"Conservative Anglicans have condemned a decision to approve the election of another openly gay bishop in the US Episcopal church.
Last night it was confirmed that the Rev Mary Glasspool, who has been with her partner, Becki Sander, for 22 years, had received the required number of votes from bishops and standing committees. Her consecration will take place on 15 Mayin Los Angeles.
Glasspool, from Baltimore, welcomed the news but admitted that not everybody would share in her happiness.
'Not everyone rejoices in this election and consent, and [I] will work, pray, and continue to extend my own hands and heart to bridge those gaps, and strengthen the bonds of affection among all people.'
The archbishop of Sydney said the US church had 'committed itself to a life contrary to scripture' and that the communion had reached 'another decisive moment'.
Her victory underscores a continued Episcopal commitment to accepting same-sex relationships, despite enormous pressure from other Anglicans to change their stand.
The Episcopal church, the Anglican body in the US, caused uproar in 2003 by consecrating the first openly gay bishop in the communion, Gene Robinson. His consecration took place at an ice-hockey stadium in Durham, New Hampshire, and he wore a bulletproof vest under his gold vestments because he had received death threats.
In 2004, Anglican leaders asked Episcopalians for a temporary ban on electing gay bishops as they tried to prevent a permanent schism in the fellowship.
Since the request was made, some gay Episcopal priests have been nominated for bishop, but Glasspool is the first to be elected.
Breakaway conservatives last year formed a rival church, the Anglican Church in North America, and appealed to the archbishop of Canterbury to officially recognise the new entity.
Dr Rowan Williams has yet to comment on this latest development but called for 'gracious restraint' among warring factions when news of her election was announced in December. He said it raised serious questions for the divided church." ...source
"Sex abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church are proof that that 'the Devil is at work inside the Vatican', according to the Holy See's chief exorcist.
Father Gabriele Amorth, 85, who has been the Vatican's chief exorcist for 25 years and says he has dealt with 70,000 cases of demonic possession, said that the consequences of satanic infiltration included power struggles at the Vatican as well as 'cardinals who do not believe in Jesus, and bishops who are linked to the Demon'.
He added: 'When one speaks of 'the smoke of Satan' [a phrase coined by Pope Paul VI in 1972] in the holy rooms, it is all true – including these latest stories of violence and paedophilia.'
He claimed that another example of satanic behaviour was the Vatican 'cover-up' over the deaths in 1998 of Alois Estermann, the then commander of the Swiss Guard, his wife and Corporal Cedric Tornay, a Swiss Guard, who were all found shot dead. 'They covered up everything immediately,' he said. 'Here one sees the rot'."
A remarkably swift Vatican investigation concluded that Corporal Tornay had shot the commander and his wife and then turned his gun on himself after being passed over for a medal. However Tornay's relatives have challenged this. There have been unconfirmed reports of a homosexual background to the tragedy and the involvement of a fourth person who was never identfied. ...more
"A series of allegations in Germany and Holland have plunged the Catholic Church into a renewed crisis over how it has dealt with child abuse after it emerged that the Pope's brother ran a renowned choir at the centre of some of the latest claims.
Reports of systematic historical abuse by clergy have surfaced at three schools in the Regensburg diocese in Bavaria. One of them is the much-heralded Regensburger Domspatzen, a thousand-year-old male choir and boarding school, whose choral master for 30 years was the Pope's older brother, Georg Ratzinger."
Monsignor Ratzinger has agreed to testify in any eventual prosecutions – but says that he knew of no abuse. And last night the German Justice Minister, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, joined a growing chorus of politicians in Berlin to criticise the church over its attitude to the investigation, accusing Catholic institutions of a policy of secrecy.
"In many schools there was a wall of silence allowing for abuse and violence," said Ms Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, a prominent critic of the church. She pointed to a Vatican directive from 2001 which required that even the most damaging allegations should be first investigated internally and then reported to the authorities. A church spokesman called her criticisms "absurd".
A separate sex scandal has also enveloped the Catholic Church in the Netherlands after three people said they were abused at a boarding school run by priests in the 1960s. Since the allegations were published on Friday more than 200 people have come forward to a designated helpline claiming that they were also abused by monks and priests. ...more
Leading Provider of Faith-Based Software Solutions to Offer M2SYS Fingerprint Readers and Biometric Software for Membership Management
'We are thrilled to provide this fingerprint recognition technology through our new relationship with M2SYS,' said Frank Canady, president of Shelby Systems. 'The integration with M2SYS is the latest example of how Shelby Systems strives to equip churches and other faith-based organizations with the best technology for improved security and streamlined operations. The biometrics solution will significantly benefit the check-in process for the ministries that we serve."...more
"Despite the many, many, many times that “The Simpsons,” above, has mocked or satirized religion, that long-running animated series has earned an endorsement from the official Vatican newspaper on the occasion of the show’s 20th anniversary, The Associated Press reported. In an article published on Tuesday in L’Osservatore Romano under the headline “Aristotle’s Virtues and Homer’s Doughnut,” “The Simpsons” was praised for its “realistic and intelligent writing” (and rapped on the knuckles for “excessively crude language, the violence of certain episodes or some extreme choices by the scriptwriters”). Noting plots in which Homer Simpson has variously renounced his faith and mispronounced the name of Jesus, L’Osservatore Romano wrote that Homer nonetheless “finds in God his last refuge” and that the character’s attitudes toward religion were “a mirror of the indifference and the need that modern man feels toward faith."...source
"Tonight the nation of Ukraine is in an absolute state of panic as a mystery illness rips through that country. Some reports are claiming that this mystery illness is a more virulent form of the H1N1 swine flu. Other reports are linking the mystery illness with typhus, ebola hemorrhagic fever or even the pneumonic plague. What all the media reports do agree on is that an epidemic is devastating Ukraine tonight and that a wave of panic is sweeping over that nation.
The following is a list of many of the most recent reports that we have received regarding this outbreak. Hopefully there will be additional reports that will clarify the situation in Ukraine over the next 24 hours…..
*One report says that this mystery illness begins as an ordinary bout of the flu, but after a week the symptoms get far worse. The report says that approximately 40,000 Ukrainians have contracted the disease and that about 30 people there have died of it so far.
*Ukraine Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko has ordered schools and cinemas closed and has banned public gatherings for three weeks to contain the spread of the mystery virus amid growing panic over several dozen unexplained deaths in the western areas of the country.
*The Kyiv Post is reporting that Ukraine’s Health Ministry has not yet determined whether the recent deaths are related to the H1N1 swine flu virus, but they have admitted to sending more than 1,200 doses of Tamiflu to western Ukraine.
*The World Health Organization has announced that it is sending a team of experts to the Ukraine to investigate reports of severe H1N1 disease there.
*Recombinomics is reporting that four doctors have died of the flu in Ukraine’s Ternopol and Lvov regions.
*There is a report that the temperature inside of the lungs of those dying from this illness reached up to 55 degrees Celsius (over 130 degrees Fahrenheit). In other words, their lungs virtually melted and filled with blood.
*Rumors that the mystery illness could be connected to typhus or ebola hemorrhagic fever are circulating in Ukraine.
*One international media report claims that the Ukraine Ministry of Health has not established the exact diagnosis of the epidemic disease in the western regions of Ukraine yet, but that pneumonic plague is suspected.
*Meanwhile, a second man has died of pneumonic plague in a remote part of northwest China where a city of more than 10,000 people has been sealed off. Could this be linked to the outbreak in Ukraine?" ...Source
"Four Christians working in Somalia to provide services to orphans have been executed by beheading by al-Qaida-linked interests who told their families that is the penalty for apostasy.
The report on the outrage comes from International Christian Concern, which said the executions took place sometime after the kidnapping of the Christians July 27, but it only discovered the tragedy recently.
The organization identified the Christian orphanage workers as Fatima Sultan, Ali Ma'ow, Sheik Mohammed Abdi and Maaddey Diil. They had been kidnapped in the coastal Somalian town of Merca, about 50 miles from Mogadishu.
According to ICC, al-Shabaab, an Islamic extremist organization, claimed responsibility and said the Christians were killed when they refused to renounce their faith in Jesus"...more return to rampartproductions.com
"LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – The U.S. Episcopal Church gave its clergy the go-ahead on Friday to bless some same-sex unions, such as civil partnerships in states that legally recognize them, setting the stage for further conflict with the wider Anglican world.
The resolution, passed on the final day of the church's triennial national convention, also directs church leaders to develop official rites, or liturgies, for the blessing of same-sex unions -- a move that could see the church eventually change its definition of marriage.
For now, the church's official definition of marriage is a union between a man and a woman. The same-sex rites called for on Friday will be discussed and voted on at the next general church conference in three years.
The 2 million-member Episcopal Church earlier this week approved a resolution opening the doors to ordain gay men and women as clergy.
Both resolutions are sure to further strain U.S. Episcopal Church relations with its conservative parishes and the global Anglican Communion, whose 80 million members belong to congregations that are offshoots of the Church of England.
Church unity has been strained since 2003, when the Episcopal Church consecrated Gene Robinson of New Hampshire as the first bishop in Anglican history known to be in an openly gay relationship.
The ordaining of gay clergy and related issues have already prompted some congregations to leave the Episcopal fold and form a rival North American church that claims 100,000 believers. Anglican churches in regions like Africa have broken ties with their more liberal U.S. brethren.
'We're doing our best to make room for everybody. We have gay and lesbian members, and gay and lesbian clergy, and we are trying to honor the diversity of belief and theology in the church,' Stephen Lane, the bishop of Maine, told Reuters before the resolution's final passage." ...mores:
"Some in the media are calling it just a statement about 'economic justice.' But Pope Benedict XVI's 'Charity in Truth' statement, also known as an encyclical, is a radical document that puts the Roman Catholic Church firmly on the side of an emerging world government.
In explicit and direct language, the Pope calls for a 'true world political authority' to manage the affairs of the world. At the same time, however, the Pope also warns that such an international order could 'produce a dangerous universal power of a tyrannical nature' and must be guarded against somehow.
The New York Times got it right this time, noting the Pope's call for a world political authority amounted to endorsement of a New World Economic Order, a long-time goal of the old Soviet-sponsored international communist movement. Bloomberg.com highlighted the Pope's call for a new world order with 'teeth.'
The Pope's shocking endorsement of a 'World Political Authority,' which has prophetic implications for some Christians who fear that a global dictatorship will take power in the 'last days' of man's reign on earth, comes shortly after the United Nations Conference on the World Financial and Economic Crisis issued a call for global taxes and more powerful global institutions. U.N. General Assembly President, Miguel D'Escoto, a Communist Catholic Priest, gave a speech at the event calling on the nations of the world to revere 'Mother Earth' but concluded with words from the Pope blessing the conference participants.
The controversial Papal statement comes just before a meeting of the G-8 nations and a scheduled meeting between the Pope and President Obama at the Vatican on July 10.
Sounding like Obama himself, Pope Benedict says this new international order can be accomplished through 'reform of the United Nations Organization, and likewise of economic institutions and international finance, so that the concept of the family of nations can acquire real teeth.'
The 'teeth' may come in adopting the global environmental agenda, which the Pope warmly embraces." ...more
Faith matters. Even if you are not of religious faith yourself. Over 4 billion people world-wide recognize themselves as religious. They may not attend an organized place of worship. But Faith plays a part in their lives. A recent poll found that religion is important for around 30-35% of people in Europe, 65% of Americans and for about 90% of people in most Muslim-majority countries.
I started the Tony Blair Faith Foundation because I believe the modern world cannot work unless people from different faiths and cultures learn to live in peaceful co-existence with each other. Understanding increases the possibility of peace. Ignorance increases the potential for division.
The reason this is so important today is that globalization is shrinking the space we live in, making us share it, pushing people together in a way that is unique in human history. Some dislike this process. Some, like me, are content and even welcome it. But, for sure, it is a fact.
In this world, if religious faith becomes a counter force to this process, one which pulls people apart, then it becomes reactionary and divisive. So if I define myself as a Christian in opposition to you as a Muslim, then just as we are forced to live together by globalization, so we are forced apart by a view of religious faith that is exclusionary and hostile to those of a different faith to our own. Apostasy The Tony Blair Faith Foundation works in a number of ways to prevent this happening. One way is an inter-faith encounter through action, which is why we are supporting the UN anti-malaria campaign, to mobilize the faith communities to become centres of distribution for bed nets and medicines in Africa. We work also for reconciliation where religion is a dimension in political conflict, as in the Middle East. A key part of our work is education. In partnership with Yale University in the United States we now have a 'Faith and Globalization' course which began last year. This is now being extended to four other universities world-wide.
Now we are adding a new dimension: an education program linking up schools across the globe and across the faith divide. Launching officially today is Face to Faith, the new global schools project from my Foundation, designed to encourage young people of different faiths to learn directly with, from and about each other. Through structured video-conferencing, an online community and a course syllabus, Face to Faith gets secondary school students from across the world working together, investigating big global issues; sharing their own opinions, values and beliefs; and exploring the reasons for similar and different views. In this way, Face to Faith encourages young people to recognize the similarities between faiths but also, importantly, to respect and deal with the differences between diverse and often conflicting worldviews, helping to equip them to live in a global society made up of different faiths and beliefs."...more
"Rape and sexual molestation were 'endemic' in Irish Catholic church-run industrial schools and orphanages, a report revealed today.
The nine-year investigation found that Catholic priests and nuns for decades terrorised thousands of boys and girls in the Irish Republic, while government inspectors failed to stop the chronic beatings, rape and humiliation.
The high court judge Sean Ryan today unveiled the 2,600-page final report of Ireland's commission into child abuse, which drew on testimony from thousands of former inmates and officials from more than 250 church-run institutions. Police were called to the news conference amid angry scenes as victims were prevented from attending.
More than 30,000 children deemed to be petty thieves, truants or from dysfunctional families – a category that often included unmarried mothers – were sent to Ireland's austere network of industrial schools, reformatories, orphanages and hostels from the 1930s until the last facilities shut in the 1990s." ...more
"The Vatican has admitted that Charles Darwin was on the right track when he claimed that Man descended from apes.
A leading official declared yesterday that Darwin’s theory of evolution was compatible with Christian faith, and could even be traced to St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas. “In fact, what we mean by evolution is the world as created by God,” said Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, head of the Pontifical Council for Culture. The Vatican also dealt the final blow to speculation that Pope Benedict XVI might be prepared to endorse the theory of Intelligent Design, whose advocates credit a “higher power” for the complexities of life.
Organisers of a papal-backed conference next month marking the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species said that at first it had even been proposed to ban Intelligent Design from the event, as “poor theology and poor science”. Intelligent Design would be discussed at the fringes of the conference at the Pontifical Gregorian University, but merely as a “cultural phenomenon”, rather than a scientific or theological issue, organisers said.
The conference is seen as a landmark in relations between faith and science. Three years ago advocates of Intelligent Design seized on the Pope’s reference to an “intelligent project” as proof that he favoured their views."
Conceding that the Church had been hostile to Darwin because his theory appeared to conflict with the account of creation in Genesis, Archbishop Ravasi argued yesterday that biological evolution and the Christian view of Creation were complementary.
Marc Leclerc, who teaches natural philosophy at the Gregorian University, said that no scholar could “remain indifferent” to the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth tomorrow. There was, however, “no question of celebrating” it.
The Vatican would “take the measure of an event, which has left its mark for ever on the history of science and has influenced the way we understand our humanity”. The “time has come for a rigorous and objective valuation” of Darwin by the Church, he said.
Professor Leclerc said that too many opponents of Darwin – above all Creationists – had mistakenly claimed that his theories were “totally incompatible with a religious vision of reality”, as did proponents of Intelligent Design.
Darwin’s theories had never been formally condemned by the Roman Catholic Church, Monsignor Ravasi insisted. His rehabilitation had begun as long ago as 1950, when Pius XII described evolution as a valid scientific approach to the development of humans. In 1996 John Paul II said that it was “more than a hypothesis”.
Father Giuseppe Tanzella-Nitti, Professor of Theology at the Pontifical Santa Croce University in Rome, said that Darwin had been anticipated by St Augustine of Hippo. The 4th-century theologian had “never heard the term evolution, but knew that big fish eat smaller fish” and that forms of life had been transformed “slowly over time”. Aquinas had made similar observations in the Middle Ages, he added.
He said it was time that theologians as well as scientists grappled with the mysteries of genetic codes and “whether the diversification of life forms is the result of competition or cooperation between species”. As for the origins of Man, although we shared 97 per cent of our “genetic inheritance” with apes, the remaining 3 per cent “is what makes us unique”, including religion.
“I maintain that the idea of evolution has a place in Christian theology,” Professor Tanzella-Nitti added.
Creationism remains powerful in the US, however, notably among Protestants, and its followers object to evolution being taught in state schools.
The Church of England is seeking to bring Darwin back into the fold with a page on its website paying tribute to his “forgotten” work in his local parish, to illustrate how science and Church need not be at odds. Several pages celebrate Darwin’s “significant scientific progress” to mark his bicentenary and also the 150th anniversary of On the Origin of Species.
The Church wants to correct the impression that Darwin’s relationship with Anglicanism was contentious. The Anglican Church as a whole did not condemn Darwin or his beliefs. It says that although he lost his faith, he did not become antiChurch or antireligious. ...Source
Giant agribusinesses are enjoying soaring earnings and profits out of the world food crisis which is driving millions of people towards starvation, The Independent on Sunday can reveal. And speculation is helping to drive the prices of basic foodstuffs out of the reach of the hungry.
The prices of wheat, corn and rice have soared over the past year driving the world's poor – who already spend about 80 per cent of their income on food – into hunger and destitution.
The World Bank says that 100 million more people are facing severe hunger. Yet some of the world's richest food companies are making record profits.... more
High in the darkening sky, a flock of enormous ravens swoop and swirl - narrow black wings stretched wide, heads protruding forward and huge hairy beaks scything through the air.
Every few minutes they let out deep, throaty, honking calls as they soar effortlessly, circling around until, finally, they spot their prey and swoop.
But forget dormice, voles or even small furry rabbits; these sinister looking birds are feasting on something far larger - newborn lambs....more
"Conservative Anglicans have condemned a decision to approve the election of another openly gay bishop in the US Episcopal church.
