French court’s decision forces a change of place for John Paul II statue

March 2, 2018 CNA Daily News News Briefs 1 Print

Paris, France, Mar 2, 2018 / 04:01 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- A statue of St. John Paul II will be removed from public land in a small French city, after a 2017 court order ruled its cross must be removed.

The statue, nearly 25 feet tall, portrays Pope Saint John Paul II praying beneath an arch adorned with a cross. Its Russian sculptor had given the statue to the town, and it was installed at a public car park in 2006.

Patrick Le Diffon, the mayor of Ploërmel, has sold the statue to the Catholic Church for about $24,000. The statue will be moved a few dozen yards down the street to a church-owned property neighboring a Catholic school, Agence France Presse reports. It will be visible there for residents and visitors to the small city in northwest France’s Brittany region.

In October 2017, France’s top administrative court, the Conseil d’Etat, ordered a cross to be removed from the statue, citing France’s 1905 secularism law.

At the time of the ruling, Le Diffon called the statue a work of art and opposed its dismantling.

Paul Anselin, the town’s 87-year-old mayor and former paratrooper, had installed the statue but then supported the agreement to end the controversy.

“We have to move on from this situation,” said Anselin, who regretted that a gift had been sold.

“Selling presents, it just isn’t done,” he said.

The court decision had provoked a strong response from the late pontiff’s native Poland.

Poland’s Prime Minister Beata Szydlo offered to have the statue relocated to Poland to save the statue from what she said were “the dictates of political correctness” and “secularization of the state.”

“Our great Pole, a great European, is a symbol of a Christian, united Europe,” she said, according to the British newspaper The Telegraph.

Since its arrival, the statue had been a source of controversy from some locals. The secularist National Federation of Free Thought campaigned for its removal even before it was set up.

Prime Minister Szydlo had charged that religious censorship was undermining the values of Europe and was a nuisance to Europeans. Secularization and the dictatorship of political correctness was “alien to our culture, which leads to terrorizing Europeans in their everyday life,” she said.

Tens of thousands of people signed online petitions against the decision. The ruling also drew a backlash on Twitter. Objectors to the court’s decision used the hashtag “#montretacroix,” which means “show your cross.”

France’s conservative parties decried the decision as “madness” and “destructive to the country’s history.”

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Gender theory flourished in an ideological vacuum, cardinal says

May 29, 2018 CNA Daily News 1

Rome, Italy, May 29, 2018 / 10:08 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Cardinal Gerhard Müller reflected recently on the rise of gender ideology, saying it flourished in the vacuum left by the collapse of fascism and Soviet communism as a “new religion”.

“Marxism and fascism, anti-Christian ideology, fell. Capitalism is in crisis. There was room for true philosophy, for theology, for Christian religion. But people preferred to invent a new religion, which believes in the human being rather than God,” the prefect emeritus of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith told CNA May 25.

The cardinal spoke before the presentation of the Italian edition of Why I Don’t Call Myself Gay, by Daniel Mattson.

“People cannot be classified according to their sexual orientation,” Cardinal Müller said. “We do not have human beings who are more special than others. Man must be described according to his persona and the fact that he is created in the image and likeness to God and his vocation to eternal life.”

This character fits “every human being.”

Speaking about pastoral care for homosexuals, the cardinal noted that “the Church has always had respect toward every human person, beyond any categorization.”

He also emphasized that “in gender ideology you can count dozens of genders, while human being is created as man and woman: this is our nature, and the God cretor’s will is expressed in this nature.”

Cardinal Müller underscored that people “must resist those who organize as an ideological group and want to change all the society, imposing their thought on every people.”

That is “an imposition of a unique thought,” as ideological groups “attack all those who do not think their way, they insult, they even destroy the human dignity of people who think differently from them.”

He said these people “are a lobby, an organization with their own interests.”

Cardinal Müller praised Mattson for not labeling himself as gay, but as “Son of God.”

“We can talk about anything in the secret of confession and with pastoral care, but no man can identify himself with a category that does not exist in reality,” Cardinal Müller said.

He also stressed that this construction comes from Marxist thought, because “the Marxist rationale claims that mind does not recognize reality, but it builds reality: when the communist party says that 2+2 is 5, everybody must believe it.”

Gender ideology and pastoral care for homosexual people are among the most discussed topics in the Catholic Church.

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued in 1986 a Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons, which said, “We encourage the Bishops to provide pastoral care in full accord with the teaching of the Church for homosexual persons of their dioceses.”

“No authentic pastoral programme will include organizations in which homosexual persons associate with each other without clearly stating that homosexual activity is immoral. A truly pastoral approach will appreciate the need for homosexual persons to avoid the near occasions of sin,” it added.

And Benedict XVI discussed gender ideology in his final Christmas Greetings to the Roman Curia, on Dec. 21, 2012.

In the speech, he said that “the profound falsehood of (gender) theory and of the anthropological revolution contained within it is obvious. People dispute the idea that they have a nature, given by their bodily identity, that serves as a defining element of the human being. They deny their nature and decide that it is not something previously given to them, but that they make it for themselves.”

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