Category: Blog

Petition to BMA on Abortion

6.7 million abortions have been performed by doctors in Britain since the implementation of the 1967 Abortion Act and 2006 figures just published show a further rise in the annual number of abortion

There is growing public unrest about the growing number of abortions and specifically about:
1. The 24 week upper age limit for abortions – many feel this should be reduced
2. The fact that abortions for handicap are available up until birth
3. Doctors being placed under pressure to be involved in abortion
4. The increasing evidence that abortion has adverse consequences for mental health
5. The inadequacy of counselling currently available for women seeking abortion

Despite this the British Medical Association (BMA) Ethics Committee is pressing for further liberalisation of the abortion law to allow abortion on request up until twelve weeks.

Sign the petition (if you a UK citizen) or learn more from the Christian Medical Fellowship

The Christian Medical Fellowship and the Lawyers Christian Fellowship are evangelical outfits, presently campaigning on abortion and the sexual orientation regulations respectively. But you will find no mention of them or these campaigns at (the evangelical) Christian Today UK online news service.

The problem is not just that evangelicals cannot hear what Catholics are saying, but they cannot hear each other either. Public Christianity, ha, ha.

Pope Benedict has, in his Wednesday General Audiences, been giving brief addresses on the leadership of early Christianity. He began last year with the Apostles. Such things naturally lend themselves to be collected in book form, and a couple of months ago, OSV obtained rights to publish an edition of Apostles in the US (a British version has already been published).

As the editor was working his way through the text (cleaning up footnotes, clarifying puzzling translations, etc), it occurred to me that this would lend itself to the needs of an adult religious ed program. It’s short, the chapters are relatively brief, and of course, it’s Pope Benedict writing, so the content is rich and clearly presented, with at least one thought-provoking, made-for-reflection sentence on every page.

So, I opened my big mouth, and here I am with one more project to do before the end of the month.

Anyone who does religious ed in a parish setting – consider this. There will be twelve sessions, each with questions for study and questions for reflection, as well as opening and closing prayers.

I really believe in what Pope Benedict is doing – he is a master catechist, he understands the problems and challenges of the way of discipleship, of the way of simply being human, and he brings all of that into what he writes.

Amy Welborn

And here are those Wednesday General Audiences – (backwards from June) on Athanasius, Eusebius, Cyprian, Tertullian, Origen, Irenaeus…

Christianity is politics done slowly. It is politics with memory and imagination, that understands the past as resource from which a future may perhaps come into being constructed. It is the politics of the promise of God.

It is a deep-seated assumption of the tradition as we have inherited it that the past is gone and has no further impact on us. But the past does not disappear. It is still entirely with us. It is just that we have no awareness of it. This is the nominalism (we are entirely to free to make up names for things, after which they will be what we have named them), or the voluntarism (things are what we will them to be) or antinomianism (there is no law or tradition or givens for us to come to terms with) of the Western tradition. We do not see it as a tradition, that is as somthing passed to us, or see it as one tradition, but instead see it simply as everything, our field of view being filled by it.

The Western tradition is a kind of forgetfulness. We are not at in charge of the machine we have inherited. The machine wants to give us the impression that we are entirely in charge: it does not even tell us that we are astride a machine. It wants us to believe that we are entirely free agents, able to choose what to do just as impulsively and unconstrainedly as children. We are up on the bridge of an ocean liner, throwing the wheel this way and that, unaware that the ship is only able to react very slowly, so each of our instructions cancels out the previous one, while the great ship of the Western intellectual tradition ploughs on.

But Christianity allows us to see that the Western intellectual tradition – ‘modernity’ – is one tradition, because Christianity is another tradition. Christianity is a distinct tradition because the world is unable to absorb the church so that the distinction between disappears.

The Western tradition think it knows Christianity and has seen through it. But Christianity is preserved as a tradition, and as an alternative to the Western tradition, by the freedom of God. It is God who keeps Christianity out of our reach, this unknown, ungraspable mystery, which alone secures for us the possibility of a future.

Scott Prather at Swords to Plowshares introduces the Aberdeen theology faculty. They look like a good team, young fresh and energetic, all publishing, with the emphasis on dogmatics, which I think makes this department unique in the UK.

My first question:

What sort of ecclesiology does all this evangelical dogmatics result in? It looks to me as though ecclesiology is regarded as the concern of just one member of this faculty. Evangelicals do have an ecclesiology, don’t they? Since there is a fair input from the German theological scene, I hope that there is at least a nodding relationship with Lutheran ecclesiology, by which I mean Luther, not Bonhoeffer. I appreciate that the Anglican/Episcopalian church is not in particularly good shape in Scotland, but then this is where a faculty like this could make a difference, isn’t it?

Second question:

How can we replicate this faculty a little further south in the UK? You have heard of church plants – how about a faculty plant? I know another city a little further down that North Sea coast that could do with some dogmatic theology, and London is its name.

At the very least, then, the Lambeth Conference is like a council in that its purpose from the beginning has been to confront divisive issues with both truth and charity, engaged through the work of the Holy Spirit, and so nourishing and preserving unity in the midst of division. Thus, to insist that agreement be present before meeting – and despite previous meetings! – is simply to void the purpose of the meeting in the first place. Further, to separate precipitously from a body that no longer resembles Christian truth and practice as one understands them, or that seems incapable to upholding them, is to foreclose on the pneumatic promises of providence that call us into council in the first place.

The above points do not entail the conclusion that discipline cannot or should not be imposed on those who persist in an alien way or who scandalize by their behavior. I, like many others, believe such discipline is in fact required. Still, such alien and scandalous life should be confronted rather than avoided by absenting oneself from an encounter in the Lord and refusing the obligation to hold to account in the power of the Lord. The primary point behind all this is that Christians have been given a divine narrative and vocation that insists upon engaged suffering as a means of witness, rather than upon departure and beginning anew as a means of protest and self-protection. Thus, the prophets (eg Jeremiah) and Christ suffer among their people. They do not leave them to form another people.

Ephraim Radner Lambeth Can Be What It Wants To Be

Asia News Iraqi Christians ‘facing extinction’

â??Without Sunday, without the Eucharist the Christians in Iraq cannot surviveâ??: that was how Fr Ragheed spoke of his communityâ??s hope, a community that was used to facing death on a daily basis, that same death that yesterday afternoon faced him, on his way home from saying mass. After having fed his faithful with the Body and Blood of Christ, he gave his own blood, his own life for Iraq, for the future of his Church. This young priest had willingly, knowingly chosen to remain by the side of his parishioners from Holy Spirit parish in Mosul, judged the most dangerous, after Baghdad. His reasoning was simple: without him, without its pastor, his flock would have been lost. In 2003 on finishing his studies in Rome, he decided to return to his country â??that is where I belong, that is my placeâ??.

Asia News

The bishop who is president of Iraqâ??s Council of Catholic Churchesâ?? Committee for inter religious dialogue , signed a declaration regarding the â??tragic situation of Baghdadis Christiansâ??, denouncing militant groups which under the threat of armed violence ask Christians to convert immediately to Islam or to consign their property and leave the country. The same thing happens in Mosul, but with a different â??choiceâ??: pay a monetary tribute to the Jihad if they want to avoid their death.

However in the current situation Christians are targeted as chief conspirators to be exploited or eliminated. They cannot openly profess their faith, the veil is imposed on the women and the crosses are taken down from their churches, threats of kidnappings and extortion weigh heavily over all of them. Msgr Sako lists the violence to which they are submitted on a daily basis: â??now a days Christians are suffering in certain areas and cities in Iraq from forced evacuation, rape, kidnap, blackmail, scarring and killing. This unfamiliar behaviour contradicts the Iraqi humanitarian and Islamic morals. Let everybody realize that emptying Iraq of Christians will be disastrous not only for the Christians but for all Iraqis!… Forcing Christians to leave their homes indicates deterioration in the concept of conviviality and furthermore it destroys the cultural, civil and religious mosaic of which Iraq is considered to be the very cradleâ??.

The appeal signed by Msgr. Sako urges all of the political, religious and cultural communities of Iraq to remain united, because â??there is no salvation without our unity. Let the outsider whoever is he, leave and stay away so that the danger of death and the risk of division disappear and vanish and thus permitting life to return to what it once was; a river which flowed in harmony, a river of brotherhood and close unityâ??.

Asia News