AFP - A small Florida church Wednesday brushed aside global outrage and vowed to go ahead with burning some 200 Korans, as local officials drew up plans to try to tamp down the protest.
AP - Most of the country will see a colder-than-usual winter while summer and spring will be relatively cool and dry, according to the time-honored, complex calculations of the "Old Farmer's Almanac."
Catholic campaigners seeking reform within their Church have published six questions for the Pope to consider during his visit to the UK next week.
Catholic campaigners seeking reform within their Church have published six questions for the Pope to consider during his visit to the UK next week.
They include questions on the “present over-centralised Church structure” and the lack of accountability highlighted by the child abuse crisis. There are also questions on women's ordination, sexuality, priestly celibacy and the Church's new English-language liturgy.
Catholic Voices for Reform, an umbrella organisation for pro-reform groups, delivered the questions yesterday (7 September) to Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Westminster and head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales. They asked him to pass them to the pope during his trip.
Benedict XVI will visit Glasgow, London and Birmingham during his state visit to the UK from 16 – 19 September.
Speaking at a press conference prior to handing in the questions, Simon Bryden-Brook of Catholics for a Changing Church urged the Pope to listen more carefully to his flock. He said, “A pope who does not listen to the sheep is not doing his job properly”. Pat Brown of Catholic Women's Ordination (CWO) added, “If the institution doesn't start listening, I really don't see a future for it”.
Bernard Wynne of the group Stand up for Vatican II added, “Lay people are denied a role in the central government of the Church. They're also denied a role in the diocesan and sometimes the parish government of the Church.” Bryden-Brook criticised a system that allowed power to be concentrated in “one person and his cronies”.
Bryden-Brook described the requirement for priests to be celibate as "incredibly damaging" and pointed out that it appears to be waived when it comes to Anglican clergy converting to Rome. He emphasised that "we do not denigrate celibacy for those priests who wish to adopt it,” but argued that it should not be compulsory.
Empowering the laity is a central theme of the reformers' agenda. Valerie Stroud of the group We Are Church bemoaned the lack of adult education in the Roman Catholic Church and suggested that there is a “vast swathe of Catholics who've never learnt any more about their faith than what they learnt when they were seven years old”.
Asked if they were abandoning church teaching in favour of secular notions of human rights, Bryden-Brook insisted that Christianity is about the incarnation and “God being revealed in humanity”. He said that such Christian teaching fitted naturally with a commitment to human rights.
Brown was challenged on the level of support for the ordination of women. She insisted that it is not only a western concern and that she has worked with Catholics from various parts of the global south calling for women's ordination. She admitted that CWO could not give a precise membership figure because of the fluid nature of its membership, but Wynne said that they would welcome an independent opinion poll to measure support.
The panel were asked by Ekklesia's reporter if they also wished to see change in the Vatican's approach to economic justice, given the current Pope's campaign against liberation theology in his previous role as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Wynne admitted that, “The Church was very peremptory in the way it handled liberation theology” but argued that “compared to many governments”, the Church's position on social justice has been “pretty good”.
The groups that make up Catholic Voices for Reform are keen to emphasise that Catholic opinion is much broader than the views promoted by the Vatican. Bryden-Brook yesterday encouraged grassroots Catholics to take the initiative, insisting that, “change at the top will only come from pressure from below”.
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AFP - A small Florida church Wednesday brushed aside global outrage and vowed to go ahead with burning some 200 Korans, as local officials drew up plans to try to tamp down the protest.
A report released by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has warned that at least 34 Colombian tribes face extinction due to continuing violence.
A report released by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has warned that at least 34 Colombian tribes face extinction due to continuing violence on their lands.
The report found that, “In spite of new efforts by the state… the risk of physical or cultural disappearance remains, and in some cases has risen”.
An increase in murders, death threats, and the forced recruitment of indigenous youth into armed groups are just some of the dangers reportedly facing Colombia’s Indians.
Internal displacement is also cited as a major issue that disproportionately affects Colombia’s tribal peoples. Of the country’s four million internal refugees, Indians make up 15 per cent of the total, despite the fact that they represent just two per cent of the national population.
Just two weeks before the report was released, leader Luis Socarrás Pimienta of the Wayúu tribe was shot dead by an alleged paramilitary outside his home in the northern Colombian province of la Guajira.
According to the report, murders of indigenous Colombians rose by 63 per cent between 2008 and 2009, and 33 members of Colombia’s Awa tribe were killed in 2009 alone.
The Awa are mentioned alongside one of the Amazon’s last nomadic tribes, the Nukak, as requiring “special attention”. More than half of the Nukak have been wiped out since the arrival of coca-growing colonists on their land. The Nukak are said to be trapped in a cruel limbo between oppressive refugee shelters on the outskirts of a town and the violence-stricken forest.
An earlier UN report cites a suspected programme of “ethnic cleansing” in the country to make way for illicit crops or “to establish large-scale agro-business ventures, including palm oil plantations and beef cattle production”.
“We can move around less and less, even to hunt or collect food,” said a leader of the recently displaced Wounaan tribe, who blames the presence of armed groups and heightened violence on an influx of coca cultivation in Wounaan territory.
“Colombia’s former President lays claim to his successful campaign against violence, yet this report has again illustrated the country’s abysmal record of human rights abuses against its indigenous population,” said Stephen Corry of Survival International yesterday (7 September).
He added, “Juan Manuel Santos’ new government must act once and for all to protect its most vulnerable citizens from being wiped out, before it’s too late”.
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Three Catholics arrested after cutting through the fence at the Aldermaston Atomic Weapons Establishment say they were “inspired by the message of Jesus”.
Three Catholic peace activists who were arrested after cutting through the fence at a nuclear base say that they were “inspired by the message of Jesus”.
The three, who include a priest, entered the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) in Aldermaston, England and put up a sign declaring “Open for Disarmament: All Welcome”.
The incident follows UK government plans to build a new multi-million pound nuclear testing facility at the Aldermaston site. One of the gates of the establishment was blocked on Monday (6 September) by around twenty members and supporters of Trident Ploughshares who disrupted access to the site during the morning rush hour.
The three Catholics have all been arrested in the past for nonviolent direct action. They include Father Martin Newell, 43, a Passionist priest from London Catholic Worker. The others are Susan Clarkson, 63, of Oxford Catholic Worker and Chris Cole, 47, also from Oxford.
They said that they were at Aldermaston to open “a new gateway into this tightly guarded factory of death”.
In a statement issued shortly after they entered the base, they declared, “We come inspired by the message of Jesus to love our enemies, to be peacemakers and to live and act nonviolently at all times”.
The activists pointed out that this week marks the thirtieth anniversary of the first act of direct nuclear disarmament, the “Ploughshares 8”. They said that their action was inspired by the same “spirit of disarmament”.
They added, “We believe that AWE Aldermaston and its extensive and expensive new development programme needs to be exposed for what it is: a factory for the creation of weapons of mass destruction which have the power to destroy this beautiful world, given to us by God, our loving creator, to care and tend”.
In addition to Newell, Clarkson and Cole, three of the Trident Ploughshares activists were also arrested for their role in blocking one of the establishment's gates.
Trident Ploughshares are drawing attention to the ongoing £1 billion-a-year modernisation programme at Aldermaston, which includes the Orion laser, an enriched uranium handling facility and three new supercomputers.
The campaigners say this will enable the UK government to develop a new generation of nuclear warheads, circumventing obligations under the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and undermining its disarmament commitments under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. They are also concerned about the health and safety and environmental implications of the new developments, particularly in light of the lack of public disclosure.
Ann Kobayashi, a Trident Ploughshares activist and retired social worker from Wickford, Essex, said, “We don’t need new nuclear weapons, but we do need the skills and knowledge of the AWE workforce to address the significant challenges of decommissioning existing nuclear weapons and nuclear waste disposal, which will affect future generations”.
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AP - Pope Benedict XVI thanked the British on Wednesday for the "vast amount of work" they have put into his upcoming visit and said he hoped their efforts would pay off.