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sábado, 31 de mayo de 2014

Mercredi 28 mai 2014 : le Grand-Orient de France organisait son 1er forum des Obédiences maçonniques libérales et adogmatiques de l’Union Européenne







Mercredi 28 mai 2014 : le Grand-Orient de France organisait son 1er forum des Obédiences maçonniques libérales et adogmatiques de l’Union Européenne au Temple Arthur Groussier Hôtel du Grand Orient de France 16 rue Cadet. L’introducteur de la séance, dénonçant l’imminence d’ « une régression identitaire », a souligné la nécessité de faire un débat sur les élections européennes du dimanche 26 mai. L’affluence dans la salle confirmait l’urgence de cette réunion, a-t-il indiqué ensuite, précisant qu’en ces « temps sombres, [il convient] d’apporter de la lumière ». Vingt-huit obédiences s’étaient rassemblées au siège parisien, comprenant plusieurs membres de loges de l’étranger, de loges de France[1] et ceux qu’ils appellent des profanes, les non-initiés – tel l’auteur de cet article. La séance se déroulait en deux temps : le premier se composait de trois interventions sur des thèmes précis (les droits des femmes et leur présence à l’échelle européenne, la question de l’immigration en Europe et l’état de l’Union Européenne en regard du scrutin européen venant d’être voté), le deuxième d’interventions des maçons présents dans l’assemblée qui devaient soulever des problématiques sur l’Union Européenne.

Les conférences

La première intervenante, maçonne grecque, a insisté sur la présence trop discrète des femmes au sein de l’Union Européenne ; a été avancé le nombre de 33 % de femmes présentes à la Commission européenne et cinq présidentes seulement à la tête des pays membres. Le rejet du rapport Estrela, cause des pressions de la droite et l’extrême-droite et les « régressions » de l’Espagne vis-à-vis des lois en relation avec l’IVG ont été dénoncées avec vigueur. Une solution a été proposée : la création d’une charte pour le droit des femmes, afin que la vision « progressiste » soit établie à l’échelle européenne ; tout pays voulant entrer dans l’Union devra adopter celle-ci pour y être intégré favorablement.

Le deuxième intervenant, est revenu sur les questions d’immigration dans l’Union Européenne ; cette question a été le vecteur majeur de la campagne électorale, a-t-il indiqué, soulignant que l’immigration extra-européenne se fondait sur un dumping-social[2] qui favoriserait le vote extrémiste. Il a insisté ensuite sur ses problèmes à l’échelle intra-européenne, indiquant que d’importants fonds financiers étaient disponibles en faveur de l’intégration des populations roms et qu’ils ne sont pas mis en œuvre comme il conviendrait[3]. Enfin, la récession du droit d’asile a été jugée inacceptable et les modalités de régulation de l’immigration clandestine, comme le dispositif FRONTEX, désormais inefficace. La solution avancée : redéfinir une politique de coproductions entre pays du nord et pays du sud et non une affiliation de uns sur les autres : « Les hommes sont dans une maison commune : la planète Terre. Il faut que chacun puisse y vivre dans la dignité. L’immigration n’est pas un fléau si elle est pensée en termes humanistes ».

Le troisième intervenant s’est interrogé sur l’Etat de l’Union Européenne à l’heure actuelle ; les critères de création de l’Union Européenne partageaient certaines valeurs avec la Franc-Maçonnerie (« Fraternité, humanisme,… ») que le vote Front National a remis en cause ; « une certaine vision de l’Europe est morte ce dimanche dans les urnes. Nous sommes renvoyés à notre devoir d’imaginer notre Europe » dira le Grand Maître Daniel Keller dans sa conclusion. La constitution de groupes de travail dans les loges maçonniques pour réfléchir sur les questions européennes, la création de forums pour rassembler les loges et proposer de nouveaux projets, ont été les solutions indiquées pour « redéfinir une Europe humaniste »[4].

La deuxième partie du débat a proposé une interrogation sur les facteurs de causalité de cet ‘’échec régressif’’ cristallisé par le vote frontiste et les solutions mises en œuvre pour recréer une « Europe humaniste ».

Les « lobbys catholiques » en défaveur de l’Europe humaniste maçonne

Il convenait avant tout d’opérer une «reconquête étique et idéologique[LC1] (et de contre-offensive, a souligné un membre dans l’assemblée) » en faveur des valeurs de la République. Ré-intéresser le citoyen français, trop autocentré sur ses problèmes internes[5], aux questions européennes est une nécessité ; il faudra faire preuve de pédagogie, notamment dans les médias. Et l’introducteur de séance de souligner l’inanité de l’article de l’un de ses « confrères du Point », qui a prêché l’abstention au cours de l’un de ses articles.

Lors du débat, beaucoup de membres des loges présents ont dénoncé l’importance du ‘’lobbysme catholique’’, d’une influence certes moins prégnante (sic) depuis la mise en vigueur de l’article 17 du Traité de Lisbonne[6] qui élève le ‘’dialogue’’ avec les autorités religieuses au statut d’obligation juridique. Ont été dénoncés d’influence majeure l’Opus Dei et les groupes religieux (notamment les Orthodoxes) qui interviendraient de façon trop forte sur les questions des droits des femmes, bioéthiques et en rapport avec la « mort dans la dignité ». Si un maçon intervenait et dénonçait un anathème passéiste, un autre fulminait : « comment se fait-il qu’un lobby catholique puisque encore s’exercer au sein d’une France qui se déchristianise de jour en jour ? ». Enfin, d’autres reprochaient aux catholiques de s’être accaparés la question des « droits de l’enfant » et, en le dissociant des droits de l’Homme, de l’avoir retourné en leur faveur – il devient une sorte de postulat intouchable auquel il est difficile de répondre. Une solution a été proposée : il va falloir bientôt « mettre la main à la poche » pour se constituer un véritable « bureau de lobbying ».

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Centenaire de 1914 : ne pas oublier le héros de Verdun

1

The plagues of the Culture of Death: The good family is the only entity capable of transmitting the culture that leads to life.






Driving a significant distance to work is a clear and present danger for a hypochondriac. In case you had not noticed, billboards are increasingly about sickness. One drive to work could leave him wondering about the ten most important questions to ask a doctor, suspicious that he might have lupus, ADHD, Alzheimer’s, or certain that he is suffering from autism to some degree. In the public schools we incessantly talk about and try to normalize disorder. The entire public school system is grounded in disorder. We are compelled to talk about mental illness, intellectual deficiency, gender issues, blood borne pathogens, the flu, and many other kinds of poverty and disease prevention strategies. The latest disordered issue sweeping across elementary school campuses is youth suicide.

The culture of death is insidious and ubiquitous. Satan and his minions have their favorite haunts, like the mainstream media, politics, healthcare, the public schools, and the field of psychology. It is hard to determine where the plagues of the Culture of Death are festering most, but festering they are and in more places than the above mentioned.

I have been in the public schools as a “teacher” for nearly a quarter of a century. Sometimes I think I am so clever that I have heard and seen the most ridiculous things humans can say and do, and then out of nowhere I am staggered by something even weirder than I could have imagined. Yesterday was one of those shocking days.

We were assaulted by an enemy I had not yet seen. It came in the form of a bizarre but vivacious old woman- butch short gray hair, hunched over, jaw jutting forth with a set of false teeth, a rock hard countenance forged in the 60s and a passionate zeal for spreading the secular humanist gospel of salvation by education. She spoke in a crackly high pitched whine about the need to talk to every single child from age five through high school about suicide. She recommended that we have regular classroom discussions, then branch out to small groups and individuals and get that conversation started.

The tone and tenor of her screed was so disconcerting that I finally had to interject, “Madam, don’t you think talking to such young children about suicide and death in this way is a destruction of innocence?” She screeched at me “DO YOU WANT THEM TO DIE? I love these children, all of them. I WANT THEM TO LIVE! Five year olds are killing themselves these days!” She proceeded to threaten us with legal action. She called it “criminal negligence” if someone happened to kill themselves on our watch. (Note to self: include in teacher-student contract “I will not kill myself while Mr. R. is my teacher.”)

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Read more: www.theimaginativeconservative.org




The Byzantine citizen would to the very end believe that his empire was founded on a magnificent Idea—the creation of empire as an expression of Divine Will.




“Le grand absent—c’est l’Empire”
C. Dufour,Constantinople Imaginaire


Everywhere Western man longs for Constantinople and nowhere has he any idea how to find her. To do so is to reclaim, at last, the meaning of an empire that once defined a hierarchy of imagination long ago abandoned by our civilization; of an eleven-century political, religious and cultural struggle that sought to reconcile Christianity and Antiquity, transforming the Western spirit into a brilliant battleground between Latin and Greek, Augustus and Basileus, reason and faith, ancient and modern. Yet to unearth this Byzantium, this “heaven of the human mind”, as Yeats dreamed her, is not to go searching through histories and legends, glorious ruins or immortal poems. It is, instead, to be found retracing the evolution of a new and profound conflict in Western thought that began with the mysterious conversion of the first Constantine and ended, at the gates of the marble and gold City called ‘the world’s desire’ by the sons of that city, with the unconquerable faith of the last Constantine—himself heir to the great Palaiologoi who resurrected the dormant title of Hellene to describe their own noble line of descent.

No Byzantine ever referred to himself as Byzantine—it was ‘Roman’ all the way. It was, in fact, the librarian of the wealthy 16th century Fugger family, Hieronymous Wolf, who coined the term “Byzantium”; its common usage, in turn, taking root only as of the early 20th century among the gentleman-scholars of Oxford University—so intrigued, as they were, by the empire’s fall from grace and its even harder fall from Memory. Byzantium’s aura remained singular, unique and unmistakeable down the centuries after its collapse. “Constantinople had been left naked and desolate without a prince or a people”, wrote Edward Gibbon of the fateful events of May 29, 1453 in the 68th—and may I add, absolutely spellbinding—chapter of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. “But she could not be despoiled, and the incomparable genius of the place will ever triumph over the accidents of time and fortune”. Even the Ottomans referred to ‘Constantinople’ in their official documents until 1923, no doubt aware of the power and beauty that the monumental civitas dei could still evoke—though by then she was nowhere, no more, to be lived.

But when we set out to locate this forgotten world, such definitions mean little because we no longer recognize their significance. There is no literature tempting us back slowly, chapter by century, into the center of Byzantium’s mysterium magnum that once imposed itself upon the world.


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Read more: www.theimaginativeconservative.org



How Jesus retells and fulfills the whole Old Testament in 5 sermons


The 5 Discourses of Jesus


Making comparisons and connections brings greater clarity to all of our reading and guides us in the cultivation of wisdom and virtue

In recent months, I have done some extensive study and teaching in the gospel of Matthew, a fascinating journey which produced a slew of articles, sermons, and posts (a couple of which are previously posted on the CiRCE blog here and here), mainly addressing the structure, types, and patterns in the gospel. Here I offer one more.

St. Matthew uses five of Christ’s discourses to structure and frame his gospel, completing what amounts to a retelling and fulfilling of the entire Old Testament.

The five discourses are large blocks of Jesus’ teaching found throughout Matthew’s gospel. Each one of them begins and ends in similar fashion. For example, the Sermon on the Mount (chapters 5-7) begins, “Seeing the crowds, he went up on the mountain, and when he sat down, his disciples came to him. And he opened his mouth and taught them, saying…” When the Sermon is over in 7:28-29, Jesus says, “And when he had finished these sayings, the crowds were astonished at his teaching, for he was teaching them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes.”

The second discourse, which is found in chapter 10, begins this way: “These twelve Jesus sent out, instructing them…” (10:5) and ends in 11:1 where Matthew says, “When Jesus had finished instructing his twelve disciples, he went on from there to teach and preach in their cities.” We find the same pattern used in the third discourse in chapter 13. Matthew opens it officially in 13:1-3 and ends officially in 13:53. The fourth discourse has a similar “official” opening in 18:1-3 and an “official” ending in 19:1. The fifth and final discourse begins in 23:1 and ends in 26:1, all following the same pattern. This pattern makes the discourses easily identifiable and, perhaps, serves a mnemonic function similar to Homer’s “rosy-fingered dawn.”

But, what is of particular interest to me is how these discourses are used by Matthew to retell the entirety of the Old Testament, demonstrating that Christ is the fulfillment of all that was promised therein.

1.The Sermon on the Mount (chapters 5-7) ....

2.Commissioning of the Twelve (chapter 10) ....

3.Parables of the Kingdom (chapter 13) ....

4.Talking of the Church (chapter 18) ....

5.Olivet Discourse (chapters 23-25) ....

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Estatización de la Universidad de Madres de Plaza de Mayo: Hebe de Bonafini la fundó “para la formación de cuadros revolucionarios”


Madres: un escándalo para tapar otro escándalo

La estatización de la Universidad Popular Madres de Plaza de Mayo
constituiría un nuevo salvataje para seguir ocultando la corrupción

El proyecto de estatización de la Universidad Popular Madres de Plaza de Mayo , que obtuvo ya la aprobación del Senado y que ahora deberá debatirse en la Cámara de Diputados para convertirse en ley, viene a ratificar una vez más las oscuras estrategias de poder del oficialismo: a los amigos como Hebe de Bonafini no se los abandona nunca, siempre y cuando convenga, y especialmente mientras se los pueda ayudar con fondos públicos que salen incesantemente del bolsillo de todos los contribuyentes y de los que casi nunca se rinden adecuadas cuentas.

Así como en el caso de la empresa Ciccone se acudió a un salvataje estatal sobre la hora con la velada intención de ocultar un caso de corrupción, con el proyectado rescate al instituto de formación privada que preside Bonafini se buscaría tapar las irregularidades de la organización, al tiempo que todos los argentinos deberemos hacernos cargo de una descomunal deuda acerca de la cual probablemente nadie brindará explicaciones.

Inaugurado en 2000, el instituto educativo, que no tiene entidad académica de universidad en realidad, se halla en un estado financiero crítico , con una deuda con la AFIP calculada en más de 200 millones de pesos, que se suman a las serias sospechas de corrupción que pesan sobre la Fundación Madres de Plaza de Mayo a partir de las graves irregularidades detectadas en la construcción de viviendas populares del programa Sueños Compartidos.

Sin embargo, nada de esto ha obstado para que, anteanoche, el kirchnerismo impusiera su mayoría en el Senado: con el apoyo del Movimiento Popular Neuquino y de los peronistas disidentes Liliana Negre de Alonso y Adolfo Rodríguez Saá -curiosamente, minutos antes, en la misma sesión se había aprobado la creación de una universidad nacional en Merlo, San Luis-, la estatización fue aprobada por 39 votos a favor y 23 en contra.


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Leer más aquí: www.lanacion.com.ar



Universidades kirchneristas

por Jorge Eduardo Simonetti


En el discurso de apertura del 6 de abril del 2000 de la Universidad de Madres de Plaza de Mayo, Hebe de Bonafini dijo que se fundaba “para la formación de cuadros revolucionarios”. Como si los argentinos no tuviéramos una triste historia con el desarrollo del concepto de “defensa”, el Gobierno kirchnerista, de sesgo netamente autoritario, quiere crear una universidad que forme militares y civiles para ello.


SALVATAJE ECONOMICO Y FABRICA DE MILITANTES

Luego de dos intentos fallidos, un par de comisiones del Senado de la Nación le dieron el dictamen favorable a sendos proyectos de nuevas universidades, que serían tratados en la sesión próxima.

Se trata de la estatización de la Universidad de Madres de Plaza de Mayo y de la creación de la Universidad de la Defensa, ambas iniciativas de neto cuño oficialista.

Es el presente griego que el kirchnerismo dejará a toda la sociedad argentina, presente que involucra la estatización de una monumental deuda producto de una estafa y el intento de montar una fábrica de militantes, que constituirán la descendencia bastarda de un modelo fracasado y casi muerto.

La llamada “universidad” de Madres es privada, fue creada en el año 2000, con algunas carreras terciarias y pequeños cursos; actualmente se comenzaron a dictar las carrera de Abogacía y las licenciaturas de Trabajo Social e Historia. 

Según su propia declaración de principios, tiene el propósito de “generar herramientas para disputar la hegemonía intelectual (...), superar las prácticas educativas del sistema, legitimadoras de la opresión (...), recuperar las tradiciones de luchas populares, transformar la sociedad en el saber y la lucha”. En el discurso de apertura del 6 de abril del 2000, Hebe de Bonafini dijo que se fundaba “para la formación de cuadros revolucionarios”.

Existen dos materias que son transversales a todas las carreras: “Formación Política cátedra Carlos Marx” e “Historia de las Madres de Plaza de Mayo” y hasta hace poco se mantuvo la cátedra “Che Guevara”.

De acuerdo a denuncias de diversos sectores, la misma Fundación que está a cargo de la Universidad está involucrada en el desfalco de más de 230 millones de pesos con el Programa Sueños Compartidos, por lo que estatizar el instituto educativo significaría además estatizar la deuda producto del desfalco, cuya investigación se tramita en los tribunales penales.
Además, señalaron las mismas fuentes, de que no es una universidad reconocida por el Ministerio de Educación, no ha sido objeto de aprobación por el Consejo Interuniversitario Nacional y su nivel apenas alcanzaría para un instituto terciario.


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Leer más aquí: www.ellitoral.com.ar



La mayoría de los que ocuparán escaños en el Parlamento Europeo son conformistas que no sueñan con guerras


Europa después del "terremoto" electoral

por James Neilson


Algunos alarmistas parecen creer que Europa está por retroceder un siglo, que una vez más se verá transformada en un campo de batalla para un sinnúmero de nacionalistas pendencieros. Por ahora cuando menos, los pesimistas exageran. Si bien entre quienes obtuvieron más votos que antes en las elecciones paneuropeas de la semana pasada hay muchos sujetos de antecedentes truculentos, la mayoría de los que ocuparán escaños en el Parlamento Europeo son conformistas que no sueñan con guerras, depuraciones étnicas, campos de concentración y todos los demás aportes de sus mayores a la civilización.

Asimismo, entre los descalificados como ultraderechistas, para no decir fascistas, se encuentran personajes nada peligrosos como Nigel Farage, un hombre que recuerda con nostalgia una versión bucólica de su país; quisiera reencontrar el Reino Unido de su emblema partidario, la libra esterlina, con sus chelines, peniques y otras rarezas, que existía antes de que funcionarios extranjeros de ideas contundentes abolieran tales antigüedades. Puede que oponerse así a la fría modernidad bruselense sea lamentable, pero sería excesivo comparar lo que tiene en mente Farage con el desafío planteado por agrupaciones netamente neonazis como Crisi Avgi, el "Amanecer dorado", de Grecia, los antisemitas del Jobbik húngaro o el Frente Nacional de la francesa Marine Le Pen que, no obstante sus esfuerzos por darle una imagen respetable, dista de haberlo librado de todos los elementos fascistas que fueron recogidos por su padre, el exparacaidista Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Si los que votaron por candidatos que a juicio de los biempensantes son populistas reaccionarios de ideas venenosas tienen algo en común, es el temor a que su propia aldea, ciudad, país o continente ya no les pertenezcan, que su destino esté en manos de tecnócratas más interesados en esquemas abstractos que en la vida de personas "normales". El rencor que sienten puede entenderse. A ningún argentino le gustaría que un burócrata norteamericano o chino, digamos, lo obligaran a modificar radicalmente su estilo de vida. La distancia emotiva que separa a un alemán de un griego, a un italiano de un luxemburgués, es tan grande que resulta lógico que se haya difundido por el continente la sensación de que una camarilla de ideólogos cosmopolitas se cree con derecho a tratar como cobayos a los demás europeos.


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Leer más aquí: www.rionegro.com



viernes, 30 de mayo de 2014

Romania: they distrust America's sense of commitment.


Romania’s delicate balance




I arrived in Bucharest, Romania, the day after U.S. Vice President Joe Biden. U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel will be here in a few weeks. The talk in Bucharest, not only among the leadership but also among the public, is about Ukraine. Concerns are palpable, and they are not only about the Russians. They are also about NATO, the European Union, the United States and whether they will all support Romania if it resists Russia. The other side of the equation, of course, is whether Romania will do the things it must do in order to make outside support effective. Biden left Romania with a sense that the United States is in the game. But this is not a region that trusts easily. The first step was easy. The rest become harder.

If this little Cold War becomes significant, there are two European countries that matter the most: Poland and Romania. Poland, which I visit next, stands between Germany and Russia on the long, flat North European plain. Its population is about 38 million people. Romania, to the south, standing behind the Prut River and bisected by the Carpathian Mountains, has a population of about 20 million. Of the roughly 82 million people along the eastern frontier (Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria), approximately 58 million live in Poland and Romania. Biden's visit to Romania and U.S. President Barack Obama's planned visit to Poland provide a sense of how Washington looks at the region and, for the moment at least, the world. How all of this plays out is, of course, dependent on the Russians and the course of the Ukrainian crisis.


All Soviet satellites emerged damaged after the collapse of the old order in 1989. Few were as damaged as Romania. In many ways, the damage was self-inflicted: The villain of the piece was a Romanian, Nicolae Ceausescu. Ceausescu followed an anti-Soviet line, staying in the Warsaw Pact but displaying singular hostility to the Soviet Union. I recall Americans being excited about Ceausescu's Romania since, being anti-Soviet, it was assumed that by definition he had to be pro-American. To America's amazement, he wasn't. He wasn't even pro-Romanian given that he concocted a scheme to pay off all of Romania's foreign debts by destroying the lives of a generation of Romanians by consigning the vast majority of the country's agricultural and industrial production to hard currency exports. Beyond that, he created a nightmarish security system that was both corrupt and vicious. The world barely noticed. When the end came, it also came for Ceausescu and his wife, the only Eastern European leaders to be executed (amid intense fighting between factions).

For all that, Romania has done remarkably well. Romania's unemployment rate is only about 7 percent, which by European standards is remarkably low. Its annual growth rate stands at more than 3 percent, which is conversely high. In talking to Romanians, it is hard to see into their hearts. They seem a gracious and friendly people, with a measure of distrust and a taste for conspiracy no greater than the norm for this region. What is remarkable about the Romanians is that they are unremarkable. They have emerged from a nightmare inflicted by one of their own and have regained their balance.

Ceausescu aside, the nightmare was initiated by the Soviets, who were drawn in by the Germans. This has resulted in a lasting national trait: When the Russians act, it strikes fear deep into the Romanian heart. When the Russians act and the Germans have a hand in the action, the Romanians' worst nightmare is realized. Their reaction doesn't manifest itself as with the Poles, who are always committed to the decisive confrontation. Instead, the nightmare scenario elicits a more cautious and sinewy response involving the search for a way both to resist and if necessary to accommodate. Above all, it elicits a search for allies, preferably far enough away not to occupy them and strong enough to offer meaningful support. Obviously, the Americans are tailor-made for this role, so long as they don't overstep their bounds and generate fears of domination. 

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It's time the media and sex education told the truth about women's fertility.


Motherhood at 40: 
how women came to believe a modern myth



In a recent PBS “To the Contrary” show about the infertility industry, host Bonnie Erbe` asked: Why did Miriam Zoll wait until age 40 to try to become a mother? Here is my response.

Over the last four decades, we emancipated daughters of America have been taught that we have the power to control our destinies. Programs like the Ms. Foundation for Women’s original “Take Our Daughters To Work Day,” which I helped co-produce, reinforced the notion that we could grow up to be just about anything­­––from astronauts to doctors, to lawyers or plumbers. With abortion and contraceptives legally accessible, we believed from an early age that we could control our reproduction, too. If the Pill could help us prevent unwanted pregnancy, surely we could just as easily manifest a wanted pregnancy whenever we were ready. If we encountered obstacles, well, there was always reproductive medicine like in-vitro fertilization (I.V.F.) to save the day.

When it came to motherhood, from the late 1990s onward, rumors like “40 is the new 30” began to spread like wildfire among a small demographic subset of mostly educated, middle class women. With the media and cultural discourse fortifying the myth that modern women’s reproductive systems were now, somehow, superhuman, millions of women assumed it was safe to wait. Over glasses of red wine, we celebrated the timing of our good fortune, recognizing that unlike the women who came before us, we were not bound by our reproductive biology.

This is the backdrop that literally pushed the ‘old’ notion that women’s (and men’s) fertility declines in their 30s off the proverbial table, and paved the way for the current, confusing discourse on the subject.

The modern cultural dialogue brazenly defies—or misinterprets––volumes of contemporary medical evidence confirming that, on average, ovarian reserve sharply drops after 37.5 years. (1) A case in point is a well-publicized June 2013 article in the Atlantic magazine, written by psychologist Jean Twenge and titled: “How Long Can You Wait to Have a Baby?” Twenge, who birthed her own children after age 35, asserts, “Women's age and fertility...is one of the more spectacular examples of the mainstream media's failure to correctly report on and interpret scientific research."


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The legal recognition of new gender identities will further distance marriage from the natural family unit.


Gender beyond the binary: 
implications for marriage



A binary classification is one in which there are two, and only two, states in which a given entity may exist. Sex has long been such an entity, the two states in which it may be manifested being male and female. Nature occasionally presents us with individuals who do not fit in well with the binary schema in the form of genetic anomalies and morphogenetic quirks resulting in indeterminate sexual appearance; the standard response has been hormonal treatment and/or corrective surgery to assign such individuals to one of the two members of the binary set.

Traditionally, marriage was restricted to partners of opposite sexes as determined by the sex on their birth certificates. The binary system was tested by people who underwent ‘gender reassignment’: someone born one sex who, through medical interventions, changed his or her body to conform to the image of that of the opposite sex. In various Western jurisdictions, these people have been given the thumbs-up to marry someone of the sex opposite to that to which they have been reassigned following the legal recognition of their new sex through the changing of the birth certificate. The binary classification schema prevailed.

Same-sex marriage in itself does not throw the binary classification into a tizzy as long as we’re still talking M and F. However, there has been a move away from sex towards gender in terms of how people define their identity. Putting it simply, sex is anatomical while gender is psychological. For most of us, the distinction between sex and gender is a moot point, but there have always been people who have felt a discord between the two such as feeling like a woman in a man’s body (or the other way around), or even believing oneself to be both (or neither). With the shift towards gender and the de-emphasising of biological sex, there has been a growing acceptance of the view that ‘male’ and ‘female’ are at opposite ends of a continuum, thereby introducing arbitrariness into the conventional ‘either/or’ classification. The binary system is starting to look a bit shaky at this stage.

The kiss of death for any binary system is the recognition of a third member of that set which is distinctive rather than being ‘somewhere in between’ the two conventional categories – in the context of this discussion, a ‘third sex’ or, as it is usually called, ‘third gender’.- See more at: http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/gender_beyond_the_binary_implications_for_marriage#sthash.S8NLfRH9.dpuf

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Gay and lesbian groups are now beginning to criticize supporters who are thought to be insufficiently loyal


Progressives Eat Their Own in Virginia

by ANNE HENDERSHOTT


Continuing their commitment to silence anyone who might stand in the way of their agenda, gay and lesbian groups are now beginning to criticize supporters who are thought to be insufficiently loyal. 

The most recent case involves Douglas Laycock, a University of Virginia law professor, who is married to the University’s president, Teresa A. Sullivan. A man with impeccable progressive credentials, Laycock has been a longtime supporter of gay rights and same-sex marriage—filing an amicus brief in the 2012 Supreme Court case, United States v. Windsor that urged the court to extend same-sex marriage benefits to every state in the union.
His offense? Laycock supports religious liberty. 
According to news reports, Laycock wrote a letter to Arizona Governor Jan Brewer in support of SB1062—a bill that if it had passed would have provided greater legal protections for individuals and businesses accused of violating state anti-discrimination laws. 

The bill was designed to protect those who cite religious reasons for not participating in same-sex weddings by baking cakes for same-sex couples, taking photographs of the same-sex wedding ceremonies, or hosting same-sex wedding receptions at their places of business. 

Professor Laycock’s letter to the Governor, which was signed by ten other law professors from institutions around the country, argued that “the Arizona law was a fair extension of the existing federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act because it didn’t pick winners: the government could still show that compliance with the law was necessary to serve a compelling government interest.”



Facts: Today, over 40 percent of children are born outside of marriage




by Rachel Sheffield

If healthy marriage is the basis of a strong society, it is worth every effort to strengthen it. Marriage education should supplement other efforts to address social problems.


One of the greatest social problems facing our country is the breakdown of the family, and, more specifically, the breakdown of marriage. Today, over 40 percent of children are born outside of marriage. In the 1960s, that percentage was less than 10 percent. The rate of unwed births is far higher among some groups: nearly three-quarters of African-American babies and over half of all Hispanic babies are born to single mothers annually.

The retreat from marriage and the increased rate of unwed births are tragic in terms of their effects on children and their costs to society as a whole. Children in single-parent homes are more than five times as likely to be poorcompared to their peers born to married parents. They are also less likely to thrive: they are at significantly greater risk for dropping out of high school, going to jail, abusing drugs and alcohol, and becoming single parents themselves.

Sadly, however, there is far too little discussion about the growing problem of marital breakdown. This is tragic, not only because its social costs are great, but also because the aspiration of a stable marriage and family remains elusive for so many men and women. Some states, communities, churches, and charities are making efforts to strengthen marriage, particularly marriages among low-income couples. Yet greater effort is required.

Marriage Matters

Marriage provides a host of benefits not only to children, but to men and women as well, including better physical and mental health and increased financial stability

Strong marriages are the foundation of a strong society. A new Harvard study by Raj Chetty and colleagues shows that children—even those from single-parent homes—have greater upward mobility if they are reared in a community with a larger proportion of married-parent families. 

Also, because marriage is associated with greater financial stability, married-parent families are less likely to depend on government welfare support. 

Roughly three-quarters—about $330 billion—of welfare spending on families with children goes to single-parent households. 

The fact that marriage is falling apart, and that it is particularly declining in lower-income communities, have serious consequences for individuals and society as a whole.

While marriage seems to be relatively stable among the highly educated (those with a college education or more), it is floundering in lower-income communities and, increasingly, in “middle America.” 

For a growing proportion of America, the dream of achieving a successful marriage remains only that: a dream. 

Among women with less than a high school diploma, 65 percent of births are to single mothers; among those with no more than a high school diploma, the rate is about 55 percent (42 percent among women with some college). 

In contrast, among college graduates, the rate is not much higher than the overall rate back in the 1960s: about 8 percent. 

According to my colleague Robert Rector at the Heritage Foundation, “The U.S. is steadily separating into a two-caste system with marriage and education as the dividing line.”

  • Educational Strategies for Adolescents and for Cohabiting, Engaged, or Married Couples ...
  • Initiatives by Schools, Communities, and State Governments ...
  • Improving Marriage and Relationship Education Programs ...

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Situación en que quedan los partidos políticos españoles tras las elecciones europeas del pasado fin de semana.


'Los partidos son cada vez menos portadores de ideas y más de intereses espurios'

por José María Gutiérrez Montero

Mikel Buesa analiza la situación en que quedan los partidos políticos españoles tras las elecciones europeas del pasado fin de semana.

  • ¿El resultado de las elecciones europeas es fruto de la crisis económica o de una crisis institucional?
Creo que el resultado de las elecciones europeas refleja ambos elementos. Por una parte, las consecuencias acumulativas de la crisis económica dan lugar a demandas de solución que ni el PP ni el PSOE han sabido administrar. Por otra, es evidente que España atraviesa por una crisis institucional que se expresa en la hipertrofia de sus Administraciones Públicas, en los excesos de gasto, los derroches y la corrupción. Todo esto ha producido una desafección de los ciudadanos con respecto a los principales partidos que, en las encuestas, supera el 50 por ciento del electorado tanto para el PP como para el PSOE. Es esa desafección la que explica el bajo nivel que alcanza el voto a dichos partidos en estas elecciones y la que concede una oportunidad a los partidos pequeños, sean emergentes o ya establecidos.

  • ¿Por qué tantos votantes del PP han dejado de votarlo?
Porque el PP no ofrece ni ideología (discurso político) ni empuje en el programa reformista. Porque ha contrariado los intereses de las clases medias con sus medidas fiscales. Porque no ha solucionado los problemas institucionales y más bien ha optado por una política lampedusiana, como por ejemplo en el tema judicial. Porque ha dejado a un lado el tema del aborto. Y porque frente a las demandas de cambio que le auparon al poder practica más bien lo que yo suelo denominar como la "pachorra conservadora".

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RITV Vidéo Huit centième anniversaire de saint Louis



  • Le huit centième anniversaire de la naissance de saint Louis est l'occasion de revenir sur un règne qui a façonné la France et la chrétienté. 
  • La sainteté du roi transparaît dans sa vie et frappe nos contemporains qui l'ont étudiée. 
  • Philippe de Villiers nous a donné un entretien remarquable qui montre une grande hauteur de vue et une profonde compréhension de la sainteté de Louis IX. 
  • Un très beau documentaire marqué par la grâce qui a touché toute l'Europe·

El aborto psíquico representa más del 97% de los abortos perpetrados en España


Los ‘puntos’ de Rajoy: asesinar al disminuido
 y dejar en el aire el aborto psíquico

por Eulogio López 

Aborto psíquico: ninguna mujer sufre depresiones 
por ser madre sino por matar a su hijo

Siguiendo los sesudos consejos del Consejo General del Poder Judicial (CGPJ), es decir, excusándose en las mamarrachadas del CGPJ, Mariano Rajoy, un hombre que siente pasión por la vida y, en general, por todo lo que le rodea, ha decidido modificar en algunos puntos la reforma del aborto.

Veamos: el texto de la reforma Gallardón tienedos puntos de esperanza -el resto del proyecto de ley es tragedia homicida-: el abortoeugenésico y, el más importante de todos: el aborto por peligro para la salud psíquica de la madre. Ya saben: doctor, si no aborto, puedo sufrir feroces depresiones. Cuando la realidad es al revés: se deprime cuando aborta, claramente, y queda marcada de por vida: en su cuerpo, en su mente y en su alma... o en las tres cosas a la vez.

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Leer más aquí: www.hispanidad.com



jueves, 29 de mayo de 2014

Massimo Franco contends the Holy Father is more orthodox than many of his critics believe.


Author Discusses 
‘The Vatican According to Francis’ 


by EDWARD PENTIN 




VATICAN CITY — What impact is a Latin-American pope having on a Roman Curia heavily influenced by Italians? Massimo Franco, a senior correspondent with Italy’s daily newspaper Corriere della Sera, shares his perspective in a new book called Il Vatican Secondo Francesco(The Vatican According to Francis).

Drawing on a number of high-level sources within the Vatican and Buenos Aires, Franco aims to show how Pope Francis’ vision of Catholicism is having a positive impact in the heart of the Vatican.

In an interview with the Register, the Italian author explains why he believes Francis has come to save the Roman Curia from “moral default” after recent scandals, how his attempts at Curial reform are faring and why he believes the Pope is more orthodox than many imagine.

Why did you decide to write this book?

My first motive was to give an analysis of the geopolitical change that occurred with the election of a Latin-American pope, because there has been a shift from Europe and Italy to Latin America. That means we have a sort of “colonization of the Vatican” by the Latin-American Church, which has been traditionally a land of mission for Europe and Italy.

Well, now, Europe is the missionary land — there has been a reversal. We now have a Latin American going to re-evangelize Europe and Italy, and his election is very telling about the shift of power from Europe and Rome and the Americas.

You also say in the book that the surprise isn’t that he’s the first Jesuit, or even the first Latin-American pope, but that he is a stranger to the mentality of the Roman Curia. Can you tell us what you mean by that?

I mean that the real novelty is not just that Francis is a Latin American, but he’s a complete outsider. One cannot explain his election without the resignation of Benedict XVI. That resignation signaled that all the positions were at ground zero in the Vatican, so at that point, even a Jesuit could become pope; even a Latin American could become pope. To put it in different terms, we see that the International Monetary Fund tends to save countries that are in financial disarray. In this case, we had a conclave that acted as a sort of international religious or Catholic fund called to save the Vatican from a “moral default.”

You said in your last book, three or four years ago, that you felt the Vatican was “imploding.”


Exactly, the problem is Rome.

Is Francis’ election putting a stop to that?

That was the intention of the cardinals. The conclave was a major defeat of European and Italian Catholicism, and what was quite clear in that conclave was they wanted a brand-new pope with a brand-new-mentality and new paradigms. I think the Pope is trying very hard to obtain results. I think he has gotten the Church on the international stage, but in the governance of the Vatican, the challenge is still there. He has not yet won.

You talk about a South-American model for that. What do you mean by this?

I mean a model in which popular religion is more important than rituals, power or relations with powerful people. It’s an approach that underlines a choice for the poorest and a more available kind of Catholic Church. This is the first major change.

The second is that it is a Church close to the people and with a majority [of the local population], while the European model is that of a Church surrounded by secularism, which is the minority and which tried to recover from a position of self-defense, while this pope is attacking [that secular mindset]. He’s not defending the Church [in a defensive way], because he knows he has behind him hundreds of millions of Catholics. Latin America has roughly half the total of Catholics of the world, so they feel much stronger.

And what is brand new is that Latin America, for the last five years, has reached a sort of unity among all the cardinals and bishops, which it hadn’t had before; so it is a very powerful force, which is joined by Northern and Central Americans and eventually by a part of the European episcopate and Asian and African episcopates.

As an Italian yourself, do you see him as attacking what is primarily an Italian way of doing things in the Curia, or is the Curia a separate culture altogether?


Yes, I think that what was quite clear during the conclave was that most foreign cardinals didn’t want an Italian pope. So this was de facto an anti-Italian conclave. Not by chance, some American cardinals defined some Italian cardinals as the poison-and-dagger lobby, which means that a very bad impression of the way Italians acted had pervaded the other episcopates.

Now, we’re seeing that this pope is choosing his advisers, his closest collaborators, maybe among the Italians, but not among Italians who were particularly powerful in the past. So they are all, in a way, outsiders. This is very telling and speaks volumes about the approach of this pope. And this is, of course, an opportunity and a risk, as well, because this pope doesn’t know very well the mechanisms of the Curia and how papal Rome works.

Some have said there’s resistance in the Curia. Do you know how the Curia generally sees him and whether that resistance is something he’ll not be able to overcome?

Yes, I think there are very strong and rooted resistances. I think there are many people in the Curia who think they must just wait and see what’s going to happen, and they hope this season will be over very soon. So they’re waiting and waiting for the Pope to commit some mistake, but so far, we have seen the Pope is winning.

Although some signals given in Rome — for a solution to the IOR, the Vatican Bank, for instance — have been quite contradictory. Because at the beginning, we understood that the Pope was going to close or reform radically the IOR. Now, we see the solution is much more a compromise.

What is your view of the Extraordinary Synod on Marriage and the Family and the Pope’s wish for open debate?

My impression is that this pope wants to follow processes but doesn’t want to impose an ideology and the truth [in a demanding way]. So his approach to problems is to make them emerge, to have a debate. But, from the point of view of doctrinal decisions, he hasn’t said that much so far. My impression is that, in the past months, he was depicted as a progressive pope, but my feeling is that, eventually, we’ll see that he’s more conservative than we think.

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Read more: www.ncregister.com



Many “so-called distributists” are hypocrites


WHY IS DISTRIBUTISM SO INTOLERABLE?

by Gregory Pine, O.P.


Arguments for Distributism have become predictable. Most include an historical homage to long established tradition: Look for mention of guilds, agrarian reform, and Aristotle’s theory of the polis. Catholic authors typically proceed to locate their claims in the magisterial teaching of modern Catholic Social Teaching: Look for mentions of Rerum novarum or any one of the subsequent encyclicals, which commemorate its anniversary (see here, p. 42ff.). Next, there are the literary sources, which can be mined for any number of bombastic or polemical gems.Chesterbelloc can always be depended upon to deal one’s opponent a good drubbing. And yet, the appeal to tradition, magisterial teachings, and some of the best contrarians of the age leave most unmoved.

This same disconnect between theory and practice is evident in the lives of distributists themselves. In short, many “so-called distributists” are hypocrites. While decrying the evils of modern technology and insistently re-proposing the perennial appeal of agrarian life, many distributists continue to avail themselves of all of modernity’s amenities and fail to take their principles to their conclusion. I count myself among these conflicted adherents. I extol the virtues of a simpler life and persist in a vocation that traditionally places me at the center of the world’s largest cities. Embarrassing. With the force of Aristotelian-Thomistic anthropology, a deeply felt pastoral nostalgia, and even “patron saints” of the movement like Fr. Vincent McNabb, O.P., how is it that these arguments wield such anemic purchase?

I think that discourse on the subject may suffer at times from a practical despair. To even mention the word may conjure the specter of Judas Iscariot and send the imagination to the very pit of hell. And yet, I am not here speaking of a spiritual, that is, volitional phenomenon, but rather what originates as a pre-volitional movement of the senses. I mean despair as a passion of the irascible appetite, namely, the movement of the sense appetite regarding a good not possessed and perceived as impossible to obtain, from which the soul flees. In short, distributism, while perhaps appearing to be a nice idea is widely perceived as simply impossible at a gut level. As a result, many have begun to develop an aversion and exasperation with its conclusions, its argumentation, and even its adherents.

Decaying states today are as dangerous as Napoleon's armies were 200 years ago.


The Lessons of 1814



A recent issue of the German historical magazine Geo Epoche interviewed Christopher Clark, author of the definitive diplomatic history of the events leading to World War I, The Sleepwalkers. In the interview, Dr. Clark said, “The world in which we now live is becoming ever more like that of 1914.”


Well, no and yes. We do not have two unequal power blocks—the Entente had three Great Powers; the Central Powers only one, Germany, plus a has-been and a wannabe, Austria-Hungary and ever-treacherous Italy—eyeing each other with apprehension. We do not live in a world where, thanks to the advantage conveyed by early mobilization, everyone’s military has a hair trigger. We do not have a major player whose strategic objective requires a war among the Great Powers, as France’s objective of retaking Alsace and Lorraine did then.

Yet there are parallels, too. We do see, in many countries including our own, foreign-policy establishments detached from reality and infected with hubris. We have tense situations similar to the one in the Balkans in 1914, including China’s claim to Japan’s Senkaku islands and, if Washington and the European Union are completely stupid in their reactions, Russia’s recovery of parts of Ukraine.

The greatest and most worrying parallel is that today as in 1914 key policy-making elites are thinking and acting within an outdated paradigm. Then, the obsolete paradigm was dynastic competition, especially that between the Houses of Hapsburg and Romanov; the new paradigm was set by the mortal threat posed to all Christian, conservative monarchies by the notion of popular sovereignty and Jacobinical definitions of human rights. By fighting each other instead of uniting against the left, three dynasties doomed themselves and possibly us as well. Western culture’s last chance of survival may have been a victory by the Central Powers in World War I.

Today, the obsolete paradigm is competition between states. It is for such competition that our foreign policies and armed services, and those of almost all other countries, are shaped. The new paradigm is the contest between the state system and the non-state forces of Fourth Generation war, forces that (often with America’s short-sighted help) are destroying one state after another and thriving in the resulting stateless chaos. Just as Hapsburgs, Hohenzollerns, and Romanovs did themselves in by clinging to an outdated paradigm, so the state system is doing now.

But there is another ’14 parallel, and it is one that offers conservatives hope. The parallel is to 1814, when conservatism won and, for a century, partially maintained a victory over the poisons unleashed by the French Revolution.

In 1814, the Sixth Coalition, whose core was Russia, Prussia, and Austria, militarily defeated Napoleon, forced him to abdicate, and restored legitimate government to France in the form of Louis XVIII. It then gathered for the Congress of Vienna, which authored not a brutal, punitive diktat like the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, but a peace that welcomed a restored France back into the Concert of Europe.

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Read more: www.theamericanconservative.com

Who is Francis, this pope? The answer is an anomaly. He’s a Jesuit with a Franciscan heart.


Without Gloss: Francis of Assisi 
and Western Catholicism

ARCHBISHOP CHARLES J. CHAPUT, O.F.M. CAP.

Editor’s note: The following essay was written for the “St. Francis of Assisi and the Western Tradition” conference sponsored by the Thomistic Institute and delivered at the NYU Catholic Center on April 25, 2014.

I want to start with a simple statement of fact. All Christian life is a paradox. What I mean is this.

In Isaiah 55, God says, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts [higher] than your thoughts” (8-9). Then in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells his disciples, “You therefore must be perfect, [even] as your heavenly Father is perfect” (5:48).

Scripture tells us that God is utterly different from us, vastly higher than us. Then it tells us to become like him. Therein lies the paradox. The task seems impossible. And yet we know it to be possible. We know it through the witness of the saints. In Hebrew, God is called hakadosh, “the Holy One,” with the word kadosh meaning holy. Our English word “saint” derives from the Latin word sanctus, which means the same thing: holy. Holy does not mean “good,” though holy people are always good and often—though not always—nice. St. Jerome was certainly holy and good, but “nice” might not be the first word that springs to mind in remembering him.

Holy means “other than.” It means different from the world; set apart from the profane; sacred. The saints are ordinary men and women—persons with every kind of talent, weakness and personality—who took a different path, one step at a time, away from the routine habits of the world. They fell in love with God. They followed him. They conformed their lives to him in simple ways that became extraordinary ways. And now their example and their intercession give us hope that we can do the same.

I mention all this because my job today is to talk about “St. Francis and Western Catholicism.” I’m a Capuchin Franciscan, so I’m happy to do that. But I want to do it by posing three questions: Who is Francis, this pope? Who was Francis, the man of Assisi? And after 800 years, what, if anything, can a man from the Middle Ages teach us about being alive and free and human?

So first: Who is Francis, this pope? The short answer is, I don’t know. I’m not sure anyone really knows yet, outside the Holy Father’s friends and close coworkers. A number of Latin American bishops have told me how different the Pope now seems from his years as a bishop in Argentina—much more outgoing and ebullient than they remember. But these are their thoughts, not mine. I did have the privilege of working with him for a month in November and December 1997 when we were both delegates to the Special Assembly for America in Rome. He was an impressive man. He had a keen intelligence, a healthy realism about the problems facing the Church in our hemisphere and a strong emphasis on evangelization. But these are just anecdotes from a long time ago.

I do think we can draw some conclusions from the example he already gives us. He has a deep sense of the continuity of the Church. The respect he shows to Benedict, the Pope Emeritus, literally has no precedent. And his affection for Benedict clearly comes from the heart. On Sunday, he’ll canonize two of his predecessors; the two greatest men of the Second Vatican Council—Pope John XXIII, who had the vision and courage to convene it; and Pope John Paul II, who helped draft some of its key documents and who embedded the meaning of Vatican II in the life of the post-conciliar Church.

John XXIII and John Paul II are perfectly paired in sainthood. In canonizing them together, Pope Francis places them as bookends to one of the central events in Catholic life since the Reformation. They were untiring in their discipleship. Zealous in their love of God and God’s people. And also thoroughly human in their complexity.

John XXIII saved Jews from the Holocaust as a Vatican diplomat. He radiated warmth, humor and a concern for peace. He worked a revolution in Catholic thought and life. And he also frowned on the worker-priest movement in France and forbade Catholics from voting for the Communist Party. John Paul II helped bring down the Soviet bloc. He worked vigorously for the purity of Catholic teaching. He defended the rights of workers, the suffering and the unborn. And he was also a profound shepherd of mercy—a message that runs through his whole pontificate, from his encyclical “Rich in Mercy” to his placing Divine Mercy Sunday on the universal Church calendar.

Pope Francis stands in this line of great recent popes. But in choosing the name “Francis,” he also makes himself distinct from it.

Until now, every pope of the last 200 years—no matter how gifted or how saintly—has been, in a sense, a prisoner of war. The Church has centered herself in Europe. Every pope in recent history has been a European. And the civil war for Europe’s soul that began before the Enlightenment and ran through the bloodiest century in history—the twentieth century—continues today in Europe’s denial of its Christian roots and its self-destroying battles over marriage, family, sexual identity and euthanasia.

Europe has exhausted itself. Europe has exhausted the world. And so, when John Paul II called for a “new evangelization,” maybe he spoke more prophetically than he could know. Maybe a genuinely new evangelization can never be achieved except by a new voice with a new spirit from a new world. Pope Francis is no stranger to poverty or violence, the plague of corrupt politics or the cruelty of human trafficking. But neither is he a child of the Old World, with its cynicism and despair, its wars and its hatreds.

Francis seems to be something different. He embodies a Christian spirit older than Europe’s civil war and younger than its fatigue and loss of hope. He’s a surprise; disarming, improbable, the kind of man no one could have predicted—a surprise that keeps unfolding into more surprises.

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The Supreme Court affirmed the constitutionality of opening legislative meetings with prayer



by Gerard V. Bradley


Justice Kennedy’s opinion in Greece v. Galloway is the Court’s best piece of Establishment Clause work in decades—and a happy omen for religious liberty in our country.


Earlier this month, the Supreme Court affirmed the constitutionality of opening legislative meetings with prayer. That outcome is no surprise; the smart bet has long been that the Court would uphold praying for lawmakers on the strength of its 1983 decision in Marsh v. Chambers. The Court’s five-to-four split is no surprise either, save to the few who thought that Justice Breyer might join the religion-friendly Justices Scalia, Alito, Thomas, Kennedy, and Chief Justice Roberts in the majority.

The surprise—and it is a big one—is that Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion did not stick to the reasoning of the more limited 1983 case. He did not equivocate or dither. Instead, Kennedy authored a bold and almost uniformly lucid opinion that secured a wide constitutional berth for robustly “sectarian” prayers. Kennedy’s opinion is the Court’s best piece of Establishment Clause work in decades—and a happy omen for religious liberty in our country.

Prayer vs. Ceremonial Verbiage


The recent case arose in Greece, New York, located just outside Rochester. For many years, the town council opened its monthly meetings with prayers by community religious leaders who were selected randomly from local congregations. An overwhelming majority of these prayer-givers were Christians, praying as Christians are wont to do: “in the name of Jesus,” “through Our Lord,” to “Our Heavenly Father,” by the “Holy Spirit,” and so on. This proportion was no surprise: the vast majority of Greece’s residents are Christians, as were all of the local religious congregations during the litigated period of time.

This vast preponderance was nonetheless the basis for the lower appellate court’s invalidation of the prayer practice and for the dissent of the four more liberal justices on the high Court. In their view, Greece endorsed Christianity in violation of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause.

But all of the justices in Greece v. Galloway agreed that they resolved a constitutional dispute concerning sincere invocations of divine blessings and assistance, heartfelt expressions of gratitude for previous blessings bestowed, and recognition of God’s continuing action in the world and everyone’s dependence upon it. All of them agreed that this was a case about prayer.

One might well ask: what is the alternative? Well, the Court has, on other occasions, labeled sacred verbiage “ceremonial deism.” The Pledge’s “Under God” and the Court’s own “God Save this Honorable Court” are examples of language that time and familiarity have—according to the Court—stripped of literal meaning and thus blanched of religious content. These expressions linger usefully because, in the Greece Court’s phrases, they “lend gravity to the occasion” and “reflect values long part of the Nation’s heritage.”

At one point in the Greece decision, Kennedy seems to equate legislative prayer with these phrases. The “reasonable observer” is, according to Kennedy, “presumed [to be] acquainted with this tradition and understands that its purposes are to lend gravity to public proceedings and to acknowledge the place religion holds in the lives of many private citizens”—as if the “prayer” only functioned to solemnize the occasion, merely acknowledging ambient private sentiment.

The great bulk of Greece’s descriptions of the town’s opening acts, however, leaves no doubt that the Court acted upon them as real prayers, “invo[cations of] divine guidance in town affairs.”

Praying the Truth

The Court preserved these prayers from practically all constitutional attacks, save when the public prayer organizers act in bad faith. “So long as the town maintains a policy of nondiscrimination, the Constitution does not require it to search beyond its borders for non-Christian prayer givers in an effort to achieve religious balancing.” “The content of the prayers is no concern,” according to the majority opinion, so long as there is no indication that “the prayer opportunity has been exploited to proselytize or advance any one, or to disparage any other, faith or belief.” An isolated “disparagement” will not suffice: “Absent a pattern of prayers that over time denigrate, proselytize, or betray an impermissible government purpose, a challenge based solely on the content of a prayer will not likely establish a constitutional violation” (emphases added).

What counts as “proselytizing” or “disparaging”? We know one thing that does not count, and it is a critical bit of information. In an opinion authored by former Yale Law Dean Guido Calebresi, the lower appellate court went so far as to warn Greece prayer-givers to “resist [the] temptation” to “convey their view of religious truth, and thereby run the risk of making others feel like outsiders.”

The alarming suggestion is that the only way to display respect and tolerance for others’ beliefs is for the prayer-giver to keep his real beliefs to himself or to offer them as one opinion among many others. But every religious tradition consists of a set of claims defining a particular view of reality, that is, of truth. Inviting religious believers into the public square, asking them to “pray,” and then telling them to avoid suggesting that they are speaking the truth from their hearts as they understand that truth to be, only promotes an artificial dialogue, a phony pluralism, and a platitudinous civil religion.

Greece v. Galloway could not have more resoundingly rejected this whole notion of self-censorship. The majority declared, “Once it invites prayer into the public sphere, government must permit a prayer giver to address his or her own God or gods as conscience dictates, unfettered by what an administrator or judge considers to be nonsectarian.” The purpose of the Establishment Clause is not to protect some empty civic ritual or politico-theological civil religion. Prayer-givers may speak from the heart (“conscience”) in sectarian terms. They may speak what they believe to be true.


Civil Society, Exclusion, and a “Mosaic” of Beliefs ...

The Nature of Coercion and No Sect-Preference ...


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