Wisdom, piety, humility, gentleness, intellectual rigour and faith in reason are all marks of this true German Shepherd

Why I will miss Benedict XVI

Monique David 

I will miss the insights Benedict offered during his weekly public audiences. Since 2005, I have read most of his Wednesday addresses and have always found them incisive, relevant and practical, bridging divine truths and earthly realities. There was always food for thought and I have often found myself cogitating on these ideas long after reading them. I have forwarded many audiences over the years to friends or colleagues who I thought could benefit from the wisdom they encapsulated. They offered lights for scanning one’s conscience and behaviour as well as original explanations of theological notions which entered into dialogue with the public square.

In his Ash Wednesday audience, for example, he described the nature of Christ’s temptations in light of our daily struggles, pointing out that “reflecting on the temptations undergone by Jesus in the desert is an invitation for each of us to answer a fundamental question: what is truly important in our lives?”

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Read more: www.mercatornet.com

Is Japan’s Population Decline Worse than Previously Thought?

Japanese politician suggests 

banning abortion to increase birthrates

Shannon Roberts

It is common knowledge that Japan is in more economic trouble than most as a result of its low birth rate, and it seems that Japanese politicians are taking the situation increasingly seriously. One Japanese politician has come up with a fairly commonsensible plan to increase the country’s ailing birth rate – ban abortions.

It is true that without the effect of so many abortions many countries’ birth rates would increase to at least replacement level. However it is surprising that the suggestion should surface first in Japan –a non-Christian, largely secular minded country. Blog “Japan Crush” reports Seiko Noda, a legislator in Japan’s House of Representatives who has worked on the birthrate issue for many years and served in several cabinet positions, as saying:

With 200,000 pregnancies being terminated per year, if we are to counteract the falling birthrate, then we must begin there. I intend to have this reviewed in the party’s Special Committee on Population Decline in Society following the Upper House elections. We will not only prohibit abortion, but instead of prohibition we must also create laws (to mediate) child adoption, and prepare an environment in which children who are born can be brought up in society.

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Read more: www.mercatornet.com

Is Japan’s Population Decline 

Worse than Previously Thought?

Marcus Roberts

That was my first question when I saw this semi-amusing story from the Daily Yomiuri Online.

The former Deputy Mayor of the town of Higashiura, in the Aichi Prefecture in Honshu, Japan has been arrested “on suspicion he deliberately padded the town's population data in the 2010 census.” 

The town was aiming to be upgraded to the administrative status of a city, a goal which requires a population of at least 50,000 citizens.

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 With Japan’s population declining (especially outside of the main urban areas) I would be very surprised if Higashiura ever made it to the magical 50,000 mark. I wonder if Mr Hideo Ogisu was of the same mind set and thought that the only way to boost his town’s population was to manipulate the figures?

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Read more: www.mercatornet.com

Pope Benedict XVI’s final public address is a testament to Christian faith, hope and love - especially love, the keynote of his pontificate

The Testament of the Wise Helmsman

Benedict XVI

The central passages of the last address of pope Joseph Ratzinger,

 Wednesday, February 27, 2013. 

"I no longer bear the authority of the office, but I remain within the enclosure of Saint Peter"

The central passages of the last address of Pope Joseph Ratzinger, delievered to a crowd of over 200,000 in St Peter’s Square, Wednesday, February 27, 2013.

Dear brothers and sisters [...] In this moment my spirit reaches out to the whole Church scattered throughout the world; and I give thanks to God for the “news” that during these years of the Petrine ministry I have been able to receive about the faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, and about the charity that circulates in the body of the Church and makes it live in love, and about the hope that opens us and orients us toward the fullness of life, toward our homeland in heaven. […]

At this moment there is in me a great trust, because I know, we all know, that the Word of life of the Gospel is the power of the Church, it is its life. The Gospel purifies and renews, it bears fruit, wherever the community of believers listens to it and welcomes the grace of God in truth and lives in charity. This is my trust, this is my joy.

When, on April 19 almost eight years ago, I agreed to assume the Petrine ministry, I held firm this certainty that has always accompanied me.

At that time, as I have already expressed repeatedly, the words that resounded in my heart were these: Lord, what are you asking of me, and why are you asking it of me? It is a great weight that you are placing on my shoulders, but if You are the one who is asking me, at your word I will cast out the nets, sure that you will guide me. And the Lord has truly guided me, he has been close to me, I have been able to perceive his presence every day.

It has been a segment of the journey of the Church that has had moments of joy and light, but also moments that have not been easy; I have felt like Saint Peter with the Apostles in the boat on the Sea of Galilee: the Lord has given us so many days of sun and of gentle breeze, days in which the fish have been abundant; there have also been moments in which the waters were agitated and the wind contrary, as in all the history of the Church, and the Lord seemed to be sleeping.

But I have always known that in that boat is the Lord, and I have always known that the barque of the Church is not mine, it is not ours, but it is his and he does not let it sink; it is he who pilots it, certainly also through the men whom he has chosen, because this is how he has wanted it. This has been and is a certitude that nothing can obscure. And it is for this reason that today my heart is full of thanksgiving to God that he has never deprived the whole Church and me as well of his consolation, his light, his love.

We are in the Year of Faith, which I wanted in order to reinforce precisely our faith in God in a context that seems to put him ever more in the background. I would like to invite all of us to renew our firm trust in the Lord, to entrust ourselves like children into the arms of God, certain that those arms support us always and are that which permits us to walk every day even in weariness. I would like that each one of us should feel loved by that God who has given his Son for us and has demonstrated to us his love without limit. I would like that each one should feel the joy of being Christian.

In a beautiful prayer to be recited every day in the morning it says: “I adore you, my God, and I love you with all my heart. I thank you for having created me, made me Christian..." Yes, we are content with the gift of faith; it is the most precious good, which no one can take away from us! Let us thank the Lord for this every day, with prayer and with a consistent Christian life. God loves us, but he is waiting for us to love him too! [...]

In these last months I have felt that my powers were diminished, and I asked God with insistence, in prayer, to illuminate me with his light in order to help me make the best decision not for my own good, but for the good of the Church. I have taken this step in full awareness of its gravity and also of its novelty, but with a profound serenity of spirit. Loving the Church also means having the courage to make difficult and painful decisions, keeping always in view the good of the Church and not of oneself.

Allow me here to return once again to April 19, 2005. The gravity of the decision has lain precisely also in the fact that from that moment on, I was engaged always and forever by the Lord. Always: the one who assumes the Petrine ministry no longer has any privacy. He belongs always and completely to all, to the whole Church. His life is, so to speak, completely stripped of the private dimension. I have been able to experience, and I am experimenting it right now, that one receives life precisely in giving it away. Before I have said that many persons who love the Lord also love the successor of Saint Peter and are fond of him; that the pope truly has brothers and sisters, sons and daughters all over the world, and that he feels secure in the embrace of their communion; because he no longer belongs to himself, he belongs to all and all belong to him.

The “always" is also a “forever”: there is no more returning to the private. My decision to resign from the active exercise of the ministry does not revoke this. I am not returning to private life, to a life of travel, meetings, receptions, conferences etc. I am not abandoning the cross, but I remain in a new way with the crucified Lord. I no longer bear the authority of office for the governance of the Church, but in the service of prayer I remain, so to speak, within the enclosure of Saint Peter. St. Benedict, whose name I bear as pope, will be a great example for me in this. He showed us the way to a life that, active or passive, belongs completely to the work of God.

I thank all and each one also for the respect and understanding with which you have received this very important decision. I will continue to accompany the journey of the Church with prayer and reflection, with that dedication to the Lord and to his Bride which I have sought to live every day until now and which I want to live always.

I ask you to remember me before God, and above all to pray for the cardinals called to such a significant task, and for the new successor of the apostle Peter: may the Lord accompany him with the light and strength of his spirit. [...]







Read more chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it

UK - Britain will pay the price for its 1970s-style war on the energy companies and banks. Who will finance the new power stations?

Profit has become a dirty word 

when it comes to fuel and banks

By Jeremy Warner

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Yet to go this route ignores the lessons of the past. Rewind to the 1970s again, and you find a publicly owned utilities sector that was profoundly more starved of investment than the privately owned one today. This was particularly the case with the water industry, but it was also partially true of gas and electricity. Publicly owned utilities were treated like milch cows by a revenue-hungry Treasury, and suffered accordingly.

Privatisation drove huge gains in efficiency and has helped deliver some of the lowest gas and electricity prices in Europe. If turning back the clock is what fires you up, then yes indeed, let’s reverse 30 years of Thatcherite reform. Just don’t expect a more prosperous economy as a result.


Read more: www.telegraph.co.uk

UK - It is certainly the case that, for all the austerity rhetoric, public spending continues to spiral upward.

Britain's credit downgrade is a call 

to live within our means

By Liam Halligan

So Moody’s has downgraded the UK. This country’s sovereign debt has dropped one notch from AAA, the lowest possible credit risk, to AA1. For the first time since 1978, Britain has lost its triple-A rating.

The markets saw this coming. All three major credit ratings agencies – the others being Standard & Poor’s and Fitch – have had the UK on “negative outlook” for some time, suggesting a downgrade would follow if the economy deteriorated further. Well, GDP contracted by 0.3pc during the last three months of 2012, we learned a few weeks ago, as Britain flirts with a triple-dip recession.
Little wonder that the Moody’s downgrade notice issued on Fridaynight pointed to “continuing weakness in the UK’s medium-term growth outlook”.
The Government’s fiscal consolidation programme faces significant “challenges”, the agency noted, with our huge public-sector debts “unlikely to reverse before 2016”. Again, this is nothing financial analysts didn’t already know.
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Read more: www.telegraph.co.uk

Pologne - les deux chaînes de la télévision publique faisaient campagne pour les revendications les plus extrémistes des milieux LGBT

Rejet du PaCS par les députés polonais : 

les «élites» contre-attaquent

par Eric Martin 

Après l’échec en janvier de la tentative du gouvernement du libéral Donald Tusk d’imposer aux Polonais des unions civiles ouvertes aux couples homosexuels sur le modèle du PaCS français (notre article), les « élites » politico-médiatiques contre-attaquent. 

Mardi soir, les deux chaînes de la télévision publique faisaient campagne pour les revendications les plus extrémistes des milieux LGBT militants : la 1ère chaîne diffusait un documentaire sur une famille britannique où des enfants vivent heureux et équilibrés avec deux papas dont un « enceint ». 

Oui, « enceint », grâce aux avancées de la médecine il portait un bébé et lui-même et son entourage se comportaient comme s’il s’agissait d’une grossesse tout à fait naturelle. 

Le papa « enceint » s’est rendu à l’hôpital quand il a commencé à perdre ses eaux (sic) et la caméra observait ses contractions. Rien de plus normal, quoi. 

Pendant ce temps la 2e chaîne avait organisé un « débat » où le journaliste et 2 invités sur 3 étaient tous favorables au « mariage », à l’adoption, à la PMA et à la GPA pour les homosexuels. Le 3e invité était un prêtre catholique puisque, tout le monde le sait, seuls les catholiques sont suffisamment arriérés pour s’opposer encore à cet inéluctable progrès.
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Anna Grodzka

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Grodzka

Anna Grodzka (born 16 March 1954 in Otwock) is a Polish politician. Grodzka was elected to the Sejm in the 2011 Polish parliamentary elections as a candidate for the left-liberal Palikot's Movement. She is the first transsexual Member of Parliament in European history.[1]

Born in 1954 as Krzysztof Bęgowski,[2][3][4][5] she underwent male-to-female sex reassignment surgery in 2010. She was an entrepreneur and worked in publishing, poligraphy and filmmaking.

Grodzka is currently the only transgender MP in the world. She is the second transsexual MP in world history after the transsexual New Zealand MP Georgina Beyer, and the third transgender MP after Beyer and the transgender Italian MP,Vladimir Luxuria.[6]

Lire ici: www.ndf.fr

Sobre cómo los estilos y líneas editoriales se convierten en varas de medir distintas al momento de hablar de las personas y de las instituciones

Obama y Benedicto XVI: dos modos diversos

(e injustos) de medir por parte de la prensa

Jorge Enrique Mújica, LC

A propósito de un artículo publicado enThe New York Times sobre el discurso del presidente Obama respecto al estado de la nación (el tradicional “reporte” que el presidente de la Unión Americana rinde anualmente para decir cómo está su país), Diego Contreras comentaba el estilo reverencial del periódico más conocido de Estados Unidos al hablar de Barack Obama. Lo hacía retomando las observaciones de James Taranto, en The Wall Street Journal, quien se tomó la molestia de poner en contraste el modo como se suele referir The New York Times al Papa Benedicto XVI y la manera como lo hace respecto a Obama.

Con su observación, Diego Contreras quiere resaltar «un fenómeno que se repite con insistencia: para muchos, la piedra de toque del papado, de la elección del nuevo Papa y del mismo futuro del cristianismo, se reduce a los tres o cuatro temas de siempre, todos de trasfondo sexual». Y añade:

Se lee, por ejemplo, en una de esas crónicas: “La dimisión establece una lucha entre los más acérrimos conservadores, siguiendo el molde de Benedicto XVI, que abogan por una iglesia más pequeña integrada por creyentes más fervientes, y los que creen que la iglesia puede ampliar su atractivo en formas pequeñas pero significativas”.Entre ellas formas está el uso del preservativo, cambios en el celibato sacerdotal y –según los casos-, tema homosexual y ordenación de mujeres.

Se filtra y se juzga la actividad, finalidad y naturaleza de una institución (la Iglesia católica) con lo que podríamos llamar los dogmas de la agenda del radicalismo-chic, de los que el diario (y no solo) es un prestigioso representante. Eso es todo el horizonte que se ofrece. No niego el derecho de tener un propio punto de vista. Lo que me parece necesario es reconocerlo. Porque aquí ocurre como con la fotografía: no todos los filtros funcionan bien con todos los sujetos o paisajes.

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Leer aquí: www.religionenlibertad.com