Christianity

Pope Francis has set about charming the crowds according to The Telegraph. Perhaps he’d be better off telling the world how the catholic Church is going to set about stopping boy buggering and halting their cover-ups and how they are going to assist the authorities to hold to account their dodgy priests.

In his first Sunday appearance from the papal apartment overlooking St. Peter’s Square, Pope Francis charmed a huge crowd by infusing the message of the Gospel with personal recollections and a smattering of humor.

He greeted the estimated 200,000 people who had crowded into the square for his first Angelus, a traditional prayer to the Virgin Mary, with a hearty “Buon giorno,” which was cheered. And he took leave of them with “Buon pranzo” — “Have a good lunch” — which was cheered even more.

His reflection was on mercy and God’s power to forgive. And he told the story of an elderly woman he had met in Buenos Aires two decades ago who believed this to be true.

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Melissa Iaria suggests the church should rid itself of celibacy:

The Catholic Church should get rid of celibacy as a way of preventing clergy from preying on children, an inquiry has been told.

Former clinical director of the Victorian Institute of Forensic Health, Professor Paul Mullen, says celibacy has no basis in theology and is just a form of discipline in the priesthood.

Prof Mullen added the issue is a financial one for the church.

“I’ve have heard a Catholic bishop say that the reason celibacy is maintained is that they could not afford to pay priests, they couldn’t afford to pay them pensions, they couldn’t afford to pay them enough if they had a wife and children,” he told the Victorian parliamentary inquiry on Friday.

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An interesting question considering how many ultra-conservatives think they know what Jesus thinks on a whole range of issues, including homosexuality. Derek Flood thinks he knows the answer:

Is homosexuality a sin? It’s an age-old question, and there are people on both sides of the debate, each quoting their Bibles. How do we know who’s right? What would Jesus do if he were here with us today? Jesus never said anything about homosexuality, so can we really say?

I’d like to propose that we can. Perhaps we wont be able to settle the debate over what the Bible says about homosexuality (least of all from one little blog post!) but I think there is one thing we can be sure of — Jesus loves every one of us. In fact Jesus was especially known for loving the very people that the religious people of his time had condemned and cast out.

Now for the facts:

As their voices have begun to be heard, we have seen story after story of how gay and transgender kids have felt hated, at times even hating themselves. We have heard how life for them can be a living hell, so bad that it makes some of them want to end their lives.

That really should be a wakeup call for us as Christians. Regardless of where we stand on the rightness or the wrongness of being gay, none of that matters much when people are dying. We can argue over what the Bible says about homosexuality, but one thing is utterly clear: Jesus clearly teaches us to love people, not to hate them, not to make them feel hated, and not to stand by while that is happening. From the perspective of the New Testament there simply is no room for doubt on this. We know exactly where Jesus stands. He stands on the side of the least, the condemned, the vulnerable.  Read more »

Cardinal Keith O’Brien said it was clear many priests struggled to cope with celibacy, and should be able to marry and have children.

I wonder he thinks this is a pragmatic move to provide priests with a way to express themselves as sexual beings without having to resort to abusing children?

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Bob McCoskrie and other who oppose marriage equality always run out the “but, but, but….gay marriage will lead to polygamy” line. My smart arsed line is always the same…so what…if you support families then surely you support really BIG families…and any bloke who wants more than one mother in law is doing us all a favour.

However, jokes aside…let’s look at history…Craig Young has, at GayNZ:

Family First is once more ruminating hypocritically about the alleged “relationship” between same-sex monogamous marriage and polygamy. It’s time someone told Mr McCoskrie that some of us are aware of Christianity’s own polygamist past.

It goes all the way back to the sixteenth century and Martin Luther, the very founder of Protestant Christianity himself- and an advocate of polygamy. What?!! Yes, that is correct. Luther believed that polygamous marriages were preferable to extramarital sex (or ‘fornication’) or adultery. Indeed, Luther and Phillip Melancthon, another early Lutheran theologian and pivotal figure, advocated that Phillip, Landgrave of Hesse (a German principality within the Holy Roman Empire) covertly and bigamously marry two women- Christine of Saxony, an invalid and alcoholic, and one of her ladies-in-waiting, Margarethe van der Saale. However, it doesn’t end there. Instead of divorcing Catherine of Aragon, his first wife, Melanchthon also advised future serial monogamist Henry VIII to bigamously marry Anne Boleyn. Henry didn’t take his advice, divorced Catherine instead and monogamously remarried Anne, future mother of Elizabeth I of England.  Read more »

Maybe Mormons aren’t so fundy after all:

Church apostle Elder Quentin L. Cook stresses that Latter-day Saints, who devote their lives to following Jesus Christ’s teachings, should be an example to the world of expressing love and hope for those with same-gender attraction.

“As a church, nobody should be more loving and compassionate,” Elder Cook said. “Let us be at the forefront in terms of expressing love, compassion and outreach. Let’s not have families exclude or be disrespectful of those who choose a different lifestyle as a result of their feelings about their own gender.”

This is going to get very interesting:

A historian of early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School has identified a scrap of papyrus that she says was written in Coptic in the fourth century and contains a phrase never seen in any piece of Scripture: “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife …’”

The faded papyrus fragment is smaller than a business card, with eight lines on one side, in black ink legible under a magnifying glass. Just below the line about Jesus having a wife, the papyrus includes a second provocative clause that purportedly says, “she will be able to be my disciple.”

The finding was made public in Rome on Tuesday at an international meeting of Coptic scholars by Karen L. King, a historian who has published several books about new Gospel discoveries and is the first woman to hold the nation’s oldest endowed chair, the Hollis professor of divinity.

The provenance of the papyrus fragment is a mystery, and its owner has asked to remain anonymous. Until Tuesday, Dr. King had shown the fragment to only a small circle of experts in papyrology and Coptic linguistics, who concluded that it is most likely not a forgery. But she and her collaborators say they are eager for more scholars to weigh in and perhaps upend their conclusions.

Even with many questions unsettled, the discovery could reignite the debate over whether Jesus was married, whether Mary Magdalene was his wife and whether he had a female disciple. These debates date to the early centuries of Christianity, scholars say. But they are relevant today, when global Christianity is roiling over the place of women in ministry and the boundaries of marriage.

The UK needs better government lawyers. Have they not heard of freedom of expression…including religious expression. They certainly wouldn’t contemplate saying these sorts of things over overt displays of Islamic faith…

Christians should leave their religious beliefs at home or accept that a personal expression of faith at work, such as wearing a cross, means they might have to resign and get another job, government lawyers have said.

Landmark cases, brought by four British Christians, including two workers forced out of their jobs after visibly wearing crosses, have been heard today at the European Court of Human Rights

David Cameron, the Prime Minister, has previously pledged to change the law to protect religious expression at work but official legal submissions on Tuesday to Strasbourg human rights judges made a clear “difference between the professional and private sphere”.

James Eadie QC, acting for the government, told the European court that the refusal to allow an NHS nurse and a British Airways worker to visibly wear a crucifix at work “did not prevent either of them practicing religion in private”, which would be protected by human rights law.

He argued that that a Christian, or any other religious believer, “under difficulty” is not discriminated against if the choice of “resigning and moving to a different job” is not blocked.

“The option remains open to them,” he said.

How good do you have to be to get to heaven?

There are many many denominations that tell you various different things to get you to heaven…but there is only one way.

ᔥ Sydney Morning Herald

Peter FitzSimons lets the Catholic Church know precisely what he thinks about latest boy buggering priest hush scandal erupting in Australia.

An Argentinian priest frolics with his heterosexual lover in the surf and instant de-frocking…boy buggering in Australia….years of silence, cover-ups and bullshit. When will the Catholic Church realise that boy buggering is bad?

Suppose, just suppose, that it had emerged this week that back in 1992 a major Australian institution such as, say, Qantas, BHP, the ACTU or, indeed, Fairfax, had an employee make an admission that he had committed paedophile acts on 10-year-old boys; and that instead of calling the police, the institution had kept him in their employ for another 13 years, even as two of those boys went on to take their own lives.

And say within the same institution, credible allegations emerged that another employee regularly raped 10-year-old boys, but instead of the police being called, that employee had been promoted to head office! Just how great do you think the outcry would be? Of course it would engulf the public discourse, would dominate talkback, letters to the editor and Parliament for days, if not weeks. As it happens, that scenario did occur this week, all revealed by reporter Geoff Thompson on Four Corners on Monday night. But the institution in question was the Catholic Church of Australia, the employees in question were priests and reaction since has been somewhat muted. Why?

Two reasons. First, news that a Catholic priest has committed such abominable acts is not actually a ”hold the front page” story any more, so regularly do we hear of it.

And, second, because these acts occurred within a religious institution, people are reluctant to criticise, for that would be criticising religion, and we don’t do that.

I say the hell with it. I say we should call it for what it is: appalling systemic child abuse that has gone on for generations and will go on for generations more, until we as a people get to grips with it. Far from being held to account, one of the alleged perpetrators is now being sheltered in the Vatican!