Pro-Choice Movement Takes on Catholic Fascist Theocrats, Women Turn Their Backs on the Catholic Church

Pro-choice movement in Poland is taking on church and state

Why are so many Polish women turning their backs on the Catholic Church?

Beth Holmgren

PAYPAL

People protest in Gdansk against Polish government plans to tighten anti-abortion laws. Photograph: Michal Fludra/Gallo Images Poland/Getty Images

 On April 3rd, the Middle Ages engaged in an unusual skirmish with the 21st century in cities across Poland. During Sunday Mass in this overwhelmingly Catholic country, priests read their congregations a letter from the Polish episcopate calling for an unconditional ban on abortion.

Scores of women then walked out in protest, their exodus filmed in famous churches such as St Mary’s Basilica in Gdansk and St Anne’s Church in Warsaw.

Outside, thousands of women gathered on city streets and squares, listening to pro-choice speakers and holding up signs that flashed their opinions: “Hands off my uterus,” “No to torturing women,” “I’ll have a child when I want to.” They brandished coat hangers, an implement of dangerous self- induced abortion first politicised by American feminists in the 1960s.

These actions mark an extraordinary nationwide moment for Polish women and Polish Catholicism. I have been studying Polish culture since the 1980s, when the Catholic Church strived to be the true ally of the working class in a communist state. The 1978 election of a Polish pope, John Paul II, bolstered the rise of Solidarity, an independent trade union that eventually engendered several political parties in post-1989 Poland. The church produced martyrs for the people’s cause.

Compromise

The church wielded even greater authority over Polish society after the fall of communism, though that authority remained deeply patriarchal, with liberty and justice for some, not all. John Paul II stood tough against a corrupt communist system and initiated an important rapprochement between Catholics and Jews, but a campaign for women’s reproductive rights lay beyond his religious belief. This Polish pope subscribed fully to the Catholic doctrine that human life begins at conception. Abortion had been legal in communist Poland. In post-communist Poland, the church helped push through a “compromise” in 1993 – a law that allowed women to have abortions only in the case of rape, incest, severe foetal impairment and risk to the mother’s life.

Poland’s abortion law is one of the most restrictive in the world, yet was not ameliorated even after the country’s admission into the European Union in 2004.

Why, then, have so many Polish women turned their backs on the church in recent weeks? For six months, huge numbers of Poles have taken to the streets, protesting against an ever more repressive government. The conservative Law and Justice party, which won a clear majority in parliament last October, wasted no time pushing its nationalist agenda. It has defied the authority of the extant Polish constitution and the constitutional tribunal, placed a “leftist” public media under government control, distanced itself from the socially liberal policies of the EU and tarnished as traitors those who disagree with its anti-pluralist stance on virtually every issue ranging from sexuality to national self-criticism.

Now members of the Committee in Defence of Democracy, which numbers in the hundreds of thousands, march en masse in Polish cities almost every week, carrying signs and giving speeches.

Anti-abortion protests

Their efforts have provoked opposition, with anti-abortion protests springing up as well. Backed by the church, those protesters have called for a tightening of the abortion laws to allow abortion only when the woman’s life is in danger.

Polish Catholic women did not decide to walk out of church on April 3rd until the episcopate ordered priests to endorse Law and Justice legislation during Mass. The line separating church and state was expediently erased. A supposedly independent lobbying committee, Stop Abortion, collected the 100,000 signatures required to present the abortion ban Bill to parliament; only the church could approve such a Bill; and the all-Catholic Law and Justice party could only obey the church. Lest there be any opposition, the church enlisted its local representatives to tell the faithful how to vote.

This church-party strategy backfired, provoking rather than pre-empting opposition. A non-partisan group, Women for Women, formed on Face- book, gathering 100,000-plus members and organising protests and church walkouts. The opposition has picked up steam and plenty of left-wing political support, generating a new committee, Let’s Save Women, which proposes more radical legislative and educational reform.

Let’s Save Women has three months to collect the 100,000 signatures needed to propose its Bill “in support of women’s rights and informed parenting” – specifically, legalised abortion for the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, Poles’ guaranteed access to contraceptives without a prescription, and mandatory sex education in the schools. Supporters of Let’s Save Women insist they will not accept a church-run government – the result being a contentious battle between theocracy and secular democracy in 21st-century Poland.

Beth Holmgren is a professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at Duke University

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Mad Catholic Monk Tony Abbott & Co; Destroying the “democratic life of this nation”

Speak boldly

Written by: Kaye Lee

The editorial in the Age today suggests that “the Abbott government is cynically moving to de-legitimise certain institutions that perform vital roles in the democratic life of this nation.”

This latest reprehensible attempt to silence the Human Rights Commission is, as Penny Wong points out, part of a wider pattern of behaviour.

This is a Government that seeks to intimidate people who don’t agree with their policies and to silence independent voices.

Within hours of being sworn in, the Prime Minister’s office issued a press release, announcing three departmental secretaries had had their contracts terminated and the Treasury Secretary Martin Parkinson would be stood down next year.

Dr Don Russell lost his job as head of the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research; Blair Comley was the head of the Resources, Energy and Tourism Department; and Andrew Metcalfe, a former Immigration Department chief, was sacked as head of the Agriculture Department.

AusAID was integrated into the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) and its director-general Peter Baxter resigned.

“AusAID has been delivering an aid program that eradicates poverty in the world’s poorest communities, while DFAT’s objective is to promote and protect Australia’s national economic and political interests.”

The head of Infrastructure Australia, Michael Deegan, stepped down in February 2014 after he lashed out against the Abbott government for eroding the advisory body’s independence.

Infrastructure Australia disagreed about the priorities being pushed by government.  For example, they had listed Sydney’s WestConnex motorway as an ”early stage” project, despite Premier Barry O’Farrell’s and Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s determination to proceed with the project.

”Grand announcements, ‘funding commitments’, glossy brochures, and project websites do not change the reasons (why some projects had not progressed on his organisation’s priority list.),” Mr Deegan said in an email. ”Many proposals lack merit.”

Infrastructure Australia was required to report to the federal government on how climate change would affect federal infrastructure policy. It was set up to assess infrastructure investments on their productivity merits instead of their vote-buying potential. As climate change could inflict damage worth $9billion annually to Australia’s infrastructure by 2020, it makes sense for our infrastructure advisory body to think about how to bring those costs down.

But the Abbott government expunged this instruction as part of its rewrite of Infrastructure Australia’s mandate. This is despite infrastructure co-ordinator Michael Deegan’s warning that rising sea levels and heat stress are among climate impacts threatening ‘‘a significant proportion of Australia’s existing infrastructure assets … and adaptation will require changes to the scope and mix of infrastructure investment’’.

Mr Deegan also noted that ‘‘a significant proportion of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions are associated with the various infrastructure sectors, notably energy and transport’’.

No wonder he had to go, along with the Climate Commission and the Climate Change Authority.

Talking about global warming is a death sentence to funding.

The CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology have had their funding slashed with hundreds of jobs lost and research programmes abandoned.  With no Minister for Science to point out the value of research it is seen as an avenue to save money and control the areas being studied.

As a direct consequence of the $111 million budget cut, the organisation will lose 489 researchers and support staff by mid-2015.  Another 300 positions will be cut after an internal restructure. The union estimates CSIRO is set to shrink by about 20 per cent over two years.

In August, management confirmed eight infectious disease researchers at the Australian Animal Health Laboratory in Geelong, the country’s only facility for researching live samples of deadly diseases such as Ebola, would lose their jobs.

Eight staff have left the Aspendale laboratory, which focuses on marine and atmospheric research, since the budget was handed down in May. Those leaving Aspendale include senior scientist Paul Fraser, who has taken a voluntary redundancy. Dr Fraser, head of oceans and atmosphere, has been honoured by NASA and also helped establish one of the world’s two most important climate research centres at Cape Grim in Tasmania.

Water research also appears to have been targeted. The office of water science research and the national water commission will be abolished, while the sustainable rural water use and infrastructure program’s budget has had a $400 million trim.

At CSIRO’s largest Victorian site, in Clayton, 15 staff have left or are in the process of leaving. The laboratory, home to research areas including advanced materials, nanotechnology, energy, mining and minerals work, had already lost staff under Labor’s efficiency drive. Among them was organic chemist San Thang, who was made redundant in September. It came as Dr Thang and two colleagues were nominated as frontrunners for the illustrious Nobel Prize in chemistry. Dr Thang has been made an honorary fellow – an unpaid position allowing him to both continue his work and to supervise PhD students.

In addition to the budget cuts, CSIRO also lost about $4 million indirectly when the government folded the Australian Climate Change Science Program into the new National Environmental Science Program.

A further 175 government bodies were cut in the last MYEFO, building on previous decisions to defund agencies in the 2014-15 budget, “taking the total reduction in the number of government bodies since the election to 251″.

Two groups whose funding ceased were the Biosecurity Advisory Council and the National Biosecurity Committee Stakeholder Engagement Consultative Group.  In light of the recent outbreak of Hepatitis A due to contaminated imported berries one wonders who is advising Barnaby on how to proceed.

Other bodies to be disbanded included the Diabetes Advisory Group and the Alcohol and Drug Council of Australia.  This is unbelievably short term thinking as the cost of these problems to our society are astronomic.

The Standing Council on School Education and Early Childhood (SCSEEC) Joint Working Group to Provide Advice on Students with Disability was also disbanded which fits in with George Brandis’ decision to replace the Human Rights Commissioner for the Disabled, Graeme Innes, with the IPA’s Tim Wilson – Commissioner for bigots and presumably the “anonymous source” quoted in the government attack on Gillian Triggs.

Reading through the list of bodies that have been axed makes me wonder who the hell is looking after these crucial advisory roles.

The Prime Minister for Women has watered down gender reporting while the Minister Assisting assures us that, whilst she likes women, she also likes men so couldn’t possibly be a feminist – a view shared by the highest placed woman in our government, Julie Bishop, who tells us that “it’s only a downward spiral once you’ve cast yourself as a victim.”

Righto.  Domestic violence, workplace discrimination and sexual harassment are our own fault and we should stop whinging….is that the message?

The Prime Minister for Indigenous Affairs promptly cut over half a billion in funding from Indigenous programmes and disbanded the National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples, replacing them with Gerard Henderson’s son-in-law Warren Mundine.

Speaking of Gerard Henderson, he was appointed Chairman of the panel tasked with awarding the PM’s non-fiction Literary Awards.  He chose to give the history award to “a poorly sourced anti-union tome” which was described as a rudimentary, badly-structured book full of hearsay by another panel member.  But it fed into Abbott’s anti-union agenda.

From the outset, Abbott has spent many millions of dollars in a frenzied attack on unions seeking to demonise and undermine the only group with the power to present a collective voice in bargaining to protect workers’ rights.

In December, the Abbott government reintroduced legislation to abolish the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission, despite 82% of the sector believing it was important to keep the charity regulator.

ACNC Advisory Board Chair and Productivity Commissioner Robert Fitzgerald said: “…the key beneficiaries of the repeal of the ACNC are really only those organisations who do not want independent public accountability or transparency but which seek to continue to receive large benefits from the Australian community.”

Unsurprisingly, it was George Pell who told Kevin Andrews to get rid of the watchdog.  Scott Morrison appears to have recently backed away from the idea calling it a low priority while he gets his “family package” together.

Huge cuts to the funding of the ABC, questionable board appointments, and threats to journalists that they will be jailed if they report on “special operations”, are all designed to muzzle the watchdogs.

Whether it’s scientists, charities, Aborigines, people with disabilities, refugees, unions, feminists, preventative health groups, Muslims, infrastructure specialists, journalists, public servants, or even colleagues….Abbott does not want to hear from us unless it’s to agree.

Bill Wright, a priest and church historian who was vice-rector at St Patrick’s seminary whilst Tony was there, said many found him “just too formidable to talk to unless to agree; overbearing and opiniated. Tony is inclined to score points, to skate over or hold back any reservations he might have about his case.”

Nothing has changed.

The Abbott government may not want to pay for advice but that sure as hell isn’t going to stop me from giving them some.

May Gillian Trigg’s strength and defiance be an example to us all and may we all raise our collective voices to defend those who this government would mute.

Rick Santorum: Only dirty commies support the separation of church and state

Rick Santorum: Only dirty commies support the separation of church and state

The social conservative favorite is playing to type VIDEO

EnlargeRick Santorum (Credit: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst)

Rick “Man on Dog” Santorum made his political career as a champion of theocratic conservatism, so it’s hardly a surprise that he’s no fan of the separation of church and state.

But to Santorum, the concept of church-state separation isn’t merely misguided. It’s downright communist.

Santorum delivered this sizzling take in a conference call with social conservatives posted online today and flagged by the watchdog group Right Wing Watch. A caller told Santorum that that many of the policy priorities of President Obama and “the Democrat Party” appeared in Karl Marx’s “The Communist Manifesto”; the caller proceeded to cite a number of things, including same-sex marriage, that appear nowhere in the tome.

“Well, I was just thinking,” Santorum chimed in, “that the words ‘separation of church and state’ is not in the U.S. Constitution, but it was in the constitution of the former Soviet Union. That’s where it very, very comfortably sat, not in ours.”

The fact that the phrase “separation of church and state” doesn’t appear verbatim in the Constitution is a favorite right-wing talking point — one that conveniently glides over the founders’ explicitly expressed support for a “wall of separation.” It’s been a particular hobbyhorse of Santorum, who made headlines during his 2012 presidential campaign for saying that he “almost threw up” upon reading then-Sen. John F. Kennedy’s famed 1960 speech in which he advocated an “absolute” separation of church and state.

Santorum’s latest remarks don’t mark the first time he’s tarred an idea he doesn’t like with the pinko label. Earlier this year, he said that using the term “middle class” is “Marxism talk.”

“Since when in America do we have classes?” Santorum asked at the time. “Since when in America are people stuck in areas or defined places called a class? That’s Marxism talk.”

Early indications suggest that Santorum is prepared to take his anti-commie crusade to the 2016 presidential race, although it’s looking like America will be deprived of the chance to be led by the warrior for all that is good and godly. RealClearPolitics’ polling average finds Santorum in 11th place in the GOP field, garnering just 3 percent support.

Listen to Santorum’s newest comments, via Right Wing Watch:

Luke Brinker is Salon’s deputy politics editor. Follow him on Twitter at @LukeBrinker.

Philippines Begins To Dismantle The Shackles of Catholic Medievalism

Passage of contraceptives law in Philippines shows times have changed for Catholic church

Article by HRVOJE HRANJSKI , Associated Press

MANILA, Philippines – Twenty-six years after Roman Catholic leaders helped his mother marshal millions of Filipinos in an uprising that ousted a dictator, President Benigno Aquino III picked a fight with the church over contraceptives and won a victory that bared the bishops’ worst nightmare: They no longer sway the masses.

Aquino last month signed the Responsible Parenthood and Reproductive Health Act of 2012 quietly and without customary handshakes and photographs to avoid controversy. The law that provides state funding for contraceptives for the poor pitted the dominant Catholic Church in an epic battle against the popular Aquino and his followers.

A couple with links to the church filed a motion Wednesday to stop implementation of the law, and more petitions are expected. Still, there is no denying that Aquino’s approval of the legislation has chipped away at the clout the church has held over Filipinos, and marked the passing of an era in which it was taboo to defy the church and priests.

Catholic leaders consider the law an attack on the church’s core values — the sanctity of life — saying that contraceptives promote promiscuity and destroy life. Aquino and his allies see the legislation as a way to address how the poor — roughly a third of the country’s 94 million people — manage the number of children they have and provide for them. Nearly half of all pregnancies in the Philippines are unwanted, according to the U.N. Population Fund, and a third of those end up aborted in a country where abortion remains illegal.

Rampant poverty, overcrowded slums, and rising homelessness and crime are main concerns that neither the church nor Aquino’s predecessors have successfully tackled.

“If the church can provide milk, diapers and rice, then go ahead, let’s make more babies,” said Giselle Labadan, a 30-year-old roadside vendor. “But there are just too many people now, too many homeless people, and the church doesn’t help to feed them.”

Labadan said she grew up in a God-fearing family but has defied the church’s position against contraceptives for more than a decade because her five children, age 2 to 12, were already far too many for her meager income. Her husband, a former army soldier, is jobless.

She said that even though she has used most types of contraceptives, she still considers herself among the faithful. “I still go to church and pray. It’s a part of my life,” Labadan said.

“I have prayed before not to have another child, but the condom worked better,” she said.

The law now faces a legal challenge in the Supreme Court after the couple filed the motion, which seems to cover more ideological than legal grounds. One of the authors of the law, Rep. Edcel Lagman, said Thursday that he was not worried by the petition and expected more to follow.

“We are prepared for this,” he said. “We are certain that the law is completely constitutional and will surmount any attack on or test of its constitutionality.”

Over the decades, moral and political authority of the church in the Philippines is perceived to have waned with the passing of one its icons, Cardinal Jaime Sin. He shaped the role of the church during the country’s darkest hours after dictator Ferdinand Marcos imposed martial law starting in 1972 by championing the cause of civil advocacy, human rights and freedoms. Sin’s action mirrored that of his strong backer, Pope John Paul II, who himself challenged communist rulers in Eastern Europe.

Three years after Aquino’s father, Benigno Aquino Sr., a senator opposing Marcos, was gunned down on the Manila airport tarmac in 1983, Sin persuaded Aquino’s widow, Corazon, to run for president. When massive election cheating by Marcos was exposed, Sin went on Catholic-run Radio Veritas in February 1986 to summon millions of people to support military defectors and the Aquino-led opposition. Marcos fled and Aquino, a deeply religious woman, was sworn in as president.

Democracy was restored, but the country remained chaotic and mired in nearly a dozen coup attempts. The economy stalled, poverty persisted and the jobless were leaving in droves for better-paying jobs abroad as maids, teachers, nurses and engineers. After Aquino stepped down, the country elected its first and only Protestant president, Fidel Ramos. He, too, opposed the church on contraceptives and released state funds for family planning methods.

Catholic bishops pulled out all the stops in campaigning against Ramos’ successor, popular movie actor Joseph Estrada, a hero of the impoverished masses who made little attempt to keep down his reputation for womanizing, drinking and gambling.

But few heeded the church’s advice. Estrada was elected with the largest victory margin in Philippine history. Halfway through his six-year presidency, in January 2001, he was confronted with another “people power” revolt, backed by political opponents and the military, and was forced to resign.

His successor, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, styled herself as a devout Catholic and sought to placate the church by abolishing the death penalty and putting brakes on the contraceptives law, which languished in Congress during her nine years in power.

It mattered little. Arroyo’s mismanagement and corruption scandals set the stage for Aquino’s election on a promise to rid the Philippines of graft, fix the economy and lift millions out of poverty. The scion of the country’s democracy icon took power several years after Sin’s death, but it was a different era in which the church was battered by scandals of sexual misconduct of priests and declining family values.

The latest defeat of the church “can further weaken its moral authority at a time when this is most badly needed in many areas, including defense of a whole range of family values,” said the Rev. John J. Carroll, founding chairman of the Jesuit-run John J. Carroll Institute on Church and Social Issues. He said he wondered how many Catholics have been “turned off” by incessant sermons and prayers led by the church against the contraceptives law, and how much it contributed to rising anticlericalism and the erosion of church authority.

“People today are more practical,” said Labadan, the street vendor. “In the old days, people feared that if you defy the church, it will be the end of the world.”

Associated Press writers Jim Gomez and Teresa Cerojano contributed to this report.

Related articles

• New law points to Philippine church’s waning sway (sfgate.com)
• New law points to Philippine church’s waning sway (sacbee.com)
• New Law Points to Philippine Church’s Waning Sway (abcnews.go.com)
• New contraceptives law points to Philippine church’s waning sway (washingtontimes.com)
• New Philippine law exposes decline of church clout (thehimalayantimes.com)
• New law points to Philippine church’s waning sway (kansascity.com)
• New law points to Philippine church’s waning sway (dailystar.com.lb)

1000 Years of Carnage & Barbarity in The Name of Christ

1000 Years of Carnage & Barbarity in the name of Christ

Kenneth Humphreys

10th Century Obscenities Vile Princes of the Papacy “Popes maimed &         were maimed, killed & were killed… Without question, these pontiffs         constitute the most despicable body of leaders, clerical or lay, in history.         They were, frankly, barbarians. Ancient Rome had nothing to rival them         in rottenness.” – Peter de Rosa (Vicars of Christ, p48)          John XII (955-964). Born from an incestuous          relationship  between Pope Sergio III and his 13-year-old daughter          Marozie. John, in         turn, took his mother as his own mistress. Pope at 18, he turned the            Lateran  into a brothel. He was accused by a synod of “sacrilege,            simony,  perjury, murder, adultery and incest” and was temporarily          deposed.  He took his revenge on opponents          by hacking off limbs. He was murdered            by an enraged husband who caught him having sex with his wife.	11th Century Horror Church lords over ignorant squalor of millions 1095 – Pope Urban II          calls upon the Franks to invade the more civilized Muslim world. Begins        five centuries of warfare. “Let those who have         hitherto been robbers now become soldiers.” – Urban II addresses his gangsters.   1009: Rivalry from Islam prompts         eastern churches to break with idolatry. This ‘iconoclasm’ begins breach         with idol-worshipping Catholic west. Centuries of bloodshed ensue. 1079: The Council of Rome:         Persecution of Berengarius & his followers who cannot stomach the         dogma of ‘transmutation of bread & wine into Christ.’ Svyatoslav’s Miscellany, 1076. God’s work – a serious business.	12th Century Criminality Christian Church ally of murderous kings & rogue      princes “Warrior Monks”         – Muslim heads catapulted into the besieged city of Antioch by Christian         Knights (Illumination from Les Histoires d’Outremer by         William of  Tyre 12th century, Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris).   1118: Christian fanatics          captured Saragossa; the beginning of the decline of Muslim civilization          in Spain.          1184 Council of Verona         condemns Waldensians for witchcraft. The charge is later extended to condemn         heretics.	13th Century Wickedness Vile Crusaders Plunder & Murder for God 1204 Christian crusaders         sack & ruin greatest Christian city, Constantinople. 1209 Pope Innocent III         launches Albigensian Crusade against Christian Cathars of southern France.         7000 massacred in La Madeleine Church alone. 1211 Burning of Waldenses         heretics at Strasbourg begins several centuries of persecution.            German Teutonic Knights         butcher their way through the Baltic lands, savage Catholic Poles &         Orthodox Russians. 1231: Pope Gregory IX authorizes         Inquisition for dealing with heretics. 1277 Pope John XXI, alarmed          by rumors of pagan heresy among “scholars        of arts in the faculty of theology” pressurizes Stephen Tempier,        Bishop of Paris, to prohibit 219 philosophical and theological theses.      The “Condemnations of Paris” is the first of 16 lists of censorship.
14th Century Catastrophe Church hostility to medicine allows plague to decimate Europe Burning of the Jews of Cologne – blamed by Christians for the         Black Death (Liber Chronicarum Mundi). World Domination? “We declare, say,         define, and pronounce that it is absolutely necessary for the salvation         of every human creature to be subject to the Roman pontiff.” – Pope Boniface VIII, Bull Unun Sanctum, 1302 1311-12: Ecumenical Council         of Vienne. It authorises the brutal suppression of the Knights Templar         (mercenaries of the church who have outlived their usefulness).       1316-1334: Pope John XXII,         world’s richest man and first pontiff to promote theory of witchcraft.         Sanctions bull allowing heresy charges to be brought against dead people.         In 1320 he instructs French Inquisition to confiscate all property belonging         to blasphemers or dabblers in black arts. 1300s.  Glowing eyes and nocturnal behaviour of the cat interpreted by the Church as clear proof of the hapless moggy’s diabolic affinity. Wholesale trapping and burning of cats allowed free rein to the spread of the flee-carrying rat. Subsequently, Europe’s population was decimated  by the plague. 1347-50: The Black Death sweeps         across Europe, killing one-third of the population. “Jews were burnt all         the way from the Mediterranean into Germany… under torture confessing         to have spread the plague by poisoning wells… the poison made from the         skin of a basilisk (a kind of mythical serpent)…” – N. Cantor (In the Wake of the Plague)	15th Century          Malevolence Tortured Bodies by Sadists of the Lord	16th Century Mayhem Pogroms & civil wars in the name of Jesus “My advice…               is: First, that their synagogues be burned down, and that all who               are able toss sulphur and pitch; it would be good if someone could               also throw in some hellfire..” Martin Luther (“On              the Jews and their lies” 1543) 1517: Martin Luther posts         95 theses at Wittenberg. The Reformation will turn Europe into a battleground. 1517 A Dominican monk Johann         Tetzel swells papal coffers by selling indulgences (‘souls freed from         purgatory’!) 1524: Luther – no friend           of the downtrodden – encourages savagery of German princes in           putting  down the two-year Peasants’ Revolt.   Book Burners for Christ– Dominican monks in the service of Ferdinand proudly consign the wisdom         of Moorish Spain to the flames (Berruguete, Prado Museum, Madrid) 1553 John Calvin, the “Protestant            Pope” of Geneva proves his Christian credentials by having Michael            Servetus, the Spanish physician, burned at        the stake for heresy. Servetus      had opposed Trinitarianism and infant baptism. Servetus,                  the discoverer of pulmonary blood circulation (an advance on                  Galen) had fled the Inquisition and had thought himself safe          among Protestants. Oh dear.         1559 Introduction of Index of Forbidden Books (lasts until 1966) 1563 Following the Council         of Trent, Jesuit Order becomes ‘Defender of the Faith’. Huguenots are         persecuted in France.	17th Century Barbarity Burning Witches for Christ Urbain Grandier, burned         in Loudun, 1634. Cardinal Richelieu orchestrated his murder. 1600 After a seven year trail           before the Inquisition, Giordano Bruno, who had the audacity to suggest           that space was boundless and that the sun and its planets were not unique,           is condemned and burned at the stake. 1605: The Gunpowder Plot. Catholic fanatics attempt to blow up James         I of England. 1633 Galileo is brought before the Inquisition. Under threat of torture and death, he is forced from his knees to renounce all belief in Copernican theories. He is sentenced to life imprisonment. He dies in 1642 and the charges against him stand for another 350 years.     1618-1648 Central Europe         devastated by Thirty Years’ War between Catholics and Protestants
	1411 Dominican Vincente Ferrer         revives anti-Jewish hysteria in Spain: “cohorts of the Devil and         Anti-Christ, clever, warped and doomed.” 1415 John Huss           of Bohemia, critic of papal corruption but guaranteed personal           safety,  burned at the stake. “When dealing with heretics,           one is not obligated  to keep his word.” – Pope Gregory           XII. 1415 Pope John           XXIII deposed: “The most scandalous charges were suppressed;           the  Vicar of Christ was only accused of piracy, murder, rape, sodomy           and incest.” – Gibbon (Decline & Fall) 1478: Pope Sixtus         IV, in alliance with King Ferdinand of Spain, establishes the Spanish         Inquisition. Jews, Moors and heretics will be imprisoned, tortured and         murdered for centuries.         The bisexual Sixtus, though suffering from syphilis, fathers children         from his elder sister. 1484 Pope Innocent VIII decrees that cats are unholy creatures, to be burned along with the witches that own them. 1486 Taking a break               from book-burning, two Dominican monks, Henrich Kramer & James               Sprenger, write a best-seller – Malleus Maleficarum               (‘The Witches Hammer’) – ‘the most blood thirsty book ever               written.’ (Peter de Rosa, Vicars of Christ, p184) This unsurpassed               nonsense rests on the bench of every magistrate and judge in Europe               for three centuries and leads to tens of thousands of judicial murders. 1498 Dominican           reformer, Savonarola – burner of books & ornaments of ‘pagan            immorality’ – is himself burned for criticising the degenerate            Pope Alexander VI.
18th Century Scandal Christian Church endorses Slavery, Racism & subordination      of women “And Noah awoke from         his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him. And he said,         Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.         And he said, Blessed be the LORD God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his         servant.” Genesis 9.24-26   “As for your male         and female slaves whom you may have: you may buy male and female slaves         from the nations that are round about you. You may also buy from among         the strangers who sojourn with you and their families that are with you,         who have been born in your land; and they may be your property.”          Leviticus 25:44   1738: Freemasonry is condemned         by Clement XII and Catholics are forbidden to join. 1793: Last ‘witch’ burning at Poznen in Germany	19th Century Evil Christian Church Rejects Science & social        reform; Christian ‘missions’ go hand-in-hand with colonialism.   1814: Society of Jesus, suppressed         since 1773, is restored. The Inquisition continues until 1834, Church-sanctioned         torture until 1917. 1844: ‘Protection of Children         Act’ allows Church missionaries in Australia to kidnap aboriginal children. 1854: Pius IX proclaims the         dogma of the Immaculate Conception in the bull Ineffabilis Deus.         Lourdes shrine introduced.   1864: Pius IX issues the encyclical          Quanta cura and the Syllabus of Errors. It condemns some         80 propositions derived from scientific method and rationalism. Liberalism         & socialism are denounced.   1870: Vatican Council declares         the Pope “infallible”.   ‘Bible Societies’ & ‘Missions’         in European colonies destroy indigenous cultures	20th Century Iniquity Christian Church allies itself with Fascism;        opposes advances of science & personal freedom 1907 Pius X condemns Modernism         in the decree Lamentabili and the encyclical Pascendi. Hitler’s Pope – Pius         XII (1939-1958) Hitler, a Roman Catholic,            is never excommunicated for causing the death of millions; whereas        Martin Luther was excommunicated for criticism of the papal system. Friends of Fascists Everywhere:          Germany          Spain          Croatia	21st Century Menace Churches the Stalking Ground of Paedophiles & Sex        Offenders On March 12, 2000 Pope         John Paul II attempted to purify the soul of the Catholic Church by         apologising for 2000 years of “sins” committed by the church         – quite some compensation for twenty centuries of terrorism, extortion         and murder! And yet – September 2000 – the            same John Paul II issues “Dominus Jesus (Lord Jesus)”,  reaffirming              intolerance: “Only one path to God – the Roman Catholic Church.” And the story does not end: Still the evil continues… Child               sex abuse scandal rocks the US Catholic Church “The Roman Catholic         Church has removed 218 priests from their positions this year because         of child sexual abuse allegations, but at least 34 known offenders remain         in church jobs”– Reuters (June 9 2002) Anti-abortion Anti-birth control Creator of “saints” 31 July, 2003 “Congregation          for the Doctrine of the Faith” condemns same sex deviants          who seek marriage. In contrast, no Vatican condemnation    of priestly paedophiles.

Infected by Priestcraft, Catholic Poland Regresses Further Into a Culture of Credulity | “country is in the midst of an exorcism epidemic”

Rash of demonic possessions in Poland gives rise to ‘Exorcist Magazine’

Posted by George Dvorsky

Business is good in Poland for priests who are skilled in the arts of demonic extrication. The country is in the midst of an exorcism epidemic (or boom, depending on how you feel about it.) And this has inspired Catholic priests to join forces with a publisher, and launch the world’s first monthly magazine devoted to the subject. And with a three-month waiting list for exorcisms in Warsaw, people had better start reading.

Called Egzorcysta Magazine, the monthly journal contains such page-turning titles as, “New Age – the spiritual vacuum cleaner,” and “Satan is real.” The first issue is 62 pages and costs about $3.00.

The Raw Story tells us more:

“The rise in the number or exorcists from four to more than 120 over the course of 15 years in Poland is telling,” Father Aleksander Posacki, a professor of philosophy, theology and leading demonologist and exorcist told reporters in Warsaw at the Monday launch of theEgzorcysta monthly.

Ironically, he attributed the rise in demonic possessions in what remains one of Europe’s most devoutly Catholic nations partly to the switch from atheist communism to free market capitalism in 1989.

“It’s indirectly due to changes in the system: capitalism creates more opportunities to do business in the area of occultism. Fortune telling has even been categorised as employment for taxation,” Posacki told AFP.

“If people can make money out of it, naturally it grows and its spiritual harm grows too,” he said, hastening to add authentic exorcism is absolutely free of charge.

Ah, so it’s authentic exorcism that’s free of charge. Good to know; now we can avoid all those inauthentic kinds.

Related articles

• Demonic Possession Video Proves That Satan, Demons and Exorcisms are REAL (theageofblasphemy.wordpress.com)
• Catholic Diocese Creates Exorcism Hotline: Who You Gonna Call? (patheos.com)
• Catholic Church acts to deal with an epidemic of demonic possessions (freethinker.co.uk)

50 Reasons to Boycott the Catholic Church

50 Reasons to Boycott the Catholic Church

The Church uses its resources to oppose social progress and positive change all over the world.

 

Photo Credit: AFP

Last month in Ireland, Savita Halappanavar died, and she shouldn’t have. Savita was a 31-year-old married woman, four months pregnant, who went to the hospital with a miscarriage in progress that developed into a blood infection. She could easily have been saved if the already doomed fetus was aborted. Instead, her doctors did nothing, explaining that “this is a Catholic country,” and left her to suffer in agony for days, only intervening once it was too late.

Savita’s death is just the latest in a long line of tragedies directly attributable to the doctrines and beliefs of the Roman Catholic church. I acknowledge that there are many good, progressive Catholics, but the problem is that the church isn’t a democracy, and those progressives have no voice or vote in its governance. The church is a petrified oligarchy, a dictatorship like the medieval monarchies it once existed alongside, and it’s run by a small circle of conservative, rigidly ideological old men who make all the decisions and choose their own successors.

This means that, whatever individual Catholics may do, the resources of the church as an institution are bent toward opposing social progress and positive change all over the world. Every dollar you put into the church collection plate, every Sunday service you attend, every hour of time and effort you put into volunteering or working for church organizations, is inevitably a show of support for the institutional church and its abhorrent mission. When you have no voice, there’s only one thing left to do: boycott. Stop supporting the church with your money and your time. For lifelong Catholics, it’s a drastic step, but it’s more than justified by the wealth of reasons showing that the church as an institution is beyond reform, and the only meaningful response is to part ways with it. Here are just a few of those reasons:

1. Throughout the world, Catholic bishops have engaged in a systematic, organized effort going back decades to cover up for priests who molest children, pressuring the victims to sign confidentiality agreements and quietly assigning the predators to new parishes where they could go on molesting. Tens of thousands of children have been raped and tortured as a result of this conspiracy of silence.

2. Strike one: “What did the pope know and when did he know it?” The current pope, when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, was personally implicated in a case from the 1970s in which at least three sets of parents reported that a priest in his diocese had sexually abused their children. In response, Ratzinger assigned the priest to therapy, without notifying law enforcement, and washed his hands of the matter. That priest was back on duty in just a few short days and went on to molest more children.

3. Strike two: In 1981, again when the current pope was Cardinal Ratzinger, he got a letter from the diocese of Oakland asking him to defrock a priest who had acknowledged molesting two children. Ratzinger ignored this letter, and several followup letters, for four years. Finally, in 1985, he wrote back saying that more time was needed, and that they had to proceed very slowly to safeguard “the good of the Universal Church” in light of “the young age of the petitioner” — by which he meant not the victimized children, but the pedophile priest. (By contrast, when a rogue archbishop ordained married men as priests, he was laicized six days later.)

4. Strike three: In 2001, Cardinal Ratzinger wrote a letter, De Delictis Gravioribus, to all Catholic bishops advising them how to handle accusations of sex crimes by priests. There was no recommendation to contact the police, but rather an instruction for them to report such cases only to the Vatican and tell no one else: “Cases of this kind are subject to the pontifical secret.”

5. Some church officials, like the American friar Benedict Groeschel, have blamed the epidemic of child molestation on sexually wanton boys who tempt priests into assaulting them.

6. They threaten to cut off funding for immigrants’ rights advocates because they sometimes work with gay-rights advocates. Preventing immigrants from getting legal and medical aid is less important than ensuring the church isn’t contaminated by even indirect contact with anyone who helps gay people.

7. In a sign of how ridiculously disproportionate and unhinged the church’s martyrdom complex is, the current pope has compared expanding the rights of women and gay people to the murderous anticlerical violence of the 1930s Spanish civil war.

8. They’ve used their official UN observer status to team up with Islamic theocracies like Iran and Libya to oppose calls for family-planning services to be made available in the world’s poorest nations.

9. They’ve gone to desperately poor, AIDS-ravaged regions of Africa to spread the life-destroying lie that condoms don’t prevent transmission of HIV.

10. In the mid-20th century, they appointed a special papal commission to study whether Catholicism should permit the use of birth control. When the commission almost unanimously recommended that they should, they ignored that recommendation and doubled down on their absolute ban on contraception.

11. They excommunicated the doctors who performed an abortion on a pregnant 9-year-old who’d been raped by her stepfather.

12. They did not excommunicate the stepfather.

13. Savita Halappanavar wasn’t the first: Catholic-run hospitals are willing to let women die rather than get lifesaving abortions, even when a miscarriage is already in progress and no possible procedure could save the fetus.

14. They refused to provide contraception or abortion to women who were abducted and forced to work as prostitutes, and then filed a lawsuit complaining it was violating their religious freedom when the government took away their contract.

15. In Poland, they ordered politicians to vote for a law banning IVF and threatened to excommunicate any who didn’t comply.

16. They were a major source of the pressure on the Komen Foundation that led to its disastrous decision to cut ties with Planned Parenthood.

17. They’ve announced an inquisition into the Girl Scouts to get to the bottom of its association with morally suspect groups like Doctors Without Borders and Oxfam.

18. They’ve been one of the major forces attacking Obamacare, filing lawsuits arguing that non-church Catholic employers should be able to decide whether or not employee health insurance plans will cover contraception. This is effectively an argument that a woman’s employer should be allowed to force her to pay more for medical coverage, or even place it out of her reach altogether, based on his religious beliefs.

19. In Australia, they allegedly derailed a police investigation of an accused pedophile, putting pressure on higher-ups to get an investigating officer removed from the case.

20. They demanded that Sunday school teachers sign a loyalty oath agreeing to submit “will and intellect” to the proclamations of church leaders.

21. Some top church officials, including the current pope, have advocated denying communion to politicians who support progressive and pro-choice political ideas. Notably, although the church also opposes preemptive war and the death penalty, no conservative politician has ever been denied communion on this basis.

22. They’ve cracked down on American nuns for doing too much to help the poor and not enough to oppose gay marriage, condemning them for displaying a seditious “feminist spirit.”

23. In Germany, where parishioners pay an officially assessed tax rate to the church, they’ve tried to blackmail people who don’t want to pay the church tax, threatening to fire them from jobs in church institutions. In some cases, if the person opts out but later loses the paperwork, they demand on-the-spot repayment of decades of back taxes.

24. In America, bishops have compared Democratic officeholders, including President Obama, to Hitler and Stalin and have said that it jeopardizes a person’s eternal salvation if they don’t vote as the bishops instruct them to.

25. They fight against equal marriage rights for same-sex couples. It’s not enough for the Catholic church hierarchy that they refuse to perform church weddings for gay and lesbian couples; they want to write that prohibition into the civil law and deny marriage equality to everyone who doesn’t fit their religious criteria, and have invested vast amounts of money and effort into doing so. In the 2012 election cycle alone, the church spent almost $2 million in an unsuccessful fight to defeat marriage-equality initiatives in four states.

26. They’ve compared gay sex to pedophilia and incest and called for it to be forbidden by law, saying that “states can and must regulate behaviors, including various sexual behaviors.”

27. They’ve shut down adoption clinics rather than consider gay people as prospective parents. The church’s official position, apparently, is that it’s better for children to remain orphans or in foster care than to be placed in a loving, committed same-sex household.

28. They barred an anti-LGBT bullying group, anti-teen-suicide foundation from a Catholic school ceremony, explaining that the group’s mission is “contrary to the teachings of the Catholic church.”

29. They told a teenager he wouldn’t be allowed to go through confirmation because he posted a pro-gay-rights status message on Facebook, and they expelled a preschooler from a private Catholic school because his parents were lesbians.

30. They have a history of dumping known pedophile priests in isolated, poor, rural communities, where they apparently assumed that local people wouldn’t dare to complain or that no one would listen if they did.

31. They’ve given huge payouts — as much as $20,000 in some cases — to pedophile priests, to buy their silence and quietly ease them out of the priesthood, after specifically denying in public that they were doing this.

32. When the Connecticut legislature proposed extending statute-of-limitations laws to allow older child-abuse cases to be tried, the bishops ordered a letter to be read during Mass instructing parishioners to contact their representatives and lobby against it.

33. To fight back against and intimidate abuse-survivor groups like SNAP, the church’s lawyers have filed absurdly broad subpoenas demanding the disclosure of decades’ worth of documents.

34. In the Netherlands, some boys were apparently castrated in church-run hospitals after complaining to the police about sexual abuse by priests.

35. When a Catholic official from Philadelphia, William Lynn, was charged with knowingly returning predator priests to duty, his defense was to blame those decisions on his superior, Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua, thus acknowledging that the corruption reaches to the highest levels of the church.

36. When confronted with hundreds of complaints about child-raping priests spanning decades, a Dutch cardinal used the same “we knew nothing” excuse once given by Nazi soldiers. Several months later, it was reported that this same cardinal had personally arranged to move a pedophile priest to a different parish to shield him from accusations.

37. In one case, Mother Teresa successfully persuaded the church to return a suspected pedophile priest to duty because he was a friend of hers. Eight additional complaints of child abuse were later lodged against him.

38. In yet another case, they appointed a priest with a history of child molestation to a board that advises the church on what to do when they get reports of priests molesting children.

39. And after all this, they’ve had the audacity to plead for money and ask parishioners to pick up the tab for legal costs and settlements.

40. They abducted tens of thousands of babies from unwed mothers who gave birth in Catholic-run hospitals all over the world throughout the 20th century, forcing drugged or helpless women to give their newborn children up for adoption against their will.

41. They tried to have the Indian skeptic Sanal Edamuruku charged with blasphemy and imprisoned for debunking a claim of a miraculous weeping statue.

42. They publicly supported the Russian Orthodox church’s decision to have the punk band Pussy Riot charged and imprisoned for blasphemy.

43. Their finances are a disorganized mess, lacking strong accounting controls and clear internal separations, which means parishioners who give to the church can have no assurance of what the money will be used for. According to an investigation by the Economist, funds meant for hospitals, cemeteries and priests’ pensions have been raided to pay legal fees and settlements in several diocesan bankruptcies.

44. They’ve said in public that the sexist prohibition on women priests is an infallible part of Catholic dogma, and hence can never be changed.

45. They’ve silenced priests who call for the ordination of women and other desperately needed reforms, exhorting them to instead show “the radicalism of obedience.”

46. They’ve excommunicated at least one priest for advocating the ordination of women.

47. They lifted the excommunication of an anti-Semitic, Holocaust-denying bishop who also thinks women shouldn’t attend college or wear pants.

48. When it comes to the question of who’s financially responsible for compensating the victims of sex abuse, they argue that priests aren’t employees and therefore the church bears no responsibility for anything they do.

49. They canonized Mother Teresa for doing little more than offering a squalid place for people to die. Outside observers who visited her “Home for the Dying” reported that medical care was substandard and dangerous, limited to aspirin and unsterilized needles rinsed in tap water, administered by untrained volunteers. The millions of dollars collected by Mother Teresa and her order, enough to build many advanced clinics and hospitals, remain unaccounted for.

50. They announced that voluntary end-of-life measures, such as terminal patients’ directives for when they wish to have a feeding tube removed, won’t be respected at Catholic hospitals.

Related articles

• Catholic theologian preaches revolution to end church’s ‘authoritarian’ rule (guardian.co.uk)
• Catholic Church Defends Convicted Child Molesters (atheistrev.com)
• Why Popes Never Have to Say Sorry (time.com)
• Alex Gibney On What The Pope Knew (And Why He Did Nothing) In ‘Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence In The House of God’ (movieline.com)
• 50 Reasons to Boycott the Catholic Church (alternet.org)
• Pope Ratzinger a Nazi Pedophile? Stop The Catholic Church From Raping Our Children (truelogic.wordpress.com)