Gay marriage vote passed

A MOTION backing same-sex marriage has been passed by the Tasmanian House of Assembly the first time an Australian parliament has voted for marriage equality for gays and lesbians.

The Greens’ motion calls on the Federal Government to change the Marriage Act.

The passage of the motion was greeted with applause from Labor and Green members on the floor of the House and a standing ovation by same-sex marriage activists in the public gallery.

Liberal members voted against the motion.

The debate was watched by a large national audience on the Parliament’s internet broadcast.

Greens leader Nick McKim said the motion provided hope.

“By voting in support of marriage equality, Tasmania has written itself into this country’s history books, as a national leader in advocating a compassionate and progressive society,” he said. “It is now time for the Federal Government to act to remove legally entrenched discrimination.”

Mr McKim said that if the Federal Government did not reform marriage laws by the end of the year, he would push on with plans for state legislation.

Premier Lara Giddings said the vote was a great day for the state.

“Tasmania has come a long way since 1997 when we rectified the terrible situation of having homosexual relationships considered illegal in this state,” she said. “We’ve come a long way to show we are in fact a tolerant and compassionate community.”

Australian Marriage Equality national convener Alex Greenwich said people nationwide followed the debate.

“What they heard today was a message of hope. They heard a message of hope coming out of the Tasmanian Parliament that one day gay and lesbian Australians will be treated equally by the law and by the Marriage Act,” he said. “This gives us the momentum and the encouragement to go on and keep fighting.”

Tasmanian Gay and Lesbian Rights Group spokesman Rodney Croome said: “If every state and territory parliament were to do what we have seen in Tasmania today, it would be impossible for the Federal Parliament to continue to resist change. If Tasmania can do this, other states and territories can do it too.”

Catholic Archbishop of Hobart Adrian Doyle expressed disappointment: “Our position on maintaining the current meaning of marriage is well known and the church will continue to lobby both state and federal politicians to ensure the Act is not changed.”

Presbyterian minister Campbell Markham was also unhappy with the result: “Today’s Greens motion is an attack on the basic rights of children.”

Full Article HERE!

Canadians losing faith in religion

Many link traditional institutions with religious conflict, survey finds.

It’s no secret fewer Canadians attend church today than 20 years ago, but what may be surprising is almost half of Canadians believe religion does more harm than good, according to the results of a survey conducted by Ipsos Reid.

Explanations from experts vary – from fear of extremists and anger toward individuals who abuse positions of power, to a national “forgetting” of Canadian history.

“In the past few years, there have been several high-profile international situations involving perceived religious conflicts, as well as the anniversary of 9/11, and I think when people see those, it causes them to fear religion and to see it as a source of conflict,” said Janet Epp Buckingham, associate professor at Trinity Western University in Ottawa.

Religion seems to be a key player in many of today’s top stories, from stand-alone events – such as the 2005 riots in the suburbs of Paris linked to the French government’s proposed burka ban, and rightwing Christian Anders Behring Breivik’s shooting rampage in Oslo, Norway – to more drawn-out sagas, such as child abuse in the Catholic Church, and the perception that Christians are constantly campaigning against gay marriage and abortion.

Canadians who don’t participate in religion themselves experience it in the news, which can sensationalize the negatives aspects of religion, said Dr. Pamela Dickey Young, the principal of the School of Religion at Queen’s University, in Kingston, Ont.

Dickey Young said that had the survey asked if religious people did more harm than good, the answer would have been very different.

“To me, that means people think religion is harmful, but people who are religious aren’t particularly harmful,” she said.

The survey, which was conducted ahead of the launch of a new Global TV show – Context – about religion in Canada, also found that 89 per cent of Canadians are comfortable being around people of different faiths.

Dickey Young said when she asks most of her firstyear students if they’re religious, they say no. When she asks if they are spiritual, they say yes.

She said this follows a general trend among Canadians who are turning away from organized religion – which is seen as a concrete set of pre-ordained rules – in favour of a more personalized spiritual journey.

But, on the question of whether religion does more harm than good, Rev. Canon Dr. Bill Prentice said: “We forget our history.”

He pointed out that the first hospitals, schools and universities in Canada were founded by religious institutions, or at the very least, have a religious foundation.

Prentice, director of Community Ministry for the Anglican Diocese of Ottawa, said churches continue to “do good works” across the country, managing food banks, social programs, and helping the country’s homeless find shelter.

These charities “would not exist if the churches pulled out because the volunteer sector in the religious communities does work that wouldn’t otherwise go on,” he said.

“I think we take for granted all the positive things that religious institutions are doing in our society, because they’re working in the background and they’re working with marginalized people,” said Epp Buckingham.

“They’re the first on the ground when there’s a humanitarian disaster or a tornado or a hurricane, and they’re often the unsung heroes.”

Dan Merkur, a visiting scholar in the department for the study of religion at the University of Toronto, said he thinks there are massive changes happening in organized religion worldwide.

In the 1960s and ’70s, he said, most clergy tried to “rationalize” religion by making it logical. But these days, he said, the trend is toward social work and counselling, suggesting that clergy “want to listen to people and help them through their troubles.”

This, said Merkur, could be a reaction to fewer people in the pews, or it could be the natural course of religious philosophy.

Full Article HERE!

Priesthood should be open to male, female, married or celibate – Fr Sean McDonagh

The call by the retired Bishop for Derry for the Church to change its position on mandatory celibacy for priests does not go far enough, according to Association of Catholic Priests co-founder, Fr Sean McDonagh.

The Columban priest was responding to comments made on the Church’s policy on celibacy by Dr Edward Daly in his memoirs A Troubled See: Memoirs of a Derry Bishop.

Dr Daly, who was Bishop of Derry between 1974 and 1993, describes celibacy in his book as, “an obligation that has caused many wonderful potential candidates to turn away from a vocation, and other fine men to resign their priesthood at great loss to the church.” Elsewhere Dr Daly writes, “If things continue as they are, a lot of parish communities will not have a priest in a few years’ time, and those that they have will be older, weary and greatly overworked.”

He asks why celibacy should be “the great sacred and unyielding arbiter, the paradigm of diocesan priesthood?”

In his memoirs, Dr Edward Daly said he hoped, “that senior members of the clergy and laity make their views more forcefully known” on the issue of celibacy and he said these were views that were often expressed privately but seldom publicly.

Responding, Fr Sean McDonagh called on the Irish hierarchy to support the retired Bishop’s call rather than going “down the cul de sac” of a married diaconate, which, he warned, would “clericalise laity” instead of looking to a “different kind of priesthood.”

Speaking to UK Catholic weekly, The Tablet, Fr Sean McDonagh commented, “I would go further than that – it should be open to male, female, married or celibate.”

He told ciNews that he was not the first voice in the Church to call for women priests, and referred to Cardinal Martini of Milan’s writings, and biblical scholar, Professor Jerome Murphy O’Connor.

Fr McDonagh also called on the bishops to conduct a survey among the laity to assess people’s level of satisfaction with the new translation of the Roman missal, which he said had been “imposed” by Rome. The Columban missionary told ciNews that a number of women in his congregation last Sunday had voiced their opposition to the new translation and particularly to the use of non-inclusive language.

Fr McDonagh, who is a linguist, urged anyone who is unhappy with the new translation to write to the bishops and outline their difficulties. He added, “The anecdotal line is that everyone is happy with it.” But he said, “People should tell the truth about what has happened. People were not consulted on it.”

“I would like to see, within a year or a year and a half at the most, a really good survey done to find out what people really think of it.” The survey, he said, needed to include all age groups.

Referring to Vatican II, the ACP co-founder said its basic insight had been that the liturgy is for everyone and that the Church should be facilitating participation. “If you are starting to use archaic language, you are not facilitating partnership and participation for a lot of people – why do that?” he asked.

Referring to the fact that just 200 students out of 55,000 who sat the Leaving Certificate studied Latin, Fr McDonagh asked, “What has Latin got to offer?” and he suggested to ciNews that the proponents of the new translation are “operating out of a world that doesn’t exist.”

He queried whether they were intent on returning to pre Vatican II approach “when the laity were basically an audience and could not participate because they did not understand or speak Latin?”

Fr McDonagh said the new translation demonstrated “incompetence” in the decision to follow a literalist translation rather than use dynamic equivalence.

Full Article HERE!

Conference Promotes Dialogue About Voices of Sexual Diversity and the Church

Catholics academics, professionals and pastoral workers were among the speakers at a recent Fordham University conference, which sought, according to the program, to “raise awareness and generate informed conversation about sexual diversity issues within the community of faith and in the broader civic world that the Catholic Church and the Catholic people inhabit.”

The conference, held on Sept. 16, was titled “Learning to Listen: Voices of Sexual Diversity and the Catholic Church,” and was the first of a four-part series called “More than a Monologue: Sexual Diversity and the Catholic Church.” The series also will include conferences hosted by Union Theological Seminary, Yale Divinity School and Fairfield University. Although the conferences are thematically connected, each one has been independently planned by its respective institution. Each one seeks to more clearly depict the experience of people who are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender in the church.

Approximately 370 people attended the Fordham conference, which was made up of three panel discussions. During a press conference, Paul Lakeland, the Aloysius P. Kelley, S.J., Professor of Catholic Studies and Director of the Center for American Catholic Studies at Fairfield University, said that while many people are aware of the church’s teachings on sexual ethics, he hoped the conferences would help speak to issues that are not directly addressed by those teachings.

“When you say more than a monologue, people say, ‘Oh, the bishops are the monologue, and now we want to get all the other voices in,’ but that’s not strictly the case,” Lakeland said. “There’s a monologue in the sense that: wherever you stand in the debate on sexual ethics, that’s a sort of monologue.” Views on both sides are often one-dimensional, he added. “But when we ask questions—What is the experience of gay and lesbian Catholics in the church? Or what about teen suicide? Or what about the relationship between the church and the legal system as they look at sam…..

Full Article HERE!

Ex-nun a cardinal sinner in the mind of the church

PATRICIA Fresen prefers being quietly subversive to openly confrontational, but the 70-year-old former Dominican nun is like a purple rag to a bull to the Vatican.
She says she is a Catholic woman bishop, properly ordained by a male bishop in the sacrament passed down by laying on hands from the first apostles. The official church says that by that act she ceased to be a Catholic and it has excommunicated her (banned her from the church).

Bishop Fresen – now a bishop in the Roman Catholic Womenpriests church – rejects the excommunication.

In Australia to speak to progressive Catholic groups, the former South African says apartheid taught her about unjust laws. ”We learnt through people like [Nelson] Mandela and [Archbishop Desmond] Tutu that if you have tried and tried to change unjust laws the only way, in the end, is to break them. An unjust law must not be obeyed but broken.”

She also suggests that she is in plentiful company because, according to church law, vast numbers of Catholics are automatically excommunicated – if they use artificial contraception, if they divorce and remarry without church approval, if they are gay and sexually active.

Roman Catholic WomenPriests was launched in 2002 when an anonymous Catholic bishop ordained seven women secretly on a boat on the Danube. Bishop Fresen was ordained a priest in 2003, a bishop in 2005 and excommunicated in 2007.

Now the group has nearly 200 women priests in North America and Europe, with a toehold in Colombia, plus three male priests. Bishop Fresen suspects they may soon be joined by some Australian women.

Usually, a woman who becomes a priest in her group is already supported by a community. ”I recently travelled down the east coast of the US. When I first saw the communities they were little groups of five, six, or eight; now there are in the hundreds,” Bishop Fresen says.

”Nearly all are people on the fringes of the church, who want to be Catholic but are very critical of some aspects. They are forming churches with much more communitarian structures, much more accountability on the part of the leaders.”

Now based in Germany, Bishop Fresen predicts a time of massive change.
”Benedict, a German Pope, is very unpopular in Germany. He’s become a figure of fun. I think he’s bringing the papacy to a quick end, and I don’t think there will be many more popes elected this way,” she says.

The authoritarian structure based on the Pope and Vatican bureaucracy is collapsing, she says, and soon the Bishop of Rome will be just another Italian bishop. But the church will survive, and she will be a part. ”I am still a Roman Catholic, very much on the edges. They don’t want me, but I’m not going. As [theologian] Hans Kung says, ‘Less Pope, more Jesus.’ ”

Full Article HERE!