The election prospects facing the Land Down Under are, or should be, fairly cut and dried. Sadly, in our fallen world, nothing is ever quite that easy. Still, here’s the choices that Australia is being presented with going into its next election cycle.
The incumbent and her potential allies don’t exactly impress:
The current government (Labor) is led by Julia Gillard an athiest and a founding member of ‘Emily’s List’ (strongly pro abortion etc) who led the fight for the legalisation of abortion in her home state recently. Funding will be worse for Catholic schools, they will be forced to employ anyone regardless of ‘sexuality’ and ‘personal moral choices’…Gillard will deal with the Greens to get her bills past the senate, which she says will be ‘absolutely no problem’. In other words, she is happy to deal with them…the Greens leader co-wrote a book with Peter Singer which advocated all the usual crazy “kill all the (unwanted) babies (including those just born is we want) and old people so the trees can grow” rubbish…Gillard, after an affair with a married politician, is unmarried living with her hairdresser ‘boyfriend’ and the Greens leader lives with his gay lover…
The challenger sounds more promising:
…Tony Abbot (Lib), openly Catholic and an Oxford graduate (who got into trouble with the Greens last election for consulting Cardinal Pell on policy issues) is trying to stand up against the ‘Green extreme’ and the ‘Emily’s List’ (baby killer) left. I don’t want to give the impression he is the Catholics dream choice but he is head and shoulders above the current government. One indication of his worth is that one of his best friends is Rev Dr Paul Mankoswki SJ (one of the best). As health minister in a previous government he also tried to reduce abortions (which cost him) and called it a ‘national shame.’
The Green Party in Australia is a right nasty piece of work, apparently…sufficiently so that the ever-formidable Cardinal George Pell labeled them an “anti-Christian party”. (Pell isn’t given to needless hyperbole.) The less the ruling party has to do with them, the better it will be for everyone — Aussies in general, not just Catholics.
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Posted by: Saint Angilbert
Posted in: Atheism - Australian Politics - Catholicism | Tags: abortion, Atheism, Australia, Catholicism, Emily's List, George Pell, Green Party, Julia Gillard, Oxford, Paul Mankoswki, Peter Singer, Tony Abbot
…as John Zmirak notes, shouldn’t cause us to reject Religion — good and true faith — outright. It shouldn’t cause us to question the supernatural. Indeed, it should move us toward faith, toward the altar…and away from all the false things that dress themselves up in the beauty of religious signs, but are diabolical underneath.
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Posted by: Saint Angilbert
Posted in: Atheism - Catholicism | Tags: faith, Inside Catholic, John Zmirak, Religion, skepticism
John Zmirak offers a frightening portent:
When the icons whose eyes are gouged out are those on the walls of St. Peter’s Basilica, and the shards of stained glass fall from the parish church at Fatima, maybe then we will start to take our oldest enemy seriously.
Sadly, “we” (in the sense of secular society) probably won’t; people of no particular religious affiliation can’t be bothered by the plight of Catholics in particular or Christians in general, and will even tend to turn a blind eye toward the sufferings of society as a whole if it is Christians who are suffering the worst.
“We” (in the sense of Catholics, pew-sitting and not) might still be roused to act, though only after it’s too late for some of our most priceless treasures and places. Still, we might need just that kind of shock to the system to remind us that only one side ever stopped fighting the Crusades.
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Posted by: Saint Angilbert
Posted in: Catholicism - Islam | Tags: Catholicism, Crusades, Fatima, Islam, John Zmirak, St. Peter's Basilica, the Church
…it’s an international scandal, and people will demand his arrest.
If a progressive-minded kindergarten teacher does it, it’s just contemporary education, open-mindedness, and a protest against corporatism and sexual repression.
I keep waiting for secularism to deliver society into utopia, and out of the darkness of religious faith. And yet, day after day, I keep finding reasons to long for what religious faith has to offer society instead. It seems so much brighter, by comparison.
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Posted by: Saint Angilbert
Posted in: Atheism - Catholicism - Education - Men and Women - Parenting - Sex | Tags: Catholicism, Education, secularism, Sex, sexual repression
The Quebec cardinal has been appointed to the Vatican:
Quebec Cardinal Marc Ouellet has officially been appointed to a top-job at the Vatican.
Canada‘s highest ranking Catholic priest will head the Congregation of Bishops, the organization that makes bishop appointments around the globe.
Although…because this is the legacy media reporting, the obligatory attempt to sour things:
Ouellet set off a firestorm last month when he told an anti-abortion conference in Quebec City that terminating a pregnancy is a “moral crime,” even in cases where a woman has been raped. The comments provoked rebukes from several women‘s rights organizations and Parti Quebecois Leader Pauline Marois.
Apparently, that’s supposed to be a bad thing.
Anyhow, all congratulations to the good cardinal. May God grant him wisdom and charity in the conduct and execution of his new office, and may he oversee the appointment of many good and faithful bishops with, at minimum, the above-demonstrated willingness to articulate uncomfortable truths to people who live in the shadow of lies and clever fictions.
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Posted by: Saint Angilbert
Posted in: Canadian News - Catholicism | Tags: abortion, Canada, Congregation of Bishops, Marc Ouellet, Parti Quebecois, Pauline Marois, pregnancy, Quebec, Quebec City, rape, Vatican, women
…how the small but vocal minority who e.g. lobby to ban crucifixes from Italian classrooms always dress up their reasoning in the language of self-determination, of seeking the right to raise their children as they see fit (as though the presence of a religious icon hanging — usually unremarked upon — on a wall were some manner of impairment to doing so), or something along those lines?
What about the 90% of Italians who self-identify as Christian? Do they likewise desire the right to raise their children as they see fit, and do they likewise deserve to exercise that right? What if a component of that right, for at least some of them, includes a crucifix on the wall? In a sane society, this wouldn’t even be a question: the larger group would not have their rights diminished to satisfy the demands of the smaller group (since, really, the smaller group is not, in any reasonable sense being denied its rights or otherwise oppressed).
But then, the West has long since parted ways with sanity, hasn’t it?
Or perhaps it has only mostly done so. Italy is attempting to reverse the banning of crucifixes from its classrooms, though it is a pity that Italians themselves can’t be moved to return to a more typically Catholic birthrate, even if only in the interests of keeping Italy Italian.
Update: Welcome, Steynians!
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Posted by: Saint Angilbert
Posted in: Atheism - Catholicism - Christianity - Education - European News - European Politics - Law | Tags: Catholicism, Christianity, crucifix, Italy
An unexpected victory: Loyola High School — a private Jesuit boy’s school in Montreal — has won in court the right to continue teaching its Catholic-centric ethics course; the school will not (for now, at least) be forced to teach the broader “all-inclusive” ethics course being pushed by the provincial government.
Do be sure to read the article that Mark Shea links to, and not only for the deliciousness in the comments (don’t miss the champion of atheist “reason” who confuses the Euthyphro Dilemma — which isn’t even a legitimate argument against the Christian understanding of God — with matter pertaining to ethics). The ruling judge’s citation of the Galileo affair as his example in his condemnation of the province’s actions is really too good to miss.
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Posted by: Saint Angilbert
Posted in: Atheism - Canadian News - Canadian Politics - Catholicism - Education - History | Tags: Euthyphro Dilemma, Galileo, God, Loyola High School, Mark Shea, Montreal, Quebec
Funnily enough, the first thing that came to mind upon reading this was a question for Mike Brock. Mr. Brock, the good reader may recall, wrote the following:
I reject Religion, in general, because contrary to it’s pedlars, religion is not a force of tolerance. It is a force of conformity, and often, outright hatred for those who do not conform….From Buddhist Monks to Hindus, violence has been an omnipresent facet of religion. From Northern Ireland, the West Bank, Kashmir, to the ultra-catholic South America, religion is the reason for so much violence and hatred against those who do not conform.
So would these be Buddhist or Hindu swans, exactly? Or are they perhaps ultra-Catholic? Jewish, maybe? On a related note, would these chimpanzees be, perhaps, Muslim…or should we venture to say that they are probably Methodists?
Perhaps religion really isn’t itself to blame for the strife that Brock highlights; perhaps it is human concupiscence, untempered by genuine faith in Christ or exacerbated by any of the various false religions, which motivates man to act not in keeping with his rational faculties, but instead with his base animal instincts?
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Posted by: Saint Angilbert
Posted in: Atheism - Catholicism - Christianity - Hinduism - Islam - Judaism - Middle Eastern News - Protestantism - Racism - War | Tags: Christ, concupiscence, faith, Kashmir, Mike Brock, Northern Ireland, Religion, South America, tolerance, West Bank
A former convent on Staten Island was evidently that the sale won’t go through. Turning its former convent into a mosque would “not serve the needs” of the St. Margaret Mary Church parish community, apparently. Although that probably should have been obvious when the sale was first proposed.
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Posted by: Saint Angilbert
Posted in: American News - Catholicism - Islam | Tags: Catholicism, Islam, New York, Staten Island
It’s not the happiest story, but it serves as a reminder not only of the transformative power of Christ and God, who is Father of us all…but it also inspires more than a little contemplation as to what responsibilities fall on the shoulders of men who would be good fathers.
Yeah, yeah, I’m being a downer. I’m also miles away from my family on Father’s Day. I suggest that these two facts correlate.
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Posted by: Saint Angilbert
Posted in: Catholicism - Family - Personal | Tags: Christ, Father, Father's Day, God