Pope slams selfish food speculators, urges curbs on world commodity markets
Pope Benedict said on Friday financial trading based on “selfish attitudes” is spreading poverty and hunger and called for more regulation of food commodity markets to guarantee everyone’s right to life. “Poverty, underdevelopment and hunger are often the result of selfish attitudes which, coming from the heart of man, show themselves in social behaviour and economic exchange,” the pope told a U.N. food agency conference.
“How can we ignore the fact that food has become an object of speculation or is connected to movements in a financial market that, lacking in clear rules and moral principles, seems anchored on the sole objective of profit?” he asked.
The Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organisation’s (FAO) food price index hit a record high earlier this year, reviving memories of soaring prices in 2007-08 that sparked riots in developing countries. That gave fresh urgency to the debate about how to improve a global food system that leaves some 925 million people hungry.
There is controversy over how much a new wave of investments by funds into commodities has contributed to pushing up prices. The issue has pitted French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who blames speculators for surging food prices and unrest in some countries, against other countries who see little interest in more market regulation.
In June, G20 farm ministers struck a deal that paved the way to more global cooperation on agricultural issues but steered clear of concrete regulatory measures.
The pope said a reform of agricultural markets was urgent to ensure everyone has enough to eat. “Eating touches on the fundamental right to life. Guaranteeing that means reacting directly and without delay to those factors in the agricultural sector that are negatively affecting the capacity to manufacture and distribute.”
“If I were Pope Benedict, this is what I’d tell them in Berlin …”
Have you ever wanted to write a major speech for Pope Benedict to deliver? What would you say? How much leeway would you have if you were chosen to be the papal ghostwriter?
Benedict is not about to let outsiders write the landmark speech he will deliver to the German Bundestag in Berlin during his visit to his homeland on September 22-25. But the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (KAS), a think-tank affiliated with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), wants to test out this idea before he leaves Rome for the visit.
The KAS office in the Italian capital has just announced a contest called “Ghost writer for the pope!” This is not an invitation to write anything heretical. The announcement on its website says KAS will only consider entries that reflect Pope Benedict’s thinking “in theology, form and content.” It suggests that papal speechwriters in spe should use his address in London’s Westminster Hall last September as a model. Maximum length 5 pages, deadline August 26. The winner will be invited to hear the pope’s actual speech in the Bundestag on September 22.
“The choice will be made by a jury of KAS staffers in Rome, Catholic theology professors, journalists (Radio Vatican and L’Osservatore Romano) and religious dignitaries,” it warned. “The choice is not subject to appeal.”
One last condition — all entries must be submitted in German. We’ll keep an eye out for the results to report how innovative — or imitative — the winning text may be.
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Rosemary, I have no idea what happened to your initial post, which I did not see. We would not have rejected it for the reasons you allege, so I can only assume it got automatically rejected on some technicality. If you want to resend it, please do so and we’ll post it.
Spanish Catholic priests criticise corporate sponsorships for papal visit
A group of 120 Spanish Catholic priests have criticised church leaders for signing up a list of high-profile corporate sponsors for a visit by the Pope in August, saying authorities had given in to temptation. In a rare joint letter, the priests told Archbishop of Madrid Cardinal Antonio Maria Rouco Varela the sponsorship deals reinforced the impression the church was a privileged institution.
“It’s been necessary to form a pact with the economic and political powers which reinforces the image of the church as a privileged institution, close to power, and the social scandal this implies, especially in the context of the economic crisis,” the priests said in an open letter. Organisers of Pope Benedict’s visit, scheduled for August 18-21 as part of the celebrations of World Youth Day, have mounted a nationwide advertising campaign, backed by well-known multinationals and Spain’s top companies.
Corporate logos of the companies, including Coca Cola , Telefonica , Santander and Iberia , fill the sponsorship page of the official visit website www.madrid11.com/.
“To trust in the strength of power and money … is to give in to a temptation as old as the Church,” said the letter. “No one can serve two masters. You cannot serve both God and money,” the letter said, citing the passage from the Bible, Matthew 6:24.
Read the full story by Paul Day here.
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Liberal U.S. Catholics say their Church is not listening
Members of a liberal group of U.S. Catholics called on Sunday on Church leaders to open talks with their members on controversies ranging from the ordination of women to allowing priests to marry. Members of the American Catholic Council, meeting in Detroit, said they had grown concerned that the Church hierarchy was not listening to its members on issues such as the role of women, married clergy and the treatment of homosexuals.
The meeting comes as the Roman Catholic Church in the United States is struggling with a sexual abuse crisis, loss of membership and a dwindling number of priests.
“When in God’s name are the conversations going to begin?” asked Joan Chittister, a Benedictine nun who addressed the meeting of about 2,000 people — part of a liberal wing that represents a minority in the 1.2 billion-member Church. She likened the structure, with bishops and archbishops answering to the pope in Rome, to “a medieval system that has now been abandoned by humanity everywhere, except by us.”
Detroit Archbishop Allen Vigneron had warned before the meeting that any members of the clergy who attended the group’s mass would be at risk of being defrocked. “All of the invited keynote speakers have manifested dissent from Catholic teachings or support for dissenters,” the archdiocese said in a posting on its website.
Robert Wurm, a retired priest from Ferndale, Michigan, who officiated at the closing mass, said he was not worried the archbishop would take action against him. “He was careful about that. He said they could be defrocked, not that they would,” Wurm told reporters. Under Church law, an archbishop has authority over all masses held in his area.
“It’s disheartening that a Detroit priest would preside over a Sunday service with so many serious liturgical abuses,” said Ned McGrath, spokesman for the archdiocese. “They will be among the matters that now must be — will be — reviewed by the Detroit archdiocese.”
At a separate event in a nearby neighborhood, about 600 members of the Church met to speak out against the ACC conference and espouse conservative views on social issues, according to local media reports. The Archdiocese of Detroit sanctioned but did not organize that meeting, according to an archdiocesan spokesman.
Pope urges help for traditional families crumbling in secularised Europe
Pope Benedict warned on Sunday that the traditional family in Europe was disintegrating under the weight of secularization and called for laws to help couples cope with the costs of having and educating children. On the second day of his trip to Croatia, a bastion of Roman Catholicism in the Balkans, the pope said an open-air mass for hundreds of thousands of people and hammered home one of the major themes of his papacy.
“Unfortunately, we are forced to acknowledge the spread of a secularization which leads to the exclusion of God from life and the increasing disintegration of the family, especially in Europe,” he said in his sermon on the edge of the capital.
The 84-year-old Benedict’s sermon was the latest in a series of salvos against what the Church sees as growing anti-Catholicism and “Christianophobia” in Europe. Speaking on the day Croatia, whose population of 4.4 million people is 90 percent Catholic, celebrates its “Family Day,” he denounced practices such abortion, cohabitation as a “substitute for marriage,” and artificial birth control.
The pope urged Catholic families throughout Europe not to give in to a creeping “secularized mentality” and called for “legislation which supports families in the task of giving birth to children and educating them.”
The sermon reflected the Vatican’s belief that the Catholic Church in Europe is under assault by some national governments and European institutions over issues such as gay marriage, abortion, religious education and the use of Christian religious symbols in public places.
Read the full story here. For more on the pope’s visit, see Pope tells Croatians EU too bureaucratic, sometimes ignores local cultures
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Guestview: How Catholic should a Catholic charity be?
The following is a guest contribution. Reuters is not responsible for the content and the views expressed are the authors’ alone. Abigail Frymann is Online Editor of the British Catholic weekly The Tablet, where this first appeared.
By Abigail Frymann
How Catholic should a Catholic charity be? The confederation of Catholic charities Caritas Internationalis elected a new secretary general, Michel Roy, last week after the re-appointment of the previous incumbent, Lesley-Anne Knight, was blocked, apparently because the Vatican wanted a stronger Catholic identity.
When I wrote for one Protestant charity we would have to check we had spelled out some reference to the spiritual dimension of its work so that supporters knew they weren’t reading about a secular agency. Someone at another charity I have worked with, this time Catholic, admitted that they highlighted their Catholic roots for one audience and played them down for another.
At HIV/Aids conferences, Christian charities are thrown in together with no end of charities that are pro-condom, pro-choice, pro-all sorts of methods they wouldn’t choose to adopt. They have to defend their beliefs in, for example, advocating abstinence or working to reduce the stigma of the disease and convince others that these are intelligent, viable and compassionate responses. And as Christians who carry the hope of the Gospel, there is on the face of it a perversity in not sharing something of that treasure with people who are in need and ask about it.
But in 21st century secular Europe, many people are deeply suspicious of any action they consider remotely redolent of proselytising. Elsewhere in the world, there are very serious risks to being more Catholic, or Christian in one’s identity as a charity worker. In Afghanistan for example – despite its vast needs – religious aid workers have to promise that they will not breathe a word of their faith to be allowed to operate in the country. The dangers of being too open about faith need to be acknowledged miles away in Rome.
Maybe it’s not the Taleban that the Roman officials want their foot-soldiers to stand up to, but the Western liberals. Those, powerful as they may be, do not wield swords. And here Archbishop Vincent Nichols’ phrase comes to mind that religion is not a problem to be solved, but a gift to be discovered afresh.
I feel like this article was poorly written and difficult to understand. I had to read this sentence: “When I wrote for one Protestant charity we would have to check we had spelled out some reference to the spiritual dimension of its work so that supporters knew they weren’t reading about a secular agency.” three times before I understood what the first half of it meant. A reader should not have to work that hard to understand a story.
“In Afghanistan for example – despite its vast needs – religious aid workers have to promise that they will not breathe a word of their faith to be allowed to operate in the country.”
Eek.
China says respects religious freedom after pope laments pressure
China’s Foreign Ministry said on Thursday it hoped the Vatican could acknowledge the reality of religious freedom in the country, after the pope said Beijing was putting pressure on the faithful who want to remain loyal to the Vatican.
“We hope the Vatican can squarely face the reality of religious freedom in China and the continuous development of Chinese Catholics, and take concrete actions to create conditions for developing Sino-Vatican ties,” ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu told a regular news briefing.
China’s 8 to 12 million Catholics are divided between the state-sanctioned church that names bishops without the Vatican’s approval and an underground church wary of government ties. China forced several bishops and priests loyal to the pope to attend a meeting of the state-backed church last year, rankling the Vatican. Read the full story here.
Pope Benedict has said China’s communist authorities were putting pressure on faithful who want to remain loyal to the Vatican and he hoped the Chinese church could survive attempts to divide it from Rome. He called on Wednesday for all Catholics to pray for the faithful in China, who are not allowed to recognise the pope’s authority but forced to be members of a state-backed Church.
“We know that among our brother bishops, there are some that suffer and are under pressure,” the pope said at his weekly general audience in St Peter’s Square. “By praying we can ensure that the Church in China remains one, holy and Catholic.” Read the full story here.
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I bet the catholic bishops from china won’t be able to touch the pope, without being touched by him first. 2000 years of traditional warfare tactics, and the mind of the most philophically, and tactically familiar mind of the pope will prevail, I swear on my own name.
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?
Vatican boosts pressure on bishops to widen use of traditional Latin mass
The Vatican told Catholic bishops around the world on Friday they had to obey a papal order allowing priests to say the old-style Latin mass for traditionalist Catholics, whether they liked it or not. The Vatican issued an “instruction” to bishops as a follow-up to a 2007 papal decree authorizing the wider adoption of the Latin Mass, which was in universal use before the 1962-1965 Vatican Council introduced masses in local languages.
The re-instatement of the Latin mass was one of the demands of ultra-traditionalists whose leaders were excommunicated in 1988, prompting the first schism in modern times. The pope, in a nod the traditionalists, satisfied many of them in 2007 when he allowed a wider use of the Latin mass, in which the priest faced east with his back to the faithful for most of the service.
But some bishops around the world said privately it was a headache because of the scarcity of priests trained in Latin, and logistical problems inserting Latin mass in their schedule. The five-page instruction from the Vatican’s doctrinal department, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, made it clear that the pope wants bishops to follow his orders.
“It is the task of the Diocesan bishop to undertake all necessary measures to ensure respect for the ‘forma extraordinaria’,” the instruction said, using a Latin term for the old liturgy. The return of the mass met with resistance in many places and has been privately opposed by some bishops, who either have dragged their feet in implementing the decree or put it on the back burner, saying they had more pressing issues to deal with.
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Belgium looks to Pope Benedict to help end its clerical sexual abuse crisis
Belgium’s politicians and prelates are looking to Pope Benedict to help end a clerical sexual abuse crisis that is crippling the local Catholic Church and frustrating judicial authorities unable to resolve it.
Calls to punish former Bruges Bishop Roger Vangheluwe, who shocked Belgium last week by publicly excusing abuse cases that caused his downfall last year, have come from the Belgian prime minister, justice and foreign ministers and several senior politicians. Belgian bishops have denounced Vangheluwe, 74, who quit as bishop of Bruges after admitting to molesting his nephew, and several bishops have made clear they want swift punitive action from the Vatican, which took control of his case this month.
But there is no consensus on what Benedict, who has the final say on Vangheluwe’s fate, should do. He has shied away from stiff punishments for bishops caught in the abuse crisis plaguing the Church in Europe and the United States.
Belgian justice cannot intervene because the abuse cases, which Vangheluwe admits to, all occurred before the 20-year statute of limitations for them. Church law has no provision to defrock a bishop although the Vatican has done it in rare cases.
“The Church … should be much more severe and much more complete than what has been said up until now,” Justice Minister Stefaan De Clerck, a Christian Democrat, said on Friday.
Guy Harpigny, the bishop of Tournai, said: “I hope the Holy See understands that we need its help to clear up this affair – it’s time for it to get to work.”
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