On Sunday, Vincent Nichols, the archbishop of Westminster, was asked by Andrew Marr of the BBC:

"Do you share that sort of vision that Britain is a particularly Godless and indeed sort of death culture society, extremely secular by modern standards?"

Archbishop Nichols replied:

"Well it's not how I would describe our society at all actually. I think our society is characterised as much by generosity and by genuine concern one for another, and I think religious faith is taken quite seriously by probably a majority of people in this country."

I can't think of anyone, Catholic or non-Catholic, religious or non-believer, who believes that

"religious faith is taken quite seriously by probably a majority of people in this country".

And with 570 babies killed daily in Britain and with well over two million embryos discarded, or frozen, or selectively aborted, or miscarried or used in destructive experiments since the birth of the first IVF child was born over thirty years ago, how can the archbishop blithely dismiss the culture of death without having his head kept, deliberately, buried in the sand?

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Belief in the success of marriage now requires a faith reserved in times past for religion. As a result, cohabitation and serial monogamy are at an all-time high. People are applying the mutated companionate courtship values of sexual attraction and contrived compatibility in choosing cohabitation partners. In an interview with television and movie star George Clooney on his 1980s decision to move in with actress Kelly Preston on their first date, Clooney concluded, “I was always Mr. Full-On Spontaneous . . . then as you get older, you start to go, ‘you know what? Maybe we should go out a little bit first’” (quoted in Rochlin, 56). What—go out and get to know each other before moving in together? For many mirage men that is an unthinkable idea. But the results of this deceitful cohabitation trend have been anything but encouraging, with a break up rate for couples who cohabitate twice as high as for married couples (Jayson 3A).

Washington State University researcher Jan Stets reported that women who cohabitate are more than twice as likely to be victims of domestic violence than married women and data from the National Institute of Mental Health show that cohabitating women have three times the rate of depression as married women and twice as much as non-cohabitating single women (Popenoe: Smart Marriage)

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John Sentamu accuses government of 'sitting on sidelines' while other countries tackle the cross-border problem

The Archbishop of York has joined critics of the government's opt-out from the EU's new directive on sex trafficking, describing the decision as "stunning".

John Sentamu accused ministers of "sitting on the sidelines" while other countries try to tackle a cross-border problem, which is thought to be growing but has seen fewer traffickers jailed this year than at any time since 2005.

The Archbishop said the "evil trade, which is nothing less than modern-day slavery", requires joint international action with Britain playing a full part. Estimates suggest that 2,500 foreign women have been pimped into prostitution by gangs.

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[.....]  the really striking finding is the extent to which the public actually endorse Catholic Social Teaching.

The public claim to disagree with the Pope. Loud and clear. 40% say that they 'generally disagree with the Pope’s views on current affairs.'

But present the public with things the Pope has actually written and the story is rather different.

In the survey, we tested twelve statements taken directly – but anonymously – from Benedict’s most recent encyclical letter, Caritas in Veritate, to see if the public agreed with them. And they did. Strongly.

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[.....]  The man who comes to Britain as the 264th successor of St Peter is many things. Britons who rely on media imagery to form their impressions of public personalities will find some of those things surprising. Those who expect to meet "God's Rottweiler" (as his theological enemies caricatured Cardinal Ratzinger decades ago) will find instead a shy, soft-spoken man of exquisite manners. Those determined to portray Pope Benedict as the central figure in a global criminal conspiracy of child-rapers and their abettors will, it may be hoped, discover the man who did more than anyone else in the Roman Curia to compel the Church to face what he once called the "filth" marring the priesthood. Those looking for a hidebound clerical enforcer will meet instead a man of deep faith, a gentle pastor who has met, wept with, and apologised to the abused victims of his brother priests and bishops.

Joseph Ratzinger is also a man of ideas: a world-class European intellectual with an intriguing analysis of contemporary Europe's present circumstances and bold proposals to make about Europe's future. During the Pope's visit to Britain, those who ignore those proposals because of their fixation on scandal are depriving themselves of an opportunity to think seriously about the moral and cultural condition of the West — and indulging that intellectual anorexia at a moment when the West's future seems anything but secure demographically, economically, fiscally, strategically or morally.

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In an interview on Zenit, Edmund Adamus, the pastoral affairs director of the Catholic archdiocese of Westminster, provides a compelling analysis of England in the context of Pope Benedict's visit next month. He says:

" … whether we like it or not as British citizens and residents of this country … the fact is that historically, and continuing right now, Britain … has been and is the geopolitical epicenter of the culture of death … Britain in particular, with its ever-increasing commercialization of sex, not to mention its permissive laws advancing the gay agenda*, is such a wasteland …

" … Our laws and lawmakers for over 50 years or more have been the most permissively anti-life and progressively anti-family and marriage, in essence one of the most anti-Catholic landscapes culturally speaking than even those places where Catholics suffer open persecution."

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The poster campaign on London buses by Catholic Women’s Ordination demanding that Pope Benedict ‘ordain women now’ can only serve to highlight one thing: the failure of feminism.

A number of realities need to be faced:

• Women are treated with significantly less respect in permissive Britain than they were in Christian Britain. Various feminist writers including Natasha Walter, Rosie Boycott and Joan Bakewell have highlighted the degrading impact of the permissive society on young women – their socialisation and their self-esteem.

• Women have been turned into wage slaves. Christian Britain regarded the nurture of children as a vitally important calling and Evangelical social reformers such as the Earl of Shaftesbury worked tirelessly to reform working practices so that women were liberated to pursue that God-given calling. But the inflation of house prices by double incomes is forcing young mothers back to work.

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[.....] Social issues are featured high on the agenda. The environment, poverty, HIV/ADIS and diseases of one sort or another are being addressed. However, one wonders if some of the speakers, many of whom are bureaucrats who struggle with resources, are adopting UN language to get UN dollars. Every Anglican province has an HIV office as well as development offices with huge staffs.

One of the criticisms of Episcopal Church bishops like John Chane of Washington and Tom Shaw of Massachusetts is that Africa is more concerned with homosexuality than the pressing issues of Africa. It is a lie, of course. It is the North American churches that are obsessed with homosexual behavior, not the Africans. Africans have no interest in the subject at all. They are being forced to address it precisely because it is being thrust upon them by the West's Culture Wars.

This conference is not shying away from addressing the subject, but this conference has dispelled forever the African church's alleged lack of interest on social issues that are tearing people apart including war and disease. Whole lectures have been devoted to HIV/AIDS, the environment, poverty, disease, war and the need for clean water and what local churches should be doing about it. One African bishop says he hopes to plant one million trees before he dies. (Has US Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori planted a single tree?) The Africans have the resources. What they need is help to mobilize and strategize them.

The problems are immense and the need is great. Many African nations have had a series of corrupt political leaders, which has made change difficult. Uganda is a case in point. The country has gone from Idi Amin to a solid Christian Anglican president today. Things can change. The church even has a provident fund for retiring clergy. No, it is not in the same league as the Church Pension Fund, but the African Anglican world is growing and changing. Constant whining about Western pansexuality will not hold them back. The evidence is in. The total Average Sunday Attendance (ASA) for the whole of North America wouldn't be one decent sized Nigerian diocese. So the question is: who should be listening to whom?

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The Pope welcomed a gathering of altar servers in Rome. As John Allen notes:

First, for the first time this year, the female altar servers in attendance outnumbered the males. According to organizers, the balance was roughly 60-40 in favor of females. The official Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, pointed to the turnout as a symbol of “the massive entry in recent decades of girls and young women into a role once reserved exclusively to males.”

This predominance of girls was predictable (anyway I predicted it in my book The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity). Western Christianity has for a long time been regarded as unmasculine. It has been difficult to keep men, especially young men, connected to a church which seems to want to lessen their masculinity.

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Figures released by the Health Protection Agency (HPA) this morning have shown that the state of sexual health among the UK population is poor, with STI rates reaching record levels. The figures have also revealed that gay men are of partcular concern.

Terrence Higgins Trust’s Chief Executive Sir Nick Partridge said: "It’s staggering that almost half a million people each year are affected by preventable sexually transmitted infections. Gay men continue to top the list, accounting for two thirds of syphilis and over a third of gonorrhoea diagnoses last year, while being only 6% of the population.

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Women aged 19 and men aged between 20 and 23 are at greatest risk of contracting an infection, according to the data from the Health Protection Agency.

Overall there were 482,696 new cases of sexually transmitted infections diagnosed in the UK in 2009. This was a rise of three per cent on the previous year.

Experts warned that greater efforts were needed to get the safer sex message across to the younger generation amid fears young people are increasingly engaging in risky sex.

The data showed that at least one in ten teenagers aged between 16 and 19 who are treated at a clinic for a sexually transmitted infection will return within a year with another infection.

The Health Protection Agency said the number of cases of sexually transmitted infections was still 'too high' but added that more testing and the use of more accurate tests will have contributed to the rise.

Dr Gwenda Hughes, head of the HPA's STI section, said: "These latest figures show that poor sexual health is a serious problem among the UK's young adults and men who have sex with men.

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Schoolchildren as young as six are subjecting teachers to a shocking level of sexual abuse – from leering and sexual comments to groping and threats of rape.

New figures reveal that hundreds of teachers have been touched inappropriately or propositioned by pupils, and other reports say that children have fondled themselves in class in a bid to embarrass or intimidate their teacher.

It comes as police reports reveal that children – also as young as six in some cases – are being arrested for serious crimes including assault and battery and robbery.

The increasing incidence of children sexual harassing their teachers has been highlighted in private logs kept by local councils, which have been made available through the Freedom Of Information Act.

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Fewer than one in five people who voted in a survey asking people which songs they wanted player at their funeral chose hymns.

Timeless classic songs such as 'What a Wonderful World' by Louis Armstrong are increasingly popular choices for final farewells, according to the research for the website My Last Song.

The poll, which asked people to vote on the type of music they wanted played at their funeral, found that 39 per cent chose modern secular music while those who wanted a mixture of all categories accounted for 27 per cent.

Paul Hensby, founder of the website, said the poor showing of hymns confirms the trend towards funerals with a greater secular content …

The Modern British Funeral is more celebratory than grieving as family and friends give tributes to the loved one rather than listening to readings delivered by the minister, said Mr Hensby.

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According to Tom Jensen, director of the North-Carolina based Public Policy Polling (PPP), polls finding that a majority of Americans support homosexual "marriage" cannot be trusted because Americans are sometimes hesitant to state their position before a live interviewer who may judge them to be intolerant.

Earlier this month a CNN poll found that 52% of Americans thought that homosexuals should have the constitutional right to marry; 46% said the Constitution should not give that right.

Public Policy Polling's latest survey however, found that 57% of Americans think that same-sex "marriage" should be illegal, while only 33% think it should be legal and 11% have no opinion.

The difference between the two polls, according to Jensen, springs from the fact that CNN and other major polling organizations use live interviewers, while Public Policy Polling uses an automated system.

He said that people are "more likely to tell their true feelings on an automated poll, where there's no social anxiety concern, than to a live interviewer who they may be worried about the reaction of."

"It is frankly impossible," he continued, "based on the results of gay marriage referendums over the last decade, to believe that a majority of Americans support its legalization."

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Europeans thought they were progressing towards an ideal civilisation. Now time is up, and it hurts

VIEWED from afar, Europeans are a complacent, ungrateful lot. Nannied from cradle to grave by the world’s most generous welfare systems, they squeal like spoiled children when asked to give up just a few of their playthings. As governments in the euro zone trim benefits and raise the retirement age in the wake of the sovereign-debt crisis, a wail of indignation has rung out and a wave of protests set in. “Unfair!” thundered Antonis Samaras, the Greek conservative opposition leader, this week, at the government’s proposed pension-reform plans. “Totally unfair!” howled Martine Aubry, the French opposition Socialist leader, at her country’s attempt to do the same.

American commentators seem particularly amused to watch Europeans “dismantle” their welfare systems, just as America embraces European-style universal health care. Only a year ago Europe’s leaders were laying into American free-marketry and declaring unbridled capitalism finished. “After listening to two years of stern and self-righteous lectures about the ‘failure’ of the American capitalist model,” writes Walter Russell Mead, an academic, “many Americans…are quietly enjoying the spectacle of the smug Europeans writhing in helpless indecision and pain over the continent’s self-inflicted wounds.”

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Partisan disagreement drives national controversy on gay relations, abortion

Americans generally agree about the morality of 12 out of 16 behaviors or social policies that sometimes spark public controversy, with sizable majorities saying each is either "morally acceptable" or "morally wrong." By contrast, views on doctor-assisted suicide, gay and lesbian relations, abortion, and having a baby outside of marriage are closely divided — the percentage supporting and the percentage opposing are within 15 points of each other.

The findings are from Gallup's annual Values and Beliefs survey, conducted May 3-6, 2010. While doctor-assisted suicide is the most controversial of the issues tested, with the public tied at 46% over its moral acceptability, Americans are fairly unified in their opposition to another life-ending choice — suicide — with 77% calling this morally wrong.

The morality of gay or lesbian relations is also relatively divisive in comparison with other issues Gallup tested; however, for the first time since this question was established in 2001, a slight majority, 52%, now finds them morally acceptable. Prior to a transition period from 2007 to 2009, when Americans were closely split on the issue, the majority had considered these relations morally wrong.

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