'An idolatry that kills': Pope Francis on greed

By Hannah Brockhaus

Vatican City, Oct 23, 2017 / 10:20 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Pope Francis preached Monday about the idolatry of money, which causes us to ignore those in need, allowing others to go hungry and die while we turn money and worldly possessions into false gods.

Today there are people who are greedy for more money and worldly goods, people who have “so much,” but walk by “hungry children who have no medicine, who have no education, who are abandoned,” he said Oct. 23 during his homily at Mass at the chapel of the Vatican's Casa Santa Marta.

This is “an idolatry that kills,” that makes “human sacrifices” to the god of money, the Pope said.
“This idolatry causes so many people to starve,” he stated, pointing to the example of the hundreds of thousands of Rohingya people who have been displaced from their home in Burma, also known as Myanmar, due to ethno-religious persecution.
There are 800,000 Rohingya people in refugee camps, the Pope said. And of these, 200,000 are children. They are “malnourished, without medicine,” he said.
“Even today this happens,” he emphasized, noting how our prayers against idolatry “must be strong.”
We should pray: “Lord, please, touch the hearts of these people who worship… the god of money. Touch also my heart so I do not fall into” the same thing, that I can see everything clearly, he said.
The Rohingya are a predominantly Muslim ethnic group who reside in the Rakhine state of majority-Buddhist Burma. They have been denied citizenship for nearly 40 years, and their persecution by the government has intensified in recent years.

Pope Francis has spoken out on behalf of the minority many times in recent years. In November he will visit Burma, as well as Bangladesh, where he will undoubtedly speak out for the rights of religious and ethnic minorities.
In his homily, he reflected on the words of Christ in the day’s Gospel from St. Luke: “Take care to guard against all greed, for though one may be rich, one’s life does not consist of possessions.”
God who ultimately puts a limit on our attachment to money, Pope Francis said, since at the end of life it becomes worthless.
Many men worship money and make money their god, he continued, but their life has no meaning.

“Thus will it be for the one who stores up treasure for himself but is not rich in what matters to God,” Francis said, quoting from the Gospel of Luke.
God underlines this with “gentleness” in the end, he said. To make ourselves rich in what matters to God, “that is the only way. Wealth, [yes], but in God.”

....
Taken from: https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/an-idolatry-that-kills-pope-francis-on-greed-76687

6K

0

6K

Mark Latham: ALP is full of useful idiots assisting cultural Marxism

Mark Latham, The Daily Telegraph

October 17, 2017 12:00am

When Vladimir Lenin coined the phrase “useful idiots” in politics, he gave us a handy way of understanding Bill Shorten’s Labor Party.

As identity politics has taken hold of our major public institutions and private companies, Labor politicians have played along.

In wanting to help so-called “oppressed minorities”, they have fallen into the trap of naively assisting the far more dangerous agenda of cultural Marxism.

media_cameraMark Latham. Picture: Harold David

In the eyes of this far-Left movement, they are very useful idiots.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, most people thought Marxism had been defeated.

But this was only true of economic Marxism — government control of the means of production.

Like a scene from a Terminator movie, neo-Marxists reassembled themselves, morphing into an even more menacing force.

They adopted the tactics of the Italian writer Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937). Instead of seeking economic control, they pursued cultural control by manipulating the beliefs, values and language of society.

Gramsci proposed a “long march through the institutions”, steadily taking over universities, schools, media outlets and government agencies by appointing like-minded people to senior positions.

media_cameraKarl Marx argued for state control of production.

media_cameraAntonio Gramsci argued that socialists should first control culture, beliefs and values of a society before being able to control the economy.

Sound familiar?

This is what has happened to Australia over the past 20 years. Political correctness is being used to control our language.

Gender fluidity courses in schools are being used to teach young people there is no such thing as fixed, biological science.

Post-structuralist Marxism is now the dominant ideology in Australia’s universities, such that students are being made to “unlearn” all prior knowledge and to regard history, science and even education itself as “capitalist constructs”.

Employment quotas and theories of “unconscious bias” are dismantling merit-based recruitment, with people hired by the medieval habit of how they look (skin colour and gender).

The overall impact has been to create a society devoid of certainty, drained of institutional ballast.

Cultural Marxism aims to convince people their true beliefs and identities in life are being repressed, that in feeling anxious and uneasy, they need to rise up against the existing social order.

MARK LATHAM: Stop! Diversity police, this is just too much

It’s a powerful movement that started in the underbelly of our institutions and now dominates around 80 per cent of Australian public life.

The rest of us, the 20 per cent, are the resistance.

I say these things from a background in the right-wing of the Labor Party, where I fought the Left internally on most issues.

But I’m not the only one saying it.

Peter Baldwin, the intellectual leader of the Socialist Left faction in the period of the Hawke and Keating governments, has been making similar points.

He has called for a new political alliance: for conservatives, libertarians and traditional social democrats to unite in preserving the values of the 17th-century Enlightenment.

To defend freedom, science and reason.

MARK LATHAM: Finally, someone goes against the herd

To fight for fraternity: bringing people together in common cause.

This is where Shorten and Labor have lost the plot. Identity politics is an incredibly divisive doctrine.

It pits Australians against each other: black versus white, female versus male, gay versus straight.

The neo-Marxists like it this way, as it creates the preconditions of political unrest: large parts of society agitating on spurious grounds.

Why would Labor ever endorse it?

media_cameraOpposition Leader Bill Shorten sees Aboriginals, migrants and females as victims, according to Mark Latham. Picture: Kym Smith

The founding purpose of social democracy is to encourage co-operation between people, transcending self-interest and superficial differences such as skin colour.

Under Shorten’s leadership, the ALP has ditched this kind of thinking.

It’s now a wholly owned subsidiary of identity politics, where questions of race, gender and sexuality are central to its policymaking.

Shorten believes Australia is so bigoted that a democratic vote on same-sex marriage would force large numbers of gay people to kill themselves — a false prophecy.

He sees Aboriginal, migrant and female Australians as victims of institutionalised prejudice.

He has said an ALP government will actively discriminate in favour of these groups.

This means more safe space segregation, more language policing, more radical gender theory, more job quotas and more damaging social division.

In effect, the Daniel Andrews Labor model in Victoria will be imported to Canberra.

These policies are not only wrong but unnecessary. Research has consistently shown Australia to be one of the most tolerant nations on earth.

A major study inside the Prime Minister’s Department earlier this year found that, if anything, we tend to overcompensate in supporting women, migrants and Aborigines, in giving them a fair go.

media_cameraMark Latham believes the Yes campaign is remarkably unconcerned by the need to protect religious freedoms. Picture: AAP

For the cultural Marxists, the purpose of identity politics is not to empower so-called minorities but to tear down perceived majorities — most notably, white straight men.

In the same-sex marriage debate, for instance, the Yes campaign is remarkably unconcerned by the need to protect religious freedoms.

Christians are expected to suffer into the future, just as gays claim to have suffered in the past.

Similarly, radical left feminists are not intent on empowering women, but disenfranchising men — to make them pay for past perceptions of privilege.

Recently, a Mark Latham’s Outsiders viewer wrote to me describing how, in his workplace in Melbourne, men were being sacked under a policy of eliminating “stale, pale males”.

Division of this kind is sparking bitter resentment.

It’s destroying social capital and the cause of Labor.

The one person with a moral duty to speak out against it is Shorten.

Yet he sees his role as egging it on.

This is a stunning betrayal of social democracy: a Labor leader who has lit a Bonfire of the Vengeances, with Australians fighting each other on the basis of race, gender and sexuality.

Truly a useful idiot.

….

Taken from: http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/opinion/mark-latham-alp-is-full-of-useful-idiots-assisting-cultural-marxism/news-story/6425b58d26c78ec0659d9d225a194608?nk=b88dad37a2c83b63e4079d919c47e3e0-1508190807

The ‘novelty’ of Christianity is love, not revenge, Pope Francis says

• In Catholic News Agency, Vatican

• Elise Harris 

• October 8, 2017

• CATHOLIC_NEWS_AGENCY

In his Sunday Angelus address in St. Peter's Square, Pope Francis used the day's Gospel reading from Matthew about the master of a vineyard who hires tenants to oversee it, to impress upon the audience that God "though disappointed by our sins and our errors, does not go back on his word, he does not stop and above all does not take revenge!”

Pope Francis greets pilgrims in St. Peter's Square before his Wednesday general audience, Dec. 2, 2015. (Credit: Daniel Ibaez via CNA.)

VATICAN CITY – On Sunday Pope Francis said the new and unique perspective offered by Christianity is an attitude of love, rather than revenge, which God continues to adopt even in the face of our sins and errors.

“Here is the great novelty of Christianity: a God who, though disappointed by our sins and our errors, does not go back on his word, he does not stop and above all does not take revenge!” the Pope said Oct. 8.
“God loves, he doesn’t take revenge! He loves, and waits to forgive us,” Francis said, explaining that like the Israelites in salvation history, God calls each of us to form a relationship, an alliance, with him.
And “the urgency of responding with good fruits to the call of the Lord, who calls us to become his vineyard, helps us to understand what is new and unique in Christianity,” he said.
“This is not so much the sum of prescripts and moral norms, but it is first of all a proposal of love that God, through Jesus, made and continues to make through humanity,” he said. “It’s an invitation to enter this story of love, becoming a living and open vine, rich in fruit and hope for all.”
Francis spoke to pilgrims present in St. Peter’s Square for his Sunday Angelus address, which he centered on the day’s Gospel reading from Matthew that recounts how the master of a vineyard hires tenants to oversee it.
However, the tenants mistreat and kill his servants when the master sends them to collect the fruits. The tenants, Francis said, “assume a possessive attitude: they don’t consider themselves simple managers, but owners,” and refuse to hand over the crop. Even when the master sends his son, the tenants kill him in hopes of taking the son’s inheritance.
In his speech, the pope noted that this parable offered by Jesus illustrates in “an allegorical way” the warnings and rebukes given by the prophets in the history of Israel.
This is also a story that belongs to us, he said, because it speaks of the alliance God wanted to establish with humanity, and which he also calls each of us to participate in. However, like any “love story,” this history of alliance with God “has its positive moments, but it is also marked by betrayals and refusals.”
To understand how God responds to the refusals opposed to his love and his proposed alliance, the Gospel passage puts forth the question on the lips of the master: “What will the owner of the vineyard do to those tenants when he comes?”
Both this question and Jesus’ response about the stone rejected by the builders becoming the “cornerstone” of a new foundation, Francis said, highlight “that God’s disappointment for the wicked behavior of mankind is not the last word!
“Through the ‘discarded stones’ – and Christ is the first stone that the builders rejected – through situations of weakness and sin, God continues to circulate the ‘new wine’ of his vineyard, which is mercy,” he said.
And the only thing that can impede the “tenacious and tender” will of God, he said, is “arrogance and presumption, which at times even become violence!”
Faced with these attitudes, rather than going back on his promise, God “retains all his power to rebuke and admonish,” telling the arrogant and presumptuous that “the Kingdom of God will be taken from you, and it will be given to a people that will bear fruit.”
We too are invited to become part of God’s vineyard and to bear good fruit, Francis said, but stressed that in order to do so, we must be open.
“A vine that is closed can become wild and produce wild grapes,” he said. “We are called to go out of the vineyard and put ourselves at the service of our brothers who are not with us, to shake up and encourage each other, to remind each other that we must be the vine of the Lord in every environment, even the most distant and uncomfortable.”
The pope closed his address asking for Mary’s intercession in helping each of us “to be everywhere, especially on the peripheries of society, the vine that the Lord has planted for the good of all.”


....
Taken from: https://cruxnow.com/vatican/2017/10/08/novelty-christianity-love-not-revenge-pope-francis-says/

Sydney University's Descent Into Dark Ignorance

The Evolutionists have it the wrong way around. They did not evolve from ignorant brutes. Instead, they have finally evolved into ignorant brutes.

Case in point:

Bella d’Abrera: Sydney Uni wants students to unlearn civilisation

Bella d’Abrera, The Daily Telegraph

October 6, 2017 12:00am

• Bella d’Abrera: Refusing a handshake is an affront to basic values
• Bella D’Abrera: Integration, not segregation is best

Australia’s oldest and most prestigious institution of higher education, the University of Sydney, has reached an all- time low. In a remarkable act of institutional suicide, the university has introduced a compulsory initiative to “unlearn”.

In one fell swoop, it has done ­itself out of a job.

Under the guise of promoting ­research and its role in the changing world, the driving force behind the enterprise is to teach students to “challenge the established, and question the accepted”.

Dr Bella d'Abrera. Picture: Stuart McEvoy for the Australian.

In other words, it’s telling students to forget any preconceived ideas they might have about such things as “truth”, “love”, “medicine” and “criminal”, and to ­replace them with new ones.

Out with the old, in with the new. Under the section entitled “Criminal”, the website informs us that protecting our borders is not really necessary.

And if you think “truth” is ­objective, think again.

According to the university, we live in a post-truth world, where everything is true and everything is false.

One of its Orwellian “Post Truth” initiatives is to be the authority for fact-checking fake news. But how will it do this if it doesn’t believe in truth or facts in the first place?

Unsurprisingly, the section on “love” is a pitch for same-sex marriage. Modern “medicine” it continues, might just be overrated.

The Quadrangle at the University of Sydney. Picture: AAP

On Tuesday, the university ventured out of academia into the world of commerce by issuing a press release in which a leading ­researcher at the University of Sydney Business School urged both students and the rest of society to unlearn the traditional idea of profit and loss in order to build a “sustainable future”.

Just how depriving Australians of the ability to earn a living will “help the community” is an unfathomable mystery.

It’s now clear that even the ideas of economics are being railed against in order to perpetuate ­issues such as climate change, ­sustainability and identity politics nonsense.

Speaking of money, will the university continue to accept the federal Government’s Australian Awards for outstanding contributions to Learning? Surely this would completely contradict this campaign of unlearning.

The Unlearn initiative is completely and utterly at odds with the purpose of education, which is to impart knowledge and to hone the mind.

It’s the exact opposite of curiosity, of progress, of the human thirst for knowledge and a desire to improve both our lot and the lot of others.

Instead, it is promoting unlearning, unknowing and encouraging incuriousness.

So much for the Enlightenment. Without knowledge, it’s impossible to be creative.

When William Charles Wentworth, who is no doubt turning in his grave, first proposed the idea of Australia’s first university in 1850, he envisaged an establishment in which all Australians from every class would be given the opportunity to “become great and useful in the destinies” of this country.

READ MORE: Tim Blair on the rules of a post-truth era

It’s hard to see how students who have been uneducated and deprived of knowledge at the taxpayers’ ­expense will be of any use to ­anyone, let alone the future of ­Australia.

The University of Sydney has gone from teaching students how to think, to what to think, to not to think at all. It is going to produce a generation of ignoramuses.

What then, is the point of sending your children to school at all, if everything they learn will be ­undone at university? This brave new world will be an easy one for academics who might otherwise be expected to know things.

But it would be a mistake to attribute this lunacy only to self-interest. The entire escapade is part of a broader, postmodern movement which has manifested itself as identity politics. Identity politics is a critique of our established institutions and norms, such as equality before the law, parliamentary democracy and freedom of speech.

Our established values, customs and history don’t represent the ­diverse, racial, cultural and gender identities of today, so they must be destroyed.

Identity politics is revolutionary. It says that these institutions are used to oppress, and as long as they exist, groups in society will suffer. So they must be torn down and we must start again.

Racks of human skulls and bones from slaughtered Cambodians as part of the Khmer Rouge. Picture: Getty Images

During the French Revolution, after the abolition of the monarchy, they declared it to be Year I. When the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia in 1975, they declared it to be Year Zero. This might be Year -1, the complete negation of history.

And the proponents of this ­ideology have given up being subtle about it. In this latest operation, the university has openly adopted the pattern of teaching which has been eating away at academia since the 1960s.
It’s there, written large on the website.

The “unlearn” initiative is about “breaking down old rules so we can write new ones”.

This is not about freedom, but rather indoctrinating students into a new religion of ignorance, a new kind of groupthink.

The proponents of unlearning ask: “Imagine what could be possible if we all learn to unlearn.”

But if we go down this regressive road of unlearning, nothing will be possible at all.

Dr Bella d’Abrera is the Director of the Foundations of Western Civilisation Program at the Institute of Public Affairs.

Share this on Facebook

Share this on Twitter

Share this by Email

....
Taken from: http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/opinion/bella-dabrera-sydney-uni-wants-students-to-unlearn-civilisation/news-story/f6cc925f168e2b0ac280201239228516?nk=10d21ee06b928a812479da2e3d9274a9-1507245886

US House passes bill to ban most abortions after 20 weeks

 

By Matt Hadro

Washington D.C., Oct 3, 2017 / 04:35 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- The U.S. House passed on Tuesday a ban on abortions after 20 weeks of gestation in a largely party-line vote. The measure is a major pro-life legislative priority, but it is expected to fail in the Senate.
“The New England Journal of Medicine has documented that premature babies are surviving earlier and earlier, yet our nations laws fail to protect these children,” stated Maureen Ferguson, senior policy advisor with The Catholic Association.
The House passed the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act late in the afternoon of Oct. 3 by a vote of 237 to 189, largely along party lines. The chamber also passed a version of the bill in 2015; but Tuesday’s bill, as in 2015, is expected to fail in the Senate.
If it were to be signed into law, the bill would “not only save between 11,000-18,000 lives a year, but will serve to educate the public on the humanity of the unborn person and affirm the science of fetal pain early in development,” said Jeanne Mancini, president of the March for Life.”
It bans most abortions past 20 weeks, except in cases of rape, incest, or when the life of the mother is at stake. Pro-life leaders have pointed to studies which say that unborn babies can feel pain by 20 weeks post-fertilization, and that a small number can actually survive with the proper medical care, if born at that stage of the pregnancy.
“The fact is that more than 18,000 late-term, pain capable unborn babies were torturously killed without anesthesia in America in just the last year,” Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.), who introduced the bill, said on the House Floor Monday evening. “It is the worst human rights atrocity in the history of the United States of America.”
Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, chair of the Pro-Life Committee of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, asked House members to support the bill in a Sept. 29 letter.
“We hold that every child, from conception onward, deserves love and the protection of the law. We believe that no person or government has the right to take the life of an innocent human being – and we hold that the real problems that lead women to consider abortion should be addressed with solutions that support both mother and child,” Cardinal Dolan wrote.
“Stories of children being born earlier in pregnancy, as early as 20 weeks post-fertilization, are becoming more common,” he wrote. “These procedures after the middle point of pregnancy also pose serious dangers to women – as evidenced by a disturbing number of news stories about the death or serious complications of women undergoing such procedures.”
Rep. Randy Hultgren (R-IL) said in a floor statement supporting the bill that “The Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act will moderate our extreme position and ensure we protect the most vulnerable – like Micah Pickering, a lively five-year-old I met last week.”
He explained that Micah was born prematurely, at the age children would be protected by the bill: “Micah was able to survive and thrive after spending more than four months in the neonatal intensive care unit. He is now in kindergarten, and I found out when talking to him that we share a love of Legos.”
“The bottom line is this: 20 weeks is halfway through a pregnancy. It’s too late to end the life of an unborn baby,” Hultgren stated. “It violates what Americans want, it violates science, and it violates our country’s most enduring values.”
The White House has promised to sign the bill if it passes both chambers, in line with a promise that President Donald Trump made on the campaign trail to sign certain pro-life bills if they were sent to his desk.
“The bill, if enacted into law, would help to facilitate the culture of life to which our Nation aspires,” the White House stated on Tuesday. “The United States is currently out of the mainstream in the family of nations, in which only 7 out of 198 nations allow elective abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy.” Among those seven countries are China and North Korea.
Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List, stated on Tuesday that “This bill, which the President has promised to sign, would get us out of that disgraceful club and bring our laws into line with basic human decency.” She noted that 20 states have already passed versions of the bill.
If the bill fails in the Senate, Dannenfelser told CNA last week that Susan B. Anthony List will begin working to ensure that enough pro-life candidates are elected in 2018 to build a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.
“We are preparing for 2018 Senate elections,” Dannenfelser said. “What we’re doing is we’re building that Senate up to a 60-vote margin.”


....
Taken from: https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/us-house-passes-bill-to-ban-most-abortions-after-20-weeks-85842