy, and whose example inspired Prophet Muhammad. In Sufi literature, he is frequently portrayed as an example of detachment from the material world and closeness to God.
The Ikhwan al-Safa’, or Brethren of Purity, depicted Prophet ‘Isa as a spiritual exemplar par excellence. The Ikhwan al-Safa’ were a group of anonymous scholars who wrote a series of Arabic epistles, or rasa’il. Historians have debated their identity and spiritual affiliation, with several scholars suggesting that they may have been Ismailis of the pre-Fatimid era.
In his article “Jesus, Christians and Christianity in the Thought of the Ikhwan al-Safa’,” Dr Omar Ali-de-Unzaga writes:
“Jesus figures prominently in the Rasa’il, as one of the exemplars who embodied the views of the Ikhwan al-Safa’: belief in the eternity of the soul and the pursuit of the purification of the soul from matter by detachment from the bodily realm.”
Fatimid Ismaili missionaries or religious teachers (da‘is), such as al-Sijistani and Ja‘far ibn Mansur al-Yaman, also praised Prophet ‘Isa’s virtues as a spiritual teacher, healer and guide to enlightenment who introduced his followers to the inner or esoteric (batin) aspects of their faith.
In The Memoirs of Aga Khan, the 48th Ismaili Imam, Sir Sultan Mahomed Shah (peace be upon him), mentions Prophet ‘Isa as someone who attained spiritual enlightenment:
“…some men are born with such natural spiritual capacities and possibilities of development, that they have direct experience of that great love, that all-embracing, all-consuming love, which direct contact with reality gives to the human soul. Hafiz, indeed, has said that men like Jesus Christ, and Muslim mystics like Mansour and Bayezid and others, have possessed that spiritual power of the greater love; that any of us, if the Holy Spirit ever-present grants us that enlightenment, can, being thus blessed, have the power which Christ had…”
The 49th Ismaili Imam, His Highness Prince Karim Aga Khan, spoke about Prophet ‘Isa in connection with pluralism in his acceptance speech for the Tutzing Evangelical Academy’s “Tolerance” award in 2006, saying:
“Despite the long history of religious conflict, there is a long counter-history of religious focus on tolerance as a central virtue – on welcoming the stranger and loving one's neighbour. ‘Who is my Neighbour?’ – one of the central Christian narratives asks. Jesus responds by telling the story of the Good Samaritan – a foreigner, a representative of the Other, who reaches out sympathetically, across ethnic and cultural divides, to show mercy to the fallen stranger at the side of the road.”
Conclusion
In Islamic traditions, Prophet ‘Isa is held in high regard as a messenger of God and an exemplar of piety and as a guide to spiritual truth. He is also part of the shared heritage that binds the monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Together, they are known in the Qur’an as the ahl al-kitab, or People of the Book, that is, people to whom God sent revelation.
His Highness Prince Karim Aga Khan highlighted this shared Abrahamic heritage in his address to the Canadian parliament in 2014, stating:
“We find singularly little in our theological interpretations that would clash with the other Abrahamic faiths - with Christianity and Judaism. Indeed, there is much that is in profound harmony.”
Sources
Faith and Practice in Islamic Traditions, vol. 1 (Student Reader). London: Islamic Publications Limited for The Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2015.
The Qur’an and its Interpretations vol. 1 (Student Reader). London: Islamic Publications Limited for The Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2017.
Shedinger, Robert F. "Jesus", in: Oxford Bibliographies in Islamic Studies.
Omar Ali-de-Unzaga. “Jesus, Christians and Christianity in the Thought of the Ikhwan al-Safa’”, in: Christian-Muslim Relations. A Bibliographical History. Volume 2 (900- 1050), ed. David Thomas et al. (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2010); The History of Christian-Muslim Relations, 14; pp. 306-311.
Andani, Khalil, “Jesus in Esoteric Islam: An Ismaili Muslim Christology,” Lecture for the Society of Comparative Theology, Harvard Divinity School, 1 March 2013.
Aga Khan III. The Memoirs of Aga Khan: World Enough and Time. London: Cassell and Company Ltd, 1954.
TheIsmaili 24 Dec 2023
His name is mentioned in the Holy Qur’an twenty-five times, often in the form ‘Isa ibn Maryam, meaning “Jesus, son of Mary.” In the Qur’an, he is referred to by the unique title of “Messiah” (al-masih in Arabic), meaning “anointed one.” He is regarded as one of many prophets from the hereditary lineage of Prophet Ibrahim, or Abraham (peace be upon him). Many Muslim traditions view him as an ideal exemplar of spirituality.
Descriptions of Jesus in the Qur’an include many aspects of the narrative found in the Gospels about Prophet ‘Isa’s life, including his virgin birth, the signs given to him by God, that he was raised by God into His presence, and it also suggests his future return. Prophet ‘Isa is also referred to in the Qur’an as the “Word” and the “Spirit” of God, a special honour. However, he is revered as a Prophet of great spiritual insight rather than as the literal son of God.
The Prophets of the Abrahamic Tradition
The Holy Qur’an frequently mentions that divine guidance was sent to humankind through various prophets. For example, it says:
“So [you believers], say, ‘We believe in God and in what was sent down to us and what was sent down to Ibrahim (Abraham), Isma’il (Ishmael), Ishaq (Isaac), Ya’qub (Jacob), and the Tribes, and what was given to Musa (Moses), ‘Isa (Jesus), and all the prophets by their Lord. We make no distinction between any of them, and we devote ourselves to Him’” (Q 2:136).
This view that all prophets are considered to be equal is also supported by a widely-reported hadith, in which Prophet Muhammad is believed to have said:
“Both in this world and in the Hereafter, I am the nearest of all the people to Jesus, the son of Mary. The prophets are paternal brothers; their mothers are different, but their religion is one.”
Many Qur’anic verses also describe the prophets as belonging to the same family. For example, there is a line of prophets descended from Prophet Ibrahim. Both of his sons, Ishaq and Isma’il were prophets, as was Prophet Ishaq’s son, Prophet Ya’qub, and his grandson, Prophet Yusuf, or Joseph (peace be upon them).
Thus, God chose certain families over others based on their devotion, faith and commitment towards the Divine, as reflected in the following two Qur’anic verses:
“Allah chose Adam and Nuh (Noah), the family of Ibrahim, and the family of Imran above all mankind: a progeny one from the other” (Q 3:33-34).
“We have already given the family of Ibrahim the Book and Wisdom and conferred upon them a great kingdom” (Q 4:54).
According to Islamic tradition, Prophet Muhammad was a descendant of Prophet Ibrahim through Prophet Isma’il, while the prophets Musa and ‘Isa were descendants of Prophet Ibrahim through Prophet Ishaq. For the Shia, this elevated status of Prophet Ibrahim’s family also extends to Prophet Muhammad’s family, including the first Shi‘a Imam, Hazrat Ali (peace be upon him), and the Imams descended from him.
The Life and Legacy of Prophet ‘Isa
The Qur’an mentions that angels announced the coming birth of Prophet ‘Isa, saying:
“The angels said, ‘O Maryam, Allah gives you good news of a Word [kalima] from Him. His name is [the Messiah], ‘Isa ibn Maryam, honoured in this world and in the next, and of those brought near [to God]’” (Q 3:45).
Throughout history, Prophet ‘Isa has been viewed by Muslims as someone who embodied the qualities of piety and a concern for the needy, and whose example inspired Prophet Muhammad. In Sufi literature, he is frequently portrayed as an example of detachment from the material world and closeness to God.
The Ikhwan al-Safa’, or Brethren of Purity, depicted Prophet ‘Isa as a spiritual exemplar par excellence. The Ikhwan al-Safa’ were a group of anonymous scholars who wrote a series of Arabic epistles, or rasa’il. Historians have debated their identity and spiritual affiliation, with several scholars suggesting that they may have been Ismailis of the pre-Fatimid era.
In his article “Jesus, Christians and Christianity in the Thought of the Ikhwan al-Safa’,” Dr Omar Ali-de-Unzaga writes:
“Jesus figures prominently in the Rasa’il, as one of the exemplars who embodied the views of the Ikhwan al-Safa’: belief in the eternity of the soul and the pursuit of the purification of the soul from matter by detachment from the bodily realm.”
Fatimid Ismaili missionaries or religious teachers (da‘is), such as al-Sijistani and Ja‘far ibn Mansur al-Yaman, also praised Prophet ‘Isa’s virtues as a spiritual teacher, healer and guide to enlightenment who introduced his followers to the inner or esoteric (batin) aspects of their faith.
In The Memoirs of Aga Khan, the 48th Ismaili Imam, Sir Sultan Mahomed Shah (peace be upon him), mentions Prophet ‘Isa as someone who attained spiritual enlightenment:
“…some men are born with such natural spiritual capacities and possibilities of development, that they have direct experience of that great love, that all-embracing, all-consuming love, which direct contact with reality gives to the human soul. Hafiz, indeed, has said that men like Jesus Christ, and Muslim mystics like Mansour and Bayezid and others, have possessed that spiritual power of the greater love; that any of us, if the Holy Spirit ever-present grants us that enlightenment, can, being thus blessed, have the power which Christ had…”
The 49th Ismaili Imam, His Highness Prince Karim Aga Khan, spoke about Prophet ‘Isa in connection with pluralism in his acceptance speech for the Tutzing Evangelical Academy’s “Tolerance” award in 2006, saying:
“Despite the long history of religious conflict, there is a long counter-history of religious focus on tolerance as a central virtue – on welcoming the stranger and loving one's neighbour. ‘Who is my Neighbour?’ – one of the central Christian narratives asks. Jesus responds by telling the story of the Good Samaritan – a foreigner, a representative of the Other, who reaches out sympathetically, across ethnic and cultural divides, to show mercy to the fallen stranger at the side of the road.”
Conclusion
In Islamic traditions, Prophet ‘Isa is held in high regard as a messenger of God and an exemplar of piety and as a guide to spiritual truth. He is also part of the shared heritage that binds the monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Together, they are known in the Qur’an as the ahl al-kitab, or People of the Book, that is, people to whom God sent revelation.
His Highness Prince Karim Aga Khan highlighted this shared Abrahamic heritage in his address to the Canadian parliament in 2014, stating:
“We find singularly little in our theological interpretations that would clash with the other Abrahamic faiths - with Christianity and Judaism. Indeed, there is much that is in profound harmony.”
Sources
Faith and Practice in Islamic Traditions, vol. 1 (Student Reader). London: Islamic Publications Limited for The Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2015.
The Qur’an and its Interpretations vol. 1 (Student Reader). London: Islamic Publications Limited for The Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2017.
Shedinger, Robert F. "Jesus", in: Oxford Bibliographies in Islamic Studies.
Omar Ali-de-Unzaga. “Jesus, Christians and Christianity in the Thought of the Ikhwan al-Safa’”, in: Christian-Muslim Relations. A Bibliographical History. Volume 2 (900- 1050), ed. David Thomas et al. (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2010); The History of Christian-Muslim Relations, 14; pp. 306-311.
Andani, Khalil, “Jesus in Esoteric Islam: An Ismaili Muslim Christology,” Lecture for the Society of Comparative Theology, Harvard Divinity School, 1 March 2013.
Aga Khan III. The Memoirs of Aga Khan: World Enough and Time. London: Cassell and Company Ltd, 1954.
TheIsmaili 24 Dec 2023
‘The Miraculous Is Essential’: A Conversation About Christmas, God and Faith
“Madonna and Child” by Vincenzo Foppa, circa 1480.Credit...Metropolitan Museum of Art
This is the latest in my occasional series of conversations about Christianity, aimed at bridging America’s God gulf. Previously, I’ve spoken with the Rev. Timothy Keller, President Jimmy Carter, Cardinal Joseph Tobin and others. Here’s my interview with Beth Moore, an influential evangelical writer who broke with the Southern Baptist Convention in 2021. It has been edited for clarity and length.
Nicholas Kristof: Merry Christmas! This is my favorite season, but I’m skeptical that Jesus was born to a virgin. Do we need to accept miracles to celebrate the Christmas story?
Beth Moore: For people who believe Jesus rose from the dead, a virgin birth is not inconceivable.
Kristof: Most Christians today no longer believe that the Earth was created 6,000 years ago, or that Eve was made from Adam’s rib. So why hold on to the virgin birth, which, after all, is mentioned in only two of the Gospels and is omitted in Mark, which was probably the first to be written?
Moore: If we were to strip the Bible of its wonders, miracles and mysteries, we might have a religion left, but it wouldn’t be Christianity or Judaism. The miraculous is essential. But any place is a starting point: whatever draws us into the story. God uses all sorts of aspects to draw us into its center.
Kristof: Some 500 years ago, Catholics and Protestants were killing each other partly in a feud over transubstantiation versus consubstantiation. Today, almost nobody knows the difference. So should we worry less about doctrine and define Christian faith in terms of what people do more than in what they believe?
Moore: Our behavior is a result of belief. The love of God takes place not only in word but also in deed. For example, you cannot possibly be steeped in the Gospels and disregard the poor. The Sermon on the Mount is etched in the concrete of the Gospel. First Corinthians 13 says we can be sacrificial and gifted speakers but if we don’t have love, our serving is nothing but noise to God. We’re staring today in the face of a profound failure of discipleship. Our witness has gone awry.
Kristof: Such as the Southern Baptist Convention and its sexual abuse scandals?
Moore: You have to understand, this was my world. From where I sat, it was burgeoning publicly with idolatry, misogyny and racism. There comes a time when you say, “No, I can no longer identify with this.”
Kristof: Did that shake your own religious faith?
Moore: My faith in institutions, yes. Mostly it caused a tremendous season of introspection and repentance. It was too late for me to be greatly shaken about Christ himself.
Kristof: Jesus was remarkably open-minded about gender. The only person in the gospels who defeats him in argument is an unnamed woman described in Mark 7:24-30 and more fully in Matthew 15:21-28; she is feisty as she begs for help and talks back until Jesus changes his mind. So why has the church tended to be patriarchal and sexist?
Moore: Christ made a point of bringing in women. You find women among his traveling band of followers in Luke’s Gospel. Jesus brought Mary of Bethany into theology class. Jesus chose women to be the first witnesses of his resurrection. Why would we rebuild a wall Christ tore down? Some of these guys have the attitude, “Give women an inch, they’ll take a mile.” Well, you know what? It’s not their inch.
Kristof: When you and I were young in the 1960s and ’70s, two of the most prominent evangelicals were arguably Martin Luther King Jr. and Jimmy Carter. And now white evangelicals overwhelmingly support Donald Trump. How did that happen?
Moore: The marriage between the Republican Party and the evangelical church. As believers in Christ, we can’t give ourselves to a political party or to politicians. We’re to be led by the spirit, free agents who can’t be bought.
Kristof: How should we think about the intersection of religion and morality? One of the most repulsive things I’ve seen was the opposition to funding for the AIDS crisis by prominent evangelicals like Senator Jesse Helms because they thought it was gay people who would die. Yet when I visit prisons, when I travel to the poorest places around the world, I disproportionately see people of faith — often conservative people of faith — truly doing the Lord’s work, risking their lives to help others. Somehow Pat Robertson and these heroic missionaries were all reading the same Gospel.
Moore: I often tell people of faith who are demoralized and unsure if they want to be part of Christianity anymore, don’t go to social media for your impressions of the church! We’ve lost our minds there. Go to the streets where we do some good. Go to the crises. To homes for abused women and children. That’s where your faith will be rebuilt.
Kristof: You used that term “Jesus Follower.” I wonder if you think that the term “Christian” has accumulated so much baggage that we should change terminology?
Moore: “Christian” is a fine and wonderful word. But what I saw happening in politics made me change how I refer to myself and the community of fellow believers. What has become “pro-Christian” politically too often fails to reflect what is Christlike.
Kristof: One element of evangelical principles that I find at odds with that message of love is the notion that only people who have accepted Jesus will end up in heaven. I recoil at the idea of Gandhi, who was Hindu, writhing in hell.
Moore: There are things I obviously cannot explain. But I don’t believe anyone is getting into the presence of God except through Christ. That is the spine of my faith. I can’t work out exactly what that looks like, but I know the Savior is good. My best understanding of hell is eternal separation from God. I can’t say what Gandhi or anyone else is doing right now, but I believe to my core the way to God is through Christ.
Kristof: What do liberals not get about evangelicals?
Moore: Breaking down stereotypes begins with knowing people who don’t believe the same thing you do. Case in point: My older brother was in the theater world, where he encountered and embraced Buddhism, renouncing Christianity as backward and hateful. This was my beloved big brother, one of the wittiest, most talented people I’ve ever known. As an attempt to salvage family relationships, all talk of religion became off limits. It didn’t work for the two of us. It left us polite but not close. Ten or so years ago we decided to lift the ban and free each to talk openly about anything, including our beliefs, agreeing to respect each other’s differences.
Kristof: Was your brother won over?
Moore: He died suddenly 10 months ago. My best friend. We were thick as thieves. Thicker than blood. I miss him every second. I can’t say either of us won over the other but we won back our relationship, enjoyed the heck out of each other. And he no longer seemed to think Jesus was a jerk.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/23/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Re: Christianity
CBS News
Ukraine snubs Russia, celebrates Christmas on Dec. 25 for first time
CBSNews
Updated Mon, December 25, 2023 at 8:45 AM CST·
Ukrainian Orthodox Christians attended services on Sunday as the country for the first time celebrated Christmas on Dec. 25, after the government changed the date from Jan. 7, when most Orthodox believers celebrate, as a snub to Russia.
"All Ukrainians are together," said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a Christmas message released Sunday evening. "We all celebrate Christmas together. On the same date, as one big family, as one nation, as one united country."
In the southern Black Sea port of Odesa, churchgoers prayed and lit candles as priests in gold vestments held Christmas Eve service in the Cathedral of the Nativity, decorated with fir trees and a nativity scene
"We believe that we really should celebrate Christmas with the whole world, far away, far away from Moscow. For me, that's the new message now," said one smiling parishioner, Olena, whose son is a medic on the front line.
"We really want to celebrate in a new way. This is a holiday with the whole of Ukraine, with our independent Ukraine. This is very important for us," she told AFP.
Most eastern Christian churches use the Julian calendar, in which Christmas falls on Jan. 7, rather than the Gregorian calendar used in everyday life and by Western churches.
Separately, Ukraine's air force said it shot down 28 Russian drones out of 31 launched from the annexed Crimea peninsula on Monday as well as had also shot down two Russian missiles and two fighter jets.
Zelenskyy signed a law in July moving the celebration to Dec. 25, saying it enabled Ukrainians to "abandon the Russian heritage of imposing Christmas celebrations on January 7."
The date change is part of hastened moves since Russia's invasion to remove traces of the Russian and Soviet empires. Other measures include renaming streets and removing monuments.
The Orthodox Church of Ukraine formally broke away from the Russian Orthodox Church over Moscow's annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its support for separatists in eastern Ukraine.
The political rift has seen priests and even entire parishes switch from one church to another, with the new Orthodox Church of Ukraine growing fast and taking over several Russia-linked church buildings, moves supported by the government.
On Sunday evening, worshippers packed St Michael's Golden-Domed Monastery in Kyiv — the headquarters of the new independent church — for a Christmas service led by the primate of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, Metropolitan Yepifaniy.
Ukrainians around the country voiced support for the Christmas date change.
"We wanted to support what is happening in Ukraine now. Because changes are always difficult, and when these changes occur, more people are needed to support it in order for something new to happen," said Denis, a young man attending church in Odesa.
At Kyiv's Golden-Domed Monastery, Oksana Krykunova said that for her, after the invasion, it was "natural to switch to the 25th."
She added: "I just visited my parents — my 81-year-old mother and 86-year-old father — and they accepted it absolutely (normally)."
In the western city of Lviv, which has been little damaged by the war, Taras Kobza, an army medic, said "We have to join the civilized world."
Tetiana, a singer in a traditional music group called Yagody (berries), agreed, saying, "I'm very happy that we are finally celebrating Christmas Eve and Christmas together with the rest of the world. It's really cool."
The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church has also opted to hold Christmas services on Dec. 25.
But the historically Russia-linked Ukrainian Orthodox Church is keeping the Jan. 7 Christmas date. This church claims to have cut ties with Russia because of the war but many Ukrainians are sceptical.
Under the Soviet Union, atheism was encouraged and Christmas traditions such as trees and gifts were shifted to New Year's Eve, which became the main holiday.
Ukrainian Christmas traditions include a dinner on Christmas Eve with 12 meatless dishes including a sweet grain pudding called kutya.
People decorate homes with elaborate sheaves of wheat called didukh. Celebrations also include singing carols called kolyadky, carrying decorations in the shape of stars and performing nativity scenes.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/uk ... 18241.html
Two comments;
Kashutin
By shifting Christmas to 25ht of December Zelensky replicates action of Germans in 1941 when they occupied Ukraine and decreed to switch Christmas celebration to westernized date. Zelensky behaves no different from their manner in his efforts to eradicate Ukrainian cultural connection with Russia nevertheless the facts that: First, he has not such authority to issue a decree concerning religious practices as a lay person who has nothing to do with a religion. Second, he is a Jew and should not intervene into Christians religious life. Third, Ukrainian tradition to celebrate Christmas on 7th January as Orthodox Christians do has nothing to do with Russia. People who lives on territory of present day Ukraine and in its capital Kiev have been celebrating Christmas on 7th of January from 10th century when they were baptized by prince Vladimir. So Zelensky conducts himself as real occupier who use its authoritative power to change identity of people he rules.
Robert
For those who recall the song "The 12 days of Christmas", those 12 days begin on December 25, the date of Jesus's birth, & end with the Epiphany on January 7th. Western churches (i.e. both Catholic & Protestant) celebrate Christmas on the 1st day, while eastern churches (Orthodox) have traditionally celebrated it on the 12th day.
Ukraine snubs Russia, celebrates Christmas on Dec. 25 for first time
CBSNews
Updated Mon, December 25, 2023 at 8:45 AM CST·
Ukrainian Orthodox Christians attended services on Sunday as the country for the first time celebrated Christmas on Dec. 25, after the government changed the date from Jan. 7, when most Orthodox believers celebrate, as a snub to Russia.
"All Ukrainians are together," said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a Christmas message released Sunday evening. "We all celebrate Christmas together. On the same date, as one big family, as one nation, as one united country."
In the southern Black Sea port of Odesa, churchgoers prayed and lit candles as priests in gold vestments held Christmas Eve service in the Cathedral of the Nativity, decorated with fir trees and a nativity scene
"We believe that we really should celebrate Christmas with the whole world, far away, far away from Moscow. For me, that's the new message now," said one smiling parishioner, Olena, whose son is a medic on the front line.
"We really want to celebrate in a new way. This is a holiday with the whole of Ukraine, with our independent Ukraine. This is very important for us," she told AFP.
Most eastern Christian churches use the Julian calendar, in which Christmas falls on Jan. 7, rather than the Gregorian calendar used in everyday life and by Western churches.
Separately, Ukraine's air force said it shot down 28 Russian drones out of 31 launched from the annexed Crimea peninsula on Monday as well as had also shot down two Russian missiles and two fighter jets.
Zelenskyy signed a law in July moving the celebration to Dec. 25, saying it enabled Ukrainians to "abandon the Russian heritage of imposing Christmas celebrations on January 7."
The date change is part of hastened moves since Russia's invasion to remove traces of the Russian and Soviet empires. Other measures include renaming streets and removing monuments.
The Orthodox Church of Ukraine formally broke away from the Russian Orthodox Church over Moscow's annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its support for separatists in eastern Ukraine.
The political rift has seen priests and even entire parishes switch from one church to another, with the new Orthodox Church of Ukraine growing fast and taking over several Russia-linked church buildings, moves supported by the government.
On Sunday evening, worshippers packed St Michael's Golden-Domed Monastery in Kyiv — the headquarters of the new independent church — for a Christmas service led by the primate of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, Metropolitan Yepifaniy.
Ukrainians around the country voiced support for the Christmas date change.
"We wanted to support what is happening in Ukraine now. Because changes are always difficult, and when these changes occur, more people are needed to support it in order for something new to happen," said Denis, a young man attending church in Odesa.
At Kyiv's Golden-Domed Monastery, Oksana Krykunova said that for her, after the invasion, it was "natural to switch to the 25th."
She added: "I just visited my parents — my 81-year-old mother and 86-year-old father — and they accepted it absolutely (normally)."
In the western city of Lviv, which has been little damaged by the war, Taras Kobza, an army medic, said "We have to join the civilized world."
Tetiana, a singer in a traditional music group called Yagody (berries), agreed, saying, "I'm very happy that we are finally celebrating Christmas Eve and Christmas together with the rest of the world. It's really cool."
The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church has also opted to hold Christmas services on Dec. 25.
But the historically Russia-linked Ukrainian Orthodox Church is keeping the Jan. 7 Christmas date. This church claims to have cut ties with Russia because of the war but many Ukrainians are sceptical.
Under the Soviet Union, atheism was encouraged and Christmas traditions such as trees and gifts were shifted to New Year's Eve, which became the main holiday.
Ukrainian Christmas traditions include a dinner on Christmas Eve with 12 meatless dishes including a sweet grain pudding called kutya.
People decorate homes with elaborate sheaves of wheat called didukh. Celebrations also include singing carols called kolyadky, carrying decorations in the shape of stars and performing nativity scenes.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/uk ... 18241.html
Two comments;
Kashutin
By shifting Christmas to 25ht of December Zelensky replicates action of Germans in 1941 when they occupied Ukraine and decreed to switch Christmas celebration to westernized date. Zelensky behaves no different from their manner in his efforts to eradicate Ukrainian cultural connection with Russia nevertheless the facts that: First, he has not such authority to issue a decree concerning religious practices as a lay person who has nothing to do with a religion. Second, he is a Jew and should not intervene into Christians religious life. Third, Ukrainian tradition to celebrate Christmas on 7th January as Orthodox Christians do has nothing to do with Russia. People who lives on territory of present day Ukraine and in its capital Kiev have been celebrating Christmas on 7th of January from 10th century when they were baptized by prince Vladimir. So Zelensky conducts himself as real occupier who use its authoritative power to change identity of people he rules.
Robert
For those who recall the song "The 12 days of Christmas", those 12 days begin on December 25, the date of Jesus's birth, & end with the Epiphany on January 7th. Western churches (i.e. both Catholic & Protestant) celebrate Christmas on the 1st day, while eastern churches (Orthodox) have traditionally celebrated it on the 12th day.
This Is Why Jesus Wept
James Tissot, “Jesus Wept (Jésus pleura),” 1886-1896.Credit...Brooklyn Museum
Of all the qualities that the New Testament ascribes to God, compassion is among the most shocking.
Compassion has nothing to do with power, with immortality or with immutability, which is what many people think of when they contemplate God’s qualities. The Greek gods of myth who lived on Mt. Olympus were defined by many things, but compassion was not high among them.
“For much of antiquity feeling the pain of others was regarded as a weakness,” John Dickson, a professor of biblical studies and public Christianity at Wheaton College, told me. This comes to full flowering in the Stoics, he said, “on the grounds that this involved allowing an external factor — the emotions or plight of another — to control your own inner life.”
Compassion, on the other hand, is central to the Christian understanding of God. Compassion implies the capacity to enter into places of pain, to “weep with those who weep,” according to the Apostle Paul, who was central both to the early conception of Christianity and to the idea of its underpinning in compassion.
In the Hebrew Scriptures, we’re told many times that God is compassionate. It is at the center of the Jewish conception of God. But for Christians, there is an incarnational expression of that compassion. The embodiment of God in Jesus — the deity made flesh, dwelling among us — means that God both suffered and, crucially, suffered with others in a way that was a seismic break with all that came before. In the Gospels, we repeatedly read of the compassion of Jesus for those suffering physically and emotionally, for those “harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.”
When a man afflicted with leprosy came to Jesus, begging on his knees to be healed, we’re told that Jesus, “moved with compassion, stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, ‘I am willing; be cleansed.’” And he was.
This is an extraordinary scene. Those with leprosy were considered not just unclean, physically and spiritually, but loathsome. Everything they touched was viewed as defiled. They were often cast out from their villages, quarantined “outside the camp.” In the words of the famed 19th-century preacher Charles Spurgeon, “They were to all intents and purposes, dead to all the enjoyments of life, dead to all the endearments and society of their friends.”
People would avoid contact with those afflicted with leprosy. They were seen by many as the object of divine punishment, the disease understood to be a visible mark of impurity. Yet in the account in Mark, Jesus not only heals the man with leprosy; he also touches him. In doing so, Jesus defied Levitical law. He himself became “unclean.” And he provided human contact to a person whom no other human would touch — and who had very likely not been touched in a very long time.
Jesus’ touch was not necessary for him to heal the man of leprosy, but the touch may have been necessary to heal the man of feelings of shame and isolation, of rejection and detestation.
Kerry Dearborn, professor emerita of theology at Seattle Pacific University, told me her students found the most moving examples of Jesus’ compassion to be his responses to outsiders, especially those deemed unworthy, unclean or unfit. “In taking on their ‘outsider status’ with them,” Dr. Dearborn told me, “he reflected his deep love and solidarity with them, and his willingness to suffer with them.” Jesus not only healed them, she said; he also took on their alienation.
In the 11th chapter of the Gospel of John, we’re told that Lazarus, the brother of Mary of Bethany and Martha, and a friend of Jesus’ whom he loved, was sick. By the time Jesus arrived in Bethany, Lazarus had died and had been entombed for four days. Both sisters were grieving. Mary, when she saw Jesus, fell at his feet weeping. “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died,” she said. We’re told Jesus “was deeply moved in spirit and troubled.”
“Where have you laid him?” he asked.
“Come and see, Lord,” they replied. And according to verse 35, “Jesus wept.”
“Jesus wept” is the shortest verse in the Bible and also “the most profound and powerful,” the artist Makoto Fujimura told me. For him, those are “the most important two words in the Bible.”
And understandably so. Earlier in John 11, we’re told that Jesus knew he was going to raise Lazarus from the dead, which he did. So Jesus wasn’t weeping because he wouldn’t see Lazarus again; it was because he was entering into the suffering of Mary and Martha. Jesus was present with them in their grief, even to the point of tears, all the while knowing that their grief would soon be allayed.
My daughter Christine Wehner, who originally suggested to me that Jesus’ compassion would be a worthwhile topic to explore, told me, “Jesus wept because Mary was before him and her heart was breaking — and as a result, his heart broke, too.” The Psalms tell us that God is “close to the brokenhearted”; in this case, Christine said, “Jesus doesn’t just care for the brokenhearted; he joins them. Their grief becomes his in a remarkable act of love.”
“Jesus ushered in a compassion revolution,” Scott Dudley, senior pastor at Bellevue Presbyterian Church, told me. Before Jesus, compassion was primarily thought of as a weakness, he said.
“When Jesus says he is with us, that’s not a metaphor or a trite offer of ‘thoughts and prayers,’” the pastor said. “He’s literally in it with us.”
Dr. Dudley pointed out that in his suffering, Job says to God, “Do you have eyes of flesh? Do you see as a mortal sees?” In other words, Do you know how hard it is to be human? “Because of Christmas,” Dr. Dudley told me, “God can legitimately say yes in a way no other god in any other religion can.”
Renée Notkin, colead pastor of Union Church in Seattle, told me that “our daily invitation in living is to be with people in their stories. When I take time to listen deeply and to listen beyond the words spoken to another person’s heart story, am I able to begin to cry with them? Not problem solving and not saying, ‘I know what you mean’; rather simply weeping alongside in shared humanity.”
As a Christian, my faith is anchored in the person of Jesus, who won my heart long ago. It would be impossible to understand me without taking that into account. But sometimes my faith dims; God seems distant, his ways confounding. “Faith steals upon you like dew,” the poet Christian Wiman has written. “Some days you wake and it is there. And like dew, it gets burned off in the rising sun of anxiety, ambitions, distractions.” And the rising sun of grief and loss, too. Those things don’t necessarily destroy faith; in some cases, for some people, they can even deepen it. But they always change it.
During times of sorrow and times of tears, when it feels like we’re “being broken on the wheels of living,” in the words of Thornton Wilder, there is great comfort in believing God empathizes with our suffering, having entered into suffering himself. But we also need his emissaries. We need people who see us and know us, who enter our stories. Through their compassion and love, we feel, I feel — even if only partly — God’s compassion and love. That doesn’t eliminate the storms from within or without. But it makes greater room for joy in the journey.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/24/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Blessing of Same-Sex Couples Rankles Africa’s Catholics
It is out of step with the continent’s values, many bishops say, and threatens to derail expansion in the church’s fastest growing region in the world.
Pope Francis meeting leaders of the Roman Catholic Church last February at the Cathedral of St. Theresa in Juba, South Sudan’s capital.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
The Vatican’s recent declaration allowing the blessing of same-sex couples caused a stir around the globe, but perhaps most of all in Africa, a rising center of the Roman Catholic Church’s future. In one statement after the next, bishops in several countries spoke of the fear and confusion the declaration has caused among their flocks, and said it was out of step with the continent’s culture and values.
The bishops also harbored a deeper fear: that in a place where the church is growing faster than anywhere else in the world, and where many forms of Christianity are competing for worshipers, the declaration could slow the church’s expansion on the continent.
Bishop John Oballa of the Ngong Diocese near Nairobi said that a woman had written to him saying that a friend told her he wanted clarification on the declaration, or else he would convert to the Methodist Church.
“There’s a lot of vibrancy in many, many dioceses of Africa,” Bishop Oballa said in an interview. “We need to safeguard against anything that might derail that growth.”
He said he would advise his priests to give blessings to same-sex couples only if they were seeking God’s strength in helping “to stop living in same-sex unions.”
But if the couple merely wanted a blessing and planned to continue living the way they were, “it may give the impression of recognition,” he said, adding that he would advise clergy “not to bless because it may be scandalous to others — it may weaken the faith of others.”
This past week, the Vatican sought to placate those bishops alarmed by the new rule, saying that allowances should be made for “local culture,” but that it would remain church policy. Bishops opposed to the change, it said in a statement, should take an “extended period of pastoral reflection” to wrap their heads around why the Vatican says the blessing of same-sex couples is in keeping with church teaching.
//More on the Roman Catholic Church
//Blessings for Gay Couples: The Vatican said that Pope Francis has allowed priests to bless same-sex couples, his most definitive step yet to make the Roman Catholic Church more welcoming to L.G.B.T.Q. people. The decision caused mixed reactions among American Catholics.
//Nicaragua: The pope used his New Year’s Day address to highlight concern over the worsening situation of the church in the country as a result of a crackdown by the government of President Daniel Ortega.
//A High-Profile Case: A Vatican criminal court sentenced Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu, once one of the church’s most powerful officials, to five and a half years in prison for financial crimes.
//Running Out of Patience: Francis, who recently moved against two of his most vocal critics in the United States, seems increasingly focused on settling scores and cleaning house.
Home to 236 million of the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics, Africa accounted for more than half of the 16.2 million people who joined the church worldwide in 2021. As bishops and other church leaders on the continent deal with the fallout among their parishioners over the declaration, broader concerns have been raised about whether it could lead to a rift between Pope Francis and a region that is a demographic bright spot for Catholicism.
“I think there is a rebellion already that’s started to say, ‘We’re not going to implement this,’” said Father Russell Pollitt, the director of the Jesuit Institute South Africa, referring to the responses of bishops across the continent.
Image
A cathedral with people filling the pews. Pope Francis is onstage.
Pope Francis meeting leaders of the Roman Catholic Church last February at the Cathedral of St. Theresa in Juba, South Sudan’s capital.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
Some African clergy said they expected the Vatican and church leaders in Africa to work through their differences. But the declaration has complicated the relationship and will force difficult conversations between the church’s central authority and its African leaders. Some bishops have even hinted at a split between the values of African nations and the West, where some clergy had for years been running afoul of the Vatican’s guidance by blessing same-sex unions.
“In our African context, while recognizing the confusion existing in the more developed countries of new, unchristian models of ‘conjugal union’ and ‘styles of life,’ we are very clear on what a family and marriage is,” said a statement from the Kenya Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Without exception, church leaders in Africa have emphasized to their flocks that the declaration approved by Francis was explicit in saying that marriage remained a union between a man and a woman. They have stressed that the church’s doctrine on marriage has not changed, and that the declaration is about blessing the individuals, not their relationships.
Bishops in Malawi and Zambia have already said that, to avoid confusion, their clergy would be instructed not to give blessings to same-sex couples. The Catholic Bishops Conference of Nigeria did not take a firm position on the issue, and said in a statement that “asking for God’s blessing is not dependent on how good one is.” But it added that there was “no possibility in the church of blessing same-sex unions and activities,” a nod to the declaration’s nuance of blessing gay individuals not relationships.
Image
People standing in the pews of a large church. Two candles are lit in front.
Catholic worshipers singing last year at the Emmanuel Cathedral in Durban, South Africa, during a New Year’s service.Credit...Rajesh Jantilal/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Some African clergy said they expected the Vatican and church leaders in Africa to work through their differences. But the declaration has complicated the relationship and will force difficult conversations between the church’s central authority and its African leaders. Some bishops have even hinted at a split between the values of African nations and the West, where some clergy had for years been running afoul of the Vatican’s guidance by blessing same-sex unions.
“In our African context, while recognizing the confusion existing in the more developed countries of new, unchristian models of ‘conjugal union’ and ‘styles of life,’ we are very clear on what a family and marriage is,” said a statement from the Kenya Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Without exception, church leaders in Africa have emphasized to their flocks that the declaration approved by Francis was explicit in saying that marriage remained a union between a man and a woman. They have stressed that the church’s doctrine on marriage has not changed, and that the declaration is about blessing the individuals, not their relationships.
Bishops in Malawi and Zambia have already said that, to avoid confusion, their clergy would be instructed not to give blessings to same-sex couples. The Catholic Bishops Conference of Nigeria did not take a firm position on the issue, and said in a statement that “asking for God’s blessing is not dependent on how good one is.” But it added that there was “no possibility in the church of blessing same-sex unions and activities,” a nod to the declaration’s nuance of blessing gay individuals not relationships.
Image
People standing in the pews of a large church. Two candles are lit in front.
Catholic worshipers singing last year at the Emmanuel Cathedral in Durban, South Africa, during a New Year’s service.Credit...Rajesh Jantilal/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference affirmed that distinction in its statement. But it went further in saying that the church’s position was that “all people, regardless of their sexual orientation, must be treated with the dignity that they deserve as God’s children, made to feel welcome in the church, and not be discriminated against or harmed.”
The Vatican’s declaration has laid bare a tension for the church in Africa: How can it welcome homosexuals while not upsetting believers who stand firmly behind the church’s teaching that homosexuality is a sin?
Some African church leaders feel strongly that they should not even talk about homosexuality “because it is un-African,” said Bishop Sithembele Sipuka of the Mthatha Diocese in South Africa, who is also the president of the Southern African conference. Others, he added, felt differently because they personally knew gay people. “It is not our experience that it’s this thing they got from Europe,” he said.
His conference has interpreted the declaration to mean that people in same-sex relationships can be blessed, he said, but individually and not presented together.
Months before the Vatican’s declaration, Bishop Martin Mtumbuka of the Karonga Diocese in Malawi delivered a fiery sermon accusing Western pastors of trying to bend the word of God to accept homosexuals as a way of attracting a larger pool of priests and other religious vocations.
“Any one of us pastors who champions this is just being heretical and fooling himself,” Bishop Mtumbuka said, according to an audio recording of the sermon, which circulated widely on social media after the Vatican’s declaration.
Image
A crowd of people outside a church. One man is holding a sign saying, “Don’t normalize abnormal.”
A man carrying an anti-L.G.B.T.Q. sign in July in Lilongwe, Malawi, at the beginning of nationwide marches organized by churches in the country.Credit...Amos Gumulira/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Francisco Maoza, 48, a parishioner who lives in Malawi’s capital, Lilongwe, said he was relieved when his country’s bishops said they would not permit blessings for same-sex couples.
“I still think the position by the pope is wrong,” said Mr. Maoza, a carpenter. “In the African context, even in Malawian culture, we don’t allow men and women to marry people of their own sex. So why should priests be allowed to bless such unions?”
Another Catholic in Malawi, Josephine Chinawa, said she felt that Francis needed to step down because of the declaration.
“I really couldn’t understand his motivation,” she said. “Maybe he is too old.”
However, Father Pollitt said that some church leaders in Africa were being hypocritical. While they severely criticize homosexuality, he said, they say little about other “irregular unions” identified in the Vatican’s declaration, such as unmarried heterosexual couples who live together. The document says that priests can bless them, too. There have also been many cases on the continent of priests breaking celibacy rules by having children, but that does not get the same scrutiny among church leaders, he said.
“Let’s face facts: There is a lot of homophobia in Africa,” Father Pollitt said.
How the controversy over the blessing of same-sex couples plays out in the long run in Africa remains an open question. Some analysts say there may end up being very little tension, primarily because few gay couples are expected to actually ask for blessings.
“I don’t think they would even have the courage to introduce their partners to their parents, let alone coming to receive a blessing from the priest,” Bishop Oballa said.
Bishop Sipuka said that the Vatican and African church leaders would eventually find a way forward.
“I foresee a softening of position, maybe, by some who have reacted very strongly, as the document gets explained and discussed,” he said.
Image
Children facing away from the camera are lined up in a single file along a road. Across the way is a huge crowd of people many rows deep.
Waiting for Pope Francis last February in Juba.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
Golden Matonga contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/07/worl ... olics.html
Pope Francis meeting leaders of the Roman Catholic Church last February at the Cathedral of St. Theresa in Juba, South Sudan’s capital.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
The Vatican’s recent declaration allowing the blessing of same-sex couples caused a stir around the globe, but perhaps most of all in Africa, a rising center of the Roman Catholic Church’s future. In one statement after the next, bishops in several countries spoke of the fear and confusion the declaration has caused among their flocks, and said it was out of step with the continent’s culture and values.
The bishops also harbored a deeper fear: that in a place where the church is growing faster than anywhere else in the world, and where many forms of Christianity are competing for worshipers, the declaration could slow the church’s expansion on the continent.
Bishop John Oballa of the Ngong Diocese near Nairobi said that a woman had written to him saying that a friend told her he wanted clarification on the declaration, or else he would convert to the Methodist Church.
“There’s a lot of vibrancy in many, many dioceses of Africa,” Bishop Oballa said in an interview. “We need to safeguard against anything that might derail that growth.”
He said he would advise his priests to give blessings to same-sex couples only if they were seeking God’s strength in helping “to stop living in same-sex unions.”
But if the couple merely wanted a blessing and planned to continue living the way they were, “it may give the impression of recognition,” he said, adding that he would advise clergy “not to bless because it may be scandalous to others — it may weaken the faith of others.”
This past week, the Vatican sought to placate those bishops alarmed by the new rule, saying that allowances should be made for “local culture,” but that it would remain church policy. Bishops opposed to the change, it said in a statement, should take an “extended period of pastoral reflection” to wrap their heads around why the Vatican says the blessing of same-sex couples is in keeping with church teaching.
//More on the Roman Catholic Church
//Blessings for Gay Couples: The Vatican said that Pope Francis has allowed priests to bless same-sex couples, his most definitive step yet to make the Roman Catholic Church more welcoming to L.G.B.T.Q. people. The decision caused mixed reactions among American Catholics.
//Nicaragua: The pope used his New Year’s Day address to highlight concern over the worsening situation of the church in the country as a result of a crackdown by the government of President Daniel Ortega.
//A High-Profile Case: A Vatican criminal court sentenced Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu, once one of the church’s most powerful officials, to five and a half years in prison for financial crimes.
//Running Out of Patience: Francis, who recently moved against two of his most vocal critics in the United States, seems increasingly focused on settling scores and cleaning house.
Home to 236 million of the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics, Africa accounted for more than half of the 16.2 million people who joined the church worldwide in 2021. As bishops and other church leaders on the continent deal with the fallout among their parishioners over the declaration, broader concerns have been raised about whether it could lead to a rift between Pope Francis and a region that is a demographic bright spot for Catholicism.
“I think there is a rebellion already that’s started to say, ‘We’re not going to implement this,’” said Father Russell Pollitt, the director of the Jesuit Institute South Africa, referring to the responses of bishops across the continent.
Image
A cathedral with people filling the pews. Pope Francis is onstage.
Pope Francis meeting leaders of the Roman Catholic Church last February at the Cathedral of St. Theresa in Juba, South Sudan’s capital.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
Some African clergy said they expected the Vatican and church leaders in Africa to work through their differences. But the declaration has complicated the relationship and will force difficult conversations between the church’s central authority and its African leaders. Some bishops have even hinted at a split between the values of African nations and the West, where some clergy had for years been running afoul of the Vatican’s guidance by blessing same-sex unions.
“In our African context, while recognizing the confusion existing in the more developed countries of new, unchristian models of ‘conjugal union’ and ‘styles of life,’ we are very clear on what a family and marriage is,” said a statement from the Kenya Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Without exception, church leaders in Africa have emphasized to their flocks that the declaration approved by Francis was explicit in saying that marriage remained a union between a man and a woman. They have stressed that the church’s doctrine on marriage has not changed, and that the declaration is about blessing the individuals, not their relationships.
Bishops in Malawi and Zambia have already said that, to avoid confusion, their clergy would be instructed not to give blessings to same-sex couples. The Catholic Bishops Conference of Nigeria did not take a firm position on the issue, and said in a statement that “asking for God’s blessing is not dependent on how good one is.” But it added that there was “no possibility in the church of blessing same-sex unions and activities,” a nod to the declaration’s nuance of blessing gay individuals not relationships.
Image
People standing in the pews of a large church. Two candles are lit in front.
Catholic worshipers singing last year at the Emmanuel Cathedral in Durban, South Africa, during a New Year’s service.Credit...Rajesh Jantilal/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Some African clergy said they expected the Vatican and church leaders in Africa to work through their differences. But the declaration has complicated the relationship and will force difficult conversations between the church’s central authority and its African leaders. Some bishops have even hinted at a split between the values of African nations and the West, where some clergy had for years been running afoul of the Vatican’s guidance by blessing same-sex unions.
“In our African context, while recognizing the confusion existing in the more developed countries of new, unchristian models of ‘conjugal union’ and ‘styles of life,’ we are very clear on what a family and marriage is,” said a statement from the Kenya Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Without exception, church leaders in Africa have emphasized to their flocks that the declaration approved by Francis was explicit in saying that marriage remained a union between a man and a woman. They have stressed that the church’s doctrine on marriage has not changed, and that the declaration is about blessing the individuals, not their relationships.
Bishops in Malawi and Zambia have already said that, to avoid confusion, their clergy would be instructed not to give blessings to same-sex couples. The Catholic Bishops Conference of Nigeria did not take a firm position on the issue, and said in a statement that “asking for God’s blessing is not dependent on how good one is.” But it added that there was “no possibility in the church of blessing same-sex unions and activities,” a nod to the declaration’s nuance of blessing gay individuals not relationships.
Image
People standing in the pews of a large church. Two candles are lit in front.
Catholic worshipers singing last year at the Emmanuel Cathedral in Durban, South Africa, during a New Year’s service.Credit...Rajesh Jantilal/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference affirmed that distinction in its statement. But it went further in saying that the church’s position was that “all people, regardless of their sexual orientation, must be treated with the dignity that they deserve as God’s children, made to feel welcome in the church, and not be discriminated against or harmed.”
The Vatican’s declaration has laid bare a tension for the church in Africa: How can it welcome homosexuals while not upsetting believers who stand firmly behind the church’s teaching that homosexuality is a sin?
Some African church leaders feel strongly that they should not even talk about homosexuality “because it is un-African,” said Bishop Sithembele Sipuka of the Mthatha Diocese in South Africa, who is also the president of the Southern African conference. Others, he added, felt differently because they personally knew gay people. “It is not our experience that it’s this thing they got from Europe,” he said.
His conference has interpreted the declaration to mean that people in same-sex relationships can be blessed, he said, but individually and not presented together.
Months before the Vatican’s declaration, Bishop Martin Mtumbuka of the Karonga Diocese in Malawi delivered a fiery sermon accusing Western pastors of trying to bend the word of God to accept homosexuals as a way of attracting a larger pool of priests and other religious vocations.
“Any one of us pastors who champions this is just being heretical and fooling himself,” Bishop Mtumbuka said, according to an audio recording of the sermon, which circulated widely on social media after the Vatican’s declaration.
Image
A crowd of people outside a church. One man is holding a sign saying, “Don’t normalize abnormal.”
A man carrying an anti-L.G.B.T.Q. sign in July in Lilongwe, Malawi, at the beginning of nationwide marches organized by churches in the country.Credit...Amos Gumulira/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Francisco Maoza, 48, a parishioner who lives in Malawi’s capital, Lilongwe, said he was relieved when his country’s bishops said they would not permit blessings for same-sex couples.
“I still think the position by the pope is wrong,” said Mr. Maoza, a carpenter. “In the African context, even in Malawian culture, we don’t allow men and women to marry people of their own sex. So why should priests be allowed to bless such unions?”
Another Catholic in Malawi, Josephine Chinawa, said she felt that Francis needed to step down because of the declaration.
“I really couldn’t understand his motivation,” she said. “Maybe he is too old.”
However, Father Pollitt said that some church leaders in Africa were being hypocritical. While they severely criticize homosexuality, he said, they say little about other “irregular unions” identified in the Vatican’s declaration, such as unmarried heterosexual couples who live together. The document says that priests can bless them, too. There have also been many cases on the continent of priests breaking celibacy rules by having children, but that does not get the same scrutiny among church leaders, he said.
“Let’s face facts: There is a lot of homophobia in Africa,” Father Pollitt said.
How the controversy over the blessing of same-sex couples plays out in the long run in Africa remains an open question. Some analysts say there may end up being very little tension, primarily because few gay couples are expected to actually ask for blessings.
“I don’t think they would even have the courage to introduce their partners to their parents, let alone coming to receive a blessing from the priest,” Bishop Oballa said.
Bishop Sipuka said that the Vatican and African church leaders would eventually find a way forward.
“I foresee a softening of position, maybe, by some who have reacted very strongly, as the document gets explained and discussed,” he said.
Image
Children facing away from the camera are lined up in a single file along a road. Across the way is a huge crowd of people many rows deep.
Waiting for Pope Francis last February in Juba.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
Golden Matonga contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/07/worl ... olics.html
Re: Christianity
Associated Press
Pope reaffirms Christians' special relationship with Jews amid rising antisemitism, Gaza war
Associated Press
Updated Sat, February 3, 2024 at 3:02 PM CST
Pope Francis on Saturday reaffirmed Christians special relationship with Jews amid rising antisemitism since the outbreak of the Gaza war in a letter to the Jews of Israel that he said was prompted by messages from Jewish organizations around the world. In the letter that served as a belated fence-mending after Francis was criticized for his initial response to the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, Francis said the Holy Land has been “cast into a spiral of unprecedented violence."
VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis on Saturday reaffirmed Christians' special relationship with Jews amid rising antisemitism since the outbreak of the Gaza war in a letter to the Jews of Israel that he said was prompted by messages from Jewish organizations around the world.
The letter served as a belated fence-mending after Francis was criticized for his initial response to the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel. Francis said the Holy Land has been “cast into a spiral of unprecedented violence,” part of what the pope referred to as “a sort of ‘piecemeal world war,’ with serious consequences on the lives of many populations.’’
“My heart is torn at the sight of what is happening in the Holy Land, by the power of so much division and so much hatred,’’ the pontiff wrote. “The whole world looks on at what is happening in that land with apprehension and pain.”
In November, the pope set off a firestorm by using the word “terrorism” generically after meeting separately with relatives of Israeli hostages in Gaza and Palestinians living through the war.
Jewish leaders criticized his failure to explicitly condemn Hamas' attack, and bristled after the Palestinian visitors reported he had used the term “genocide” to describe Israel's actions in Gaza. The Vatican denied he had used the term in the private meeting, but since then Francis has been more balanced in his remarks and has explicitly condemned the Oct. 7 attack.
Without elaborating, Francis said in the letter to Israeli Jews that he was moved by communication from friends and Jewish organizations around the world to “assure you of my closeness and affection. I embrace each of you and especially those who are consumed by anguish, pain, fear and even anger.”
He said that Catholics “are very concerned about the terrible increase in attacks against Jews around the world we had hoped that ‘never again’ would be a refrain heard by the new generations, yet now we see that the path ahead requires ever closer collaboration to eradicate these phenomena.’’
“My heart is close to you, to the Holy Land, to all the peoples who inhabit it, Israelis and Palestinians, and I pray that the desire for peace may prevail in all,’’ he said.
The reconciliation between Jews and Catholics provides “a horizon” to imagine a future “where light replaces darkness, in which friendship replaces hatred, in which cooperation replaces war.”
“Together, Jews and Catholics, we must commit ourselves to this path of friendship, solidarity and cooperation in seeking ways to repair a destroyed world, working together in every part of the world, and especially in the Holy Land, to recover the ability to see in the face of every person the image of God, in which we were created,’’ Francis wrote.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/po ... 40063.html
Pope reaffirms Christians' special relationship with Jews amid rising antisemitism, Gaza war
Associated Press
Updated Sat, February 3, 2024 at 3:02 PM CST
Pope Francis on Saturday reaffirmed Christians special relationship with Jews amid rising antisemitism since the outbreak of the Gaza war in a letter to the Jews of Israel that he said was prompted by messages from Jewish organizations around the world. In the letter that served as a belated fence-mending after Francis was criticized for his initial response to the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, Francis said the Holy Land has been “cast into a spiral of unprecedented violence."
VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis on Saturday reaffirmed Christians' special relationship with Jews amid rising antisemitism since the outbreak of the Gaza war in a letter to the Jews of Israel that he said was prompted by messages from Jewish organizations around the world.
The letter served as a belated fence-mending after Francis was criticized for his initial response to the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel. Francis said the Holy Land has been “cast into a spiral of unprecedented violence,” part of what the pope referred to as “a sort of ‘piecemeal world war,’ with serious consequences on the lives of many populations.’’
“My heart is torn at the sight of what is happening in the Holy Land, by the power of so much division and so much hatred,’’ the pontiff wrote. “The whole world looks on at what is happening in that land with apprehension and pain.”
In November, the pope set off a firestorm by using the word “terrorism” generically after meeting separately with relatives of Israeli hostages in Gaza and Palestinians living through the war.
Jewish leaders criticized his failure to explicitly condemn Hamas' attack, and bristled after the Palestinian visitors reported he had used the term “genocide” to describe Israel's actions in Gaza. The Vatican denied he had used the term in the private meeting, but since then Francis has been more balanced in his remarks and has explicitly condemned the Oct. 7 attack.
Without elaborating, Francis said in the letter to Israeli Jews that he was moved by communication from friends and Jewish organizations around the world to “assure you of my closeness and affection. I embrace each of you and especially those who are consumed by anguish, pain, fear and even anger.”
He said that Catholics “are very concerned about the terrible increase in attacks against Jews around the world we had hoped that ‘never again’ would be a refrain heard by the new generations, yet now we see that the path ahead requires ever closer collaboration to eradicate these phenomena.’’
“My heart is close to you, to the Holy Land, to all the peoples who inhabit it, Israelis and Palestinians, and I pray that the desire for peace may prevail in all,’’ he said.
The reconciliation between Jews and Catholics provides “a horizon” to imagine a future “where light replaces darkness, in which friendship replaces hatred, in which cooperation replaces war.”
“Together, Jews and Catholics, we must commit ourselves to this path of friendship, solidarity and cooperation in seeking ways to repair a destroyed world, working together in every part of the world, and especially in the Holy Land, to recover the ability to see in the face of every person the image of God, in which we were created,’’ Francis wrote.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/po ... 40063.html
Re: Christianity
Here's why Catholics eat fish on Fridays during Lent: 'Important' practice
Christine Rousselle
Fri, February 16, 2024 at 5:30 AM CST·
Here's why Catholics eat fish on Fridays during Lent: 'Important' practice
Christians of many denominations abstain from meat for all or part of the liturgical season of Lent.
For Roman Catholics, "all Fridays through the year and the time of Lent are penitential days and times throughout the entire Church." In addition, "abstinence from eating meat or another food according to the prescriptions of the conference of bishops is to be observed on Fridays throughout the year unless they are solemnities," says the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
Christians believe that Jesus was crucified and died on a Friday — which is why the day is penitential.
The practice of giving up meat on Fridays may seem simple, or even non-consequential — but it has a deeper meaning, Fr. David Paternostro, S.J., a Jesuit priest based in St. Louis, told Fox News Digital.
"In giving up something so ordinary that sustains us, we have an opportunity to set Fridays apart, reflecting upon the events of Good Friday and how it sustains us spiritually," he said.
"Meat," in this case, is defined as the flesh and organ meat of mammals and fowl, meaning that broth, lard and other byproducts do not count as consuming meat, even if they come from mammals or fowl.
Fish, also, does not count as meat for the purposes of Lenten abstinence. Fish (and shellfish), unlike mammals and birds, are cold-blooded.
Given that fish is a permitted food during Lenten Fridays, it has become a tradition in parts of the United States for churches to offer a fish-fry dinner during the Fridays of Lent.
The fish fry first made its way to the United States with the influx of Catholic immigrants from Eastern Europe, says Travel Wisconsin.
Much of the Midwest, along with Pennsylvania and Buffalo, New York (which had their own sizable Catholic immigrant populations), have strong fish-fry traditions that have continued to the present day.
Typically, food at a Lenten Friday fish fry is served at a church hall or other community center, and involves fried (or baked) cod, perch or similar fish.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/lifesty ... 00905.html
Christine Rousselle
Fri, February 16, 2024 at 5:30 AM CST·
Here's why Catholics eat fish on Fridays during Lent: 'Important' practice
Christians of many denominations abstain from meat for all or part of the liturgical season of Lent.
For Roman Catholics, "all Fridays through the year and the time of Lent are penitential days and times throughout the entire Church." In addition, "abstinence from eating meat or another food according to the prescriptions of the conference of bishops is to be observed on Fridays throughout the year unless they are solemnities," says the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
Christians believe that Jesus was crucified and died on a Friday — which is why the day is penitential.
The practice of giving up meat on Fridays may seem simple, or even non-consequential — but it has a deeper meaning, Fr. David Paternostro, S.J., a Jesuit priest based in St. Louis, told Fox News Digital.
"In giving up something so ordinary that sustains us, we have an opportunity to set Fridays apart, reflecting upon the events of Good Friday and how it sustains us spiritually," he said.
"Meat," in this case, is defined as the flesh and organ meat of mammals and fowl, meaning that broth, lard and other byproducts do not count as consuming meat, even if they come from mammals or fowl.
Fish, also, does not count as meat for the purposes of Lenten abstinence. Fish (and shellfish), unlike mammals and birds, are cold-blooded.
Given that fish is a permitted food during Lenten Fridays, it has become a tradition in parts of the United States for churches to offer a fish-fry dinner during the Fridays of Lent.
The fish fry first made its way to the United States with the influx of Catholic immigrants from Eastern Europe, says Travel Wisconsin.
Much of the Midwest, along with Pennsylvania and Buffalo, New York (which had their own sizable Catholic immigrant populations), have strong fish-fry traditions that have continued to the present day.
Typically, food at a Lenten Friday fish fry is served at a church hall or other community center, and involves fried (or baked) cod, perch or similar fish.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/lifesty ... 00905.html
Re: Christianity
What Christian Traditions Say About I.V.F. Treatments
While Catholic teaching expressly forbids in vitro fertilization, Protestants tend to be more open.
Medications that are taken during I.V.F. treatments.Credit...Wes Frazer for The New York Times
The Alabama Supreme Court ruling that embryos should be considered children has forced Americans to grapple with a mess of complicated realities about law, infertility, medicine and politics.
At the heart of the decision, there is also Christian theology. “Human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God,” the court’s chief justice, Tom Parker, wrote in his decision.
Among conservative Christians, the belief that life begins at conception has been a driving force behind anti-abortion policies for years. Among the most ardent abortion opponents, that thinking has also led to uncompromising opposition to in vitro fertilization.
“That is the fundamental premise of our entire movement,” said Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life, which opposes abortion. I.V.F., she said, “is literally a business model built on disposable children and treating children as commodities.”
But on the morality of I.V.F., there is a more noticeable divide between Catholics and Protestants. Catholic teaching expressly forbids it. Protestants tend to be more open, in part because there is no similar top-down authority structure requiring a shared doctrine.
Evangelical tradition has built a public identity around being pro-family and pro-children, and many adherents are inclined to see I.V.F. positively because it creates more children. Pastors rarely preach on fertility, though they may on abortion.
But the Alabama decision “is a very morally honest opinion,” said Andrew T. Walker, associate professor of Christian ethics and public theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. The ruling, he said, shows the direct line of reasoning between belief that life begins at conception, and opposition to abortion and I.V.F.
“It’s going to force conservative Christians to reckon with potentially their own complicity in the in vitro fertilization industry,” he said.
The Roman Catholic Church is perhaps the largest institution in the world that opposes I.V.F. Nearly all modern fertility interventions are morally forbidden.
The I.V.F. process typically includes many elements that the Catholic Church opposes. There’s masturbation — an “offense against chastity,” according to the catechism, or teaching — often required to collect sperm. There’s the fertilization of an egg and sperm outside a woman’s body — outside the sacramental “conjugal act” of sex between a husband and wife. And there is the creation of multiple embryos that are often destroyed or not implanted — an “abortive practice.”
The church’s first major statement opposing I.V.F. came in response to the world’s first “test tube baby,” born in England in 1978. Written by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who went on to become Pope Benedict XVI, the document addressed a variety of fertility technologies, like artificial insemination, I.V.F. and surrogacy.
Last month, Pope Francis condemned surrogacy as “despicable” and called for a global ban on the practice. An unborn child should not be “turned into an object of trafficking,” he said.
Many Catholics use contraception and I.V.F. treatment in violation of church teaching. But for observant Catholics, opposition to I.V.F. is part of an ecosystem of beliefs about marriage, family and especially sex.
The marital act of sex must be performed in conception and the embryo must not be subject to “different indignities, being poked and prodded” by scientists, said Joseph Meaney, president of the National Catholic Bioethics Center.
In cases of infertility, some “assistive” technologies might be OK, he said, but not “replacement” ones like I.V.F. That distinction may seem immaterial, but it stresses the importance of sex in Catholicism as holy act exclusively for a husband and wife who want children.
For instance, Mr. Meaney said, he and his wife faced fertility challenges and used methods to conceive that included an operation to address scar tissue and deep tissue massages. “Assisting means there has to be sex,” he said. “Replacing means there is no sexual act taking place.”
But the bioethics of I.V.F. is not a subject most conservative Christians have on their radar. Evangelicals typically rely on literal readings of the Bible, not centuries of Catholic social philosophy and anthropology. And the Bible, an ancient text, of course does not mention I.V.F.
Mr. Walker said that when he had considered introducing a resolution about artificial reproductive technology at the Southern Baptist Convention, the country’s largest Protestant denomination, friends and colleagues reacted with hesitation.
But evangelical and Catholic communities have increasingly blended together over shared conservative political beliefs. Now the unavoidable politics on fertility in America may shape evangelical belief and practice on I.V.F.
Emma Waters, a research associate at the Heritage Foundation, hopes evangelical pastors will work to train their churches about the theological reasons to oppose I.V.F., as Catholics have. She sees potential openings with Gen Z evangelicals who are opposed to hormonal birth control and the broad ways technology has infiltrated their lives.
“I.V.F. is just the very beginning of reproductive technologies,” she said. “We are just woefully unprepared to address the onslaught of issues that are coming.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/24/us/c ... 778d3e6de3
While Catholic teaching expressly forbids in vitro fertilization, Protestants tend to be more open.
Medications that are taken during I.V.F. treatments.Credit...Wes Frazer for The New York Times
The Alabama Supreme Court ruling that embryos should be considered children has forced Americans to grapple with a mess of complicated realities about law, infertility, medicine and politics.
At the heart of the decision, there is also Christian theology. “Human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God,” the court’s chief justice, Tom Parker, wrote in his decision.
Among conservative Christians, the belief that life begins at conception has been a driving force behind anti-abortion policies for years. Among the most ardent abortion opponents, that thinking has also led to uncompromising opposition to in vitro fertilization.
“That is the fundamental premise of our entire movement,” said Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life, which opposes abortion. I.V.F., she said, “is literally a business model built on disposable children and treating children as commodities.”
But on the morality of I.V.F., there is a more noticeable divide between Catholics and Protestants. Catholic teaching expressly forbids it. Protestants tend to be more open, in part because there is no similar top-down authority structure requiring a shared doctrine.
Evangelical tradition has built a public identity around being pro-family and pro-children, and many adherents are inclined to see I.V.F. positively because it creates more children. Pastors rarely preach on fertility, though they may on abortion.
But the Alabama decision “is a very morally honest opinion,” said Andrew T. Walker, associate professor of Christian ethics and public theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. The ruling, he said, shows the direct line of reasoning between belief that life begins at conception, and opposition to abortion and I.V.F.
“It’s going to force conservative Christians to reckon with potentially their own complicity in the in vitro fertilization industry,” he said.
The Roman Catholic Church is perhaps the largest institution in the world that opposes I.V.F. Nearly all modern fertility interventions are morally forbidden.
The I.V.F. process typically includes many elements that the Catholic Church opposes. There’s masturbation — an “offense against chastity,” according to the catechism, or teaching — often required to collect sperm. There’s the fertilization of an egg and sperm outside a woman’s body — outside the sacramental “conjugal act” of sex between a husband and wife. And there is the creation of multiple embryos that are often destroyed or not implanted — an “abortive practice.”
The church’s first major statement opposing I.V.F. came in response to the world’s first “test tube baby,” born in England in 1978. Written by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who went on to become Pope Benedict XVI, the document addressed a variety of fertility technologies, like artificial insemination, I.V.F. and surrogacy.
Last month, Pope Francis condemned surrogacy as “despicable” and called for a global ban on the practice. An unborn child should not be “turned into an object of trafficking,” he said.
Many Catholics use contraception and I.V.F. treatment in violation of church teaching. But for observant Catholics, opposition to I.V.F. is part of an ecosystem of beliefs about marriage, family and especially sex.
The marital act of sex must be performed in conception and the embryo must not be subject to “different indignities, being poked and prodded” by scientists, said Joseph Meaney, president of the National Catholic Bioethics Center.
In cases of infertility, some “assistive” technologies might be OK, he said, but not “replacement” ones like I.V.F. That distinction may seem immaterial, but it stresses the importance of sex in Catholicism as holy act exclusively for a husband and wife who want children.
For instance, Mr. Meaney said, he and his wife faced fertility challenges and used methods to conceive that included an operation to address scar tissue and deep tissue massages. “Assisting means there has to be sex,” he said. “Replacing means there is no sexual act taking place.”
But the bioethics of I.V.F. is not a subject most conservative Christians have on their radar. Evangelicals typically rely on literal readings of the Bible, not centuries of Catholic social philosophy and anthropology. And the Bible, an ancient text, of course does not mention I.V.F.
Mr. Walker said that when he had considered introducing a resolution about artificial reproductive technology at the Southern Baptist Convention, the country’s largest Protestant denomination, friends and colleagues reacted with hesitation.
But evangelical and Catholic communities have increasingly blended together over shared conservative political beliefs. Now the unavoidable politics on fertility in America may shape evangelical belief and practice on I.V.F.
Emma Waters, a research associate at the Heritage Foundation, hopes evangelical pastors will work to train their churches about the theological reasons to oppose I.V.F., as Catholics have. She sees potential openings with Gen Z evangelicals who are opposed to hormonal birth control and the broad ways technology has infiltrated their lives.
“I.V.F. is just the very beginning of reproductive technologies,” she said. “We are just woefully unprepared to address the onslaught of issues that are coming.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/24/us/c ... 778d3e6de3
Re: Christianity
Martin Scorsese to Headline a Religious Series for Fox Nation
The Oscar-winning director is the latest Hollywood name to sign up for the Fox News streaming platform, joining Kevin Costner, Rob Lowe and Dan Aykroyd.
Martin Scorsese, arriving this month for the Academy Awards. He will narrate a new series that dramatizes the stories of eight saints.Credit...Nina Westervelt for The New York Times
Martin Scorsese has agreed to spearhead a documentary series about Christian saints for Fox Nation, the subscription streaming service run by Fox News Media.
“Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints,” which begins airing in November, will be hosted, narrated and executive produced by Scorsese, the decorated director of classic films like “Taxi Driver” and “The Wolf of Wall Street.” Fox Nation is set to formally announce the series on Wednesday.
Since its debut in 2018 as a companion service to Fox News, Fox Nation has expanded into entertainment and general-interest programming as it aspires to become a kind of Netflix for conservative audiences. The streaming network already boasts shows with Hollywood stars like Kevin Costner (“Yellowstone: One-Fifty”), Rob Lowe (“Liberty or Death: Boston Tea Party”) and Dan Aykroyd (“History of the World in Six Glasses”).
The Scorsese series, created by Matti Leshem, dramatizes the stories of eight saints, including Joan of Arc, John the Baptist, Mary Magdalene, Francis of Assisi and Thomas Becket.
“I’ve lived with the stories of the saints for most of my life, thinking about their words and actions, imagining the worlds they inhabited, the choices they faced, the examples they set,” Scorsese said in a statement. “These are stories of eight very different men and women, each of them living through vastly different periods of history and struggling to follow the way of love revealed to them and to us by Jesus’ words in the gospels.”
Along with narrating re-enactments of the saints’ stories, Scorsese will also host on-camera discussions with experts. Four episodes will stream on Nov. 16, with the concluding quartet of episodes released in May 2025. The series is directed by Elizabeth Chomko and written by Kent Jones.
Christianity is a frequent preoccupation of Scorsese’s works, at times to the consternation of conservative audiences. His 1988 film, “The Last Temptation of Christ,” was denounced by religious groups for its depiction of Jesus, played by Willem Dafoe, struggling with human urges and frailties and questioning his divinity.
Scorsese, 81, told The Los Angeles Times in January that he has completed a screenplay for a new film about Jesus, based on the book “A Life of Jesus,” by the Japanese writer Shusaku Endo. The director said the film would examine Jesus’s teachings and be mostly set in the present day.
“Right now, ‘religion,’ you say that word and everyone is up in arms because it’s failed in so many ways,” Scorsese told the newspaper. “But that doesn’t mean necessarily that the initial impulse was wrong. Let’s get back. Let’s just think about it. You may reject it. But it might make a difference in how you live your life — even in rejecting it.”
Rick Yorn, Leonardo DiCaprio’s manager and a producer on several of Scorsese’s previous films, is among the executive producers on “The Saints.” Lionsgate Alternative Television is producing.
Scorsese was nominated for the best director prize at this month’s Academy Awards for his film “Killers of the Flower Moon”; he lost to Christopher Nolan of “Oppenheimer.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/27/movi ... ation.html
The Oscar-winning director is the latest Hollywood name to sign up for the Fox News streaming platform, joining Kevin Costner, Rob Lowe and Dan Aykroyd.
Martin Scorsese, arriving this month for the Academy Awards. He will narrate a new series that dramatizes the stories of eight saints.Credit...Nina Westervelt for The New York Times
Martin Scorsese has agreed to spearhead a documentary series about Christian saints for Fox Nation, the subscription streaming service run by Fox News Media.
“Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints,” which begins airing in November, will be hosted, narrated and executive produced by Scorsese, the decorated director of classic films like “Taxi Driver” and “The Wolf of Wall Street.” Fox Nation is set to formally announce the series on Wednesday.
Since its debut in 2018 as a companion service to Fox News, Fox Nation has expanded into entertainment and general-interest programming as it aspires to become a kind of Netflix for conservative audiences. The streaming network already boasts shows with Hollywood stars like Kevin Costner (“Yellowstone: One-Fifty”), Rob Lowe (“Liberty or Death: Boston Tea Party”) and Dan Aykroyd (“History of the World in Six Glasses”).
The Scorsese series, created by Matti Leshem, dramatizes the stories of eight saints, including Joan of Arc, John the Baptist, Mary Magdalene, Francis of Assisi and Thomas Becket.
“I’ve lived with the stories of the saints for most of my life, thinking about their words and actions, imagining the worlds they inhabited, the choices they faced, the examples they set,” Scorsese said in a statement. “These are stories of eight very different men and women, each of them living through vastly different periods of history and struggling to follow the way of love revealed to them and to us by Jesus’ words in the gospels.”
Along with narrating re-enactments of the saints’ stories, Scorsese will also host on-camera discussions with experts. Four episodes will stream on Nov. 16, with the concluding quartet of episodes released in May 2025. The series is directed by Elizabeth Chomko and written by Kent Jones.
Christianity is a frequent preoccupation of Scorsese’s works, at times to the consternation of conservative audiences. His 1988 film, “The Last Temptation of Christ,” was denounced by religious groups for its depiction of Jesus, played by Willem Dafoe, struggling with human urges and frailties and questioning his divinity.
Scorsese, 81, told The Los Angeles Times in January that he has completed a screenplay for a new film about Jesus, based on the book “A Life of Jesus,” by the Japanese writer Shusaku Endo. The director said the film would examine Jesus’s teachings and be mostly set in the present day.
“Right now, ‘religion,’ you say that word and everyone is up in arms because it’s failed in so many ways,” Scorsese told the newspaper. “But that doesn’t mean necessarily that the initial impulse was wrong. Let’s get back. Let’s just think about it. You may reject it. But it might make a difference in how you live your life — even in rejecting it.”
Rick Yorn, Leonardo DiCaprio’s manager and a producer on several of Scorsese’s previous films, is among the executive producers on “The Saints.” Lionsgate Alternative Television is producing.
Scorsese was nominated for the best director prize at this month’s Academy Awards for his film “Killers of the Flower Moon”; he lost to Christopher Nolan of “Oppenheimer.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/27/movi ... ation.html
Re: Christianity
Associated Press
A Filipino villager is nailed to a cross for the 35th time on Good Friday to pray for world peace
JIM GOMEZ
Updated Fri, March 29, 2024 at 3:37 PM CDT·
A Filipino villager has been nailed to a wooden cross for the 35th time to reenact Jesus Christ’s suffering in a brutal Good Friday tradition he said he would devote to pray for peace in Ukraine, Gaza and the disputed South China Sea.
On Friday, over a hundred people watched on as 10 devotees were nailed to wooden crosses, among them Ruben Enaje, a 63-year-old carpenter and sign painter. The real-life crucifixions have become an annual religious spectacle that draws tourists in three rural communities in Pampanga province, north of Manila.
The gory ritual resumed last year after a three-year pause due to the coronavirus pandemic. It has turned Enaje into a village celebrity for his role as the “Christ” in the Lenten reenactment of the Way of the Cross.
Ahead of the crucifixions, Enaje told The Associated Press by telephone Thursday night that he has considered ending his annual religious penitence due to his age, but said he could not turn down requests from villagers for him to pray for sick relatives and all other kinds of maladies.
The need for prayers has also deepened in an alarming period of wars and conflicts worldwide, he said.
"If these wars worsen and spread, more people, especially the young and old, would be affected. These are innocent people who have totally nothing to do with these wars,” Enaje said.
Despite the distance, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza have helped send prices of oil, gas and food soaring elsewhere, including in the Philippines, making it harder for poor people to stretch their meagre income, he said.
Closer to home, the escalating territorial dispute between China and the Philippines in the South China Sea has also sparked worries because it’s obviously a lopsided conflict, Enaje said. “China has many big ships. Can you imagine what they could do?" he asked.
"This is why I always pray for peace in the world,” he said and added he would also seek relief for people in southern Philippine provinces, which have been hit recently by flooding and earthquakes.
In the 1980s, Enaje survived nearly unscathed when he accidentally fell from a three-story building, prompting him to undergo the crucifixion as thanksgiving for what he considered a miracle. He extended the ritual after loved ones recovered from serious illnesses, one after another, and he landed more carpentry and sign-painting job contracts.
“Because my body is getting weaker, I can’t tell … if there will be a next one or if this is really the final time,” Enaje said.
During the annual crucifixions on a dusty hill in Enaje’s village of San Pedro Cutud in Pampanga and two other nearby communities, he and other religious devotees, wearing thorny crowns of twigs, carried heavy wooden crosses on their backs for more than a kilometer (more than half a mile) under a hot summer sun. Village actors dressed as Roman centurions hammered 4-inch (10-centimeter) stainless steel nails through their palms and feet, then set them aloft on wooden crosses for about 10 minutes as dark clouds rolled in and a large crowd prayed and snapped pictures.
Among the crowd this year was Maciej Kruszewski, a tourist from Poland and a first-time audience member of the crucifixions.
“Here, we would like to just grasp what does it mean, Easter in completely different part of the world,” said Kruszewski.
Other penitents walked barefoot through village streets and beat their bare backs with sharp bamboo sticks and pieces of wood. Some participants in the past opened cuts in the penitents’ backs using broken glass to ensure the ritual was sufficiently bloody.
Many of the mostly impoverished penitents undergo the ritual to atone for their sins, pray for the sick or for a better life, and give thanks for miracles.
The gruesome spectacle reflects the Philippines’ unique brand of Catholicism, which merges church traditions with folk superstitions.
Church leaders in the Philippines, the largest Catholic nation in Asia, have frowned on the crucifixions and self-flagellations. Filipinos can show their faith and religious devotion, they say, without hurting themselves and by doing charity work instead, such as donating blood, but the tradition has lasted for decades.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/fi ... 09601.html
A Filipino villager is nailed to a cross for the 35th time on Good Friday to pray for world peace
JIM GOMEZ
Updated Fri, March 29, 2024 at 3:37 PM CDT·
A Filipino villager has been nailed to a wooden cross for the 35th time to reenact Jesus Christ’s suffering in a brutal Good Friday tradition he said he would devote to pray for peace in Ukraine, Gaza and the disputed South China Sea.
On Friday, over a hundred people watched on as 10 devotees were nailed to wooden crosses, among them Ruben Enaje, a 63-year-old carpenter and sign painter. The real-life crucifixions have become an annual religious spectacle that draws tourists in three rural communities in Pampanga province, north of Manila.
The gory ritual resumed last year after a three-year pause due to the coronavirus pandemic. It has turned Enaje into a village celebrity for his role as the “Christ” in the Lenten reenactment of the Way of the Cross.
Ahead of the crucifixions, Enaje told The Associated Press by telephone Thursday night that he has considered ending his annual religious penitence due to his age, but said he could not turn down requests from villagers for him to pray for sick relatives and all other kinds of maladies.
The need for prayers has also deepened in an alarming period of wars and conflicts worldwide, he said.
"If these wars worsen and spread, more people, especially the young and old, would be affected. These are innocent people who have totally nothing to do with these wars,” Enaje said.
Despite the distance, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza have helped send prices of oil, gas and food soaring elsewhere, including in the Philippines, making it harder for poor people to stretch their meagre income, he said.
Closer to home, the escalating territorial dispute between China and the Philippines in the South China Sea has also sparked worries because it’s obviously a lopsided conflict, Enaje said. “China has many big ships. Can you imagine what they could do?" he asked.
"This is why I always pray for peace in the world,” he said and added he would also seek relief for people in southern Philippine provinces, which have been hit recently by flooding and earthquakes.
In the 1980s, Enaje survived nearly unscathed when he accidentally fell from a three-story building, prompting him to undergo the crucifixion as thanksgiving for what he considered a miracle. He extended the ritual after loved ones recovered from serious illnesses, one after another, and he landed more carpentry and sign-painting job contracts.
“Because my body is getting weaker, I can’t tell … if there will be a next one or if this is really the final time,” Enaje said.
During the annual crucifixions on a dusty hill in Enaje’s village of San Pedro Cutud in Pampanga and two other nearby communities, he and other religious devotees, wearing thorny crowns of twigs, carried heavy wooden crosses on their backs for more than a kilometer (more than half a mile) under a hot summer sun. Village actors dressed as Roman centurions hammered 4-inch (10-centimeter) stainless steel nails through their palms and feet, then set them aloft on wooden crosses for about 10 minutes as dark clouds rolled in and a large crowd prayed and snapped pictures.
Among the crowd this year was Maciej Kruszewski, a tourist from Poland and a first-time audience member of the crucifixions.
“Here, we would like to just grasp what does it mean, Easter in completely different part of the world,” said Kruszewski.
Other penitents walked barefoot through village streets and beat their bare backs with sharp bamboo sticks and pieces of wood. Some participants in the past opened cuts in the penitents’ backs using broken glass to ensure the ritual was sufficiently bloody.
Many of the mostly impoverished penitents undergo the ritual to atone for their sins, pray for the sick or for a better life, and give thanks for miracles.
The gruesome spectacle reflects the Philippines’ unique brand of Catholicism, which merges church traditions with folk superstitions.
Church leaders in the Philippines, the largest Catholic nation in Asia, have frowned on the crucifixions and self-flagellations. Filipinos can show their faith and religious devotion, they say, without hurting themselves and by doing charity work instead, such as donating blood, but the tradition has lasted for decades.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/fi ... 09601.html
Re: Christianity
Greg Locke reacts to trailer full of Bibles burned in Wilson County near church
Andy Humbles, Nashville Tennessean
Updated Sun, March 31, 2024 at 7:15 PM
Wilson County police and emergency crews responded to a trailer fire early Sunday that saw hundreds of Bibles burned, according to the Wilson County Sheriff's Office.
Investigators believe the trailer, at the intersection of Old Lebanon Dirt Road and Chandler Road near Global Vision Bible Church led by Pastor Greg Locke, was intentionally set on fire at around 6 a.m., the sheriff's office said.
The fire was extinguished by the Mt. Juliet Fire Department.
Locke addressed the trailer fire at Global Vision and said there were "probably 200 Bibles" on the trailer. Locke said the fire was set in front of an entrance.
"It was 100 percent directed at (Global Vision Bible Church)," Locke said. "It blocked the entrance to our campus and the fact that it was an entire load of Bibles is rather conclusive proof that is was most assuredly directed at us.
"It did not, nor will it stop us. It was cleaned up in time for people to drive into the parking lot. We had a full house and a marvelous service."
Global Vision has held burning events in the past that involved materials the church believes is connected to witchcraft and the occult.
After the fire was contained, Wilson County Sheriff’s Office deputies and detectives took control of the investigation.
"If you think Christianity is not under attack more than ever before in the United States of America, you have not been paying attention." Locke said about the fire.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Police: Trailer with Bibles set on fire in Wilson County on Easter
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/gr ... 34722.html
Andy Humbles, Nashville Tennessean
Updated Sun, March 31, 2024 at 7:15 PM
Wilson County police and emergency crews responded to a trailer fire early Sunday that saw hundreds of Bibles burned, according to the Wilson County Sheriff's Office.
Investigators believe the trailer, at the intersection of Old Lebanon Dirt Road and Chandler Road near Global Vision Bible Church led by Pastor Greg Locke, was intentionally set on fire at around 6 a.m., the sheriff's office said.
The fire was extinguished by the Mt. Juliet Fire Department.
Locke addressed the trailer fire at Global Vision and said there were "probably 200 Bibles" on the trailer. Locke said the fire was set in front of an entrance.
"It was 100 percent directed at (Global Vision Bible Church)," Locke said. "It blocked the entrance to our campus and the fact that it was an entire load of Bibles is rather conclusive proof that is was most assuredly directed at us.
"It did not, nor will it stop us. It was cleaned up in time for people to drive into the parking lot. We had a full house and a marvelous service."
Global Vision has held burning events in the past that involved materials the church believes is connected to witchcraft and the occult.
After the fire was contained, Wilson County Sheriff’s Office deputies and detectives took control of the investigation.
"If you think Christianity is not under attack more than ever before in the United States of America, you have not been paying attention." Locke said about the fire.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Police: Trailer with Bibles set on fire in Wilson County on Easter
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/gr ... 34722.html
Re: Christianity
Vatican Document Casts Gender Change and Fluidity as Threat to Human Dignity
The statement is likely to be embraced by conservatives and stir consternation among L.G.B.T.Q. advocates who fear it will be used as a cudgel against transgender people.
Pope Francis at his weekly general audience in St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City last week.Credit...Ettore Ferrari/EPA, via Shutterstock
The Vatican on Monday issued a new document approved by Pope Francis stating that the church believes that gender fluidity and transition surgery, as well as surrogacy, amount to affronts to human dignity.
The sex a person is assigned at birth, the document argued, was an “irrevocable gift” from God and “any sex-change intervention, as a rule, risks threatening the unique dignity the person has received from the moment of conception.” People who desire “a personal self-determination, as gender theory prescribes,” risk succumbing “to the age-old temptation to make oneself God.”
Regarding surrogacy, the document unequivocally stated the Roman Catholic Church’s opposition, whether the woman carrying a baby “is coerced into it or chooses to subject herself to it freely.” Surrogacy makes the child “a mere means subservient to the arbitrary gain or desire of others,” the Vatican said in the document, which also opposed in vitro fertilization.
The document was intended as a broad statement of the church’s view on human dignity, including the exploitation of the poor, migrants, women and vulnerable people. The Vatican acknowledged that it was touching on difficult issues, but said that in a time of great tumult, it was essential, and it hoped beneficial, for the church to restate its teachings on the centrality of human dignity.
Even if the church’s teachings on culture war issues that Francis has largely avoided are not necessarily new, their consolidation now was likely to be embraced by conservatives for their hard line against liberal ideas on gender and surrogacy.
The document, five years in the making, immediately generated deep consternation among advocates for L.G.B.T.Q. rights in the church, who fear it will be used against transgender people. That was so, they said, even as the document warned of “unjust discrimination” in countries where transgender people are imprisoned or face aggression, violence and sometimes death.
“The Vatican is again supporting and propagating ideas that lead to real physical harm to transgender, nonbinary and other L.G.B.T.Q.+ people,” said Francis DeBernardo, the executive director of New Ways Ministry, a Maryland-based group that advocates for gay Catholics, adding that the Vatican’s defense of human dignity excluded “the segment of the human population who are transgender, nonbinary or gender nonconforming.”
He said it presented an outdated theology based on physical appearance alone and was blind to “the growing reality that a person’s gender includes the psychological, social and spiritual aspects naturally present in their lives.”
The document, he said, showed a “stunning lack of awareness of the actual lives of transgender and nonbinary people.” Its authors ignored the transgender people who shared their experiences with the church, Mr. DeBernardo said, “cavalierly,” and incorrectly, dismissing them as a purely Western phenomenon.
Though the document is a clear setback for L.G.B.T.Q. people and their supporters, the Vatican took pains to strike a balance between protecting personal human dignity and clearly stating church teaching, a tightrope Francis has tried to walk in his more than 11 years as pope.
Image
A cleric in a dark suit speaks into a microphone at a news conference.
Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández, the head of the Vatican’s office on doctrine, at a news conference Monday to present the document on human dignity.Credit...Gregorio Borgia/Associated Press
Francis has made it a hallmark of his papacy to meet with gay and transgender Catholics and has made it his mission to broadcast a message for a more open, and less judgmental, church. Just months ago, Francis upset more conservative corners of his church by explicitly allowing L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics to receive blessings from priests and by allowing transgender people to be baptized and act as godparents.
But he has refused to budge on the church rules and doctrine that many gay and transgender Catholics feel have alienated them, revealing the limits of his push for inclusivity.
“In terms of pastoral consequences,” Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, who leads the Vatican’s office on doctrine, said in a news conference Monday, “the principle of welcoming all is clear in the words of Pope Francis.”
Francis, he said, has repeatedly said that “all, all, all” must be welcomed. “Even those who don’t agree with what the church teaches and who make different choices from those that the church says in its doctrine, must be welcomed,” he said, including “those who think differently on these themes of sexuality.”
But Francis’ words were one thing, and church doctrine another, Cardinal Fernández made clear, drawing a distinction between the document, which he said was of high doctrinal importance, as opposed to the recent statement allowing blessings for same-sex Catholics. The church teaches that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.”
In an echo of the tension between the substance of church law and Francis’ style of a papal inclusivity, Cardinal Fernández said on Monday that perhaps the “intrinsically disordered” language should be modified to better reflect that the church’s message that homosexual acts could not produce life.
“It’s a very strong expression and it requires explanation,” he said. “Maybe we could find an expression that is even clearer to understand what we want to say.”
Though receptive to gay and transgender followers, the pope has also consistently expressed concern about what he calls “ideological colonization,” the notion that wealthy nations arrogantly impose views — whether on gender or surrogacy — on people and religious traditions that do not necessarily agree with them. The document said “gender theory plays a central role” in that vision and that its “scientific coherence is the subject of considerable debate among experts.”
Using “on the one hand” and “on the other hand,” language, the Vatican’s office on teaching and doctrine wrote that “it should be denounced as contrary to human dignity the fact that, in some places, not a few people are imprisoned, tortured, and even deprived of the good of life solely because of their sexual orientation.”
“At the same time,” it continued, “the church highlights the definite critical issues present in gender theory.”
Image
A vicar in a white robe raises arms to bless two women in a church.
A same-sex blessing at St. Benedict’s Church in Munich in 2021. Pope Francis approved such blessings in 2023.Credit...Felix Hoerhager/DPA, via Associated Press
On Monday, Cardinal Fernández also struggled to reconcile the two seemingly dissonant views.
“I am shocked having read a text from some Catholics who said, ‘Bless this military government of our country that created these laws against homosexuals,’” Cardinal Fernández said on Monday. “I wanted to die reading that.”
But he went on to say that the Vatican document was itself not a call for decriminalization, but an affirmation of what the church believed. “We shall see the consequences,” he said, adding that the church would then see how to respond.
In his presentation, Cardinal Fernández described the long process of the drafting of a document on human dignity, “Infinite Dignity,” which began in March 2019, to take into account the “latest developments on the subject in academia and the ambivalent ways in which the concept is understood today.”
In 2023, Francis sent the document back with instructions to “highlight topics closely connected to the theme of dignity, such as poverty, the situation of migrants, violence against women, human trafficking, war, and other themes.” Francis signed off on the document on March 25.
The long road, Cardinal Fernández wrote, “reflects the gravity” of the process.
In the document, the Vatican embraced the “clear progress in understanding human dignity,” pointing to the “desire to eradicate racism, slavery, and the marginalization of women, children, the sick, and people with disabilities.”
But it said the church also sees “grave violations of that dignity,” including abortion, euthanasia, the death penalty, polygamy, torture, the exploitation of the poor and migrants, human trafficking and sex abuse, violence against women, capitalism’s inequality and terrorism.
The document expressed concern that eliminating sexual differences would undercut the family, and that a response “to what are at times understandable aspirations,” will become an absolute truth and ideology, and change how children are raised.
The document argued that changing sex put individualism before nature and that human dignity as a subject was often hijacked to “justify an arbitrary proliferation of new rights,” as if “the ability to express and realize every individual preference or subjective desire should be guaranteed.”
Cardinal Fernández on Monday said that a couple desperate to have a child should turn to adoption, rather than surrogacy or in vitro fertilization because those practices, he said, eroded human dignity writ large.
Individualistic thinking, the document argues, subjugates the universality of dignity to individual standards, concerned with “psycho-physical well-being” or “individual arbitrariness or social recognition.” By making dignity subjective, the Vatican argues, it becomes subject to “arbitrariness and power interests.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/08/worl ... 778d3e6de3
The statement is likely to be embraced by conservatives and stir consternation among L.G.B.T.Q. advocates who fear it will be used as a cudgel against transgender people.
Pope Francis at his weekly general audience in St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City last week.Credit...Ettore Ferrari/EPA, via Shutterstock
The Vatican on Monday issued a new document approved by Pope Francis stating that the church believes that gender fluidity and transition surgery, as well as surrogacy, amount to affronts to human dignity.
The sex a person is assigned at birth, the document argued, was an “irrevocable gift” from God and “any sex-change intervention, as a rule, risks threatening the unique dignity the person has received from the moment of conception.” People who desire “a personal self-determination, as gender theory prescribes,” risk succumbing “to the age-old temptation to make oneself God.”
Regarding surrogacy, the document unequivocally stated the Roman Catholic Church’s opposition, whether the woman carrying a baby “is coerced into it or chooses to subject herself to it freely.” Surrogacy makes the child “a mere means subservient to the arbitrary gain or desire of others,” the Vatican said in the document, which also opposed in vitro fertilization.
The document was intended as a broad statement of the church’s view on human dignity, including the exploitation of the poor, migrants, women and vulnerable people. The Vatican acknowledged that it was touching on difficult issues, but said that in a time of great tumult, it was essential, and it hoped beneficial, for the church to restate its teachings on the centrality of human dignity.
Even if the church’s teachings on culture war issues that Francis has largely avoided are not necessarily new, their consolidation now was likely to be embraced by conservatives for their hard line against liberal ideas on gender and surrogacy.
The document, five years in the making, immediately generated deep consternation among advocates for L.G.B.T.Q. rights in the church, who fear it will be used against transgender people. That was so, they said, even as the document warned of “unjust discrimination” in countries where transgender people are imprisoned or face aggression, violence and sometimes death.
“The Vatican is again supporting and propagating ideas that lead to real physical harm to transgender, nonbinary and other L.G.B.T.Q.+ people,” said Francis DeBernardo, the executive director of New Ways Ministry, a Maryland-based group that advocates for gay Catholics, adding that the Vatican’s defense of human dignity excluded “the segment of the human population who are transgender, nonbinary or gender nonconforming.”
He said it presented an outdated theology based on physical appearance alone and was blind to “the growing reality that a person’s gender includes the psychological, social and spiritual aspects naturally present in their lives.”
The document, he said, showed a “stunning lack of awareness of the actual lives of transgender and nonbinary people.” Its authors ignored the transgender people who shared their experiences with the church, Mr. DeBernardo said, “cavalierly,” and incorrectly, dismissing them as a purely Western phenomenon.
Though the document is a clear setback for L.G.B.T.Q. people and their supporters, the Vatican took pains to strike a balance between protecting personal human dignity and clearly stating church teaching, a tightrope Francis has tried to walk in his more than 11 years as pope.
Image
A cleric in a dark suit speaks into a microphone at a news conference.
Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández, the head of the Vatican’s office on doctrine, at a news conference Monday to present the document on human dignity.Credit...Gregorio Borgia/Associated Press
Francis has made it a hallmark of his papacy to meet with gay and transgender Catholics and has made it his mission to broadcast a message for a more open, and less judgmental, church. Just months ago, Francis upset more conservative corners of his church by explicitly allowing L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics to receive blessings from priests and by allowing transgender people to be baptized and act as godparents.
But he has refused to budge on the church rules and doctrine that many gay and transgender Catholics feel have alienated them, revealing the limits of his push for inclusivity.
“In terms of pastoral consequences,” Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, who leads the Vatican’s office on doctrine, said in a news conference Monday, “the principle of welcoming all is clear in the words of Pope Francis.”
Francis, he said, has repeatedly said that “all, all, all” must be welcomed. “Even those who don’t agree with what the church teaches and who make different choices from those that the church says in its doctrine, must be welcomed,” he said, including “those who think differently on these themes of sexuality.”
But Francis’ words were one thing, and church doctrine another, Cardinal Fernández made clear, drawing a distinction between the document, which he said was of high doctrinal importance, as opposed to the recent statement allowing blessings for same-sex Catholics. The church teaches that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.”
In an echo of the tension between the substance of church law and Francis’ style of a papal inclusivity, Cardinal Fernández said on Monday that perhaps the “intrinsically disordered” language should be modified to better reflect that the church’s message that homosexual acts could not produce life.
“It’s a very strong expression and it requires explanation,” he said. “Maybe we could find an expression that is even clearer to understand what we want to say.”
Though receptive to gay and transgender followers, the pope has also consistently expressed concern about what he calls “ideological colonization,” the notion that wealthy nations arrogantly impose views — whether on gender or surrogacy — on people and religious traditions that do not necessarily agree with them. The document said “gender theory plays a central role” in that vision and that its “scientific coherence is the subject of considerable debate among experts.”
Using “on the one hand” and “on the other hand,” language, the Vatican’s office on teaching and doctrine wrote that “it should be denounced as contrary to human dignity the fact that, in some places, not a few people are imprisoned, tortured, and even deprived of the good of life solely because of their sexual orientation.”
“At the same time,” it continued, “the church highlights the definite critical issues present in gender theory.”
Image
A vicar in a white robe raises arms to bless two women in a church.
A same-sex blessing at St. Benedict’s Church in Munich in 2021. Pope Francis approved such blessings in 2023.Credit...Felix Hoerhager/DPA, via Associated Press
On Monday, Cardinal Fernández also struggled to reconcile the two seemingly dissonant views.
“I am shocked having read a text from some Catholics who said, ‘Bless this military government of our country that created these laws against homosexuals,’” Cardinal Fernández said on Monday. “I wanted to die reading that.”
But he went on to say that the Vatican document was itself not a call for decriminalization, but an affirmation of what the church believed. “We shall see the consequences,” he said, adding that the church would then see how to respond.
In his presentation, Cardinal Fernández described the long process of the drafting of a document on human dignity, “Infinite Dignity,” which began in March 2019, to take into account the “latest developments on the subject in academia and the ambivalent ways in which the concept is understood today.”
In 2023, Francis sent the document back with instructions to “highlight topics closely connected to the theme of dignity, such as poverty, the situation of migrants, violence against women, human trafficking, war, and other themes.” Francis signed off on the document on March 25.
The long road, Cardinal Fernández wrote, “reflects the gravity” of the process.
In the document, the Vatican embraced the “clear progress in understanding human dignity,” pointing to the “desire to eradicate racism, slavery, and the marginalization of women, children, the sick, and people with disabilities.”
But it said the church also sees “grave violations of that dignity,” including abortion, euthanasia, the death penalty, polygamy, torture, the exploitation of the poor and migrants, human trafficking and sex abuse, violence against women, capitalism’s inequality and terrorism.
The document expressed concern that eliminating sexual differences would undercut the family, and that a response “to what are at times understandable aspirations,” will become an absolute truth and ideology, and change how children are raised.
The document argued that changing sex put individualism before nature and that human dignity as a subject was often hijacked to “justify an arbitrary proliferation of new rights,” as if “the ability to express and realize every individual preference or subjective desire should be guaranteed.”
Cardinal Fernández on Monday said that a couple desperate to have a child should turn to adoption, rather than surrogacy or in vitro fertilization because those practices, he said, eroded human dignity writ large.
Individualistic thinking, the document argues, subjugates the universality of dignity to individual standards, concerned with “psycho-physical well-being” or “individual arbitrariness or social recognition.” By making dignity subjective, the Vatican argues, it becomes subject to “arbitrariness and power interests.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/08/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Re: Christianity
The Line Between Good and Evil Cuts Through Evangelical America
I’m afraid that an exit poll question has confused America.
Every four years, voters are asked, “Are you a white evangelical or born-again Christian?” And every time, voters from a broad range of Protestant Christian traditions say yes, compressing a diverse religious community into a single, unified mass.
It’s not that the question is misleading. People who answer yes do represent a coherent political movement. Not only do they vote overwhelmingly for Republicans; they’re also quite distinct from other American political groups in their views on a host of issues, including on disputes regarding race, immigration and the Covid vaccines.
But in other ways, this exit poll identity misleads us about the nature and character of American evangelicalism as a whole. It’s far more diverse and divided than the exit poll results imply. There are the rather crucial facts that not all evangelicals are white and evangelicals of color vote substantially differently from their white brothers and sisters. Evangelicals of color are far more likely to vote Democratic, and their positions on many issues are more closely aligned with the American political mainstream. But the differences go well beyond race.
In reality, American evangelicalism is best understood as a combination of three religious traditions: fundamentalism, evangelicalism and Pentecostalism. These different traditions have different beliefs, different cultures and different effects on our nation.
The distinction between fundamentalism and evangelicalism can be the hardest to parse, especially since we now use the term “evangelical” to describe both branches of the movement. The conflict between evangelicalism and fundamentalism emerged most sharply in the years following World War II, when so-called neo-evangelicals arose as a biblically conservative response to traditional fundamentalism’s separatism and fighting spirit. I say “biblically conservative” because neo-evangelicals had the same high view of Scripture as the inerrant word of God that fundamentalists did, but their temperament and approach were quite different.
The difference between fundamentalism and neo-evangelicalism can be summed up in two men, Bob Jones and Billy Graham. In a 2011 piece about the relationship between Jones and Graham, the Gospel Coalition’s Justin Taylor called them the “exemplars of fundamentalism and neo-evangelicalism.” Jones was the founder of the university that bears his name in Greenville, S.C., one of the most influential fundamentalist colleges in America.
Bob Jones University barred Black students from attending until 1971, then banned interracial dating until 2000. The racism that plagued Southern American fundamentalism is a key reason for the segregation of American religious life. It’s also one reason the historically Black Protestant church is distinct from the evangelical tradition, despite its similar views of the authority of Scripture.
Graham attended Bob Jones University for a semester, but soon left and took a different path. He went on to become known as “America’s pastor,” the man who ministered to presidents of both parties and led gigantic evangelistic crusades in stadiums across the nation and the world. While Jones segregated his school, Graham removed the red segregation rope dividing white and Black attendees at his crusades in the South — before Brown v. Board of Education — and shared a stage with Martin Luther King Jr. at Madison Square Garden in 1957.
But since that keen Jones/Graham divide, the lines between evangelicalism and fundamentalism have blurred. Now the two camps often go to the same churches, attend the same colleges, listen to the same Christian musicians and read the same books. To compound the confusion, they’re both quite likely to call themselves evangelical. While the theological differences between fundamentalists and evangelicals can be difficult to describe, the temperamental differences are not.
“Fundamentalism,” Richard Land, the former head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, once told me, “is far more a psychology than a theology.” That psychology is defined by an extreme sense of certainty, along with extreme ferocity.
Roughly speaking, fundamentalists are intolerant of dissent. Evangelicals are much more accepting of theological differences. Fundamentalists place a greater emphasis on confrontation and domination. Evangelicals are more interested in pluralism and persuasion. Fundamentalists focus more on God’s law. Evangelicals tend to emphasize God’s grace. While many evangelicals are certainly enthusiastic Trump supporters, they are more likely to be reluctant (and even embarrassed) Trump voters, or Never Trumpers, or Democrats. Fundamentalists tend to march much more in lock step with the MAGA movement. Donald Trump’s combative psychology in many ways merges with their own.
A Christian politics dominated by fundamentalism is going to look very different from a Christian politics dominated by evangelicalism. Think of the difference between Trump and George W. Bush. Bush is conservative. He’s anti-abortion. He’s committed to religious liberty. These are all values that millions of MAGA Republicans would claim to uphold, but there’s a yawning character gap between the two presidents, and their cultural influence is profoundly different.
While the difference between evangelicalism and fundamentalism can be difficult to discern, Pentecostalism is something else entirely. American evangelicals can trace their roots to the Reformation; the Pentecostal movement began a little over 100 years ago, during the Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles in 1906. The movement was started by a Black pastor named William Seymour, and it is far more supernatural in its focus than, say, the Southern Baptist or Presbyterian church down the street.
At its heart, Pentecostalism believes that all of the gifts and miracles you read about in the Bible can and do happen today. That means prophecy, speaking in tongues and gifts of healing. Pentecostalism is more working class than the rest of the evangelical world, and Pentecostal churches are often more diverse — far more diverse — than older American denominations. Hispanics in particular have embraced the Pentecostal faith, both in the United States and in Latin America, and Pentecostalism has exploded in the global south.
When I lived in Manhattan, my wife and I attended Times Square Church, a Pentecostal congregation in the heart of the city, and every Sunday felt like a scene from the book of Revelation, with people “from every nation, tribe, people and language” gathered together to worship with great joy.
Pentecostalism is arguably the most promising and the most perilous religious movement in America. At its best, the sheer exuberance and radical love of a good Pentecostal church is transformative. At its worst, the quest for miraculous experience can lead to a kind of frenzied superstition, where carnival barker pastors and faux apostles con their congregations with false prophecies and fake miracles, milking them for donations and then wielding their abundant wealth as proof of God’s favor.
The Pentecostal church, for example, is the primary home of one of the most toxic and dangerous Christian nationalist ideas in America — the Seven Mountain Mandate, which holds that God has ordained Christians to dominate the seven “mountains” of cultural influence: the family, the church, education, media, arts, the economy and government. This is an extreme form of Christian supremacy, one that would relegate all other Americans to second-class status.
Pentecostalism is also the primary source for the surge in prophecies about Trump that I’ve described before. It’s mostly Pentecostal pastors and leaders who have told their flocks that God has ordained Trump to rule — and to rule again. Combine the Seven Mountain Mandate with Trump prophecies, and you can see the potential for a kind of fervent radicalism that is immune to rational argument. After all, how can you argue a person out of the idea that God told him to vote for Trump? Or that God told him that Christians are destined to reign over the United States?
When I look at the divisions in American evangelicalism, I’m reminded of the Homer Simpson toast: “To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.” The American church has been the cause of much heartache and division. It is also the source of tremendous healing and love. We saw both the love and the division most vividly in the civil rights movement, when Black Christians and their allies faced the dogs and hoses all too often unleashed by members of the white Southern church. We saw this on Jan. 6, when violent Christians attacked the Capitol, only to see their plans foiled by an evangelical vice president who broke with Trump at long last to uphold his constitutional oath and spare the nation a far worse catastrophe.
I’ve lived and worshiped in every major branch of American evangelicalism. I was raised in a more fundamentalist church, left it for evangelicalism and spent a decade of my life worshiping in Pentecostal churches. Now I attend a multiethnic church that is rooted in both evangelicalism and the Black church tradition. I’ve seen great good, and I’ve seen terrible evil.
That long experience has taught me that the future of our nation isn’t just decided in the halls of secular power; it’s also decided in the pulpits and sanctuaries of American churches. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote that the line between good and evil “cuts through the heart of every human being.” That same line also cuts through the heart of the church.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/21/opin ... 778d3e6de3
I’m afraid that an exit poll question has confused America.
Every four years, voters are asked, “Are you a white evangelical or born-again Christian?” And every time, voters from a broad range of Protestant Christian traditions say yes, compressing a diverse religious community into a single, unified mass.
It’s not that the question is misleading. People who answer yes do represent a coherent political movement. Not only do they vote overwhelmingly for Republicans; they’re also quite distinct from other American political groups in their views on a host of issues, including on disputes regarding race, immigration and the Covid vaccines.
But in other ways, this exit poll identity misleads us about the nature and character of American evangelicalism as a whole. It’s far more diverse and divided than the exit poll results imply. There are the rather crucial facts that not all evangelicals are white and evangelicals of color vote substantially differently from their white brothers and sisters. Evangelicals of color are far more likely to vote Democratic, and their positions on many issues are more closely aligned with the American political mainstream. But the differences go well beyond race.
In reality, American evangelicalism is best understood as a combination of three religious traditions: fundamentalism, evangelicalism and Pentecostalism. These different traditions have different beliefs, different cultures and different effects on our nation.
The distinction between fundamentalism and evangelicalism can be the hardest to parse, especially since we now use the term “evangelical” to describe both branches of the movement. The conflict between evangelicalism and fundamentalism emerged most sharply in the years following World War II, when so-called neo-evangelicals arose as a biblically conservative response to traditional fundamentalism’s separatism and fighting spirit. I say “biblically conservative” because neo-evangelicals had the same high view of Scripture as the inerrant word of God that fundamentalists did, but their temperament and approach were quite different.
The difference between fundamentalism and neo-evangelicalism can be summed up in two men, Bob Jones and Billy Graham. In a 2011 piece about the relationship between Jones and Graham, the Gospel Coalition’s Justin Taylor called them the “exemplars of fundamentalism and neo-evangelicalism.” Jones was the founder of the university that bears his name in Greenville, S.C., one of the most influential fundamentalist colleges in America.
Bob Jones University barred Black students from attending until 1971, then banned interracial dating until 2000. The racism that plagued Southern American fundamentalism is a key reason for the segregation of American religious life. It’s also one reason the historically Black Protestant church is distinct from the evangelical tradition, despite its similar views of the authority of Scripture.
Graham attended Bob Jones University for a semester, but soon left and took a different path. He went on to become known as “America’s pastor,” the man who ministered to presidents of both parties and led gigantic evangelistic crusades in stadiums across the nation and the world. While Jones segregated his school, Graham removed the red segregation rope dividing white and Black attendees at his crusades in the South — before Brown v. Board of Education — and shared a stage with Martin Luther King Jr. at Madison Square Garden in 1957.
But since that keen Jones/Graham divide, the lines between evangelicalism and fundamentalism have blurred. Now the two camps often go to the same churches, attend the same colleges, listen to the same Christian musicians and read the same books. To compound the confusion, they’re both quite likely to call themselves evangelical. While the theological differences between fundamentalists and evangelicals can be difficult to describe, the temperamental differences are not.
“Fundamentalism,” Richard Land, the former head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, once told me, “is far more a psychology than a theology.” That psychology is defined by an extreme sense of certainty, along with extreme ferocity.
Roughly speaking, fundamentalists are intolerant of dissent. Evangelicals are much more accepting of theological differences. Fundamentalists place a greater emphasis on confrontation and domination. Evangelicals are more interested in pluralism and persuasion. Fundamentalists focus more on God’s law. Evangelicals tend to emphasize God’s grace. While many evangelicals are certainly enthusiastic Trump supporters, they are more likely to be reluctant (and even embarrassed) Trump voters, or Never Trumpers, or Democrats. Fundamentalists tend to march much more in lock step with the MAGA movement. Donald Trump’s combative psychology in many ways merges with their own.
A Christian politics dominated by fundamentalism is going to look very different from a Christian politics dominated by evangelicalism. Think of the difference between Trump and George W. Bush. Bush is conservative. He’s anti-abortion. He’s committed to religious liberty. These are all values that millions of MAGA Republicans would claim to uphold, but there’s a yawning character gap between the two presidents, and their cultural influence is profoundly different.
While the difference between evangelicalism and fundamentalism can be difficult to discern, Pentecostalism is something else entirely. American evangelicals can trace their roots to the Reformation; the Pentecostal movement began a little over 100 years ago, during the Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles in 1906. The movement was started by a Black pastor named William Seymour, and it is far more supernatural in its focus than, say, the Southern Baptist or Presbyterian church down the street.
At its heart, Pentecostalism believes that all of the gifts and miracles you read about in the Bible can and do happen today. That means prophecy, speaking in tongues and gifts of healing. Pentecostalism is more working class than the rest of the evangelical world, and Pentecostal churches are often more diverse — far more diverse — than older American denominations. Hispanics in particular have embraced the Pentecostal faith, both in the United States and in Latin America, and Pentecostalism has exploded in the global south.
When I lived in Manhattan, my wife and I attended Times Square Church, a Pentecostal congregation in the heart of the city, and every Sunday felt like a scene from the book of Revelation, with people “from every nation, tribe, people and language” gathered together to worship with great joy.
Pentecostalism is arguably the most promising and the most perilous religious movement in America. At its best, the sheer exuberance and radical love of a good Pentecostal church is transformative. At its worst, the quest for miraculous experience can lead to a kind of frenzied superstition, where carnival barker pastors and faux apostles con their congregations with false prophecies and fake miracles, milking them for donations and then wielding their abundant wealth as proof of God’s favor.
The Pentecostal church, for example, is the primary home of one of the most toxic and dangerous Christian nationalist ideas in America — the Seven Mountain Mandate, which holds that God has ordained Christians to dominate the seven “mountains” of cultural influence: the family, the church, education, media, arts, the economy and government. This is an extreme form of Christian supremacy, one that would relegate all other Americans to second-class status.
Pentecostalism is also the primary source for the surge in prophecies about Trump that I’ve described before. It’s mostly Pentecostal pastors and leaders who have told their flocks that God has ordained Trump to rule — and to rule again. Combine the Seven Mountain Mandate with Trump prophecies, and you can see the potential for a kind of fervent radicalism that is immune to rational argument. After all, how can you argue a person out of the idea that God told him to vote for Trump? Or that God told him that Christians are destined to reign over the United States?
When I look at the divisions in American evangelicalism, I’m reminded of the Homer Simpson toast: “To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.” The American church has been the cause of much heartache and division. It is also the source of tremendous healing and love. We saw both the love and the division most vividly in the civil rights movement, when Black Christians and their allies faced the dogs and hoses all too often unleashed by members of the white Southern church. We saw this on Jan. 6, when violent Christians attacked the Capitol, only to see their plans foiled by an evangelical vice president who broke with Trump at long last to uphold his constitutional oath and spare the nation a far worse catastrophe.
I’ve lived and worshiped in every major branch of American evangelicalism. I was raised in a more fundamentalist church, left it for evangelicalism and spent a decade of my life worshiping in Pentecostal churches. Now I attend a multiethnic church that is rooted in both evangelicalism and the Black church tradition. I’ve seen great good, and I’ve seen terrible evil.
That long experience has taught me that the future of our nation isn’t just decided in the halls of secular power; it’s also decided in the pulpits and sanctuaries of American churches. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote that the line between good and evil “cuts through the heart of every human being.” That same line also cuts through the heart of the church.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/21/opin ... 778d3e6de3