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Please pray:
For peace in Syria and an end to bloodshed. For God’s rich mercies on the suffering people.
For safety and protection for the churches and wisdom and vision for church leaders.
To empower the Church to reach out to the suffering, to share the divine cure of the gospel, and to speak the word of the Lord in all boldness.
That the Lord would send wise, God-fearing counsellors to the decision-makers in all parties in the country.

Powerful and heart-rending–read it all.

As a result of Vatican II, the Catholic Church opened its windows onto the modern world, updated the liturgy, gave a larger role to lay people, introduced the concept of religious freedom and started a dialogue with other religions.

“It was a time of a new hope, when everybody was proud that we are able to convoke such a council and having a real renewal of the Catholic Church,” says Hans Kung, who was the youngest theologian at Vatican II.

But the changes provoked a backlash, and many Catholics today say the council’s renewal momentum has been stopped in its tracks.

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Today, fifty years from the opening of the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, we begin with great joy the Year of Faith. I am delighted to greet all of you, particularly His Holiness Bartholomaois I, Patriarch of Constantinople, and His Grace Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury. A special greeting goes to the Patriarchs and Major Archbishops of the Eastern Catholic Churches, and to the Presidents of the Bishops’ Conferences. In order to evoke the Council, which some present had the grace to experience for themselves – and I greet them with particular affection – this celebration has been enriched by several special signs: the opening procession, intended to recall the memorable one of the Council Fathers when they entered this Basilica; the enthronement of a copy of the Book of the Gospels used at the Council; the consignment of the seven final Messages of the Council, and of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which I will do before the final blessing. These signs help us not only to remember, they also offer us the possibility of going beyond commemorating. They invite us to enter more deeply into the spiritual movement which characterized Vatican II, to make it ours and to develop it according to its true meaning. And its true meaning was and remains faith in Christ, the apostolic faith, animated by the inner desire to communicate Christ to individuals and all people, in the Church’s pilgrimage along the pathways of history.

The Year of Faith which we launch today is linked harmoniously with the Church’s whole path over the last fifty years: from the Council, through the Magisterium of the Servant of God Paul VI, who proclaimed a Year of Faith in 1967, up to the Great Jubilee of the year 2000, with which Blessed John Paul II re-proposed to all humanity Jesus Christ as the one Saviour, yesterday, today and forever. Between these two Popes, Paul VI and John Paul II, there was a deep and profound convergence, precisely upon Christ as the centre of the cosmos and of history, and upon the apostolic eagerness to announce him to the world. Jesus is the centre of the Christian faith. The Christian believes in God whose face was revealed by Jesus Christ. He is the fulfilment of the Scriptures and their definitive interpreter. Jesus Christ is not only the object of the faith but, as it says in the Letter to the Hebrews, he is “the pioneer and the perfecter of our faith” (12:2).

Today’s Gospel tells us that Jesus Christ, consecrated by the Father in the Holy Spirit, is the true and perennial subject of evangelization.

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“This is a big old ship, Bill. She creaks, she rocks, she rolls, and at times she makes you want to throw up. But she gets where she’s going. Always has, always will, until the end of time. With or without you.”

–J.F. Powers’ Wheat that Springeth Green (New York: New York Review Books Classics edition of the 1988 original, 2000), p. 170

Check it out. Lol.

Mitt Romney may have seized the advantage in terms of poll numbers and momentum, but there’s one area where President Obama enjoys the upper hand.

In the end, it’s the only area that counts: the Electoral College. Over the past 20 years, Republicans have had a much lower ceiling when it comes to electoral support, while Democrats have had a significantly higher floor.

“The Democrats start with a larger number of electoral votes in the bank,” says Daron Shaw, author of The Race to 270, a book about electoral strategy. That’s because while the election is still very much in the air, Obama can count on a larger store of electoral votes that are all but guaranteed to him than Romney can.

Read or listen to it all.

I will take comments on this submitted by email only to at KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

It was a splendid day on 11 October 1962 when the Second Vatican Council opened with the solemn procession into St Peter’s Basilica in Rome of more than two thousand Council Fathers. In 1931 Pius XI had dedicated this day to the feast of the Divine Motherhood of Mary, mindful that 1,500 years earlier, in 431, the Council of Ephesus had solemnly recognized this title for Mary in order to express God’s indissoluble union with man in Christ. Pope John XXIII had chosen this day for the beginning of the Council so as to entrust the great ecclesial assembly, which he had convoked, to the motherly goodness of Mary and to anchor the Council’s work firmly in the mystery of Jesus Christ. It was impressive to see in the entrance procession bishops from all over the world, from all peoples and all races: an image of the Church of Jesus Christ which embraces the whole world, in which the peoples of the earth know they are united in his peace.

It was a moment of extraordinary expectation. Great things were about to happen. The previous Councils had almost always been convoked for a precise question to which they were to provide an answer. This time there was no specific problem to resolve. But precisely because of this, a general sense of expectation hovered in the air: Christianity, which had built and formed the Western world, seemed more and more to be losing its power to shape society. It appeared weary and it looked as if the future would be determined by other spiritual forces. The sense of this loss of the present on the part of Christianity, and of the task following on from that, was well summed up in the word “aggiornamento” (updating). Christianity must be in the present if it is to be able to form the future. So that it might once again be a force to shape the future, John XXIII had convoked the Council without indicating to it any specific problems or programmes. This was the greatness and at the same time the difficulty of the task that was set before the ecclesial assembly….

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Here is today’s introductory text from VR:

The Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, addressed the Synod of Bishops in the Vatican on Wednesday about the central role of contemplation in helping people rediscover the beauty of the Christian faith.
Drawing deeply on the writings of some of the great Catholic authors and theologians from the time of the Second Vatican Council, the archbishop said contemplation is the only real “answer to the unreal and insane world that our financial systems and advertising culture”¦..encourage us to inhabit”. Those who “know little and care less about the institutions and hierarchies of the Church” today, he continued, are often attracted and challenged by lives that show justice and love reflected in the face of God. In particular he pointed to the crucial work and witness of communities like Taizé and Bose, or networks like St Egidio, the Focolare or Communion and Liberation, who bring fresh expressions of faith and transcend the historic divisions between Christians.
Vatican Radio’s Philippa Hitchen talked to Dr Williams about his address to the Synod, about his advise to his successor (expected to be announced over the coming weeks) and his message to Pope Benedict XVI”¦.

You can find the link the part one of the interview here and part two is here.

Pope Benedict XVI says he hopes his latest book on Jesus ”” about his infancy ”” will help bring people closer to Christ.

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Speaking after a meeting with the Bishop Andudu Adam Elnail, Bishop of Kadugli in the Nuba Mountains, the Archbishop urged attention to be given to the plight of the affected population of these areas, both Muslim and Christian alike.

“Food and basic essentials are urgently needed by the displaced population. The international community needs to wake up to the gravity of the situation. All parties need to work together to find practical ways to get help to those most in need.”

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Why should a former Church of England leader like myself intervene now? After all, the Christian faith emphasizes the need to welcome the stranger. Jesus and his family were themselves refugees fleeing to Egypt to escape the wrath of King Herod. The Church has rightly and repeatedly given sanctuary to many genuine asylum-seekers over the years. This compassionate Christian tradition has contributed to the British reputation for tolerance and a very proud history of welcoming successive waves of immigrants.

We have successfully integrated many communities from the Commonwealth.But there comes a point when we have to reconsider policy and, without backing away from a commitment to those who need asylum, find ways to limit the scale of immigration which is disturbing our way of life.

The stark fact is that our proud heritage of welcoming strangers is threatened by the breakdown of our border control during the past 15 years. Net migration was allowed to increase from 50,000 a year in 1997 to a record level of 250,000 in 2010. The growth in population during the last ten years was the largest recorded since the very first census in 1801.

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It wasn’t working, any of it. Our third year of marriage threatened to be our last. I’d become cynical and withdrawn, obsessive and preoccupied, dismissive and unhelpful.

“I don’t know when things got bad,” Kristen said, wiping away tears. “I feel like I’ve lost you and I don’t know what will bring you back.”

In reality she hadn’t lost me. She’d found me. The facade of semi-normalcy I’d struggled to maintain was falling away, revealing the person I’d been since childhood. I didn’t even know what was wrong with me, though my wife, a speech pathologist who works with autistic children, had her suspicions. Even so, it would be another two years before she would put all the pieces together and attach a name to what was ruining our marriage: Asperger’s syndrome….

Read it all. Some of you may recognize that this was used by yours truly in a recent sermon–a great story–KSH.

Ulf Bastian tramped into Christengemeinde Elim Pentecostal church in Hamburg, Germany, parading his punk-rocker duds: hair dyed a shocking bright color, black leather jacket, torn jeans and a T-shirt screaming the angry message, “Hate Mankind.” His ex-girlfriend, who had become a born-again Christian (and is now his wife), urged him to attend.

“I thought she was crazy,” he says. “I did not want to be part of Christian people.”

Still, the Holy Spirit coaxed him to return a second time. Arriving late, he grabbed a chair in the last row. The worship music and pastor’s preaching about sin and the cross of Christ hit home. Weeping, he rushed to the altar at the end of the service and told the pastor, “I need forgiveness.”

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When protests against the low-budget, anti-Islam “Innocence of Muslims” video flared across the Islamic world last month, Indonesia’s Habib Munzir Almusawa preached a different message to his tens of thousands of followers in Jakarta: Just ignore it.

“If we react so emotionally, then how can we show the good side of Islam?” Mr. Almusawa told worshipers at the al-Munawwar mosque here….

Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation, is seeing a wave of new, more moderate Muslim preachers, among them Mr. Almusawa. They represent a balancing of the more militant strains of Islam that have proliferated here. Ten years ago this week, Muslim extremists bombed nightclubs on the resort island of Bali, killing 202 people in the single biggest terror attack since Sept. 11, 2001, in the U.S.

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One in five adults does not belong to an organized religion. Nearly a third of Americans age 18-29 don’t have a spiritual home.

“I think it goes without saying these are pretty significant changes in the American religious landscape,” said Greg Smith, a lead researcher on the Pew study.

Needless to say, this study hits home for religious leaders. So we asked a number of them why they thought so many Americans were walking away from organized religion. Their fascinating responses are below. We’ll keep adding perspectives as they come in, so return here for updates, and please feel free to suggest additional sources.

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But one of the most important aspects of the theology of the second Vaticanum was a renewal of Christian anthropology. In place of an often strained and artificial neo-scholastic account of how grace and nature were related in the constitution of human beings, the Council built on the greatest insights of a theology that had returned to earlier and richer sources ”“ the theology of spiritual geniuses like Henri de Lubac, who reminded us of what it meant for early and mediaeval Christianity to speak of humanity as made in God’s image and of grace as perfecting and transfiguring that image so long overlaid by our habitual ”˜inhumanity’. In such a light, to proclaim the Gospel is to proclaim that it is at last possible to be properly human: the Catholic and Christian faith is a ”˜true humanism’, to borrow a phrase from another genius of the last century, Jacques Maritain.

Yet de Lubac is clear what this does not mean. We do not replace the evangelistic task by a campaign of ”˜humanization’. ”˜Humanize before Christianizing?’ he asks ”“ ”˜If the enterprise succeeds, Christianity will come too late: its place will be taken. And who thinks that Christianity has no humanizing value?’ So de Lubac writes in his wonderful collection of aphorisms, Paradoxes of Faith. It is the faith itself that shapes the work of humanizing and the humanizing enterprise will be empty without the definition of humanity given in the Second Adam. Evangelization, old or new, must be rooted in a profound confidence that we have a distinctive human destiny to show and share with the world.

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Holy God, no one is excluded from thy love; and thy truth transformeth the minds of all who seek thee: As thy servant Philip was led to embrace the fullness of thy salvation and to bring the stranger to Baptism, so grant unto us all the grace to be heralds of the Gospel, proclaiming thy love in Jesus Christ our Savior, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

O God of love, who art the true sun of the world, evermore risen and never going down: We beseech thee mercifully to shine into our hearts, that the night of sin and the mists of error being driven away, we may this day and all our life long walk without stumbling in the road which thou hast prepared for us; through thy Son our Saviour Jesus Christ.

A Song of Ascents. Of David. O LORD, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me. But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a child quieted at its mother’s breast; like a child that is quieted is my soul. O Israel, hope in the LORD from this time forth and for evermore.

–Psalm 131

Turkey sharply escalated its confrontation with Syria on Wednesday, forcing a Syrian passenger plane to land in Ankara on suspicion of carrying military cargo, ordering Turkish civilian airplanes to stay out of Syrian airspace and warning of increasingly forceful responses if Syrian artillery gunners keep lobbing shells across the border.

Turkey’s NTV television said two Turkish F-16 warplanes were dispatched to intercept a Syrian Air A-320 Airbus jetliner with 35 passengers en route from Moscow to Damascus, and forced it to land at Esenboga Airport in Ankara, because it may have been carrying a weapons shipment to the Syrian government. Inspectors confiscated what NTV described as parts of missile and allowed the plane to resume its trip after several hours. The Turkish authorities declined to specify what precisely had been found.

“There are items that are beyond the ones that are legitimate and required to be reported in civilian flights,” Foreign Minister Ahmed Davutoglu of Turkey said in remarks reported by the country’s semiofficial Anatolia News Agency. “There are items that we would rate as troublesome.”

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When Facebook Inc. (FB) filed its proposal Feb. 1 to go public, it touted the effectiveness of ads linked to customers’ friends, citing research from Nielsen, the audience-counting company.

arbara Jacobs, an assistant director for corporation finance at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, was skeptical, as she and her staff vetted the filing to ensure Facebook had disclosed all material information to investors. The claim appeared to be drawn from marketing materials, not a Nielsen study, she wrote to Chief Financial Officer David Ebersman, 42.

She gave him an ultimatum: Produce the study and provide Nielsen’s consent for use of the data — or don’t use it, she wrote to Ebersman on Feb. 28. Facebook dropped the reference after initial resistance.

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Ten years ago I was part of a movement called Jubilee 2000 which changed the way people think about debt. It challenged a deeply held principle ”˜that debts must always be repaid’ by showing how, in the case of many debts owed by impoverished countries, the consequences of repayments was creating nearly unimaginable suffering.

We were not calling for an act of charity, but a realisation that the economy we had created was structured in a way which was deeply unfair, exaggerating inequality and poverty in many parts of the world. We didn’t want donations, but a change in the rules of engagement.

The change in values which the Jubilee movement effected, forced decision-makers to enact policies which went someway to redressing this injustice. $125 billion of debt was wiped out, government’s were able to start spending money in ways that benefited their people.

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Who is John Q. Nones? Here’s a snapshot drawn from the Pew Forum’s new poll:

1. He’s a he. Though fewer than half of Americans are male, 56 percent of nones are. The gender divide among nones who are atheists or agnostics is even more pronounced: 64 percent of this group is male.

2. He’s young. The older the American, the more likely he or she is to be affiliated with a religion. One-third of Americans under 30 say they have no religious affiliation, compared to 9 percent of those 65 and older. This is mostly due to “generational replacement” as a younger generation assumes the place of an older one that is decidedly more religious.

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The invitation…[came in] an open letter from the Freedom from Religion Foundation to liberal and nominal Catholics, or as some would call us, cafeteria Catholics, secular Catholics or people pretending to be Catholic. I’ve been called all of the above.

The handout urged me to quit because my staying is “aiding and abetting” a church that wants to ban birth control and abortion. It asked me to choose between reproductive freedom or the Dark Ages, between “women and their rights or bishops and their wrongs.”

It asked me to stop deluding myself that I can change the church from within. It asked me to vote with my feet and leave “an institution that discriminates against half of humanity.”

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The Most Reverend Dr Justice O. Akrofi, Primate and Archbishop of the Church of the Province of West Africa, Anglican Church, has asked the judiciary to uphold justice and truth at all times, especially in their adjudication in the election year.

“The learned society needs justice. Truth is also ever so sacred that it cannot be negotiated-not the same as playing fast and loose with it. The role of justice for instance is very relevant in ensuring peace at this year’s election”, Rev Akrofi said in a sermon to open the 55th Legal Year of the Judicial Service.

The legal year is marked annually in October with a church service after members of the bench and bar return from their two months vacation.

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As Britain awaits the appointment of the next archbishop of Canterbury to lead both the Church of England and the far-flung Anglican Communion, there’s renewed attention on the woman who officially gets the final say: Queen Elizabeth II, the “Defender of the Faith.”

The current archbishop, Rowan Williams, ends his 10-year tenure in December. A Church of England committee is sifting through candidates — two of whom will be submitted to Prime Minister David Cameron, whose top choice will be submitted to the queen for final approval.

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A potentially serious complication has arisen in California’s latest effort to avoid billions in spending cuts, which threaten the state’s education and welfare systems.

Gov. Jerry Brown’s Proposition 30 intends to forestall “draconian” budget cuts by temporarily raising taxes, including sales taxes and income taxes on the wealthy. The initiative could largely determine his legacy, as well as the state’s fiscal health for at least a decade. Moreover, if successful, Prop. 30 could begin to shift the national conversation on taxes after decades of extreme antitax sentiment across the country.

Polls show that a thin majority of state voters support Prop. 30. But that support could be undercut by another proposition that aims to raise taxes for public education. Molly Munger, the millionaire behind the rival initiative, has even suggested she might start airing comparison ads arguing why voters should vote for her proposition, not Governor Brown’s Prop. 30.

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The number of Americans who do not identify with any religion continues to grow at a rapid pace. One-fifth of the U.S. public ”“ and a third of adults under 30 ”“ are religiously unaffiliated today, the highest percentages ever in Pew Research Center polling.

In the last five years alone, the unaffiliated have increased from just over 15% to just under 20% of all U.S. adults. Their ranks now include more than 13 million self-described atheists and agnostics (nearly 6% of the U.S. public), as well as nearly 33 million people who say they have no particular religious affiliation (14%).

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