ROME: In a policy, welcomed by anti-abortion campaigners but dismissed by critics as propaganda, women in northern Italy who cannot afford to have their babies are to be offered E4500 ($6600) not to have an abortion.
Roberto Formigoni, the centre-right governor of the Lombardy region, said yesterday the offer was to fulfil his pledge in regional elections in March that no woman should have to have an abortion because of economic difficulties.
[...] In the regional poll, centre-right candidates also vowed to ban the RU486 abortion pill days after it was made available.
Abortion has been available on demand in Italy since 1978.
[http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/italy-pays-women-not-to-abort/story-e6frg6so-1225874706258]
Augusto Colombo, a gynaecologist in Milan, said that there had been an increase in demands for abortion, which was attributable to the economy.
[http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/lombady-offers-women-money-to-not-have-abortion/story-e6frg6so-1225874533852]
"Government: Too Much, Too Little?"
I don't have time to read this now, but it looks interesting:
http://angelqueen.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=31909
Nonsense, but interesting:
http://www.cathnews.com/article.aspx?aeid=21670
Fr. Zuhlsdorf, Terra, and others on whether layfolk pray liturgically
http://wdtprs.com/blog/2010/06/quaeritur-do-laypeople-pray-liturgically-when-praying-the-office/#comments
http://australiaincognita.blogspot.com/2010/06/can-laity-pray-liturgically.html
I thought that when layfolk fulfill what would for clerics be a liturgical function, then what they're doing is not a liturgy--a paraliturgy, perhaps, but not liturgy properly so called. But Terra and others (see the link to Fr. Zuhlsdorf's post's combox above here) disagree. I'm not sure what to make of it all.
Blog comments by me
Just one today, at Mr. Schütz's blog:
Cardinal Pole
June 3, 2010 at 4:44 am
“And where was this in the previous, by the RCC’s count 1925, years of the church’s existence?”
Being lived out in and by however many Catholic Confessional States existed for the sixteen hundred or so years from the time the Roman Empire made Christianity the State religion to the present situation, where only one or two States confess the Catholic religion. Legitimate doctrinal development is the making explicit of what was previously only implicit, and Quas Primas is one of many such explications throughout the Church’s history.
Christ is God, and God’s Kingdom is three-fold: The Kingdom of nature, of grace, and of glory. To say that God is King of nature is to say that He gives things their respective natures and directs them towards their respective ends by means suitable to each, and it is the natural law by which He directs humans towards their natural end. So He is the Legislator of the natural law and the Author and source of authority of every natural institution. Hence Christ is (objectively) King of each and every family, each and every State, and the whole human race (regardless of whether they subjectively acknowledge and honour this Kingship). So to say that
“There is no such thing as the Social Reign of Christ”
would seem to be to deny at least one of the following:
1. That Christ is God.
2. That He imposed the natural law and that all authority comes from Him.
3. That the State is an institution of the natural law.
As for the post-Conciliar subversion of the Feast of Christ the King: I’m well aware of all that, with one exception: What is the RCL?
[http://scecclesia.wordpress.com/2010/05/29/simon-shama-on-the-snares-of-history-for-the-secular-humanist/#comment-15061]
