My Gospel Workers Blog

Changing US demographics could make Latinos 'hosts of table'

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2010-01-17T21:31:00Z

Chris Herlinger
New York (ENI). Roman Catholics in the United States are asking a question that touches on demographics and culture: what will the church look like in the coming years when at least 40 percent, and perhaps even a majority, of U.S. Catholics are Latino?

At the very least, "they will not only have a place at the table, they will be the hosts of the table," said Peter Steinfels, a New York Times religion columnist and the co-director of the Fordham Center on Religion and Culture, at a recent forum that examined the impact of Latin Americans on the church and the U.S. religious landscape.

Steinfels spoke at a 9 December event at Fordham University, a Jesuit institution, noting that previous questions of Latino involvement centred on the issue of the wider church welcoming new arrivals into the United States.

Forum speakers said the sheer scale of demographics calls for new ways of thinking – a fact acknowledged by Rev. Allan Figueroa Deck, executive director of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' Secretariat for Cultural Diversity in the Church.

Deck noted that the late Cardinal Avery Dulles said the influx of Spanish-speaking immigrants was an opportunity for the Catholic Church, "to influence the broader American culture".

The changes occurring now within U.S. Catholicism will eventually be reflected in the wider US culture, a process Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life in Washington, DC, called "the browning of America".

While the United States remains predominately white and Protestant, shifting demographics will change that dynamic, said Lugo. He added that by 2050 Latinos will constitute at least a quarter, and perhaps close to a third, of the U.S. population. (Currently Latinos comprise about 15 percent of the population)

Lugo noted that one-quarter of newborns in the United States are Latino and more than half of newborns to Catholic families are Latino.

A majority of Latinos in the United States have family roots in Mexico but the profile of Latino Catholics in the country is diverse, with backgrounds in the Caribbean, Central America and South America, as well. "Cubans are very different than Mexican Americans," observed Monsignor Arturo J. Bañuelas, pastor of St. Pius X Church in El Paso, Texas.

The issue of diversity emerges in several ways, including in the style of worship. The Rev. Claudio Burgaleta, who coordinates the Latino studies program at Fordham's Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education, noted that a majority of U.S, Latino Catholics identify themselves as "charismatic". While Catholic, they embrace a Pentecostal-like worship, believe in miracles, are biblically conservative and believe that Mary, the mother of Jesus, watches over them.

Participants in the Fordham forum recognised that with its history of welcoming waves of past immigrant groups such as Italians, Irish and Poles, the U.S. Catholic Church has experience in dealing with the dynamics of immigration.

But Bañuelas, among others, rejects the idea of an "assimilationist" model in which immigrants shed their cultural identity for an American "norm". Bañuelas argued that Latinos want to reaffirm their values and culture.

Part of that stems from recognising, Bañuelas said, that most U.S. Latinos "live in the shadows of power, including the Church".

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Pope defends invitation to Anglicans to convert

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2010-01-17T21:19:00Z

By NICOLE WINFIELD, Associated Press Writer Nicole Winfield, Associated Press Writer Fri Jan 15, 10:14 am ET

VATICAN CITY – Pope Benedict XVI defended his decision to invite disaffected Anglicans to join the Catholic Church en masse, saying Friday it was the "ultimate aim" of ecumenism.

Benedict told members of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith that the invitation wasn't an attack on the church's reunification efforts with other Christians but was rather designed to help them by bringing about "full and visible communion."

The Vatican in October announced it was making it easier for traditional Anglicans upset over women priests and gay bishops to join the Catholic Church while retaining many of their Anglican traditions, including married priests.

The move roiled the 77-million Anglican Communion, already on the verge of schism over woman and gay clergy, particularly since its spiritual leader, Archbishop Rowan Williams, wasn't consulted and was only informed at the last minute.

Anglicans split from Rome in 1534 when English King Henry VIII was refused a marriage annulment. For decades, the two churches have held theological discussions on trying to reunite, part of the Vatican's broader, long-term ecumenical effort to unify all Christians who have separated from Rome over the centuries.

The Vatican denied that it was poaching for converts in the Anglican pond and said its unprecedented invitation was merely a response to the many Anglican requests to join the Catholic Church.

The Vatican's invitation "is not in any way contrary to the ecumenical movement but shows, instead, its ultimate aim which consists of reaching full and visible communion of the Lord's disciples," Benedict told the members of the congregation, which he headed for a quarter century before becoming pope.

Benedict has made healing the divisions in the church a priority of his papacy, reaching out not only to Anglicans but also to Orthodox Christians and breakaway Catholics as well in a bid to unify all the Christian faithful.

In that vein, he told congregation members that he hoped they resolve the remaining doctrinal problems with a group of traditionalist conservatives, the Society of St. Pius X, which includes a Holocaust-denying bishop.

The society, founded in 1969 by the late ultraconservative Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, split from Rome over the modernizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council, particularly its outreach to Jews. Lefebvre and four bishops were excommunicated in 1988 after Lefebvre consecrated them without papal consent.

Last year, Benedict removed the excommunications, sparking outrage because one of the bishops, British Bishop Richard Williamson, had denied that any Jews were gassed during the Holocaust.

Benedict apologized for mistakes in the Williamson affair but has insisted that his overall aim of bringing the society back under Rome's wing was necessary to prevent greater division in the church and promote unity.

"Achieving the common witness to faith of all Christians is a priority of the Church at all times," Benedict said Friday. "In this spirit, I trust in the commitment of the (congregation) so that the doctrinal problems that remain with the Society of St. Pius X ... can be overcome."

Jewish groups have denounced Benedict's rehabilitation of Williamson as well as his moves to put the World War II-era pontiff, Pope Pius XII, on the path to possible sainthood. Some historians and Jewish groups say Pius didn't sufficiently denounce the Holocaust.

The criticism has overshadowed Benedict's planned visit this weekend to Rome's main synagogue, prompting at least one rabbi and one prominent Jewish community member to announce they will not attend.

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Haiti hit by largest earthquake in over 200 years

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2010-01-13T03:13:00Z

By JONATHAN M. KATZ, Associated Press Writer Jonathan M. Katz, Associated Press Writer 26 mins ago

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – The strongest earthquake in more than 200 years rocked Haiti on Tuesday, collapsing a hospital where people screamed for help and heavily damaging the National Palace, U.N. peacekeeper headquarters and other buildings. U.S. officials reported bodies in the streets and an aid official described "total disaster and chaos."

United Nations officials said a large number of U.N. personnel were unaccounted for.

Communications were widely disrupted, making it impossible to get a full picture of damage as powerful aftershocks shook a desperately poor country where many buildings are flimsy. Electricity was out in some places.

Karel Zelenka, a Catholic Relief Services representative in Port-au-Prince, told U.S. colleagues before phone service failed that "there must be thousands of people dead," according to a spokeswoman for the aid group, Sara Fajardo.

"He reported that it was just total disaster and chaos, that there were clouds of dust surrounding Port-au-Prince," Fajardo said from the group's offices in Maryland.

State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said in Washington that embassy personnel were "literally in the dark" after power failed.

"They reported structures down. They reported a lot of walls down. They did see a number of bodies in the street and on the sidewalk that had been hit by debris. So clearly, there's going to be serious loss of life in this," he said.

Alain Le Roy, the U.N. peacekeeping chief in New York, said late Tuesday that the headquarters of the 9,000-member Haiti peacekeeping mission and other U.N. installations were seriously damaged.

"Contacts with the U.N. on the ground have been severely hampered," Le Roy said in a statement, adding: "For the moment, a large number of personnel remain unaccounted for."

Felix Augustin, Haiti's consul general in New York, said a portion of the National Palace had disintegrated.

"Buildings collapsed all over the place," he said. "We have lives that are destroyed. ... It will take at least two or three days for people to know what's going on."

An Associated Press videographer saw the wrecked hospital in Petionville, a hillside Port-au-Prince district that is home to many diplomats and wealthy Haitians, as well as many poor people. Elsewhere in the capital, a U.S. government official reported seeing houses that had tumbled into a ravine.

Kenson Calixte of Boston spoke to an uncle and cousin in Port-au-Prince shortly after the earthquake by phone. He could hear screaming in the background as his relatives described the frantic scene in the streets. His uncle told him that a small hotel near their home had collapsed, with people inside.

"They told me it was total chaos, a lot of devastation," he said. More than four hours later, he still was not able to get them back on the phone for an update.

Haiti's ambassador to the U.S., Raymond Joseph, said from his Washington office that he spoke to President Rene Preval's chief of staff, Fritz Longchamp, just after the quake hit. He said Longchamp told him that "buildings were crumbling right and left" near the national palace. He too had not been able to get through by phone to Haiti since.

With phones down, some of the only communication came from social media such as Twitter. Richard Morse, a well-known musician who manages the famed Olafson Hotel, kept up a stream of dispatches on the aftershocks and damage reports. The news, based mostly on second-hand reports and photos, was disturbing, with people screaming in fear and roads blocked with debris. Belair, a slum even in the best of times, was said to be "a broken mess."

The earthquake had a preliminary magnitude of 7.0 and was centered about 10 miles (15 kilometers) west of Port-au-Prince at a depth of 5 miles (8 kilometers), the U.S. Geological Survey said. USGS geophysicist Kristin Marano called it the strongest earthquake since 1770 in what is now Haiti. In 1946, a magnitude-8.1 quake struck the Dominican Republic and also shook Haiti, producing a tsunami that killed 1,790 people.

The temblor appeared to have occurred along a strike-slip fault, where one side of a vertical fault slips horizontally past the other, said earthquake expert Tom Jordan at the University of Southern California. The earthquake's size and proximity to populated Port-au-Prince likely caused widespread casualties and structural damage, he said.

"It's going to be a real killer," he said. "Whenever something like this happens, you just hope for the best."

Most of Haiti's 9 million people are desperately poor, and after years of political instability the country has no real construction standards. In November 2008, following the collapse of a school in Petionville, the mayor of Port-au-Prince estimated about 60 percent of the buildings were shoddily built and unsafe in normal circumstances.

Tuesday's quake was felt in the Dominican Republic, which shares a border with Haiti on the island of Hispaniola, and some panicked residents in the capital of Santo Domingo fled from their shaking homes. But no major damage was reported there.

In eastern Cuba, houses shook but there were also no reports of significant damage.

"We felt it very strongly and I would say for a long time. We had time to evacuate," said Monsignor Dionisio Garcia, archbishop of Santiago.

The few reports emerging from Haiti made clear the country had suffered extensive damage.

"Everybody is just totally, totally freaked out and shaken," said Henry Bahn, a U.S. Department of Agriculture official visiting Port-au-Prince. "The sky is just gray with dust."

Bahn said he was walking to his hotel room when the ground began to shake.

"I just held on and bounced across the wall," he said. "I just hear a tremendous amount of noise and shouting and screaming in the distance."

Bahn said there were rocks strewn about and he saw a ravine where several homes had stood: "It's just full of collapsed walls and rubble and barbed wire."

In the community of Thomassin, just outside Port-au-Prince, Alain Denis said neighbors told him the only road to the capital had been cut but that phones were all dead so it was hard to determine the extent of the damage.

"At this point, everything is a rumor," he said. "It's dark. It's nighttime."

Former President Bill Clinton, the U.N.'s special envoy for Haiti, issued a statement saying his office would do whatever he could to help the nation recover and rebuild.

"My thoughts and prayers are with the people of Haiti," he said.

President Barack Obama ordered U.S. officials to start preparing in case humanitarian assistance was needed.

Venezuelan Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro said his government planned to send a military aircraft carrying canned foods, medicine and drinking water and also would dispatch a team of 50 rescue workers

Haitian musician Wyclef Jean urged his fans to donate to earthquake relief efforts, saying he had received text messages from his homeland reporting that many people had died.

"We must think ahead for the aftershock, the people will need food, medicine, shelter, etc.," Jean said on his Web site.

Brazil's government was trying to re-establish communications with its embassy and military personnel in Haiti late Tuesday, according to the G1 Web site of Globo TV. Brazil leads a 9,000-member U.N. peacekeeping force there.

Felix Augustin, Haiti's consul general in New York, said he was concerned about everyone in Haiti, including his relatives.

"Communication is absolutely impossible," he said. "I've been trying to call my ministry and I cannot get through. ... It's mind-boggling."

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The Power of the Gospel

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2010-01-11T02:21:00Z

Orthodox-Catholic Commission Studies Primacy of Peter

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-12-27T23:41:00Z

Concludes 11th Plenary Session in Paphos

By Jesús Colina

PAPHOS, Cyprus, OCT. 23, 2009 (Zenit.org).- The International Mixed Commission for Theological Dialogue Between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church has progressed in its reflection on the role of the bishop of Rome.

The commission issued a joint communiqué reporting on its progress at the end of its 11th plenary session, ended today in Paphos. The document in question is titled "The Role of the Bishop of Rome in the Communion of the Church in the First Millennium."

The document is based on a draft prepared by an Orthodox-Catholic committee, which met in Crete last year. At present, the commission is reflecting on the role of the Bishop of Rome in the communion of the Church in the first millennium -- before the Great Schism of 1054.

The current work of the commission responds to the appeal made by Pope John Paul II in his 1995 encyclical "Ut Unum Sint" on the "ecumenical commitment," in which he proposed "finding a way to exercise the primacy that, without giving up in any way what is essential to its mission, opens to a new situation."

This is possible, he added, as "for a millennium Christians were united by the fraternal communion of faith and sacramental life, the See of Rome being, by common consent, the moderator when disagreements arose among them on matters of faith or discipline."

John Paul II himself invited both sides to seek "naturally together, the ways with which this ministry can carry out a service of faith and love recognized by one another."

Still working

"During this plenary meeting, the Commission analyzed with great care and amended the draft of the Mixed Coordination Committee, and decided to complete its work on the text next year, calling a new meeting of the Mixed Commission," the communiqué reported.

The meeting was attended by 20 Catholic members; all Orthodox Churches were represented, with the exception of the Patriarchate of Bulgaria.

The commission worked under the guidance of two co-presidents: the Catholic representative was Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity; and the Orthodox representative was Metropolitan Ioannis Zizioulas of Pergamum.

On Saturday, the co-presidents and other participants, among whom was Argentine Cardinal Leonardo Sandri, prefect of the Congregation for Eastern Churches, were received in the presidential palace by Demitris Christofias, president of Cyprus, who placed his hope "in this important dialogue for a world still divided."

The president "expressed his best wishes for progress in communion between the two Churches in the future," the communiqué reported.

Protests of radical Orthodox opposed to dialogue with the Catholic Church interrupted the work of the weeklong meeting. The country's police arrested four citizens and two monks of the monastery of Stavrovunio, confirmed Amen.gr.

The Orthodox representatives called the protests "totally unjustifiable and unacceptable, as they present false information which creates confusion," the communiqué stated. "All the Orthodox members of the commission re-affirmed that the dialogue continues with the decision of all the Orthodox Churches and advances with fidelity to the truth and to the Tradition of the Church."

The mixed commission was established by John Paul II and Ecumenical Patriarch Dimitrios I in Istanbul on Nov. 30, 1979, on the feast of St. Andrew (Patron of the Church of Constantinople).

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Rome-Moscow Relations Begin New Era

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-12-27T23:37:00Z

Orthodox Archbishop Offers to Help Europe Fight Secularism

By Robert Moynihan

WASHINGTON, D.C., DEC. 14, 2009 (Zenit.org).- Things are moving on the Eastern front. And more movement may be coming soon, as an old winter chill in Rome-Moscow relations seems to be thawing, with profound consequences for Europe and the entire world.

Vatican observers have been following these developments with great attention. "For Rome and Moscow, It's Spring Again," the respected Italian Vatican observer Sandro Magister noted in a Dec. 11 column.

This improvement in relations is due in part to many quiet steps taken by the Vatican under the direction of Cardinal Walter Kasper, the Vatican's chief ecumenist, who led the Vatican delegation to a week-long theological dialogue in Cyprus, and by Archbishop Antonio Mennini, the Pope's very able nuncio to Moscow.

Magister, however, was commenting on two key recent events: (1) the upgrading of relations between the Holy See and Russia, and (2) the publication in Russia, for the first time ever, of a collection of Benedict XVI's homilies.

And this "springtime" has a goal, Magister argues: "the defense of the Christian tradition" in Europe and around the world.

So what we have, essentially, is the announcement of a new alliance on the world stage between two powers that have long distrusted each other: Rome and Russia.

Incredible as it may seem -- given that just 20 years ago Russia was the atheist, Church-persecuting Soviet Union -- this is what seems to be occurring right before our eyes.

On Dec. 9, following a meeting in the Vatican between the Pope and the president of Russia, Dimitri Medvedev, Russia and the Vatican announced "the establishment of diplomatic relations between them, at the level of apostolic nunciature on the part of the Holy See, and of embassy on the part of the Russian Federation."

The week before, Benedict XVI had received Medvedev in audience at the Vatican and gave him a copy, in Russian, of the encyclical "Caritas in Veritate."

On Dec. 2, the day before Medvedev met with the Pope, a book published by the Patriarchate of Moscow containing the main speeches about Europe made over the past 10 years by Joseph Ratzinger, as cardinal and Pope, was presented in Rome.

The entire volume is in two languages, Italian and Russian -- again, a sign of the ever-closer relations between Russia and Rome.

Kindred spirit

Archbishop Hilarion Alfeyev of Volokolamsk, the head of the patriarchate's department for external Church relations, wrote the introduction for the book. The archbishop is an increasingly important figure in the Russian Orthodox Church, and in the Orthodox world. (The previous occupant of this post, Kirill, was elected patriarch of Moscow earlier this year, which suggests the possible future importance of Archbishop Hilarion himself.)

In his introduction, Archbishop Hilarion, 43, sets forth his vision for Europe, and the new "alliance" needed to realize that vision. It is a remarkable text, which we can only touch upon here.

Magister was so impressed by this introduction that he wrote: "Those who expect an Orthodox Church removed from time, made up only of remote traditions and archaic liturgies, will come away shaken from reading the introduction to this book. [...]

"The image that emerges from it is that of a Russian Orthodox Church that refuses to let itself be locked up in a ghetto, but on the contrary hurls itself against the secularist onslaught with all the peaceful weapons at its disposal, not excluding civil disobedience against laws 'that oblige the commission of a sin in the eyes of God.'"

Those in the West, both in Europe and in the United States, who feel that unjust laws have been passed that cannot be countenanced by Christians, will find a kindred spirit in Archbishop Hilarion.

The title of the Orthodox archbishop's text is, "The Help That the Russian Orthodox Church Can Give to Europe."

It begins with a very candid, and deeply felt, lamentation by an Orthodox leader for the closing of Catholic and Protestant churches in Western Europe.

"When traveling in Europe, especially in the traditionally Protestant countries, I am always astonished at seeing not a few churches abandoned by their congregations, especially the ones turned into pubs, clubs, shops, or places of profane activities of yet another kind," Archbishop Hilarion writes. "There is something profoundly deplorable in this sad spectacle.

"I come from a country in which for many decades the churches were used for nonreligious purposes. Many places of worship were completely destroyed. […] Why has the space for religion in Western society been reduced in such a significant way in recent decades?"

Help for the West

Then Archbishop Hilarion makes his main point: Russia can help. Russia can come to the rescue of the West.

"The Russian Orthodox Church, with its unique experience of surviving the harshest persecutions, struggling against militant atheism, reemerging from the ghetto when the political situation changed, recovering its place in society and redefining its social responsibilities, can therefore be of help to Europe," he writes.

Then he draws a line in the sand.

"The totalitarian dictatorship of the past cannot be replaced with a new dictatorship of pan-European government mechanisms. […] The countries of Orthodox tradition, for example, do not accept laws that legalize euthanasia, homosexual marriage, drug trafficking, the maintenance of brothels, pornography, and so on."

In short, the archbishop is saying that the Orthodox, including the Russian Orthodox Church which he represents, are ready to fight for Christian values in the West, alongside Catholics and Protestants.

And Archbishop Hilarion does not exclude disobedience against unjust laws.

"Obviously, disobedience of civil law is an extreme measure that a particular Church might adopt in exceptional circumstances," he writes. "It is nonetheless a possibility that must not be excluded a priori, in case a system of secularized values should become the only one operating in Europe."

Was this a random, unrepresentative text, out of the mainstream?

Well, one indication that it is not merely a stray opinion, but rather part of a growing consensus, is that the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano saw fit to publish Archbishop Hilarion's text almost in its entirety on Dec. 2.

John Thavis, the distinguished Vaticanist for Catholic News Service -- of the U.S. bishops' conference -- wrote Dec. 11: "The Russian Orthodox Church has come forward to propose a strategic alliance with the Catholic Church aimed, in effect, at saving Europe's soul from 'Western post-Christian humanism.' The offer came in an introduction written by Russian Orthodox Archbishop Hilarion to a book of speeches by Benedict XVI on Europe's spiritual crisis, published in Russian by the Orthodox Moscow Patriarchate. In an unusual move, the Vatican newspaper published almost the entire introduction in its Dec. 2 edition."

Thavis notes that Archbishop Hilarion's proposal comes precisely as 140 Christian leaders in the United States met in New York and issued the "Manhattan Declaration" pledging renewed zeal in defending the unborn, defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman, and protecting religious freedom.

And, Thavis summed up, "Vatican officials made no formal response to the archbishop's text, but read it with great interest."

St. Gregory of Nazianzus

This introduction by Archbishop Hilarion should not come as a surprise. During the last four years, the archbishop has spoken publicly a number of times of such an alliance. In fact, in May 2006 the Vatican and the Moscow Patriarchate held a weeklong conference in Vienna, which I attended, outlining the framework for such cooperation.

Last month, I traveled to Russia and met with Archbishop Hilarion and his close associates.

One of them is Leonid Sevastianov, 31, the executive director of the Russian Orthodox St. Gregory of Nazianzus Charitable Foundation, established a few weeks ago with the blessing of Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill to help carry out Archbishop Hilarion's vision of working with Western Christians on behalf of Christian values.

"We want your help, the help of Catholics, and of Western Europeans and Americans," Sevastianov told me. "Patriarch Kirill has called for the moral renewal of Russia, through a return to the deep values of the Christian faith. This is our vision." (Forbes magazine in November named Patriarch Kirill as one of the most powerful leaders in Russia today.)

St. Gregory of Nazianzus was a theologian in the 300s, well before the division of the Church into East and West, and so is venerated both by the Catholics and by the Orthodox. He is a Father of the Church for all Christians.

The co-founders of this new foundation are Archbishop Hilarion and Vadim Yakunin, one of the wealthiest businessmen in Russia.

Other wealthy Russians are also prepared to support this foundation. But participation by Americans and Western Europeans would also be very much appreciated, Archbishop Hilarion and Sevastianov told me.

"We want to try to attract the attention of religious believers, in Russia and abroad, who believe in traditional Christian values, and who want to contribute to making society more just and more moral," Sevastianov said.

"We want to promote the idea of the unity between the West and Russia on the basis of common Christian roots."

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Moving towards a united Christianity

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-12-25T00:11:00Z

Meetings between high-ranking Orthodox, Anglican and Catholic clergy signal that old schisms might soon be healed

Adrian Pabst

guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 2 December 2009 11.00 GMT

In the past two months, relations between the three main Christian churches have moved in more promising directions than perhaps during the past 50 years of uninspiring liberal dialogue. By opening a new chapter of theological engagement and concrete co-operation with Orthodoxy and Anglicanism, Pope Benedict XVI is changing the terms of debate about church reunification. In time, we might witness the end of the Great Schism between east and west and a union of the main episcopally-based churches.

First there was the Rome visit in September by the Russian Orthodox Archbishop Hilarion of Volokolamsk, Moscow's man for ecumenical relations. In high-level meetings, both sides argued that their shared resistance to secularism and moral relativism calls forth a further rapprochement of Orthodoxy and Catholicism. Declaring that "More than ever, we Christians must stand together", Hilarion insisted that each side can appeal to shared traditions and work towards greater closeness in a spirit of "mutual respect and love".

That this was more than diplomatic protocol was confirmed by the Catholic Archbishop of Moscow, Monsignor Paolo Pezzi. In an interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, he said that union between Catholics and Orthodox "is possible, indeed it has never been so close". The formal end of the Great Schism of 1054, which has divided the two churches for a millennium, and the move towards full spiritual communion "could happen soon".

Even on doctrinal matters, Roman Catholicism and Russian Orthodoxy are essentially in agreement. Hilarion acknowledged that the two have different ecclesiological models, with the former favouring a more centralised structure led by the pontiff while the latter emphasises the autonomy of provinces and local churches. "There remains the question of papal primacy and this will be a concern at the next meeting of the Catholic-Orthodox commission. But to me, it doesn't seem impossible to reach an agreement", said Pezzi.

Indeed, when Joseph Ratzinger was elected pope in 2005, one of his first acts was to drop the title of patriarch of the west. Rather than affirming absolutist papal supremacism, Benedict indicated with this act that he seeks to blend the historical primacy of the see of Rome and the pope's universal jurisdiction with that of local churches in east and west. The next step for Rome is to incorporate the Orthodox emphasis on conciliarity as a counterweight to papal authority. Increasingly shrill attacks on Benedict by Catholic dissidents like Hans Küng represent little more than the angry expression of some liberals who are excluding themselves from pan-Christian reunification.

Meanwhile, closer church ties will be greatly helped by concrete co-operation. There's already considerable convergence on social teaching, as evinced by Kirill's preface to Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone's book The Ethics of the Common Good in Catholic Social Doctrine. Both Catholicism and Orthodoxy argue for a civil market economy embedded in communal relations and serving the public good rather than exclusively private profit, a prominent theme in Benedict's recent social encyclical "Caritas in veritate".

Similarly, last week's Rome visit by the Archbishop of Canterbury has advanced Catholic-Anglican relations. Far from humiliating the primate of the Anglican Communion by parking papal tanks on the lawn at Lambeth, Benedict emphasised the importance of Anglicanism in promoting the unity of all episcopally-based Christian churches.

The presence of Anglicans within Catholicism might lead to a better appreciation of Anglicanism's unique contribution to Christianity. It could also help Anglicans define an episcopal identity beyond the divide between liberals and evangelicals.

No less significant was the fact both the pope and the archbishop spoke in favour of a different model of socio-economic development that does not rely exclusively on the state or the market. Rather, it accentuates mutualist principles of reciprocity and gift-exchange and the absolute sanctity of human and natural life which is relational, not individualist or collectivist. This shared social teaching is key in further developing concrete links and bonds of trust among Christians of different traditions.

Moves towards church reunification are signs of a revivified Christian Europe, one which can use its shared faith to transform the continent and the whole world.

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The Seven Trumpets Part VI: In the Days of the Voice of the Seventh Angel

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-12-19T22:14:00Z

Handout

Many Americans haunted by ghosts, look to astrology

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-12-15T22:00:00Z

By Ed Stoddard Ed Stoddard – Thu Dec 10, 9:23 am ET

DALLAS (Reuters Life!) – Although most Americans are Christian and many are devout it hasn't stopped some members of the flock from believing in astrology, reincarnation or the ability of trees to trap spiritual energy.

A poll by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life shows a surprising number of U.S. adults claim to have had supernatural experiences such as ghost sightings or hold beliefs associated with the New Age movement or Eastern religions.

And some of them claim allegiance to more traditional faiths such as Catholicism or evangelical Protestantism.

"American religious folks hold a variety of views and there is overlap among their beliefs and practices. Many do not fit into simple boxes," said Pew researcher Alan Cooperman.

The poll released on Wednesday showed that three-in-ten Americans say they have felt in touch with a dead person and 18 percent say they have seen or been in the presence of a ghost.

Other Pew surveys have shown that relatively few Americans would identify an Eastern religion or New Age spirituality as their core faith. But about a quarter of those surveyed say they believe in aspects of Eastern religions.

Nearly 25 percent said they believed in reincarnation and 23 percent said yoga was a spiritual practice. Twenty six percent said they believed "spiritual energy" could be found in objects such as trees.

A quarter said they believed in astrology, while 16 percent of U.S. adults think that an "evil eye" exists or that some people can cast curses or spells on others. Among black Protestants the evil eye figure is 32 percent.

The number of Americans who profess a belief in astrology is about the same as the number who claim to be Roman Catholic. Nearly 30 percent of Catholics surveyed said they believed in astrology. Among Catholics who attended church each week the figure was 16 percent.

Much of this would be jarring to -- among others -- many evangelical Protestants, who account for one in four adult Americans and take their Bible very seriously.

Still, 13 percent of white evangelicals profess a belief in astrology and about 10 percent accepted the possibility of reincarnation. Although the percentages are lower than in other groups, they are high enough to curl the hair of a Southern Baptist preacher.

Researchers said they were careful to stress that reincarnation meant being reborn again and again in this world and did not refer to, say, the resurrection of Christ.

Evangelicals, who place a heavy emphasis on spiritual conversions, are much more likely than most Americans to have had "a religious or mystical experience -- that is, a moment of religious or spiritual awakening," according to the poll.

About half of Americans claim to have had such an experience but among white evangelicals the number is 70 percent and for black Protestants it is 71 percent.

The nationwide survey of around 4,000 adults was conducted in August. Interviews were done in English and Spanish.

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Vatican Diplomacy: Realism of Hope

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-12-15T17:31:00Z

Papal Visitors Show Church's Patience, Says Spokesman

VATICAN CITY, DEC. 14, 2009 (Zenit.org).- Benedict XVI met this month with leaders from three nations where the situation of the Church is touchy. According to a Vatican spokesman, these types of meetings reflect a principle of Holy See diplomacy: the realism of hope.

Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, director of the Vatican press office, dedicated the most recent edition of Vatican Television's "Octava Dies" to a reflection on the Pope's meetings with the new ambassador from Cuba, and the presidents of Russia and Vietnam.

He suggested that Vatican diplomacy pursues a dialogue of hope in the name of the Gospel for the good of humanity.

So for example, Father Lombardi said, when the Holy Father was visited by the new Cuban ambassador to the Holy See, Eduardo Delgado Bermúdez, "the Pope observed that, despite the difficulties in relations with the Holy See over the past decades, and above all the limitations on the Church's activities, diplomatic relations have never been interrupted and the improvements are appreciable."

"The Pope's meeting with Russian President Medvedev,” Father Lombardi continued, "was the occasion to announce the establishment of diplomatic relations with the Russian Federation, concluding the 20 year effort at rapprochement with official but not yet full relations."

This, the Jesuit underscored, "is a significant step forward," demonstrating that "the situation of past hostility of the Soviet communist regime is today a memory."

Finally, the audience with the president of Vietnam, Nguyen Minh Triet, "must be considered as a further stage in the hoped for journey toward the normalization of relations with the Asian country, where the Catholic Church counts on a large and dynamic community," Father Lombardi asserted.

He noted how Catholics in Vietnam are "celebrating this year an important jubilee year" and "despite the difficulties of past decades, looks to the future in hope."

In this way, the Vatican spokesman proposed, "the Holy See -- with patience and a farsighted approach -- continues to weave together its dialogue with the leaders of nations, thinking of the good of the Church in their countries and in the perspective of understanding and peace among all peoples.”

"[The Vatican's] diplomacy is not guided by weakness or the spirit of compromise," Father Lombardi affirmed. "It is a matter of, as has been well said in the past, the 'realism of hope.'"

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German Court Enforces Day of Rest

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-12-13T15:38:00Z

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Germany's Highest Court Strictly Enforces Day of Rest, Bans Sunday Shopping

By SIOBHÁN DOWLING

Dec. 3, 2009 —

Many visitors to Germany can find themselves standing outside a closed department store, perplexed to find that they cannot do a bit of shopping during their weekend trip. This is a result of Germany's long-held resistance to Sunday shopping even in the face of growing consumerism.

Yet many of Germany's 16 states have already made some exceptions, allowing stores to open a few Sundays a year. And in Berlin the city government had gone the furthest in chipping away at the ban on Sunday trading. In 2006 the German capital gave the green light for retailers to open on 10 Sundays a year, including the four Advent Sundays preceding Christmas.

However, Germany's Constitutional Court has now upheld a complaint made by the country's Catholic and Protestant churches, based on a clause in the German constitution that Sunday should be a day of rest and "spiritual elevation."

The court on Tuesday decided in favor of the churches, saying that Sunday opening should not take place four weeks in a row. The ruling will not affect shopping this December, but would come into force next year. However, the ruling did not overturn completely the principle of limited Sunday store opening.

The labor unions had joined the churches in their campaign to ring-fence Sunday as a day off for the nation. However, their focus was not on protecting the right to practise religion, but rather on protecting workers in the retail sector from having to work on Sundays, sometimes the only day they might get to spend with other members of their family. The services union Verdi greeted Tuesday's ruling with "relief and joy," saying this was a boon to shopworkers and their families.

German papers on Wednesday are broadly in favor of the ruling, though their reasons for supporting the court's decision are strikingly different.

A Day to Synchronize Society

The center-right Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung writes:

"The Constitutional Court had to overthrow the Berlin law. ... The judgement was not 'out of touch with reality,' as the Berlin Chamber of Commerce claims, but is actually very closely in touch with real life. The great diversity of working lives brings with it the fact that members of a single family are forced into different and sometimes incompatible working hours. If the state does not use some of its regulatory power to give a dependable rhythm to at least one free day -- and that is still Sunday -- then the family faces the threat of being pulled further apart."

"If they have no time with each other and for each other, then the formal notion of belonging together loses value. This danger faces many families in society. & The fact that in the face of growing commercialization and fewer jobs hardly any employee ever dares to ask for a free Saturday, led the labor unions to join the churches in their campaign -- with noticeable success."

The conservative Die Welt writes:

"The churches have argued correctly that employees in the retail sector are not given the possibility of organizing their Advent Sundays according to Christian principles: going to church, being involved in the community, singing and reading aloud. It is part of religious freedom to be able to do these things."

"The judges did not just endorse the division of time marked by Christianity, but also the necessity for this division. There is no ambiguity about this weekly rhythm. We people as social animals are duty bound and justified in dividing our time together. It is good to have free time together, it helps us to live as the social beings that we are."

The center-left Süddeutsche Zeitung writes:

"The judgement sounds antiquated, maddeningly unmodern and pretty patronizing. It tells citizens when they are allowed to shop, and when they are not. It makes shopping on a Sunday an exception. It is a ruling that goes against the economic liberal zeitgeist and is a ruling against the round-the-clock commercialization of life."

"Yet, the ruling is humane. It is an act in favor of the public spirit. & Those who regularly go shopping on Sundays today will have to work regularly on Sundays tomorrow."

"It may sound old fashioned but it is still correct: Sunday is Sunday because it is unlike other days. This is not about tradition or religion or a social heritage. Sunday is more than just a day off for individuals. It that were so, then it wouldn't matter if someone took a day off on Tuesday or Thursday. It is a day to synchronize society, that is what makes it so important. Without Sunday, every day would be a working day and a fixed point in the week would disappear. Of course there can be exceptions, there have always been particular professions who work on Sundays. But when the exception becomes the rule, then the commercialization of Sundays will not end at the department stores."

"The court has given everyone the right to a day off on Sundays. You don't have to take it. Everyone can do what they like with it. But it is good to have it."

An Interference in Individual and Economic Freedom?

The Financial Times Deutschland writes:

"The ruling by the Constitutional Court has revived the emotional debate about opening hours of shops on Sundays. That alone is annoying. But even more annoying is that with its strong emphasis on the religiously based day of rest on Sunday, it is interfering in individual and economic freedom."

"Without a doubt the freedom to practise religion is of great value. However, in an increasingly secular society with more and more individualized rhythms of living, it seems an anachronism for the country's highest court to use retail of all things to save the day of rest."

"In the public debate there is too little mention of the freedom of shop owners to keep customers through opening on Sundays, who would otherwise order online. And the freedom of towns to use Sunday opening hours to attract tourists. Or the freedom of customers to decide for themselves if they would rather spend Sundays amidst the crowds in the shopping malls or walking in the forest."

"Appreciating these rights does not mean throwing away the country to the false god of consumerism. It means allowing a debate & about what Sunday really means to us. That includes protecting the rights of salespeople, paying them extra for working on Sundays and not putting anyone under pressure to work on Sunday."

"If this is achieved, then it is high time that Sunday opening hours are no longer discussed in terms of belief but rationally."

The left-leaning Die Tageszeitung, which is based in Berlin, writes:

"Sunday as a day off is a great gift. The treadmill is closed for 24 hours. The court has given relaxation, rest and 'spiritual elevation' precedence over the thirst for profit and the right to a consumer fix. However, it made it clear in its ruling that Sunday was not just for those who wanted to practise their religion undisturbed. It is also to play cards, go for a walk or simply to laze around. After all even the strictest atheist needs the switching off that Sundays allow."

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The Seven Trumpets Part V: The 6th Trumpet - The Fall of the Islamic Powers and Its Modern Application

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-12-13T00:10:00Z

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Vatican and Moscow boost ties 20 years after historic meeting

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-12-12T22:15:00Z

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Sophia Kishkovsky: www.eni.ch
Moscow (ENI). Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has issued a decree in Moscow on the establishment of full diplomatic relations with the Holy See following a meeting at the Vatican with Pope Benedict XVI.

In the decree, posted on the official Kremlin Web site, www.kremlin.ru, Medvedev said the Russian Foreign Ministry should hold talks on "establishing diplomatic relations at the level of a Russian Federation Embassy in the Vatican and Apostolic Nunciature in Russia, transforming the Russian Consulate at the Vatican into an Embassy".

Since 1990 the Russia and the Vatican have exchanged diplomatic representatives but without full relations, the Catholic News Service reported from Rome.

The 3 December meeting between Medvedev and Pope Benedict came almost 20 years to the day after a historic meeting at the Vatican on 1 December 1989 between Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and Pope John Paul II. This meeting was seen as breaking the ice following decades of suspicion and intrigue between the then officially-atheist communist Soviet Union and the Holy See.

Medvedev was in Italy for the third time in 2009 and met with Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi on political and energy issues. It was his first meeting with Pope Benedict. Former president Vladimir Putin met with Benedict in 2007 and twice with Pope John Paul II.

"During the cordial discussions, pleasure was expressed on both sides at the cordial relations that currently exist between them, and it was agreed to establish full diplomatic relations between the Holy See and the Russian Federation," stated a Vatican communiqué after the meeting, which lasted 30 minutes.

The communiqué said that Medvedev and Benedict discussed issues of security and peace, as well as "cultural and social questions of mutual interest, such as the value of the family and the contribution believers make to life in Russia".

Gorbachev and Pope John Paul at their meeting in 1989 had agreed in principle to establish diplomatic ties.

Aleksei Yudin, a member of the editorial board of the Russian Catholic Encyclopedia, who writes on Russian Orthodox-Catholic relations, told Ecumenical News International on 4 December that the dates of the two meetings 20 years apart are a coincidence, but nevertheless deeply symbolic.

Tensions between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Vatican over allegations of Catholic proselytism by seeking converts from among Orthodox believers, in Russia and Ukraine have given way to greater focus on common ground, on ecclesiastic and political levels.

"In this light is very important that recently the diplomatic representatives both of the Russian foreign ministry and the Vatican structures have … underscored that there exists a certain harmony, closeness of views, in the position of Russia and the Holy See on a whole number of international issues," said Yudin.

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Philippines lifts martial law, ordered after massacre

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-12-12T21:52:00Z

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(CNN) -- Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo lifted martial law in the country's south, which she declared after the massacre of 57 people last month, Philippine news outlets reported Saturday.

The order lifting martial law was due to be effective at 9 p.m. (8 a.m. ET) Saturday, the Philippines News Agency (PNA) and CNN affiliate ABS-CBN said.

Military troops will remain in Maguindanao province to keep the peace despite the move, said Victor Ibrado, chief of staff of the Philippine armed forces, PNA said.

Arroyo imposed martial law December 4 but lifted it Saturday after deciding it had achieved its objectives, Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita said, according to PNA.

Local government was now back in power and the justice system was functioning again, he said.

Authorities have said the November 23 massacre in Maguindanao province was a politically motivated attempt to keep an opponent of the politically powerful Ampatuan family from running for governor.

Thirty journalists were among those killed.

The martial law allowed arrests without warrants, and at least six members of the Ampatuan family -- including a local mayor -- were arrested, according to ABS-CBN.

Authorities raided a warehouse and ranch belonging to the family last weekend and confiscated firearms, ammunition and vehicles, Maj. Randolph Cabangbang, deputy of operations for the eastern Mindanao command, told CNN.

Ermita said Saturday that three charges of multiple murders were filed in court, and that 24 people were charged with rebellion. The Philippine National Police has referred nearly 900 other cases to the Department of Justice, he said.

Violence in the run-up to elections is not uncommon in the Philippines. The Maguindanao massacre, however, is the worst politically motivated violence in recent Philippine history, according to state media.

The victims included the wife and sister of political candidate Ismael "Toto" Mangudadatu, who had sent the women to file paperwork allowing him to run for governor of Maguindanao. He said he had received threats from allies of Gov. Andal Ampatuan Sr., the father of the accused mayor, saying he would be kidnapped if he filed the papers himself.

Maguindanao is part of an autonomous region in predominantly Muslim Mindanao, which was set up in the 1990s to quell armed uprisings by people seeking an independent Muslim homeland in the predominantly Christian Asian nation.

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What More Can Christ Give?

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-12-08T01:50:00Z

The Seven Trumpets Part IV: The 5th Trumpet and the Coming of Mahometanism

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-12-06T06:39:00Z

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High court reaffirms ban on Sunday shopping

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-12-03T00:53:00Z

Ruling in favor of the Catholic and Lutheran churches, Germany's highest court has found that the city of Berlin's ten shopping Sundays a year go against the constitutional protection of Sundays as a day of rest

Germany's Constitutional Court ruled on Tuesday that shops must close on Sundays, and that legislation in Berlin allowing for ten shopping Sundays was unconstitutional. Germany's Basic Law protects Sunday and public holidays as "days of rest from work and of spiritual improvement."

Berlin legislation passed in 2006 had allowed shops to remain open up to ten Sundays a year, including the four Sundays before Christmas. The Catholic and Lutheran churches had challenged the change and took the issue to the nation's highest court.

"Legal protection measures must recognized Sundays and public holidays as days of rest from work," said Hans-Juergen Papier, president of the Constitutional Court. "A mere economic interest in revenues and the basic desire of potential shoppers to buy does not justify allowing these shops to be open as an exception."

The protection of Sundays in Germany's Basic Law is a holdover from the Weimar Constitution of 1919 and can be found in Article 139.

The shopping Sundays already planned in Berlin for the Advent season this year will take place despite and the ruling will come into effect in 2010.

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Scientists grow pork meat in a laboratory

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-12-02T04:00:00Z

Lois Rogers

SCIENTISTS have grown meat in the laboratory for the first time. Experts in Holland used cells from a live pig to replicate growth in a petri dish.

The advent of so-called “in-vitro” or cultured meat could reduce the billions of tons of greenhouse gases emitted each year by farm animals — if people are willing to eat it.

So far the scientists have not tasted it, but they believe the breakthrough could lead to sausages and other processed products being made from laboratory meat in as little as five years’ time.

They initially extracted cells from the muscle of a live pig. Called myoblasts, these cells are programmed to grow into muscle and repair damage in animals.

The cells were then incubated in a solution containing nutrients to encourage them to multiply indefinitely. This nutritious “broth” is derived from the blood products of animal foetuses, although the intention is to come up with a synthetic solution.

The result was sticky muscle tissue that requires exercise, like human muscles, to turn it into a tougher steak-like consistency.

“You could take the meat from one animal and create the volume of meat previously provided by a million animals,” said Mark Post, professor of physiology at Eindhoven University, who is leading the Dutch government-funded research.

Post and his colleagues have so far managed to develop a soggy form of pork and are seeking to improve its texture. “What we have at the moment is rather like wasted muscle tissue,” Post said.

“We need to find ways of improving it by training it and stretching it, but we will get there. This product will be good for the environment and will reduce animal suffering. If it feels and tastes like meat, people will buy it.”

At present there is a question mark over the taste as laboratory rules prevent the scientists eating the fruits of their labour.

The Dutch experiments follow the creation of “fish fillets” derived from goldfish muscle cells in New York and pave the way for laboratory-grown chicken, beef and lamb.

The project, which is backed by a sausage manufacturer and has received £2m from the Dutch government, is seeking additional public funds to improve the technology.

Global meat and dairy product consumption is expected to double by 2050, according to the United Nations. This could have an unprecedented impact on climate change because the warming effect on the atmosphere of methane, a digestive by-product from farm animals, is 23 times greater than that of carbon dioxide. The UN has attributed 18% of the world’s greenhouse gases to livestock.

The Vegetarian Society reacted cautiously yesterday, saying: “The big question is how could you guarantee you were eating artificial flesh rather than flesh from an animal that had been slaughtered. It would be very difficult to label and identify in a way that people would trust.” Peta, the animal rights group, said: “As far as we’re concerned, if meat is no longer a piece of a dead animal there’s no ethical objection.”

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The Seven Trumpets Part III: The Fourth Trumpet and the Race to 538 AD

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-12-01T04:31:00Z

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Salmonella still prevalent in Chicken

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-12-01T03:39:00Z

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The Seven Trumpets Part II: The Second & Third Trumpets

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-11-15T20:39:00Z

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Will Gay Marriage Pit Church Against Church?

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-11-11T03:13:00Z

By Michael A. Lindenberger Sunday, Apr. 26, 2009

The fight over gay marriage may be far from over, but already some conservative Christian leaders are looking beyond the courtroom dramas and the legislative infighting. The trouble they see is not just an America where general support for gay marriage will have driven a wedge between churches and the world, but between churches themselves.

"More than anything else, these developments may signal the fact that those who, on biblical grounds, are led by conscience to reject same-sex marriage, really will be exposed as a moral minority," the Rev. Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and a staunch defender of traditional definition of marriage, told TIME recently. "If so, it will expose a great divide over the authority of the Bible among many Christian churches and denominations — perhaps in a way exceeding any other issue." (Check out the story "What If You're on the Gay 'Enemies List.'")

Ever since Jesus told followers to "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's," preachers have been warning about a clash between "the world" and "the church." But now Mohler is predicting something more, a clash between churches themselves. (Most recently, the Anglican Communion has been paralyzed by debate over the consecration of gay bishops.) Writing on Thursday morning in his personal blog, Mohler laid out his thoughts more clearly still. "No issue defines our current cultural crisis as clearly as homosexuality. Some churches and denominations have capitulated to the demands of the homosexual rights movement, and now accept homosexuality as a fully valid lifestyle," he wrote. "Other denominations are tottering on the brink, and without a massive conservative resistance, they are almost certain to abandon biblical truth and bless what the Bible condemns. Within a few short years, a major dividing line has become evident — with those churches endorsing homosexuality on one side, and those stubbornly resisting the cultural tide on the other." (Read the story "A Gay Marriage Solution: End Marriage?")

Mohler's view is, to a certain extent, shared by Joseph E. Kurtz, Archbishop of Louisville, who leads an ad hoc panel of U.S. Catholic bishops set up to fight gay marriage. He too sees a potential future when a greater acceptance of homosexuality leads to pressure on churches to conform, and even to change their teachings. "There are grave threats that decisions by the courts, legislative actions or regulations could erode religious freedom," Kurtz tells TIME. "With regard to marriage, this implicates the right of Catholics to practice our beliefs. Here we are talking about the bedrock of society, it's not just a belief, it's written on the hearts of every human person."

Unlike the Baptist's stark outlook, however, Kurtz is more optimistic that the fight to preserve a traditional definition of marriage is not doomed — and is actively forming alliances and organizing to shore up the one-man-and-one-woman concept of matrimony. He sent a letter last fall to Thomas Monson, president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, praising Mormon support for Prop 8, the ballot-initiative in California that made gay marriage unconstitutional. That state's Supreme Court is expected to rule on the validity of the amendment soon.

Kurtz concedes there have been wins for supporters of gay marriage lately, but last November's statewide votes against gay marriage in California, Arizona and Florida buoyed him. "It's hard for any of us to have a crystal ball to know our culture society will move," says Kurtz. "The Catholic Church will certainly respond with a commitment to truth and love. ... November is not all that long ago, and I still believe that getting out the message about marriage, with a commitment to both truth and love, will succeed. In upholding the traditional definition of marriage, there is not a desire to punish or hurt anyone. We want to do a better job of communicating our concern for all, for both those who agree, and disagree."

Mohler sees the true church as a body comprised of believers who refuse to give ground on gay marriage. So does the Catholic Church, which has shown no willingness to change its own teachings, rooted as they often are in centuries of tradition. But, except for the November referendums, solidarity among fellow-thinkers has not borne much fruit. And a recent swarm of dire ads warning of a "gathering storm" of gay rights mostly backfired. "Those advocates want to change the way I think," a woman says in one of the most-viewed commercials. Another adds, "I will have no choice." And another warns that she will soon be faced with a choice between "my job and my faith." The ads prompted hundreds of thousands of views on Youtube.com, but they mainly served to show how far removed their creators were from the zeitgeist. The Colbert Report mocked the ads, and countless parodies have sprung up across the Internet at the expense of the ads' grave-faced actors.

So while both men are calling for courage and compassion among their flocks, it's not clear yet whether their message that homosexuals are sinners by definition is resonating beyond their staunchest supporters. Of course, that may be just fine with both men, who see in the future a kind of purifying ordeal that will sort out the true church from the others.

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Pope invites Tony Blair to Vatican summit to discuss Church's fears that politics is losing its religion

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-11-09T03:14:00Z

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Catholic convert Tony Blair is among several world leaders being invited to attend a top level summit with Pope Benedict XVI to discuss the role of the Church in politics.

The two-day summit will be held at the Vatican and will include other Catholic politicians from all over the world, including German chancellor Angela Merkel, U.S. vice president Joe Biden, former Spanish PM Jose Maria Aznar, and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

Church officials have been quietly working on the conference, which will be called 'Witnesses of Christ in the Political Community', for several months.

Items to be discussed include the family, right to life, Christian roots, education and bio-ethics.

Vatican sources said that Pope Benedict XVI was becoming 'increasingly concerned' at how Christian values were being eroded because of various world governments introducing legislation against Catholic teaching.

During his time in office Mr Blair chose to remain a member of the Church of England after spin doctor Alistair Campbell famously warned him: 'We don't do religion.'

Some Labour policies were at odds with the Catholic Church and Mr Blair even incurred the wrath of the late Pope John Paul II by refusing to back down over the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The former Prime Minister famously converted to Catholicism after he left Downing Street in 2007.

He has met current Pope Benedict XVI and he has also set up The Tony Blair Faith Foundation. Two months ago he told the Communion and Liberation Committee in Rimini, Italy, that switching to Catholicism was like 'coming home' and is now 'where my heart is.'

Vatican sources said the timing of the meeting would be pushed forward to early next year given the decision earlier this week by the European Court of Human Rights that Italy should remove crucifixes from classrooms.

A senior Vatican official said: 'There is growing alarm within the Vatican and especially the Holy Father that not enough prominence is being given to basic Christian and family values by governments.

'This has been further increased by this week's ruling by the European Court of Human rights and the display of crucifixes in Italian classrooms - it is outrageous that such an institution could interfere in the cultural heritage of Italy in such a way.'

The landmark decision caused outrage amongst Italian politicians and was also slammed by the Vatican who described it as 'wrong, short sighted and regretful.'

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Texas churches help pave way for new Vatican plan

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-11-03T00:54:00Z

By ANGELA K. BROWN, Associated Press Writer Angela K. Brown, Associated Press Writer – Sat Oct 31, 3:13 pm ET

ARLINGTON, Texas – At Saint Mary the Virgin Catholic Church, the 75-year-old priest is married, members sing from an Episcopalian hymnal and parishioners kneel at the altar to receive Communion.

Years ago, the Texas parish and a handful of other conservative Episcopal churches in the U.S. decided to become Roman Catholic. Though they were confirmed by the Vatican, they were still allowed to practice some of their Anglican traditions, including having married priests.

Now, these churches may have helped pave the way for Anglicans worldwide, or Episcopalians as they are known in the U.S., to become Catholic under a new Vatican plan created to make it easier for such conversions. The surprise move revealed in October is designed to entice traditionalists opposed to women priests, openly gay clergy and blessing of same-sex unions.

The Rev. Allan Hawkins, who leads Saint Mary the Virgin church outside of Dallas, said the Vatican's decision could start unifying the Catholic and Anglican churches after a centuries-old rift.

"I didn't think I would live to see this day," Hawkins said during a recent Sunday Mass.

Saint Mary the Virgin is one of three churches in Texas to become Catholic after the Vatican's 1980 approval of the "Anglican use" provision, which allowed U.S. churches to convert on a case-by-case basis but also retain their traditions and identity.

The small church 20 miles west of Dallas made the switch in 1994 after members decided to leave the Episcopal church because they felt it was going against Biblical teachings when it ordained women as bishops and accepted gay priests.

Saint Mary the Virgin stuck to many of its Anglican roots, such as offering a more traditional way of receiving Communion that includes kneeling instead of standing. But in other ways, it operates the same as Catholic parishes.

"We didn't join to be completely different," said Giles Hawkins, 42, the priest's son and parish member.

The new effort by Pope Benedict XVI to make it easier for Anglicans worldwide to convert to Catholicism is considered part of his overall aim of unifying the church and putting a highly conservative stamp on it.

The decision was reached in secret by a small group of Vatican officials, and the spiritual leader of the global Anglican church was not consulted about the change and was informed only hours before the announcement.

The Vatican and Anglican leaders have been in talks for decades over how to possibly reunite since Anglicans split with Rome in 1534 when English King Henry VIII was refused a marriage annulment. But the Vatican move could be considered as a signal that the ecumenical talks' ultimate goal is converting Anglicans to Catholicism.

"Christ's will for his church is that it's one," Hawkins said. "As Anglicans, our background is with the church (in Rome), and we didn't create that division. I would also like to see Baptists, Methodists and Presbyterians unite as well."

However, no one expects a large number of Anglo-Catholic parishes to be created in the U.S. The decision was prompted mainly by Anglo-Catholics in England and the Traditional Anglican Communion, a 77-million strong organization led by an Australian archbishop.

Although details have not been finalized, the U.S. bishops are expected to create the equivalent of a nationwide diocese with one leader to oversee Anglo-Catholic parishes. Currently, each parish answers to a local Catholic bishop.

When San Antonio's Our Lady of the Atonement Catholic Church converted to Catholicism in 1983, it was the first parish to do so under Rome's new provision. At the time, it was a group of 18 people who had left several Episcopal churches and wanted to become a Catholic church, said the Rev. Christopher Phillips, the parish priest. It has since grown to 500 families.

"But being a married priest has never been an issue. When I'm with other priests, they always ask about my family. I've been accepted as a Catholic priest because that's what I am," Phillips said.

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Blair for President

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-10-27T00:53:00Z

By Denis MacShane | NEWSWEEK

Published Oct 24, 2009

From the magazine issue dated Nov 2, 2009

Like his mentor Bill Clinton, tony Blair is poised to become the comeback kid of his generation. Europe's chattering class is currently buzzing with speculation that the former British prime minister is about to emerge from semiretirement to become president of the European Union Council. The new post, created by the Lisbon Treaty, will preside over meetings of Europe's elected leaders, where all the EU's real decisions get made. Assuming the treaty gets ratified—Czech President Václav Klaus is the last holdout—Europe's 27 prime ministers, presidents, and chancellors will soon have to pick a person to speak in their name. And the odds favor Blair.

This is not a traditional contest for a big international job. Everyone knows Blair's qualities and faults. But almost everyone also recognizes that he can put Europe on the world map in a way that no Brussels Eurocrat has ever managed.

That doesn't guarantee his chances, however. Blair insists he's not formally a candidate for a post that, after all, doesn't even exist yet (it's waiting for the Lisbon Treaty to come into force). But EU leaders are planning a mid-November conclave to select someone nonetheless, and also to fill the new post of EU foreign minister (or high representative, as the job will be called in EU jargon). Plenty of horse trading will ensue. But if Europe chooses a bland, barely known former national leader for its first true president, the continent and the rest of the world will roll over in boredom and promptly ignore him or her. Thus Gordon Brown (privately) and Silvio Berlusconi (publicly) are vigorously pushing Blair forward, even as a furious anti-Blair campaign has gotten underway.

A Stop Blair Web site has already collected 38,000 signatures, and Britain's Tories are leading the charge to block him. This Conservative opposition is somewhat surprising, for when Blair's name was first floated this summer, party leader David Cameron let it be known he was comfortable with the prospect. Blair is a fierce defender of London's battered financial sector and a strong defender of the Atlantic alliance—two causes dear to the Conservatives' hearts. So Tory Tony should present no problems for a putative Prime Minister Cameron. Like-minded European leaders, such as the center-right Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel, also support him. The problem seems to be with Cameron's No. 2, William Hague, who leads the popular anti-EU faction in the Conservative Party and has spent recent weeks denouncing the prospect of a President Blair. Hague fears his selection would mean the continuation of Labourism by other means. Hague even convened a meeting of EU ambassadors in London recently to lecture them on why Blair shouldn't be supported.

Hague isn't alone in his animosity: Blair's right-wing, Europhobic opposition has found strange bedfellows on Europe's anti-American left, which cannot forgive him for being one of the architects of the Iraq War. Europe's socialists also resent him for winning three elections by explicitly rejecting Old Labour's socialist statist shibboleths—principles to which many other left-wing parties remain loyal.

Rounding out the anti-Tony coalition are old European grandees like former French president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, who craves the post for himself, and Romano Prodi, Italy's ex–prime minister and ex-president of the EU Commission. These two have begun huffing and puffing that Blair shouldn't be allowed to be president because Britain doesn't even use the euro or participate in the Schengen zone, which allows EU citizens to drive across frontiers without passport checks.

They have a point; Britain has long stood somewhat apart. But Blair also did the EU a favor by never holding a referendum on the euro in the United Kingdom, for, as in Sweden, that vote would have resulted in a resounding no, and such outcomes have set back the cause of European integration in the past. Though it's true that Britain does perform modest checks on EU citizens at its airports, once inside the country they actually find it much easier to get jobs, rent homes, and enjoy the free National Health Service than is the case in most other EU states. So Blair's European credentials are solid. If he seemed to spurn the Union in trivial ways, it's worth pointing out that Britain under him was the second-biggest net contributor to the EU budget—no small matter.

Whatever the merits of his candidacy, all this sound and fury may ultimately count for little, for the choice of president will be made by Merkel, Sarkozy, and their fellow leaders, and likely on a highly personal basis. Other names are being kicked about, but those candidates all have drawbacks: they either also signed on to the Iraq invasion, or they're now on the Kremlin's payroll, or they lack Blair's fluent French, which counts for a lot in Southern Europe, where it often functions as a second language. Blair, moreover, remains popular in Eastern Europe as the champion of EU and NATO expansion.

A bigger worry comes from the undefined nature of the job. Unlike the EU foreign minister, who will have an €8 billion budget and offices in most capitals but little room for independent policymaking, the post of EU president will be shaped by the first person who holds it. Here Blair offers a big advantage: he'll bring with him the vision thing that Europe often lacks. Limiting himself to just a few major interventions a year, Blair could speak for Europe at a global level. He could use the post as a bully pulpit and help the EU regain the enthusiasm that was generated 25 years ago when Jacques Delors worked with Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand to create the single market, launch the euro, and thus transform the old, cozy European Economic Community into something bigger and much more meaningful.

The biggest question is probably for Blair himself: does he really want to quit the lecture circuit, where he can currently earn $100,000 for a single speech? Or his job trying to promote economic development for the Palestinians? The answer is likely yes. Blair has spent his whole life in public service, turning down more lucrative options as a young man to spend years in opposition before finally winning power. Now openly a Catholic, he also seems impelled by a moral sense of duty, even if his particular choices sometimes outrage other moralists. Contrary to the attacks of his leftist critics, Blair actually increased social justice in Britain during his terms as prime minister with his tax-and-spend policies. His passion for Europe also informed his time in office, even if he never managed to sell the EU to the British public. Meanwhile, Blair has watched his friend Bill Clinton fade into policy irrelevance after stepping down. Now Blair has a rare chance to avoid that fate, and he seems sure to take it—so long as European leaders cooperate by thinking big instead of acting small. To make the job work, Europe's elected leaders are also going to have to share the limelight. But if anyone can persuade them to, it's President Blair.

MacShane is a Labour M.P., a former U.K. minister for Europe, and the author, most recently, of Globalising Hatred: The New Antisemitism.

Find this article at http://www.newsweek.com/id/219422

Economics Versus Extremism

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-10-27T00:49:00Z

By Vali Nasr | NEWSWEEK

Published Oct 24, 2009

From the magazine issue dated Nov 2, 2009

Eight years after 9/11, many in the West still think of Islam as a threat. Islamic extremists are seen as brainwashed robots, and the rest of Muslims as only a step behind in their blind acceptance of what their leaders preach. But this view misses a larger point: Islamic extremism is the direct result not of a problem with doctrine but of sclerotic, overregulated economies that stifle entrepreneurship; isolate people from the global economy; and deprive them of jobs, services, and hope for a brighter future. And there is a glimmer of good news: all this can change. Indeed, it already is. Recent years have seen the tentative emergence of a middle class throughout the Muslim world. And this capitalist trend, if encouraged by the West, offers the single best hope for combating Islamic extremism worldwide.

Consider the problem first. For too long, standards of living have been falling in many parts of the Muslim world. Populations are getting younger, putting more pressure on weak growth rates. By one estimate, the Arab world alone will have to create 100 million new jobs by 2020 to meet the surging demand, and the prospects don't look good. Unemployment is growing, and those lucky enough to have jobs must endure menial, demeaning work. Social mobility is too rare, and extremism thrives on anger and hopelessness. Radical Islam promises despondent youngsters the kind of meaning they can't find in their daily lives. As one Pakistani father of a would-be jihadi told me recently, "Let [my son] be martyred. There is nothing for him here. He has no future. At least if he dies in jihad he will bring honor to his family."

Underneath this gloom, however, one can glimpse sparks of change. Economic reform in Turkey, Dubai, and Malaysia, and even the modest loosening of government control in places such as Egypt, the West Bank, and Pakistan have begun allowing space—though rarely enough space—for commerce and global trade. Local entrepreneurs and businessmen have begun to take advantage of these changes.

The result is the birth of a small but growing middle class. In the 1960s, on average no more than a third of the populations of large Muslim countries such as Turkey, Iran, or Pakistan lived in cities, and by most estimates no more than 6 percent of the populations counted as middle class. Today, around two thirds of the populations of those countries live in urban areas, and on average, twice as many count as middle class. If you define the group as those who have a regular income and formal employment with a steady salary and benefits, and who can afford to devote a third of their income to discretionary spending, the middle class now amounts to around 15 percent of the population of Pakistan and twice that in Turkey. The numbers are even higher if you broaden the definition to include those who have adopted modern family values, especially the desire to have fewer children and to invest in their advancement. One estimate puts as many as 60 percent of Iranians in, or ready to enter, that group.

The signs of this emerging middle class and the capitalist surge it's helping to drive can be found everywhere in the Muslim world, even war-torn Beirut and fundamentalist Tehran. While the overall picture in these countries looks grim, an economic renaissance has tentatively begun. Between 2002 and 2008, real GDP in the Middle East and North Africa grew by 3.7 percent, up from 3 percent in the previous decade.

This matters for one key reason: middle-class capitalists represent the best hope for the advancement of their societies—and the most potent weapon for combating extremism. While it's true that the 9/11 attackers were middle class (as have been many other terrorists), what matters is whether or not the middle class as a whole supports extremism. The problem in the Muslim world until now has been that the tiny middle class has had few ties to free markets and has depended on state salaries and entitlements. The growth of local capitalism—and integration with the world economy—could help change that.

Already these forces are having an impact. The recent election controversy in Iran can be seen as a struggle by its rising middle class to protect its economic interests against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a populist who has sought to increase state domination of the economy. Turkey, meanwhile, has already arrived at the future; it is a successful Muslim democracy fully integrated into the global economy.

The same pattern will replicate itself elsewhere. One and a half billion consumers have clout, and as they move up the economic ladder, they demand a blending of traditional and moderate Islam with the opportunities and material benefits of liberal capitalism. They want distinctly Islamic goods: not just halal food and headscarves, but Islamic housing, haute couture, banking, education, entertainment, media, and consumer goods.

This demand has already created waves in global markets, best demonstrated by the boom in Islamic finance (financial services that abide by Islamic rules forbidding the collection and payment of interest). The growth of such services is tying the Muslim world more closely to the global economy. Although it remains a niche market—there are currently some 300 Islamic banks and investment firms operating in more than 75 countries, overseeing banking services totaling close to $500 billion and an Islamic bond market worth $82 billion, a mere one 10th of 1 percent of the global bond market—some estimate that the assets of this sector will grow to as much as $4 trillion by 2015. This trend might look, at first glance, like an attempt to defy the global economy. But what it really represents is an attempt to join it on terms that make sense to Muslims, that combine capitalism with piety.

Some members of this new middle class are the children of the old bureaucracy, but a far larger percentage comes from the provinces and from lower social classes. These sons and daughters of the rural poor have made the jump to the middle class by accepting the requirements of modern economics. Many are devout, but their wealth and aspirations put them squarely at odds with extremism. After all, with wealth comes conspicuous consumption, liberal social and political values, and a vested interest in engaging the world. This does not mean there will be no more middle-class Muslim terrorists. But terrorism as a whole will stop resonating with a truly integrated Muslim middle class—a process similar to what occurred in Latin America in the 1990s. Those with a stake in commerce and trade will not subscribe to destructive ideas that endanger their futures. The alienation and rage many Muslims feel toward the West is a product of historical grievances but has been great-ly aggravated by their exclusion from the global economy. Were that to change, many Muslims would begin looking forward rather than backward. The rise of this "critical middle" is a trend every bit as powerful and important as extremism. And it holds the key to changing the hearts and minds of the Muslim world once and for all.

It's too soon to say whether Muslim businessmen in Lahore, Tehran, or Cairo will lead a full-fledged capitalist revolution akin to that spearheaded by Protestant burghers in Holland four centuries ago. But European history does suggest that only such actors and the robust breed of capitalism they embrace have a chance of truly modernizing the Muslim world. The modern capitalist West was invented by children of the Reformation, but it was not their puritanical faith that transformed things. It was, rather, their newfound belief in trade and commerce, which took hold in Europe's backwaters like Scotland and gave birth to Adam Smith and David Hume. Similarly today, the agents who will vanquish Muslim extremism will not be secular dictators, enlightened clerics, or liberal reformers but entrepreneurs and businessmen.

This truth has obvious implications for Western governments. Values gain currency when they serve the economic and social interests of the people, and they shape states' behavior when those who hold them gain power. If moderate, capitalist values have not yet been fully embraced in Muslim lands, that's not because of the fundamental nature of Islam, but because the commercial class leading the process is still too small. Helping that bourgeoisie to grow and dominate its societies is the best way of making sure the right values take root.

So what should Washington and its allies do? The first answer is trade. The West has committed much in blood and treasure to protecting its interests in the greater Middle East, yet it does very little real business with the region (apart from Turkey). If you don't count oil and weapons sales, U.S. trade with the whole Arab world amounts to barely a fraction of its trade with Latin America, Eastern Europe, or India. The United States now has free-trade deals with Jordan and Morocco, and Europe is considering an economic partnership with the Arab countries of the Mediterranean rim. These are positive steps, but there are still far too few Arab-made goods on Western shelves.

Trying to reform someone else's religion is a fool's game, and when it comes to nation building, the West's record is spotty. But if there is one thing America and its allies are good at, it is unleashing the transformative power of business. To encourage the middle-class Muslim revolution, therefore, the West should help free Muslim economies from the clutches of state control. Local governments must be pressured to submit to the rule of law, to accept constitutional checks and balances, to open their economies to direct foreign investment, trade, and the free flow of goods and resources, and to reduce regulation. Developed countries should push for fewer and smaller state-run enterprises, reduced public sectors, and fewer people on government payrolls. The West, in return, should open its markets to products from the Muslim world and ensure that the money it pours into the region goes to support the right kind of change.

This won't turn the tide in just a few years. The Muslim world suffers from too many problems. But change is possible, so long as the rich world builds strong ties with the "critical middle" and helps it prosper. The great historical process that changed the West has just begun in the greater Middle East. The United States and Europe must help it along, to ensure that they're standing on the right side of history as it evolves.

Nasr is a professor of international politics at Tufts University and the author of the forthcoming Forces of Fortune: The Rise of a New Muslim Middle Class and What it Means for Our World, From Which This Article Was Adapted.

Find this article at http://www.newsweek.com/id/219341

New World Order

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-10-27T00:46:00Z

By Justin Fox

In recent weeks, the world has been politely standing by and watching how things play out with the fiscal stimulus and latest bank-bailout plans in Washington. Yes, there's been some grumbling overseas about "buy American" provisions in the stimulus bill, but for the most part, officials elsewhere don't want to step on the toes of a new President to whom they are favorably disposed. They also don't want to endanger legislation that they hope will help jump-start the global economy.

Just wait a couple of months, though. Politicians from Beijing to Berlin to Brasília see the current crisis as the product of a messed-up global financial infrastructure dominated by the U.S., and they will soon be pushing for big changes--whether Americans like them or not.

All this will begin to gel on April 2, when the newish international organization known as the G-20--the leaders of 19 of the world's biggest national economies, plus the European Union--meets in London. An unofficial meeting has already taken place, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where G-20 officials (with the conspicuous exception of those from the U.S.) made speeches, conversed in the halls and gave a sense of the direction in which the world outside the U.S. wants to head. (Read TIME's special report on Davos 2009.)

The global discussion of the financial crisis is strikingly different from the one in the U.S. Here there's still something of a debate over whether the mess is the result of too much government interference in the housing market or too little government regulation of financial markets. In the rest of the world, that's no debate: inadequate and inconsistent financial regulation is uniformly blamed. What's more, a consensus seems to have emerged among the world's finance ministers and central-bank bosses that the chief underlying cause of the crisis was an unbalanced and out-of-control system of global capital flows in which some big-spender countries (namely the U.S.) ran up huge debts while big savers (China and India, for example) hoarded surpluses.

On the regulatory front, the path to a new global approach is pretty clear. Last spring the leaders of the G-7, a club of wealthy nations, agreed to create a "college of supervisors" to more closely coordinate regulation of multinational banks. The Group of Thirty, an influential organization of current and former central bankers and financial regulators, recommended in January that "systematically significant" financial institutions (those that are too big to fail) be identified in advance and subjected to higher capital requirements and tougher regulation. (See who's to blame for the financial crisis.)

Yet regulators around the world were already jointly setting bank-capital standards before the current crisis hit. A lot of good that did us. So there is also much talk about the need for a new architecture--"a new Bretton Woods" was a phrase that echoed around Davos--to rein in global financial flows.

Bretton Woods is the mountain resort in New Hampshire where in 1944 the Allied nations met--with the U.S. calling almost all the shots--to plan a postwar financial system. The Bretton Woods creations included the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and a quarter-century of fixed exchange rates built around a U.S. dollar that was linked to gold. The fixed exchange rates and gold standard unraveled in the 1970s, and ever since we've had a system in which the IMF occasionally steps in to help countries in currency crises (usually imposing harsh terms in the process) but exercises no real control over the global financial system.

After the emerging-market currency collapses of the late 1990s, in which IMF aid wasn't much help, the lesson that emerging economies such as China and India took was that they needed to build up gigantic reserves of U.S. dollars to protect their currencies. To build those reserves, they ran big trade surpluses, which were in turn enabled mainly by record trade deficits in the U.S., which were in turn enabled by massive borrowing from around the world. It was an extremely unbalanced financial ballet, and it has now come crashing to the ground.

In the view of many outside the U.S. (and some within), the only way to limit such excesses is through a bigger, more powerful IMF that can act as a central bank to the world--and knock heads when needed. While everybody agrees that this new IMF needs to be less dominated by the U.S. and Western Europe, things get controversial as soon as you go past voting rights. Should capital flows be restricted? Should there be limits on trade deficits and surpluses? Should the IMF be able to order around even the U.S.? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, global capitalism will have entered a new and dramatically less freewheeling era.

To read Justin Fox's daily take on business and the economy, go to time.com/curiouscapitalist

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We Need a Bank Of the World

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-10-27T00:44:00Z

The financial crisis is global, and only an international central bank can deal with it.

By Jeffrey E. Garten | NEWSWEEK

Published Oct 25, 2008

From the magazine issue dated Nov 3, 2008

If George W. Bush's upcoming global summit on how to fix the world's broken financial system—an event proposed by several European presidents and prime ministers—is to be a serious effort, the leaders should begin laying the groundwork for establishing a global central bank.

The idea of such an institution would have been a political nonstarter before the current debacle. The crises of the last several decades—the Latin American debt meltdown in the early 1980s, the stock-market crash in 1987, the savings and loan collapse of the early 1990s, the Asian financial blowup of the late

1990s, the Internet-stock collapse earlier in this decade—did not involve the extent of global linkages among financial institutions or the mind-boggling consequences of complex securities that we are seeing today. In none of these previous blowups did the global credit system shut down, as it did in recent weeks; in none did governments in both the industrialized and developing world intervene so massively, coming close to nationalizing the entire global banking system.

And in none was it so clear that there is no effective governing authority at the center of global finance. There was a time when the U.S. Federal Reserve played this role, as the prime financial institution of the world's most powerful economy, overseeing the one global currency. But with the growth of capital markets, the rise of currencies like the euro and the emergence of powerful players such as China, the shift of wealth to Asia and the Persian Gulf and, of course, the deep-seated problems in the American economy itself, the Fed no longer has the capability to lead singlehandedly.

After World War II, the IMF was designed to be a central financial institution, too. But over the decades it has had less and less influence on the rich industrialized nations. Its credibility with Asia and Latin America has also waned. It is still involved in bailouts for countries such as Iceland and Pakistan, but its once central role in protecting global stability is clearly over. And most important, its political legitimacy is deeply flawed, because its management structure reflects the 1950s, with Belgium having more voting power than China.

In the future, a global central bank is needed to oversee the rudderless global financial system. There are a number of critical functions it could perform.

It could be the lead regulator of big global financial institutions, such as Citigroup or Deutsche Bank, whose activities spill across borders. It could monitor risks that are building in the global market and create an early-warning system that alerts banks and national regulators that trouble is coming, and pushes them to modify their policies.

It could act as a bankruptcy court when big global banks that operate in multiple countries need to be restructured. It could oversee not just the big commercial banks, such as Mitsubishi UFJ, but also the "alternative" financial system that has developed in recent years, consisting of hedge funds, private-equity groups and sovereign wealth funds—all of which are now substantially unregulated.

A new institution could have influence over key exchange rates, and might lead a new monetary conference to realign the dollar and the yuan, for example, for one of its first missions would be to deal with the great financial imbalances that hang like a sword over the world economy.

A global central bank would not eliminate the need for the Federal Reserve or other national central banks, which will still have frontline responsibility for sound regulatory policies and monetary stability in their respective countries. But it would have heavy influence over them when it comes to following policies that are compatible with global growth and financial stability. For example, it would work with key countries to better coordinate national stimulus programs when the world enters a recession, as is happening now, so that the cumulative impact of the various national efforts do not so dramatically overshoot that they plant the seeds for a crisis of global inflation. This is a big threat as government spending everywhere goes into overdrive.

The IMF could continue to exist, but its board would have to be restructured, its bailout role for smaller nations carefully defined, and its directions—including the severity of the conditions it imposes on borrowers—would have to come from the new central bank.

To give it legitimacy, a global central bank would have to be governed in light of political realities. That means that its board would include not only the top financial officials of the United States, the U.K., the euro zone and Japan, but also China, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, South Africa and perhaps a few others.

If a global central bank had existed before today's financial crisis, it could have sounded a shrill warning about irresponsible financial transactions much earlier; and if it had been set up with the enforcement teeth it deserves, it would have had the clout to demand, perhaps as early as 2005, that banks and other financial institutions start building reserves when times were booming, rather than allow them to maintain lower reserves precisely because profits were soaring. It would have seen that financial institutions were accumulating debt that was 30 times their capital and imposed—or caused national central banks to impose—more sober leverage ratios.

A global central bank worth its salt would have reined in not just commercial banks but also loosely-regulated investment banks, because all such institutions would have been obligated to adhere to the global banks' regulatory standards or else be blacklisted in global markets. It would have intervened to deal with Lehman Brothers and AIG, both with truly global reach, and thereby put the burden not just on American taxpayers but also taxpayers of other countries who used these institutions' services.

Had it existed, a global central bank would have acted without the air of panic that has been exhibited by national central banks and finance ministries in this meltdown. Ideally, it would have gathered its governing board well in advance of a financial blowup to execute a coordinated rescue and global-stimulus plan, part of what should be its ongoing role of preparing for crises.

It would be hard to overestimate the political pushback that any official proposal for a global central bank would draw from various constituencies, most especially within the United States. Among their many charges, critics will protest the establishment of "world government." But we have a World Trade Organization with legally binding powers over trade disputes. We have a World Health Organization for communicable disease with the ability to quarantine entire countries. And a World Court functions today that has considerable legal and moral clout.

No one should want too much globally centralized oversight. But the world's gathering misery shows that too little leadership from the center can be equally dangerous. The November summit itself won't solve anything, but if it gave instructions to finance ministers and central bankers to explore what a new central bank could do, with a deadline to come back with concrete ideas shortly after a new U.S. president is inaugurated, it will have made real progress on one of the great problems of our times.

Garten is the Juan Trippe Professor of international trade and finance at the Yale School of Management.

Find this article at http://www.newsweek.com/id/165772

Senior Anglican bishop reveals he is ready to convert to Roman Catholicism

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-10-24T23:27:00Z

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The Rt Rev John Hind, the Bishop of Chichester, has announced he is considering becoming a Roman Catholic in a move that could spark an exodus of clergy.

By Jonathan Wynne-Jones, Religious Affairs Correspondent
Published: 9:50PM BST 24 Oct 2009

Bishop Hind said he would be "happy" to be reordained as a Catholic priest and said that divisions in Anglicanism could make it impossible to stay in the church.

He is the most senior Anglican to admit that he is prepared to accept the offer from the Pope, who shocked the Church of England last week when he paved the way for clergy to convert to Catholicism in large numbers.

In a further blow to the Archbishop of Canterbury's hopes of preventing the Anglican Communion from disintegrating, other bishops have cast doubt over its survival.

The Rt Rev John Broadhurst, the Bishop of Fulham, even claimed that "the Anglican experiment is over". He said it has been shown to be powerless to cope with the crises over gays and women bishops.

In one of the most significant developments since the Reformation, the Pope last week announced that a new structure would be set up to allow disaffected Anglicans to enter full communion with Rome, while maintaining parts of their Protestant heritage.

The move comes after secret talks between the Vatican and a group of senior Anglican bishops. Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was not informed of the meetings and his advisers even denied that they had taken place when the Sunday Telegraph broke the story last year.

Now Bishop Hind, the most senior traditionalist in the Church of England, has confirmed that he is willing to sacrifice his salary and palace residence to defect to the Catholic Church.

"This is a remarkable new step from the Vatican," he said. "At long last there are some choices for Catholics in the Church of England. I'd be happy to be reordained into the Catholic Church."

While the bishop stressed that this would depend on his previous ministry being recognised, he said that the divisions in the Anglican Communion could make it impossible to stay.

"How can the Church exist if bishops are not in full communion with each other," he said.

Conservative archbishops and bishops have broken ties with their liberal counterparts following the US Episcopal Church's consecration of Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop.

Bishop Broadhurst said that the Pope has made his offer in response to the pleas of Anglicans who despair at the disintegration of their Church.

"Anglicanism has become a joke because it has singularly failed to deal with any of its contentious issues," said the bishop, who is chairman of Forward in Faith, the Anglo-Catholic network that represents around 1,000 traditionalist priests.

"There is widespread dissent across the [Anglican] Communion. We are divided in major ways on major issues and the Communion has unravelled.

"I believed in the Church I joined, but it has been revealed to have no doctrine of its own.

"I personally think it has gone past the point of no return. The Anglican experiment is over."

The Rt Rev Martyn Jarrett, the Bishop of Beverley, also said there were questions over the church's survival, adding that the Church of England has changed too dramatically for some traditionalists.

"They are beginning to reflect that the theological position of the Church isn't what they believe," he said.

"The offer from the Vatican is momentous and I felt a great sense of gratitude that the Roman Catholic Church is thinking about the position of traditionalist Anglicans."

Clergy at the Forward in Faith conference, which met in Westminster yesterday, expressed relief that the Pope had provided them with an escape route.

Fr Ed Tomlinson, vicar of St Barnabas, Tunbridge Wells, said that he would be following the lead of Bishop Hind.

"The ship of Anglicanism seems to be going down," he said. "We should be grateful that a lifeboat has been sent.

"I shall be seeking to move to Rome. To stay in the Church of England would be suicide."

Hundreds of traditionalist clergy could join the exodus, though most are waiting for the exact details of the new apostolic constitution to be published.

Battles lie ahead over whether priests who leave to join the Catholic Church will be allowed to take their churches with them, but some bishops have already warned against property seizure.

Dr Williams was only informed of the details of the Pope's decree last weekend and is understood to have been "implacably opposed" to the move.

Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, said he was "appalled" that his successor was given such short notice and was excluded from discussions on the issue.

The Rt Rev Gregory Cameron, Bishop of St Asaph and a close colleague of Dr Williams, said that the archbishop was likely to be saddened by the developments.

"Rowan has worked very hard for unity both within the Anglican Communion, and with Rome, and I suspect he may feel that what has happened is little short of a betrayal, not by the Catholic Church, but by some of those in his own ranks."

"He is likely to be saddened that they felt driven to seek such a radical solution and that some of them now feel they have to go."

"Up until now, the Roman Catholic Church has been putting its weight behind Rowan, but now it is appearing to put its weight behind the conservative groups it can most easily win over."

"The danger is that they'll have every disaffected Anglican beating down the pathway to their door and asking for special treatment."

The Sunday Telegraph can disclose that the planning behind last week's announcement began in 2006, when the Pope asked the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to consider how they could invite Anglicans into the Roman Catholic fold.

He had reached out to disillusioned Anglicans three years earlier, when as head of the Congregation, the most powerful of the Vatican's departments and successor to the medieval Inquisition, he wrote a personal letter to Anglicans in America. He reassured them of the Catholic Church's support of their stand against the liberal tide.

Source

Canadian Anglicans Assure Church of Collaboration

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-10-23T03:13:00Z

CORNWALL, Ontario OCT. 21, 2009 (Zenit.org).- The primate of the Anglican Church of Canada reminded the Catholic bishops of that country that Christ wants that "we all be one."

Archbishop Fred Hiltz addressed the Plenary Assembly of Canada's episcopal conference Tuesday, the same day the Vatican announced Benedict XVI's forthcoming apostolic constitution that will facilitate the process for groups of Anglicans to join the Catholic Church.

In a brief address to the members of the conference, Archbishop Hiltz recalled how Christians are to be committed "to the realization of the will of our Lord that we all be one, as he and the Father are one."

"We now have much theological consensus to build on and to move forward together," he said, before inviting the episcopal conference to send a representative to attend the next General Synod of the Anglican Church in Canada.

He also suggested a joint meeting of Anglican and Catholic Bishops in Canada.

Source

Vatican seeks to lure disaffected Anglicans

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-10-23T03:07:00Z

VATICAN CITY – The Vatican announced Tuesday it was making it easier for Anglicans to convert to Roman Catholicism — a surprise move designed to entice traditionalists opposed to women priests, openly gay clergy and the blessing of same-sex unions.

The decision, reached in secret by a small cadre of Vatican officials, was sure to add to the problems of the 77-million-strong Anglican Communion as it seeks to deal with deep doctrinal divisions that threaten a permanent schism among its faithful.

The change means conservative Anglicans from around the world will be able to join the Catholic Church while retaining aspects of their Anglican liturgy and identity, including married priests. Until now, disaffected Anglicans had joined the church primarily on a case by case basis.

"The unity of the church does not require a uniformity that ignores cultural diversity, as the history of Christianity shows," said Cardinal William Levada, head of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in announcing the decision.

The spiritual leader of the global Anglican church, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, was not consulted about the change and was informed only hours before the announcement. He nevertheless tried to downplay the significance and said it wasn't a Vatican commentary on Anglican problems.

"It has no negative impact on the relations of the communion as a whole to the Roman Catholic Church as a whole," he said in London.

The decision could undermine decades of talks between the Vatican and Anglican leaders over how they could possibly reunite. Although Levada insisted such discussions remain a priority, the Vatican move could be taken as a signal that the ultimate goal of ecumenical talks is to convert Anglicans to Catholicism.

Still, the decision confirmed Pope Benedict XVI's design of creating a unified, tradition-minded Catholic Church — a goal he outlined at the start of his pontificate and has been steadily implementing ever since.

This drive also involved a recent move to rehabilitate four excommunicated ultra-conservative bishops, including one who denied the full extent of the Holocaust, in a bid to bring their faithful back under the Vatican's wing.

Levada made the announcement hours after briefing Williams and Catholic bishops in London about the decision. Notably, no one from the Vatican's ecumenical office on relations with Anglicans attended; Levada said he had invited representatives but they said they were all away from Rome.

Austen Ivereigh, a former adviser to the Catholic archbishop of Westminster, called the Vatican announcement historic because it allowed for the "gradual absorption into the Catholic Church of huge numbers of Anglicans," who are conservative in their theology and liturgy.

Until now, Anglicans had been allowed to join the church primarily on an individual basis. With the new provision, groups of Anglicans from around the world will be able to join new parishes headed by former Anglican prelates, who will provide spiritual guidance to Anglicans who wish to be Catholic. Called personal ordinariates, they will be established within local Catholic dioceses.

The new provision also allows married Anglican priests and even seminarians to become ordained Catholic priests — much the same way that Eastern rite priests who are in communion with Rome are allowed to be married. However, married Anglicans cannot become Catholic bishops.

A model for the future exists in the United States, where a handful of such parishes function — including three in Texas — thanks to a 1980 Vatican decision to accommodate Episcopal faithful and priests who wanted to convert. These parishes use a Vatican-approved Book of Divine Worship, based on the Book of Common Prayer, that includes Catholic and Anglican rituals, said Monsignor William Stetson, who manages the initiative.

The new entity is also modeled on Catholic military ordinariates, special units of the church established in most countries to provide spiritual care for members of the armed forces and their dependents.

In addition, within the Catholic Church there are ancient communities in the Middle East and others in Eastern Europe that follow different rites and allow married priests while remaining loyal to the pope.

The new model doesn't create a new rite, but rather an Anglicanized liturgy within the Latin rite.

Levada said Tuesday's announcement was in response to many requests that have come to the Vatican over the years from Anglicans disillusioned with the progressive bent of the Anglican Communion. Some have already left and consider themselves Catholic but have not found an official home in the 1.1-billion strong Catholic Church.

Levada declined to give exact figures, though he said 30 to 40 bishops had been in touch, accounting for a few hundred would-be converts.

One group, known as the Traditional Anglican Communion, has publicly stated its desire to join the Catholic Church. The group, which split from the Anglican Communion in 1990, says it has 400,000 members in 41 countries, although only about half are regular churchgoers.

"This is a moment of grace, perhaps even a moment of history, not because the past is undone but because the past is transformed," the group's leader, Archbishop John Hepworth said in a statement welcoming the Vatican decision.

Anglicans split with Rome in 1534 when English King Henry VIII was refused a marriage annulment.

Since then, the Anglican Communion, which includes the Episcopalian Church in the United States, has fashioned itself as a kind of big tent of fellowship with a wide variety of worship styles and theological outlooks that include Anglo-Catholics.

It's not known how many Anglicans consider themselves Anglo-Catholic. However, the biggest impact of the Vatican announcement is likely to be felt in England, where the Church of England has been involved in a bitter battle over whether female priests can become bishops. British Anglicans opposed to the ordination of women simply leave and join the Catholic Church.

The announcement is likely to have far less impact in the U.S., where many Anglo-Catholics left the Episcopal Church more than a decade ago. More recently, four theologically conservative Episcopal dioceses and dozens of individual parishes broke away and formed a rival church in North America.

Still, no one expects a sudden mass exodus out of the Anglican Communion because of the Vatican announcement.

"We're not talking floodgates," said Paul Handley, editor of the Church Times a London-based weekly that covers Anglican affairs.

"There are a significant number of people who remain loyal Anglicans who will be seriously (tried) by this," he said, adding that they may want to remain part of the Church of England but will "feel increasingly exposed if their friends start disappearing to Rome."

Some Anglo-Catholics who have not yet left the Anglican fold could choose to stay for a variety of reasons, including a desire to avoid lengthy and expensive battles over parish property. Others may oppose the ruling that married Anglicans cannot become Catholic bishops.

The Rev. Christopher Stainbrook, pastor of St. Timothy's Episcopal Church, an Anglo-Catholic parish that is part of the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth, Texas, said it was far too soon to know the implications for his parish or others like it in the U.S.

Indeed, Levada made clear that the next step — publication of the pope's Apostolic Constitution outlining the new provision — would be the start of a lengthy process of consultation with Catholic bishops around the world about how to implement the change.

Still, Stainbrook and other traditionalist Anglican groups were elated by the Vatican announcement.

While some Anglicans will want to remain in the Anglican Communion, others "will begin to form a caravan, rather like the People of Israel crossing the desert in search of the Promised Land," said two traditionalist Anglican clerics in Britain, Bishop Andrew Burnham of Ebbsfleet and Bishop Keith Newton of Richborough.

The Anglican Communion has been divided for decades over interpreting the Bible on many issues, including ordaining women. But the rift blew wide open in 2003 when the Episcopal Church consecrated the first openly gay bishop, V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire.

Williams has struggled ever since to keep the church from splitting, frustrated by moves by churches in the United States, Canada and elsewhere to bless gay relationships.

At least four conservative U.S. dioceses and dozens of individual Episcopal parishes have voted to leave the national denomination, with many affiliating themselves with like-minded Anglican leaders in Africa and elsewhere.

Source

The Penalty, The Power, The Presence

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-10-15T04:34:00Z

PM and the pope

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-10-11T18:57:00Z

The Guardian, Tuesday 17 February 2009

Article history

As a member of the Church of Scotland, Gordon Brown has no plans to convert to Catholicism like Tony Blair. But he is keen to court the pope, whose influence extends across 1.1 billion Catholics worldwide. As chancellor in 2007 he met Pope Benedict and gave him a book of sermons by his father. He used the meeting to promote a scheme to provide lifesaving vaccines to children in the developing world. Last year Brown wrote to the pontiff asking him to help the world meet the UN millennium development goals.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/feb/17/gordon-brown-pope-benedict

Treaty of Lisbon

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-10-11T18:29:00Z

Updated: Oct. 9, 2009

The Treaty of Lisbon is a blueprint for consolidating the European Union 's power and streamlining its increasingly unwieldy bureaucracy.

The treaty must be approved by all 27 member states to be enacted. It was rejected by voters in Ireland in 2008, but a second referendum on Oct. 2, 2009, supported the treaty. The Czech Republic , Poland and Germany have yet to ratify it. Defeat by a single country has the potential effect of stopping the whole thing cold.

The treaty, written after torturous meetings among all the member states, is dense and complex. But if enacted, it would give Europe its first full-time president and create a new foreign policy chief whose responsibilities would include controlling the development aid that the union distributes. The new post is intended to help give Europe a diplomatic voice on a par with that of the United States.

European leaders say they hope the treaty will reduce the nationalistic fissures that have hobbled the European Union as a policy-making body.

The treaty would also reduce the size of the European Commission , the union's executive body, rotating the seats so that each member country would have a seat in 10 out of every 15 years. And it would change the voting procedures on the European Council, made up of Europe's heads of state and government, so that fewer decisions would require unanimity.

The defeat of the treaty in Ireland in 2008, by a margin of 53.4 percent to 46.6 percent, was the result of a highly organized "no" campaign that had played to Irish voters' deepest fears about the European Union. For all its benefits, many people in Ireland and in Europe feel that the union is remote, undemocratic and ever more inclined to strip its smaller members of the right to make their own laws and decide their own futures.

After some soul-searching, the European Union decided to try again in large part because there seemed to be no alternative.

Public opinion appears to have shifted because of the economic crisis. Since Ireland joined what was then the European Community in 1973, peat bogs and grazing pastures have been plowed over to make way for gleaming semiconductor plants and tracts of suburban McMansions. But over the last year and a half, the so-called Celtic Tiger has lost its roar, as Ireland has suffered through one of the worst real estate busts of any country in the world.

With the economy continuing to function largely because of E.U. support, in the form of liquidity from the European Central Bank in Frankfurt, many voters apparently decided that thumbing their noses at their European neighbors would have been a bad idea.

While the Irish vote was a great relief to Brussels, worries grew that the real stumbling bloc could be the recalcitrant CzechRepublic. While Poland and Germany were expected to complete ratification if the Irish voted "yes," Prime Minister Jan Fischer of the CzechRepublic warned his E.U. counterparts in September 2009 that a legal challenge to the treaty could delay its signature in Prague. To satisfy the Czech Constitution, the country's president, Vaclav Klaus , who opposes the treaty and is a vociferous critic of the E.U. in general, will have to sign it.

President Nicolas Sarkozy of France warned that any country dragging its feet would face unspecified "consequences" if it did not follow an Irish "yes" by swiftly signing the treaty.

On Oct. 9, only days after Irish voters gave final approval to the treaty, Mr. Klaus, as foreseen, threatened to erect a last-minute roadblock and demanded changes. With the content of the changes unknown, analysts debated whether Mr. Klaus might simply be trying to delay the signing, or perhaps wring a face-saving concession given his conservative party's opposition to the treaty.

Poland continued a somewhat bumpy route to expected approval of the treaty, with officials publicly disagreeing over when President Lech Kaczynski - also a Euroskeptic - would sign it.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/info/treaty-of-lisbon/

Chosen By God

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-09-07T22:52:00Z

Brazil Advances Accord Negotiations With Holy See

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-08-23T15:20:00Z

Will Bring Religious Education to Public Schools

RIO DE JANIERO, Brazil, AUG. 20, 2009 (Zenit.org).- A bilateral accord that will regulate relations between the Holy See and Brazil was approved last week by the latter's Foreign Relations Commission of the Chamber of Deputies.

In an article published Monday on the Web page of the Brazilian bishops' conference, Archbishop Orani João Tempesta of Rio de Janeiro affirmed that this is a positive step for the Church in this country.

He stated that this agreement creates a juridical statute for the Church in Brazil, which has been "needed since the proclamation of the Republic in 1889."

The accord, signed last November during a visit of Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to the Vatican, will be brought to the Federal Senate next week for ratification.

The archbishop explained that the agreement is adapted to the constitution of the secular State and does not grant extraordinary privileges to the Catholic Church.

The document, which consists of a preamble and 20 articles, "ratifies a relationship that has always existed and opens perspectives, for other religions as well," he added. He mentioned, for example, the accord's support of a greater respect for freedom of worship.

The prelate added that the agreement regulates "the juridical statute of the Catholic Church in Brazil, recognition of titles of study, religious education in public schools, canonical marriage and the fiscal regime."

No privileges

When the agreement was signed in November, Archbishop Dominique Mamberti, the Pope's secretary for relations with states, highlighted some of the main elements of the text.

He underlined "the recognition of the juridical personality of the institutions foreseen in the canonical ordering, the teaching of the Catholic religion in schools, as well as the other religious confessions, the recognition of ecclesiastical decisions on marital matters, the insertion of places dedicated to worship in urban ordering, and the recognition of ecclesiastical academic titles."

Archbishop Mamberti also pointed out at the time that "it would be out of place to speak of privileges because there is no privilege in the recognition of a social reality of such great historical and current relevance as the Catholic Church is in Brazil."

The nation has more Catholics than any other country in the world. Some 74% of its 196 million habitants are Catholic; some 15% are Protestant.

The prelate added that this accord does not take anything away from "what is owed to citizens of other religious faiths and of different ideological convictions."

Archbishop Mamberti expressed his desire that the text "might enter into force as soon as possible and contribute, as stated in its objectives," to "consolidate the ties between the Holy See and Brazil and increasingly favor the orderly development of the mission of the Catholic Church."

As well, he affirmed the hope that it will "promote the spiritual and material progress of all the inhabitants of the country, and to collaborate, in so far as possible, in the solution of the great problems that preoccupy humanity today."

Source

Christian Unity Week to Focus on Mission

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-08-23T15:14:00Z

Leaders Affirm Urgency of Evangelization

VATICAN CITY, AUG. 21, 2009 (Zenit.org).- Leaders of various Christian churches are affirming that the mission of their communities should foster a spirit of ecumenism rather than competition.

This was underlined in a document prepared by the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity and the Commission on Faith and Order of the World Council of Churches for the 2010 Week of Christian Unity.

This document, recently published on the Vatican Web site, offers resources for the week, which will focus on the theme: "You are witnesses of these things" (Luke 24:48).

The coming year will mark the anniversary of the 1910 World Mission Conference in Edinburgh, which "marked the beginnings of the modern ecumenical movement," the document affirmed.

It stated that the idea of "mission" has a particular place in the efforts toward reconciliation between Christians, along with prayer, doctrinal accords and social cooperation.

The manuscript acknowledged that "not everyone naturally makes the link between missionary endeavor and the desire for Christian unity," and in the past there were even "rivalries that existed between missionaries sent by different churches."

However, it continued, these missionaries were often the first to recognize the "tragedy of Christian division" in the face of "enormous human and material need."

They did not want to "export" these divisions from their home countries to the "peoples who were discovering Christ" for the first time.

Common spirit

In this context a century ago, the Edinburgh conference was called in Scotland to "help missionaries to forge a common spirit and coordinate their work."

In a similar spirit, the churches will celebrate the 100th anniversary of this conference by reflecting on Christ's final discourse before his ascension.

The document noted that at this moment in the Gospel, the "mission of the Church is given by Christ" and it "cannot be appropriated by anyone."

The manuscript explained that after Christ's sending, the disciples in the Gospel will go forth to witness in different ways, and "sometimes dissent may arise between them about what faithfulness to Christ requires, and yet all will work to announce the Good News."

The resources offered for this week of unity include reflections on various ways of witnessing to the Risen Christ, and on the ways in which church division can be remedied.

In June 2010, church leaders will once again gather in Edinburgh to pray together and share perspectives on missionary work.

Conference participants will reflect on the issues related to the mission of evangelization today: secularization and de-Christianization, new means of communication, interfaith relations and interreligious dialogue.

The document affirmed that now, as in 1910, "Christians have at heart a similar sense of urgency: for our humanity wounded by division the Gospel is not a luxury; the Gospel cannot be proclaimed by discordant voices."

Source

Remarks to introduce His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI to the General Assembly of the United Nations

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-08-04T05:26:00Z

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon
General Assembly

18 April 2008

Your Holiness,

Excellencies,

I am deeply grateful to His Holiness for accepting my invitation to visit the United Nations -- home to all men and women of faith around the world. Your Holiness, welcome to our common home.

The United Nations is a secular institution, composed of 192 States. We have six official languages but no official religion. We do not have a chapel -- though we do have a meditation room.

But if you ask those of us who work for the United Nations what motivates us, many of us reply in a language of faith. We see what we do not only as a job, but as a mission. Indeed, mission is the word we use most often for our work around the world -- from peace and security to development to human rights.

Your Holiness, in so many ways, our mission unites us with yours.

You have spoken of the terrible challenge of poverty afflicting so much of the world's population, and how we cannot afford indifference and self-centred isolation.

You have encouraged the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, and called for progressive and agreed-upon nuclear disarmament.

You have spelled out that those with greater power may not use it to violate the rights of others, and stated that peace is based on respect for the rights of all.

You have spoken of water resources and climate change as matters of grave importance for the entire human family.

You have called for an open and sincere dialogue, both within your Church and between religions and cultures, in search of the good of humankind.

Finally, you have called for trust in, and commitment to, the United Nations. As you have said, the UN is “capable of fostering genuine dialogue and understanding, reconciling divergent views, and developing multilateral policies and strategies capable of meeting the manifold challenges of our complex and rapidly changing world.”

Your Holiness, these are fundamental goals we share. We are grateful to have your prayers as we proceed on the path towards them.

Before leaving the UN today, you will visit the Meditation Room. My great predecessor, Dag Hammarskjöld, who created that room, put it well. He said of the stone that forms its centerpiece [and I quote]: “We may see it as an altar, empty not because there is no God, not because it is an altar to an unknown God, but because it is dedicated to the God whom man worships under many names and in many forms.” End quote.

Excellencies,

Whether we worship one God, many or none -- we in the United Nations have to sustain and strengthen our faith every day. As demands on our Organization multiply, we need more and more of this precious commodity.

I am profoundly grateful to his Holiness Pope Benedict XVI for bestowing some of his faith on us -- and for placing his trust in us. He possesses both of these in abundance. May we be strengthened by his visit today.

Thank you very much.

Source

Obama nomination would boost ranks of Catholics on court

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-08-04T03:01:00Z

Shift called sign of tolerance

By Michael Paulson, Globe Staff | May 30, 2009

For the first 50 years of the Supreme Court, there were no Catholics on the bench, and for years after that, there was generally a single "Catholic seat."

Obama seeks to quell dust-up over Sotomayor remarks. A10

But over the last two decades the number of Catholics on the court has dramatically increased, and now, if Judge Sonia Sotomayor is confirmed as a Supreme Court justice, there will be six Catholics on the nine-member court. The percentage of Catholics on the high court will be more than double the percentage of Catholics in the general population.

The preponderance of Catholics is occasioning quite a bit of chatter among court-watchers, who say it illustrates how much anti-Catholicism has faded as a public issue a half-century after the nation bitterly argued over whether to elect a Catholic president.

"It is surprising, and my first reaction, too, was 'dang!' " said John H. Garvey, the dean of Boston College Law School. "The one sense in which it probably matters is that this very fact isn't going to be a big deal. I'll bet you $100 that this fact couldn't prevent Sotomayor's appointment, and that says something very nice about the religious tolerance of the American public."

But scholars of religion and the Supreme Court also say that the court's Catholics have spanned the ideological spectrum, from William J. Brennan Jr. on the left to Antonin Scalia on the right, suggesting that a justice's Catholic faith does not predict how he or she will rule even on issues such as abortion and gay rights, where the Catholic Church has staked out clear positions.

"It's clear that neither the politicians nor the public nor the media are making any equation at all between Catholicism and even those issues where the church has spoken so strongly," said Nadine Strossen, a long-time court watcher as the former president of the American Civil Liberties Union and a law professor at New York Law School. "It's a very positive development, when you get to a point where what used to be considered noteworthy diversity goes without notice."

A spokeswoman for the US Conference of Catholic Bishops noted in an e-mail interview this week that Catholics are the largest religious denomination in the United States, and also increasingly well educated.

"As quality justices they make their decisions based on an intelligent understanding of the Constitution," said the spokeswoman, Sister Mary Ann Walsh. "Catholic teaching urges these judges to work with integrity and to follow their informed consciences, which is compatible with the US Constitution."

The religious makeup of the court has long been a subject of interest to politicians and scholars, and, with a handful of exceptions, for years there was one Jew, one Catholic, and seven Protestants on the court. But with the retirement this year of Justice David H. Souter, the court for the first time in the nation's history will have no Episcopalians, and, even more astonishing given the history of the United States, if Sotomayor is confirmed there will be only one remaining Protestant justice, 89-year-old John Paul Stevens.

Some scholars suggest the number of Catholic justices is essentially random. Laurence H. Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard, called the majority of Catholic justices "sheer coincidence," and, when asked if it would matter, said, simply, "probably not."

But Garvey, the Boston College law school dean, pointed out that all of the current Catholic justices were appointed by Republicans who opposed abortion.

"Given the position of the Catholic Church on the question of abortion, it is not surprising that those presidents looking for pro-life nominees have fished in a pond that was richer in Catholics than the general population," Garvey said.

Similarly, President Obama's interest in appointing a Hispanic to the court made it likely that his nominee would be Catholic.

Robert F. Cochran, Jr., a law professor at Pepperdine University, suggested that there are elements of Catholic tradition, including its support, in modern times, for religious freedom, that make Catholics more appealing as nominees than resolute secularists or fundamentalists.

Several scholars suggested that as Protestantism's dominance in American culture has receded over the last half-century, Catholicism and Judaism have become non-issues in court appointments, and the nation's concerns about diversity have shifted from religion and geography to gender and race.

William G. Ross, a professor of law at Samford University, in Alabama, who has written about the religious affiliation of Supreme Court justices, says that the last Supreme Court justice whose Catholicism was a primary factor in his appointment was Justice William G. Brennan Jr., who was named to the court by President Eisenhower in 1956. Eisenhower, a Republican, was hoping the appointment would help him win Catholic votes in that year's presidential election.

Although the Catholic Church strongly opposes abortion, Catholic justices have ruled in a variety of ways on the issue. Brennan was a strong supporter of abortion rights, and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy has been moderately so. Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia have made clear they were prepared to overturn Roe v. Wade, while Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. are also thought to be open to returning the abortion issue to the states. Some of the court's Catholic justices have supported capital punishment, despite the church's opposition, and Kennedy has authored two recent decisions supportive of gay rights.

"There is no correlation between being Catholic and what your views are on the constitutional issues," Strossen said.

Scalia addressed the role of Catholic faith in judging in 2007, speaking at Villanova University.

"The bottom line is that the Catholic faith seems to me to have little effect on my work as a judge," he said, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. "Just as there is no 'Catholic' way to cook a hamburger," he said to a murmur of laughter, "I am hard-pressed to tell you of a single opinion of mine that would have come out differently if I were not Catholic."

A few scholars allowed that a justice's Catholicism might have some general influence on the personal experience they draw on to understand cases.

"To the extent that judges are shaped - as we all are, and as every judge is - by experiences, values, and moral commitments, we might expect that the Catholic faith and tradition have played a role in shaping a Catholic judge's worldview," said Richard W. Garnett, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame. "But . . . a judge's worldview and personal experiences should not, as a general matter, determine the outcomes that judge reaches."

Source

Faithful in the Least

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-08-03T12:13:00Z

The King of the North

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-07-31T12:53:00Z

The Glorious Land

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-07-30T13:03:00Z

A Moment of Respite

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-07-30T03:17:00Z

God's Remnant

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-07-30T02:41:00Z

Ireland passes blasphemy law

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-07-17T04:22:00Z

On Friday July 11th, 2009, Ireland passed the Defamation Bill by one vote. One of the aspects of this bill would make it illegal to criticize religion… any religion under penalty of fines up to 25,000 Euros. That is the equivalent to nearly $35,000.

When I first heard this story on the internets, I was certain that it was a false story. I read the story, googled it, checked out legitimate Ireland news sites, and double checked more Ireland news sites. The story checks out. It seems that the Blasphemy Clause of the Defamation Bill was challenged in the legislature by an amendment which would delete such a clause. The amendment to delete the clause initially passed by one vote, but a request was made for a “walk-through vote.” During that time two more Senators came in and voted against the amendment to delete the clause. This meant that the clause would stay in the bill. The bill then passed by the same margin.

Here is an excerpt from the Blasphemy Clause:

Section 36

(1) A person who publishes or utters blasphemous matter shall be guilty of an offence and shall be liable upon conviction on indictment to a fine not exceeding €100,000. [Amended to €25,000]

(2) For the purposes of this section, a person publishes or utters blasphemous matter if (a) he or she publishes or utters matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion, and (b) he or she intends, by the publication or utterance of the matter concerned, to cause such outrage.

This part of the bill makes it illegal to criticize any religion either verbally or in writing. Saying anything in which a “substantial number” of followers might find offensive would now be a crime in the Ireland. But the bill goes even further. Here is another excerpt:

Section 37

(1) Where a person is convicted of an offence under section 36, the court may issue a warrant (a) authorising any member of the Garda Siochana to enter (if necessary by the use of reasonable force) at all reasonable times any premises (including a dwelling) at which he or she has reasonable grounds for believing that copies of the statement to which the offence related are to be found, and to search those premises and seize and remove all copies of the statement found therein, (b) directing the seizure and removal by any member of the Garda Siochana of all copies of the statement to which the offence related that are in the possession of any person, specifying the manner in which copies so seized and removed shall be detained and stored by the Garda Siochana.

The Garda Siochana is the Irish police who can now (under this law) break into people’s homes and confiscate copies of any book which might be critical of any religion. I keep trying to point out that any religious criticism is a crime, because many Christians are critical of differing religions. Atheists are not the only ones being targeted here. Simply claiming that the Pope is not infallible might be considered blasphemous to many Catholics. Claiming that the prophet Joseph Smith was not really visited by angels and given magic golden plates would be blasphemous to Mormons. Mentioning the prophet Mohammad without adding the phrase “peace be upon him” would be considered blasphemous to Muslims. And claiming that Scientology is a sham and that Tom Cruise is crazy would obviously be blasphemous to Scientologists.

What if a Christian claimed that if someone was not saved through Jesus Christ, he or she would spend eternity in Hell? An argument could be made that such a statement and even the Bible itself might be considered blasphemous to other religions. In fact, most religious are blasphemous to other religions. Maybe the Irish police will fine everyone.

Source

Libel and blasphemy bill passed by the Dail (Ireland)

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-07-17T00:36:00Z

By ine Kerr Political Correspondent

Thursday July 09 2009

MAJOR new legislation reforming the State's libel laws and enabling judges to advise juries on the size of damages was passed in the Dáil yesterday.

The Defamation Bill, which also introduces a new crime of blasphemous libel, will come into operation after it is passed by the Seanad later this week and signed into law by President Mary McAleese.

The legislation, which the media industry broadly supports, also aims to ensure that the recently established Press Council operates as efficiently as possible.

It also enables newspapers to offer an apology without risking an admission of liability, and to defend libel actions by arguing that a story was in the public interest.

The new laws are expected to be in full operation by October.

In recent months, the stalled legislation was the subject of major debate when Justice Minister Dermot Ahern announced the introduction of a new crime of blasphemous libel. He argued that a new definition was required by the Constitution.

Under the changes, the maximum fine for blasphemy will be cut from €100,000 to €25,000.

During a debate on 33 proposed amendments to the legislation yesterday, Mr Ahern refused calls from Opposition parties to continue the debate today.

He claimed that TDs had debated the legislation "endlessly" since 2006 and it was now time to pass it.

"There is an understanding that it will and should pass before the summer.

"Many of the following amendments are simply a regurgitation of what members discussed on Committee Stage ad nauseam and of what has been debated in the Seanad and the Dáil over the past two years," Mr Ahern said.

Sinn Fein's Aengus O Snodaigh earlier argued that the legislation should be changed so that TDs who took a legal case or who were sued could remain in public office if they ended up bankrupt.

Under current rules, if a TD becomes bankrupt, they are debarred from elected office.

However, Mr Ahern said these concerns could be dealt with in the context of the ethics-in-public-office or electoral legislation. He did not adopt the Sinn Fein proposal.

- ine Kerr Political Correspondent

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Source 2 (opinion response)

Pope Urges Forming New World Economic Order to Work for the ‘Common Good’

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-07-16T05:13:00Z

By RACHEL DONADIO and LAURIE GOODSTEIN

Published: July 7, 2009

VATICAN CITY — Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday called for a radical rethinking of the global economy, criticizing a growing divide between rich and poor and urging the establishment of a “true world political authority” to oversee the economy and work for the “common good.”

He criticized the current economic system, “where the pernicious effects of sin are evident,” and urged financiers in particular to “rediscover the genuinely ethical foundation of their activity.”

He also called for “greater social responsibility” on the part of business. “Once profit becomes the exclusive goal, if it is produced by improper means and without the common good as its ultimate end, it risks destroying wealth and creating poverty,” Benedict wrote in his new encyclical, which the Vatican released on Tuesday.

More than two years in the making, “Caritas in Veritate,” or “Charity in Truth,” is Benedict’s third encyclical since he became pope in 2005. Filled with terms like “globalization,” “market economy,” “outsourcing,” “labor unions” and “alternative energy,” it is not surprising that the Italian media reported that the Vatican was having difficulty translating the 144-page document into Latin.

Reportedly delayed to take into consideration the financial crisis, it was released by the Vatican on the eve of the Group of 8 industrialized nations summit meeting, which opens in Italy on Wednesday, and before Benedict is expected to receive President Obama at the Vatican on Friday.

“It’s not an encyclical done for the crisis,” Cardinal Renato Martino, the president of the Vatican’s Council for Justice and Peace, said at a news conference on Tuesday. Still, he added, “if the encyclical had come out before the crisis, you would have said it was prophetic.”

In the encyclical, Benedict wrote that “financiers must rediscover the genuinely ethical foundation of their activity, so as not to abuse the sophisticated instruments which can serve to betray the interests of savers.”

In many ways, the document is a puzzling cross between an anti-globalization tract and a government white paper, another signal that the Vatican does not comfortably fit into traditional political categories of right and left.

“There are paragraphs that sound like Ayn Rand, next to paragraphs that sound like ‘The Grapes of Wrath.’ That’s quite intentional,” Vincent J. Miller, a theologian at the University of Dayton, a Catholic institution in Ohio, said by telephone.

“He’ll wax poetically about the virtuous capitalist, but then he’ll give you this very clear analysis of the ways in which global capital and the shareholder system cause managers to focus on short-term good at the expense of the community, of workers, of the environment.”

Indeed, sometimes Benedict sounds like an old-school European socialist, lamenting the decline of the social welfare state and praising the “importance” of labor unions to protect workers. Without stable work, he noted, people lose hope and tend not to get married and have children.

But he also wrote, “The so-called outsourcing of production can weaken the company’s sense of responsibility towards the stakeholders — namely the workers, the suppliers, the consumers, the natural environment and broader society — in favor of the shareholders.” And he argued that it was “erroneous to hold that the market economy has an inbuilt need for a quota of poverty and underdevelopment in order to function at its best.”

Benedict also called for a reform of the United Nations so there could be a unified “global political body” that allowed the less powerful of the earth to have a voice, and he called on rich nations to help less fortunate ones.

“In the search for solutions to the current economic crisis, development aid for poor countries must be considered a valid means of creating wealth for all,” he wrote.

John Sniegocki, a professor of Christian ethics at Xavier University in Cincinnati, said one of the most controversial elements of the encyclical, at least for some Americans, would be the call for international institutions to play a role in regulating the economy.

“One of the things he’s saying is that the global economy is escaping the power of individual states to regulate it,” Mr. Sniegocki said. He said the encyclical also contained elements “very critical” of how the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank “have required cuts in social spending in the third world.”

Michael Novak, a philosopher and theologian at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, a conservative research organization, said he thought that the encyclical was stronger on principles than policy suggestions. He said he was particularly uncomfortable with the idea of a strong international institution to regulate the global economy.

“I like limited government. I would much prefer to have many limited governments than one overriding authority,” Mr. Novak said by telephone.

Benedict, arguably the most environmentally conscious pope in history, wrote, “One of the greatest challenges facing the economy is to achieve the most efficient use — not abuse — of natural resources, based on a realization that the notion of ‘efficiency’ is not value-free.”

Rachel Donadio reported from Vatican City, and Laurie Goodstein from New York.

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Pope calls for 'God-centered' global economy

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-07-08T06:04:00Z

By Cathy Lynn Grossman, USA TODAY

Pope Benedict XVI today called for reforming the United Nations and establishing a "true world political authority" with "real teeth" to manage the global economy with God-centered ethics.

In his third encyclical, a major teaching, released as the G-8 summit begins in Italy, the pope says such an authority is urgently needed to end the current worldwide financial crisis. It should "revive" damaged economies, reach toward "disarmament, food security and peace," protect the environment and "regulate migration."

Benedict writes, "The market is not, and must not become, the place where the strong subdue the weak."

The encyclical, Caritas in Veritate (Charity in Truth) is a theologically dense explication of Catholic social teaching that draws heavily from earlier popes, particularly PaulVI's critique of capitalism 42 years ago. And echoing his predecessor John Paul II, Benedict says, "every economic decision has a moral consequence."

FAITH & REASON: Experts say pope's economic views draw from politics

Issued days before his Friday meeting with President Obama, the pope's views here are "to the left of Obama in terms of economic policy," particularly in calls for redistribution of wealth, says political scientist Thomas Reese, a Jesuit priest and senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

The encyclical also echoes Benedict's many speeches, saying that to reach sound a global economy every responsibility and commitment must be rooted in the values of Christian truth.

Without that, he says, "there is no social conscience and responsibility." Neither, he says, are mere "good sentiments" enough. Human progress requires God, and today's choices concern "nothing less than the destiny of man."

Although Benedict says the church has no "technical solutions to offer," he asserts that religion has a role in the public square. His very specific suggestions on the economy, ecology and justice are addressed not just to Catholics, but to everyone, from heads of state to household shoppers.

According to the encyclical:

•Labor must be safeguarded after years of rampant market forces leaving citizens powerless in the face of "new and old risks" and without effective trade union protections.

•Elimination of world hunger is essential for "safeguarding the peace and stability of the planet," and the problem is not resources but their inequitable distribution.

•"Demographic control" through an "anti-birth mentality" that promotes abortion and birth control "cannot lead to morally sound development." He blasts those who support abortion "as if it were a form of cultural progress."

•The environment is "God's gift to everyone" and we have a "grave duty to hand the earth on to future generations" in good condition, says Benedict. He laments, "how many natural resources are squandered by wars!"

•"Financiers must rediscover" ethics and not use "sophisticated instruments" to "betray the interests of savers."

•Consumers, must "realize that purchasing is always a moral — and not simple economic — act." In this context, the ecological crisis is seen as a crisis in human ecology.

"The pope is saying you need just structures and people who act justly," says Steve Colecchi, director of the office of international justice and peace for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. "He's calling on every level of society to be rooted in an ethical vision of the human person."

The "true world political authority" that Benedict calls for should keep solutions as simple and local as possible but still create solidarity for the common good.

Reese notes the "strong language here on the redistribution of wealth — not something people like to talk about in the USA. If the Catholic right is against the redistribution of wealth, they're against the pope. He doesn't believe an unregulated marketplace is going to solve all the problems of economy and poverty."

Kirk Hanson, executive director of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara (Calif.) University, praised Benedict for including an emphasis on "life ethics" as "essential" to a healthy social and economic order.

Lew Daly, senior fellow at Demos, a New York City-based public policy organization and author of God's Economy: Faith-Based Initiatives and the Caring State, praised the text as "a turning point for the church and particularly for the American church, because our nation and our society is both the epicenter of wealth and the epicenter of inequality.

"Nearly half of the world's population lives on less than $2.50 a day and nearly 80% live on less than $10 a day. In the meantime a relative handful of corporations and wealthy families have grown rich far beyond the greatest emperors and kings of the past.

"There may be growth, but a faithful Catholic does not call this progress, the pope argues, until the growth is more equitably shared according to the design of the Creator," says Daly.

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Pope calls for a "global authority" on economy

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-07-07T22:56:00Z

Tue Jul 7, 2009 3:25pm EDT

By Philip Pullella

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Benedict called on Tuesday for a "world political authority" to manage the global economy and for more government regulation of national economies to pull the world out of the current crisis and avoid a repeat.

The pope made his call for a re-think of the way the world economy was run in a new encyclical which touched on a number of social issues but whose main connecting thread was how the current crisis has affected both rich and poor nations.

Parts of the encyclical, titled "Charity in Truth," seemed bound to upset free marketers because of its underlying rejection of unbridled capitalism and unregulated market forces, which he said had led to "thoroughly destructive" abuse of the system and "grave deviations and failures."

An encyclical is the highest form of papal writing and gives the clearest indication to the world's 1.1 billion Catholics -- and to non-Catholics -- of what the pope and the Vatican think about specific social and moral issues.

The pope said every economic decision had a moral consequence and called for "forms of redistribution" of wealth overseen by governments to help those most affected by crises.

Benedict said "there is an urgent need of a true world political authority" whose task would be "to manage the global economy; to revive economies hit by the crisis; to avoid any deterioration of the present crisis and the greater imbalances that would result."

Such an authority would have to be "regulated by law" and "would need to be universally recognized and to be vested with the effective power to ensure security for all, regard for justice, and respect for rights."

"Obviously it would have to have the authority to ensure compliance with its decisions from all parties, and also with the coordinated measures adopted in various international forums," he said.

The United Nations, economic institutions and international finance all had to be reformed "even in the midst of a global recession," he said in the encyclical, a booklet of 141 pages.

The pope's call for a supranational body to tackle global economic woes disturbed some Catholic capitalists.

"There is a difference between coordination and mandate ... a reckless loan in the United States can and did impoverish people in Latvia. So obviously coordination is important as long as it is not mandates," said Frank Keating, CEO of the American Council of Life Insurers and former Governor of Oklahoma.

LOFTY MESSAGE

The encyclical was addressed to all Catholics and "all people of good will" and was released on the eve of the start of the G8 summit in Italy and three days before the pope is due to discuss the global downturn with U.S. President Barack Obama.

In several sections of the encyclical, Benedict made it clear he had great reservations about a totally free market.

"The conviction that the economy must be autonomous, that it must be shielded from 'influences' of a moral character, has led man to abuse the economic process in a thoroughly destructive way," he said.

"In the long term, these convictions have led to economic, social and political systems that trample upon personal and social freedom and are therefore unable to deliver the justice that they promise," he added.

Profit was useful only if it served as a means to a brighter future for all humanity.

"Once profit becomes the exclusive goal, if it is produced by improper means and without the common good as its ultimate end, it risks destroying wealth and creating poverty," he said.

He said the current economic crisis was "clear proof" of "pernicious effects of sin" in the economy.

"Financiers must rediscover the genuinely ethical foundation of their activity ...," he said.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who had rebuked the pope earlier this year at the height of the row over a Holocaust-denying bishop, welcomed the encyclical as important encouragement for world leaders ahead of a G8 meeting in Italy.

"Pope Benedict has encouraged the state leaders to create rules so that this sort of worldwide economic crisis isn't repeated," Merkel told reporters. "I also saw this as an order to work toward a social market economy in the world."

The pope appeared to back government intervention "in correcting errors and malfunctions" in the economy, saying "one could foresee an increase in the new forms of political participation, nationally and internationally."

Source

Pope's role is key to ecumenical progress, Pope tells Orthodox delegation

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-07-07T03:57:00Z

2009-06-29

CWNews.com - Pope Benedict XVI met on June 27 with a delegation of Orthodox prelates representing the Patriarch of Constantinople, and renewed his pledge that the Catholic Church would do everything possible to restore full communion among Christians. He remarked that the Orthodox, like Catholics, revere Sts. Peter and Paul, and suggested that "the common veneration of these martyrs be a pledge of our commitment to full communion." Pope Benedict alluded to the work of a joint Catholic-Orthodox theological commission, noting that their discussions necessarily focus on the role of the Bishop of Rome: a key to understanding the path to Christian unity.

The Orthodox prelates were in Rome to join with the Roman Pontiff in celebrations for the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul, the patrons of the Rome diocese. They had arrived a day early so that they could also participate in ceremonies on June 28 for the closing of the Pauline Year. The Ecumenical Patriarchate has made it an annual event to send a high-level delegation to Rome for the patronal feast-- and in turn the Holy See sends important Vatican officials to Istanbul in November to join the Orthodox Patriarch in celebrating the feast of St. Andrew, the patron of the Constantinople see.

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Obama, eyes on Vatican meeting, cites areas of cooperation

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-07-07T03:35:00Z

WASHINGTON
Pope Benedict XVI has “taken extraordinary leadership” on a host of issues that could form the basis for additional U.S.-Vatican cooperation, President Obama told religion writers at the White House earlier today. Obama and the pope are scheduled to meet for the first time at the Vatican July 10, following the president’s participation in the three-day meeting of the Group of Eight industrialized countries.

The areas of additional cooperation between the Holy See and the United States could include, said the president, Middle East peace, worldwide poverty and climate change.

On one level, said Obama, the papal-presidential meeting represents typical diplomatic exchanges that take place “with any other government.” But, he continued, “this is more than just that.” Said Obama: “The Catholic church has such a profound influence worldwide and in our country. The Holy Father is a thought leader and an opinion leader on so many wide-ranging issues and his religious influence is one that extends beyond the Catholic.”

“From a personal perspective,” said the president, “having a meeting with the Holy Father is a great honor and something I’m very much looking forward to.”

The president responded to eight questions during the 45-minute Roosevelt Room briefing. Among the issues he addressed:

Federal protections for health workers who choose not to participate in procedures, such as abortion, that violate their religious or ethical beliefs. The Obama administration rescinded “conscience clause” provisions promulgated by the Bush administration as Bush’s term drew to a close. “I think that the only reason that my position may appear unclear is because it came in the wake of a last-minute, eleventh-hour change in conscience clause provisions that were pushed forward by the previous administration that we chose to reverse,” said Obama. “But my underlying position has always been consistent, which is I’m a believer in conscience clauses. I was a supporter of a robust conscience clause in Illinois for Catholic hospitals and health care providers.” He continued, “I can assure all of your readers that when this review is complete there will be a robust conscience clause in place. It may not meet the criteria of every possible critic of our approach, but it certainly will not be weaker than what existed before the changes were made.”
Assistance to countries and individuals especially hard-hit by the world economic crisis. The United States has “robust plan” to address the food security needs of poorer countries and will be promoting its approach at the G-8 meeting. But programs for the poor, he said, are not just international in focus. “I think what I’ll also want to talk to the Holy Father about is the need to initiate some core reforms not just oversees, but here in this country, that assure basic security for individuals in this country not only poor, but also middle class, who are extremely vulnerable to bankruptcy if they get sick, to flat wages and incomes, [which] are making it more and more difficult for them to live lives of dignity and security. So everything from our health care reform agenda to our approach to education I think is geared towards providing greater opportunity.”
Administration efforts to promote areas of agreement among abortion-rights supporters and opponents. The president said he expects to receive recommendations from a working group that includes both pro-choice and pro-life advocates later this summer. Said Obama, “I can tell you, though, that on the idea of helping young people make smart choices so that they are not engaging in casual sexual activity that can lead to unwanted pregnancies, on the importance of adoption as a option, an alternative to abortion, on caring for pregnant women so that it is easier for them to support children, those are immediately three areas where I would be surprised if we don’t have some pretty significant areas of agreement.” The president said there would undoubtedly be areas — he specifically mentioned contraceptive services — of continued disagreement. But, he continued, “I don’t know any circumstance in which abortion is a happy circumstance or decision, and to the extent that we can help women avoid being confronted with a circumstance in which that’s even a consideration, I think that’s a good thing.”

Obama’s meeting with the pope follows the controversy surrounding his recent commencement address at the University of Notre Dame, which raised the public ire of nearly 90 U.S. bishops who criticized the school for providing an honorary degree and a Catholic platform to a pro-choice president. Obama expressed no rancor toward those church leaders who spoke out against his presence at Notre Dame.

“Number one, one of the strengths of our democracy is that everybody is free to express their political opinions, and I take people’s opinions seriously,” said the president. “I’m the president of all Americans, not just the Americans who happen to agree with me.” Further, said Obama, “The American bishops have a profound influence in their communities, in the church, and beyond.”

The president noted, “Although there have been criticisms leveled at me from some of the bishops, there have been a number of bishops who have been extremely generous and supportive even if they don’t agree with me on every issue. So in that sense the American bishops represent a cross section of opinion just like other groups do.”

Meanwhile, said Obama, at a recent Oval Office meeting with Chicago Cardinal Francis George, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, “I expressed to him my interest in working in as constructive a manner as possible with the bishops on a range of issues.” Obama said his desire to work with church leaders is inspired by his experiences as a church-funded community organizer.

“You know, part of why establishing a relationship with the bishops is important to me is because I have very fond memories of Cardinal [Joseph] Bernardin, who was in Chicago when I first arrived to be a community organizer — funded in part by the Campaign for Human Development — and working with Catholic parishes on the south side of Chicago. And so I know the potential that the bishops have to speak out forcefully on issues of social justice.” Said Obama, “I think there are going to continue to be areas where we have profound agreements and there are going to be some areas where we disagree. That’s healthy.”

Asked whether he sometimes felt he has been “dragged into a largely intra-Catholic family fight” on issues that divide liberal and conservative Catholics, Obama again recalled Bernardin’s example, particularly as it relates to the “seamless garment” of life issues the late cardinal saw as integral to Catholic teaching.

“Cardinal Bernardin was strongly pro-life, never shrank away from talking about that issue, but was very consistent in talking about a seamless garment and a range of issues that were part and parcel of what he considered to be pro-life, that meant that he was concerned about poverty, he was concerned about how children were treated, he was concerned about the death penalty, he was concerned about foreign policy.

“And that part of the Catholic tradition is something that continues to inspire me. And I think that there have been times over the last decade or two where that more holistic tradition feels like it’s gotten buried under the abortion debate.”

The president continued, “Now, as a non-Catholic, it’s not up to me to try to resolve those tensions. As I said, all I can do is to affirm how that other tradition has made me, a non-Catholic, I think reflect on how I can be a better person and has had a powerful influence on my life. And that tells me that it might be a powerful way to move a broader set of values forward in American life generally.”

The president said that he and First Lady Michelle Obama have yet to decide on what, if any, religious congregation to join in the Washington area. The Obama family attends religious services when they spend the weekend at Camp David, he said, but may, in a concession to the disruption the president’s presence causes other worshipers, ultimately opt to rotate among different churches in Washington. In addition, said Obama, the controversy over his previous pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, “made us very sensitive to the fact that as president the church we attend can end up being interpreted as speaking for us at all times.”

In addition to NCR, the Catholic press represented at the briefing included representatives from America, Catholic Digest, Catholic News Service, Commonweal, the National Catholic Register, and Vatican Radio. From the secular media, a reporter from The Washington Post was present.

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NKorea warns of nuclear war amid rising tensions

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-06-14T17:50:00Z

SEOUL, South Korea – North Korea's communist regime has warned of a nuclear war on the Korean peninsula while vowing to step up its atomic bomb-making program in defiance of new U.N. sanctions.

The North's defiance presents a growing diplomatic headache for President Barack Obama as he prepares for talks Tuesday with his South Korean counterpart on the North's missile and nuclear programs.

South Korean President Lee Myung-bak told security-related ministers during an unscheduled meeting Sunday to "resolutely and squarely" cope with the North's latest threat, his office said. Lee is to leave for the U.S. on Monday morning.

A commentary Sunday in the North's main state-run Rodong Sinmun newspaper, carried by the official Korean Central News Agency, claimed the U.S. has 1,000 nuclear weapons in South Korea. Another commentary published Saturday in the state-run Tongil Sinbo weekly claimed the U.S. has been deploying a vast amount of nuclear weapons in South Korea and Japan.

North Korea "is completely within the range of U.S. nuclear attack and the Korean peninsula is becoming an area where the chances of a nuclear war are the highest in the world," the Tongil Sinbo commentary said.

Kim Yong-kyu, a spokesman at the U.S. military command in Seoul, called the latest accusation "baseless," saying Washington has no nuclear bombs in South Korea. U.S. tactical nuclear weapons were removed from South Korea in 1991 as part of arms reductions following the Cold War.

South Korea's Unification Ministry issued a statement Sunday demanding the North stop stoking tension, abandon its nuclear weapons and return to dialogue with the South.

On Saturday, North Korea's Foreign Ministry threatened war on any country that dared to stop its ships on the high seas under the new sanctions approved by the U.N. Security Council on Friday as punishment for the North's latest nuclear test.

It is not clear if the statements are simply rhetorical. Still, they are a huge setback for international attempts to rein in North Korea's nuclear ambitions following its second nuclear test on May 25. It first tested a nuclear device in 2006.

In Saturday's statement, North Korea said it has been enriching uranium to provide fuel for its light-water reactor. It was the first public acknowledgment the North is running a uranium enrichment program in addition to its known plutonium-based program. The two radioactive materials are key ingredients in making atomic bombs.

On Sunday, Yonhap news agency reported South Korea and the U.S. have mobilized spy satellites, reconnaissance aircraft and human intelligence networks to obtain evidence that the North has been running a uranium enrichment program.

South Korea's Defense Ministry said it could not confirm the report. The National Intelligence Service — South Korea's main spy agency — was not available for comment.

North Korea said more than one-third of 8,000 spent fuel rods in its possession has been reprocessed and all the plutonium extracted would be used to make atomic bombs. The country could harvest 13-18 pounds (6-8 kilograms) of plutonium — enough to make at least one nuclear bomb — if all the rods are reprocessed.

In addition, North Korea is believed to have enough plutonium for at least half a dozen atomic bombs.

North Korea says its nuclear program is a deterrent against the U.S., which it routinely accuses of plotting to topple its regime. Washington, which has 28,500 troops in South Korea, has repeatedly said it has no such intention.

The new U.N. sanctions are aimed at depriving the North of the financing used to build its rogue nuclear program. The resolution also authorized searches of North Korean ships suspected of transporting illicit ballistic missile and nuclear materials.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the new U.N. penalties provide the necessary tools to help check North Korea's continued pursuit of nuclear weapons.

The sanctions show that "North Korea's pursuit of nuclear weapons and the capacity to deliver those weapons through missiles is not going to be accepted by the neighbors as well as the greater international community," Clinton said Saturday at a news conference in Canada.

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EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT - WRITTEN DECLARATION

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-05-31T02:44:00Z

pursuant to Rule 116 of the Rules of Procedure
by Anna Záborská, Martin Kastler, Jean Louis Cottigny, Patrizia Toia and
Konrad Szymański
on the protection of a work-free Sunday as an essential pillar of the European
Social Model and a part of the European cultural heritage

Written declaration on the protection of a work-free Sunday as an essential pillar of the
European Social Model and a part of the European cultural heritage
The European Parliament,

– having regard to Article 137 of the TEU,

– having regard to Rule 116 of its Rules of Procedure,

A. whereas a work-free Sunday is an essential pillar of the European Social Model and a part
of the European cultural heritage,

B. whereas a EUROFOUND survey shows that the likelihood of sickness and absenteeism in
establishments that work on Saturdays and Sundays is 1.3 times greater compared with
establishments that do not require staff to work at the weekend,

C. whereas, according to EU law, Sunday is the weekly rest day for children and adolescents,

D. whereas the European institutions, bodies and agencies have not worked on Sundays
since their creation and do not intend to do so in the future, despite the diversity of
religious, cultural and ethnic backgrounds of EU officials and decision-makers,

1. Calls on the Member States and the EU institutions to protect Sunday, as a weekly rest
day, in forthcoming national and EU working-time legislation in order to enhance the
protection of workers' health and the reconciliation of work and family life;

2. Instructs its President to forward this declaration, together with the names of the
signatories, to the Council, the Commission and the parliamentary committees for social
affairs of the national parliaments.

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European Churches call the European Union and its Member States to protect Sunday as a weekly day of rest

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-05-31T02:25:00Z

The plenary meeting of the Church and Society Commission of the Conference of European Churches (CEC), adopted unanimously on 14 March 2009 the following statement on the protection of Sunday:

From 11-15 March the Church and Society Commission of the Conference of European Churches is meeting at Nyborg (Denmark). The meeting takes place at a moment when the European Parliament and the EU Member States are negotiating a new EU working time directive.

With regard to the ongoing debate on Sunday protection in the Member States of the European Union, the Church and Society Commission of the Conference of European Churches calls on the Member States of the European Union and the EU institutions to protect Sunday as a weekly rest day in forthcoming national and EU working-time legislation – in order to enhance both the protection of workers’ health and also the reconciliation of work and family life.

Scientific research shows that Sunday is more closely connected with the health of workers than any other day of the week. A recent survey of Eurofound, the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions (a European Union body), showed that the likelihood of sickness and absenteeism in establishments that work on Saturdays and Sundays is 1.3 times greater than in establishments that do not require staff to work at the weekend.

According to EU law, Sunday is protected as a weekly rest day for children and adolescents. Therefore, more than any other day of the week, a free Sunday offers the opportunity to be with one’s family and friends. Thus a free Sunday serves the aim of reconciling work and social life. Common free time is an important precondition for a participatory society, which allows its members to engage in civil activities.

(Conference of European Churches – Press Release 16 March 2009)

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US-Vatican diplomacy: 25 years official, centuries behind the scenes

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-05-31T02:15:00Z

By Patricia Zapor

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- From the earliest days of the nation, U.S. and Vatican leaders have considered it worthwhile to keep diplomatic channels open, despite the sometimes rocky political paths involved.

Through times when the Vatican has served as intermediary between sparring nations, to a diplomatic-channel offer from the United States -- politely rejected -- to find out who might have ordered an assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II, the relationship has often been beneficial to each side, whether the ties were formal or not.

A fortunate bit of timing brought a refresher course in the history of U.S.-Vatican diplomacy to Washington May 28. It was the same day word got out about President Barack Obama's nomination of theology professor Miguel Diaz to be the ninth U.S. ambassador to the Vatican.

A symposium marking the 25th anniversary of formal diplomatic relations between the United States and the Holy See had long been scheduled at The Catholic University of America. Co-sponsors of the symposium were the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the apostolic nunciature, the equivalent of the Vatican's embassy in the United States.

With the late-evening May 27 announcement of Diaz's nomination, the audience made up largely of academics, bishops, priests and nuns, current and former diplomats, students and reporters was primed the next day for context.

Quoting from a recent journal article he wrote, New York Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan noted that as early as 1783, the Vatican was working through its representative in France to establish contacts in the new country's government.

Though it would be another 200 years before formal diplomatic ties were established, the Vatican persistently kept diplomatic channels open.

"The Holy See, when eager to advise the United States of particular concerns, would often confide in a prominent American ecclesiastic, most often the archbishop of Baltimore until 1921, and especially during the reign of Francis Spellman, the archbishop of New York," said Archbishop Dolan.

The intermediaries worked to calm the United States in the weeks leading up to the Spanish-American War; Pope Benedict XV relayed papal plans for peace during World War I, he noted.

Working the other direction, President Franklin Roosevelt sought Vatican guidance for how to deal with a controversial radio broadcaster, Father Charles Coughlin, Archbishop Dolan said. Roosevelt also used his friendship with Cardinal George Mundelein of Chicago and later, his personal envoy to the Vatican, Myron Taylor, to bring various concerns to Rome.

Several former U.S. ambassadors and the United Kingdom's current ambassador to the Vatican told stories of their experiences.

Among them was the revelation from Thomas Melady (1989-93) that President George H.W. Bush had asked him to inquire whether Pope John Paul II would like the help of U.S. investigators in determining who had ordered the unsuccessful assassination attempt on the pope in 1981.

"Not now" came the cryptic answer, Melady said.

He later learned that the Vatican had been making diplomatic inroads with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, which were beginning to bear fruit.

"Despite their obvious curiosity about who ordered the assassination attempt, they were more interested in opening up conversations," Melady said. Gorbachev later expressed respect and admiration for Pope John Paul, crediting him with helping bring about the largely peaceful collapse of the Soviet Union in 1993.

In 2006 an Italian parliamentary commission concluded that orders for the assassination attempt had come from the Soviet Union.

The most recent ambassador, Mary Ann Glendon, in a keynote address, explained that the position doesn't fit into the usual diplomatic mold, in part because it has no role in trade policy, issuing visas or some of the other typical tasks of an embassy.

The U.S.-Vatican relationship was particularly close during her year in the post, which concluded this January, Glendon said.

"There was no interest in reliving the disagreement from the time of the beginning of U.S. military action in Iraq," which the Vatican vocally opposed, she said. But there were shared concerns, she said, for human rights, fighting terrorism, fostering religious dialogue and working for peace in the Middle East and other troubled areas.

"Another area of common concern that doesn't get enough attention is our common commitment to relief of poverty, hunger and disease among the poorest people of the world," Glendon said.

The Vatican also serves "as an important listening post," she explained. With thousands of church-run relief agencies around the world, including in places where the U.S. has little or no official presence, and the network of parishes, priests and nuns working globally, the Vatican is positioned "to get information about what's really going on."

Nicholas Burns, a professor of diplomacy and international politics at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, said during his term as undersecretary of state for political affairs (2005-08) he came to especially appreciate the role of diplomatic go-between played by Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick, the now-retired archbishop of Washington.

In times of difficulties in the Balkans several years after wars there ended, "we turned to Cardinal McCarrick," who played an unofficial role in using his church-based connections to help smooth problems, Burns said.

Ambassador Francis Campbell, Great Britain's representative to the Vatican, in discussing his country's long history of often difficult relations with the Vatican said one indication of how successful the relationship has been recently occurred just the day before. Former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was visiting the Vatican and asked to visit Pope John Paul's tomb, where she prayed and laid a wreath and commented that he had been "a man of faith and courage."

Thatcher and the late pope had worked closely together toward ending the Cold War and resolving conflicts in Northern Ireland.

"If there's any doubt about the power of the Holy See," Campbell said, "for a Methodist former British prime minister, coming for second time to the tomb of Pope John Paul II, and to leave that message is an example of Holy See diplomacy and why we have an embassy there."

Source

Making Friends With the Holy See

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-05-31T02:03:00Z

Symposium Considers 25 Years of US Diplomatic Relations

WASHINGTON, D.C., MAY 29, 2009 (Zenit.org).- The United States is interested in keeping and developing its diplomatic relations with the Holy See for three principal reasons, according to former U.S. ambassador Mary Ann Glendon.

Glendon offered her reflections on motives for formal relations between the two entities at a daylong symposium held Thursday at the Catholic University of America. The conference marked the 25th anniversary of the establishment of these relations, when President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II formalized them Jan. 10, 1984.

Glendon, who is also the president of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences and a Harvard professor, said that relations with the Holy See have come to be "especially valuable to the United States," and offered her suggestions on "why it is likely to remain so in the future."

"The first reason is simply that the Holy See's sphere of concern, like that of the United States, is worldwide," the former ambassador explained. Citing Colin Powell, she added, "Both of us think and act globally and that makes for a unique partnership."

There are "important common commitments, global commitments, enduring commitments" shared by the two states, Glendon contended. And she listed a common pledge to "human rights, especially religious freedom, to strengthening the global moral consensus against terrorism, especially against the use of religion as a pretext for violence, to fostering interreligious dialogue and to working for peace in the Middle East and other troubled areas of the world."

The professor went on to maintain that a strong link could be expected between two entities that share a "common commitment to the relief of poverty, hunger, disease among the poorest peoples of the world, and the poorest countries of the world."

"If you think about it, it is only natural that a partnership should have arisen between the country that is the world's largest and most generous donor of humanitarian aid and the Holy See, which oversees the world's largest network of health care, educational and relief agencies," she remarked.

Listening and speaking

Offering a second reason for the importance of relations with the Holy See, Glendon said that the Holy See is "regarded as what diplomats call an important listening post." This, she explained, is due to the Church's "350,000 educational, charitable aid agencies, health care agencies all over the world," and its "network of parishes, parish priests, dioceses, bishops, missionaries, religious sisters all over the world."

"This gives the Holy See access to types of information that are difficult for most countries to obtain -- information about what is really going on in the capillaries of society," she commented.

Finally, the pontifical academy president said another reason can be offered, one that is "increasingly important as our world has become more interdependent."

"In this age of rapid communications, the Holy See has come to be recognized not only as a great listening post, but as a great, important, influential communicator. It possesses a widely respected moral voice," Glendon declared. "As they say, 'When the Pope speaks the world listens.' And since that voice carries so many of the values to which the United States also is dedicated, this provides yet another reason to treasure our diplomatic relationship."

Hard to come by

Nevertheless, as attested by an address from New York's Archbishop Timothy Dolan, the fact that the United States and the Holy See share formal diplomatic relations is only thanks to literally centuries of effort, dating back to the very beginnings of the United States as a nation.

Contacts were "awkward at the start," as the United States established itself as a state, the archbishop explained. Superiors in Rome were initially concerned about the health of the Church in this new country.

The model the fledging state was developing for relations between Church and state was also unique. Archbishop Dolan noted how Benjamin Franklin responded to a request from Rome that there was no need to involve Congress in dictating who would govern the Church in the United States.

Nevertheless, there was no easy road to follow in order to establish a good relationship.

Rome wanted early on "more stable contact" with both the Church in the United States and with the government, "hopefully in the person of an apostolic delegate," the prelate said.

But, anti-Catholicism in the United States was part of the obstacle, he pointed out, as could be seen with the tour of a papal diplomat in 1853, who after mob harassment eventually had to be escorted in disguise to a departing ship in the New York harbor.

Several presidents were able to maintain contact with Rome through the figures of "personal envoys." Then finally, in 1984, Archbishop Dolan explained, a turnaround came about: "Undoubtedly the immense prestige of Pope John Paul II and the obvious influence of the Holy See in world affairs muted criticism," and President Reagan was able to formalize ties with the Holy See.

"From the Holy See's point of view, the establishment of the pontifical mission in Washington has been very successful," the prelate said. "Since the earliest days of the new Republic, due to distance, the novel political arrangement, the American penchant for freedom, and the unreliability of communication, Rome has been ever eager for stable, personal representation. […]

"The development [of] influence of the United States in world affairs made such a mission all the more important so that the exchange of ambassadors and nuncio in 1984 proved very satisfactory. And to the United States as well, even critics had to acknowledge the Holy See's impact on world events in the mid 1980s when diplomatic relations were formalized and to admit that it was probably in America's self interest to have exchanged ambassadors."

"It may have taken a while to get there," he concluded, "but it has sure been worth it."

Source

Religion and Public Policy at the UN

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-05-31T01:27:00Z

The Holy See

The term “Holy See” refers to the “see” or “seat”(from the Latin sedes) of institutional authority in the Roman Catholic Church occupied by the Pope and his representatives, whose administrative headquarters are in the Vatican City, an independent territory located in Rome. In 1964 the Holy See was granted permanent observer status in the UN General Assembly as a non-member state, a status it has shared only with Switzerland, which has just voted to apply to become a member state.

Thus the Holy See, although a religious body, differs from religious NGOs, which are limited to consultative relationships with the UN system. As a non-member state permanent observer at the UN, the Holy See does not typically enjoy member-state voting rights, but
it does participate in numerous deliberations and activities involving member states and UN bodies. The Holy See has full membership in some UN specialized agencies, on which basis it participates as a state, with voting rights, at many UN conferences. Other entities holding permanent observer status at the UN include the Mission of Palestine, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, and the Order of Malta. These differ from the Holy See in that they are not considered “non-member state” permanent observers.

Our interviewees were virtually unanimous in identifying the Holy See as a major religious actor at the UN today. The Holy See has been “terribly effective...in promoting Catholic views, advocating Catholic views, and organizing states that are predominantly
Catholic to support those views,” observes a former US government official experienced in UN work. Of course, recognizing the Holy See’s effectiveness does not necessarily entail appreciating all of its goals or methods. For the most part the UN as a whole sees the Vatican as more of a help than a hindrance because only on this certain set of issues [gender, sexuality, and reproductive health] is it a problem. In many other areas it’s a great provider of humanitarian assistance. It is often an advocate for human rights in a similar context to the UN. It has certainly taken an approach to development that is a people-centered, poor people’s approach to development. And so in many, many areas it is very helpful to the United Nations....”

...Several complain that the Holy See abuses its UN status and employs obstructionist tactics in UN conferences, especially during debates over proposed wording in conference documents. The same official recalls that “In the Cairo conference they were politically
active in securing the support of the Islamic countries and they did that in Beijing as well, and to a lesser extent they did it with all the conferences …they are a polarizing factor on issues of women and population.” Allies of the Holy See may consider its
methods appropriate to its role as “the conscience of the General Assembly,” to quote Austin Ruse, president of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute. “The Holy See provides a kind of moral leadership that, really, nobody else has at the United Nations,”
Ruse explains.

Read entire report by clicking here

SECRETARY-GENERAL STRESSES RELIGIOUS, SPIRITUAL DIMENSIONS OF UNITED NATIONS WORK, IN KEYNOTE ADDRESS

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-05-31T01:25:00Z

"...You may be wondering what a Secretary-General of the United Nations is doing in a synagogue, speaking about religion. You may think that the United Nations, an intergovernmental organization, must abide by the same separation between Church and State found in the United States and many other countries. You may be trying to imagine how spirituality can coexist with the world of diplomacy, national security and hard-edged negotiations.

I would ask you to think differently; I would ask you to take another look. The United Nations is a tapestry, not only of suits and saris, but of clerics' collars, nuns' habits and lamas' robes -- of mitres, skullcaps and yarmulkes.

I meet regularly with interfaith groups and religious figures of many creeds..."

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Bush used Scripture for Pentagon Briefings

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-05-20T03:15:00Z

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Unions protest in EU

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-05-17T18:12:00Z

Ban pledges to work with Pope on justice, peace, equality

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-05-17T16:24:00Z

17 April 2009 – Marking the anniversary of Pope Benedict’s address to the General Assembly, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon pledged to continue work with the head of the Catholic Church to build “a world of lasting justice and peace.”

“As Secretary-General of the United Nations, I represent a secular institution, composed of 192 States, with six official languages but no official religion,” Mr. Ban told a symposium convened yesterday in New York to commemorate the occasion.

“Yet His Holiness and I share many common values, above all a belief in the inherent dignity and equal rights of every human being,” he said.

The two, he said, also share a commitment to the fight against poverty and inequality; to conflict prevention and the responsibility to protect; to efforts to stop the spread of nuclear weapons; and to human rights, justice and the rule of law.

“This forms a broad basis for joint advocacy and cooperation,” Mr. Ban said

In his half-hour speech to the Assembly on 18 April 2008, delivered in English and French, Pope Benedict stressed the UN’s central role in seeking a better world.

He also highlighted the need to protect human rights, ensure development and security and reduce local and global inequalities.

The Pope called the UN the embodiment of aspirations for a “greater degree of international ordering” in response to the needs of the human family.

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Ban Ki-moon welcomes Pope Benedict, stressing common mission

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-05-17T16:21:00Z

18 April 2008 – Welcoming a guest he invited to the United Nations a year ago, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stressed to Pope Benedict XVI today the fundamental goals that unite the world Organization and the Roman Catholic Church.

“Your Holiness, welcome to our common home,” Mr. Ban told the smiling Pontiff as he introduced him to the 192-member Assembly at UN Headquarters in New York.

“In so many ways, our mission unites us with yours. You have spoken of the terrible challenge of poverty afflicting so much of the world’s population, and how we cannot afford indifference and self-centred isolation. You have encouraged the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, and called for progressive and agreed-upon nuclear disarmament.

“You have spelled out that those with greater power may not use it to violate the rights of others, and stated that peace is based on respect for the rights of all. You have spoken of water resources and climate change as matters of grave importance for the entire human family.

“You have called for an open and sincere dialogue, both within your Church and between religions and cultures, in search of the good of humankind. Finally, you have called for trust in, and commitment to, the United Nations.”

Mr. Ban recalled that the Pope had underscored the UN ability to foster genuine dialogue and develop multilateral strategies to meet the manifold challenges of a complex and rapidly changing world, and he stressed the faith that motivates UN personnel.

“Whether we worship one God, many or none – we in the United Nations have to sustain and strengthen our faith every day. As demands on our Organization multiply, we need more and more of this precious commodity,” he said.

“I am profoundly grateful to his Holiness Pope Benedict XVI for bestowing some of his faith on us – and for placing his trust in us. He possesses both of these in abundance. May we be strengthened by his visit today.”

General Assembly President Srgjan Kerim told the Pope his visit was a very powerful recognition of the validity and importance of international institutions, particularly of the UN.

“In a world full of controversies which can escalate into conflicts, violence and atrocities, the role of international institutions is without alternative. Effective multilateralism remains our goal, so as to achieve peace and stability on Earth,” he said.

“Let me express my high appreciation for the valuable contribution of the Holy See to the work of the General Assembly and in particular for your important role in promoting social justice, providing education and alleviating poverty and hunger around the world.”

Mr. Kerim held a brief meeting with Pope following his address, in which the two underscored the need for multilateralism as a guiding principle in international relations and agreed that international institutions and especially the UN should be at the centre of multilateral approaches as they play an important and relevant role in today’s world.

“However, they both stressed that international bodies, including the United Nations and, within that the Security Council, have to change and readjust to the realities of the world to be able to adapt to ongoing changes and address current global challenges,” a statement issued by Mr. Kerim’s spokesman said.

Source: http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=26381&Cr=pope&Cr1

Aide: Interreligious Dialogue Enters New Era

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-05-17T16:13:00Z

Father Atuire Says Pope Brought "Renaissance"

By Mercedes de la Torre

JERUSALEM, MAY 15, 2009 (Zenit.org).- Benedict XVI's visit to the Holy Land brought with it a "renaissance" in relations between Jews, Muslims and Christians, says Father Caesar Atuire.

Father Caesar Atuire, the delegate administrator of Opera Romana Pellegrinaggi, the Vatican institution whose mission is to evangelize through pastoral tourism and the ministry of pilgrimage, said this in comments to ZENIT after the Pope visited the Holy Sepulcher today, a few hours before returning to Rome.

"The Holy Sepulcher is the place of the resurrection of Jesus Christ," noted Father Atuire. "This place marks the renaissance in the history of humanity. I believe that the visit of Benedict XVI here to the Holy Land has been a moment for the renaissance of the relations between Christians, Muslims and Jews."

The priest cited as an example the comments of Israel's President Shimon Peres when he told the Pontiff that never in the history of 2,000 years have the relations between Jews and Christians been better.

"The Pope has washed away the fears and worries that were there before the visit, and he has cleared away the environment to establish a new era in the relations between Christians and Jews," said Father Atuire.

"And the same has happened with the Muslims," he continued. "It is enough to listen to the address from Thursday in Nazareth, of the Muslim representative, to see that a new era is opening."

"In the four years of the pontificate of Benedict XVI there have been tensions with Jews and Muslims, and the media has made it look that interreligious relations have gotten worse under this Pope," added the pilgrimage director. "But this trip shows that these accusations don't have any basis."

Father Atuire noted that the trip will also have an important impact among the Christians in the Holy Land, "who feel isolated from the rest of the world. The Pope's visit made them feel the closeness of the universal Church and confirmed them in their vocation to be the leaven of peace for the earth.

"Even though they are few, they can make a difference so that peace comes to this land. They have a vocation at the service of the Church and of the world."

The priest said that as another fruit of the trip, "it can be hoped that the peace process, that goes forward on square wheels, begins to gain speed. There are many convergent elements that are seeking peace in this land and the Pope's visit has given a lot of encouragement to those who seek peace.

"The Pope confirmed to Mahmud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian National Authority, the need to create two states that live in security and collaboration, guaranteeing the right to free movement, in which its citizens can live in dignity with their families. In this sense, it is not just a political peace, but one that comes from the heart of each person."

Source

WCC and the ecumenical movement in the 21st century

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-05-17T16:00:00Z

The visible unity of the church is the central goal of the ecumenical movement. And while "visible unity" can be understood in various ways, it necessarily involves relationships between churches.

Churches and other ecumenical partners pray, reflect, plan and act together. As a fellowship of some 350 Anglican, Eastern and Oriental Orthodox, Old Catholic, Protestant, independent and united churches, nurturing such relationships is a vital facet of the WCC's vocation to support the churches and the ecumenical movement in their efforts to reach visible unity.

Thus, this programme will encourage relationships with and among its member churches, but also with churches which are not members, Christian world communions, conciliar bodies and other ecumenical agencies; it will support ecumenical initiatives at regional, national and local levels and, in general, seek to promote the coherence of the one ecumenical movement.

Projects

Ecumenical vision of the WCC: This project interprets and communicates a vision, embodied in the WCC's 1998 policy statement "Towards a common understanding and vision of the WCC", that seeks both to broaden the ecumenical movement and to serve it.
Global platform for theology and analysis: This project offers a global platform for theological analysis of 21st century ecumenical challenges and their implications for church and ecumenical vision, activities and structures.
Relationships with member churches: This project provides a space in which member churches can explore and experience what being in fellowship means, and seeks to maximize their participation in its governing bodies and ongoing programmatic work.
Partnership with ecumenical organizations: This project seeks to develop partnerships with and among international and regional ecumenical organizations, national councils of churches, specialized ministries, Christian world communions, and coordinate relationships with non-member churches such as the Roman Catholic, Pentecostal and evangelical churches.
Youth in the ecumenical movement: This project promotes the active participation of young adults in the life of churches and the ecumenical movement, helping them to network, and enabling them to express their concerns and visions.
Women in church and society: This project offers women from different Christian traditions, regions and age groups an opportunity to speak out and share their visions so that they might contribute to society, the ecumenical movement and the search for unity.

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Faith and values organizations form coalition to advance United Nations Decade for Inter-religious Cooperation for Peace

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-05-17T15:57:00Z

11.03.09 10:36

Some forty-five religious, interfaith, and value-based organizations from five continents agreed to form a coalition to advance a "United Nations Decade for Inter-religious and Intercultural Dialogue, Understanding, and Cooperation for Peace." Coalition members expressed the hope that the UN Sixty-Fourth General Assembly, which will begin its deliberations in September 2009, will approve a resolution establishing such a decade from 2011-2020.

The meeting took place at Maryknoll, New York, on 2-4 March. Participants included Baha'i, Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, Shinto, Sikh, Zoroastrian as well as indigenous traditions.

A provisional steering committee promoted the decade with UN member states during 2008. The UN General Assembly took the first step on 14 November 2008 by adopting resolution 63/22 which calls for exploring the feasibility of such a decade. The resolution was co-sponsored by 78 states.

On Monday, the president of the UN General Assembly, Miguel D'Escoto Brockmann, reiterated his previous calls for a "new spirit of solidarity and a powerful injection of moral and ethical values into our business and political lives." He urged the religious leaders to work together with the United Nations since these concerns require "life-long commitment" and religious institutions have the "staying power in the face of these challenges."

The coalition elected a steering committee - composed of organizations representing religious communities, interfaith and value-based civil society organizations - to strategically promote the decade idea among member states of the UN.

An opportunity to work for peace

Stein Villumstad, deputy secretary general of Religions for Peace, the world's largest and most representative multi-religious organization, will chair the coalition steering committee. "This is a unique opportunity for religious traditions, so easily hijacked for destructive purposes, to work with the United Nations and jointly mobilize their communities and organizations for urgent and compelling actions for peace," he said. "Time and space created by the decade should make a difference for the poor, marginalized, and oppressed peoples of the world."

The World Council of Churches (WCC) - host of the initial gathering of this coalition in Bossey, Switzerland in January 2008 - continues to promote this initiative, said Shanta Premawardhana, WCC director for Inter-religious Dialogue and Cooperation. "Our churches, through the Churches Commission on International Affairs (CCIA) have a long history of working with the UN and its agencies on a variety of projects that contribute to sustainable peace," he said.

The coalition will meet next in the context of the Parliament of the World's Religions in Melbourne, Australia, in December 2009. Dirk Ficca, the executive director of the Parliament, himself a member of the steering committee welcomed the initiative.

Coalition members hope the proposed UN decade will be launched on 21 September 2010, the International Day of Peace. This would immediately follow the current 2001-2010 International Decade for a Culture of Peace and Non-violence for the Children of the World and the 2010 International Year for the Rapprochement of Cultures.

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U.N. panel says world should ditch dollar

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-05-01T04:15:00Z

Wed Mar 18, 2009 11:16am EDT

By Jeremy Gaunt, European Investment Correspondent

LUXEMBOURG (Reuters) - A U.N. panel will next week recommend that the world ditch the dollar as its reserve currency in favor of a shared basket of currencies, a member of the panel said on Wednesday, adding to pressure on the dollar.

Currency specialist Avinash Persaud, a member of the panel of experts, told a Reuters Funds Summit in Luxembourg that the proposal was to create something like the old Ecu, or European currency unit, that was a hard-traded, weighted basket.

Persaud, chairman of consultants Intelligence Capital and a former currency chief at JPMorgan, said the recommendation would be one of a number delivered to the United Nations on March 25 by the U.N. Commission of Experts on International Financial Reform.

"It is a good moment to move to a shared reserve currency," he said.

Central banks hold their reserves in a variety of currencies and gold, but the dollar has dominated as the most convincing store of value -- though its rate has wavered in recent years as the United States ran up huge twin budget and external deficits.

Some analysts said news of the U.N. panel's recommendation extended dollar losses because it fed into concerns about the future of the greenback as the main global reserve currency, raising the chances of central bank sales of dollar holdings.

"Speculation that major central banks would begin rebalancing their FX reserves has risen since the intensification of the dollar's slide between 2002 and mid-2008," CMC Markets said in a note.

Russia is also planning to propose the creation of a new reserve currency, to be issued by international financial institutions, at the April G20 meeting, according to the text of its proposals published on Monday.

It has significantly reduced the dollar's share in its own reserves in recent years.

GOOD TIME

Persaud said that the United States was concerned that holding the reserve currency made it impossible to run policy, while the rest of world was also unhappy with the generally declining dollar.

"There is a moment that can be grasped for change," he said.

"Today the Americans complain that when the world wants to save, it means a deficit. A shared (reserve) would reduce the possibility of global imbalances."

Persaud said the panel had been looking at using something like an expanded Special Drawing Right, originally created by the International Monetary Fund in 1969 but now used mainly as an accounting unit within similar organizations.

The SDR and the old Ecu are essentially combinations of currencies, weighted to a constituent's economic clout, which can be valued against other currencies and indeed against those inside the basket.

Persaud said there were two main reasons why policymakers might consider such a move, one being the current desire for a change from the dollar.

The other reason, he said, was the success of the euro, which incorporated a number of currencies but roughly speaking held on to the stability of the old German deutschemark compared with, say, the Greek drachma.

Persaud has long argued that the dollar would give way to the Chinese yuan as a global reserve currency within decades.

A shared reserve currency might negate this move, he said, but he believed that China would still like to take on the role.

(To read Reuters Global Investing Blog click here; for the MacroScope Blog click on blogs.reuters.com/macroscope; for Hedge Fund Hub click on blogs.reuters.com/hedgehub)

(editing by Patrick Graham)

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Tax Day revolution brewing

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-04-16T00:09:00Z

Jeff Weingarten, chair of the Morristown Tax Day Tea Party pictured at the Tea Party held in Manhattan in February.

CLIFTON – "A revolution is brewing" and it promises to boil over on April 15 at the hundreds of Tax Day Tea Parties reminiscent of the original Boston Tea Party.

In 1773 American colonists, fed up with the British government and its excessive taxation, hijacked a British ship carrying tea and dumped the cargo into the Boston Harbor. The act sent a clear message to the British government that colonists would no longer stand for taxation without representation.

Taxation and government spending is once again at the heart of the new ‘revolution.’

On April 15 people will unite and protest what they call the government’s excessive spending and excessive taxation with hundreds of "Tax Day Tea Parties." Even though this time, organizers say there are no plans to throw tea into harbors, the message to the government will be loud and clear — repeal the pork, cut taxes and spending.

One such "Tax Day Tea Party" is planned for noon on the Green in Morristown.

Chaired by Clifton resident Jeffrey Weingarten, the Morristown Tea Party, is one of at least 500 nationwide and one of at least six in New Jersey. Other New Jersey cities hosting tea parties are Belmar, Flemington, Newark, Piscataway and Trenton.

Weingarten said hundreds, and possibly thousands of people are expected to attend the Morristown ‘Party" because "spending, borrowing and printing more and more money are not core American values." He said most New Jersey residents, as well as other Americans, all say the same thing: "We are taxed enough already. Enough is enough."

Gubernatorial candidates Steve Lonegan and Chris Christie have accepted invitations to the Tax Party, Weingarten said, and have promised to speak. He said other politicians and elected leaders, including Gov. Jon Corzine have been invited to attend.

Weingarten said this event is for all taxpayers who are fed up with the government’s "overspending." He said the events set for Tax Day are not anti-Democrats or anti-Republican, just "excessive spending" and about "Americans wanting to take their country back."

The idea to hold the tea parties originated with CNBC analyst Rick Santelli, who became a favorite hit on YouTube after his rant from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange against President Obama's proposed $275 billion homeowner bailout plan and other massive spending measures. While on air, he told viewers he would be scheduling a tea party to protest the spending, and that idea really took off, Weingarten said.

Following Santelli’s "rant" a national collaborative grassroots effort which included Smart Girl Politics, Top Conservatives on Twitter, the DontGo Movement and many other online groups and coalitions, organized and followed through with the planned events, according to taxdayteaparty.com. Individuals or organizations on the local levels have planned the local events.

"This is about public citizens dedicated to supporting the Constitution…personal liberty, responsibility, limited government and free markets," Weinberger said.

"This is historic, very historic. This really is a We the People moment," Weingartenr said, adding, "We want to show people that they are not alone in their frustration against government spending."

Event organizers expect to also break a record on April 15 with the most anti-spending rallies held at one time.

Weingarten said he has spoken to thousands of people and they are all supportive of the events. He said he has not met anyone who objects to the rallies, adding many people are going out of their way to attend.

"There is a group of older people in their 70s from Exit 58 on the Parkway who have chartered a bus and are coming to the event. They are calling themselves the "Band of Patriots," Weingarten said.

Some Tea Parties have already been held and others are scheduled to take place prior to Tax Day, Wiengarten said, adding he was a guest speaker at the Tea Party held in Manhattan in February. He said since then the word has continued to spread and attendance keeps growing.

While Manhattan was having its own Party on Feb. 27th, an estimated 30,000 Americans took to the street in about 40 cities across the country in the first nationwide "Tea Party" protest, according to the national Web site.

Weingarten and other organizers attribute the success of the tea parties to a number of decisions made by elected official, starting off with Congress voting for a $500 billion tax bill without reading it; spending trillions of borrowed dollars leaving a debt for "our great-grandchildren"; giving money to special interest groups in earmarks for election purposes; saying they would take wealth and redistribute it; punishing those who practice responsible financial behavior and rewarding those who did not; messing with America’s health care and more.

For more information log on to: morristownteaparty.blogivists.com/, or www.taxdayteaparty.com.

E-mail: Sportelli@northjersey.com

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Analysis: Crisis may lead to new world order

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-04-02T03:40:00Z

LONDON, England (CNN) -- Can this G-20 summit prove to be anything more than group therapy for a bunch of fingernail-gnawing, troubled individuals?

The prospects are not good.

The men and women called together in London by UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown to counter an economic slump are politicians -- just at a time when the world's electorates are demonstrating their lack of faith in governments and in their ability to understand, let alone sort out, the economic mess.

Thirty, 20, even 10 years back there used to be some belief that getting the power-players together could solve problems, or at least give others a push in doing so.

But it was once said of a former U.S. Secretary of State, "There was never any world situation so bad that a few well-chosen words from John Foster Dulles couldn't make it a hundred times worse."

The main task of this London summit may be simply to avoid doing that.

The British talking down of expectations over the past few days has been significant. Up front, on camera, ministers make optimistic noises. Behind the scenes diplomats warn of a potential lose-lose scenario.

If the summit fails to agree, it will destroy what is left of any confidence in the world's trading centers. Who's who at the G-20 »

But if the G-20 leaders do sign up to an agreement, it is likely to be so anodyne that it won't make any difference, other than boosting a few participants' opinion poll ratings at home a notch or two for being seen to try.

It was always unreal to imagine that the economic ministers of the G-20 nations were going to re-write their budgets in 24 hours in London.

And since the G-20 doesn't have a permanent secretariat, who is going to enforce anything they do agree?

The run-up to the summit has revealed essential differences in approach between the principals.

U.S. President Barack Obama and Brown both favor driving on fiscal stimulus, even if the governor of the Bank of England is cautioning his prime minister he can't afford to throw any more money at the problem. Obama, Brown together before the G-20 summit »

Brown and Obama have limited room for maneuver since both their countries have such hefty current account and budget deficits.

They just don't have the money to do it themselves, and they may have trouble persuading those who do have the cash to use it.

In an uncomfortable reminder of serious divisions over the Iraq war, Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel and France's President Nicolas Sarkozy, each with more national traditions than Obama and Brown, and with their welfare states already pumping money into their economies as unemployment increases, are pursuing a different agenda.

Blaming "Anglo-Saxon economics" and dodgy banking practices for the mess, they don't want more funds injected. Watch the view from France »

They want to focus on tougher regulation of the financial community. They want the summit to start re-writing the global rulebook on capitalism.

Sarkozy, a man constitutionally uncomfortable unless the spotlight is shining on him, has even threatened to walk out of the G-20 proceedings rather than sign up to anything he doesn't consider tough enough on reining back tax havens, policing hedge funds and restricting the bonus culture.

Facing growing unpopularity at home, he is back on the "moral capitalism" kick he evidenced when holding the EU presidency.

The intriguing thing is that the economic crisis and Brown's lining up with Obama, who has proclaimed his belief in the enduring "special relationship" with Britain, has revived the Franco-German alliance which used to dominate EU affairs and which had seemed to wither under Merkel and Sarkozy.

She doesn't like his touchy-feely ways, he finds her incremental style of politics frustrating. They had drifted apart, but they are back sharing a political tent.

Their agreement does not just make life uncomfortable for Brown.

It means that on his first trip outside the U.S., Obama is facing unexpected tensions with instinctive allies and the possibility of being associated with discord and failure.

He must be disappointed too at the overall contribution from the EU, which sees many of its newer members to the east struggling for survival in the economic slowdown.

The EU response has been insignificant, poorly co-coordinated, and divided.

Jose Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, has outlined six areas on which the Europeans hope the summit will focus.

They include, tactfully, both Brown's fiscal stimulus and Sarkozy/Merkel's tougher regulation of markets.

The big question on the fiscal stimulus front is: What will China do? The Chinese perspective »

Brown's hope is that China, worried about the safety of its money invested in the U.S., will be ready to commit extra funds to fighting the world recession.

But if he agrees to do so, President Hu Jintao will surely exact a price.

Already the G-8 countries have seemingly conceded that the world's current problems are too big for them to solve and that G-20 is a more appropriate forum.

If China comes up with the money to help, it will need assurances that it will in the future enjoy greater power within such multilateral institutions as the IMF and the World Bank.

The U.S. and Europe, who have dominated the G-8, now have little option too but to accept a new world order.

The G-20 meetings -- remember that chap George Bush who called one in Washington last November? -- have given Asia, India, China and Latin America a much-needed voice at the top table.

Whatever the outcome in London it is unlikely now that the G-8 alone will ever carry the same sway.

And not surprisingly, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who hosts this summer's G-8 in Sardinia, has proposed that its gathering should be immediately followed by one of the G-20.

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French parliament delays debate on Sunday law

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-03-28T04:09:00Z

01.06.09, 08:41 AM EST

PARIS, Jan 6 (Reuters) - France's opposition Socialists claimed a rare victory over the centre-right government when parliamentary debate on a bill to ease restrictions on Sunday business hours was postponed indefinitely.

Examination of the bill, which has aroused fierce opposition among the Socialists as well as among several centre-right deputies, had been scheduled to resume on Jan. 15 but was removed from the parliamentary timetable issued on Tuesday.

Government spokesman Luc Chatel denied there had been a climbdown over the bill but said that with major debates over an economic stimulus package and constitutional reform coming up, there had been no space on the parliamentary calendar.

But Socialists said the move, which was heavily backed by President Nicolas Sarkozy, showed the government was not sure of support among its own ranks.

'The deputies on the right have obviously abandoned the government on this question,' said Christian Eckert, spokesman for the Socialist parliamentary group on the issue.

'This plan did not help any social phenomenon that should be encouraged or anything that could have helped economic recovery,' he said.

Roger Karoutchi, the minister responsible for government relations with the parliament, said there was no space to debate the measures before Jan. 25 but he declined to say when debate may resume. 'We will see later on,' he said.

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European bishops back proposed EU law on Sunday rest

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-03-28T03:56:00Z

Brussels, Belgium, Feb 16, 2009 / 07:23 pm (CNA).- The secretariat of the Commission of the Bishops' Conferences of the European Community has welcomed a proposed EU law that would safeguard Sunday as a day of rest from work.

According to L’Osservatore Romano, the secretariat issued a statement praising the measure proposed by five EU parliamentarians to recognize the value of “Sunday rest as part of the ‘cultural patrimony’ and ‘European social model’.”

“The current economic and financial crisis has made it even more evident that not every aspect of human life can be subject to the laws of the market,” the bishops stressed.

“In fact, consumerism is not a model either for a sustainable economy or for healthy human development.” Sunday work, they continued, “puts those who work on Sunday into a socially disadvantageous position, affecting everything from family life to their own personal health.”

The proposed measure, which would need 394 votes to pass in the EU parliament, would call on member states and EU institutions to “protect Sunday as the weekly day of rest” in order “to improve the protection of workers’ health and the balancing of work and family life.”

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Store fines highlight French ire over Sunday work

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-03-28T03:33:00Z

Posted 4/6/2008 2:40 PM

PARIS (AP) — Ikea was ordered to pay more than $700,000 last week for staying open on Sundays in a Paris suburb. A big French home repair chain was sued for nearly as much — also for violating a 102-year-old requirement to shut up shop on Sunday.

Both cases show that the stakes are mounting in a long-running battle between French unions and retailers over shopping on the seventh day.

The government of President Nicolas Sarkozy, encouraged by major companies, is trying to shed old restrictions as part of broader plans to loosen up the French economy.

Advocates of the 1906 law, determined to prevent its demise, are digging in and demanding ever-higher fines against violators of a rule they say upholds a less spending-obsessed French way of life.

"Working on Sundays calls into question the very foundation of society," said lawyer Vincent Lecourt, who represents the Workers Force union. "It is a day when we try to consume less ... when we try to have values that are a little different."

Lecourt, who will take another home repair shop to court April 18 in a similar case, has helped blaze a policing campaign in the Val d'Oise region north of Paris in recent months.

For decades, business owners around France have gotten around the law through loopholes allowing local officials to permit Sunday openings.

But in November, the loopholes were ruled illegal in the Val d'Oise region. Several stores including Ikea ignored the new restrictions, hoping that mayors and Sarkozy's free-market-friendly government would take their side.

Instead, companies in the Val d'Oise region are getting hit with unprecedented large penalties.

"This has never happened to us before," said Ikea spokeswoman Isabelle Cremoux. "Furniture stores around Paris have opened on Sundays for the last 40 years."

Other French regions have also seen a rise in legal battles over Sunday shopping, but the Val d'Oise struggle is seen as key because the region hosts many outlet stores and major chains that pull in big tax receipts. They also pull in shoppers from nearby Paris — where prices are higher and entire shopping districts are shuttered Sundays.

Finance Minister Christine Lagarde tried unsuccessfully last summer to tackle the overall Sunday work rules. In December, parliament approved an amendment allowing furniture stores to open Sundays, and Lagarde promised deeper changes to the law.

Resistance remains even among some in Sarkozy's ruling conservative party UMP, which dominates parliament. But the high-profile cases and skyrocketing penalty fees in recent months have prompted a new parliamentary discussion of the rules, said legislative adviser Thomas Berettoni, who works with UMP lawmaker Richard Mallie on the issue.

"For some areas of France, Sunday is a major shopping day, and it would hurt them not to work," said Berettoni.

Ikea, which is covered by the furniture store amendment, was sued by Workers Force for three Sundays that it stayed open before the new rules went into effect. A regional court ordered the chain to pay the equivalent of $707,500 by March 31.

The company says Sundays provide 20 to 25% of its weekly revenue in France. One memo from Ikea's French operations showed sales between $314,400 and $754,700 per Sunday at that location in 2005-06.

Castorama, a home repair chain not covered by the furniture amendment, risked violating the rules in hopes that the overall law would be relaxed soon, a spokeswoman said.

Instead, the Workers Force union went to court Thursday seeking more than $550,000 from a Castorama store in Val D'Oise.

Lecourt promised not to rest until major chains start adhering to the rules.

"If they don't close, we'll force them to close, even if we have to go there by public force, with the police ... but at least things will be clear," he said.

Source

Retailers sack workers as "Never on Sunday" law kicks in

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-03-28T01:33:00Z

Under pressure from the church, Croatia banned shops from working on Sundays and retailers immediately began firing workers, the Slobodna Dalmacija daily said on January 8. Large retail chains started first, in the first week of the year, saying they conducted one-fifth of their business on Sundays. The Getro chain has let go 200 employees and Magma toy stores did not renew annual contracts with 155, the report said. Small, single stores are also expected to follow suit.

"If only three percent of the workforce in retail trade is let go, that means 10,000 people in Croatia," the country representative of the Italian mall chain Emmezette said. The conservative Premier Ivo Sanader's cabinet had been preparing the controversial law banning work on Sundays over the previous four years. The law was pushed through under pressure of the Catholic Church, which is the vastly dominant confession and very influential in Croatia. A similar legislation, passed in 2004 by a Socialist-led government, was eventually toppled by the constitutional court as religiously discriminating and limiting the freedom of entrepreneurship.

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U.N.'s Ban says slump may lead to political crisis

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-03-28T01:04:00Z

Fri Mar 27, 2:34 pm ET

MOSCOW (Reuters) – U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned on Friday that the global economic crisis could lead to a political crisis and social unrest and called on the world's leading economies to act.

"I am concerned that if we do not properly address this issue swiftly, this may develop rather alarmingly into political instability, into a political crisis," the U.N. chief told diplomats in Moscow.

Ban, who was speaking less than a week before he attends a crisis meeting of leaders of the G20 group of industrialized and developing nations in London, spoke of the impact of the economic crisis on Russia and Eastern Europe.

Latvia's government collapsed last month after a wave of protests, while Greece, Bulgaria and Lithuania have seen popular anger explode into riots.

"Looking around the world we see a growing list of political instability. If we do not manage it properly, this crisis, I am concerned that this crisis may develop into global political instability," he said.

"If life goes much like this and harder ... social unrest will surely increase," he said. "That is why in London I will speak out forcefully for action to prevent the potential catastrophe in human development."

The head of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, on Monday said the crisis would push millions into poverty and unemployment, risking social unrest and even war.

Ban used his Moscow speech to call on countries to use anti-crisis stimulus packages to help fight climate change.

"My answer is it would be very smart to invest a certain proportion of this stimulus package in green growth and by doing this we can catch two birds with one stone," he said.

"If we are going to spend trillions of dollars on the global stimulus packages let us be smart and tackle climate change at the same time."

Source

Obama, president of US bishops hold private meeting

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-03-21T00:56:00Z

By Patricia Zapor
Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- President Barack Obama met for half an hour March 17 with Chicago Cardinal Francis E. George, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the White House and the USCCB announced.

Brief statements issued by the White House and the USCCB said little more than that the two presidents had met for a private, 30-minute afternoon session in the Oval Office.

The meeting was not included in Obama's daily schedule released to the press and no mention was made of it by either organization until it was over.

"The president and Cardinal George discussed a wide range of issues, including important opportunities for the government and the Catholic Church to continue their long-standing partnership to tackle some of the nation's most pressing challenges," said the White House statement. "The president thanked Cardinal George for his leadership and for the contributions of the Catholic Church in America and around the world."

The statement from the USCCB said: "The meeting was private. Cardinal George and President Obama discussed the Catholic Church in the United States and its relation to the new administration. The meeting lasted approximately 30 minutes.

"At the conclusion, Cardinal George expressed his gratitude for the meeting and his hopes that it will foster fruitful dialogue for the sake of the common good," the USCCB statement added.

Mercy Sister Mary Ann Walsh, USCCB director of media relations, said she expected no further information about the meeting to be released.

Source: http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0901238.htm

EU car licence symbolises 'adoration of Mary', says Dutch group

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-03-21T00:51:00Z

Andreas Havinga

Utrecht, Netherlands (ENI). A group of Protestant Christians in the Netherlands is objecting to the emblem of the European Union being placed on car registration plates in their country, asserting that the symbol conflicts with their religious convictions.

The National Foundation for the Preservation of the Political Reformed Principles states that the EU emblem - a circle of 12 golden stars on a blue background - symbolises the veneration of Mary, the mother of Jesus, by the Roman Catholic Church.

"Most people don't think about it, but the EU symbol was thought up by a Roman Catholic in honour of Mary," P. H. op 't Hof, chairperson of the Reformed foundation, was quoted recently by the Nederlands Dagblad newspaper as saying. The newspaper reported that a court in the town of Leeuwarden had acknowledged that the issue concerns a matter of conscience.

This emboldened the Protestant group to repeat earlier requests to transport minister Camiel Eurlings, asking that the EU symbol be removed from the licence plates that have been in force since 2000.

The government minister responded, however, by saying that he saw no reason to do so since it is European Union policy to have licence plates with the symbol.

The emblem and flag were first used by another European body, the Council of Europe, before being adopted by the EU in 1985. Some observers say that the symbol bears a striking similarity to the 12-star halo of the Virgin Mary often seen in Catholic art.

In 1989, the Vatican newspaper l'Osservatore Romano, reported the emblem's designer, Arsène Heitz, had described the source of his inspiration as a series of reported apparitions by the Virgin Mary in 19th-century Paris. The date on which the Council of Europe adopted the flag, 8 December 1955, coincided with the Catholic Feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Still, a Dutch member of the European Parliament, Toine Manders, has rejected as "outrageous" the statements by the Protestant group. "These 12 stars were already around in the period of Greek mythology, in other words long before Christianity,'' Manders stated on his Web site.

The Reformed foundation is a group of members of the Political Reformed Party (SGP), who judge the SGP to be insufficiently Calvinist. Founded in 1918, the SGP is the oldest political party in the Netherlands, and is known for its refusal to take part in any government Cabinet.

The Reformed foundation declared its was "disappointed" by the answer from the transport ministry.

Its chairperson, Op 't Hof, however, has come up with a provisional solution to the problem. The group sells adhesive stickers with the Dutch lion symbol to cover the EU emblem. Officially this is not allowed, but Op 't Hof says he has never encountered any problems.

New age of rebellion and riot stalks Europe

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-03-02T00:16:00Z

January 22, 2009

Roger Boyes

Iceland has no army, no navy and no air force - but it does have riot police.

On Tuesday night the black-uniformed troopers came out to quell the latest riots in Reykjavik, which erupted in front of parliament. The building was splattered with paint and yoghurt, the crowd yelled and banged pans, shot fireworks and flares at the windows and lit a fire in front of the main door.

Yesterday the protesters gathered again, hurling eggs at the car of Geir Haarde, the Prime Minister, and banging cans on its roof.

The transformation of the placid island into a community of seething anger - there have been half a dozen riots in recent weeks - is more than a regional oddity.

In Riga last week 10,000 protesters laid siege to the Latvian parliament; yesterday hundreds of Bulgarians rallied to demand that the Socialist-led Government should take action or step down, in a second week of demonstrations, and last month the police shooting of a 15-year-old Greek boy led to days of running battles in the streets of Athens and Salonika.

The protests went beyond the usual angry reflexes of societies braced for recession. The Greek riots heralded sympathetic actions across the world, from Moscow to Madrid, and in Berlin the Greek Consulate was briefly stormed. The Riga unrest spread rapidly to Lithuania. It is, some say, just the beginning: 2009 could become another 1968 - a new age of rebellion.

The LSE economist Robert Wade addressed about 1,000 Icelanders recently at a protest meeting in a Reykjavik cinema, warning that large-scale civil unrest was on the way. The tipping point, he said, would be this spring.

“It will be caused by the rise of general awareness throughout Europe, America and Asia that hundreds and millions of people in rich and poor countries are experiencing rapidly falling consumption standards; that the crisis is getting worse, not better, and that it has escaped the control of public authorities, national and international,” he said.

The global liquidity emergency became a full-blown crash so quickly that there was no time to hold governments to account. Now leaders all over Europe have declared themselves to be the saviours of the economy and are nationalising assets, extending loans and guarantees to failing banks and manufacturers. But the price is high: unemployment is starting to soar and cuts in public spending are hurting hospitals, schools and universities. Personal bankruptcies are at record levels.

Every segment of society has been hit, but it is the young who feel the pain most - and just as in 1968, it is they who are leading the rebellion.

The Greek disturbances, the worst since 1974, were triggered by the killing of the teenager, but the anger was stoked by a sense that the young were going to have to pick up the bill for the miscalculations of the political class. Unemployment among Greeks aged 15 to 24 has reached 21.2 per cent; for 25 to 34-year-olds it is 10.5 per cent. The good years have come to an end suddenly.

The boom in Iceland led to the few narrow streets of the capital becoming jammed with expensive 4x4s. Latvia had double-digit growth for years; now GDP is set to contract 5 per cent in the coming year and Latvian youths are beginning to rail against mismanagement and corruption.

In the EU, migration was always a way out of a tight domestic labour market. No more: the sheer magnitude of the recession means there is no easy escape. There are reports of anti-immigrant trouble brewing in Spain. Usually at this time of year migrant workers, most of them from Morocco, pile into the country to pick strawberries. This year the Spaniards are making it clear that they are unhappy about migrants taking jobs.

Each flare-up touches on a separate aspect of the crisis. In Greece it was partly about the failure of the education system (as in 1968). In Vilnius it was over high taxes. In Iceland it is about massive debt. In Russia unrest in Yekaterinburg and Vladivostok was about dearer car import duties.

But there are common threads. Across Europe, protesters demand a change of government. Politicians in wealthier countries can try to prop up banks and industries, but it does not work in heavily indebted nations with bloated and exposed financial sectors.

And there is a shared shock that the good times have gone. “The explosion conceals a compressed desperation,” the Greek psychology professor Fotini Tsalikoglou said of last month's outburst in Athens. “Many young people live with the unbearable knowledge that there is no future.”

Source

Kissinger: Obama primed to create 'New World Order'

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-03-02T00:06:00Z

Policy guru says global upheaval presents 'great opportunity'

9:07 pm Eastern

By Drew Zahn
© 2009 WorldNetDaily

Henry Kissinger

Conflicts across the globe and an international respect for Barack Obama have created the perfect setting for establishment of "a New World Order," according to Henry Kissinger, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and former secretary of state under President Nixon.

Kissinger has long been an integral figure in U.S. foreign policy, holding positions in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations. Author of over a dozen books on foreign policy, Kissinger was also named by President Bush as the chairman of the Sept. 11 investigatory commission.

Kissinger made the remark in an interview with CNBC's "Squawk on the Street" hosts Mark Haines and Erin Burnett at the New York Stock Exchange, after Burnett asked him what international conflict would define the Obama administration's foreign policy.

The president-elect is coming into office at a moment when there is upheaval in many parts of the world simultaneously," Kissinger responded. "You have India, Pakistan; you have the jihadist movement. So he can't really say there is one problem, that it's the most important one. But he can give new impetus to American foreign policy partly because the reception of him is so extraordinary around the world. His task will be to develop an overall strategy for America in this period when, really, a new world order can be created. It's a great opportunity, it isn't just a crisis."

Kissinger's comments are captured at roughly the two-minute mark of the following video:

Editor's note: The video includes a balloon in the first several seconds promoting a MySpace page that includes profane language and music and is not endorsed in any way by WND.

The phrase 'new world order' traces back at least as far as 1940, when author H.G. Wells used it as the title of a book about a socialist, unified, one-world government. The phrase has also been linked to American presidents, including Woodrow Wilson, whose work on establishing the League of Nations pioneered the concept of international government bodies, and to the first President Bush, who used it in a 1989 speech.

"A new partnership of nations has begun, and we stand today at a unique and extraordinary moment," said Bush before a joint session of Congress. "Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective – a new world order – can emerge: A new era … in which the nations of the world, east and west, north and south, can prosper and live in harmony."

The phrase "New World Order" causes alarm for many Americans, particularly those concerned about an international governing body trumping U.S. sovereignty or those that interpret biblical prophecy to foretell the establishment of a one-world government as key to the rise of the Antichrist. Conspiracy theorists, too, have latched on to the phrase, concerned that powerful financial or government figures are secretly plotting to rule the world.

Kissinger's ties to government and international powers – as well as his use of the phrase – have made him suspect in the eyes of many who are wary of what "new world order" might actually mean.

"There is a need for a new world order," Kissinger told PBS interviewer Charlie Rose last year, "I think that at the end of this administration, with all its turmoil, and at the beginning of the next, we might actually witness the creation of a new order – because people looking in the abyss, even in the Islamic world, have to conclude that at some point, ordered expectations must return under a different system."

As WND reported, Kissinger was also part of last year's super-secret Bilderberg Group, an organization of powerful international elites, including government, business, academic and journalistic representatives, that has convened annually since 1954.

According to sources that have penetrated the high-security meetings, the Bilderberg meetings emphasize a globalist agenda and promote the idea that the notion of national sovereignty is antiquated and regressive.

CNBC's Haines concluded the Kissinger interview by asking, "Are you confident about the people President-elect Obama has chosen to surround him?"

Kissinger replied, "He has appointed an extraordinarily able group of people in both the international and financial fields."

Source

Emerging global elite to use new global media to educate 'global citizens'

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-03-01T23:49:00Z

The following is based on a report by Cliff Kincaid, Accuracy in Media.

Elite members of the World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos, Switzerland, recently considered a proposal for a new global television network to usher in a state of “global governance.” The concept strikes some as authoritarian, even totalitarian. But the parent company of Fox News was one of the sponsors of this year's gathering.

The media proposal, which was included in “The Global Agenda 2009” report, is to create “a new global network” with “the capacity to connect the world, bridging cultures and peoples, and telling us who we are and what we mean to each other.” Several prominent U.S. media figures signed on to the alarming and controversial proposal.

Isn’t it nice that we might have a TV network telling us “who we are?” And “what we mean to each other?” Perhaps we will learn that we are global citizens. Perhaps a global leader of some sort will tell us that. Who might that be?

This proposal doesn’t come from a fringe organization. The WEF is an exclusive club of very rich and powerful people from around the world. It describes itself as “an independent international organization committed to improving the state of the world by engaging leaders in partnerships to shape global, regional and industry agendas.”

This year’s conference featured speeches by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Chinese Premier We Jiabao. Many U.S. corporations, including some getting Wall Street bailout money, were sponsors. News Corporation, the parent of Fox News, was a “strategic partner” of the event.

Valerie Jarrett, Assistant to the President for Intergovernmental Relations and Public Liaison, represented the Obama Administration at this year’s event and called leaders from all nations to “seize gladly” the duties of collaborating and boldly embrace “a new era of global financial responsibility.”

But the WEF also envisions cooperation and collaboration in global media ventures. It asks, “How can we save journalism to help it save the world?” Clearly, this is advocacy journalism on a global scale.

Indeed, the list of “Recommendations” says it is imperative to start “Communicating a global agenda, and motivating and mobilizing people to support it…”

Is this journalism? Or is it brainwashing and propaganda?

It says that “a genuine, global voice” is needed that shares a “fundamental commitment” to being an international media voice, and makes mention of “the media voices we think of as international” coming from London (the BBC), Qatar (Al-Jazeera) or Atlanta (CNN).

BBC is known for its anti-American programming, Al-Jazeera for its pro-terrorist slant, and CNN for its left-wing and pro-Democratic bias.

It will take “innovative public-private funding” to bring this new network into being, apparently meaning that the taxpayers in the U.S. will have to be soaked in order to help bring this about. But no price tag is put on the venture and no objection was apparently raised to government funding of such a network on a global basis. An “overview” statement does, however, decry “censorship and self-censorship.”

Elsewhere in the report (page 31) the idea of “international taxation” is proposed for “global action” of various kinds. Perhaps this is a vehicle for raising revenue for the new “global voice.”

The media proposal was developed by one of several “Global Agenda Councils” under the auspices of the WEF. The new TV network proposal was issued under the supervision of Pat Mitchell, the president of the Paley Center for Media and former President and Chief Executive Officer of the Public Broadcasting Service. She was the chair of the Global Agenda Council on the Future of Media.

Other members of the Council on the Future of Media were Betsy Morgan of the left-wing Huffington Post (former general manager of CBSNews.com); Rui Chenggang of China Central Television, an official political propaganda arm of the communist regime; and Zafar Siddiqi of CNBC Arabiya, a subsidiary of General Electric which is described as a 24-hour Arabic language financial and business information channel.

There is no indication in the published report that the Huffington Post executive raised any objection to working hand-in-glove with the communist propaganda channel. Is the Chinese media model a precedent for the new “global network?”

The conference was covered by media organizations such as CNBC, CNN, Bloomberg, Forbes and Fox, but no coverage that we could find was devoted to the proposal for a government-financed global media network. Talk about self-censorship!

John J. DeGioia, President of Georgetown University and the “Rapporteur of the Global Agenda Councils focusing on Society and Values,” summarized the work of Mitchell’s panel. He says (page 46) that, “We believe that this new moment also calls for a new media platform, across all media channels, a global non-profit ‘CNN’ providing a new form of independent journalism to inform, illuminate and deepen knowledge about issues that improve the state of the world.”

According to DeGioia’s biography, he walks the walk and is dedicated to helping “prepare young people for leadership roles in the global community.” His bio adds, “He is a member of the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO and Chair of its Education Committee and he represents Georgetown at the World Economic Forum and on the Council on Foreign Relations.”

The media council took advantage of what a description of its work said was an “enormous opportunity” to “redefine the media and its roles in a global, interconnected society.”

Under the title of “Recommendations” (page 182), the Council on the Future of Media declares that “The Council is championing a new global, independent news and information service whose role is to inform, educate and improve the state of the world?one that would take advantage of all platforms of content delivery from mobile to satellite and online to create a new global network.”

It goes on, “In a world where there are calls for global governance as a response to a global financial crisis, where scientific research, capital flows and production chains are globalized, the media and the communities in which we imagine ourselves remain fiercely localized.” Hence, a global network will work against “localized” or national-based systems and convince people to go “global” with their outlook and solutions. In other words, the new network will help undermine old-fashioned notions of national sovereignty and patriotism.

There are 22 members (page 183) of the Council on the Future of Media. In addition to Mitchell and Morgan, American members include:

Alex S. Jones, former media reporter for the New York Times and now Director, Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.
Susan King, former Washington correspondent for ABC News and now Director, Journalism Initiative, Special Initiatives and Strategy, Carnegie Corporation of New York.
John Lavine, Dean, Medill School of Journalism Northwestern University.
Nicholas Lemann, former Washington Post reporter and now Dean, School of Journalism, Columbia University.
David Nordfors, Director, Innovation Journalism and Senior Research Scholar, Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning, Stanford University.
Monroe Price, Director, Centre for Global Communications Studies, Annenberg School for Communication, the University of Pennsylvania.
Orville H. Schell, Director, Center on US-China Relations, Asia Society.

There doesn’t appear to be one identifiable conservative member on the list. Of course, everyone on the list is a certified objective media proessional, neither liberal nor conservative. Just ask them.

Source

Muslims, Catholics Join to Promote Peace

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-03-01T23:33:00Z

ROME, FEB. 26, 2009 (Zenit.org).- Muslims and Catholics have much in common when it comes to beliefs about peace, decided participants at an interreligious meeting: Both faiths consider that peace should permeate all aspects of life.

This was a conclusion from the Joint Committee for Dialogue of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue and the Cairo-based Permanent Committee of al-Azhar for Dialogue Among the Monotheistic Religions. The group had their annual meeting on Tuesday and Wednesday.

The seven-member group, led by Cheikh Ali Abd al-Baqi Shahata as head of the al-Azhar delegation, and Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, head of the Catholic delegation, gave eight conclusions in their final statement today.

"Peace and security are much needed in our present world marked by many conflicts and a feeling of insecurity," they affirmed. "Both Christians and Muslims consider peace a gift from God and, at the same time, the fruit of human endeavor. No true and lasting peace can be achieved without justice and equality among persons and communities."

The committees went on to affirm that religious leaders of both faiths "have the duty to promote a culture of peace, each within his respective community, especially through teaching and preaching."

And they contended that a "culture of peace should permeate all aspects of life: religious formation, education, interpersonal relations and the arts in their diverse forms. To this end, scholastic books should be revised in order not to contain material which may offend the religious sentiments of other believers, at times through the erroneous presentation of dogmas, morals or history of other religions."

Kids and the press

The Muslim-Catholic group also affirmed that the media has a key role in "the promotion of positive and respectful relations among the faithful of various religions."

And they acknowledged that there is a strong link between peace and human rights, such that "special attention was given to the defense of the dignity of the human person [...] especially regarding freedom of conscience and of religion."

The religious leaders said that youth need "special care" to be protected from violence and fanaticism so that they become "peace builders for a better world."

Finally, the delegations had a word to say about the Middle East.

"[T]he participants," they said, "in respect of the competence of the political leaders, ask to make use, through dialogue, of the resources of international law to solve the problems at stake in truth and justice."

Source

Protection of the work-free Sunday:

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-02-14T04:49:00Z

The Secretariat of COMECE, the Protestant Church in Germany (EKD) and the Church of England welcome the initiative of several Members of the European Parliament, to ask the House to decide on a Written Declaration “on the protection of a work-free Sunday as an essential pillar of the European Social Model and as part of the European cultural heritage”. Such a declaration would constitute an important commitment to a “Social Europe”. It is now important to find the majority necessary for this cross-party resolution, which has been launched by five parliamentarians – from the political groups of EPP, PSE, ALDE and UEN – on 2 February 2009.

The economic and financial crises have made us more aware of the fact that not all aspects of life can be subject to market forces. Unrestrained consumption is neither a model for a sustainable economy, nor a healthy concept for human development. Men and women, who work on Sundays, are put at a disadvantage in their social relationships: Their family life, personal development and even health are verifiably affected.

A part of the European cultural heritage of longstanding tradition and high value, the work-free Sunday is a decisive factor in balancing work and family life. It is of fundamental importance for family relations, but also for social and cultural life to safeguard one of the few remaining times which can be shared by children and their parents. According to EU law, Sunday is the weekly rest day for children and adolescents (1). That is why respect for Sunday rest has the potential to be a pillar of the European social model.

In recent years, the protection of Sunday has been eroded in many Member States, with the purpose of increasing production and consumption. Workers have experienced fragmentation of their private lives, while small and medium-sized enterprises, which cannot afford uninterrupted opening hours have lost ground in the market place. Accordingly this declaration now introduced into parliament calls on the Member States and on the EU institutions to “protect Sunday, as a weekly rest day, in forthcoming national and EU working-time legislation in order to enhance the protection of workers' health and the reconciliation of work and family life”.

In order to be adopted, it is now necessary for the Written Declaration to be signed by a majority (394) of MEPs before 7 May 2009.

------
(1)- See article 10 of Council Directive 94/33/EC of 22 June 1994, concerning the protection of young people at work, OJ L216, p. 12-20.

Article 116 of the Rules of Procedure of the European Parliament stipulates that a Written Declaration is a text of a maximum 200 words presented by a maximum of 5 MEPs and submitted to all MEPs for a period of 3 months. If the Declaration collects a majority of signatures, it becomes on official act of the European Parliament and is then transmitted to the addressees that are cited.

Text of the Written Declaration is in the annex and can also be found under:
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/activities/plenary/writtenDecl/wdFastOngoing.do

click here for source article

Gadhafi, as new African Union chairman, will seek single state

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-02-14T04:40:00Z

By LYDIA POLGREEN

The New York Times

DAKAR, Senegal — President Moammar Gadhafi of Libya was named chairman of the African Union on Monday, wresting control of a body he helped found and has long wanted to remake in his Pan-African image.

His installation as the new head of the 53-member body resembled more of a coronation than a democratic transfer of power. Gadhafi was dressed in flowing gold robes and surrounded by traditional African leaders who hailed him as the "king of kings."

The choice of Gadhafi was not a surprise — he was the leading candidate — but the prospect of his election to lead the African Union caused some unease among some of the group's member nations — who were meeting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia — as well as among diplomats and analysts. Gadhafi, who has ruled Libya with an iron hand for decades, is a stark change from the succession of recent leaders from such democratic countries as Tanzania, Ghana and Nigeria.

Gadhafi is an ardent supporter of a long-held dream of transforming Africa — a collection of post-colonial fragments divided by borders that were drawn arbitrarily by Western powers — into a vast, unified state that could play a powerful role in global affairs.

He has repeatedly proposed immediate unity and the establishment of a single currency, army and passport for the entire continent. He pledged Monday to bring up the issue for a vote at the African Union's next summit meeting, in July.

While a few African leaders share his passion and his timetable for this Pan-African vision, most prefer a go-slow approach, given the political realities that have emerged in the half-century since most of Africa became independent.

"In principle, we said the ultimate is the United States of Africa," said Tanzania's president, Jakaya Kikwete, the previous African Union chairman, according to the BBC. "How we proceed to that ultimate — there are building blocks."

Gadhafi's new role comes alongside a changing of the guard in Africa. A set of leaders once hailed as new visionaries or cursed as dictators have left the continent's stage, and a jumbled array of new leaders have emerged. But few match the global or continental influence and heft of those who have departed.

The cerebral Thabo Mbeki, one of the architects of what was supposed to be a club of democratic, corruption-free African countries, was hounded out of office in South Africa by his own party amid a shower of international criticism of his handling of everything from the AIDS pandemic to the crisis in Zimbabwe.

Olusegun Obasanjo, Nigeria's globe-trotting military-ruler-turned-democrat and continental power broker, stepped down in 2007 when his two terms were up. His replacement, Umaru Yar'Adua, a sickly and little known former state governor, has struggled to fill Obasanjo's global statesman-size shoes.

In December, Ghana, a bellwether for the state of democracy and economic progress in Africa, held a successful election in which the party of John Kufuor, a darling of foreign donors that keep the country afloat, was defeated by a two-time also-ran from the largest opposition party.

And Guinea's longtime strongman, Lansana Conte, the subject of one of Africa's longest deathwatches, died late last year, and a military junta seized power, throwing the country into confusion.

Gadhafi has been trying to remake his image, cooperating with the United States and Europe on nuclear weapons, terrorism and immigration issues. How he plans to use the post as chairman of the African Union is unclear.

"It remains to be seen if he is capable of being serious about anything," said J. Stephen Morrison, director of the Africa program at the Center for International and Strategic Studies, a research institution.

But Gadhafi has been a behind-the-scenes player in many African conflicts and intrigues, and persuading him to use his power and influence for the continent's benefit could help, Morrison said.

"The Libyans may want to show some utility in their leadership," he said. "They have got cash they can use. They have an intelligence service they can use. They have got oil. This is a continent that is really hurting right now. I wonder to what degree people looked at this and thought it may be goofy, but maybe something good will come out of this."

Source

Annan: World faces 'crisis of governance'

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-02-06T19:31:00Z

By CNN's Simon Hooper

DAVOS, Switzerland (CNN) -- The worldwide economic recession has exposed a "crisis of global governance" that can only be addressed by the radical reform of the United Nations, former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Wednesday as the World Economic Forum got under way in Switzerland.

Kofi Annan says the United Nations needs to be reformed. "The current architecture of managing global affairs is broken and needs to be fixed," Annan said on the opening morning of the five-day annual meeting of global political and business leaders. "We have major new players coming on the scene and they need to be integrated and given a voice."

Referring to the U.N. Security Council, which gives permanent places and vetoing powers to the U.S., the UK, Russia, China and France, Annan said: "We cannot continue to run the world based on countries that won a war 60 years ago. It's either destructive competition or cooperation. We live in an interdependent world and the only way to move forward is to cooperate."

Annan is one of six co-chairs at this year's WEF gathering, along with news tycoon Rupert Murdoch, HSBC Chairman Stephen Green, Werner Wenning of the German chemical group Bayer, Indian industrialist Anand G. Mahindra and Maria Ramos, Chief Executive of the South African transport group Transnet.

He also urged delegates to address three interconnected challenges: the global recession, energy and security, and climate change.

"It is important leaders work on ways of finding effective, far-reaching policies -- even if they are radical -- that will allow us to create sustainable economic growth and create jobs for those who are out of jobs," Annan said.

Newscorp. CEO Murdoch said delegates needed to be "absolutely honest about where the world is at this point," warning that the consequences of $50 trillion being wiped off personal fortunes had left people feeling "depressed and traumatized."

"We've been living in the Western world way above our means. We've been on a great binge and it's come to an end and we have to live though the correction," Murdoch said.

But he said the downturn offered a chance to set about tackling issues of energy sufficiency and pollution.

"We must treat this crisis, whether it lasts for a year or five years, as an opportunity to set goals for how we want to come out of it. This is a time to shape the policies to help to solve some of those problems."

HSBC boss Green said the banking industry needed to admit that it had not "covered itself in glory" in contributing to the collapse of the financial industry and called for continuing government intervention to "stop a nasty recession spiraling down into something else."

But he said the major banks could contribute to solving the crisis as well: "I do not believe for a moment that you can have a successful economy without successful and properly functioning international capital markets."

Wenning said he didn't expect any solutions to emerge from this year's meeting, but hoped delegates could achieve "a joint understanding of the reasons for the financial crisis" and called for a return to "the basics of sustainable behavior."

"If we are really able to address these mega-challenges of the future then we would be able to restore the trust in leadership -- and I believe the world needs leadership."

Political leaders will join the discussions later Wednesday with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin both due to deliver agenda-setting addresses.

Source: http://www.cnn.com/2009/BUSINESS/01/28/davos.wef.annan/index.html

Bill creates detention camps in U.S. for 'emergencies'

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-02-06T19:28:00Z

Rep. Alcee L. Hastings, D-Fla., has introduced to the House of Representatives a new bill, H.R. 645, calling for the secretary of homeland security to establish no fewer than six national emergency centers for corralling civilians on military installations.

The proposed bill, which has received little mainstream media attention, appears designed to create the type of detention center that those concerned about use of the military in domestic affairs fear could be used as concentration camps for political dissidents, such as occurred in Nazi Germany

The bill also appears to expand the president's emergency power, much as the executive order signed by President Bush on May 9, 2007, that, as WND reported, gave the president the authority to declare an emergency and take over the direction of all federal, state, local, territorial and tribal governments without even consulting Congress.

As WND also reported, DHS has awarded a $385 million contract to Houston-based KBR, Halliburton's former engineering and construction subsidiary, to build temporary detention centers on an "as-needed" basis in national emergency situations.

According to the text of the proposed bill, the purpose of the National Emergency Centers is "to provide temporary housing, medical, and humanitarian assistance to individuals and families dislocated due to an emergency or major disaster."

Three additional purposes are specified in the text of the proposed legislation:

To provide centralized locations for the purposes of training and ensuring the coordination of federal, state and local first responders;
To provide centralized locations to improve the coordination of preparedness, response and recovery efforts of government, private, not-for-profit entities and faith-based organizations;
To meet other appropriate needs, as defined by the secretary of homeland security.

The broad specifications of the bill's language, however, contribute to concern that the "national emergency" purpose could be utilized by the secretary of homeland security to include any kind of situation the government wants to contain or otherwise control.

Rep. Hastings created controversy during the 2008 presidential campaign with his provocative comments concerning Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

"If Sarah Palin isn't enough of a reason for you to get over whatever your problem is with Barack Obama, then you damn well had better pay attention," Hastings said, as reported by ABC News. "Anybody toting guns and stripping moose don't care too much about what they do with Jews and blacks. So, you just think this through."

H.R. 645, which seeks to allocate $360 million for developing the emergency centers, has been referred to the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure and to the Committee on Armed Services.

Source: http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=87757

Global financial crisis sparks unrest

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-02-06T19:25:00Z

03 Feb 2009 16:43:25 GMT

Source: Reuters

(Updates with Latvia)

Feb 3 (Reuters) - Here are some details of protests and developments as a result of the global financial crisis:

* BRITAIN:

-- A decision by France's Total to bring Italian and Portuguese workers to build a unit at the Lindsey oil refinery has triggered a week of protests by thousands of energy workers.

-- Hundreds of contractors at the refinery walked out again on Tuesday and 600 contractors at a plant owned by ConocoPhillips on the east coast also downed tools. The strikes have not disrupted energy supplies.

* BULGARIA:

-- Hundreds of Bulgarians demanded economic and social reforms in the face of a global slowdown in anti-government rallies last month, calling on the Socialist-led government to act or step down.

-- Earlier in January, hundreds of protesters clashed with police, smashed windows and damaged cars in Sofia when a rally against corruption and slow reforms in the face of the economic crisis turned into a riot.

* FRANCE:

-- Hundreds of thousands of strikers marched in French cities on Thursday to demand pay rises and job protection. Some protesters clashed with police, but no major violence was reported.

-- The one-day strike failed to paralyse the country and support from private sector workers appeared limited. Labour leaders hailed the action, which marked the first time France's eight union federations had joined forces against the government since President Nicolas Sarkozy took office in 2007.

* GERMANY:

-- Thousands of German public sector workers went on strike on Tuesday to press for more pay during the worse economic downturn in decades, in action that affected transport and schools across the country.

Public transport ground to a halt in 10 cities across Bavaria, while schools, hospitals suffered walk-outs in northern Germany, service sector union Verdi said. Local authorities and schools were also affected in the east of the country, it added.

* GREECE:

-- Greek farmers put up roadblocks across the country, protesting against low prices. Most were taken down last week after the government pledged 500 million euros in aid. Blockades continued on and off at the border with Bulgaria, and on Tuesday riot police clashed for a second day with farmers from Crete.

-- High youth unemployment was a main driver for rioting in Greece in December, initially sparked by the police shooting of a youth in an Athens neighbourhood. The protests forced a government reshuffle.

* ICELAND:

-- Parties forming a new coalition for the crisis-hit island decided on Sunday its new prime minister will be former Social Affairs Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir.

-- Prime Minister Geir Haarde resigned last week after a series of protests, some of which had turned violent. He was the first leader to fall as a direct result of the credit crunch.

-- The collapse of the country's fast-expanding banks under a weight of debt forced the country to take a $10 billion IMF-led rescue package and sparked widespread anger.

* LATVIA:

-- Latvian farmers used tractors to block a main road and laid siege on Tuesday to the Agriculture Ministry to protest falling incomes, adding pressure on a government already facing a no confidence vote in parliament on Wednesday.

-- Farmers have demanded extra support from the authorities to compensate for the drop in prices for their produce.

-- A 10,000-strong protest in Latvia on Jan. 16 descended into a riot. Government steps to cut wages, as part of an austerity plan to win international aid, have angered people.

* LITHUANIA:

-- Also on Jan. 16, police fired teargas to disperse demonstrators who pelted parliament with stones in protest at government cuts in social spending to offset an economic slowdown. Police said 80 people were detained and 20 injured.

-- Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius said the violence would not stop an austerity plan launched after a slide in output and revenues.

* RUSSIA:

-- Thousands of opposition supporters rallied in Moscow and the far east port of Vladivostok on Saturday in a national day of protests over hardships caused by the financial crisis. On Sunday hundreds of demonstrators in Moscow called for Russia's leaders to resign.

-- Street rallies were held in almost every major city over the weekend. The pro-Kremlin United Russia party also drew thousands to rallies in support of government anti-crisis measures.

-- About 100 protesters were arrested in Vladivostok last month during protests against hikes in second hand car import duties aimed at protecting jobs in the domestic car industry.

* SWITZERLAND:

-- Hundreds of people rallied in Geneva and Davos on Saturday to protest against the World Economic Forum, saying the elite gathered for its annual meeting are not qualified to fix the world's problems.

-- In Geneva, where the WEF has its headquarters, police in riot gear fired teargas and water canon to disperse a crowd.

Source: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L1472255.htm

Iceland's Prime Minster Says Government Collapsed

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-01-31T22:22:00Z

Monday , January 26, 2009

Iceland's coalition government collapsed Monday, leaving the island nation in political turmoil amid a financial crisis that has pummeled its economy and required an international bailout to keep the country afloat.

Prime Minister Geir Haarde said he was unwilling to meet demands from his coalition partners in the Social Democratic Alliance Party, which insisted upon the post of prime minister in order to keep the coalition intact.

Haarde, who has been prime minister since 2006, said he would officially inform the country's president later Monday that the government had collapsed.

Foreign Minister Ingibjorg Gisladottir, who heads the Social Democrats, is expected to start talks immediately with opposition parties in an attempt to form a new government. That government would sit until new elections are held, likely in May.

Haarde had previously said he wouldn't lead his Independence Party into new elections, because he has cancer.

He told reporters on Monday that he had proposed Education Minister Thorgerdur Katrin Gunnarsdottir, of Haarde's own party, be appointed Iceland's new prime minister — but Gisladottir rejected that offer.

"It was an unreasonable demand for the smaller party to demand the premiership over the larger party," Haarde said.

Iceland has been mired in crisis since the collapse of the country's banks under the weight of debts amassed during years of rapid expansion. Inflation and unemployment have soared, and the krona currency has plummeted.

Haarde's government has nationalized banks and negotiated about $10 billion in loans from the IMF and individual countries. In addition, Iceland faces a bill likely to run to billions of dollars to repay thousands of Europeans who held accounts with subsidiaries of collapsed Icelandic banks.

The country's commerce minister, Bjorgvin Sigurdsson, quit on Sunday citing the pressures of the economic collapse. Sigurdsson, a member of Gisladottir's party, said Icelanders had lost trust in their political leadership.

Thousands have joined noisy daily protests in the last week over soaring unemployment and rising prices.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,482828,00.html

A million French workers march on 'Black Thursday'

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-01-30T01:06:00Z

About a million French workers staged a one-day strike yesterday and hundreds of thousands took to the streets in a show of force against President Sarkozy and his handling of the economic slump.

The stoppage, mainly by public sector workers, closed many schools but failed to paralyse public transport as the strikers had hoped. The Paris transport system remained about 75 per cent normal. But quiet stations and roads around the capital and other cities showed that many people had stayed at home for what had been billed as “Black Thursday”.

After a big and noisy march through central Paris, union leaders claimed a triumph for what they depicted as the biggest day of protest for a decade. The high point came when a huge crowd packed the Place de l’Opéra at the heart of the Right Bank, and sang The Internationale, the old revolutionary anthem.

The main unions, in rare harmony, estimated that 2.5 million had demonstrated around the country, with 380,000 in Paris. The Interior Ministry put the total at 1.08 million, with 65,000 in the capital.

The Paris march appeared bigger than previous protests against Mr Sarkozy’s reforms since he took office in May 2007 but smaller than protests against Jacques Chirac in 2006.

In Marseilles, the Mediterranean port city famous for its tradition of exaggeration, unions claimed that 200,000 had marched, while police reported 20,000.

Mr Sarkozy’s Government played down the “day of mobilisation” as relatively routine by French standards. “This was by no means exceptional in terms of a public sector stoppage,” said Luc Chatel, the Cabinet Minister who acts as government spokesman. “It was about the same as in May this year and in 2006.”

In keeping with Mr Sarkozy’s new conciliatory tone, Mr Chatel said that the Government was paying attention and understood the message that people were worried about their livelihoods, with rising unemployment and closing factories.

Bernard Thibault, the head of the powerful CGT union, said the protests had achieved their aim of warning the President about the extent of France’s malaise. Mr Sarkozy must now react to the discontent over his cuts to the public sector. “He cannot say ‘I saw nothing, I heard nothing and I have nothing to say’,” Mr Thibault said.

Mr Thibault and other union leaders emphasised what they said was the unusually large turnout from the private sector — a group that usually stays away from France’s one-day industrial actions by state employees.

Contingents from Renault, Air France and even the stock exchange were visible in the crowd, but the marches were dominated by transport, health, post office and other state staff. A quarter of all civil servants stopped work, the Government said.

Martine Aubry, the new leader of the opposition Socialist Party, used the day of action to make her first public assault on the Sarkozy Government. “We have a President who is pushing blindly ahead even after he took us into recession through his policies before the financial crisis began,” she said before marching near the front of the procession in Paris.

In a rare show of unity, the unions drew up a joint list of demands, insisting that Mr Sarkozy should drop reforms that they see as a threat to public services and refocus stimulus measures at consumers rather than companies. France’s economic woes are less severe than Spain’s or Britain’s, but unemployment has risen by 8.5 per cent over the past year. The unions want Mr Sarkozy to increase his ¤26 billion package aimed at stimulating the economy.

url: http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economics/article5610593.ece

Large number of Jesuit college alumni serving in 111th Congress

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-01-27T13:55:00Z

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- With a new president and members of the House and Senate sworn into office, officials of U.S. Jesuit colleges and universities have something to crow about, with a whopping 52 members of the 111th Congress who are alumni of their institutions. That's close to 10 percent of the 535 members of the current Congress, with 11 Jesuit alumni in the Senate and 41 in the House of Representatives, according to a newly released report by the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities in Washington. Some of Jesuit alumni are new to Congress and a few are high-ranking members, including House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, Senate Assistant Majority Leader Richard Durbin, D-Ill., and the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and special assistant to the speaker of the House, Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., the report said. Of the 52 alumni, 34 received graduate or professional degrees from Jesuit universities, the report said.

url: http://www.catholicnews.com/data/briefs/cns/20090123.htm

Pope says Christian unity can prove that division isn't inevitable

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-01-27T13:49:00Z

By Cindy Wooden
Catholic News Service

ROME (CNS) -- The unity Christians seek will strengthen their witness to the truth of faith and to the fact that diversity among peoples does not have to be a cause for division, Pope Benedict XVI said.

Marking the end of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, the pope said that while Christians are looking for unity in faith "we know that this unity in Christ is a leaven for brotherhood on a social level as well, in relations among nations and for the whole human family."

Presiding over an ecumenical vespers service Jan. 25 at Rome's Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls, Pope Benedict also marked the 50th anniversary of the day when Blessed Pope John XXIII convoked the Second Vatican Council.

The announcement was "an event that the older ones among us certainly have not forgotten," said the 81-year-old pope, who served as a theological expert at the council.

Pope Benedict said calling the council was a "providential decision, which my predecessor was firmly convinced was a suggestion of the Holy Spirit," and it opened the way to major progress in the search to restore Christian unity.

"The attitude of interior conversion to Christ, spiritual renewal and growing charity toward other Christians has given way to a new situation in ecumenical relations," the pope said.

The theological dialogues launched between the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Anglican and Protestant churches and communities have led to important agreements and a more precise definition of the issues that still divide Christians, he said.

While the hopes for full unity and Eucharistic sharing remain on the horizon, they inspire Christians "who want to live in harmony with the prayer of the Lord 'that all would be one so that the world would believe,'" the pope said.

The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity ends each year on the feast of the conversion of St. Paul, which is appropriate because it reminds Christians that the unity they seek is a gift of God that will be received only when they have converted more fully to Christ, Pope Benedict said.

The same Lord who called St. Paul, he said, "addresses members of his church -- which is one and holy -- and calling each one by name asks: Why have you divided me? Why have you injured the unity of my body?"

Christians must recognize their sins, repent and make a commitment to begin again, he said.

St. Paul's need for conversion and the need for conversion by today's Christians are not that different, the pope said.

"In reality, the conversion of St. Paul was not a passage from immorality to morality, from an erroneous faith to a correct faith, but it was a matter of being conquered by the love of Christ," relying on God rather than himself and vowing to serve others, Pope Benedict said.

Korean Christians, whom the pope said understand what it means to be divided politically as well as denominationally, prepared the materials for the 2009 Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.

"The unity which God gives to his church and for which we pray is naturally communion in a spiritual sense, in faith and in charity," the pope said, but it also can and must be a unity that will spread throughout ruptured societies and the whole world.

The pope asked Christians to make their prayers for unity "an intercession for the various situations of conflict currently afflicting humanity. Where human words become impotent because the tragic noise of violence and weapons prevails, may the prophetic force of the word of God not be lacking and may it repeat to us the fact that peace is possible and we must be instruments of reconciliation and peace."

Offering special prayers for the Holy Land, the pope said the Christians who live there and those who visit on pilgrimage must act in a way that demonstrates how "the diversity of rites and traditions does not have to constitute an obstacle to mutual respect and fraternal charity."

Addressing the Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican and Protestant bishops, clergy and laity who participated in the prayer service, the pope said that as long as all Christians seek unity in faith their different spiritualities, rituals and customs do not have to be divisive.

"In that way our diversity will no longer be an obstacle that separates us, but a richness in the multiplicity of expressions of a common faith," he said.

url: http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0900359.htm

Great expectations: World issues dominate Vatican hopes for Obama

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-01-26T13:21:00Z

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- The Vatican has struck a positive tone as it opens relations with the administration of President Barack Obama, emphasizing hopes for cooperation on issues of peace and social justice, and -- for now -- downplaying differences on moral questions like abortion.

Pope Benedict XVI sent an Inauguration Day telegram congratulating the new president and supporting Obama's resolve to "promote understanding, cooperation and peace among the nations."

The Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, compared the swearing-in of the first African-American president to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and said it ushered in a new era of expectation and participation.

But beyond these optimistic public declarations, what are the Vatican's top concerns at the start of the Obama term? What are its highest hopes and its deepest worries?

In interviews over recent weeks, Vatican officials said their expectations were highest on international questions of war and peace -- most specifically, the Israeli-Palestinian war, which a Vatican official once termed "the mother of all conflicts."

What is expected of the Obama administration, they said, is a decisive initiative to restart the peace process and move it toward a definitive solution, not a one-shot attempt but a "consistent commitment" to lead Israelis and Palestinians to the realization that a settlement is in their own best interests.

Vatican diplomats were disappointed at the Bush administration's peace-promoting efforts in the Holy Land. They said those efforts came late and that the most promising initiative -- the peace conference in Annapolis, Md., in late 2007 -- was not followed up with diplomatic pressure.

While no one expects Obama to alter the United States' fundamental support for Israel, Vatican officials said the new president begins his term with a certain amount of trust and sympathy among Arabs. That could be important, they said, because Arabs need to feel they have a world leader who takes their situation to heart.

All this could help change the dynamic of tension and mistrust throughout the Middle East, they said. Already, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's recent statement that the new administration would move quickly to diplomatically engage Syria and Iran was seen as a wise move by the Vatican.

The Vatican always was uncomfortable with the Bush administration's self-proclaimed "war on terrorism," even though officials gave qualified support to U.S. military action against terrorist enclaves in Afghanistan in 2001. Vatican sources said the hope is that the anti-terrorism effort under Obama will be carried out with two principles in mind: first, respect for legal rights, i.e., a rejection of torture; and, second, attention to the underlying causes of terrorism, including injustice and political frustration.

On economic issues, Vatican officials cited potential areas of agreement with Obama, including his concern for those on the margins of society. The hope, they said, is that the president's stated concern for the poor in the United States will translate into a serious U.S. commitment to help alleviate global poverty. This was an important area of cooperation with the Bush administration, and the Vatican wants it to continue under Obama.

Asked about pro-life issues, on which Obama and the Catholic Church have clear differences, Vatican officials took a wait-and-see attitude. They said they shared the immediate concern of U.S. church leaders that Obama may restore federal funding for nongovernmental family planning programs that offer abortion outside the United States and lift the Bush administration's limit on the funding of embryonic stem-cell research.

But on Inauguration Day, there was a strong hope at the Vatican that Obama, who is seen as an intelligent politician, would not pick unnecessary fights with the church. As a sign of just how closely the Vatican was watching the president's words and deeds and how willing it was to accentuate the positive, one official who follows pro-life questions said he was encouraged that in his inauguration address Obama didn't mention anything about these hot-button issues.

"He did mention parents who nurture their child. Now that's a very pro-life statement," he said.

Pro-life and family issues are not merely U.S. domestic affairs. Vatican diplomats know that questions regarding population control, bioethics, the family and even homosexuality increasingly come up for debate in international forums, including the United Nations. While the Vatican and the Bush administration were in close agreement on such topics, there is apprehension about the policies of the Obama administration -- and how hard it will push those policies.

For these and many other reasons, the Vatican is closely watching for Obama's choice of a new U.S. ambassador to the Vatican. An early appointment would be viewed at the Vatican as a sign of the president's interest and attention to the Holy See.

The choice of ambassador is, of course, up to the president. One informed Vatican official dismissed an earlier report that the Vatican, in a nod toward conservative Catholics, might veto the appointment of a high-profile Catholic supporter of Obama. Rejecting an ambassador for those kinds of political motives is not in the tradition of Vatican diplomacy and would, in fact, be very dangerous, the official said.

Many at the Vatican are already looking ahead to an expected meeting between Obama and Pope Benedict later this year. Although the Vatican understands that the young president has a lot on his plate as he comes into office, they are eager to see him in Rome. Asked when he hoped it would happen, one Vatican official said, "As soon as possible."

url: http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0900308.htm

Pope says Christians must work, pray, convert for Christian unity

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-01-25T00:59:00Z

By Cindy Wooden

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Full Christian unity will be a gift from God, but it is something Christians themselves must work for, pray for and experience personal conversion in order to receive, Pope Benedict XVI said.

Dedicating his weekly general audience Jan. 21 to the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, the pope said God wants Christians to be one, but that can happen only through deeper unity with Christ.

The theme of the 2009 week of prayer was "That they may become one in your hand," a quote from the Book of Ezekiel in which God tells the prophet to take two sticks, representing his divided people, and join them together.

"The hand of the prophet that puts the two sticks together becomes like the very hand of God who will gather and unite his people and, finally, all of humanity," the pope said.

"We can apply the prophet's words to Christians in the sense of an exhortation to pray, to work, to do everything possible so the unity of Christ's disciples will be accomplished, so that our hands will become instruments of the unifying hand of God," Pope Benedict said.

The divisions Ezekiel tried to heal were caused by different groups going their own way and "taking on customs foreign to divine law," he said.

The prophet made it clear to the people that the restoration of their unity could occur only through their conversion and return to the ways of the Lord, the pope said.

"The vision of Ezekiel is eloquent for the entire ecumenical movement because it highlights the absolute necessity of an authentic, interior renewal in all the members of the people of God, a renewal only the Lord can accomplish, but to which we all must be open," the pope said, because like the ancient Israelites "we, too, have picked up customs far from the word of God."

Pope Benedict prayed that the week of prayer would "stimulate all of us toward a sincere conversion, an increasingly docile listening to the word of God and a faith that is always deeper."

The week of prayer, he said, also is an opportunity to thank God for the progress made in ecumenical relations over the past year, particularly for the three personal meetings he had with Ecumenical Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople and for meetings with leaders of the Armenian Apostolic Church.

Pope Benedict also said, "I shared the pain of the Patriarchate of Moscow for the death of our beloved brother in Christ, His Holiness Patriarch Alexy, and I continue to remain in a communion of prayer with our brothers who are preparing to elect a new patriarch" in late January.

Looking at relations with the churches of the West, Pope Benedict said the Catholic, Anglican and Protestant churches continue to discuss how they can witness better to their unity in Christ before "a world that is increasingly divided and facing many cultural, social, economic and ethical challenges."

The pope asked people to pray with him that the ecumenical movement would intensify and that the day would come soon when Christians would be united.

"The desire that lives in our hearts is the hastening of the day of full unity, when all the disciples of the one Lord can finally celebrate together the Eucharist, the divine sacrifice for the life and salvation of the world."

url: http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0900285.htm

Dialogue Forges Ahead With Anglicans, Methodists

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-01-25T00:52:00Z

Pontifical Council Official Notes Progress in '08

VATICAN CITY, JAN. 23, 2009 (Zenit.org).- Despite difficulties with the Anglican and Methodist confessions, ecumenical dialogue forges ahead with them as well, confirmed a Vatican aide.

Monsignor Mark Langham, an official at the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity in the section that deals with Anglicans and Methodists, affirmed this to L'Osservatore Romano. The Vatican daily is doing a series of articles on the advance of ecumenism, in light of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, which ends Sunday.

The monsignor said that 2008 was an important year for dialogue, given that informal contacts were established with leaders of both confessions.

In work with the Anglicans, he said he considered it very significant that a Catholic delegation, headed by Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Vatican's unity council, attended the Lambeth Conference in late July. That once-a-decade conference was marked by conflict within the Anglican Communion this year, over debates about the episcopal ordination of women and the ministry of homosexuals.

At the conference, Monsignor Langham said, the cardinal "could speak frankly about the harmful impact" of these situations on ecumenical dialogue.

Though resolutions might not have been adopted, the monsignor continued, this frankness was important in regard to informal talks during the year, particularly through the Anglican Center of Rome. Reaching unity and integrity within Anglican doctrine will be the fundamental point for a reactivation of official dialogue, he added.

And regarding the Methodists, Monsignor Langham pointed to "cordial meetings" throughout the year, particularly one in Dublin between Reverend Geoffrey Wainwright and Bishop Michael Putney of Townsville, Australia.

In that meeting, the Christian leaders approved a joint statement, "Together in Holiness," which reviews the steps made in 40 years of Methodist-Catholic dialogue. Despite great differences in regard to doctrine, both parties prepared a new stage, which will be marked by a joint document to be presented at the World Methodist Conference in Australia in 2011.

url: http://zenit.org/article-24881?l=english

God expelled from school district

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-01-25T00:30:00Z

Last week, the ACLU won an injunction in Florida that officially removes prayer, God, and religious activity from the Santa Rosa County School District. U.S. District Court Judge Casey Rodgers made the ruling after school officials admitted to the religious activity. The ACLU, on behalf of two high school students, sued the district, Pace High School Principal Frank Lay, and former Superintendent John Rogers.

According to the Pensacola News Journal, the injunction states the Santa Rosa County School Board and its employees are prohibited from:

Promoting, advancing, aiding, facilitating, endorsing, or causing religious prayers or devotionals during school-sponsored events.
Planning, organizing, financing, promoting, or otherwise sponsoring religious baccalaureate services at all schools within the Santa Rosa School District, including at Pace High School.
Holding school-sponsored events at religious venues when alternative venues are reasonably available.
Permitting school officials to promote their personal religious beliefs and proselytize students in class or during school-sponsored events and activities.
Otherwise unconstitutionally endorsing or coercing religion.

According to the Pensacola paper, the ACLU says the school district violated the First Amendment when it allowed elementary graduations and middle school Christmas concerts to be held at churches, when teachers and staff at Pace High School preached about “Judgment Day with the Lord,” and when teachers and staff offered Bible readings and biblical interpretations during student meetings.

This ruling might actually be a blessing in disguise for all of us. Protestants tend to forget about the religious persecution endured by Roman Catholic families attempting to put their children in America’s public schools in the 19th century. The parochial school movement was started, in part, to give the children of Catholic families a persecution-free place to learn. This was during an era where Catholics were seen as enemies of Protestants.

The type of Protestant today who might object to the Florida ruling would curiously also likely raise objections to the following: elementary schools holding graduations in Mosques; classroom instruction being interrupted to pray during Ramadan, the Muslim spiritual holiday; and teachers reading and interpreting passages from the Koran in student meetings.

My guess is that the same Protestants who might object to the Florida court ruling would also object to an elementary school principal reading the Buddhist “Daily Affirmation Prayer” over the school’s intercom system everyday before school begins. The prayer reads:

Entrusting in the Primal Vow of Buddha,
Calling out the Buddha-name,
I shall pass through the journey of life with strength and joy.

Revering the Light of Buddha,
Reflecting upon my imperfect self,
I shall proceed to live a life of gratitude.

Following the Teachings of Buddha,
Listening to the Right Path,
I shall share the True Dharma with all.

Rejoicing in the compassion of Buddha,
Respecting and aiding all sentient beings,
I shall work towards the welfare of society and the world.

Since the Bible charges the church, not the public schools, with task for spreading the Good News, perhaps this injunction will help some Christians not to rely on the state to do what the Bible calls them to do (Matthew 28:18-20). Perhaps this injunction will help some Protestants understand that if you want “prayer in school,” in a secular and pluralistic society like the United States is today, you must be willing to accept the fact your neighborhood’s children also could be praying to Allah, Buddha, Sulevia, Sirona, Rosmerta, or Epona. Protestants can no longer assume that Christians will always in be in positions to determine which religious activity is allowed and which is not.

If you want your children to have an education that is uniquely tied to a Christian worldview in the classroom, then send them to a good Christian school or teach that to them yourselves (Deuteronomy 6:1-25). If you want your children’s non-Christian friends to learn about Christianity, love them well personally and bring them to church. If you want your son’s teammates, for example, to learn about Jesus, have them over to your house for breakfast once a week before school starts to hear about the Kingdom. This is the work of the church.

Some Protestants will see the ruling as scandalous while others will welcome it. In the end, this is yet more evidence of the fact that America is not a Christian nation.

url: http://online.worldmag.com/2009/01/21/god-finally-expelled-from-school/

A new international agenda

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-01-03T18:45:00Z

By Mikhail Gorbachev

Thursday, January 1, 2009

The year 2008 has been indelibly marked by the global financial crisis. No one predicted its outbreak or its scale; I don't think anyone knows when and how it might end.

It is already clear that initial reassuring statements about it were irresponsible. In the coming months, the world, and world politics, will be severely tested.

Searching for ways out of the crisis will be a difficult, agonizing process. Not all early efforts were effective. This first failure in the functioning of our fully globalized world caught us by surprise, largely unprepared.

As I read the reports from the July Group of 8 summit meeting in Japan, it is amazing that just a couple months before the crisis erupted, world leaders seemed unaware of warning tremors. The summit was a routine gathering. Its very format - the way it was prepared and conducted - seems outdated. We need a new vision of global political leadership, a new willingness to work together in this globalized world. Politicians are lagging behind the events.

The crisis in the Caucasus in early August was a bolt from the blue. Any war, even a short one, is always a failure of politics and policy. The Georgian leadership's military misadventure spelled disaster for thousands of Ossetians, Georgians and Russians; it also highlighted the absence of an effective security system in Europe for preventing and resolving conflicts.

Trouble hovers over other continents, too. Civil strife in Congo, Sudan and elsewhere in Africa has cost thousands of lives. The terrorist attacks on Mumbai were more than just a tragic reminder of the threat posed by terrorism: They also raised the issue of the responsibility of the state on whose territory this large-scale attack had been prepared. The situation in Afghanistan seems dismal. The Middle East remains a tinderbox. On top of it all, piracy has made a comeback, straight out of the dark ages.

The flows of migrants, social unrest in many countries (including some that are far from poor), the recent problems with contaminated food supplies, massive human rights violations - the list of the world's ills can go on and on.

There is an increasing sense of a world in turmoil, further aggravated by the crisis of the world economy.

Talking to people in different countries, again and again I hear these questions: What is happening? What is in store? Why have the world's political leaders failed to address effectively the old and new threats?

These are legitimate questions. To answer them, we must look at the underlying causes of recent events.

I am convinced that the root cause of the current widespread upheaval is the inability and even unwillingness of political leaders to correctly evaluate the situation after the end of the Cold War and jointly chart a new course.

The "winner's complex" - the fanfare of triumph sounded by the West after the Soviet Union left the international arena - obscured the fact that the end of the Cold War was not a victory for one side or one ideology. It was instead a common achievement and a common challenge, a call for major change.

But why change if, as Western politicians believed, all was fine? They would continue to lead the rest of the world with their unfailing doctrine of free markets and alliances like NATO, which were ready and eager to assume responsibility for peace in Europe and beyond.

Payback came in 2008.

We will likely continue to pay for misguided thinking in the years to come, unless we have the courage to look at things honestly and rethink our approach to world affairs.

Throughout the world, there is a clamor for change. That desire was evident in November, in an event that could become both a symbol of this need for change and a real catalyst for that change. Given the special role the United States continues to play in the world, the election of Barack Obama could have consequences that go far beyond that country.

The American people have had their say; now all will depend on whether the new president and his team measure up to the challenge.

The U.S. presidential election was followed by another consequential event: The G-20 summit meeting in Washington foreshadowed a new format of global leadership, bringing together the countries responsible for the future of the world economy. And more than just the economy is at stake.

In and of itself, the fact that the G-8 leaders were joined as equal partners by the leaders of China, India and Brazil and almost a dozen other countries was a recognition, perhaps a reluctant one, that the economic and political balance in the world had changed. It is now a given that a world with a single power center, in any shape or guise, is no longer possible. The global challenge of a financial and economic tsunami can only be met by working together.

A new concept is emerging for addressing the crisis at the national and international levels. The steps now being contemplated seem better suited to the needs of a global world than the previous approach, based on the hope that the market will eventually take care of itself.

If current ideas for reforming the world's financial and economic institutions are consistently implemented, that would suggest we are finally beginning to understand the importance of global governance. Such governance would render the economy more rational and more humane.

This is a daunting challenge, not only to the world's economy. Yet it can be met. We need to encourage equitable dialogue, democratize relations among nations and push back militaristic tendencies in politics and thinking. This amounts to a new agenda for international politics.

Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, is president of the International Foundation for Socio-Economic and Political Studies in Moscow.

url: http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/01/01/opinion/edgorby.php?page=2

BENEDICT XVI'S PRAYER INTENTIONS FOR JANUARY

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-01-03T18:40:00Z

VATICAN CITY, 30 DEC 2008 (VIS) - Pope Benedict XVI's general prayer intention for January is: "That the family ma become more and more a place of training in charity, personal growth and transmission of the faith".

His mission intention is: "That the different Christian confessions, aware of the need for a new evangelization in this period of profound transformations, may be committed to announcing the Good News and moving towards the full unity of all Christians in order to offer a more credible testimony of the Gospel".
BXVI-PRAYER INTENTIONS/JANUARY/...VIS 081230 (80)

url: http://212.77.1.245/news_services/press/vis/dinamiche/c1_en.htm

Promoting a New World Order Worthy of Human Beings

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2009-01-03T18:36:00Z

Promoting a New World Order Worthy of Human Beings

VATICAN CITY, 1 JAN 2009 (VIS) - At noon today, shortly after celebrating Mass in the Vatican Basilica, Benedict XVI addressed the pilgrims gathered in St. Peter's Square to pray the Angelus.

The Pope wished a happy New Year to all present and to those who were following the Angelus on radio or television, assuring them that "with the Lord's grace - and only with it - can we have ever-new hope that the future will be better than the past".

With the message for the World Day of Peace, the theme of which is "Fighting Poverty to Build Peace" in 2009, he affirmed that his wish "is to dialogue anew with those responsible at national levels and in international organizations, offering the Catholic Church's contribution in promoting a new world order worthy of the human being".

"At the beginning of the new year", he said, "my first objective is precisely to invite all leaders and ordinary citizens not to be disheartened in the face of difficulties or failures, and to renew their commitments".

The Holy Father noted that "in the second part of 2008, an economic crisis of vast proportions arose. This crisis must be examined in detail as a serious symptom that requires intervention at its roots. It is not enough - as Jesus would say - to take a piece from a new cloak to patch an old one. Putting the poor in first place means decidedly moving toward the global solidarity that John Paul II pointed out as necessary, co-ordinating the potentialities of the market with those of civil society in constant respect of the law and tending always to the common good".

"Jesus Christ", the Pope concluded, "did not organize campaigns against poverty but proclaimed the Gospel for a complete ransom from moral and material misery to the poor. The Church, with its unceasing labors of evangelization and human promotion, does the same. We call on the Virgin Mary, Mother of God, to help all men and women walk together the Path of peace".

url: http://212.77.1.245/news_services/press/vis/dinamiche/d2_en.htm

or

url: http://www.ewtn.com/vnews/getstory.asp?number=92845

EU resists push to limit free speech at UN meeting

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2008-12-27T04:49:00Z

GENEVA – Islamic proposals to ban criticism of religion, which have gathered strength since the
publication of cartoons of the prophet Muhammad two years ago, threaten to derail an already
troubled U.N. anti-racism conference planned for next year.

The European Union rejects suggestions by Algeria — backed by other Muslim and African countries
— that limits on free speech are needed to stop the publication of offensive articles and images.

Supporters of the proposal, who have been pushing for such a ban to be included in international
anti-discrimination charters, want it discussed in April at a high-level United Nations anti-racism
meeting in Geneva.

But European diplomats say that is out of the question.

"We have made it clear from the start that we will not negotiate," French diplomat Daniel Vosgien
told The Associated Press on Wednesday. France currently holds the rotating presidency of the
27-nation EU.

Western diplomats, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the discussions,
said the Islamic demands could wreck the meeting.

The U.N. expert on freedom of expression, Frank LaRue, has criticized so-called "anti-blasphemy
laws" used to protect religion in some countries.

"Such laws are often used to prevent legitimate criticism of powerful religious leaders and to
suppress the views of religious minorities, dissenting believers and nonbelievers, and are applied
in a discriminatory fashion," LaRue said in a statement released Monday.

Israel and Canada have already said they will stay away because of concerns that the
meeting will see a repeat of anti-Semitic outbursts that marred the first anti-racism conference
Durban, South Africa, in 2001.

The United States has also indicated it may stay away from the meeting, dubbed "Durban II."

Dutch Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen said Tuesday his country would boycott if anti-Israel
statements are not scrapped from draft texts being drawn up for the meeting.

url: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081217/ap_on_re_us/un_religion_free_speech;_ylt=Aj5k7ncgP8tnJ_diSawWy_g7Xs8F

Globalisation 'needs values' to succeed, says Blair at Yale

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2008-12-27T04:44:00Z

New Haven, Connecticut (ENI). Former British prime minister Tony Blair has completed his first semester as a visiting lecturer at Yale University, an experience he says has strengthened his belief that religious faith and economic and social globalisation are partners.

In his final appearance on 11 December with students at a seminar he co-taught, and addressing the Yale community, Blair said his time as a part-time academic has convinced him that "globalisation requires values to succeed".

Arguing that the process of "pushing people together" has made multicultural and multi-religious societies, Blair argued that "spiritual capital" and "human capital" now need to link.

That, combined with an increased need for multi-faith dialogue, he told reporters after he spoke, "will in time be seen as a defining question, and perhaps the leading question of the 21st century".

Blair also touted the need for the United States, Britain and its allies to emphasise the efficacy of social values in the fight against terrorism.

"It's the force of argument, and not of arms, that will cause us to succeed," the former British prime minister said in an address at Yale's Battell Chapel.

Blair was an Anglican but in 2007, after stepping down as prime minister, he converted to Roman Catholicism. In a BBC television document after he left office, Blair acknowledged that his belief in God played a "hugely important" role during his 10 years as prime minister.

As a Howland Distinguished Fellow at Yale, Blair has co-taught a seminar on the theme of faith and globalisation with Professor Miroslav Volf, a Croatian-born theologian and the director of Yale's Center for Faith and Culture.

The final session of the seminar, seen by video hook-up, indicated that while Blair did not mind students asking probing questions about the war in Iraq, he held his ground, saying he accepts responsibility for the decision that British forces go to war.

And while acknowledging many things have wrong in Iraq since the 2003 invasion by U.S., British and allied forces, Blair told students he believes the Middle East is still better off without Saddam Hussein at the helm in the country, particularly in a region where, Blair said, some positive effects of globalisation are being felt.

"Do I think today, that looking at the region, it would be better off with Saddam? No I don't," Blair said.

The seminar has been a joint offering of Yale Divinity School and the Yale School of Management. Blair has said he expects to return to Yale for an additional two years of teaching.

Blair has formed his own London-based foundation (www.tonyblairfaithfoundation.org), to promote interfaith dialogue. He and Yale officials are working on a joint initiative to address issues of religious faith and globalisation. Blair said the current faith and globalisation course might be "spun off" and taught elsewhere in the world.

Though Blair said the emphasis he has made on global respect for religions and that President George W. Bush has made about respecting human dignity are linked, when asked by reporters to comment further on Bush's views of religion and politics, he said, "That's not for me to say."

Url: http://www.eni.ch/featured/article.php?id=2557

Bishops insist on work-free Sunday protection by European Parliament

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2008-12-14T15:05:00Z

by di-ve.com - editorial@di-ve.com
Current Affairs -- 07 November 2008 -- 09:40CEST

The Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the European Communities (COMECE) on Thursday expressed its regret at the refusal to put to vote several amendments aimed at the inclusion of a work-free Sunday in the new Working Time Directive by the chairman of the European Parliament’s Committee on Employment and Social Affairs.

COMECE secretary-general Piotr Mazurkiewicz said he was disappointed that a debate on the issue did not take place, apparently due to procedural obstacles.

The EP is currently deliberating a revision of the Working Time Directive of 2003. On October 22, 7 MEPs from different political groupings tabled amendments under which the directive would include a statement saying that the minimum weekly rest period “shall in principle include Sunday”.

They also tabled a new clause underlining the importance of a work-free Sunday for the protection of workers’ health.

“The likelihood of sickness in companies that require staff to work on Sundays is greater than in companies that do not require staff to work on Sundays,” it states. “The health of workers depends, among other factors, on their opportunities to reconcile work and family life, to establish and maintain social ties and to pursue their spiritual needs. Sunday, as the traditional weekly rest day, contributes to these objectives more than any other day of the week.”

The clause also points out that “absenteeism and sick-leave increase significantly in companies working on Sunday”, adding that this negative impact on workers’ health “is mainly due to the consequences for social, especially family life”.

Sunday “is the natural choice for family related activities, as childcare facilities and schools are closed”, it concludes.

The secretariat of COMECE encouraged MEPs to make full use of the EP’s procedural flexibility in order to enable a debate and vote on the issue to take place in the parliament’s plenary session of December 16, maintaining that the protection of Sunday is an issue of central importance for workers and their families, and a cornerstone of the European Social Model.

URL: http://www.di-ve.com/Default.aspx?ID=72&Action=1&NewsId=55743&newscategory=31

Study finds gut germ in 40 percent of grocery meats; CDC says not to worry

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2008-12-14T14:56:00Z

By JoNel Aleccia

Health writer

Tues., Nov. 18, 2008

A potentially deadly intestinal germ increasingly found in hospitals is also showing up in a more unsavory setting: grocery store meats.

More than 40 percent of packaged meats sampled from three Arizona chain stores tested positive for Clostridium difficile, a gut bug known as C. diff., according to newly complete analysis of 2006 data collected by a University of Arizona scientist.

Nearly 30 percent of the contaminated samples of ground beef, pork and turkey and ready-to-eat meats like summer sausage were identical or closely related to a super-toxic strain of C. diff blamed for growing rates of illness and death in the U.S. — raising the possibility that the bacterial infections may be transmitted through food.

“These data suggest that domestic animals, by way of retail meats, may be a source of C. difficile for human infection,” said J. Glenn Songer, a professor of veterinary science at the Tucson school, who talked with msnbc.com about work now under review by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But specialists from the CDC and scientists who study C. diff said the connection between the presence of C. diff bacteria and infection has not been established and that there’s not enough evidence about food transmission to warrant public alarm.

“There are no documented cases of people getting Clostridium difficile infection from eating food that contains C. difficile,” said Dr. L. Clifford McDonald, chief of prevention and response for a division of the CDC. “However, because C. difficile has been found in some retail meats, that possibility does exist.”

Songer's samples included brands sold in grocery stores across the nation. Contamination ranged from 41 percent of pork products and 44 percent of turkey products to 50 percent of ground beef samples and more than 62 percent of samples of braunschweiger, a type of liverwurst.

Nearly three-quarters of the C. diff spores were toxinotype V, a type linked to illness in pigs and calves and, increasingly, in humans, Songer noted.

80 percent of infections occur in hospitals
C. diff has long been a common, usually benign bug associated with simple, easily treated diarrhea in older patients in hospitals and nursing homes. About 3 percent of healthy adults harbor the bacteria with no problem. But overuse of antibiotics has allowed the germ to develop resistance in recent years, doctors said, creating the toxic new type that stumps traditional treatment.

About 80 percent of C. difficile infections now occur in hospital or health care settings — and the number of infections is rising. About 13 in every 1,000 hospital patients is infected or colonized with the bacteria, a rate between 6.5 and 20 times higher than previously estimated, according to figures released last week by the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology, or APIC.

Every day, those infections likely cost $32 million, on average, and claim more than 300 lives, the study showed.

Especially worrisome has been a new, more virulent strain, called NAP1, which produces about 20 times the toxins of ordinary strains. It can cause severe, repeated diarrhea that resists all but the most powerful drugs. In worst cases, C. diff infection can destroy the colon and lead to blood poisoning and death.

It’s not clear, however, where the remaining infections — those that occur outside health settings, in the community — originate. Recent victims have included a 10-year-old girl with no history of antibiotic use who became very ill but recovered and a 31-year-old woman pregnant with twins who spontaneously aborted her babies and then died after becoming infected, according to a 2005 review by the CDC.

“For these community-associated sources, there has to be a source outside the hospitals,” Songer said. “It may well be that retail meats are a source or the main source.”

C. diff is a tricky bug, hard to kill with anything but bleach in the hospital and able to survive most cooking techniques in the kitchen. And, unlike scary infections like E. coli 0157:H7, which has transmitted illness through foods from ground beef to fresh spinach, C. diff can't be traced quickly to its source.

"With difficile, you can eat a nice, thick braunschweiger sandwich today, then two weeks from now you get strep throat, take antibiotics and develop difficile-related disease," Songer explained. "You're weeks separated from the event."

Songer detected C. diff in every type of meat he tested, including uncooked ground beef, pork and turkey; pork sausage and chorizo; and ready-to-eat products including beef summer sausage and pork braunschweiger, a spreadable liver sausage luncheon meat.

He collected 88 samples of retail packaged meats bought from large chain stores near Tucson on three occasions during a two-month period in 2006. Earlier analysis indicated that about 30 percent of samples showed C. diff, but that percentage increased under closer review, Songer said.

Thirty-seven of the samples, or nearly 42 percent, showed evidence of C. diff, including about 40 percent of the cooked products and nearly 48 percent of the ready-to-eat products.

Contamination could be nationwide
All of the samples collected were national brands available in grocery stores across the country, except the pork chorizo, which was locally made. Songer declined to identify the specific brands, saying that it would unfairly target a single producer when the problem is likely endemic to all.

“My perspective on this is not to blow the whistle on the meat production or meat processing agencies but to point out that we may have a problem and if we do we should work together to solve it,” he said.

At least one meat industry official said Songer’s findings served as a warning to producers, but that the research hasn’t been replicated. Liz Wagstrom, assistant vice president of science and technology for the National Pork Board, said she’s awaiting confirmation from the CDC and other sources.

“I feel very confident in the safety of our product,” she said. “If there is any animal-to-human transmission, it is a very small part of the picture.”

James “Bo” Reagan, chairman of the Beef Industry Food Safety Council, declined to discuss specific strategies for addressing C. diff. Instead, in an e-mail to msnbc.com, he said beef producers have spent $27 million on research to identify new food safety technologies and processes.

“Our efforts have resulted in new safeguards throughout the beef production chain and we continue to work with our partners in beef production to find ways to ensure beef is safe,” Reagan wrote in an e-mail.

‘Yes, it's there’
Songer’s study follows a 2007 report in the CDC journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, which showed Canadian researchers detected C. diff in 12 — or 20 percent — of 60 retail meat samples collected in 2005.

Neither report, however, definitively answers questions about C. diff in the food supply, said the study's lead researcher J. Scott Weese, an associate professor of pathobiology at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada.

“Yes, it’s there,” he said. “But we need to find out how much is there.”

Processed meats like those Songer studied may be more likely to show contamination because they combine sources of meat and because they require more handling than, for instance, a pork chop from a single pig, Weese said.

In addition, scientists don’t know when C. diff exposure sparks infection in people — or how much of a dose is necessary to cause infection, said Dr. Dale N. Gerding, a national expert in C. diff epidemiology and a professor with the Stritch School of Medicine at Loyola University in Chicago.

“With a real susceptible source, it only takes a few spores,” he said.

Bug might be in water, soil — even vegetables
But Gerding also noted that C. diff has been found in many places other than hospitals and meat counters, including water sources and soil.

“We actually wouldn’t know if a carrot in the dirt would have it just as much as hamburger,” Gerding said.

That's little comfort to Mary Woodard, 51, of Rock Falls, Ill., whose 6-year-old granddaughter, Nichole Lilly, contracted a C. diff infection in October. The child hadn't had antibiotics for six months and she'd been nowhere near a hospital or health center. But she wound up doubled over on the floor with severe cramps and diarrhea for nearly two weeks, until a clinic cultured her stool and diagnosed the illness.

Woodard is scared the infection will return, or that it will strike one of her other grandchildren. Word that C. diff has been detected in meat made Woodard think twice, despite CDC assurances to the contrary.

"I'll cut back, probably, on my meat eating," she said. "After seeing her with the bad cramping, I don't want to see her like that again."

Most consumers worried about C. diff infection should pay closest attention to hospitals and health care settings, Gerding said. Lax hand hygiene, improperly cleaned hospital rooms and overuse of antibiotics are far more likely to transmit C. diff than food products.

Although C. diff spores can be hard to kill, even Songer said most healthy consumers don’t need to change their diets because of the bug.

“To bring it right down to personal terms, I haven’t changed my eating habits one bit,” said Songer, who admits he’s a lifelong braunschweiger fan. “I’ve got about 40 pounds in my freezer that I’m eating.”

Further research will clarify the link between C. diff detection in food animals and infection in humans, Gerding said.

“The connection between the animal, the food and the disease has not been made,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean it’s not there.”

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27774614/

THE DEBATE ON SUNDAY HOLIDAY MUST BE BROUGHT BEFORE THE EP

pastorperch@mygospelworkers.org (MyGospelWorkers) — 2008-12-06T03:54:00Z

Regret and disappointment are expressed by Father Piotr Mazurkiewicz, Secretary General of the Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the European Community (COMECE) on the decision of the President of the European Parliament Employment and Social Affairs Commission, motivated by procedural reasons, to vote some amendments put forward by seven Eurodeputies from different parties to include Sunday as a day of rest in the new “Working Time Directive" which is being examined by the EP. In reality, explains the COMECE note, “the amendments will add to the directive’s article 5 a second paragraph according to which ‘the minimal weekly rest must include Sunday’.” Then there is the proposal to “highlight the importance of Sunday holiday for the protection of workers’ health.” “If the European Parliament is taking seriously the point clearly outlined in the directive,” says the COMECE, “it would be logical that it completed the present text with a disposition on Sunday as a day of weekly rest.” Hence, the wish that “the Eurodeputies will make all their possible to include the debate and the vote on Sunday holiday, the foundation of the European social model, in the plenary debate scheduled for next December 16.”

This article may be viewed at: http://www.agensir.it/pls/sir/V2_S2DOC_B.quotidiano?tema=Quot_english&argomento=dettaglio&sezione=&data_ora=&id_oggetto=161780&id_session=&password=&quantita=

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