Cardinal George Pell of Sydney, Australia, said that while priests or bishops should not serve in Parliament or be decision-makers in government, they have the same rights to freedom of speech and to participate in public debate as everyone else.
Mgr Pell was defending the right of priests to speak against the legalisation of same-sex marriage from the pulpit.
Meanwhile, Peter Furness, from the Australian Marriage Equality group said the Church’s “instructions to ordinary Catholics to lobby against marriage equality is a breach of the division between Church and State”. He said “allowing same-sex civil marriages will not change the Church’s definition of marriage”.
Social injustice fosters Islamic fundamentalism
Referring to the mass demonstrations in Egypt, Fr Samir Khalil Samir, an Egyptian Jesuit teaching at Rome’s Pontifical Oriental Institute, said there was a link between social injustice in Muslim countries and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism.
“What we need first of all is justice, equality, and social reform because the gap between rich and poor is far too wide, and this is the real cause of the Islamic fundamentalist movement,” he said.
AIDS and ‘poverty of moral thinking’
In a speech to fellow bishops, Archbishop Buti Tlhagale of Johannesburg, president of the Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference, criticised the “poverty of moral thinking in Africa” and the dependency on “American-European thinking” in developing solutions to a growing epidemic of the disease.
“When Europe thinks about moral issues around HIV and AIDS, they think of gay people. In Africa, we think about millions of ordinary men, women and youth,” he said.
“It is high time we challenged our moral theologians to assess the moral challenges of HIV and AIDS,” Mgr Tlhagale said. He called upon the bishops’ conference to “invest in the training of moral theologians in a more systematic fashion.”
UNAIDS, the joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, estimated that in 2009 about 5.6 million South Africans had HIV or AIDS.
Living chastity in a sex-saturated world
“Living chastity is no easy business in the sex-saturated world of contemporary Western culture.
“It’s impossible to walk through a shopping mall, turn on a computer or television, glance at an advert or browse through a bookstore without being bombarded by sexual imagery of every kind.
“Pornography has never been more widespread, reaching almost epidemic proportions. It denigrates authentic sexual expression, encourages masturbation, sexual intimacy outside marriage, the separation of the life-giving and love-giving meaning of sexual relations.
“If we commit a sin of impurity alone or with another person, the sacrament of Reconciliation communicates to us God’s forgiveness and merciful love.
“All we need to do is approach His throne of mercy with sincere sorrow in Confession and we are assured that all our sins are forgiven.”
Excerpts from the statement by the Episcopal Commission for Doctrine of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops.
(Compiled by Fr Joe Borg)