By Ruth Gledhill
Saturday April 03 2010
LIKE a Druidic emissary from Tuatha De Danaan, the Irish underworld, the Archbishop of Canterbury will lob a spiritual depth charge at Pope Benedict XVI on Monday when he damns the Catholic Church in Ireland as having lost all credibility.
Dr Rowan Williams also reveals on the BBC Radio 4 programme ‘Start the Week’ that he is withholding his blessing from Anglicans who choose to take advantage of the Pope’s offer of a special home in the Catholic Church for disaffected Anglicans. “God bless them. I don’t,” he says, witheringly.
What a contrast to the joyful ecumenical greetings between the Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie and Pope John Paul II during the last papal visit in 1982, when they entered Canterbury Cathedral together, greeted each other with the sign of peace, knelt in prayer before the nave altar and then moved to the high altar where they kissed the Canterbury Gospels, a gift from Pope St Gregory the Great to St Augustine.
This time, although Pope Benedict’s visit has the status of a state and not a mere pastoral visit, his welcome from the ‘primus inter pares’ of the much smaller and itself divided Anglican Communion will be less effusive.
Dr Williams has plenty of problems of his own. Next month, the Episcopal Church of the US will consecrate its second openly gay bishop, Canon Mary Glasspool, as a bishop in the Los Angeles Diocese.
Dr Williams’s efforts to keep Anglicans united have succeeded to the extent that no one quite knows if schism has occurred or not.
New churches keep being formed, but to the extent that all 39 church leaders are expected to be invited to the next primates’ meeting, they are all still in the same Anglican boat, even if that boat seems barely to be staying afloat.
His difficulties are nothing compared with the child abuse tsunami that threatens to drown Roman Catholicism.
Yesterday it got a whole lot worse for the Catholic Church when the Pope’s personal preacher, Father Raniero Cantalamessa, likened accusations against the Pope and the church in the sex abuse scandal to the “collective violence suffered by the Jews”.
It is difficult to imagine anything that could illustrate more potently the extent to which so many Catholic Church leaders still just do not get it.
In identifying themselves as the victims of persecution, rather than the children that were raped and tortured, they seem unaware of how they map their own perdition.
Any minute now, one is tempted to wonder, will they be blaming the media, or even the Jewish people themselves, for the Holocaust?
Let us not forget what the church itself preaches. In the prayer for the Jewish people, standard in the Good Friday liturgy worldwide, the Armagh congregation prayed for the people who were “first to hear the word of God”.
They prayed: “Listen to your church as we pray that the people you first made your own may arrive at the fullness of redemption.”
Having liberalised the use of the traditionalist Tridentine Rite in 2007, last year Pope Benedict lifted the excommunications on bishops of the traditionalist movement, the Society of St Pius X. He went ahead even though shortly before, one of those bishops, the English Richard Williamson, was captured on television denying the Holocaust.
The Society of St Pius X then stated it would not use Pope Benedict’s reworking of the Tridentine Rite Good Friday prayer.
The Pope had attempted to soften its tone regarding the Jewish people, asking that Jews may “acknowledge Jesus Christ is the Saviour of all men”.
The original prayer from the rite described the Jews as “perfidious” and accused them of being blind.
Nostra Aetate, the Second Vatican Council’s document on other faiths, rejected the teachings that Jews were Christ-killers, were accursed and were enemies of God; but if Jews today were to sit through a modern or, even worse, Tridentine Good Friday liturgy and hear prayers like the above, they surely would feel pretty uncomfortable.
The Vatican has already published 16 volumes of World War Two archives online and hopes this might help to defuse the controversy over Pope Pius XII’s actions during the Holocaust. The complete record has yet to emerge, but it is expected to in due course.
There is no doubt that the older generation of Catholics in Rome believes that the church is being persecuted.
The younger generation, however, believes that the church must take responsibility for its past sins and clean up its act. (© The Times, London)
– Ruth Gledhill
Irish Independent
They are all patriarchal religions though, designed to keep human beings under control and living in fear.
As for the Tuatha De Danann, it is unlikely any of them would bother to visit any of these men of god, and if they did, the great men of god are probably not evolved enough to see them.
The catholic church is only interested in self-preservation. Otherwise they would act up on the foundation of the church – Jesus who said in Luke 17:
Temptations to Sin
17:1 And he said to his disciples, “Temptations to sin are sure to come, but woe to the one through whom they come!
17: 2 It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were cast into the sea than that he should cause one of these little ones to sin.
On the other hand I ask, are their enough millstones and is the ocean big enough to hold all child abuser?
Sieglinde
View of an abuse survivor.
The above article has a familiar ring to it. Remember the tobacco industry denial of links to cancer, the oil industry denial of global warming? Remember the fall of apartheid, communism, watergate?
The following extract is from web site:alternativehealthbuzz´´………………………………………………..To no surprise of many, tobacco companies were finally found guilty of creating a smoke screen to hide the inherent health risks of cigarettes.
In August of 2006, a federal judge ruled that the tobacco industry had actually engaged in racketeering practices, stating that the industry had engaged in a decades-long conspiracy to hide the dangers of smoking from their users. Tobacco companies were actually ordered to take out newspaper ads detailing smoking’s health effects.
Hiding The Dangers of Smoking
The judge stated that the conspiracy dated back to 1953, when a group of tobacco companies met together at the Plaza Hotel in New York City and devised a public relations plan to counter health concerns associated with smoking. The judge also ruled that even after the 1964 Surgeon General’s report linked smoking to lung cancer, tobacco companies continued to deny and purposely distort many serious dangers of smoking their products.
It was also found that the tobacco industry marketed their product to youth groups; that even though the industry claims it does not want children to smoke, the companies were caught tracking youth behavior and preferences, thereby ensuring that “marketing and promotion reaches youth,” even hiding from them the serious dangers of smoking while their young bodies were still developing.
Ending The Denial of Smoking Dangers
The industry was also faulted for denying publicly that second-hand smoke is dangerous, the judge citing internal acknowledgement that this was in fact true.
In 1999, the Clinton administration accused the tobacco industry of racketeering as part of a coordinated plan to deceive the public about the dangers of smoking, and to cover up the knowledge they had to the contrary.
Under the ruling, the tobacco companies were also ordered to stop using such descriptions as “low tar,” “light,” “ultra light,” “mild,” or “natural,” or any other descriptions that might seem as if these cigarettes posed less of a health hazard or in any way were an attempt to downplay the dangers of smoking them.
While this ruling was a victory for many anti-smoking and anti-tobacco campaigns, many commented on how long it took for the government to respond to tobacco’s use and on how long the actual case itself took as well. Others felt that perhaps the court was not punitive enough with the industry. “We are pleased with the court’s finding of liability on the part of the defendants, but disappointed that the court did not impose all of the remedies sought by the government,” the Justice Department said in a written statement. “Nevertheless, we are hopeful that the remedies that were imposed by the court can have a significant, positive impact on the health of the American public.”
The power of the tobacco industry held off the US Justice Department for much longer than the knowing public wanted, but were eventually outed. However, it seemed to many to be a hollow victory, but still did some good in highlighting the real dangers of smoking that even the tobacco industry itself could not – or was no longer allowed to – deny.
With the help of stop smoking aids and new legislation, hopefully the tobacco industry will continue to act more responsibly in the battle of reducing dangers of smoking.