Anglican Mainstream

By Elizabeth Scalia, First Things

Last week’s column on the HHS mandate brought a rash of email from the usual suspects—men and women who feel passionately inclined to inform me that the church is “mysogynistic, women-hating, gay-hating, authoritarian, fetus-idolizing…” well, you get the drift. People who could not begin to accurately articulate the church’s position on most matters are quite sure that her counter-cultural stances are grounded on nothing more than hate.

The dominant narrative of the mainstream is that whatever gets in the way of what you think you should have must be founded on hate, and not just hate, but hate-without-reason. Love, in this narrative, is nice; it always says yes. Alternative points of view offering nuanced philosophies and theologies, reasoned compellingly and with depth through the ages and offered with respect? The very definition of twenty-first century hate.

Aside from revealing a general deficiency in reasoning skills and a stunning lack of curiosity as to why the Catholic church objects to contraception, sterilization, and abortifacients, there existed in these emails a general lack of interest in identifying what the conflict between the administration and the church is actually about. What little coverage has surfaced in the mainstream has been framed along predictable lines: those nasty Catholic bishops are trying to deny women contraception, which “even Catholic women” use. The constitutional question of whether the government has the right to define a church’s mission or usurp its conscience is ignored. For my correspondents, at least, it’s “all about contraception and the Catholic Church of No.”

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From Christian Today

The Roman Catholic Church and Oriental Orthodox Churches in the UK have welcomed an “unprecedented” move towards unity this week.

They have launched a new book entitled “Joint Statements” outlining areas of theological agreement between the two denominations.

The book was developed by the Catholic-Oriental Orthodox Regional Forum (COORF) and presented by the body’s co-chairs Bishop Angaelos, General Bishop of the Coptic Orthodox Church in the UK, and the Catholic Archbishop of Southwark Kevin McDonald.

Bishop Angaelos said that the areas of common faith and witness outweighed the issues that had separated them for the last 1,600 years.

“It is very well for us to stand at our pulpits and preach love, but if our faithful do not see our Churches working together they see this as being quite hypocritical,” he said.

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by Matthew Cullinan Hoffman, LifeSite News

According to The Tablet, the Archbishop of Westminster, England, has publicly expressed support for homosexual civil unions, a move that appears to put him at odds with a clear Vatican decree against supporting such unions confirmed by Pope John Paul II and then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict) in 2003.

By Victoria Ward, Telegraph

The television cook attends Mass every day and has written cookery books with religious themes including A Feast for Lent and A Feast for Advent as well as a book on prayer called Journey into God.

Once named one of the UK’s top ten most influential Catholics, she has now hinted that she might turn her handing to promoting the religion in some way.

She told a Sunday newspaper: “I can reach people who would like to cook but are finding it difficult. It’s the same with the spiritual. If people want it, I would like to be able to point them in the right direction.”

Smith converted to Catholicism at the age of 22 having been influenced by a friend who later became a priest, but has rarely spoken about her beliefs in public.

She regularly joins worshippers at the Cathedral of St John the Baptist in Norwich after watching her beloved Norwich City, of which she is the joint majority shareholder with her husband of 40 years, Michael Wynn-Jones, and dedicates an hour a day to silent contemplation.

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By Tim Stanley, Telegraph

by Andrew Stern, Reuters

The U.S. Roman Catholic Church will establish a body in January to house disaffected members of the Episcopal Church, beginning with a few dozen ministers and at least two congregations seeking communion, U.S. bishops were told on Tuesday.

Some 35 of 67 Anglican ministers who have applied to join the Catholic Church have received the "nulla osta" from the Holy See, allowing them to move forward to become priests, said Cardinal Donald Wuerl, archbishop of Washington, D.C.

Wuerl, head of a committee to move the process forward, gave a progress report to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops who are meeting this week in Baltimore.

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From John Smeaton, SPUC

UPDATED:  Catholic Herald apologises

SPUC's staff have informed me that this weekend's edition of The Catholic Herald – sold in just about every Catholic church in the United Kingdom – contains an advertising insert, addressed to "Dear Catholic Herald readers", from the Terrence Higgins Trust (THT). Terrence Higgins was a homosexual who was one of the first people in the UK to die from AIDS. Among other things, THT:

• says about abortion: "The important thing to remember is that it is your body and your choice to continue with a pregnancy or not." The status of the unborn child isn't mentioned, nor are moral objections to abortion explained
• links to the abortion providers BPAS and Marie Stopes and the pro-abortion group Education for Choice, on its pages on abortion

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By Johannes Jacobse, Acton Institute

The European religious press is abuzz over recent developments in Orthodox – Catholic relations that indicate both Churches are moving closer together. The diplomatic centerpiece of the activity would be a meeting of Pope Benedict and Patriarch Kyrill of the Russian Orthodox Church that was first proposed by Pope John Paul II but never realized. Some look to a meeting in 2013 which would mark the 1,700th anniversary of the signing of the Edict of Milan when Constantine lifted the persecution of Christians. It would be the first visit between the Pope of Rome and Patriarch of Moscow in history.

From The Christian Institute

A group within the Church of England has called on the Church’s bishops to match the boldness of Roman Catholic bishops in speaking out against plans to redefine marriage.

Revd Rod Thomas, chairman of Reform, praised Roman Catholic bishops who have spoken in support of marriage, and encouraged their Anglican counterparts to do likewise.

He said: “Many of our bishops support the Bible’s teaching on marriage. Well now we want to hear them say so publicly, loud and clear.”

Revd Thomas described the current situation as “a generation-defining moment”.

He added: “Our churches, our communities and especially our children need us to provide both clarity and compassion in this age of confusion surrounding sexual identity and relationships.”

Revd Thomas, speaking at Reform’s annual conference earlier this week, warned clergy that they need to take “urgent and significant steps” to speak out in support of traditional marriage.

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By Brendan O'Neill, Telegraph

By Fr Michael Shields, Catholic Anchor

[...]  In this debate it seems that those who support same-sex “marriage” have the moral high ground — at least as far as the media is concerned. At best, those who oppose same-sex “marriage” come across as if they come from a past age. At worst, they seem bigoted.

I spoke to one bishop who said we have already lost this debate. It does seem, at least in the public media, that this is true. If the polls are right, the general public seems to be drifting from the church’s moral views on this issue.

But perhaps the church’s moral views are not received because they have not been openly taught. When was the last time you heard a homily or read a good commentary on what the church teaches on same-sex “marriage?” I mean a rich, theological and respectful reflection.

The church has plenty of experience teaching unpopular truths down through the centuries. A good, moral and compassionate response, based on Scripture, the teachings of the church and a correct understanding of natural law is desperately needed. Most people don’t understand the church’s teaching because we haven’t moved it out into their real lives.

To address this there has to first be tremendous compassion from the church and a great recognition that there are men and women who are homosexual who are trying to live chaste lives and follow the teaching of the church. This is not going to be a popular media topic but we need to realize that these people are in our midst and being quite courageous.

Secondly the church must present its teachings in ways that go beyond sound bites and rhetoric.

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From The Catholic Herald

Can removing bishops, redrawing dioceses and a papal visit next year lead the Irish Church towards renewal?

From The Irish Catholic (Hat Tip: eChurch)

The Taoiseach, the Minister for Justice and the Minister for Children are all indicating that a proposed new law will require priests to break the seal of confession if someone confesses to them the crime of paedophilia.

This would make us the one and only country in the Western world to have such a law. Even Revolutionary France in the days of its worst violence against the Church did not pass a law requiring the breaking of the seal of confession.

The justification for the law is that the crime of paedophilia is so heinous that no one who hears about it, under whatever circumstances, can be allowed to keep it to themselves.

But our Government is clearing missing something that every other Government can see, which is that at a minimum such a law is very unlikely to lead to a single conviction and at a maximum will be counter-productive and will make society less safe, rather than more safe.

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By Damian Thompson, Telegraph

Michael Gove has to persuade the Churches to abandon their blind faith in secular dogma.

Four independent schools and one sixth-form college send more of their pupils to Oxford and Cambridge than 2,000 comprehensives and state-run colleges, according to a study by the Sutton Trust. This statistic is being reported by the teaching unions and their media supporters in priggish tones that imply that public schools are up to their old Oxbridge string-pulling games. Actually, the report finds nothing of the sort: although ancient colleges are willing to lower the bar slightly for bright children from deprived backgrounds, most comprehensives don’t come close to meeting the A-level requirements of Oxford and Cambridge.

But, more to the point, they don’t show much inclination to do so, such is the poverty of aspiration instilled in students by their chippy teachers and anti-elitist governing bodies.

Admittedly, a few comprehensives achieve the most rigorous standards: when I was at Oxford, I was always bumping into old boys of the Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School in west London – clever lads with stellar A-levels and wits sharpened in the pubs of Hammersmith. But I’d be surprised if the Vaughan is still sending many pupils to Oxford in a few years’ time.

For decades, the Left-wing education department of the Catholic Diocese of Westminster, which controls the Vaughan, has been waging a campaign of intellectual vandalism against the school. In the 1980s it tried but failed to close its sixth form. Now its aim is to stop the oversubscribed all-boys school favouring the children of parents who are actively involved in their local Catholic parishes.

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By David Mills, First Things

81 percent of the victims were post-pubescent males, [they] downplayed the homosexual connection by suggesting that this simply reflects the fact that offenders had greater access to boys. The report also proposes the possibility that, “Although the victims of priests were most often male, thus defining the acts as homosexual, the priest did not at any time recognize his identity as homosexual.”

 

A less politically correct conclusion, it would seem, is to acknowledge that the offending clerics were perhaps unwilling to take “ownership” of their struggle with homosexuality. In any event, this line of argument appears to be little more than a red herring.

 

According to Dr. Richard Fitzgibbons, a consultant to the Vatican Congregation for Clergy and a leading expert on clerical sex abuse, how an abuser may “recognize” himself is not entirely relevant; rather, the homosexual acts alone testify to “deep seated” homosexuality.

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by David Lindsay

The usual suspects are up in arms that the Vatican has once again issued instructions relating to child abuse cases which do not simply require that such matters be blithely handed over to the civil authority.

What if the civil authority is the EU, with its year planner for children which includes the festivals of every major religion except one, and I think we can all guess which one? What if there is practically no functioning civil authority, as in some countries where the Catholic Church is active? What if it would be better that there were not than that there were what there is, as in very many such countries?

What if the civil authority is our own dear Police, who long ago stopped enforcing the age of consent from 13 upwards, or our own dear Social Services Departments, with their long history of publishing academic studies claiming that sex between men and teenage boys was beneficial to both parties, not to say of putting that view into practice in their residential facilities?

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By Kathleen Gilbert, LifeSite News

A leading authority on the clerical sex abuse crisis has criticized those who conclude that new data has ruled out homosexuality as a significant cause in the scandal – even though the vast majority of priest abuse was perpetrated against adolescent males.

by David Batty, Guardian

Report claims less than 5% of abusive priests were paedophiles as critics accuse it of 'garbage in, garbage out' exoneration

A report on the child abuse scandal in the US Catholic Church has provoked condemnation for concluding that the permissive society of the 1960s was to blame for the rise in sexual offences by priests.

The investigation commissioned by Catholic bishops said that the peak incidence of sexual abuse by priests in the 1960s and 70s reflected the increased level of other deviant behaviours in American society in the period, including "drug use and crime, as well as social changes, such as an increase in premarital sex and divorce."

Researchers at John Jay College of Criminal Justice said most of the abusive priests were ordained in the 1940s and 50s and were not properly trained to confront the social upheavals of the 1960s.

David O'Brien, a historian of American Catholicism at the University of Dayton, said the report, Causes and Context of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests in the United States, 1950-2010, was dangerous because it seemed to exonerate bishops.

"This recalls an old tabloid banner headline from an early pre-Boston stage of this crisis: 'Bishops Blame Society'," said O'Brien, referring to the sexual abuse scandal in the Archdiocese of Boston in 2002.

The study said there was no single cause of the abuse and concluded that few of the abusive priests were paedophiles, as their victims were not all pre-pubescent.

Less than 5% of the abusive priests could be defined as paedophiles because the majority of victims were aged between 11 and 14.

"There's no indication in our data that priests are any more likely to abuse children than anyone else in society," said lead researcher Karen Terry.

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by Luke de Pulford, Guardian

The Vatican's letter to bishops shows an organisation taking the problem of paedophilia very seriously

Reading the authoritative letter from the Vatican to bishops worldwide one picture emerges more than any other: far from being some sort of well-organised paedophile protection ring, church bureaucrats have been flailing around desperately in an attempt to police the world's 1.2 billion Catholics since the first scandals erupted in Boston, and are clearly doing all they can.

Consider first the letter's detailing of the many reforms and processes introduced in the last 10 years by Rome, intended to make it easier to deal with case of abuse. Second, its restating that procedures in civil law must be followed – which, depending on where you live, usually means referring all allegations to police and social services.

Third, its clarification that the church's own law must be invoked to punish perpetrators. This in no way contradicts the previous point; every citizen bound by church law is equally obliged to observe the laws of their own country – and, contrary to popular belief, this has always been the case.

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