Belfast priest says united Ireland is now irrelevant, praises Queen

“As an Irish passport-holder I see the Queen and senior British government figures as defenders of faith in the UK,” claimed Fr O’Neill.

“There are similarities between how the Irish government is making life difficult for churches and how repressive communist regimes have persecuted Christians.  The Republic is now a cold house for Catholicism.”

Singling out the ‘atheistic’ Tanaiste (deputy PM) Eamon Gilmore for particular rebuke, Fr O’Neill said that the UK Government had demonstrated a respect and appreciation for the role of Christian churches which ‘Catholics could support’.

“I’m 45 — for my generation of priests and everyone below us, the national question is irrelevant; literally irrelevant,” he said.

“No-one is interested in discussing that – people are interested in discussing Europe, what’s going to happen to Greece, whether the Euro will last . . . no-one is interested in the national question.

“There’s a desire to say that we have to unpick this fusion between one sort of politics and faith because history has shown us that that has always been a mistake.”

Fr. O’Neill continues:

“I also found it interesting in the last few days to see the touching of the hem of the Chinese vice-premier by Michael D. Higgins who I remember as a schoolboy was out protesting against Ronald Reagan.

“We know China’s human rights record – still the biggest executor in the world, oppression of massive numbers of Christians, Falun Gong or anyone opposed to them – don’t we have values beyond the economy?”

Bravo, Fr. O’Neill!  You are surely the wisest, and perhaps bravest, man in Ireland.

Here is yet another nail in its coffin:

The myth of Pope Pius XII’s indifference to the Jews has no end

At the end of the Second World War, when the Nuremberg prosecutors were gathering evidence for the upcoming trials, one of the many people they turned to for assistance was Pope Pius XII.  They were not disappointed.  The Holy See sent on massive documentation, recounting Nazi criminality, and the material given proved to be of great value.  Pius XII made it a point to meet with chief prosecutor, Robert Jackson, and also announced: “Not only do we approve of the trial, but we desire that the guilty be punished as quickly as possible, and without exception.”

It is a measure of the misinformation that still surrounds Pius XII that almost no one knows about this today.  Instead, many people believe his papacy turned a blind eye to Nazi war crimes.

Such misconceptions caused Father Robert Graham, the foremost authority on the wartime papacy, to caution:

Among the many legends about the Vatican inherited from World War II is the allegation that Pope Pius XII knowingly and willingly assisted hunted Nazi war criminals to escape from justice by taking flight overseas — particularly to Latin America.  He is supposed to have regarded these ex-SS men as an elite to be preserved for the ultimate world struggle against Communism.  It is never asked why the Pope should lift a finger for a group of men who had apostasized from their religion and who were the chosen instruments of Hitler to ‘crush the Church underfoot like a toad.’ 

Of course, Dawkins and his mindless followers will pay not the slightest bit of heed.  It’s maintaining their bigotry that’s important to them, not finding out the truth.

French evangelical Christianity is on the rise

The CNEF says there are currently 2,068 evangelical churches in France, and that at least half of them have been created in the last 30 years.  But places of worship can range from concert halls to theatres like the Bobino, which is located in a neighbourhood of low-price restaurants and massage parlours.  During the week, the Bobino carries productions such as ‘Peter Pan’ and has been known to feature more risqué fare.

The CNEF “wishes to highlight the presence of evangelicals, develop their action in society and be the voice of evangelical Protestants,” Le Gall told ENInews.

French media recently turned a spotlight on the evangelical movement, with television stations doing special reports on the rise of this conservative branch of Protestantism.  One newspaper headline claimed that an evangelical church opened “every ten days,” as it profiled converts.

This year, too, a book by religion chronicler Linda Caille is being published about the movement, with the provocative title “Soldiers of Jesus, evangelicals at the conquest of France.”  Caille told Le Parisien newspaper that the talent of evangelical preachers was to “make everyone feel immediately at ease, even those lacking in religious culture.”

I was brought up in a Christian household.  Baptised a Methodist and confirmed an Anglican, I ended up as head chorister at Newcastle Cathedral.

It was a good upbringing – and my love of church music lingers on.  But I’m now an atheist.  The church didn’t do anything to offend me, or turn me away, I simply feel that the facts as they are available to me do not justify the existence of a God or the concept of a creator.

When Richard Dawkins records his deliberately contrarian, snarling TV trailers, he probably feels all fuzzy inside knowing that he’s offended some religious people.  What he doesn’t seem to factor in is how much he drives me as an atheist, and many others like me, round the bend.

Once a respectable scientist producing interesting and informative books about evolution, somewhere along the way Dawkins seems to have decided that seeing as the original Jesus wasn’t the Messiah, he may as well don the loincloth himself.

His chosen role in the public eye is as a self-appointed leader of atheists – the supreme irony of portraying oneself as the Pope of non-religion would be hilarious if it wasn’t clearly so earnest and conceited.

Every time he speaks out in public it is not to communicate the logic of his position so much as to deride and provoke others . . . for example, it is ridiculous to suggest that religion is the source of all evil, the only thing which “makes good people do bad things”.

I hate, hate, hate the fact that this pompous, unpleasant, hectoring bully attaches his name ubiquitously to the belief that I happen to hold.  Sometimes it’s almost enough to make me want to change back to believing in God – half to escape association with him, and half just to spite him.

Whilst wrapping himself in the banner of reason and humanity, he’s become a frothing-at-the-mouth, bigoted zealot who is an embarrassment to his cause . . . Is there a worse posterboy for any movement in Britain than Richard Dawkins?

The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society by Brad S. Gregory, Harvard University Press, reviewed by Harold James

There could not be a more propitious moment for a book on greed and the historical roots of capitalism.  Brad Gregory shows that historians have as much to contribute to contemporary debates about business and social ethics as most philosophers or economists.

Gregory, a historian of early modern religion at the Notre Dame University (a Catholic university in Indiana), has written an elegant and extraordinarily erudite account of how, and with what consequences, the early 16th-century Reformation, in a roundabout and wholly unintended way, produced modern society.

What is bold and unusual about The Unintended Reformation is that it comes from an explicitly Christian perspective and ends by arguing that only religion – properly understood as a doctrine of solidarity – can allow humanity to escape from the predicament of the modern, the material curse of poverty and the mental afflictions of prosperity.  Gregory not only offers what is today a highly original combination of history and morality but also cogently explains why that combination is needed today.

Click on the link above and read the whole review.

The author talks about the book here.