eChurch Blog

Associated Press

PRAGUE — Pope Benedict XVI criticized the communist era’s fierce religious persecution Saturday as he began a three-day pilgrimage to the Czech Republic, and urged the heavily secular nation to rediscover its Christian roots.

At a welcome ceremony at Prague’s Ruzyne International Airport, the 82-year-old pope spoke of how the communist regime, which was overthrown in 1989, ruthlessly persecuted the Roman Catholic Church.

“I join you and your neighbors in giving thanks for your liberation from these oppressive regimes,” Benedict said, hailing the collapse of the Berlin Wall two decades ago this autumn as “a watershed in world history.”

“Nevertheless, the cost of 40 years of political repression is not to be underestimated,” the pope said. “A particular tragedy for this land was the ruthless attempt by the government of that time to silence the voice of the church.”

“Now that religious freedom has been restored, I call upon all the citizens of this republic to rediscover the Christian traditions which have shaped their culture,” he added.

Scores of pilgrims poured into Prague for the nation’s first papal visit in a dozen years. But most Czechs seemed to shrug the trip off as irrelevant — and some were openly hostile.

“It’s just a waste of money,” said Kveta Tomasovicova, 56, who works at Prague’s National Library. “At a time of economic crisis, when our salaries are going down, the visit is a useless investment.”

Even the Vatican acknowledges the 13th foreign trip of Benedict’s papacy casts the pope as an apostle among the apostate.

Secularism is so ingrained in the modern Czech Republic that “the practice of religion is reduced to a minority,” said the pope’s spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi.

Even so, Czech organizers of the pope’s visit expect 100,000 faithful to pack an airfield for Sunday’s outdoor Mass in Brno — the highlight of the visit. Some were expected to make the trek from neighboring Austria and Poland.

Under communism, which ended with the 1989 Velvet Revolution that drew hundreds of thousands of Czechs to mostly nonviolent street protests, the church was brutally repressed.

The regime, which seized power in 1948 in what was then Czechoslovakia, confiscated all church-owned property and persecuted many priests. Churches were then allowed to function only under the state’s control and supervision.

An enduring symbol of that struggle is the 14th-century St. Vitus Cathedral, the iconic Gothic centerpiece of Prague’s medieval Hradcany Castle. Two decades after the collapse of communism, the church is still fighting to recover it from the government.

That bitter restitution battle has left a sour taste in the mouths of many Czechs. And some — claiming the church cares more about property than souls — have drifted away from the faith.

In 1991, 4.5 million of the country’s 10 million people said they belonged to a church. In 2001, a census showed that number had plunged to 3.3 million.

Recent surveys suggest the freewheeling drop continues. About one in two respondents to a poll conducted by the agency STEM said they don’t believe in God. Another 28 percent said they considered themselves believers, and 24 percent were undecided. The poll had a margin of error of 2.5 percentage points.

Moreover, the Czech Republic is one of the few nations in the world that has not ratified a standard treaty with the Vatican that spells out church-state relations.

“Czechs are getting less religious every year,” said Klara Kucerova, a resident of the southern city of Brno, where the pope will celebrate an open-air Mass on Sunday.

“They are more interested in horoscopes or other kinds of magical predictions,” she said.

Underscoring the hostility toward the church, a group calling itself Condom Positive planned to distribute condoms bearing a likeness of the pope wearing one on his head and the words: “Papa said no! And you?”

Another group, Condoms for the Pope, said it would inflate prophylactics to condemn Benedict’s assertion earlier this year that condoms are not the answer to Africa’s severe AIDS problem.

The pope’s position “clearly shows us that he is more interested in preserving dogma than saving the lives of African women, men and children,” it said in a statement.

At a stop Saturday at Prague’s Church of Our Lady of Victory, home to a revered statuette of the infant Jesus, the pope condemned violence and neglect against children.

“May children always be accorded the respect and attention that are due to them: They are the future and the hope of humanity!” he said.

The pope was to meet later with President Vaclav Klaus and other current and former leaders, including Vaclav Havel, the playwright-turned-president who led the 1989 anti-communist uprising.

After Sunday’s Mass in Brno, the pope returns to Prague to meet with local leaders of other religious faiths and with scholars at Prague’s castle.

On Monday, Benedict visits the basilica of St. Wenceslas — the nation’s patron saint — in the town of Stara Boleslav, a popular pilgrimage site just northeast of the capital. He then lunches with Czech bishops in Prague before returning to Rome.

Associated Press Writer Karel Janicek contributed to this report.

Cross post from the excellent Rosh Pina Project [Editors note: these guys (Messianic Jews) deserve all the support we can muster, get over to their blog and encourage them!]

Roi Ben-Yehuda, an Israeli writer who regularly contributes to Haaretz and France 24, has kindly linked to the Rosh Pina Project on his blog, where you can read a wide range of his articles on Jewish and Israeli society, and the Middle East conflict.

So much for “together forever – till death do us part”

By Rebecca Lefort – Telegraph

Resolution, a group of 5,700 lawyers, said there had been a large increase in people asking for a prenup in recent years, with the number doubling during the last year alone.

Pre-nups set out arrangements for what will happen to a couple’s assets and earnings if they divorce.

A series of high-profile break-ups, ending in huge settlements, have raised awareness of their role, reports the BBC.

David Allison, from Resolution, said: “There’s been a tenfold increase in ‘pre-nuts’. I’m doing considerably more now than I have ever done before and that experience is mirrored around the rest of the country.

“People are doing it because they want to be able to sort this stuff out now rather than later on.”

Celebrities who signed pre-nup agreements include Britney Spears and her ex-husband Kevin Federline, who reportedly got less than £1 million after their two-year marriage broke up.

High-profile couples Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, are also reported to have signed pre-nups which set out who gets what if they divorce.

Famous names who have faced large payouts after failing to sign watertight agreements include Sir Paul McCartney, who had to pay ex-wife Heather Mills around £30 million following their 2008 divorce, Harrison Ford, who gave former spouse Melissa Mathison £42.5 million, and Kevin Costner, whose ex-wife Cindy Silva got £40 million of his fortune.

Director Steven Spielberg thought he would be safe after signing a pre-nup before marrying Amy Irving in 1985, but reportedly a judge ruled it was invalid because it was written on a napkin, and she was awarded £50 million following their divorce in 1989.

Around 45 per cent of marriages in the UK end in divorce and while pre-nups agreements are still the exception rather than the rule, more are coming before the courts.

Currently the agreements are not legally enforceable in England and Wales, although courts will pay attention to them, but they are in Scotland, and the Law Commission has said it will consult on their use in England and Wales.

The Conservatives want to make them binding, like they are in many other European countries.

Henry Bellingham, the shadow justice minister, said: “We want to bring in a fairly wide-ranging divorce law reform bill and I’m very keen that part of it will include pre-nups and make them enforceable in law, subject to very strict safeguards.”

Melanie Phillips at the Spectator

As readers may know, I have had my differences with the American civil liberties lawyer Alan Dershowitz – specifically, over how American Jews can continue to support Barack Obama given his acute hostility towards Israel and appeasement of the Arab and Islamic world. Nonetheless, all credit to Dershowitz for mounting a devastating onslaught upon Richard Goldstone and his shocking travesty of justice masquerading as judicious analysis for the UN Human Rights Commission on Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza. In this piece, Dershowitz accuses Goldstone of conducting a ‘kangaroo court’ in which he

abandoned all principles of objectivity and neutral human rights.

And in this terrific piece he excoriates Goldstone’s ‘wilful and deliberate’ refusal to hear the other side of the story – Israel’s side: the most elementary precondition of justice and fairness. As I wrote here, the mandate Goldstone was given by the UN required him to be thus one-sided and unjust, singling out Israel alone for investigation and thus merely collecting the evidence to uphold the prior verdict of guilt – an utter negation of legal and ethical principles which he sought to conceal by presenting a dubiously revised version of his mandate which bestowed a veneer of even-handedness, while delivering precisely the rigged verdict that the UN had required of him. Dershowitz tears him to shreds by showing how he refused to take evidence from Col Richard Kemp, Britain’s former commander in Afghanistan who had previously stated that during Cast Lead Israel had behaved with globally unprecedented ethical care to avoid killing Palestinian civilians — evidence which would have holed below the water-line the blood-libel Goldstone was assembling from overwhelmingly partisan sources that Israel had deliberately targeted civilians.

Dershowitz has written countless powerful articles and books attacking the Israel-bashers. Yet his onslaught upon Goldstone has a different quality. It is a cry of anguish. He has clearly set out not just to destroy Goldstone’s report but to destroy Goldstone. Thus he states:

His name will forever be linked in infamy with such distorters of history and truth as Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein and Jimmy Carter.

The reason for this all-out attack is surely that Goldstone personally embodies the two most nightmarish, perplexing and agonising aspects of the witch-hunt against Israel: that a malevolent campaign based on bigotry, falsehoods and injustice marches mind-bendingly under the banner of ‘human rights’; and that so many of its leading proponents are Jews.

Goldstone is one of the most pre-eminent practitioners of ‘human rights’. A former judge of the South African Constitutional Court, he served as the chief prosecutor of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. If there is a high priest of the religion of ‘human rights’, Goldstone is it. And he is also a prominent Jew – indeed, according to his daughter, he is ‘a Zionist and loves Israel’.

That’s why, as Dershowitz says, his name invests the falsehoods in his report with credibility. But worse, far worse than that for Dershowitz, this report threatens to destroy the moral high ground of the whole ‘human rights’ culture.

That’s why he cries:

Every serious student of human rights should be appalled at this anti-human rights and highly politicized report… [Goldstone] no longer deserves the mantle of a human rights advocate. He has done more to destroy the credibility and objectivity of human rights than any credible human rights personage in modern times.

To save the reputation of ‘human rights’, Goldstone’s reputation has to be eviscerated and buried. But alas for Dershowitz, it’s not that simple. For Goldstone is not an aberration. Not just on Israel but on a host of other issues, ‘human rights’ has become an Orwellian synonym for an attack on human rights. It has become a judicial wrecking ball which is being deployed to shatter the fundamental principles of both western civilisation and national identity.

This is almost wholly obscured by the fact that it was western civilisation which produced the concept of human rights in the first place — the sacredness of human life, the equality of all people, the seminal importance of freedom, law and justice – and declared these to be universal principles. That’s why ‘human rights’ lawyers protest that their doctrine cannot possibly constitute an attack on western civilisation, because it is rooted in that civilisation’s own foundational principles.

The crucial point, however, is that these were not universal principles but – very different, this – culturally particular principles to be applied universally. They derived from a particular set of religious ethics which gave rise to western civilisation — principles promoted through Christianity but deriving from the Hebrew Bible. Without that Biblical moral underpinning, there can be no basis for freedom or equality or respect for life.

But modern ‘human rights’ culture effectively set out to sever those principles from their Biblical core. Arising from the contemporary cult of individuality which repudiates all external authority as unjustified constraints on self-actualisation, ‘human rights’ culture claimed that these ‘rights’ were indeed universal – principles that transcended all cultures and therefore laid claim to superseding them. It took the principle of ‘universality’ and radically dislocated it from the unique Biblical tradition from which such ethics had sprung. ‘Human rights’ thus became free-floating axioms, deriving from no higher authority than the vagaries of judicial assumptions, prejudices and whims.

In wrapping itself in the mantle of universality, ‘human rights’ culture became an explicit attack on the very notion of the particular. Religious tradition therefore was directly in its sights – particularly Christianity and the Hebrew Bible upon which it drew, even though these were the foundation of those rights. That’s why, for example, Christians are no longer allowed to uphold their belief that same–sex relationships are sinful; if they protest against same-sex adoptions, for example, on the grounds that a child has the right to a mother and a father figure, they are vilified as bigots and lose their professional position.

The rights of Christians count for nothing. As the beliefs of a particular, discrete tradition they are trumped by ‘universal rights’. And these are whatever ‘human rights’ lawyers deem them to be, through institutions such as’ human rights’ law or supra-national courts – such as the International Criminal Tribunals of which Judge Goldstone was such an ornament. This ‘transnational progressivism’ holds that the nation and the culture that made that nation must yield to the diktats of ‘universal’ principles – which are not universal at all but spring from the minds of western ‘human rights’ lawyers intent on promoting a secular agenda which kicks away all those tiresome Biblical constraints, to be replaced by their own formulae for controlling human behaviour.

Moreover, because ‘human rights’ is the legal engine of self-actualisation, it is also the legal engine of moral and cultural relativism – the doctrine that values are all subjective, that there can therefore be no hierarchy of values and that no culture can have superiority over any other culture. This turned ‘human rights’ into a battering ram against the very idea of a majority culture. So Christians – aka the west — could do no right while minorities — aka the Third World — could do no wrong.

Small wonder that Israel is such a target for so many ‘human rights’ practitioners. Israel is not only a nation (crime number one) but a nation whose existence is rooted in a religion (crime number two), a religion moreover which underpins the oppressive, imperialist, reactionary west (crime number three). Even though the Israeli judiciary is a temple to human rights, Israel is guilty of the original sin of particularity three times over.

That is why those Jewish ‘human rights’ lawyers who are supporters of Israel – and often passionately so – like to pretend that Israel’s undoubtedly stellar human rights record embodies principles which are ‘universal’ and have nothing to do with the religion of Judaism, upon whose more observant practitioners they tend to look with unalloyed horror and disdain. One wonders whether they would all still be supporters of Israel if it did not have such a record of judicial activism in the cause of liberal nostrums.

But these Jewish human rights lawyers are merely the mirror image of those from whom they recoil: those secular Jewish anti-Israel ‘human rights’ activists who make the false claim that the ‘universal’ principles they propound in order to damn Israel — doctrines which either bear no relation to or are the direct antithesis of those laid down in the Hebrew Bible and Jewish tradition –  constitute authentic Jewish ethics. The reason why these Jews are so prominent in the witch-hunt against Israel is that they are secular Jews who have signed up to the atheistic, left-wing project to destroy not only the religious foundations of the west but the very notion of cultural specificity – including their own — and who have detached human rights from those foundations in order to carry out that destruction.

The terrible thing, as Dershowitz says, is that as a prominent and distinguished Jewish human rights lawyer Goldstone is a lethal weapon in the hands of the Israel-bashers and Jew-haters. But the much more terrible and devastating thing – which Dershowitz does not say — is that in the person of the secular Jewish human rights lawyer, the Jewish people has in fact created its own nemesis.

by Joseph Puder

Few in the know doubt the fact that Iran has acquired the knowledge to produce an atomic bomb. Israeli intelligence is far more concerned with Iran’s pace of advancement towards making the bomb than American or European intelligence sources are. The question in Israel is no longer if Israel should eliminate the Iranian threat, but rather when.

The Netanyahu government is skeptical about the Obama administration’s ability to reverse Iran’s quest for a nuclear weapon. And Hillary Clinton’s statement about offering the Arab Gulf states a protective umbrella against an Iranian nuclear threat only intensified the Sunni Arab states’ skepticism over America’s capacity to stop the Iranians. In fact, in the Middle East, the Obama administration appears weak and indecisive and resigned to the reality of a nuclear Iran.

For several years now, a game of mutual intimidation has gone on between Israel and Iran. The Islamic Republic of Iran and its theocratic leadership advertised its successful testing of long-range missiles, while Israel responded with public shows of the long-range refueling capabilities of its aircraft. Iran acquired sophisticated anti-aircraft missiles to defend against aerial attacks and, in 2007, Israel responded with the destruction of the Syrian nuclear facility.

This back and forth “game” is serious. Both sides understand the consequences of a nuclear attack. Former Iranian President Rafsanjani has boasted that an Iranian attack would destroy Israel, and that an Israeli counterattack would create acceptable damage.

Rafsanjani’s point was obvious: Israel’s smallness makes it vulnerable to total destruction, whereas Iran’s huge size could easily overcome an Israeli attack.

The real issue, however, is not rooted solely in the impact of bombing by one side or the other. While an Iranian bombing of Israel might indeed devastate the Jewish state, it would not destroy it. And an Israeli counterpunch could do  much greater damage to Iran than anticipated by Rafsanjani.

Let us assume that the Israeli Air Force attacked the nuclear facilities spread throughout Iran and damaged or destroyed its capacity to produce a bomb for at least three to five years. It would certainly give Israel a respite and partial relief to its existential anxieties. What Israel cannot eliminate by attacking the Iranian nuclear facilities, however, is the know-how acquired by Iranian scientists. It would therefore become just a matter of time before the Iranians restore their nuclear capacity.

The consequences of an Israeli attack would doubtless be wide condemnation of the Jewish state in international forums, the UN in particular. More importantly, however, such a strike would solidify the mullahs’ control of Iran by appealing to the patriotism of all Iranians. It would force reformers and democrats who seek change to close ranks with the despised authoritarian regime.

As long as the regime of Ayatollah Khamenei and Ahmadinejad remains intact, bombing and destroying most of Iran’s nuclear facilities would at best only provide temporary relief. The cost of such bombing missions might be too prohibitive. Iran would unleash its dependencies — Syria, Hezbollah, and Hamas — against Israel’s population centers, with much greater damage to Israel’s civilian population than was caused by the Second Lebanon War of 2006.

Israel and the U.S. must focus on eliminating the current Iranian regime. The regime change should be undertaken by the oppressed minority groups within Iran who are currently combating the regime and its Revolutionary Guards. The persecuted and disaffected Iranian minorities (approximately 55 percent of Iran’s population), including many like the Ahwazi Arabs in the oil-rich Khuzestan region of southwestern Iran who are being forced off their lands by an ongoing campaign of ethnic cleansing, are ready to fight and die for their cause.

Military and financial support to the Ahwazi Arab rebels would increase the chances for the disablement of Iran’s oil producing capacity. As oil is the primary source of revenue for Iran, such action would create tremendous hardship for all Iranians, causing further domestic discontent and expediting regime change from within.

The largely Sunni Kurdish population has been fighting the oppressive regime of the ayatollahs for nearly thirty years and has made significant sacrifices of life and property in their attempt to attain, at the very least, their cultural and religious rights. The Kurds, who number around seven million strong out of Iran’s 70 million people, have inflicted significant damage on the Tehran regime. Moreover, the Kurdish area is also oil-rich. Providing the Kurdish rebels with weapons, training, and funds would result in a serious challenge to the Revolutionary Guards and to the regime’s survivability.

Last July, the Iranian theocracy hung 13 Baluchi students. The Sunni Baluch minority in Iran (four to five million strong), much like the Kurds, seeks self-determination for their people. The Kurds and Baluch are the only large nations in the Middle East without a sovereign national homeland. Like the Kurds (spread through Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey) the Baluch people demand an independent Baluchistan as the homeland for their people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran.

The Baluchis, Kurds, and Ahwazis are determined to bring change to Iran, and their passion for a rebellion will not subside anytime soon.

Azeris, the largest minority group, number over 20 million — approximately one-third of Iran’s population. Their mother tongue is Turkish, and they aspire to unite with their much better-off brethren in Azerbaijan. The Azeris have also been fighting the Tehran regime and demanding, at a minimum, their cultural autonomy. The recently held fraudulent elections in Iran and the huge anti-regime demonstrations that followed have further convinced these minority groups that the time is right for them to press on and continue their fight.

Once the fire is lit by coordinated attacks coming from all corners of Iran — in the north and northwest by Kurds and Azeris, in the south and the southeast by Baluchis and Ahwazi Arabs — and support from America and Israel, it would provide a backwind for the Persian reformers and democrats seeking a democratic, free, and fair Iran. Only in coordination with such a collective uprising against the mullah regime would the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities be effective and complete.

Joseph Puder, a freelance journalist, is the founder and executive director of the Interfaith Taskforce for America and Israel (ITAI).

Cross post from the most excellent Cranmer

Meet Dr Suhaib Hasan. He is one of the UK’s Sharia judges. He reminds us that Sharia means ‘the Islamic Law’ – ‘how to live according to the Muslim teachings’, to which he has devoted his life. He says: “I am a judge with the Islamic Sharia Council, which was set up in 1982 to guide the UK community on Islamic-related matters. All its scholars and judges are graduates of the Islamic universities throughout Muslim lands, or graduates from dar al uloom, the private institutions that teach Islam in India and Pakistan.”

He has lived in the UK since 1976. As a judge (qazi), he rules on legal issues that affect the daily lives of British Muslims, especially in the realms of finance, inheritance and divorce (which, he says, now constitutes the overwhelming majority of his work).

He says: “Normally the woman comes to us. This is for one simple reason: under British law both the man and woman have to apply to the court for a divorce. Under the Islamic system, the man may end the marriage if he thinks it right. It is preferable he does this in front of two witnesses, then it is a simple exercise to say: ‘I divorce you.’ The only thing we must ascertain is that he has given the dower (dowry) to the woman. This is a marriage gift from bridegroom to bride. Unless he has paid it, the man cannot get a divorce.

“When a woman applies, the process is called a khula divorce. If the husband agrees, the matter is settled, but if not, we invite both for an interview, and we do emphasise reconciliation. If she is seeking the divorce, she has to return the dower to him, if not, no divorce.”

Issues of custody raise particular problems, but (unlike English law), the Sharia stipulates that male children are permitted to choose between their mother or father at the age of seven. For female children, the age is 14 (when Islam deems them to be ‘responsible’).

Dr Hasan says he would like two further Sharia principles to be incorporated into ‘British law’: The first is the dower. The second is for the 12 existing Sharia councils to be recognised as mediation bodies and for the British courts to ‘enforce their decisions’. He reasons that this ‘would ease the pressure on the British legal system (because) at least one section of the community would be taking a little of the burden upon itself’.

Quite so, Dr Hasan. But what of Muslim women who are not content with your ability to ‘enforce’ rulings in which women are manifestly not treated as equal to me?

A very brave Muslim woman, Kavita Ramdya , has written in response:

Sir, I shudder to think of the repercussions for Muslim women if British law recognises decisions made by Sharia councils. Sharia law dictates that when a woman requests a divorce and the husband disagrees, the judge will “emphasise reconciliation” and “she has to return the dower to him”, whereas a man can divorce his wife by simply repeating “I divorce you” in front of two witnesses.

For Sharia judges to question a woman’s motives for divorce and pressure her socially and financially to remain in an unfulfilling and possibly dangerous marriage is antiquated at best and deadly at worst. Decisions made by Sharia councils have no room in British law.

The former Bishop of Rochester, Dr Michael Nazir Ali, has warned us of the regressive nature of Sharia law and its irreconcilability to the English system of jurispridence. One wonders whether the Archbishop of Canterbury would agree with Dr Hasan or Kavita Ramdya.

Who now has the ultimate authority to adjudicate between them?

From our friends at the Christian Peoples Alliance

Dear Friend,

Annual Consultative Assembly and AGM
Saturday 14th November 2009 1000am – 1600

Moulin House, 24/26 Mount Park Road Ealing – London W5 2RT

The venue is 5 mins walk from Ealing Broadway BR & Underground

After an exciting political year in which our party contested national elections for the first time, I am writing to invite you to contribute to the development of the Christian Peoples Alliance and the advance of Christian Democracy by coming to the Annual Consultative Assembly.

You will recall that in June, a quarter of a million people in Britain voted for a Christian vision of Europe by backing candidates from the Christian Peoples Alliance and our colleagues in The Christian Party. The Times newspaper said the joint ticket was among the “key winners” of the smaller parties. Will you join us in deciding the next steps? We want to hear from you and hear your views too.

A feedback session was held in June at our national office where activists from around England came together to plan ahead for next year’s parliamentary and local elections. This conference will be an important stage in that planning. Although there are 250,000 people voting for Christian Democratic policies, the CPA has insufficient paid up members! We rely on volunteers and the big challenge is to translate goodwill into proper organisation and a functioning office. The reality we face is that unprecedented numbers of people are looking for a political alternative to the big parties. The CPA stands for values of honesty and integrity. All that is required is for you and those like you in CPA to come forward and be the difference the public is seeking.

So please come and find out more. Perhaps you would like to meet other CPA supporters where you are? Or be a local or parliamentary candidate? We also have vacancies on the CPA Federal Council which decides vision and party policy. Full details available on the day or by writing to me at the office, or calling me on 07873 625396 or emailing press@cpaparty.org.uk

We are committed to hearing from members on what they think. You can also submit a resolution for debate at the conference. We of course value your prayers and any support by standing order that you can give. A donation of £20 per month will go a long way in helping us meet our campaign and election budgets for this coming year. For example, we need £500 per constituency for election deposits and more to send out election leaflets for maximum voter support. You can support us online by visiting:

http://www.cpaparty.org.uk/?page=help_support_us

Looking forward to seeing and meeting you on 14th November.

Yours for Christian Democracy

David Campanale
CPA President

PS We are looking for an intern to join our office in Canning Town in Newham. If you are interested in finding out more, please contact me through our website: Christian Peoples Alliance

Email alert from our friends at Christian Concern for our Nation

Public Sector ‘Equality Duty’ aims at ‘Culture Change’

Act now to stand by Christian organisations in your Community

Consultation closing date 30 September 2009 (for England)

Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED) in the Equality Bill is to be extended to cover age, pregnancy and maternity, sexual orientation, religion or belief, and gender reassignment.

CCFON objects in principle to the PSED extending to sexual orientation, religion or belief and gender reassignment, noting the threat to Christian Groups who will face a stark choice between eliminating the Christian element of their projects or services and being shut down for lack of vital public sector funding.

Under the proposed provisions public bodies such as local authorities, schools and health bodies will be able as part of their core business, to promote equality. As is so often the case, what is presented as tolerance and inclusiveness will in reality have the effect of shutting Christian groups out of publicly funded services.

Alarmingly, the proposals overtly state that the move is aimed at bringing about ‘culture change’.

Religious organisations are already facing local authority funding difficulties due to all- inclusive equality conditions.  Charities and religious organisations have had to consider taking “Church” or “Christian” out of their name to facilitate funding. We strongly oppose this and fear these new moves will only serve to deepen the problem.

Christian individuals, schools including faith schools and religious organisations should not be required to promote other religions or sexual orientations contrary to their beliefs.

Promotion is different from not discriminating and showing respect for diversity.

The consultation even proposes a ‘national equality standard’ to reward organisations that tick all the “culture change” Equality Award boxes. It can be assumed that holding this ‘national equality standard’ for suppliers will be a factor determining who receives public funding.

These moves threaten nothing less than the exclusion of Christianity from public services. Please raise your voice against these moves, which will result in a further erosion of our faith in our communities, hitting quality of services, parental choice and putting good Christian service providers out of business.

Please act by the 30 September using the simplified proforma reply on this vital issue.

To see the consultation and how to reply by the 30th of September 2009 click here:

http://www.equalities.gov.uk/default.aspx?page=1383

To see our response to this consultation (For England), click here.

For supporters who live in Wales:

Please see the following link:

http://wales.gov.uk/topics/equality/research/advanceequality/?lang=en

For supporters who live in Scotland:

Please see the following link:

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/consultations.

Many Christians accept Capitalism as broadly in line with biblical teaching. Its economic success appears to vindicate attribution of its origins to Christian theology. This confidence in Capitalism as the best available economic system has meant that Christians have failed to recognise that it is one of the main drivers of social and moral breakdown in Western societies. This paper will highlight five failings in the philosophical foundations and institutions of Corporate Capitalism, pointing to their devastating impact on families and communities, and how they bring about the growth of giant corporations and centralised state power. Christians need to search urgently for a new economic order based on biblical revelation. One such alternative will be set out in a future issue of Cambridge Papers.

READ THE FULL PAPER

PRAGUE — Pope Benedict XVI starts his three-day visit to the Czech Republic on Saturday with the hope of restoring faith in the largely secular ex-communist nation where religion was stifled for 40 years.

The head of the Roman Catholic Church arrives in Prague shortly before the 20th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, a peaceful coup that toppled Communist rule in former Czechoslovakia in 1989.

Religious belief was suppressed throughout the communist regime, which labelled the Church the people’s enemy, put priests under secret police surveillance and banned the Catholic press and Catholic associations.

But the fall of communism failed to bring a religious revival, and in 2001 almost six in ten Czechs said in a census they did not identify with any religion, up from 39 percent a decade earlier.

Meanwhile, the percentage of believers tumbled from 43.9 percent to 32.2 percent between 1991 and 2001.

“After going through the dramas of the past century, (the Czech Republic) needs, like the rest of the continent, to rediscover the reasons for faith and for hope,” Pope Benedict said during his Angelus service on Sunday.

In the Czech Republic, the pope is also due to discuss European themes, including the historic importance of Christianity and democracy in Europe, his spokesman Federico Lombardi said.

During his first visit to the Czech Republic as pope, Benedict XVI will visit the capital Prague, the south-eastern city of Brno, and Stara Boleslav just outside Prague.

In the Czech capital, Benedict XVI will first go to the Our Lady of Victory Church to donate a golden crown to the Infant Jesus of Prague (Bambino di Praga), a wax statuette worshipped since the 17th century.

The pope will then meet Czech politicians and serve an evening prayer at Prague’s St Vitus Cathedral before travelling to Brno where he will serve a Holy Mass for an expected crowd of 150,000 at an airport on Saturday.

The visit will symbolically end with a mass for an estimated 35,000 people in Stara Boleslav on Monday, which is the feast of St Wenceslas, the martyr and patron saint of the country who was murdered in the town on September 28, 935.