The Catholic Bishops of the United States have long supported adequate and affordable health care for all. As pastors and teachers, we believe genuine health care reform must protect human life and dignity, not threaten them, especially for the most voiceless and vulnerable. We believe health care legislation must respect the consciences of providers, taxpayers, and others, not violate them. We believe universal coverage should be truly universal, not deny health care to those in need because of their condition, age, where they come from or when they arrive here. Providing affordable and accessible health care that clearly reflects these fundamental principles is a public good, moral imperative and urgent national priority.

Sadly, the legislative proposal recently unveiled in the Senate does not meet these moral criteria. Specifically, it violates the longstanding federal policy against the use of federal funds for elective abortions and health plans that include such abortions – a policy upheld in all health programs covered by the Hyde Amendment, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program – and now in the House-passed “Affordable Health Care for America Act.” We believe legislation that violates this moral principle is not true health care reform and must be amended to reflect it. If that fails, the current legislation should be opposed.

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Only a day after Senate Democrats voted to move into a historic debate on overhauling the nation’s healthcare system, key centrists made it clear today that the party is still a long way from delivering on its promise to provide near-universal insurance coverage and contain medical costs.

Faced with the prospect of Republican filibusters, Democratic leaders must deliver the same kind of total unity they managed to achieve in Saturday’s vote to begin debate: Every Democratic senator, plus two independents who caucus with them, supported the key procedural motion.

But several of those senators spoke out today to say that they will not support the healthcare bill itself unless major changes were made.

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In reality, it was clearly tense. Relations are strained following the Pope’s recent offer of special conversion terms for disaffected Anglican conservatives unhappy with Dr Rowan Williams’s tolerance of homosexuality and the ordination of women.

The Vatican says the offer was meant as ecumenism. Many Anglicans felt it was a land grab exploiting divisions within their ranks. Dr Williams was criticised at first for his softly-softly response, giving only carefully coded public expressions of resistance to the Vatican’s approach. Anglicans feared their archbishop was a pushover. But judging by icy formalties after yesterday’s encounter, Dr Williams was more forthright in private.

That is the right balance….

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The Vatican has mounted a direct challenge to the unity of the Anglican Communion. It established last month a new legal structure by which Anglicans may enter the Catholic Church. Traditionalist Anglicans, for whom the arrangement was designed, were delighted. But Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was treated unconscionably in the process. Dr Williams will meet Pope Benedict tomorrow in Rome. In the interests of his own authority and the integrity of the Anglican tradition, he should give the pontiff two clear messages.

First, the Anglican Communion is not an arrangement of convenience among disparate parties. In creating the new structure, known as an apostolic constitution, the Vatican acted precipitately. Second, there is an impeccable case for the Church to welcome women priests and homosexual clergy. On these issues that have sharply divided Anglicans, Dr Williams is clearly liberal by temperament. Stating that position openly, regardless of its effect on Anglican-Catholic relations, is overdue….

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Underlying relations between the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion is the Christian duty to work towards unity.

The church word is “ecumenism” – describing the universal values and beliefs that all Christians share.

Forty years ago the Roman Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council seemed to promise a greater readiness to meet other churches half way in achieving greater unity.

But Pope Benedict thinks the Council’s deliberations have been misinterpreted, and he wants to put a brake on the modernisation that has taken place in the Catholic Church in recent decades.

A liberal Catholic and historian of the Church, Michael Walsh, said the Pope’s invitation to Anglicans was part of this plan.

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It is important in the light of some awkward feelings, particularly about the way the news of the Apostolic Constitution was handled, that the Pope and Archbishop restated their intent to continue and consolidate the ecumenical relations between our Churches and drew attention to the preparatory work presently under way for the next phase of the ARCIC official dialogue.

I will be in Rome this week for the Informal Talks between the Vatican and the Anglican Communion. These annual, official, in camera conversations cover our shared agenda as Churches, including our formal ecumenical instruments, ARCIC (the theological dialogue) and IARCCUM (the commission on mission and unity) and other aspects of our joint international relations. The recent private conversations between His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI and His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury appear to have set the tone for fruitful working meetings this week.

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As far as I can make out the whole speech can be paraphrased thus:

1. The ARCIC talks have worked. We’ve made a lot of progress and we agree on all the basics.
2. We agree on the creed and the main points of the Christian faith.
3. Women’s ordination really isn’t such a big deal. We got used to it. You could too.
4. The way we get on is that we all agree to differ. We’re good with that. It works. You should try it.
5. Sometimes we have to make a compromise and so we have flying bishops and ‘impaired communion.’ That works too. It’s not so bad. You should try it.
6. Things are going fine. We don’t know why you guys are still so uptight about women priests and bishops. I’m sure you’ll probably have them one day too, and until then, lets have full communion and you can recognize our orders and we can all do things the Anglican way.

What I can’t get my head around is that Rowan Williams really seems to believe this….

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In the wake of Pope Benedict XVI’s special provisions for Anglicans who want to leave Archbishop Williams’ flock and join the Roman Catholic Church, his assessment of Catholic-Anglican relations seemed to surprise some people in the audience when he spoke in Rome Nov. 19.

But people seemed less surprised when his remarks about what the next steps in ecumenical dialogue should be included several blunt challenges to the Catholic leadership and its theologians.

Anglicans and Roman Catholics — indeed, all Christians engaged in ecumenical dialogue over the last 40 years — really need to ask themselves if the doctrines and practices still dividing them are anywhere near as important as the essential dogmas they share, he said the evening before beginning a series of meetings with Vatican officials and with Pope Benedict.

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The Archbishop invoked the Prayer of St Francis at evening prayer in Rome on the eve of his meeting with the Pope. Preaching at an ecumenical service with Cardinal Walter Kasper presiding, at the Oratory of St Francis Xavier, he gave a rare insight into the depths of the his own, personal, intense desire for unity, and continued warm relations with Rome. ‘As we pray for unity between Christians…whatwever we may be, Anglicans, Methodists, Roman Catholics, Armenian, Apostolic Orthodox whatever we may be, give us the Holy Spirit to bind us together, that we may meet one another’s hunger.’

He went on to reference the St Francis Prayer. (The relevant passage is towards the end, about eight minutes into the video.) And while he did not use this passage directly, the prayer has this line: ‘It is in pardoning that we are pardoned.’ Presumably, then, he’s forgiven the Pope. What seems to have been at issue is not so much what was done, as the way it was done. The announcement a couple of weeks ago, with little notice or preparation that he was aware of, left the Archbishop of Canterbury in a state of some discomfiture, not knowing how to respond.

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Both sides have tried to present the offer as a normal step, but the Vatican’s top ecumenical official, Cardinal Walter Kasper, last week revealed Williams had called him in the middle of the night for an explanation when it was announced.

There was no immediate comment from the Anglican side on William’s brief private audience with the pontiff, which was billed as a courtesy call by church officials.

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The biggest unanswered question is how exactly Catholics and Anglicans propose to move towards unity after years of progressive mutual alienation. While the leadership of the Anglican church has embraced women’s ordination and, in the US, gay priests, the Vatican under Benedict has become increasingly proud of its conservatism on these and other issues.

In a lecture last Thursday evening at the pontifical Gregorian university, Williams made an impassioned plea for the Catholic side to recognise they had made giant steps towards reconciling their theological positions. All that stood between them were “second order” questions of ecclesiastical organisation, he claimed. But it is hard to believe Benedict’s Vatican will see things in that light, any more than traditionalist Anglicans do.

This has been one of the archbishop’s most delicate and testing encounters. On Friday he held talks with Vatican officials in which, according to a source in Rome, he repeated his disappointment at the way he had been kept in the dark about the pope’s initiative until a late stage.

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One of the surprising — at least to the journalists who have been calling me today — elements of today’s meeting was that the official Anglican-Catholic dialogue appears to be back on track after some years in the sidings. Benedict XVI and Dr Williams discussed the future of the next stage of the ARCIC process — ARCIC III — whose aim has always been to achieve the unification of the Anglican and the Catholic Churches. According to Cardinal Kasper, the topic is not yet agreed but is likely to be the question of the universal v. the local Church — a subject that will be never far behind negotiations over the new ordinariates.

One of Dr Williams’s most senior advisers, the Rev Canon Jonathan Goodall, will remain in Rome to launch a new round of dialogue designed to build closer ties. (He’s the bearded one on the right 28 seconds into this video). Goodall is well known in Rome, and is a sharp ecclesiologist who has been at Dr Williams’s side throughout the Anglican Communion storms of recent years. This news, taken with Dr Williams’s speech at the Gregorian in Rome on Friday — in which he proposed that the process of cohabitation being worked out by the Anglican Communion could offer a model for Christendom as a whole — suggests there could be some interesting surprises ahead. Is there an Anglican plan being brewed — a ‘Covenant’ that would commit the Churches of tradition (Catholic, Anglican, Orthodox) to working together more closely, recognizing the Pope as the “focus of unity” but not his Vatican I powers? Watch this space.

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The Catholic Church in Korea has lost four priests to the Anglicans in recent years, with marriage cited as the most important reason.

“They want to marry and at the same time serve as pastors,” Anglican Fr Peter Lee Kyong-nae, himself a former Catholic seminarian, told UCA News. Two more Catholic priests are currently preparing to become Anglican priests, he added.

“The priests made an honest and courageous decision to leave the Catholic Church in order to build a family, and they gave up all the privileges they enjoyed in the Catholic Church,” Fr Lee said.

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…[Dr. Williams on Vatican Radio] added: “Naturally, I wanted to express some of the concerns about the way in which the announcement of the constitution had been handled and received.

“Clearly many Anglicans, myself included, felt that it put us in an awkward position for a time ”“ not the content [of the constitution] so much as some of the messages that were given out.

“I needed to share with the Pope some of those concerns. I think those were expressed and heard in a very friendly spirit.”

He said people were wrong to think that the Catholic Church had been trying to attract Anglicans with “advertising or special officers”.

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The Archbishop of Canterbury has expressed his concerns to the Pope about the way the Vatican announced a scheme to welcome disaffected Anglicans into the Roman Catholic Church.

In the private meeting at the Vatican with Benedict XVI, Dr Rowan Williams made clear he had been put in an ‘awkward position’ because he had been given so little warning about the proposals to entice Anglicans to Rome by letting them keep many of their traditions.

But he insisted that the tone of the meeting had been ‘very friendly’, and relations between the two Churches were still strong. The Vatican also described the meeting as ‘cordial’.

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Germany’s new finance minister has echoed Chinese warnings about the growing threat of fresh global asset price bubbles, fuelled by low US interest rates and a weak dollar.

Wolfgang Schäuble’s comments highlight official concern in Europe that the risk of further financial market turbulence has been exacerbated by the exceptional steps taken by central banks and governments to combat the crisis.

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It’s no secret to students that coed dorms are more fun than same-sex dorms. But they can also fuel very unhealthy behavior that might otherwise be moderated.

A new study finds university students in coed housing are 2.5 times more likely to binge drink every week. And no surprise, they’re also likely to have more sexual partners, the study found. Also, pornography use was higher among students in coed dorms.

Some 90 percent of U.S. college dorms are now coed.

More than 500 students from five college campuses around the country participated in the study.

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There is a lingering suspicion among girls (as the unpopularity of science subjects demonstrates) that boys don’t value cleverness as an essential quality in a life partner. Given a choice between gorgeous or brainy, there is no guarantee they’ll do the right thing, because men think they’re clever enough for two. Well, it turns out they’re wrong. Swedish scientists have discovered that long life and good health have nothing to do with a man’s education and everything to do with his wife’s. Men married to smart women live longer ”” simple.

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Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) appeared Saturday to secure the 60 votes needed to move an $848 billion health-care reform bill to the Senate floor for debate, as the last two holdouts in his Democratic caucus said they will not join in a Republican filibuster.

After days of indecision, Sens. Blanche Lincoln (Ark.) and Mary Landrieu (La.) declared that they will vote to advance the bill despite reservations. Reid now expects all 60 members of his caucus to vote yes at 8 p.m. Saturday, clearing the way for amendment deliberations to begin after the Thanksgiving recess.

Reid is aiming for final passage before Christmas. The House has already passed its version of the bill.

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Our youngest daughter Selimah showed us this one–adorable!

In 1952, Sir John was appointed chairman of the department of respiratory diseases and tuberculosis at the University of Edinburgh, amid a tuberculosis epidemic in Scotland. Three years earlier, researchers in Britain reported that combining streptomycin with a newer medicine, para-aminosalicylic acid, could reduce the development of drug resistance. To this mix, Sir John added isoniazid, a new drug that became available shortly after his arrival in Edinburgh.

The third drug was the charm. Through careful monitoring, he devised a regimen that called for starting patients on all three drugs and then stopping streptomycin, which can cause hearing loss, after several months. For more than a decade, until it was replaced by a cocktail of newer and more powerful drugs, Sir John’s three-drug regimen was the standard treatment for tuberculosis.

“The treatment principles he developed are the ones we are using today,” said Dr. Mario C. Raviglione, director of the World Health Organization’s Stop TB department. “They are the model for cancer and for H.I.V. His legacy is quite significant.”

I caught this one yesterday coming up to Boston on the plane–a terrific piece which illustrates well how medical research really works. Read it all–KSH.

Human beings all begin their lives in a state of dependence. They need to learn how to speak, how to trust, how to negotiate a world that isn’t always friendly. They need an environment in which the background is secure enough for them to take the necessary risks of learning ”“ where they know that there are some relationships that don’t depend on getting things right, but are just unconditional. The human family as a personal not just a biological unit is the indispensable foundation for all this. And a culture, especially a working culture, that consistently undermines the family is going to be one that leaves everyone more vulnerable and thus more fearful and defensive ”“ potentially violent in some circumstances, or turning the violence inwards in depression in other circumstances. In the last couple of years alone, research has proliferated on the long-term damage done by the absence of emotional security in early childhood and the need for a child’s personal growth to be anchored in the presence of stable adult relationships. The Children’s Society Good Childhood document laid all this out with some force back in February and there is more material being published this autumn in the same area. An atmosphere of anxious and driven adult lives, a casual attitude to adult relationships, and the ways in which some employers continue to reward family-hostile patterns of working will all continue to create more confused, emotionally vulnerable or deprived young people. If we’re looking for new criteria for economic decisions, we might start here and ask about the impact of any such decision on family life and the welfare of the young.

I also mentioned people’s imaginative lives. We are not only dependent creatures, we are also beings who take in more than we can easily process from the world around; we know more than we realise, and that helps us to become self-questioning persons, who are always aware that things could be different. We learn this as children through fantasy and play, we keep it alive as adults through all sorts of ‘unproductive’ activity, from sport to poetry to cookery or dancing or mathematical physics. It is the extra things that make us human; simply meeting what we think are our material needs, making a living, is not uniquely human, just a more complicated version of ants in the anthill.

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The third reason I believe that orthodox Anglicans must take the lead in overcoming our divisions and manifesting the unity of the Church is that our disunity impairs our witness. It is only a united witness to the truth of the Gospel that can reach a world that is slipping into post-Christianity precisely through the compromise of the message of the Gospel by the western Church in the face of challenges from materialism and secularism on the one hand, and militant Islam and other world religions on the other hand.

To accomplish unity for the sake of the Gospel will entail a healing in our spirits, a working out of theological differences, and a renewed commitment to the integrity of our witness.

To achieve this unity will mean laying aside much of the baggage that characterizes the various parties in Anglicanism. It will require a methodology that enables us to recognize and hold fast to what is essentially Christian. It will call for passions of equal intensity for unity and truth. And it will demand a greater love for God and our brothers and sisters in the Body of Christ.

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It’s simply not true that America is ambivalent about everything when it comes to the Obama health plan.

The day after the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) gave its qualified blessing to the version of health reform produced by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Quinnipiac University poll of a national cross section of voters reported its latest results.
This poll may not be as famous as some others, but I know the care and professionalism of the people who run it, and one question was particularly interesting to me.

It read: “President Obama has pledged that health insurance reform will not add to our federal budget deficit over the next decade. Do you think that President Obama will be able to keep his promise or do you think that any health care plan that Congress passes and President Obama signs will add to the federal budget deficit?”

The answer: Less than one-fifth of the voters — 19 percent of the sample — think he will keep his word. Nine of 10 Republicans and eight of 10 independents said that whatever passes will add to the torrent of red ink. By a margin of four to three, even Democrats agreed this is likely.

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Sen. Blanche Lincoln, a centrist Democrat from Arkansas, said Saturday she would vote to move forward with debate on health-care legislation, giving Democrats what appeared to be the 60 votes needed to bring the sweeping bill to the Senate floor for debate.

Sen. Lincoln, who faces a tough reelection battle next year, said it is “important that we begin this debate” and not “simply drop the issue and walk away.” She added a bit later: “I’m not afraid of that debate.”

Her comments came few hours after Sen. Mary Landrieu (D., La.) said she would vote to move forward with debate, and a day after Sen. Ben Nelson (D., Neb.) said he, too, would vote to move forward. The three senators had all been undecided for weeks, casting doubt on the vote planned for Saturday on whether to proceed.

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Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, Anglican, and evangelical leaders stood together Friday to release the Manhattan Declaration, a statement of Christian convictions on the matters of life, family, and religious liberty.

Chuck Colson, head of Prison Fellowship and one of the initiators of the declaration, told me after document’s release, “I can’t find any other case, in modern times at least, when you’ve had such a representation.” Upon its release, the declaration had 148 signatories including pastors, professors, bishops, economists, and nonprofit leaders. WORLD’s founder Joel Belz and editor in chief Marvin Olasky are both signatories. By late afternoon, 1,600 had signed on the declaration’s website.

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We, as Orthodox, Catholic, and Evangelical Christians, have gathered, beginning in New York on September 28, 2009, to make the following declaration, which we sign as individuals, not on behalf of our organizations, but speaking to and from our communities. We act together in obedience to the one true God, the triune God of holiness and love, who has laid total claim on our lives and by that claim calls us with believers in all ages and all nations to seek and defend the good of all who bear his image. We set forth this declaration in light of the truth that is grounded in Holy Scripture, in natural human reason (which is itself, in our view, the gift of a beneficent God), and in the very nature of the human person. We call upon all people of goodwill, believers and non-believers alike, to consider carefully and reflect critically on the issues we here address as we, with St. Paul, commend this appeal to everyone’s conscience in the sight of God.

While the whole scope of Christian moral concern, including a special concern for the poor and vulnerable, claims our attention, we are especially troubled that in our nation today the lives of the unborn, the disabled, and the elderly are severely threatened; that the institution of marriage, already buffeted by promiscuity, infidelity and divorce, is in jeopardy of being redefined to accommodate fashionable ideologies; that freedom of religion and the rights of conscience are gravely jeopardized by those who would use the instruments of coercion to compel persons of faith to compromise their deepest convictions.

Because the sanctity of human life, the dignity of marriage as a union of husband and wife, and the freedom of conscience and religion are foundational principles of justice and the common good, we are compelled by our Christian faith to speak and act in their defense. In this declaration we affirm: 1) the profound, inherent, and equal dignity of every human being as a creature fashioned in the very image of God, possessing inherent rights of equal dignity and life; 2) marriage as a conjugal union of man and woman, ordained by God from the creation, and historically understood by believers and non-believers alike, to be the most basic institution in society and; 3) religious liberty, which is grounded in the character of God, the example of Christ, and the inherent freedom and dignity of human beings created in the divine image.

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Pending a series of legislative, Army, and Defense Department investigations into the rampage, the Obama administration has resisted the “terror” label. And one new poll shows slightly more Americans agreeing that the Fort Hood shooting was a “killing spree” rather than “an act of terrorism.”

But some US lawmakers see the terrorism analogy as fundamentally important to the inquiry ”” not just into Hasan’s motivations, but to national security generally in the Fort Hood aftermath.

At Senate hearings this week, some witnesses testified that “political correctness” undermined efforts to pinpoint Hasan and neutralize him before the shooting.

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