Notes: Tuesday, February 7-Monday, February 27, 2012 (part 2 of 2)

9. Dr. Weigel on, among other things, the teachings of Leo XIII. and Fr. Murray on religious liberty and Church-State relations

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/291455/catholic-betrayal-religious-freedom-george-weigel

(That came to my attention via this AQ post.)

Labels: Church and State, Confessional State, George Weigel, John Murray, Leo XIII. Pecci, religious liberty

10. "WEL[, the Women's Electoral Lobby,] took over the Family Planning Association [in or before 1972]"

http://www.smh.com.au/national/obituaries/longserving-on-front-line-for-womens-rights-20120215-1t67c.html?skin=text-only

Family Planning NSW is now, according to this web-page at its website, an independent organisation, however.

Labels: F.P.A., W.E.L.

11. "The Holy See and Her Majesty’s Government agreed on the urgent need for action to strengthen the universal commitment to religious freedom as a fundamental human right, and to its practical application with a view to promoting respect for all religions in all countries. The Holy See and the British government look forward to working together to combat intolerance and discrimination based on religion, wherever it is manifest."

http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/secretariat_state/2012/documents/rc_seg-st_20120215_comunicato_en.html

http://ukinholysee.fco.gov.uk/en/news/?id=729615482&view=News

"HOLY SEE AND UK GOVERNMENT, UNITED IN THE STRUGGLE FOR RELIGIOUS FREEDOM"
http://www.news.va/en/news/holy-see-and-uk-government-united-in-the-struggle-

http://angelqueen.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=432399#432399

Labels: Diocese of Rome, religious liberty, Roman Curia, U.K.

12. "CFN Launches New Web Page!"

http://angelqueen.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=40567

Labels: C.F.N.

13. That Atheist straw man again

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/last-post-january-25/story-fn558imw-1226252815530
(the contribution from one Brian D. Lee)

Labels: atheism

14. "Advocates of President Obama’s contraception mandate should admit that its main purpose is sexual liberation and not “women’s health,” according to a feminist author[, viz., Dr. Pamela Haag,] who supports the mandate"

http://wdtprs.com/blog/2012/02/free-contraception-is-good-for-big-business-abortion/

Dr. Haag's essay is available here.

Labels: contraception

Reginaldvs Cantvar
27.II.2012

Notes: Tuesday, September 27-Tuesday, October 4, 2011 (part 1 of 2)

1. "British Muslims reviving polygamy"

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/british-muslim-reviving-polygamy/story-e6frg6so-1226147865652

Labels: Islam, polyamory

2. "E[very] child should take a citizenship pledge at school, and all Australians should know the pledge by heart, the Social Inclusion Minister, Tanya Plibersek, said last night"

http://www.smh.com.au/national/my-oath-citizens-should-know-it-says-minister-20110927-1kvib.html?skin=text-only

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/love-of-australia-is-about-more-than-lifestyle-20110928-1kwfd.html?skin=text-only

Labels: liberalism, secularism

3. H.H. The Pope implicitly criticises the arrangements of union between Church and State which existed in history's Catholic Confessional States?

Excerpts from an item in a recent edition of the Vatican Information Service's daily e-mail bulletin:

IT IS TIME FOR THE CHURCH TO SET ASIDE HER WORLDLINESS

VATICAN CITY, 25 SEP 2011 (VIS) - At 5 p.m. today at the concert hall of Freiburg im Breisgau, the Holy Father met with representatives of Catholic associations active in the life of the Church and of society.

[...] "In the concrete history of the Church, however, a contrary tendency is also manifested, namely that the Church becomes settled in this world, she becomes self-sufficient and adapts herself to the standards of the world. She gives greater weight to organisation and institutionalisation than to her vocation to openness", the Pope said.

And he went on: "In order to accomplish her true task adequately, the Church must constantly renew the effort to detach herself from the 'worldliness' of the world. ... One could almost say that history comes to the aid of the Church here through the various periods of secularisation, which have contributed significantly to her purification and inner reform".

"Secularising trends", he added, "whether by expropriation of Church goods, or elimination of privileges or the like, have always meant a profound liberation of the Church from forms of worldliness, for in the process she has set aside her worldly wealth and has once again completely embraced her worldly poverty". In freeing herself of material ties, "her missionary activity regained credibility".

Benedict XVI recalled that history shows how a Church detached from the world can bear more effective missionary witness. "Once liberated from her material and political burdens, the Church can reach out more effectively and in a truly Christian way to the whole world, she can be truly open to the world", he said.
[...]PV-GERMANY/ VIS 20110926 (750)

It's mainly the last of those paragraphs in which I'm interested here (I provide the others mainly for context, and the full text of His Holiness's speech is available here). Does it contain an implicit criticism of the arrangements of union between Church and State which existed in history's Catholic Confessional States? (I don't ask that rhetorically. What do you make of that speech and particularly that paragraph of it?)

Labels: Benedict XVI. Ratzinger, Church and State, Confessional State, secularism

4. On Quærit semper

Excerpts from an item in a recent edition of the Vatican Information Service's daily e-mail bulletin:

MOTU PROPRIO "QUAERIT SEMPER"

VATICAN CITY, 29 SEP 2011 (VIS) - The Holy Father yesterday promulgated "Quaerit Semper", an Apostolic Letter "Motu Proprio data" which modifies the Apostolic Constitution "Pastor Bonus", transferring certain functions of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments to a new office established in the Tribunal of the Roman Rota. The office will deal with the procedures for dispensation from unconsummated marriage and causes for the nullity of priestly ordination.

Extracts from the document are given below.

[...] "In the current circumstances it seemed fitting that the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments should dedicate itself chiefly to giving fresh impetus to promoting sacred liturgy in the Church, in keeping with the renewal promoted by Vatican Council II through the Constitution 'Sacrosanctum Concilium'.

[...] The new norms will come into effect as of 1 October.
MP/ VIS 20110929 (460)

See also the following web-pages:

http://angelqueen.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=39116

http://www.cathnews.com/article.aspx?aeid=28449

http://wdtprs.com/blog/2011/09/motu-proprio-quaerit-semper-rearranges-the-cong-for-worship-and-roman-rota/

Labels: liturgy, Quærit semper, Roman Curia, Vatican II

5. Prof. Hamilton on differences between men and women:

With women to take on military combat roles, it is time to sound the Last Post over the rotting corpse of feminism. It's what has to be done to their minds. When the Defence Minister says the individual has to have "the right physical, psychological and mental attributes", he's thinking of male mental attributes - those needed to kill.

Putting women in the front line is a victory only for the campaign to obliterate difference, as if everything women were before the advent of feminism was the creation of patriarchy. But didn't women's life experiences and history provide distinctive qualities more needed today than ever? We should celebrate the uniquely female rather than bury it under the demand for equality.

Women's morality differs from men's. Feminist philosopher Carol Gilligan argues women are motivated more by care than duty, and inclined more to emphasise responsibilities than rights. They seek reconciliation through the exercise of compassion and negotiation rather than demanding "justice", through force if necessary.

War best represents the continued hegemony of male thinking, with the grunt culture of hyper-masculinity inescapable because survival depends on it. And no institution more purely reflects the male understanding of power than the armed forces, built on the idea that the world is a place of conflict where disputes can be resolved by lethal force, and the more lethal the better.
[http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/women-at-war-is-the-final-surrender-20110929-1kz77.html?skin=text-only]

Labels: gender differences

6. Br. André Marie on "The Freedom and Exaltation of Holy Mother Church"

http://angelqueen.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=39121

Labels: Church and State, Confessional State, Leo XIII. Pecci, T.L.M.

Reginaldvs Cantvar
Feast of St. Francis of Assisi, Confessor, A.D. 2011

Notes: Wednesday, August 24-Monday, September 5, 2011 (part 2 of 2)

8. Dr. Soutphommasane on Federal funding of State school chaplains

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/religion-is-not-a-state-obligation/story-e6frg6zo-1226117970883

I'm logging that opinion piece because of this excerpt:

What is really at issue is the state's neutrality. As American legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin wrote, liberalism says "political decisions must be, so far as possible, independent of any particular conception of the good life".

This isn't an argument about whether religion is good or bad; it is about the proper limits of government power. The liberal state should generally aim to be neutral on matters of the good life.

The problem is that Dr. Soutphommasane describes himself as "one who believes in a value of national solidarity based on the common good" (source), and the importance to him of the common good has been evident in his previous "Ask the Philosopher" columns, such as when he wrote that a "politics of a common good, conducted by enlightened representatives and citizens, is unimpeachable in theory" (source). The common good is indeed the end, or purpose, of the State, but how can a State form the right understanding of the common good of its populace when the common good of a society is to that society none other than what the proper good of an individual--his corporal and spiritual well-being--is to that individual, yet we are, so liberals would have us believe, supposed to refrain from taking "any particular conception of the good life" as normative?

Labels: liberalism, morality, political science

9. Earliest Papal reference to 'healthy secularity'?

As you know, I'm no fan of talk of 'healthy secularity/secularism'; leave secularity and secularism to the secularists, I say. So it dismays me whenever I see that diction coming from the Holy Father, whose fullest treatment of the notion/s of secularity and secularism can be found, to the best of my knowledge, in his "Address to the participants in the 56th National Study Congress organized by the Union of Italian Catholic Jurists (December 9, 2006)", available in English here and in what I presume is its original Italian (since it was given to an Italian audience, though I can't find it in the A.A.S.; if any of you can find it there please let me know) here. (That Address came to my attention via this AQ post.) Now I had thought that Papal use of the term 'healthy secularity' only began with the present Pope, or perhaps with one of His Holiness's Conciliar/post-Conciliar predecessors, but reading Msgr. Lefebvre's They Have Uncrowned Him the other week I was surprised to learn that Pius XII. had spoken of 'the legitimate and healthy secularity of the State' in His late Holiness's Allocution to the inhabitants of the Marches, March 23, 1958. The text of that Allocution is available in AAS 50 [1958], p. 216, here and also here, and in both those sources we see, in the fourth-last paragraph, the words "la legittima sana laicità dello Stato"; perhaps it was with that very expression of Pius XII. in mind that the present Pope put the words "sana laicità" in quotation marks in that December 9, 2006 Address. But while the teaching of Benedict XVI. on the distinction between Church and State seems to be the same as that of Pius XII., distinction does not mean, and should not imply, separation, and whereas Pius XII. spoke approvingly, on at least two occasions before that Allocution, of the kind of union which existed between the Church and history's Catholic Confessional States, Benedict XVI. has, to the best of my knowledge, never done so, and indeed seems to favour the kind of 'union' in which Church and State co-operate but without any priviliging of the Catholic Church over non-Catholic sects; see item 6.2 here, for instance.

Anyhow, is the Allocution to the inhabitants of the Marches the earliest Papal use of the term 'healthy secularity' (or any equivalent expression), or are there earlier ones? If the latter, then what and when were they, and which is the earliest?

Labels: Benedict XVI. Ratzinger, Church and State, morality, Pius XII. Pacelli, political science, secularism

10. Leo XIII. on, among other things, the formal cause, analogically speaking, of the State

This is a quotation from Libertas, praestantissimum as found in the on-line version of ASS 20 [1887], p. 604 (the text of that Encyclical begins on p. 593) (there is at least one, quite obvious, typographical error in the quotation, as in the proximate source from which I quoted it):

... Etenim dubitari non potest quin sit Dei voluntate inter homines coniuncta societas, sive partes, sive forma eius spectetur quae est auctoritas, sive caussa, sive earum, quas homini parit, magnarum utilitati! m copia. ...
[http://www.vatican.va/archive/ass/documents/ASS%2020%20[1887]%20-%20ocr.pdf]

The Vatican website's English version of that sentence is as follows:

21. ... For it cannot be doubted but that, by the will of God, men are united in civil society; whether its component parts be considered; or its form, which implies authority; or the object of its existence; or the abundance of the vast services which it renders to man. ...
[http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/leo_xiii/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_20061888_libertas_en.html]

But in the translation in Msgr. Lefebvre's They Have Uncrowned Him, the section corresponding to "which implies authority" is give as "which is authority" (my emphasis in both quotations). I don't speak Latin, but judging by a critical use of Google Translate, the latter translation would seem to be the more accurate one. Would any Latinists reading this be so kind as to suggest their own translation?

Labels: Leo XIII. Pecci, morality, political science

11. Yet more evidence of the Sodomites' League's success in diverting public discourse on homosexuality away from a focus on behaviour and towards a focus on 'identity'

These are excerpts from a letter by Josie (no surname given) of Andrews Farm which was published under the heading "Live and love" on page thirty of the Sydney Daily Telegraph of Thursday, August 25, 2011:

To deny humans the right of identity and companionship is inhuman. ...
... We cannot stop biology/chemistry, we can only control behaviour and mutual consent.
[...] Marriage is for people who seek to share family identity in the formal bounds that marriage gives.
[I include the second paragraph excerpt there solely in order to avoid being accused of implying that the letter contained no reference at all to behaviour; clearly Josie does mention behaviour, but she fails to show any understanding of its significance to marriage.]

But marriage is not just about sharing 'identity'; it is about sharing a certain kind of behaviour; it is not merely some kind of Platonic relationship, but a conjugal relationship. Hence any discrimination on the basis of sex or sexual disorientation involved in upholding the natural law's design for marriage is only indirect, since the direct discrimination is only against those who cannot consummate their respective putative marriages, and this discrimination applies equally to opposite-sex couples in which one (or both) prospective spouse(s) is (are) absolutely or relatively impotent and to same-sex couples.

Labels: G.L.B.T., marriage, morality

12. "Almost 20,000 of South Australia's 48,783 Catholic school students are not members of the church"

http://www.cathnews.com/article.aspx?aeid=27937

Labels: Catholic schools

13. Some recent AQ posts regarding the Russian Orthodox Church

http://angelqueen.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=38781

http://angelqueen.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=38811

Labels: R.O.C.

Reginaldvs Cantvar
Feast of St. Lawrence Justinian, Bishop, Confessor, A.D. 2011