"The world is divided into armed camps ready to commit genocide just because we can't agree on whose fairy tales to believe." -Ed Krebs, photographer (b. 1951)
"The average (person), who does not know what to do with (her or) his life, wants another one which will last forever." -Anatole France, novelist, essayist, Nobel laureate (1844-1924) ____________________________________________________________________________________
AN UNIMAGINABLE number of child sex-abuse reports this year was a humiliation the church must accept as an exhortation to truth and renewal, Pope Benedict XVI has said.
The Pope used his annual speech to Rome's cardinals and bishops to urge the church to reflect on how it let the abuse happen. But he also blamed the influence of the secular morality of child pornography and sex tourism, and a form of moral relativism that influenced Catholic theology in the 1970s.
''We must ask ourselves what we can do to repair as much as possible the injustice that has occurred,'' he said. ''We must ask ourselves what was wrong in our proclamation, in our whole way of living the Christian life, to allow such a thing to happen.''
The Pope said the church was well aware of the gravity of this sin committed by priests, and of the church's responsibility. But nor could he be silent about ''the context of these times''.
''There is a market in child pornography that seems in some way to be considered more and more normal by society,'' he said on Monday. ''The psychological destruction of children, in which human persons are reduced to articles of merchandise, is a terrifying sign of the times.''
He also said he heard from bishop after bishop in developing countries how sex tourism threatened an entire generation, while the problem of drugs was extending ''its octopus tentacles around the entire world''.
He criticised moral relativism from the 1970s that discarded absolutes, leaving only a ''better than'' and ''worse than''. ''Morality is replaced by a calculus of consequences, and in the process it ceases to exist.''
The Pope was pessimistic about the future, saying: ''For all its new hopes and possibilities, our world is at the same time troubled by the sense that moral consensus is collapsing, consensus without which juridical and political structures cannot function.''
A Catholic ethicist, Nicholas Tonti-Filippini, said the Pope's use of the 12th-century saint Hildegard's vision of the church as a battered woman, her garments rent and torn by priests' sins, was a powerful metaphor for the church's suffering caused by paedophile priests. He said the Pope could not blame secular culture, because the culture did not stoop so low as to advocate abusing children, but he was right to criticise situational ethics because child abuse was always an absolute wrong and never justifiable.
Victims' advocates were sceptical yesterday. Helen Last, of In Good Faith, said: ''These statements we continually get are just crocodile tears until they open their files and processes to secular authorities.''
Ms Last said it was encouraging if the Pope put the interests of children first, because that had not been the church's practice for the past 20 years.
The Melbourne historian Dr Bernard Barrett, who has researched clerical sexual abuse, said it did not begin in the 1970s but spanned the church's 2000-year history and remained a deep-seated problem.
Format: You can (1) read any or all of the article(s) that is provided for each meeting, (2) read something somewhat related to it, or (3) be prepared to share a situation that has some connection to it. We'll have a moderated discussion of all the above.
Rules: Listen and contribute to a diversity of views respectfully, especially ones you don't agree with.
Dinner: After our discussion we'll walk to Peking Duck Restaurant for dinner. (151 South California Avenue, Palo Alto, CA - (650) 321-9388.) (Note: this is different from where we normally meet)
If anyone has another somewhat related reading they wish to share please let me know.
I look forward to seeing you and anyone you wish to bring along.
A US hospital has been stripped of its ability to call itself Catholic because of a surgery that ended a woman's pregnancy to save her life.
Bishop Thomas Olmsted announced the decision to remove St Joseph's Hospital and Medical Centre's Catholic status at a news conference in Phoenix.
Bishop Olmsted said "the equal dignity of mother and her baby were not both upheld". He called the surgery an abortion.
Bishop Olmsted said the hospital is in violation of ethical and religious directives of the national Conference of Catholic Bishops. The 697-bed hospital does not receive direct funding from the church, but it will be prohibited from celebrating Mass and must remove the Blessed Sacrament from its chapel.
Hospital officials said the surgery was allowable under exceptions to the church's abortion policy.
European court rules that failure to provide services to a woman whose life could have been at risk was breach of human rights
Sarah Boseley and Henry McDonald, guardian.co.uk, Thursday 16 December 2010
Carmel Stewart, a lawyer of the three women prevented from having an abortion in Ireland, reads the judgment from the European court of human rights in Strasbourg, eastern France. Photograph: Christian Lutz/AP
The Irish government is under pressure to reform its abortion legislation after the European court ruled that failure to provide services to a woman whose life could have been at risk was a breach of her human rights.
The Strasbourg judgment was only a partial victory for campaigners; the European court of human rights rejected the cases of two other women who claimed they had suffered hardship by being forced to travel to the UK for an abortion. But its decision in the case of C, a woman who had suffered a rare cancer and believed her pregnancy might cause it to return, left pro-abortion groups with the hope at least of clarification of the law where the woman's life is in danger.
"Today's decision is a landmark one for Ireland and, in particular, for women and girls," said Niall Behan, chief executive of the Irish Family Planning Association. "The very considered and clear view of the European court of human rights leaves no option available to the Irish state other than to legislate for abortion services in cases where a woman's life is at risk.
"As a first and immediate step, we are calling on the government to set out how it intends to address today's ruling, and ensure that no further violations of human rights take place because of the state's failure to offer safe and legal abortion services, in – albeit – limited circumstances."
As rulings of the European court are binding, the Irish government will be under pressure to implement a woman's right to an abortion if her life is at risk. It is understood that the judgment is being considered by the republic's department of health and the Irish attorney general.
Abortion is banned in the republic and legalising it requires a referendum to change the constitution. Following a referendum in 1983, the unborn child is an Irish citizen with full rights.
As the next Irish government, following elections in March, is likely to be comprised of Fine Gael and Labour, the prospect of a referendum on abortion could prove divisive. Fine Gael opposes abortion, but many in the Irish Labour party support a woman's right to choose.
About 5,500 women are thought to travel to England and Wales every year from the republic to seek an abortion, at considerable cost and distress.
The first of the three women who took their cases to the European court was a recovering alcoholic whose four children had been placed in foster care. She sought an abortion because she believed another baby would jeopardise her chances of getting her children back. The court accepted she was living in poverty – she borrowed from a money-lender to travel to a private clinic in London. The second woman was unmarried and not prepared to become a single parent.
In both cases, the court ruled Ireland had not breached the women's human rights. But it took a different view of the woman who feared her rare cancer might return.
"The court considered that the establishment of any such risk to her life clearly concerned fundamental values and essential aspects of her right to respect for her private life," said the judgment. If her doctor found her health was at risk and advised an abortion, both ran a serious risk of criminal conviction and imprisonment if his view was later found to be against the Irish constitution, it said.
Tracey McNeill, director of Marie Stopes International in UK and western Europe, said: "The court highlighted that the law needs to be changed to ensure that doctors feel confident that they won't face prosecution for providing abortions if the woman's life is considered to be at risk. What we would like to see in the future is Irish women having the same fundamental rights to choose as people in the rest of Europe."
All-Ireland Primate Cardinal Sean Brady said the judgment leaves future policy in protecting the lives of unborn children in the hands of the Irish. : "The direct destruction of an innocent human life can never be justified, however difficult the circumstances," Cardinal Brady said. ". We are always obliged to act with respect for the inherent right to life of both the mother and the unborn child in the mother's womb.
"No law which subordinates the rights of any human being to those of other human beings can be regarded as a just law."
He added that as a society we all have a responsibility to respond sensitively to any woman who finds herself dealing with an unplanned pregnancy."
Ireland violated a woman’s right to privacy by restricting abortions to cases where a doctor certified the mother’s life was put at risk by the pregnancy, the European Court of Human Rights ruled today.
Ireland was ordered by the Strasbourg, France-based court to pay a woman who went to the U.K. to abort a pregnancy she feared would kill her 15,000 euros ($20,000), for violating her rights under the European human rights convention.
The penalty of life imprisonment for an abortion, under an Irish law from 1861, was modified in 1992 to allow women to leave the country to end a pregnancy and allowed abortions in Ireland if “there was a real and substantial risk to the life, as distinct from the health, of the mother,” the court said in summarizing the case. The issue lay in who had the authority to determine whether the mother’s life was at risk, the court said.
The woman “had a rare form of cancer and she feared it might relapse as a result of her being pregnant” and “the establishment of any such risk to her life clearly concerned fundamental values and essential aspects of hr right to respect for her private life,” the court said in announcing the ruling.
Irish law “constituted a significant chilling factor for women and doctors as they both ran a risk of a serious criminal conviction and imprisonment if an initial doctor’s opinion that abortion was an option as it posed a risk to the woman’s health was later found to be against the Irish Constitution,” the court said.
The court found in favor of Ireland in two other cases, brought by women whose lives were not at risk, saying the country has the right to restrict abortions given “the profound moral values of the Irish people in respect of the right to life of the unborn.”
Strasbourg court to rule on three women's claim that Irish abortion ban violates European human rights convention
Press Association guardian.co.uk, Thursday 16 December 2010
Anti-abortion protesters in Dublin. Photograph: Niall Carson/PA Ireland's abortion laws face a landmark ruling today that could overturn the republic's sovereign right to protect unconditionally "the life of the unborn".
Three women living in Ireland want a European court to declare the country's longstanding abortion ban a violation of the European convention on human rights, to which Ireland is a signatory.
The three women, identified only as A, B and C in court documents, claim the ban forced them to travel abroad for abortions, endangering their health and wellbeing, which is safeguarded by the convention.
Their case, backed by the Irish Family Planning Association and the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, was heard in the European court of human rights in Strasbourg a year ago.
The Irish government argued that the safeguards of the convention could not be interpreted as endorsing the right to abortion. Its case that Ireland must retain the sovereign right "to determine when life begins" is being supported by the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children and the European Centre for Law and Justice, which argue that rights are attached to "prenatal life".
Abortion was outlawed in Ireland in 1861 and life imprisonment remains a sentencing option for women convicted of "unlawfully procuring a miscarriage".
Ireland's constitution "acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right". The ban was reinforced by public backing in a 1983 referendum.
The three women at the centre of the legal challenge say being forced to leave Ireland to terminate their pregnancies caused hardship and unnecessary cost.
One of the three had been diagnosed as at risk of an ectopic pregnancy, where the foetus develops outside the womb. Another had become pregnant while receiving chemotherapy for cancer. The third already had children who were taken into care because of her inability to cope.
They all complained in 2005 that the Irish law breached the human rights convention's guarantees of the right to respect for private and family life, their right to life, the prohibition of discrimination and prohibition of torture.
The one-day court hearing last year took place two months after Ireland approved the EU's Lisbon treaty following guarantees that the country's anti-abortion constitution would remain unaffected. The threat now comes not from the EU but from the Strasbourg-based Council of Europe, guardian of the human rights convention.
If the women win their claim today Irish abortion law may have to be adjusted – but not necessarily removed altogether – to take account of the health and wellbeing of pregnant women.
Cities deep in Christian country are well-known for their vocal proselytizing, but when your viewpoint veers off the God script, watch out. That's what atheists in Fort Worth, Texas, are discovering, as a new non-godly ad campaign on buses is being attacked by local believers. According to the New York Times, clergy members and others are trying to take down ads saying “Millions of people are good without god,” even as a majority of religious-related campaigns tout Christianity in that city.
But the reaction from believers has been harsher than anyone in the nonbeliever’s club expected. Some ministers organized a boycott of the buses, with limited success. Other clergy members are pressing the Fort Worth Transportation Authority to ban all religious advertising on public buses. And a group of local businessmen paid for the van with the Christian message to follow the atheist-messaged buses around town.
But the little war in Fort Worth is just a larger indicator of a trend playing across the United States, says the Times. Billboards in various other cities have invoked similar opposition and even vandalism, even in outwardly liberal Manhattan:
“In New York City, a large billboard promoting atheism at the entrance of the Lincoln Tunnel, which a local affiliate of American Atheists paid for, has generated controversy. (The message: “You know it’s a myth. This season, celebrate reason!)”
The religious ad-space stand-off is particularly acute at this time of year, when atheist groups take out ad space to help non-believers feel not-alienated around Christmastime. Read more at the Times.
By Julianne Escobedo Shepherd
Posted at December 14, 2010, 7:17 am
Almost every December, I make a donation to the pediatrics department of a hospital in the San Francisco Bay Area. This year I chose the Valley Medical Center (VMC) in San Jose.
After some inquiries, I learned that the pediatrics department at VMC prefers to receive cash, as opposed to toys, so that they could purchase items which could be used by all kids (for example a new TV).
As I had done last year, I asked the Humanist Community to join me in this effort. I am happy to say that in early December, a total of $560 was sent to the VMC Foundation from:
a. San Francisco Bay Area Humanists - $100
b. Humanist Community in Silicon Valley - $460
Thanks to all for helping make a positive impact locally!
