New bishop confirms 62 inmates in Spanish prison

Rome, Italy, Oct 3, 2017 / 06:24 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Despite the challenges of secularization, a Dutch cardinal encouraged Catholics from his country and from all parts of the world to be a “creative minority” in society.

Cardinal Wilhelm Jacobus Eijk, archbishop of Utrecht, recently spoke with CNA in Rome, while giving a presentation on euthanasia. Eijk studied medicine before becoming a priest, and wrote a doctoral dissertation on euthanasia.  

The cardinal, however, identifies euthanasia as only one of many issues the Church is facing amidst a secularizing society.

Between 2003 and 2013, the Catholic population of the Netherlands declined by 589,500. Catholics now represent just 22.9 percent of population, according to 2015 data.

The country underwent a rapid period of secularization during the 1970s and ’80s, and religious groups now find it difficult to identify their place in public life.

Euthanasia is one of the most obvious symptoms of this problem, Eijk said. The Netherlands legalized euthanasia and assisted suicide in 2002. The cardinal noted that Dutch “society is marked by abortion and euthanasia.”

The situation is similar in Belgium, the Netherlands’ neighbor. There, the cultural push toward euthanasia has affected hospitals owned by the Brothers of Charity religious order, whose lay-majority board recently voted to allow euthanasia to be performed in their facilities under certain conditions.

Cardinal Eijk said that the struggle against secularization is mostly cultural. “We have to fight this secularizing trends with testimony,” he said.

In the public square, he said, Catholics “have limited possibilities, because they are just a few, and because among them there are even fewer Catholics who fully accept the Church’s teaching.”

Eijk said the solution is for faithful Catholics to build a culture of life by becoming a “creative minority.”

“When Benedict XVI traveled to the Czech Republic, he said that Czech Catholics could be few in number, but when a minority is creative, we can achieve a lot,” Cardinal Eijk said.

“The idea of a creative minority,” he explained, “is derived from the English historian (Arnold) Toynbee. He analyzed many cultures and determined that the rise of culture is due to creative minorities.”

And so, the cardinal said, “we should behave as Catholics in a way that shines with the culture of life and fights the culture of death.”

In pragmatic terms, this includes fighting euthanasia through public testimony, and by providing care for the sick and suffering.

“We work a lot to propose bills or amendments to bills in the Parliament, we explain our positions in our journals and websites,” Eijk said. “We try to announce the Gospel of Life as clearly and as often as possible.”

[…]

London, England, Jan 23, 2020 / 02:05 pm (CNA).- Sex is reserved for married heterosexual couples, new pastoral guidance from the Church of England has affirmed. The new guidance also draws a clear distinction between marriage and civil partnerships, noting that sexual relations are not proper to the latter. 

The guidance, titled “Civil Partnerships – for same sex and opposite sex couples. A pastoral statement from the House of Bishops of the Church of England,” was issued last month in response to a 2019 change to UK law, broadening access to civil partnerships by making them available for heterosexual couples for the first time.

Civil partnerships were created in 2004 for same-sex couples but are legally distinct from marriage. Same-sex couples were given the legal right to marry in the England and Wales in 2013, but civil partnerships remained available to same-sex couples only.

“Sexual relationships outside heterosexual marriage are regarded as falling short of God’s purposes for human beings,” says the guidance on the issue. “The introduction of same sex marriage, through the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013, has not changed the church’s teaching on marriage or same sex relationships.” 

Although the Church of England acknowledges that “many of the provisions in the legislation on civil partnerships are, however, similar to, or identical with, those in marriage law,” the nature of the commitment in a civil partnership is different than that of a marriage.

“In particular, [civil partnerships are] not predicated on the intention to engage in a sexual relationship,” says the guidance.

“There is likely to be a range of circumstances in which people of the same sex or opposite sex choose to register a partnership, including some where there is no intention for the relationship to be expressed through sexual activity.”

The guidance applies only to the Church of England, and not to other branches of the worldwide protestant Anglican Communion.

Since the law’s original passage, some pairs of people who are not romantically involved have entered civil partnerships for tax or benefit purposes.

In the guidance, the Church of England states that because of the “ambiguity” regarding sexual activity in civil partnerships, combined with its teaching on the nature of marriage, it does “not believe that it is possible for the church unconditionally to accept civil partnerships as unequivocally reflecting the teaching of the church.”

The Church of England has previously published policies that seem intended to accommodate modern sexual ethos and gender theory without directly contradicting Scripture and Christian history. The results have sometimes seemed gymnastic.

Although the Church of England accepts both married men and women for ordination to the priesthood and as bishops, it does not conduct or recognize same-sex marriages as marriage. In December 2012, the Church of England permited gay clergy in civil partnernships to become bishops, provided they were living in continence with their partners, that is abstaining from sexual relations. 

“The House [of Bishops] believed it would be unjust to exclude from consideration for the episcopate anyone seeking to live fully in conformity with the Church’s teaching on sexual ethics or other areas of personal life and discipline,” Graham James, Anglican bishop of Norwich, stated in January 2013. 

“All candidates for the episcopate undergo a searching examination of personal and family circumstances, given the level of public scrutiny associated with being a bishop in the Church of England.”

In 2018, the denomination published pastoral guidelines for liturgies concerning the so-called “gender transition” of church members. These new liturgies are intended to affirm and celebrate a person’s shift to a chosen gender identity, and to “to recognize liturgically a person’s gender transition.”

The guidelines, titled Pastoral Guidance for use in conjunction with the Affirmation of Baptismal Faith in the context of gender transition, were approved by the Church of England’s House of Bishops in December 2018, and published shortly afterwards. 

[…]

Katharina Westerhorstmann. / Screenshot from K-TV Katholisches Fernsehen YouTube channel.

Bonn, Germany, Jun 15, 2022 / 06:15 am (CNA).
A theologian has resigned from the German “Synodal Way” forum on sexual morality.Katharina Westerhorstmann t… […]