Pope to list nuclear weapons as immoral in Catholic manual

Pope Francis, who met victims of the Fukushima nuclear disaster while in Japan, is planning to change official Catholic Church teaching to declare the use and possession of atomic weapons as “immoral,” a move that makes clear that his rejection of the Cold War-era doctrine of deterrence is to be official church policy.

Francis had declared the possession of nuclear weapons immoral on Sunday in Hiroshima during an emotional encounter with survivors of the U.S. atomic bomb.

On Tuesday, during a news conference en route home from Japan, Francis indicated that his Hiroshima address should be considered part of his magisterium, or official church teaching.

“This must go in the Catechism of the Catholic Church,” he said, referring to the published compendium of official church teaching.

“Not just the use, also the possession,” he said. “Because an accident of possession, or the insanity of a leader or someone, can destroy humanity.”

Francis first articulated his opposition to the doctrine of deterrence in 2017, during a Vatican conference, when he said the possession of nuclear weapons was “to be condemned.”

Pope Francis speaks to reporters Tuesday during a news conference on his flight back to Rome after a weeklong trip to Thailand and Japan. | POOL / VIA AFP-JIJJI

The shift upended three decades of the Vatican’s tacit acceptance of nuclear arsenals. Starting in 1982, St. John Paul II had held that deterrence could be morally acceptable in the interim as long as it was used as a step toward mutual, verifiable disarmament.

In the ensuing years, however, the Holy See has watched as arms control treaties collapsed, new nuclear powers emerged and the policy of assured mutual destruction resulted in a permanent stockpiling of bombs.

Francis also went further Tuesday in his comments on nuclear energy, saying he would rule out its use until scientists can offer “total security” to ensure that accidents, natural disasters and “crazed” individuals won’t destroy humanity and the environment with nuclear fallout.

Francis offered his “personal opinion” that went beyond the “concern” he expressed in public a day earlier during a meeting with survivors of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, where he noted a call by Japan’s Catholic bishops to abolish nuclear power outright.

The Japanese government strongly backs nuclear energy despite the 2011 “triple disaster,” in which three Fukushima nuclear reactors partially melted down after an earthquake triggered a tsunami. The disaster spewed nuclear fallout across the region and at one point forced the evacuation of 160,000 people.

“I have a personal opinion,” Francis said. “I would not use nuclear energy as long as there’s not a total security on the use.”

Francis stayed in Japan for four days beginning on Saturday, during which he called for the elimination of nuclear weapons in addresses to Nagasaki and Hiroshima — the two Japanese cities that were devastated by U.S. atomic bombings in the closing days of World War II.

Visiting both cities was his desire, the pope said, adding that his trip to Nagasaki, where Christianity has taken root in Japan, was especially “touching.”

Francis was elected as the Roman Catholic pontiff in 2013. His trip to Japan was the first papal visit to the Asian country in 38 years.

(Source: JT)

Bishop to spray holy water over city from helicopter in mass exorcism of 'demons' this weekend

‘We have to get rid of the devil,’ says Colombian monsignor Rubén Darío Jaramillo Montoya

A Catholic bishop will spray holy water over an entire city from a military helicopter in an attempt to conquer the demons he believes are plaguing it.

Monsignor Rubén Darío Jaramillo Montoya will perform the mass exorcism for the Colombian seaport of Buenaventura during the city’s annual patron saints’ festivities.

“We want to go around the whole of Buenaventura, from the air and pour holy water onto it to see if we exorcise all those demons that are destroying our port,” he told a Colombian radio station.

The bishop, ordained in 2017 by Pope Francis, added he wanted to “get rid of all the wickedness that is in our streets” during the helicopter flight.

Buenaventura, the South American nation’s biggest Pacific seaport, is notorious for drug trafficking and the violence wage by criminal gangs.

“In Buenaventura we have to get rid of the devil to see if we can return the tranquillity that the city has lost with so many crimes, acts of corruption and so much evil and drug trafficking,” Mr Montoya told local media.

“It will be a great public demonstration for the entire community, where we will pour holy water to see if so many bad things end and the devil goes out of here.”

Human Rights Watch has issued a report detailing Buenaventura’s history of abductions and killings by gangs known to maintain “chop-up houses” where victims are slaughtered.

Although there have been efforts to tackle violence by creating a “humanitarian zone” in the city, Mr Montoya said there had been 51 murders in 2019 so far.

Last year the Vatican announced a new training course for exorcism because of the increased demand for “deliverance ministry”.

(Source: The Independent)

Many Catholics struggle to keep the faith

New wave of sexual-abuse allegations sparks soul-searching; ‘Our people still believe in God. But they don’t believe in us’

Megan McCabe was born into a Catholic family, attended Catholic high school and college, and now teaches at a Catholic university. But the 32-year-old didn’t attend Mass for more than a month following the August release of a Pennsylvania grand-jury report documented more than 1,000 cases of sexual abuse by clergy in the state.

“I had a moment when I felt like this institution doesn’t have any goodness in it,” said Ms. McCabe, choking up as she spoke.

The sexual-abuse scandals that have rocked the church this year have left some of the country’s most devoted Catholics questioning how to reconcile their longtime faith with the realities of the institution they rely on to channel it. For them, decisions that were once a given—like whether to attend mass, send their kids to Catholic school or even have their children baptized—have suddenly become agonizing.

There were 74.3 million Catholics in the U.S. as of 2017, down from 81.6 million just two years earlier, according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, a nonprofit at Georgetown University. A Pew Research Center survey released this week found 72% of them approve of Pope Francis’ job performance job performance, the lowest of his pontificate and down 12 points since the start of the year. More than 60% of American Catholics think he is doing a fair or poor job handling the sexual-abuse issue.

"Our people still do believe in God,” Archbishop Thomas Wenski, of Miami, said to his priests last month. “But they don’t believe in us.”

Megan McCabe, a lifelong Catholic, has been struggling with recent revelations about the
ongoing sexual-abuse scandals in the church. RAJAH BOSE FOR WSJ

Ms. McCabe was in high school outside Boston in 2002 when the broad extent of sexual abuse in the church was reported for the first time. Though polls show church attendance sharply dropped in the wake of the scandal, Ms. McCabe doesn’t remember talking about it much at school or at home. “I had no understanding of how bad things were,” she said.

Now, as a professor of religious studies at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash., she is confronting the church’s history of abuse as an adult.

“It just hit me—the level of coverup,” she said of her reaction to the Pennsylvania report. “That’s what felt worse to me.”

She isn’t the only devout person in her family who has been struggling.

Her mother-in-law, Marybeth Brown, has been going to Catholic mass since she was a child, though she struggles to explain why she has continued amid the recent scandals. “It’s the only thing I’ve known in my entire life,” she said.

The 63-year-old remembers questioning what she should do when the priest at her Orange County, Calif., parish—where she had all four of her children baptized—was removed in 2001 amid allegations that he had affairs with adult women and abused teenage girls.

It was “a huge kick in the gut,” she said, but she stuck with the church.

Ms. Brown believed that after the 2002 crisis, church officials had addressed the problem. Recently, though, reports have emerged that clergy who helped cover up sexual abuse by priests in the past—or who had been accused of abuse themselves—remained in positions of power.

“I’m really disgusted,” said Ms. Brown. “This should not still be happening.”

She has tried to separate her faith in God from her disappointment with the church’s leadership.

“As far as my involvement and the feeling I used to get?” she said. “No. Now it’s more my sacrifice.”

Her priest, Father Brendan Mason, was a seminarian in Boston when the 2002 scandal broke and now leads the St. Edward the Confessor congregation in Dana Point, Calif. He said this year “is different.”

“Some people just want to move on—business as usual,” he said. “That’s not my sense from our parishioners. They want accountability.”

Not all Catholics are having crises of faith.

“The mediocre Catholics are the ones shying away from the church,” said Grace Ruiz, 46, after a recent service in Artesia, Calif., where a bishop addressed the scandal from the altar. “All these things don’t only happen to Catholics. They just highlight the Catholics.”

But many of the strongest reactions in churches have come from worshipers outraged by what they have learned about sexual abuse, or by how their leaders have responded.

The first Sunday after the Pennsylvania report was released, Mary Bradford—another lifelong Catholic whose husband converted to Catholicism before they married—walked out of her Annapolis, Md., church, angry that the priest asked parishioners to pray for the church before he mentioned the victims of sexual abuse.

The family has kept attending, but Ms. Bradford, 38, recently suggested to her husband that they look at other denominations.

“The message I’m receiving still seems to be, ‘How do we make sure everyone stays in the church?’ ” she said. “Part of me is like, geez, maybe the church needs to start over.”

(Source: WSJ)

A most unlikely saint

The case for canonizing G. K. Chesterton, the bombastic man of letters and paradoxical militant for God, writes James Parker in The Atlantic. Read on:

If the catholic church makes G. K. Chesterton a saint—as an influential group of Catholics is proposing it should—the story of his enormous coffin may become rather significant. Symbolic, even parabolic. Chesterton’s coffin was too huge, you see, to be carried down the stairs of his house in Beaconsfield, its occupant being legendarily overweight at the time of his death, in 1936. So it went out a second-floor window. Very Chestertonian: gravity, meet levity. Hagiographers might pursue the biblical resonance here, citing the Gospel passages in which a paralyzed man, unable to penetrate the crowds surrounding the house in Capernaum where Jesus was staying, is lowered in through a hole in the roof. Or they might simply declare that Gilbert Keith Chesterton’s was a spirit too large to go out through the conventional narrow door of death—that it had to be received, as it were, directly into the sky.

In his vastness and mobility, Chesterton continues to elude definition: He was a Catholic convert and an oracular man of letters, a pneumatic cultural presence, an aphorist with the production rate of a pulp novelist. Poetry, criticism, fiction, biography, columns, public debate—the phenomenon known to early-20th-century newspaper readers as “GKC” was half cornucopia, half content mill. If you’ve got a couple of days, read his impish, ageless, inside-out terrorist thriller The Man Who Was Thursday. If you’ve got an afternoon, read his masterpiece of Christian apologetics Orthodoxy: ontological basics retailed with a blissful, zooming frivolity, Thomas Aquinas meets Eddie Van Halen. If you’ve got half an hour, read “The Blue Cross,” the first and most glitteringly perfect of his stories featuring the crime-busting village priest Father Brown. If you’ve got only 10 minutes, read his essay “A Much Repeated Repetition.” (“Of a mechanical thing we have a full knowledge. Of a living thing we have a divine ignorance.”)

Chesterton did not so much fall into verbalism as somersault out of it, chucking one-liners like ninja stars.
Chesterton was a journalist; he was a metaphysician. He was a reactionary; he was a radical. He was a modernist, acutely alive to the rupture in consciousness that produced Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”; he was an anti-modernist (he hated Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”). He was a parochial Englishman and a post-Victorian gasbag; he was a mystic wedded to eternity. All of these cheerfully contradictory things are true, and none of them would matter in the slightest were it not for the final, resolving fact that he was a genius. Touched once by the live wire of his thought, you don’t forget it. And what is genius? Genius is Hammy the squirrel, in DreamWorks Animation’s 2006 classic Over the Hedge, five seconds after he gulps down an energy drink. The Earth stutters on its axis and then stops turning, the soundtrack comes to a soupy halt, and Hammy saunters through a sudden, humming immobility, past the transfixed pest-control guy and around the frozen laser beams of the lawn-alarm system. He is, of course, moving at incredible speed—but with supernatural nonchalance. His ecstatic velocity has put everything around him into the slowness and vagueness of a dream. That’s what geniuses do.



“It would have been better perhaps,” Chesterton’s friend Hilaire Belloc wrote, “had he never fallen into verbalism (wherein he tended to exceed).” But he did not so much fall into verbalism as come somersaulting out of it, chucking one-liners like ninja stars. His prose, if you don’t like it, is an unnerving zigzag between flippancy and bombast—and somewhere behind that, even more unnerving, is the intimation that these might be two sides of the same thing. If you do like it, it’s supremely entertaining, the stately outlines of an older, heavier rhetoric punctually convulsed by what he once called (in reference to the Book of Job) “earthquake irony.” He fulminates wittily; he cracks jokes like thunder. His message, a steady illumination beaming and clanging through every lens and facet of his creativity, was really very straightforward: get on your knees, modern man, and praise God.

In his use of paradox it could be said, per Belloc, that he tended to excess. “One can hardly think too little of one’s self. One can hardly think too much of one’s soul.” “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.” And so on. But Chesterton—born under Gemini, the sign of doubleness—is paradoxical because the world is paradoxical. I recently watched an episode of National Geographic Channel’s Outlaw Bikers in which was recounted the strange tale of the Fort Lauderdale Warlocks, a motorcycle gang consisting of undercover ATF agents. Swap the biker gang for a group of fin de siècle anarchists, and the ATF agents for English secret policemen, and you have, basically, the plot of The Man Who Was Thursday (except that in the novel the secret policemen are secret even to one another, each thinking that he alone has infiltrated the anarchist cell).


Besides, Jesus loved a paradox: “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: but whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it.” The Chestertonian paradox, in fact, was a kind of ideogram of the foundational paradox of the Incarnation, of God being born as Man, when “the hands that had made the sun and stars were too small to reach the huge heads of the cattle,” as he wrote in another book of Christian apologetics, The Everlasting Man. And has anyone gone further than Chesterton into the agonizing paradox of the Crucifixion—Jesus’s cry of abandonment from the cross, when “God seemed for an instant to be an atheist”?

which brings us to the Catholic Church. Why should it want to make him a saint? Why Chesterton and not—if you’re talking about great Catholic writers—Gerard Manley Hopkins? Or Walker Percy? Or Flannery O’Connor? Because Chesterton, in his jolly way, was a militant. A blaster of the superstitions of modernity, a toppler of the idols of materialism. He inveighed ceaselessly, at great length, and without ever once repeating himself, against “the thought-destroying forces of our time”: pessimism and determinism and pragmatism and impressionism. Wait—impressionism? The nice paintings? Oh, indeed. Impressionism was a terrible heresy, a kind of manifesto for self-absorption. “It means believing one’s immediate impressions at the expense of one’s more permanent and positive generalisations,” Chesterton argued in his study of William Blake. “It puts what one notices above what one knows.” He wasn’t always right, in other words. The chief obstacle to his sanctity will no doubt be his indefensible heap of writings on “the Jewish problem,” which brought out the worst in him—and continues to bring out the worst in his defenders.

But when he was right, he was prophetically right. Fearing and detesting the centripetal, black-hole suck of the almighty modern Self, he faced the other way: into the fact of Creation. There is a reality outside the mind, Chesterton insisted—and part of his energy was his innocent, unflagging astonishment that he had to keep on making the point. To us, the great solipsists, for whom the recognition of another human being requires a galvanic imaginative act, he speaks very directly.

The campaign for the beatification of G. K. Chesterton has now reached the prayer-cards stage. Late last year, I walked into a Catholic church in Stowe, Vermont, and found on a table near the entrance a stack of cards inviting me to pray for Chesterton’s intercession “so that his holiness may be recognized by all and the Church may proclaim him Blessed.” In other words, I should ask him for a miracle. All right then, Gilbert, here it is: grant me a flash, just a flash, of your double-natured vision, the intuition that I, James Parker, have been summoned out of an “almost nihilistic abyss” into a world of radiant ordinariness, that my existence depends second by second upon the creative gesture of a loving God, continually renewed, and that I should be astounded and grateful. Make that happen, you rocketing squirrel in a fat man’s body, and I’m down for the cause.

Girl 'sexually abused by Catholic priest' at Scottish orphanage had arm broken by a nun

'She called me a whore, she took my left arm and yanked me out of his lap and flung me across to the wall,' Theresa Tomie-McGrane told the inquiry team.

A nun broke a young girl's arm as she reacted to discovering the child was being sexually abused by a priest, an inquiry has heard.

Theresa Tolmie-McGrane told how she had hoped she would be protected when the nun walked in on the assault in 1970, when she was eight, but was instead called a "whore", grabbed and thrown towards a wall.

She added that she was then given a "real hiding" by another nun and threatened with having her other arm broken if she told anybody what had happened.

Ms Tolmie-McGrane waived her right to anonymity at the Scottish child abuse inquiry to recount a catalogue of other abuses during her 11 years at Smyllum Park orphanage in Lanark, South Lanarkshire, which closed in the 1980s.

These included beatings, humiliations, freezing showers and children being force-fed inedible food, being told to eat their vomit and having their mouths rinsed out with soap.

She told the hearing in Edinburgh how she arrived at the institution, run by the Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul, at the age of six in 1968 after an abusive early childhood.

She recounted how, about two years later, she had a job dusting pews in the church.

One particular priest would arrive early and ask her to sit on his lap, before progressing to making her to perform a sex act on him or watch as he did so, the inquiry heard.

"He said 'I need you to be a soldier of God, a good little soldier'," she told the inquiry, adding the abuse went on for several months.

On one occasion, a nun walked in to the room as it was happening, she said.

"I thought 'praise the Lord, she's seeing this, she's going to be angry with him and protect me'", she told the hearing. "Her whole face became distorted. I thought 'she's angry with him', (but) she was angry with me.

"She called me a whore, she took my left arm and yanked me out of his lap and flung me across to the wall (and said) ... 'get the f*** out of here'."

Ms Tolmie-McGrane said she crawled away and had to go back to church, but when another nun found out she could not raise her arm she was given "a real hiding".

"I said I couldn't lift my arm, my arm hurt. I said (a nun) has broken my arm," she said.

She added that the second nun took her to hospital but warned her: "Don't you dare tell anybody what happened, young lady, or I'll break your other arm" and assured her she would be "lying to protect a man of God, so it's ok to lie".

Ms Tolmie-McGrane, who later went to Glasgow University and now works in Norway as a psychologist, told the inquiry she was at Smyllum from 1968 until 1979.

She described how, on her first night there, she was slapped after waking up screaming from a nightmare, then forced into a freezing cold shower for wetting the bed.

If a child vomited, they would have their faces rubbed in it or be told to eat it, she said. She also also described beatings at the hands of nuns, sometimes with the crosses they wore.

"I would say every child at some point would have been hit with a cross," she said.

Children would be made to sleep in soiled sheets for two or three nights as a punishment for bed-wetting, she said, and when they went on an annual holiday to Ayrshire, they would end up badly burnt and blistered from the sun.

The inquiry also heard how one girl would run away often but never returned after being run over by a car one day.

Ms Tolmie-McGrane told the inquiry she approached police officers visiting Smyllum on two occasions to tell them "the nuns are hurting me" but was "marched back in" to the institution on both occasions and then beaten by a nun.

Injuries from her time at Smyllum included a facial scar and broken tooth from being "slammed into a wall", broken fingers from being hit with a hair brush and a broken tail bone from having a seat pulled out from underneath her when she was sitting down.

"I have, unfortunately, physical scars, not just emotional ones," she told the hearing.

Ms Tolmie-McGrane recounted an occasion when, aged 13, she ran away from a nun who "was always trying to touch me" and squeezed her breasts.

She said she spoke about the instances of sexual abuse during confession with different priests. "The answer I got was 'pray for them'," she said.

She recounted how Smyllum staff would lock her in a dark pantry as a punishment, knowing she had a fear of the dark. Another punishment involved children having their mouths washed out with carbolic soap, she said.

Residents would also be separated from their friends, she told the hearing, saying: "We just thought they didn't want us speaking about what was going on."

Ms Tolmie-McGrane, who achieved five A grades in her Higher exams, also told how she would have to do her revision in the toilets after bedtime and would be called names by the nuns when she did well in her education.

Asked what lessons should be learned, she told the inquiry: "I think it's important the Catholic Church figures out who the bad nuns and priests are and has them removed."

She added: "The child should always be believed."

Colin MacAuley QC, counsel to the inquiry, put it to her that a particular nun has been spoken to by the inquiry and does not accept the allegations.

The witness replied: "All I can say is I have no reason to lie, but she maybe has a lot to lose."

The inquiry, chaired by Lady Smith, continues.

(Source: Independent)

This is the last country on earth where divorce is illegal

They say it’s easier to get married than to get out of marriage. While marriage is one of the most crucial bonds two people can take part in, divorce laws have been revised in some countries to not only make divorce legal, but also, a speedier and less daunting process. However, no matter how much has changed over the course of human history, there is still one country where divorce is not legal and where ’till death do us part’ remains a tenet: the Philippines.

Stronghold of Catholicism
During Spanish colonization, the Church played a major role in political affairs in the Philippines. When the Philippines became independent, the Philippine Constitution affirmed the separation of Church and State. However, did these two entities fully separate?

The first Christian country in Asia and the only dominantly Catholic nation in the region, religion, specifically Catholicism, still influences the Philippine government on subjects ranging from who to vote for during elections to governmental policies. The Philippine Catholic Church believes that it is their duty to uphold the teachings of the Church by opposing or implementing laws. One of these laws is divorce. You can’t file for divorce in the Philippines.

The Church views marriage as a sacred vow and the Philippine Constitution upholds it as an institution that should be protected. The Church believes that no man can break what God has unified through the sacrament of marriage. Many lawmakers were pushing for divorce laws in the Philippines, but these laws were blocked by politicians who have conservative views on marriage and by the so-called ‘Catholic vote’.

Legal Separation and Annulment
However, the Philippine Constitution offers legal separation and annulment as alternatives to divorce. Studying Philippine law illustrates that these options are just consolations to get out of a messy marriage, but an annulment is not divorce by definition.

One can only be legally separated if repeated physical abuse, drug abuse and alcoholism become marital issues. Although legally separated, parties can only end their marital duties to each other, including cohabitation. However, the couple is still married in the eyes of the law. Therefore, legally separated couples cannot get married again.

Annulment is an expensive and tedious legal battle, especially if one party is not cooperating and is against the petition. To be granted annulment, issues must have taken place before the marriage, since annulment nullifies the marriage. For example, an annulment demonstrates that marriage didn’t happen in the first place. Psychological incapacity, mistaken identity and being underage are some reasons an annulment can be granted.

Annulment is also costly and tarnished with corruption in the judiciary arena. A faster and easier annulment process often costs more money. Couples who want to get an annulment in the Philippines often feel weary. While in the US, ‘irreconcilable differences’ is the easiest reason for a divorce, the ‘easiest’ method for couples seeking an annulment in the Philippines is psychological incapacity. However, many people do not want to be viewed this way. This label can affect peoples’ careers or who will have custody of their children. Using such grounds also means a lot of mudslinging between parties.

A Conservative Culture
Since Filipino culture is heavily conservative, many couples who wish to end their marriage legally usually don’t get the support they need from their respective families. Although not a taboo, broken families are still frowned upon. Couples are taught to try their best to keep the sanctity of marriage by staying together and working things out.

With divorce not legal under the Family Code of the Philippines in the constitution, divorce is not recognized as a Civil Status in the Philippines. You can see this ruling in important documents where only ‘Single’, ‘Married’, and ‘Widow’ are options for Civil Status.

Since annulment and legal separation are so hard to get, parties cannot just ‘casually’ separate. In the Philippines, all properties between married couples are conjugal by default and prenuptial agreement is unheard of. Can you imagine if a man who wants to buy a new condo unit has to ask for ‘approval’ from his estranged wife, even though they have been estranged for years, or if a woman still has to use her ex-husband’s family name in documents and identification papers, despite being separated from her husband?

While the Philippines take pride in their Family Code and the majority of families there are still intact, divorce is a white elephant in the room that needs to be addressed. While other countries have stepped up and now allow same-sex marriages, the Philippines still hinders people from leaving bad marriages gracefully and starting new lives more quickly.

(Source: Culture Trip)

The Catholic church and its long history of child sexual abuse

The latest incident that has rocked the Catholic Church and its faithful followers is the repeated rape of a minor girl by the vicar of a local church at Kottiyoor in Kannur District, Kerala. He was the manager of the school in which the girl attended classes until February 6th, a day before she gave birth to a baby boy.

This is not the first time that a priest has misused his powers and indulged in an act that priesthood forbids. A long and notorious history of Catholic priests involved in sex crimes tells us that the preachy Church has a rotten history of burying dirty secrets allowing systemic gender violence to mushroom in its backyard.

What was bizarre was the concerted effort by the Church to cover up the crime, until the Kerala police carried out an intensive investigation. They arrested the accused priest and seven others including five nuns and the doctor of the church-run hospital where the girl gave birth to the child, who were on the run. The accused were picked up on February 7th and booked under non-bailable warrants. The police should be applauded for being swift and efficient but what breaks the heart of faithful Christians like me is that the onus of the sexual crime is being put on the minor child. The Church conveniently retorted to victim-blaming rather than accepting the need to clean up the rot in the system.

THE CHURCH PUT THE ONUS OF THE SEXUAL CRIME ON THE MINOR CHILD WHO WAS RAPED.

According to India Today’s report on an editorial written by Sunday Shalom, a Christian weekly, the rape could have been averted by the girl if she had wanted to. The weekly said “Here, the girl is above the age of 15. Let me tell you this, as I consider you like my daughter, you are also at fault. Before the Lord, it is you who will have to answer first. Daughter why did you forget who a priest is? He has a human body and has temptations. He may have forgotten his position for a few seconds, my child who has taken the Holy Communion, why didn’t you stop or correct him?”

According to this statement, a priest who preaches and makes lofty speeches after a Sunday mass is not at fault, but the people who trust and respect him, considering him a messenger of Christ, are at fault. Shouldn’t the Bishop’s Council who blamed consumerism for rape ask such sexual offenders why they forgot their celibacy vow? If it was difficult for them to “control their hormones”, they should have never embraced a vocation that forbids its servants from sex. The Bishop’s Council also forgot that the priest who gives out the Holy Communion – and not the faithful who take the Holy Communion – is more responsible for protecting its sanctity.

Clearly, these words also expose the notorious abuse of powers by people serving religion and institutions run in its name, because the Christian weekly has reprimanded the minor girl and reminded her of who the priest is. It seems to me that the Church and its faithful servants are forgetting who priests are and what their duties should be.

Another absurd remark came from Father Paul Thelekat of the Bishop’s council who answered a query put by NewsMinute.  He said “Consumerism is indeed a situation affecting everyone in the world and priests are also in the world. It is in celibacy and in virginity the crisis become apparent first, then it will become a crisis of fidelity in marriage with extra marital and pre-marital sex. Women are presented as commodity both in media and advertisements and all commodities are marketed with girls and women where human body is dehumanized.”

It’s amusing how people holding positions of power blatantly abuse it by putting the blame of the rape on consumerism and its ill-effects. Apparently consuming media that objectifies women further detracts from the rape being the fault of the rapist! He further added that Father Robin, the offender, belonged to a small minority of priests who had failed to live up to the lofty ideal of celibacy.

THERE IS AN EPIDEMIC OF SEXUAL VIOLENCE THAT HAS INFECTED HOUSES OF WORSHIP.

In August last year, the Catholic Church was hit by a similar case of sexual assault by the priest of a church in Palakkad. A 17-year-old girl was found dead under mysterious circumstances at the guest room of Father Arockiaraj, the priest of St. Stanislaus Church in Walayar. The matter was closed after the police registered it as a case of suicide. It took three years for the case to make progress, with the victim’s mother continuously struggling to prove that the Church has colluded to cover up the murder.

On being asked why the Church had not been prompt in bringing the incident to the police, the Vicar General of the Coimbatore Diocese said that “It was a mistake. It was a very, very unfortunate incident. There were mistakes on the part of the Church. But we didn’t do it on purpose.”

The victim’s mother collaborated with Zee Tamil TV to conduct a sting operation, where the accused confessed to his crime, calling it a sudden outburst of events where he had wanted to prevent the victim from making noise. He had used her duppata to silence her and then he trivialized the incident by calling it an “accident”. Following the sting operation, the Church organized massive protests outside the victim’s house and excommunicated her family.

The victim’s mother has been giving her all in the fight against the Church, and the accused was finally arrested in May 2016. He was booked under sections of rape and Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (POCSO) but was let out on bail just 60 days after his arrest.

The complicity of the Church in reporting events of sexual abuse involving minors has led to an epidemic of sexual violence that has infected the houses of worship. The Church tries to hide such incidents of brazen misuse of power to prevent its image from getting tarnished, prioritizing its image above the lives of children being destroyed within the walls of its institution. By trying to be preachy and serving lofty ideals of holiness, without acting against crimes of child sexual abuse, the Church is proving to be just another corrupt institution that isn’t an ideal example of the right and just.

In a statement issued in August 2014, Pope Francis said that one in 50 priests is a paedophile. In India, no one can clearly state the number of priests who have indulged in sexual abuse crimes because of the conservatism that resorts to secrecy. Religious fundamentalism and the illegal suppression of facts has led to the insulation of the institution. It has to be seen if the Church is willing to open up to public scrutiny. A violative religious institution with political powers and social control is harmful for the health and progress of a state.

(Source: Feminism in India)

4,444 victims: Extent of abuse in Catholic church in Australia revealed

Seven per cent of Australia’s Catholic priests were accused of abusing children in the six decades since 1950, according to new data from the royal commission.

On Monday the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse released damning statistics on the scale of the crisis within the Catholic Church. The numbers confirm the extent of sexual predation already suggested by four years of royal commission hearings involving the church, which are now entering their final weeks.

Up to 15% of priests in some dioceses were alleged perpetrators between 1950 and 2015, with abusers most prevalent in the dioceses of Sale and Sandhurst in Victoria, Port Pirie in South Australia, and Lismore and Wollongong in New South Wales. The numbers were even worse in some national Catholic orders. By far the worst was the order of the St John of God Brothers, where a staggering 40% of religious brothers are believed to have abused children.

Twenty-two per cent of Christian Brothers and 20% of Marist Brothers, both orders that run schools, were alleged perpetrators. More than one in five priests in the Benedictine community of New Norcia were alleged perpetrators, while 17.2% of clergy were accused of crimes against children in the Salesians of Don Bosco order.

In total, between 1980 and 2015, 4,444 people alleged incidents of child sexual abuse relating to 93 Catholic Church authorities. The abuse allegedly took place in more than 1,000 institutions. The average age of victims was 10.5 for girls and 11.6 for boys. The overwhelming majority of survivors were male. Almost 1,900 perpetrators were identified and another 500 remained unidentified. Thirty-two per cent were religious brothers, 30% were priests, 29% were lay people and 5% were religious sisters.

The royal commission said 37% of all private sessions it held with survivors from all institutions related to abuse in the Catholic Church.

The disturbing figures were revealed by senior counsel assisting, Gail Furness, SC. She also revealed that the Holy See had refused to hand over documents involving Australian priests accused of abuse.

“The royal commission hoped to gain an understanding of the action taken in each case,” Furness said. “The Holy See responded, on 1 July 2014, that it was ‘neither possible nor appropriate to provide the information requested’,” she said.

Furness said the responses of Catholic diocese and orders across the country were “depressingly similar”.

“Children were ignored or worse, punished. Allegations were not investigated. Priests and religious [brothers] were moved. The parishes or communities to which they were moved knew nothing of their past,” she said. “Documents were not kept or they were destroyed. Secrecy prevailed as did cover-ups.”

The church’s Truth, Justice and Healing council, set up to coordinate the church’s response to the crisis, made an opening statement following the release of the data. Chief executive Francis Sullivan struggled with emotion as he spoke, saying the data without doubt “undermines the image and credibility of the priesthood”.

“These numbers are shocking, they are tragic, they are indefensible,” Sullivan said. “And each entry in this data for the most part represents a child who suffered at the hands of someone who should have cared for and protected them.

“The data is an indictment on the priests and religious who abused these children. It also reflects on the church leaders who at times failed to take steps to deal with the abusers, failed to call them to order and failed to deal with them in accordance with the law.”

Sullivan described the abuse as a “massive failure” of the church and as a corruption of the gospel.

“As Catholics, we hang our heads in shame,” he said.

Sullivan outlined the key programs of change undertaken by the church. That included the establishment of the professional standards body responsible for auditing and reporting on the compliance of bishops and church leaders with child protection standards. It also includes revisiting abuse claims, the push for a national redress scheme, the recruitment of new professional standards officers and the creation of stronger child protection policies and procedures.

 How long can the cognitive dissonance between my faith and the Catholic church last?
Kristina Keneally
Kristina Keneally  Read more
The royal commission is now in its final stage of examining abuse by Catholic clergy and the responses of various Catholic authorities. The final three weeks are expected to focus on cultural causes of the offending, the current child protection policies of the church, and the way it has responded to the royal commission case studies so far. The archbishops of Sydney, Adelaide, Melbourne Canberra-Goulburn, Perth and Brisbane are due to give evidence.

The hearing aims to answer the questions that linger in many survivors’ minds: why did the abuse happen at such a scale? And why was it covered-up for so long?

Church leaders last week began warning churchgoers and schools about the final weeks of the royal commission. The archbishop of Brisbane, Mark Coleridge, released a video to Catholic school parents and churches warning them to expect some “grim moments”. He said the final hearing would allow the church to tell a “better story” about how it has changed.

“Through these three weeks there will be some grim moments and there will be some shocks, inevitably,” he said. “But there will also be a chance to tell a better story of what has been done and what is being done now.”

He said the church would need to show how it had changed culturally, as well as through amendments to flawed child protection policies and procedures.

“It’s not enough to change procedures and protocols, that has to happen. But we have to shift the culture and that’s a much more difficult thing to do,” he said.

(Source: Guardian)

100 years ago, Americans talked about Catholics the way they talk about Muslims today

About a century ago, millions of Americans feared that members of a religious group was amassing an arsenal of weapons for a secret, preplanned takeover of the United States.

The feared religious group wasn’t Muslims. It was, as Los Angeles Times reporter Matt Pearce wrote in a great piece in 2015, Catholics:

Hatred had become big business in southwestern Missouri, and its name was the Menace, a weekly anti-Catholic newspaper whose headlines screamed to readers around the nation about predatory priests, women enslaved in convents and a dangerous Roman Catholic plot to take over America.…

America’s deep and widespread skepticism of Catholics is a faint memory in today’s post-Sept. 11 world. But as some conservative politicians call for limits on Muslim immigration and raise questions about whether Muslims are more loyal to Islamic law than American law, the story of Aurora’s long-ago newspaper is a reminder of a long history of American religious intolerance.

Today, there are calls for federal surveillance of mosques in the name of preventing terrorist attacks; a century ago, it was state laws that allowed the warrantless search of convents and churches in search of supposedly trapped women and purported secret Catholic weapons caches.

This may seem absurd today, but there was a real fear among Protestant Americans back then that Catholics were planning to take over the country. As Pearce reported, the fears led to serious violence: Lynch mobs killed Catholic Italians, arsonists burned down Catholic churches, and there were anti-Catholic riots. It was a similar sentiment to the kind of Islamophobia today that’s led many Americans to call for shutting down mosques, forcing Muslims to register in a national database, and even banning Islam.

The point of the comparison is not to say that the US faces the same problems today as it did a century ago, or that the discrimination toward Catholics back then and Muslims today is exactly the same. But when looking back at the history of the US, it’s easy to see a pattern of consistent xenophobia and fears of outsiders.

Xenophobia is a staple of American history
In response to terrorist attacks across the globe, much of the conversation has focused on refugees and immigration. This conversation has been tinged by xenophobia toward Muslims, with President-elect Donald Trump once calling for a ban on Muslims entering the US.

But this sort of rhetoric is not new to the US. As the Pew Research Center found, Americans have generally opposed taking in refugees even as they went through abhorrent, well-known crises. (Dara Lind reported for Vox that America even rejected some Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany.)

(Source: Vox)

My Life in Doha: Between Dream and Reality (Book Review)

My Life in Doha: Between Dream and Reality
Rachel Hajar, MD
Strategic Book Group
Price: $16

It’s July 1978, and the summer at its peak with intense, blinding light at 40 degree Celsius. The sky was deeply blue and cloudless, and a young Filipina doctor, born and brought up as a Roman Catholic, arrives in Doha with her husband and two children. The very touching of the Qatari soil is like a dream, for she had neither dreamt of coming to Qatar, a name which she had never heard of before meeting her husband, nor of marrying an Arab cardiologist from Qatar, says Dr Rachel Hajar, a cardiologist and the director of non-invasive cardiology, Hamad Medical Corporation, Doha, and married to Dr Hajar Ahmad Albinali, also a cardiologist and former health minister in Qatar, in the beginning lines of her memoir – My Life in Doha: Between Dream and Reality. Doha Corniche was the first place she visited after arriving in Doha and she might have never dreamt that the Pearl Oyster Fountain along Doha Corniche would make the cover for her memoir in the later years!

Dr Rachel Hajar

The work is remarkable not just because it is written about Arab society and culture, but also because it gives first-hand experience of the author, an outsider, who was accepted by the conservative society with open arms. The book is all about her personal experience and narrates how she met her husband and came to live in Qatar. It also gives an insight into her good rapport with her in-laws, recollections of her early experiences and her insights into another culture.

She admits that the world was obviously different from the one in which she was brought up and reveals what it is like to live within the heart of a culture that’s not her own and the social changes she has witnessed through the years and most importantly, the evolution of her perspective about the region and its people.

With a physician’s eye for detail, she weaves a fascinating tale of how her love story transcended cultural and social habits in a traditionally patriarchal Arab Islamic culture. She blends art and science in a convincing manner. The chapters read easy and a tinge of humour and stories of the past help the reader to maintain the flow of reading. The author takes fascinating side trips into the history and literature surrounding incense, the Islamic call to prayer, the marketplace, and compares and contrasts Christian and Islamic festivals.

Dr Rachel describes the celebrations of Eid very vividly. In fact, she compares and contrasts Christian and Islamic. But she also says “both are occasions for prayer as well as a time devoted to family and friends and the fulfillment of social obligations.” She continues: “The template of the celebrations of Christmas that I remember is not so much different from the celebrations of Eid. The two feasts highlighted that Muslims and Christians shared the same beliefs and behaviors. The milieu for the celebration of Eid and Christmas may be different but both encode in their festival and prayer ritual the concepts peace, joy, love  —  and hope.” (P. 177)

Qatar, the thumb of Arabia, becomes the home of Dr Rachel. She is no more an outsider. She is one among the Qataris. There is a kind of happiness and belongingness when she says: “The first time I gave my children their Eid card written in my distinctive Arabic script, it created a sensation in the family. My newfound skill in writing Arabic letters languished when they outgrew Eidiyas.” (P. 175).  “There is a certain satisfaction in being able to deny yourself food and drink and an excitement in anticipating iftar. Once the fast is broken, food tastes so good, and water so sweet.” (P. 195)

As an insider she describes how Qatari kitchens buzz with activity during Ramadan as women prepare and experiment with new recipes for iftar, the breaking of fast. She goes in detail about the traditional delicacies like thareed and harees, “the two dishes known from pre-Islamic days”. (P. 188). Not to leave behind Loqaimat, a desert which inspired her husband to compose a whimsical Arabic verse. She also narrates the stories behind the traditional sweet dishes Mahalabiya and Umm Ali.

She also examines issues like wearing black veil, history behind it and how being a mother of five children, she volunteered to wear the Qatari veil when her children  reach adolescence. She gives a detail account of markets, on how she learnt to shop for fresh fish and carpets in Doha’s markets.

She is fascinated about Majilis, where ideas, news and thoughts are exchanged. She gives an insight on the nuances of majilis, serving coffee, an integral part of Arab hospitality, burning incense, driving in Doha, tent parties and farkha, a door within a door.

She dedicates two exclusive chapters for her in-laws, one for Abui (my father) and Ummi (my mother). She fondly remembers how her father-in-law, Sheikh Ahmed , became an Islamic  judge, his judgments, writings, reading, collection of books, sense of humour, majilis, his curiosity about the contents of Rachel’s “sling bag, which she carried everywhere”, and lastly slow decline of his health and death.

Rachel fondly remembers how her mother-in-law, whom she called Ummi baked khubz, mahalla and chebab, besides preparing laban, a sweet dish. Always in her veil, Ummi’s world in the house revolved around kitchen. The author gives an insight into how a whole lamb is cooked in Qatari families.

The writer not only goes in detail about anti-smoking campaigned by her husband in the country, but also gives first-hand experience of patients who suffered heart problems, thanks to their habit of smoking.
She keeps the tender love which blossomed between her and her husband for the last chapter. She replaces “the sun in his life not only in Portland”, but also in Qatar and “shines over his heart”.

The author is fond of flowers and loves watering her plants in the balcony. She likens her wedding and life in Qatar to a lotus flower which adapts and flourishes in a foreign climate. “The lotus flower is exotic. Like me, the flower is foreign in this part of world. But with tender loving care, it might survive and flourish, the way I did.” (P. 286).

It is almost impossible to understand a culture by just looking in from outside, which is like peeping through a window at events happening on the street. One has to live the life within a culture to fully comprehend its perceived mysteries. Moreover, it is difficult to get a glimpse of different aspects of Qatari life and Dr Rachel records her observations and impressions of the culture and society in detail throughout.