Notes: Tuesday-Wednesday, December 7-8, 2010

1. "Fire wardens be alarmed - you could get burnt"

Until recently the Australian Standard for emergency evacuation procedures - the ''best practice'' guide for all Australian workplaces - contained an explicit exemption from liability for the wardens, as long as they ''acted in good faith''.

But under changes announced in the past two weeks, the exemption is gone, replaced by a warning that employers and building owners should seek legal advice about the level of indemnity their fire wardens face.

The warning also applies to the members of emergency procedure committees - those charged with making sure the different evacuation plans of companies in large office blocks are consistent.
[http://www.smh.com.au/national/fire-wardens-be-alarmed--you-could-get-burnt-20101207-18ofy.html?skin=text-only]

2. "Bridle on outspoken charities was wrong"

A High Court decision last week provided a big win for charities, and another big loss for the Tax Commissioner. At issue was whether an organisation can retain its charitable status and tax benefits while engaging in political debate. The High Court held that it could. ...
[http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/bridle-on-outspoken-charities-was-wrong-20101206-18mpd.html?skin=text-only]

3. A Supreme Court decision about which I had not heard

Peter Saul, a senior intensive care specialist at John Hunter Hospital and the director of the clinical unit in ethics and health law at the University of Newcastle, said doctors and administrators had been forced to focus on the rights of dying patients by a Supreme Court decision last year.

Justice Robert McDougall ruled a Jehovah's Witness's written refusal of a blood transfusion had to be honoured even after he became unconscious, and that any advance care directive must be respected if it was ''made by a capable adult, and clear and unambiguous''.

Dr Saul said doctors would now be on "unsafe ground if they completely ignored [a directive], leaving themselves open to a charge [they] assaulted the patient''.
[square-bracketed interpolations in the original,
http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/wellbeing/dying-want-their-final-wishes-respected-20101206-18mxu.html?skin=text-only]

3. Prof. Hastings on Catholicism and Nazism

http://angelqueen.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=35017

4. "Terra" on "[t]he collapse of religious life"

http://australiaincognita.blogspot.com/2010/12/collapse-of-religious-life-why-did-it.html

5. Some figures on American Catholics and use of contraception

Studies suggest Catholic couples who use natural family planning, as directed in 1968 by Pope Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae, are in the vast minority. Estimates based on a 2006-2008 study by the National Center for Health Statistics showed that Catholic women were, essentially, just as likely as others to use some form of contraception, according to statistician William Mosher.

The nationwide estimate for women who use contraceptives was 61.9 percent overall, compared to 61.6 percent of women who identified themselves as Catholic. Based on the study, Mosher estimated that natural family planning is used by two out of 1,000 Catholic women in the country.
[http://www.cathnews.com/article.aspx?aeid=24410]

Reginaldvs Cantvar
Feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, A.D. 2010

A Holy-See-dependent charity sponsoring the Russian schism

Last Sunday’s edition of the Sydney Catholic Weekly featured the annual Catholic charities guide. That issue’s back page (p. 48, September 6, 2009) was a full-page advertisement for Aid to the Church in Need (A.C.N.), which (the advertisement, that is) described A.C.N. as “A Catholic charity under the guidance of the Holy Father”, and which contained the following startling passage:

In 1992, Fr Werenfried [van Straaten, A.C.N.’s founder] extended Aid to the Church in Need’s work to supporting the Orthodox Church in Russia: for as Pope John Paul II said in Ut Unum Sint, it is “an imperative of charity” to help our Orthodox brethren.

Now A.C.N. is not a charity like the St. Vincent de Paul Society or Caritas; it does things like funding the formation of seminarians and distributing Bibles and catechisms rather than providing social services like those which secular government or non-government organisations provide, so naturally I reacted with consternation to the thought of donations for the support of the Catholic religion going to fund the religious activities of formal schismatics. But could it be that I had misconstrued the advertisement, and that A.C.N funds are just going towards innocent social-services-type activities rather than fomenting schism and disseminating error? (Mind you, even if that were the case, it would still seem to be a misuse of donations, since A.C.N. is supposed to focus on assistance for the support of the Faith as such rather than for non-religious humanitarian activity.) Alas, no:

Before the end of the Gorbachev years, many bishops began to make plans for the daunting task of rebuilding seminary life. The strides they have made over the past ten years have been impressive. A useful benchmark is the remarkable ecumenical venture by the Roman Catholic agency, Aid to the Church in Need. In 1992 its founder, the Dutch Norbertine monk Werenfried van Straaten, already 79 years old, had a vision which challenged him to support the Russian Orthodox Church. His advisers settled on helping Russian Orthodox theological education as the most effective focus for this new outreach. Of the 46 theological academies, seminaries and schools in Russia, Aid to the Church in Need is now
[as at April 4, 2001] helping 26 financially.
[my square-bracketed interpolation,
http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2099]

And at A.C.N.’s own official Australian website we find the following things:

He [A.C.N. international president Father Joaquín Alliende] also underlined the charity’s commitment to continue supporting the Russian Orthodox – as well as the Catholic Church in Russia – and developing east-west relations.

and

Last year, ACN gave over $4 million to support Church communities in Russia, prioritising help for the Catholic Church but also some giving help to the Russian Orthodox Church as well as ecumenical projects.
[my square-bracketed interpolation,
both quotations from
http://members4.boardhost.com/acnaus/msg/1227482615.html]

Furthermore, a Google search using the keywords “Aid to the Church in Need”, “Orthodox Church” and “Russia” led me to an article by the respected Traditional Catholic lawyer and journalist Mr. Christopher A. Ferrara, who had the following things, among others, to say:

Meanwhile, as Aid to the Church in Russia seeks funds to build a headquarters for the Archbishop at Moscow, another Catholic charity, Aid to the Church in Need, is giving millions of dollars to the Orthodox Church for its continued functioning in Russia - a fact recited by the Vatican itself as justification for its creation of the Catholic pseudo-dioceses: "Navarro-Valls also reminded reporters that in the past decade Catholic groups such as Aid to the Church in Need have provided more than $17 million in direct aid to the Russian Orthodox Church." (CWNews.com, Feb. 11, 2002) The website for Aid to the Church in Need proclaims: "Following a 1984 decree of the Vatican Congregation for the Clergy, Aid to the Church in Need was recognized by the Catholic Church as a universal public association of faithful." [http://www.kirche-in-not.org/e_home.htm]

So, one Catholic charity combats the agenda of another in Russia! The faithful are asked, on the one hand, to help build up the Catholic Church in Russia, and, on the other hand, to give money to an organization that helps build up its hateful opponent, the Russian Orthodox church, already fattened by the spoils that Stalin robbed from the Catholic Church at gunpoint in the 1940s.
[bracketed content in the original,
http://www.fatimaperspectives.com/cr/perspective208.asp]

(I encourage you to read the whole article.) Now I seem to recall a recent controversy over funds from a Canadian Catholic charity going towards a Latin American organisation which supported abortion, which would and should have generated outrage. But how much more outraged should we be at Church sponsorship (by an “international Catholic charity dependent on the Holy See”, no less) of schism—abortion kills the body, but schism kills the soul. Of course, God only permits an evil in order to avert a greater evil or procure a greater good, and perhaps the indifferentists behind this scandalous funding—ecumenism at its worst—are contributing unwittingly towards, if not what one Angelqueen reader called the ‘material preparation for the conversion of Russia’, then at least, in some inscrutable way, the material preparation for the Consecration of Russia to Our Lady’s Immaculate Heart.

Reginaldvs Cantvar
Feast of Sts. Protus and Hyacinth, Martyrs, A.D. 2009

Dr. Falzon on justice and charity

http://www.catholicweekly.com.au/article.php?classID=1&subclassID=2&articleID=5158&class=Latest%20News&subclass=CW%20National

Last Sunday’s Catholic Weekly reports that Dr. John Falzon, National Chief Executive Officer of the St. Vincent de Paul Society, has

sounded a word of warning about the need for the Federal Government to be “proactive in ensuring that people who are unemployed, or who are outside the labour market for other reasons, are provided with an adequate household income”.

“It is time to turn our backs on the outdated punitive approach to people who are in receipt of income support,” he said. “At this time when we anticipate a significant growth in unemployment, people should not be subjected to the moralistic cruelty of the breaching regime.

“Rather, let us think creatively about encouraging and enabling workforce participation.

“Let us, once and for all, repudiate the misguided notion that a vulnerable family’s meagre income should be used as a bargaining chip to coerce them into a particular behaviour.”

He added: “Neither should we allow our nation to become a place where government abrogates its responsibility by sending people to charities.

“All of the charitable organisations in Australia are doing a magnificent job.

“I would be very wary, however, of encouraging the growth of a culture that pushes people to rely on charity when, in fact, what they really need is justice.”

But given that Dr. Falzon made these comments in the context of a “significant growth in unemployment”, it is hard to see how this is a matter of justice rather than of charity. That is, since the impending rise in unemployment is cyclical rather than structural in nature, how can this be a matter of justice, when justice, as I thought Dr. Falzon would agree, involves combatting unjust structures, not unavoidable slumps in the labour market, which I would have thought calls for assistance in charity when the workers affected have failed to put aside enough money to see them through the hard times? I am no liberal, economic or otherwise, but I think we need to be careful about condemning things as failures in justice when what might really be called for is assistance in charity.

Reginaldvs Cantvar
9.XII.2008 A.D.

On ‘social justice’

http://www.socialjustice.catholic.org.au/

The Australian Catholic Bishops’ Conference 2008 Social Justice Statement A Rich Young Nation: The challenge of poverty and affluence in Australia is out now. I have read it and I’m afraid I was not impressed. It seems to me that the big problem with this, like much in post-Conciliar thought on ‘social justice’, is that the term ‘social justice’ appears to confuse the cardinal virtue of justice with the theological virtue of charity, or even to conflate the two. Now I know that there is a close, harmonious relationship between all the virtues and that, if I recall correctly, St. Thomas described charity as the mother, mover, form and root of all the virtues. But nonetheless, justice is, though not separate from charity, still distinct from it. To put it simply, justice is about giving to someone what he is owed, whereas charity is giving to someone of what is one’s own. This appears to have eluded my Lords the Bishops despite the fact that they quote H.H. The Pope saying, in the Chairman’s message, that “The Church cannot neglect the service of charity any more than she can neglect the Sacraments and the Word.” The Bishops quote St. Basil the Great saying that “the acts of charity you do not perform are so many injustices that you commit” yet I wonder whether ‘injustices’ was the best translation; perhaps ‘wrongs’ would have been more apt.

Another problem in the document is the concepts of affluence and poverty that it uses. The document quotes Prof. Clive Hamilton on the problem of ‘affluenza’ saying that

When people see wants as needs, it is not surprisingthat two thirds (in a Newspoll survey) say they cannot afford everything they need. And their feelings of deprivation are real, since thwarted desire is transformed into a sense of deprivation.

Similarly, the characteristics that the Bishops assign to the condition of poverty are heavily based on ‘feelings’ and evade the distinction between absolute and relative poverty. Yet if poverty is sentimental and relative then those suffering from ‘affluenza’ can be considered legitimately ‘poor’!

I would be interested to hear readers’ opinions on the matter.

Reginaldvs Cantvar