U.S. working dads’ top priority is giving family love – survey
Many fathers these days want it all — time with kids, promotions at work and a spouse who shares the parenting duties. But some say they would trade in their commute and office gig for a stay-at-home role.
With Father’s Day just around the corner, a new study surveying nearly 1,000 fathers in the United States working at Fortune 500 firms takes a look at just how hard it is for dads to balance their work and life goals. The study titled “The New Dad: Caring, Committed and Conflicted” was unveiled on Wednesday by the Boston College Center for Work & Family.
Dads have long been celebrated for their role as breadwinner in the family. Now the top priority of men with children under the age of 18 still living at home is the softer side of being a father — providing love and support.
More than half of all fathers surveyed said they would consider not working outside the home if the family was able to live comfortably on one salary, a surprising change in perception, said Brad Harrington, executive director of the center. “There’s a lot of new thinking,” said Harrington.
Dutch Catholic order hit by pedophile group scandal
A Roman Catholic order of priests sacked its leader in the Netherlands and disciplined another priest Monday after the two publicly defended pedophile sex, an issue haunting the worldwide Church in recent years.
The scandal erupted over the weekend when RTL radio reported the priest, named only as Rev. Van B, had been a board member of a lobbying group advocating sex between adults and children. He told RTL that few children suffered from such relationships. Asked about the case, Rev. Herman Spronck, leader of the Dutch Salesians, said he agreed pedophile sex could be accepted.
“Herman Spronck is no longer the delegate from the Salesian delegation in the Netherlands,” his superior Rev. Jos Claes, leader of the Salesians in Belgium and the Netherlands, told RTL. “We fully distance ourselves from the words we find in your interview with Herman Spronck.” Rev. Van B “can longer perform any pastoral duties as of today,” he added.
The Dutch Salesians used to run boarding schools where many of the 2,000 complaints of clerical sexual abuse of boys emerged when the scandal broke there last year. It has admitted to paying hush money to some victims.
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Vatican “means business” on rooting out clerical sex abuse
The Vatican told bishops around the world Monday that they must make it a global priority to root out sexual abuse of children by priests. The Roman Catholic Church told bishops in a letter that they should cooperate with civil authorities to end the abuse that has tarnished its image around the world.
“This is telling the world that we mean business. We want to be an example of prevention and care,” said one Vatican official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The letter is intended to help every diocese draw up its own tough guidelines, based on a global approach but in line with local civil law. These must be sent to the Vatican for review within a year. “The responsibility for dealing with delicts (crimes) of sexual abuse of minors by clerics belongs in the first place to the diocesan bishop,” the letter says.
It incorporates sweeping revisions made last year to the Church’s laws on sexual abuse, which doubled a statute of limitations for disciplinary action against priests and extended the use of fast-track procedures to defrock them.
Read the full story here. The text of the letter is here. A statement by the Vatican press office explaining the principles behind the guidelines is here.
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Quote: “It is a good day for people who expect that the Church gives the good example, even when it comes to the protection of minors,” [Monsignor Charles] Scicluna said.
Even when it comes to the protection of minors? Even?! As if the protection of minors should be a trivial concern?
Over 800 complaints to Austrian Catholic Church sexual abuse commission
An Austrian commission investigating sexual abuse cases in the Roman Catholic Church said on Wednesday over 800 people had come forward to register as victims in the past year. Over a third of the cases have been settled, the head of the commission, Waltraud Klasnic, told a news conference. She said the number of complaints showed that the church must screen priests more carefully and look into their mental state before allowing them to qualify.
Klasnic said the commission, which was set up a year ago, was also looking into the structures that allowed such abuse and violence to occur, according to remarks carried by the Austria Press Agency (APA). Around three-quarters of the 837 complaints involved male victims. The commission does not pass legal judgment but hands over plausible cases to the authorities and most have the cases processed so far have involved compensation.
Abuse scandals in Austrian Catholic institutions have badly damaged the religion’s image with a record 87,000 people quitting the church in 2010. Hundreds of reports of child sexual abuse in Austrian Catholic institutions were triggered by the resignation of an arch-abbot in Salzburg last April after he admitted to sexually abusing a boy 40 years ago.
The abuse crisis has also hit the United States and several other European countries, including the pope’s native Germany.
The church plays an important role in Austria, a socially conservative Alpine country of 8 million, where around two-thirds of people described themselves as Catholic in 2008.
via More than 800 approach Austrian church abuse commission | Reuters.
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Teh church is filth and perhaps the worst criminal organization in the western world.
Back about 1000AD the church stopped priests from marrying, and in the queerest marriage of them all, had the priests married to the church, including getting a wedding ring.
the reason was so the church and not the priests family would inherit his property.
Aand that is a primary component of what led to and continues to lead to sex abuse.
If the church wanted to stop the abuse, they wouldn’t get rid of gay priests but make sure only gays could be priests. This way they could have the priests still married to the church, but getting their satisfaction from other age appropriate partners.
Guestview: “Trifecta” of bad news launched Catholics4Change blog
The following is a guest contribution. Reuters is not responsible for the content and the views expressed are the authors’ alone. Elizabeth E. Evans is a freelance writer, columnist and priest-in-charge at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Honey Brook, Pennsylvania.
By Elizabeth E. Evans
Three seemingly unrelated events – and Susan Matthews found herself at a crossroads.
Reading a letter to the editor assailing the “apathy” of local Catholics… Recollecting an essay she had written when the first grand jury report dealt her family a personal blow… Overhearing a conversation between two older women critical of the victims of an accused priest.
It was, as Matthews wryly recalls now, this ‘trifecta” that impelled her to act. Outraged at the predator priest scandal that has overtaken the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, the Huntingdon Valley resident and mother of two started a blog, Catholics4Change.com.
In February, a grand jury report alleged that as many as 37 local Catholic priests were left in parishes in spite of “credible” abuse allegations. Since then 26 priests have been suspended for allegations or abuse or other boundary violations, two as recently as last week.
In the little more than a month, Catholics4Change (which has close to 25,000 hits within the past two weeks) has become a rallying point for local believers. And Matthews (a former editor of the archdiocesan paper currently a freelance writer and QVC guest host) and another aspiring reformer, Kathy Kane, have become the center of a lively and impassioned debate that goes beyond protecting children but to holding church hierarchs accountable.
i would like to comment just briefly as there is really much too much to say about this that will eventually come out. the movement that you mention has very few followers. the number of hits is not indicative of support. myself, have looked at least 100 times to just check what people are posting-most of the time it is too specious to comment on. even if there are 25 people like me, that sure isn’t a lot of people if you compare with the number of catholics in philadelphia. there are not many who comment-and it is the same people anyway. a lot of the commenters do not make sense. people are upset, but susan mathews and company are NOT the face of philadelphia catholics. that is a fact.
Church of England to wash some Bible imagery from baptism rite
The Church of England has voted to use more accessible language during baptisms to help it connect better with congregations, especially non church-goers. Members attending the Church’s General Synod, or parliament, in London, agreed that the Liturgical Commission should provide supplementary material to help prevent the eyes of worshippers “glazing over” during important parts of the service.
The Reverend Tim Stratford, from Liverpool, said on Wednesday his motion was “not a request for christenings without Christianity.” Quite the opposite. “I am not asking for the language of Steven Gerrard,” he said, referring to the Liverpool and England soccer star. “Just references that could be understood by the majority.”
Parts of the service were difficult to use “without seeming inappropriately schoolmaster-like”, he said. Stratford said he did not disagree with the words currently being used, such as “I turn to Christ, I repent of my sins, and I renounce evil.”
“But it sounds to many as if the church wants an entirely religious response — removed from our behaviour, actions and conversations”. Instead, he wanted words that showed Christ’s neighbourly love. “Not inquisitorial, but aspirational.”
Those speaking against said there was enough flexibility already and it was unwise to add alternatives. Other synod members suggested that if the children who were being baptised understood the service better, they and their parents may be more keen to attend church in future. It was not a call for words to be watered down, but for simpler, more powerful language to be used.
The change should also be seen as part of a cultural shift, said Patricia Hawkins, of Lichfield. “They have heard about Jordan but it does not mean a river,” she added. “But they understand about needing somebody who can stand beside them in their despair, which is what Christ does in his baptism.”
In the motion, Stratford said many people today did not have enough background in the Bible to understand the images used in the current baptism services. This was “not a plea for a prayer in Scouse, but for a prayer that the majority of non-theologically-versed Britons would understand.” He gave the following as an example of what he called “problematic sentences”:
Top French court rejects gay marriage appeal
France’s ban on same-sex marriages was upheld by the country’s constitutional authority on Friday, in a ruling that relieves the government of any obligation to grant gays the wedding rights enjoyed by heterosexuals.
A handful of countries in Europe allow couples of the same sex to wed, and rights campaigners had hoped for a breakthrough in France, where two women living together had demanded the view of the Constitutional Council.
The Council said it found no conflict between the law as it stands and fundamental rights enshrined in the constitution. It ruled that it was up to parliament, rather than the constitutional authorities, to decide whether the law should change.
The two women who appealed to the Council are raising four children together, three of them conceived through artificial insemination. They say they want to marry to be able to officially share parental authority, clarify inheritance rights and guarantee custody rights for all the children if one died.
Henri Guiano, an adviser to President Nicolas Sarkozy, said shortly before the verdict was made public that the matter was one for political leaders and not lawyers, signalling that nothing should change without in-depth political debate. “This is a question of society, of civilisation even,” said Guiano. “This is a matter that could maybe be broached during the presidential election campaign, by parliamentary debate, but not just for the law,” he said.
Will Pew Muslim birth rate study finally silence the “Eurabia” claim?
One of the most wrong-headed arguments in the debate about Muslims in Europe is the shrill “Eurabia” claim that high birth rates and immigration will make Muslims the majority on the continent within a few decades. Based on sleight-of-hand statistics, this scaremongering (as The Economist called it back in 2006) paints a picture of a triumphant Islam dominating a Europe that has lost its Christian roots and is blind to its looming cultural demise.
The Egyptian-born British writer Bat Ye’or popularised the term with her 2005 book “Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis” and this argument has become the background music to much exaggerated talk about Muslims in Europe. Some examples from recent weeks can be found here, here and here.
A good example is the video “Muslim Demographics,” an anonymous diatribe on YouTube that has racked up 12,680,220 views since being posted in March 2009. Among its many dramatic but unsupported claims are that France would become an “Islamic republic” by 2048 since the average French woman had 1.8 children while French Muslim women had 8.1 children — a wildly exaggerated number that it made no serious effort to document. It also predicted that Germany would turn into a “Muslim state” by 2050 and that “in only 15 years” the Dutch population would be half Muslim. “Some studies show that, at Islam’s current rate of growth, in five to seven years, it will be the dominant religion of the world,” the video declares as it urges viewers to “share the Gospel message in a changing world.”
The BBC produced its own video entitled “Welcome to Eurabia?” that gave a point-by-point rebuttal of the video’s claims. Watching “Muslim Demographics” and “Welcome to Eurabia?” back-to-back provides a useful lesson in the dark art of twisting statistics. The image at left, shows a fictional flag of “Eurabia” created by Oren Neu Dag.
Articles defending the “Eurabia” claim have often been so shrill that they essentially discredited themselves as serious arguments. But it could be difficult to find a solid statistics that gave an overall view of what was actually happening. The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has stepped up with an impressive study entitled “The Future of the Global Muslim Population” (here’s the press release, report and graphics here). As we summarised it in our report Muslim birth rate falls, slower population growth:
Falling birth rates will slow the world’s Muslim population growth over the next two decades, reducing it on average from 2.2 percent a year in 1990-2010 to 1.5 percent a year from now until 2030, a new study says.
Muslims will number 2.2 billion by 2030 compared to 1.6 billion in 2010, making up 26.4 percent of the world population compared to 23.4 percent now, according to estimates by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life…
“The declining growth rate is due primarily to falling fertility rates in many Muslim-majority countries,” it said, noting the birth rate is falling as more Muslim women are educated, living standards rise and rural people move to cities.
The proven demographic fact that birth rates have been falling among Muslim women, both in Muslim majority countries and western countries where Muslims have migrated, is not new. Nor are articles debunking the idea that Muslims will become the majority in Europe (see here and here and here). But my own experience in discussing this with non-Muslims in Europe and the United States says this message does not seem to be getting through. The fact that Muslim birth rates, while still higher than those for non-Muslims, are actually falling seems to surprise people who do not follow these issues closely.
revel224: “to show the dastardly Europeans who colonized, plundered, looted, and murdered countless souls and treasures of 3rd world many of them Muslims, what happens when a shoe is on the other foot.”
Revel- you discredit your own statement here when you lump all of “Europe” together, when in fact it was a mere handful of European nations that were largely responsible for what you’re talking about. The British in particular, and the Dutch, French and Belgians to a far lesser extent, did indeed colonise large swathes of the Muslim world. But the vast majority of Europe did not. The Scandinavians, Poles, Czechs, Greeks, Germans, Finns, Hungarians among others had absolutely nothing to do with colonisation of Muslim countries. Quite the opposite, as many of them were victims of corrupt Muslim colonisation thru e.g. the Ottoman Turks, who thrice failed to conquer Vienna and other vast regions.
In fact, the bulk of Europe largely avoided colonisation alltogether and weren’t involved in the dishonour of the slave trade. This is one reason that the Scandinavians and Germans have the most successful economies today- they have a culture that’s never relied on slave labour and thus has become adapted to doing its own manual labour and doing it well, hence their manufacturing prowess.
Ironically, this historical fact also seems to have a correspondence in the levels of Muslim settlement in the European countries that were colonisers. It’s very low in Scandinavia and Germany, which has only about 2 million Muslims (the vast majority of immigrants to Germany are east Europeans, Russians and ethnic Germans from North America, *not* Turks as often believed), somewhat higher in France and the Netherlands (not nearly as high as often claimed), but growing significantly only in Britain, which was indeed the major coloniser in the Muslim world. About 2.5-3 million Muslims reside in the UK, but that number is indeed growing quite quickly due to heavy immigration under both Labour and Tories to provide cheap Labour for businesses, and unlike Continent European countries, Britain has sharia law and courts in many districts as well as Islamic customs predominating there. See Tower Hamlets or Manchester for examples.
So the United Kingdom and England in particular are indeed taking on an increasingly Islamic character, along with a corrupt government whichever major party is leading it with a slavish devotion to the wishes of rich campaign donors (one reason why I and so many other Britons have left). But that’s not true of the rest of Europe. Don’t lump them together so.
Does FRC index underline weak link between faith and family?
The conservative Christian, Washington-based Family Research Council (FRC) has just released its first “Annual Index of Family Belonging and Rejection.” You can click here to see its full details.
The “Index of Belonging” is 45 percent and that of “Rejection” is 55 percent. The report’s author, Patrick Fagan, who heads FRC’s Marriage and Religion Research Institute, says the following:
“Only 45 percent of U.S. teenagers have spent their childhood with an intact family, with both their birth mother and their biological father legally married to one another since before or around the time of the teenager’s birth … 55 percent of teenagers live in families where their biological parents have rejected each other. The families with a history of rejection include single-parent families, stepfamilies, and children who no longer live with either birth parent but with adoptive or foster parents.”
An intact family is one defined as one in which “a child’s birth mother and biological father (were) legally married to one another since before or around the time of the child’s birth.”
One thing that really strikes me about the index, which draws on data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, is that while it gives charts and breakdowns in a detailed appendix based on ethnicity, state, region, by region and ethnic group, by the country’s 26 largest cities, and other geographical criteria, there is no chart that gives a breakdown on faith lines.
This is interesting, not least because of FRC’s overtly conservative, evangelical outlook on the world. Indeed, the report says that the task of repairing the country’s families — which it says lies in the “restoration of the husband-wife relationship” — must be “led primarily by the institution of religion (church, synagogue, mosque and temple) and aided by the institution of education (schools, universities and media). These three—family, church and school—are the prime shapers of relationships.”
The FRC report does not show a weak link between faith and family, it shows a weak link between evangelicalism and faith. Asians, probably in part because of the South Asian Muslims (as the author notes) have high “belonging” percentages as do Mormons. That fact of the matter is that the findings are a critical commentary on the lack of conservatism in the evangelical world. They are very worldly people who are quite immersed in the secular culture and accept many of its values with a Christian veneer. I could say the same for many of my fellow religionists in America (Eastern Orthodox). The more socially conservative (not “evangelical” or “Catholic”) a group is, the greater the index of belonging. The trouble is that most Christian denominations do not use cultural pressure, including excommunication, in order to enforce standards. The utter hypocrisy will continue until they decide to do so.
Family Research Council to issue “Index of Family Belonging and Rejection”
Indices are all the rage these days. In his recently published and thought-provoking ”Why the West Rules — For Now,” historian Ian Morris has created an “index on social development” which, among other things, attempts to measure the West and East’s “energy capture.”
There are of course plenty of other examples (and future historians will no doubt see it as a sign of our times — as Morris notes, ages get the “thought they need”). The latest addition to this swelling modern family of indices will come on Wednesday when the conservative, Washington-based Family Research Council (FRC) releases its first annual “Index of Family Belonging and Rejection.” The index is a product of its Marriage and Religion Research Institute.
The details of the index will be released at 10:00 EDT on Wednesday but FRC has already made public the fact that it finds that “less than 50 percent of American children have spent their childhood belonging in an intact family.” It defines an “intact family” as one where “a child’s birth mother and biological father (were) legally married to one another since before or around the time of the child’s birth.” The study will also rank all 50 states and America’s 25 largest cities.
The FRC is an influential conservative Christian lobby that is overtly evangelical and its president, Tony Perkins, has become one of the leading voices on the religious right. It has long been a target of liberal critics and its findings will no doubt be seen in some quarters as biased from the get go. The promotion of “family values” and a stable, traditional mother-father family is a big part of what FRC is about, and the index should certainly be read against that backdrop. That doesn’t mean it won’t be of interest.
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