Estimates of the number of people who took part in a demonstration in Rome in support of the family and opposing gender theory in public education and gay marriage, vary between 330,000 and a million.

The demonstration was held as part of the celebration of Family Day. The demonstrators defied steady rain to pack the piazza in front of St John Lateran basilica.

Just a few days before the demonstration Pope Francis had once again taken a clear position against gender theory, lamenting that parents of young children had to ‘re-catechise’ their children in the evening because of the ‘strange ideas’ they learn from their teachers and schoolbooks.

‘Join moderate Muslims’

Melkite Catholic Patriarch Gregory III, Syrian Orthodox Patriarch Ignatius Efrem II, Greek Orthodox Patriarch John X, Maronite Catholic Patriarch Beshara al Rai, and Syriac Catholic Patriarch Joseph III Younan have called upon Christians to work with moderate Muslims against the rise of religious extremism.

The Catholic and Orthodox patriarchs said many Muslims are “working with their leaders to confront and completely eradicate” jihadist ideology. They appealed to Christians support the effort “to confront Takfiri ideology”. Takfari thought is a militant branch of Sunni Islam that calls for violence jihad and condemns any moderating trends.

Bush’s remarks on encyclical criticised

Cardinal Peter Turkson, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, criticised comments made by US presidential contender Jeb Bush as he discussed Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si’.

Bush had said he did not get economic policy from the Pope. He added that “religion ought to be about making us better as people, and less about things that end up getting into the political realm”.

In a reaction, Turkson told CNN: “Morality has to do with decisions and choices we make in concrete situations, including economic situations”. He expressed the wish that “we stop making this artificial separation between moral issues, theological issues, and business issues”.

At the press conference at which the encyclical was presented, Turkson said that “we talk about these subject matters not because we are experts on those matters, we talk about them because they concern the impact on our lives”.

Work, common good

In an address to the Italian National Federation of the Knights of Labour, Pope Francis said: “The common good cannot be achieved through a mere increase in earnings or production. [It requires] the active involvement of all the parties that make up the social body.

“The social teaching of the Church recalls this fundamental criterion: that the human being is at the centre of development. As long as men and women remain passive or marginalised, the common good cannot be considered fully achieved.”

Do more for Ukraine

Ukrainian Catholic Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk of Kiev-Halych wants the G7 group of industrialised countries to do more to guarantee the security of Ukraine. He said that under a 1994 agreement they had promised Ukraine’s security after the country decided to give up its Soviet-era nuclear weapons.

In a June 16 interview with Poland’s Catholic information agency, KAI, he said the 1994 security pledge had not been recognised at the June summit of the G7, although Ukraine “has been attack­ed and needs such guarantees more than ever”.

(Compiled by Fr Joe Borg)

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