Rome, Italy, Jan 2, 2018 / 05:00 pm (CNA).- After rummaging through supermarket dumpsters, 79-year-old Marta loads 90 pounds of edible food onto her bicycle every day. Three times a week she loads her car, and delivers the food to poor families i… […]
Tehran, Iran, Jan 2, 2018 / 04:08 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Ongoing protests in Iran could be a sign of hope for repressed religious minorities, if protesters demand that conscience rights be respected, said an Iranian-born journalist who converted to Catholicism in 2016.
Although most of those protesting in the streets of Iran were born after the 1979 revolution that led to the current Islamist regime, “many of them are chanting nostalgic slogans about the pre-revolutionary era,” noted Sohrab Ahmari.
“At the time Iran was no democracy,” he said, but the pre-revolution regime “was far less repressive and people retained many personal and social liberties, if not political ones.”
Ahmari was born in Tehran. He has lived in the United States for two decades and worked for the Wall Street Journal for several years before becoming a senior writer for Commentary magazine.
Ahmari spoke to CNA on Jan. 2, as Iranians protesting economic and social grievances flooded the streets of the Middle Eastern country.
Since the current round of protests erupted on Dec. 28, at least 21 people have died and 450 been arrested, CNN reports.
The protests are the largest in the country since the 2009 Green Movement, when thousands rallied in opposition to a presidential election they claimed was fraudulent.
The Iranian government has responded to the current demonstrations by sending out riot police and restricting access to internet and social media.
The protests began over economic issues. A year after sanctions against Iran were lifted by the United States, United Nations, and European Union, citizens of the Middle Eastern nation have yet to see the economic recovery that many had expected. Unemployment among the youth is high, and food and gasoline prices have risen significantly.
However, as the protests have grown, so have the grievances, with signs and slogans opposing what many see as a corrupt regime that suppresses the civil rights of its people.
“I don’t think you can separate the economic from the political,” Reza Marashi, research director for the National Iranian American Council, told CNN.
Ahmari agreed that the nation’s unrest shows a deep-seated discontent.
“The Iranians who are pouring into the streets have had it with an ideological regime that represses them and can’t even delivery basic economic security,” he said.
And while life is difficult for every Iranian, the situation for Christians and other religious minorities is particularly perilous, Ahmari told CNA.
“They are systematically discriminated against, are barred from various public offices and military posts, are prohibited by law from proselytizing, and so on.”
The regime does grant Christians and Jews a certain level of “second-class protection” as “People of the Book,” Ahmari said, but even this “limited protection only applies to the likes of Armenians and Assyrians, who are considered indigenous Christians.”
Converts are not protected, he said, because Sharia law – which is the foundation of Iran’s penal code – views apostasy from Islam as a crime punishable by death.
While the regime generally does not formally charge Christian converts with apostasy, Ahmari said, “it routinely harasses them, monitors and raids their house churches, and arrests and imprisons their pastors on trumped-up ‘national-security’ charges.”
Nearly a week after the start of the protests, it remains to be seen what effect they will have, if any. But Ahmari is hopeful that any changes in the government will include a greater respect for religious minorities.
Life before the 1979 revolution that brought Sharia law to the country “wasn’t ideal,” he acknowledged.
“(B)ut minorities thrived, and there was a sense that Iranian-ness wasn’t just about Shiite Islam but also incorporated pre-Islamic elements. Jews, Christians, Baha’i and others belonged to this identity. They were tolerated and even celebrated,” he said.
“If the protesters can recover something of that inclusive nationalism, then Christians and other ethnic and sectarian minorities will be better off than they are now.”
Astana, Kazakhstan, Jan 2, 2018 / 12:42 pm (CNA).- Three Kazakhstani bishops signed a statement on Sunday confirming that it is not licit to admit to sacramental communion Catholics who are divorced and illictly remarried, if they are not living according to the long-standing teachings of the Church.
The statement was released in response to norms issued by several groups of bishops since the promulgation of Amoris laetitia.
“It is not licit (non licet) to justify, approve, or legitimize either directly or indirectly divorce and a non-conjugal stable sexual relationship through the sacramental discipline of the admission of so-called ‘divorced and remarried’ to Holy Communion, in this case a discipline alien to the entire Tradition of the Catholic and Apostolic faith,” read the Dec. 31, 2017 letter of the bishops.
“By making this public profession before our conscience and before God who will judge us, we are sincerely convinced that we have provided a service of charity in truth to the Church of our day and to the Supreme Pontiff, Successor of Saint Peter and Vicar of Christ on earth.”
The statement was signed by Archbishop Tomash Peta of Maria Santissima in Astana; his auxiliary, Bishop Athanasius Schneider; and Archbishop Jan Pawel Lenga, Archbishop Emeritus of Karaganda.
It comes nearly a year after the same bishops issued an appeal to prayer that Pope Francis would confirm the Church’s constant practice regarding the indissolubility of marriage.
The three bishops noted that some bishops around the world – such as those of Malta and Sicily – have issued norms allowing for the divorced-and-remarried who have a living spouse yet who are in “stable cohabitation more uxorio” with a third person to “receive the sacrament of Penance and Holy Communion, while continuing to live habitually and intentionally more uxorio with a person who is not their legitimate spouse.” Those norms have qualified that such permissions are limited to individual cases, at the discretion of a confessor, pastor, or bishop.
More uxorio, which means “in the mode of marriage,” refers in this context to cohabitation and a sexual relationship between those who are not validly married.
“These pastoral norms have received approval from various hierarchical authorities. Some of these norms have received approval even from the supreme authority of the Church,” they noted. Pope Francis had, in 2016, sent a letter approving of norms from the bishops of the Buenos Aires region of Argentina, which seemed to permit reception of holy communion in particular cases.
The Pope’s letter, and the Buenos Aires norms, were then promulgated in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis, a fact made known last month.
“The spread of these ecclesiastically approved pastoral norms has caused a considerable and ever increasing confusion among the faithful and the clergy, a confusion that touches the central manifestations of the life of the Church, such as sacramental marriage with the family, the domestic church, and the sacrament of the Most Holy Eucharist,” the Kazakh bishops stated.
They said that to admit the divorced-and-remarried to Communion “means in practice a way of approving or legitimizing divorce, and in this meaning a kind of introduction of divorce in the life of the Church.”
Such pastoral norms “are revealed in practice and in time” as a way of spreading the “plague of divorce”, they said, quoting from the Second Vatican Council’s pastoral constitution on the Church in the modern world, Gaudium et spes.
The bishops maintained that the Church should be, rather, “a bulwark and an unmistakable sign of contradiction against the plague of divorce … because of her unconditional fidelity to the doctrine of Christ.”
“An approval or legitimation of the violation of the sacredness of the marriage bond, even indirectly through the mentioned new sacramental discipline, seriously contradicts God’s express will and His commandment,” the Kazakh bishops wrote.
They stated that sexual acts between those who are not married are “always contrary to God’s will and constitute a grave offense”’ and that no circumstance, including diminished guilt, can make such a sexual relationship “a positive moral reality.”
The bishops also emphasized that although the Church cannot judge the internal state of grace of any person, sacramental discipline is not based on this but on their “visible and objective situation”; and that is it morally illicit “to engage in sexual relations with a person who is not one’s legitimate spouse supposedly to avoid another sin.”
They also affirmed that the divorced-and-remarried may be admitted to Communion “only when they with the help of God’s grace and a patient and individual pastoral accompaniment make a sincere intention to cease from now on the habit of such sexual relations and to avoid scandal. It is in this way that true discernment and authentic pastoral accompaniment were always expressed in the Church.”
Furthermore, they said that those who violate their marriage bond with their legitimate spouse may not participate in Communion, and that “the fulfillment of God’s will … constitutes the true spiritual good of the people here on earth and will lead them to the true joy of love in the salvation of eternal life.”
The bishops called the recently proposed pastoral norms “a substantial alteration” of the Church’s 2,000 year discipline, and added: “a substantially altered discipline will eventually lead to an alteration in the corresponding doctrine.”
“The constant Magisterium of the Church … has preserved and faithfully transmitted both in the doctrine (in theory) and in the sacramental discipline (in practice) in an unequivocal way, without any shadow of doubt and always in the same sense and in the same meaning (eodem sensu eademque sententia), the crystalline teaching of Christ concerning the indissolubility of marriage.”
The bishops said that the indissolubility of a ratified and consummated marriage is “the revealed word of God and the faith of the Church,” and that sacramental discipline cannot contradict this, “because of its Divinely established nature.”
The faith naturally “excludes a formal contradiction between the faith professed on the one hand and the life and practice of the sacraments on the other,” they said, citing Vatican II and the writings of St. John Paul II.
“In view of the vital importance that the doctrine and discipline of marriage and the Eucharist constitute, the Church is obliged to speak with the same voice. The pastoral norms regarding the indissolubility of marriage must not, therefore, be contradicted between one diocese and another, between one country and another,” they added, citing St. Irenaeus of Lyons and St. Thomas Aquinas.
The bishops provided ample citations for the existing teaching and practice regarding the indissolubility of marriage, including Bl. Pius IX, Ven. Pius XII, Bl. Paul VI, St. John Paul II, and the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts.
“As Catholic bishops, who … must defend the unity of faith and the common discipline of the Church, and take care that the light of the full truth should arise for all men we are forced in conscience to profess in the face of the current rampant confusion the unchanging truth and the equally immutable sacramental discipline regarding the indissolubility of marriage according to the bimillennial and unaltered teaching of the Magisterium of the Church,” they wrote.
“Being bishops in the pastoral office those, who promote the Catholic and Apostolic faith, we are aware of this grave responsibility and our duty before the faithful who await from us a public and unequivocal profession of the truth and the immutable discipline of the Church regarding the indissolubility of marriage. For this reason we are not allowed to be silent,” stated the Kazakh bishops.
They made their affirmation in the spirit of Ss. John the Baptist, John Fisher, and Thomas More, who were martyred for upholding the indissolubility of marriage, and of Bl. Laura Vicuna, who offered her life for the conversion of her mother, who was living in concubinage.
Southampton, England, Jan 2, 2018 / 12:03 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- A Catholic deacon in the United Kingdom has been awarded the British Empire Medal for his work serving seafarers and rescuing trafficking victims over the last eight years.
“I was ab… […]
Vatican City, Jan 1, 2018 / 03:55 am (CNA/EWTN News).- At the start of the new year, Pope Francis said that having a devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary isn’t just something that is nice or good to do, but is an obligation in the life of a Christ… […]
Vatican City, Dec 31, 2017 / 09:20 am (CNA/EWTN News).- At Vespers for the close of 2017, Pope Francis said that the only adequate response to God’s gift of His Son Jesus is one of profound gratitude for the many graces we’ve been given, pa… […]
Washington D.C., Dec 31, 2017 / 03:01 am (CNA/EWTN News).- With a gift of more than 600 handmade leather manuscripts earlier this year, The Catholic University of America is now home to one of the most important collections of Ethiopian religious manus… […]
Munich, Germany, Dec 28, 2017 / 02:39 pm (CNA).- German Cardinal Reinhard Marx has stated that decisions about sexual morality must be discerned according to a well-formed conscience, respecting “the interplay of freedom and responsibility.”
The chairman of the German Bishops’ Conference said in a new interview that a person “has to be guided into the full reality of the faith and heed the voice of the Church. It is not sufficient to say that one knows by oneself whether something is good for you, or not. That would not constitute a conscientious decision-making process in the context of the Gospel.”
Speaking to the German magazine “Herder Korrespondenz,” Cardinal Marx affirmed that this also applies to homosexuality.
A “truly comprehensive assessment of the severity of guilt” is not possible “without looking at the individual’s conscience, without looking at his reality, at the concrete circumstances.”
Cardinal Marx warned against interpreting this “interplay of freedom and responsibility” as “relativism,” saying that while “there must be respect for the decision that one freely takes,” it is always within the context of the Gospel.
“It would be quite terrible to consider this as relativism, like some indeed have repeatedly claimed, as though everyone could just go about doing whatever they please.”
Asked whether he sees a risk of a new schism in the Church, given the current debates and controversies in Catholicism, Cardinal Marx answered: “I don’t see this being the case. I’d rather say not to be afraid, the Lord guides the Church.” In fact, the Archbishop of Munich and Freising continued, “productive debates” are “particularly important in our time.”
With regard to the question of “synodality,” something Pope Francis has repeatedly underscored as an important part of his papal agenda, Cardinal Marx said that he considered synodality an expression and consequence of the responsibilities and autonomy of the local churches, for example in liturgical translations.
“We can’t just publish texts in Rome that are then simply translated around the world. Even under John Paul II there were synods for each continent in order to focus more on specific regions. We should continue on that path.”
On the question of ordaining women to the priesthood, which the German interviewers also raised, the Cardinal gave a short, definitive answer: “That really is not for discussion. The pope has spoken decisively on the matter.”
Phoenix, Ariz., Dec 27, 2017 / 04:04 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- You’ve probably heard of Bruce Jenner.
Now referred to as Caitlyn Jenner, the high-profile Olympic athlete with a famously dramatic family had a very high-profile transition from male to female – including mutilple surgical alterations, a cover on Vanity Fair magazine and the now-canceled docu-series “I am Cait.”
You probably haven’t heard of Bruce Reimer.
Bruce and his twin brother Brian were born in Canada in the 1960s. At the age of seven months, the otherwise healthy boys were circumcised. But the doctors used a new method of circumcision, involving an electric cauterizing needle, on Bruce. An accident occurred, completely burning off the little boy’s penis.
Brian’s operation was canceled, but his parents were devastated.
The Reimers decided to take Bruce to Dr. John Money, a psychologist and sexologist at Johns Hopkins they had seen on T.V.
Dr. Money had a theory that aside from reproductive and urinary functions, gender was a social construct. Until the Reimer twins, he had largely worked with intersex cases – children born with ambiguous genitalia or abnormal sex chromosomes.
But the Reimer twins – otherwise healthy and biologically normative – were the perfect experiment on which to test his theory of gender fluidity. Brian would be raised as a boy, and Bruce would from now on be called Brenda, and raised as a girl.
The Reimers agreed, and insisted on girl’s clothes and socialization for Brenda throughout childhood. They never told the twins about the accident, or about Brenda’s biological sex.
The twins were brought in for a yearly observation with Dr. Money, who dubbed the case a wild success by the time the twins were nine years old.
“No-one else knows that she is the child whose case they read of in the news media at the time of the accident,” he wrote.
“Her behavior is so normally that of an active little girl, and so clearly different by contrast from the boyish ways of her twin brother, that it offers nothing to stimulate one’s conjectures.”
What the Doctor didn’t tell
Deacon Dr. Patrick Lappert is two things you wouldn’t necessarily expect to occur in tandem – a plastic surgeon, and a deacon for the Roman Catholic Church.
These two roles give him a unique understanding of the human person, both physically and metaphysically. They’ve also given him a unique perspective on transgendered persons, and the current cultural movement to support surgical sex changes.
Dr. Lappert was asked to speak at this year’s Truth and Love conference for Courage in Phoenix. He included the case of the Reimer twins during his talk, “Transgender Surgery and Christian Anthropology.”
The on-paper success of Brenda Reimer as a lovely and well-adjusted little girl did not match the lived reality of the child, Dr. Lappert said. Brenda Reimer was a rambunctious tomboy – shunned by the boys for wearing dresses, and by the girls for being too wild.
“She was very rebellious. She was very masculine, and I could not persuade her to do anything feminine. Brenda had almost no friends growing up. Everybody ridiculed her, called her cavewoman,” Brenda’s mother, Janet, recalled in an interview with BBC News.
“She was a very lonely, lonely girl.”
During the twins’ yearly checkup and observation, Dr. Money would force the twins to strip naked and engage in sexual play, posing in positions that affirmed their respective genders. On at least one occasion, this sex play was photographed.
By their teenage years, the twins were strongly opposed to going to their checkups with Dr. Money.
By age 13, Brenda was suicidal.
By 15, the Reimers stopped taking the twins to Dr. Money and revealed the truth to Brenda – he was biologically male. He fully embraced his male identity, chose the name David, and began hormone therapy and a surgical genital reconstruction. He dated and married a woman, whose children he adopted.
But the wounds of his traumatic childhood were deep for both David and his brother. Both suffered from depression. After 14 years, David’s wife divorced him. Then Brian died from a drug overdose. Not long after, in May 2004, David committed suicide. He was 38 years old.
Despite everything, Dr. Money never printed any retractions of his studies, or added any corrections.
“He never said a word, never took any of it back,” Dr. Lappert said.
Which is hugely problematic, because this study is still frequently cited as a successful gender transition by the medical community at large, including the society of plastic surgeons to which Dr. Lappert belongs, he said.
“I put this case out there as an example, to show you the foundation – the sand upon which this whole thing is built,” Dr. Lappert said.
“We have to understand this as we’re talking about the human person as a unity of spirit and form, that there is an integrity to the maleness and femaleness with which we are made.”
One of the biggest problems with transgender sex change surgeries is that they are permanent and irreversible in any meaningful way, Dr. Lappert said.
“There’s nothing reversible about genital surgery – it’s a permanent, irreversible mutilation of the human person. And there’s no other word for it,” he said.
“It results in permanent sterility. It’s a permanent dissolution of the unitive and the procreative functions. And even the unitive aspect of the sexual embrace is radically hindered if not utterly destroyed,” he said, because of the inevitable nerve damage that occurs during the surgery, and because the brain will always register the genital nerves as coming from their organ of origin.
In other words, nerves connected to a vagina will always register with the brain as a vagina, even if they are now part of a surgically constructed penis, and vice versa.
Another major issue is that sex change surgeries seek to solve an interior dysfunction with an external solution.
“Underneath it all, you’re trying to heal an interior wound with exterior surgery,” Dr. Lapper said.
This article was originally published on CNA Jan. 19, 2017.
Vatican City, Dec 26, 2017 / 07:24 am (CNA/EWTN News).- On Tuesday Pope Francis said there is a strong link between the death of St. Stephan, the Church’s first martyr, and the birth of Christ, who came to offer message that is often uncomfortable and calls us to convert.
“Jesus’ message is uncomfortable and inconvenient for us, because it challenges worldly religious power and provokes consciences,” the Pope said Dec. 26, adding that after his coming, “it’s necessary to convert, to change mentality, to renounce thinking like before…to convert.”
Speaking to pilgrims present in St. Peter’s Square during his Angelus address for the feast of St. Stephan, which is celebrated the day after Christmas, the Pope noted how it might seem like there is no relation between Jesus’ birth and Stephan’s death, however, “there is a strong link.”
When he preached, Stephan put the leaders of the people “into crisis,” Francis said, because “he firmly believed and professed the new presence of God among men.”
In telling the leaders at the time that Jesus would destroy the temple and change the customs that Moses handed down to them, Stephen understood that “the true temple of God is now Jesus, eternal Word come to live in our midst, (who) became like us in all things, apart from sin.”
Despite the accusation that he was preaching the destruction of the temple of Jerusalem and therefore facing death, Stephan stayed “anchored” in the message of Jesus until his last breath, with his final prayers being “Lord Jesus, welcome my spirit” and “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.”
These two prayers, Pope Francis said, are “a faithful echo” of those said by Jesus on the cross, when he prays: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit,” and “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”
“These words of Stephan were only possible because the Son of God came to earth and died and rose for us,” he said, adding that before this happened, “they were humanly impossible expressions.”
The Pope then noted that the Risen Christ is the only mediator between God and man, and he intercedes for us not just at our death, as he did for St. Stephan, but in every moment of our lives.
“Without him, we can do nothing,” Francis said, explaining that as our mediator, Jesus reconciles us not only with God the Father, but also with each other.
“(Jesus) is the font of love, which opens us to communion with brothers, to love each other, removing every conflict and resentment,” he said, adding that “resentments are an ugly thing, they do so much harm and the do us so much harm!”
This, he said, is the miracle of Jesus: that he removes these resentments and “makes it so that we love each other.”
Francis closed his address asking that Jesus, who was born for each of us, would help us to assume “this dual attitude of trust in the Father and love of neighbor; it is an attitude that transforms life and makes it more beautiful and more fruitful.”
He also prayed that Mary would help us to welcome Jesus as the Lord of our lives and “to become his courageous witnesses, ready to personally pay the price of fidelity to the Gospel.”
After leading pilgrims in the traditional Angelus prayer, the Pope offered a word of thanks for all the well-wishes he has received in recent weeks.
“I express to everyone my gratitude, especially for the gift of prayer. Thank you so much!” he said, adding that “the Lord will reward your generosity!”
© Catholic World Report