Sunday, February 28, 2010

U.K. Commons Passes Sex-Ed Bill Forcing Schools to Promote Homosexuality, Abortion- Head of Catholic bishops’conference and the Catholic Education Service thanked for supporting bill

http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2010/feb/10022403.html


By Hilary White

LONDON, February 24, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The House of Commons voted 68 to 177 last night to pass third reading of the government’s sex-education bill in a vote that pro-life and pro-family advocates have called “deplorable.”

Under the bill, schools, both religious and secular, will be required to give children information on homosexual relationships as well as artificial contraception and abortion. The government has confirmed that these programs will specifically include information for children on how to obtain abortions and contraceptives.

Under current rules, parents have the right to withdraw their child from sex and relationship education (SRE) classes up until the age of 19. But the bill will lower that to 15, ensuring that students receive at least one year of sex-education. The BBC notes that currently, only 0.04 per cent of parents use the opt-out.

The bill now goes to the House of Lords.

While the bill has been called “controversial,” the controversy in the media has focused on a promise made by the government, with an amendment, that religious schools could teach the new sex-ed curriculum according to their religious “ethos.”

After an outcry by the homosexualist lobby and secular humanist organizations, the bill’s principle supporters, the government quickly backpedalled, assuring the public that the amendment was not an opt-out for faith schools.

This week, while his department issued a public statement to confirm, Children’s Minister Ed Balls told media that the amendment will not change the requirement of Catholic and Anglican schools to promote abortion, contraception, “civil partnerships” and homosexuality as “normal and harmless.”

Even with the amendment, Balls told the BBC, religious schools “must explain civil partnership. They must give a balanced view on abortion, they must give both sides of the argument, they must explain how to access an abortion, the same is true on contraception as well.”

The BBC reports that with 1/3 of Britain’s schools being faith schools, the government is aware that the support and cooperation of both the Church of England and the Catholic Church is crucial to the success of the programs.

This support has been assured by the Catholic Education Service (CES), which helped draft the bill and has defended it against criticisms from parent groups and pro-family advocates. CES claimed credit for the tabling of the faith schools amendment that pro-life and family groups have called “worthless” and Ed Balls himself said would change nothing.

On a BBC radio program Balls specifically thanked Archbishop Vincent Nichols of Westminster, the head of the Catholic bishops’ conference of England and Wales, and the Catholic Education Service for their support of his bill.

“To have the support of the Catholic Church and Archbishop Nichols in these changes is, I think, very, very important, is a huge step forward.”

Paul Tully, general secretary of the Society for the Protection of Unborn children, which has lobbied heavily against the bill, said last night, “This is a dire result for school-children and for unborn children who are in the firing-line of this bill.”

Tully said that Balls had made it clear that the government’s intention was to force all schools, regardless of religious “ethos,” to teach children how to use and where to obtain birth control and abortions.

“These are the key ‘advertising’ messages that the pro-abortion lobby is fighting to have promoted throughout the education system – where children can be influenced and corrupted without parental guidance or protection.”

SPUC has been heavily critical of the involvement of CES, saying that the bishops’ education group has been complicit in creating anti-life and anti-Catholic legislation, that will usher in a new “totalitarianism,” suppressing religious freedoms.

Greg Hurst, writing in the opinion pages of the Times, added that the sex-education bill was all about boosting Labour’s reputation in time for the upcoming general elections, in which Gordon Brown’s Labour party is widely expected to lose. The point of such legislation, Hurst wrote today, is to continue the already massive socialist re-adjustment of Britain.

“Labour politicians want to entrench a change in social attitudes regardless of who wins. Leaving behind a more liberal Britain would be part of Labour’s legacy of achievements. If there were to be a change of government, their successors would have to live with such changes or risk looking reactionary by unpicking them one by one.”

A media release from the Department of Children Schools and Families (DCF) described the kind of cooperation that is expected from Britain’s faith schools, citing a Catholic school in Bedford as a good example.

St. Thomas More school, the DCF said, has developed a “successful balance” between the “faith ethos” and the sex education curriculum. The school teaches that restricting sex to marriage is “the ideal” but it “explicitly recognises the reality that some young people may choose to be sexually active” and will need contraception and abortion.

“The school nurse provides students with clear accurate information” on contraception and “details of local services.” These include “pregnancy options” that include abortion, which is “discussed in a non-judgemental way.”

Paul Tully remarked, “Many people will be especially appalled that both the National Society of the Church of England and the education service of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference have endorsed the provisions of the bill. Mr. Balls made much of the support for the bill by Archbishop Nichols, and we have called upon the Archbishop, and other faith leaders to reconsider their support even at this late stage.”


To contact the Department of Catholic Education and Formation
Catholic Bishops' Conference of England & Wales:
39 Eccleston Square
LONDON SW1V 1BX
Tel: 020 7901 4829
Fax: 020 7901 4821
Email: grace.applewaithe@cbcew.org.uk

Sunday, February 21, 2010

Come clean on Pius XII

(From the Jerusalem Post)

"Pope Benedict XVI’s intention to elevate his World War II-era predecessor, Pope Pius XII, to sainthood has inexorably revived the polemic about whether Pius turned a blind eye to the Holocaust. In a transparent effort to calm the controversy it itself has recharged, the Vatican announced last week that it will soon make some of its WWII archives available on the Internet. The Holy See’s semi-official newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, claimed this will “render service to the historic truth.”

But will it? Odds are that this will be a hi-tech rerun of what occurred in 1999. To counter British author John Cornwell’s book Hitler’s Pope, the Vatican appointed a panel – the International Catholic-Jewish Historical Commission – to go over material kept zealously concealed from public scrutiny. Yet even this handpicked and specifically approved panel was denied full access. Only pre-1923 papers were made available. In reaction, the commission suspended its work in 2001, after producing no findings on the papacy during the Holocaust.

This time, too, it is already being indicated that of the 8,000 pages to be uploaded, none will directly relate to the wartime pope and that only in another five to six years will anything pertaining to Pius see light. Such promises for future lifting of secrecy have been made periodically over the years, and each time the target date is further postponed.

This automatically revives abiding questions about the ongoing concealment. It’s almost 65 years since WWII ended. One would reasonably assume that any remote pretext for refusing full disclosure has long since evaporated. The very fact that such records are still being kept under wraps, indeed, only intensifies suspicion that they are damning. Otherwise, surely, the Vatican would wish to eliminate suspicion rather than amplify it.

Pius is accused both by Jews and non-Jews of having betrayed the Jews during their darkest hours. Had he so much as cautioned devout Catholics throughout Europe that annihilating Jews is sinful, it is argued, more might have been rescued.



CORNWELL, A committed Catholic and one-time candidate for the priesthood, aimed to prove Pius’s innocence. He was therefore allowed to peruse parts of the secret Vatican archives. Following exhaustive research, Cornwell recounted, “by the middle of 1997 I was in a state of moral shock. The material I had gathered amounted not to an exoneration but to an indictment... The evidence was explosive.”

Cornwell said it showed Pius “was patently, and by the proof of his own words, anti-Jewish. It revealed that he had helped Hitler to power and at the same time undermined potential Catholic resistance in Germany. It showed that he had implicitly denied and trivialized the Holocaust, despite having reliable knowledge of its true extent. And, worse, that he was a hypocrite, for after the war he had retrospectively taken undue credit for speaking out boldly against the Nazi persecution of the Jews.”

Indeed, postwar – obviously free of Fascist and Third Reich intimidation – Vatican City and extraterritorial buildings in Rome became protective semi-official asylums for numerous wanted war-criminals. The exodus to Arab destinations and the Americas of Nazis and their collaborators would have been impossible were the highest Vatican echelons genuinely faultless or clueless.



ALL OF this underscores our misgivings about the Vatican’s routine but never-kept pledges to reveal pertinent documents at later dates.

Is the object merely to deflect criticism and win time? Is the Vatican’s latest move geared to relieve pressure as it proceeds to beatify Pius XII?

Posting on the Internet documents that do not relate to the main issue of contention appears aimed at creating a false impression of cooperation and openness.

We can only hope the pontiff pays attention to 18 top Catholic scholars from America, Germany and Australia, who in a heartfelt letter last week urged him to delay canonizing Pius XII because, with Vatican archives under lock and key, “currently, existing research leads us to the view that Pope Pius XII did not issue a clearly worded statement, unconditionally condemning the wholesale slaughter and murder of European Jews.”

This is the crux of the matter. All the rest is smoke and mirrors."

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Irish victims slam talks in Vatican 'Insulting to survivors' of child abuse, critic says

ReutersFebruary 18, 2010

Irish victims of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy yesterday condemned the outcome of a two-day Vatican meeting on a series of scandals that have rocked the mainly Catholic country.

Pope Benedict XVI urged 24 of Ireland's bishops to restore the church's "spiritual and moral credibility" at the end of the meeting on Tuesday.

The pope called child abuse a "heinous crime" and a "grave sin" and the meeting recognized that the "grave crisis" had led to a breakdown in trust in the church's leadership.

But Fiona Neary, executive director of Ireland's Rape Crisis Network, expressed "deep disappointment" at the tone of the meeting, describing it as an "opportunity wasted."

"It is shocking to the rape crisis sector that the systemic failures of the institutions of the Catholic faith are not mentioned as being a significant contributory factor in the sexual abuse of minors," she said.

"It is clear that the most senior levels of Catholic institutions remain unable to take responsibility for their collusion with the abuse of children in Ireland."

Maeve Lewis, executive director of the One in Four group, said expectations for the meeting had been high but little progress appeared to have been made.

"The Vatican has accepted no responsibility for its role in facilitating the sexual abuse of children, referring only to the Irish church, and only vague declarations of intent for the future are included.

"It is deeply insulting to survivors to suggest that they were abused due to failures of faith, rather than because sex offending priests were moved from parish to parish, and those in authority looked away while further children were sexually abused," Lewis said.

Leading anti-abuse campaigner Andrew Madden said the meeting had offered "nothing intelligent, nothing coherent, nothing new."

He said submissions from victims' groups had been ignored by the Vatican and he would ask Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin why he had come back from Rome "empty-handed."


Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Irish+victims+slam+talks+Vatican/2578780/story.html#ixzz0fvnAgbuz

More Smokescreens and Whitewash in regards to "Hitler's Pope" during WW2

"Series from Vatican secret archives on Pius XII going digital"

New York City, N.Y., Feb 17, 2010 / 03:03 am (CNA).- In cooperation with the Vatican, the Pave the Way Foundation will soon publish online twelve volumes of World War II documents from the Holy See during the time of Pope Pius XII. The documents have been “almost completely ignored” until now, the organization's founder told CNA.

The Pave the Way Foundation is a non-profit group founded by Gary Krupp, which seeks to promote inter-religious dialogue and reduce religious conflict. A major focus of the organization is to vindicate Pope Pius XII from false accusations surrounding his papacy. Many have claimed that the late pontiff did nothing to assist European Jews during the Holocaust.

article continues below

(The person Gary Krupp is a Knight of the EQUESTRIAN ORDER of Saint Gregory the Great and a traitor to the truth and the world, and especially a traitor to the Jewish people. Here is the TRUTH regarding the Papacy during WW2)



Article Continues...

Speaking on the significance of the documents, Krupp, who is Jewish, explained to CNA how the accusations against Pope Pius XII surfaced. In 1963 a play called “The Deputy” by Rolf Hochhuth debuted in Europe which denounced Pope Pius XII and claimed that he failed to take any action in speaking out against the Holocaust.

Although “everybody condemned” the play at the time, including Israeli and Jewish leaders around the world, it nevertheless “caught on and started changing the entire impression of Pope Pius XII,” said Krupp.


Krupp continued to say that “in an effort to correct some of this misinformation, Pope Paul VI ordered three Jesuits to study, to go into the papacy of Pius XII, into those archives, and to pull out every significant document they could find.” Krupp said that the Jesuits described the documents, copied them and eventually published them in a series of twelve books.


“The twelve books, called the 'Acts of the Holy See during the Second World War' were published in 1981 and have been almost completely ignored internationally,” noted Krupp. “In fact, there were only a few hundred that were ever printed.”

“By digitizing the entire collection,” he explained, “we are enabling it to be spread all over the world so people all over the world can look at it and come to their own conclusions.”

A recent article from the Agence France Presse (AFP), claimed that although the volumes contain information relevant to WWII, they are “unrelated” to Pope Pius XII.

When asked about this, Krupp responded, “this type of thinking comes from people who have no idea how the Vatican works. It's as simple as that.”

Krupp explained that as an example of this, one could look and see how few documents are actually signed by Pope Benedict XVI but are rather endorsed by various Vatican officials. In other words, he said, just because Pius XII's name may not be signed on a document, does not by any means indicate he had no relation to it.

Krupp told CNA that the volumes will be posted on his website as well as the Vatican's within the next few weeks.

=======================================================

According to Pave the Way Foundation’s brochure, “Being a trusted member of the Papal household has enabled him [Krupp] to act as a catalyst in initiating changes and eliminating many obstacles to the furtherance of Judeo-Christian relations. Gary has also been invested, by permission of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, as an Officer Brother in the Anglican Order of St. John.”

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