Strategic compassion: Western nations welcoming refugees is devastating to ISIS

AISHA AHMAD
The strategic value of compassion: Welcoming refugees is devastating to IS
Contributed to The Globe and Mail
Last updated Friday, Nov. 20, 2015 8:45AM EST

Aisha Ahmad is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Toronto, specializing in jihadist financing.

In the aftermath of the deadly attacks in Paris last week, we have learned that the masterminds were "homegrown terrorists" with Islamic State links. They were not refugees. And yet, officials across Europe and the United States have called for a moratorium on refugee flows from Syria, claiming that migrants pose a security threat.

For IS, the attack was not just about killing 130 people; it was a chess move in its global game, aimed at provoking exactly this reaction. But those of us who have studied jihadist extremists for years are not fooled. We have analyzed their internal messages in every language, tracked their financial resources, and dissected their strategies across the world. This move was predictable. We have known for several months that IS has been trying to seal European borders and incite hostilities against refugees as part of its broader strategy.

How we react to the Paris attack is therefore critical. It will not only determine the fate of the refugees, but will also tip the balance of power on the battlefield. If we take the bait, we will enrich and empower IS even further. But if we respond strategically, we have the ability to undercut the financial base of IS, disrupt its recruitment, and prove that its toxic ideology holds no weight. Saving the refugees is not just a moral issue; it is an inseparable part of the strategic plan to destroy IS.

The fact is that the refugee crisis hurts IS badly. The compassionate response of many Western nations toward refugees undercuts the so-called caliphate in three key ways: money, men and messaging.

The first factor is financial. IS is the richest terrorist organization in the world with assets estimated at $2-billion, and almost all of that revenue is internally generated. Recent estimates indicate that the extremists collect nearly $1-million a day through taxation and extortion of businesses and households, arguably even more than profits from oil and antiquities smuggling.

The refugee exodus undercuts this gain. The more families that escape their violence, the fewer people the so-called caliphate has to extort. The nearly 12 million refugees who have already fled the battlefield therefore constitute a tremendous financial loss. Leading IS operatives are well aware of these costs, and are trying to force people to remain inside their turf.

To stop the flow, IS has directly threatened refugees through its media wing, explains Christopher Anzalone, an expert on jihadist information operations. In one document, IS states: "it should be known that voluntarily leaving Darul-Islam [land of Islam] for darul-kufr [land of disbelief] is a dangerous major sin [kaba'ir]".

The second reason is recruitment. We know that IS relies heavily on foreign fighters and devotes considerable effort both finding and cultivating new conscripts. With air strikes hammering rebel strongholds across Syria and Iraq, IS needs as much new cannon fodder as possible to stay in the fight.

To accomplish this goal, IS has repeatedly stated that it wants Muslims in Western countries to face increased persecution, because they believe this will catalyze a hijra (migration) to their lands. Official IS statements are unequivocal on this point – attacks like those in Paris are designed to incite violence against local Muslim communities in order to facilitate recruitment and force migration.

The third issue is message control. IS has invested tremendous resources into constructing a narrative that portrays itself as a sanctuary for Muslims. When millions of Muslim families run for their lives, IS loses this legitimacy battle on the world stage. Every horror story told by a refugee family shows these claims of being an idyllic caliphate to be utterly ludicrous.

To compensate for this damage to its image, IS has ramped up its propaganda machine, explicitly targeting the refugees. Its media wing has released 12 heavily produced propaganda films, each warning people to remain in Syria. "These media materials portray Western xenophobia, racism and indifference toward refugees" says Mr. Anzalone. These messages aim to tell potential refugees that non-Muslims hate them and that running away will result in abuse and exploitation at the hands of foreigners.

The fact that people across the Western world have reached out to help refugees has been incredibly damaging to this jihadist narrative.

Nothing has countered the message of hate more effectively than the countless church groups, community centres and humanitarian aid organizations that have welcomed Syrian refugees from all backgrounds with kindness, respect and goodwill. Our compassion and empathy have exposed the terrorist narrative as fraudulent.

Realizing these trends, IS is using the refugees as pawns in its global game. Believing the world will betray the migrants, it has bet heavily that a post-Paris xenophobic backlash will seal off the borders and leave the refugees stranded. Our next move is therefore critical. If we react as they hoped, we will have kept IS's tax base under its control, fed its recruitment campaign and reinforced its ideological message.

But we can both save the refugees and tip the balance of power on the battlefield in our favour. We can deplete their resources and disable their propaganda machine.

The strategic move in this case is to stand firm on providing assistance in the refugee crisis. By holding onto the moral high ground, we can also win this war.

Gender issues: 'The Hardest Part of Being a Woman' by Simcha Fisher

The Hardest Part of Being a Woman

by Simcha Fisher 11/12/2015 Comments (29)

Caitlyn Jenner, the transgendered celebrity recently named Woman of the Year by Glamour Magazine, told Buzzfeed that "the hardest part about being a woman is figuring out what to wear."

I've been female since I was conceived. I do spend a frustrating amount of time figuring out what to wear, but I heard Jenner's statement and I despaired. How is this trivial foolishness so readily accepted as courage and truth? Men and women are created in the image of God, and they are who they are because of who God made them, and not because of how they are perceived.

Because that is what Jenner is talking about: perception. That is what, I'm afraid, most people (liberal, conservative, and everything in between) think of when they think of what it means to be a man or to be a woman: whether we can make people believe that that's what we are, by how we dress, or how we act, or how we respond to them, or how we can make them feel.

But none of this is what makes a man a man, or a woman a woman. 

I spent a long time making a list of things which are harder for women than Jenner's stated burden of figuring out which crotch-camouflaging outfit to buy with an endless wardrobe budget. I came up with a good many struggles which are actually innate to women (mostly having to do with fertility or lack of fertility), and a good many more that have to do with how society perceives us. 

But ultimately, it doesn't matter. Many of the things on my list were things which make us suffer, but which also strengthen us, teach us about our worth, and which give us purpose and direction, or at very least something to offer up. Many of the things on my list were not really unique to women, but which men and women both struggle with, in various ways. All of them are things which will bring us closer to God, if we approach them the right way.

The one I kept going back to was #44 on my list: Being tired.

I'm tired. So tired. So tired of getting further and further away from the goal of just being free to be a human being.


Because I'm an optimist, I often feel like we're finally getting somewhere -- that maybe there is room in the world for women who are ready to deal with the inevitable sorrows of their life, to accept the crosses and contradictions of their sex, and to focus on getting to heaven and bringing their families with them. That maybe a working mom and a stay-at-home mom can be friends; maybe a thin woman and a fat woman can hang out; maybe a feminist and a traditionalist can laugh at the same joke. It feels, sometimes, like we're getting somewhere.

And then we hear, once again, that old, old, old old lie: It's all about the dress. It's all about the hair, and the lipstick, and the heels. That you can be a woman as long as you get the look right.

For many people, "the look" is not material things, like clothes, or hair, or jewelry. For many people, "the look" is a tone of voice, a skill, an attitude or a set of priorities, or a way of approaching the world. As I said before, many people think that who we are, man or women, is determined by how we act, or how we respond to other people, or how we can make other people feel. Many people -- men and women alike -- believe that if you create a certain impression of yourself to other people, then you are a "real man" or a "real women" . . . and if you can't or don't, then you're not.

Well, when I was a zygote, I was female. I was as feminine then as I am today at age 40. When I do something -- anything at all -- I do it as a woman. There is no such thing as me doing something like a man. I'm just me, doing things, and I'm a woman. I'm just me, feeling things. I'm just me, acting and thinking and feeling and behaving like me. And I am a woman. 

It sounds stupid because it's stupidly simple; and it's so stupidly simple that most people don't want to hear it. This nutty "you are whatever you say you are" nonsense is just the ugly cousin of "you are whatever I say you are" which conservatives have been trying to push on women for millennia. Same song, different verse.

I don't pretend to know the answer when transgendered people are suffering, feeling like their identities and their bodies don't match up. I feel sorry for them. But I do know that who we are is who we are, and how other people perceive us has nothing to do with who we are. 

O Catequista dum Santo: Jan Tyranowski

O Catequista  dum Santo: Jan Tyranowski

Durante a segunda guerra mundial, na Polônia, muitos jovens resistiram a ocupação nazista com armas e, a maioria deles, acabaram mortos. Mas houve uma outra resistência… Os padres Salesianos que, corajosamente, não desistiram da pastoral juvenil, encarregaram um catequista, Jan Tyranowski, de organizar um grupo secreto de rapazes na paróquia Salesiana de Debniki. As suas armas seriam o rosário da
Virgem Maria e os livros. O grupo chamava “Rosário Vivo”. Eles queriam ajudar bons jovens a conservarem suas cabeças e corações sadios em meio à loucura da guerra, a fim de que, depois que tudo passasse, pudessem reconstruir a nação. Jan observava os rapazes que iam a  missa todos os dias e os convidava para o grupo, foi assim que convidou Karol Woytilla para participar. Esse jovem sobreviveu a guerra e se tornou Papa e depois santo:João Paulo II (veja sua história aqui).

Jan Tyranowski ajudava os jovens a enxergarem sentido para a vida e esperança, os ensinado a orar, colocando em suas mãos bons livros e conversando muito com cada um deles, os apoiando nos momentos de sofrimento. Em 2001, testemunhando no seu processo de beatificção, o Papa João Paulo II chamou Jan de “um santo oculto dos nossos tempos”.

Christians Uprooted by ISIS Find Fruitfulness in Suffering

Christians Uprooted by ISIS Find Fruitfulness in Suffering
Lebanon, November 19, 2015 (ZENIT.org) Staff Reporter | 701 hits

This report is contributed by Philip Abou Zeid of Aid to the Church in Need.

* * *

One of the Lebanese capital’s eastern suburbs is home to the Assyrian Christian quarter, with at its heart St. George’s Church, serving the faithful of the Assyrian Church of the East. A sign in front says “Martyrs’ Square,” in commemoration of a 1976 rocket attack on the church that killed 30 worshipers at the height of the country’s civil war. Today, St. George serves potential martyrs—Christians who have fled Iraq and Syria to escape ISIS terror.

On a recent afternoon, Reena stood in line outside the church, waiting to register her family and become eligible to receive food and other humanitarian assistance. Married and in her mid-30s, she is the mother of two daughters, ages 3 and 5. In the country for just a week, she was eager to tell the story of the family’s trek from Baghdad to northern Iraq, making it to Erbil, Kurdistan—after the ISIS onslaught of the summer of 2014— and subsequently to Lebanon.

Being on the run fit a pattern for Reena, who used to work for the Iraqi government as a topographer. Her bosses “were looking at us Christians differently than Muslim employees. We felt discrimination during the Saddam Hussein years and afterwards too,” she said.

ISIS took away the passports of Reena and her husband, but their sense of being violated goes much deeper: “ISIS is changing the names of our cities; the history of the Assyrians is being erased; my home is gone and home is where all my traditions are, where I made my identity. But my home is no longer mine. They have taken it. It now belongs to strangers. I must find another one,” she said, adding that “the only solution left is emigration. We need to find a new country.” But that route is closed to most Christian refugees.

More than ever, Reena is clinging to her faith, saying: “Everything we are doing is to defend our Christian beliefs. We refused to stay in Iraq in order not to be vanquished by force and be made to convert to Islam. We were praying all the way to Lebanon. Jesus never let us go. He was with us—He sent us to Lebanon.”

Asked for a message to Christians in the West, Reena said that “they need to help us more. Life in Lebanon is very expensive and very hard. The Church does what it can, but the state is helpless.” Yet, she also wants to tell Christians everywhere about the hidden blessing of her family’s suffering: “Stay strong in your faith. Never lose hope. Every day we pray and that is how we manage to survive. This experience made our faith stronger. ISIS showed us the ugly face of Islam—but their killing and atrocities made us see how beautiful our faith is.”

--
Aid to the Church in Need is an international Catholic charity under the guidance of the Holy See, providing assistance to the suffering and persecuted Church in more than 140 countries. www.churchinneed.org (USA); www.acnuk.org (UK); www.aidtochurch.org (AUS); www.acnireland.org (IRL); www.acn-aed-ca.org (CAN) www.acnmalta.org (Malta)

Report: Mother Teresa to be canonised in September 2016

  by Staff Reporter

posted Wednesday, 18 Nov 2015

Girls dressed up as Blessed Mother Teresa during an event to

commemorate her 104th birth anniversary in a school in

Bhopal, India. 

(CNS photo/Sanjeev Gupta, EPA)

   

Italian news agency Agi issued the report which the Vatican has not yet confirmed

Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta will be canonised on Sunday September 5 according to the news agency, Agi.
September 5 falls within the Year of Mercy and also marks the anniversary of Mother Teresa’s death.
In further detail, the Catholic News Service has reported that a panel of doctors have concluded that there is no natural medical explanation for the miracle attributed to Mother Teresa’s intercession.
This means that her cause will now be examined by a panel of theologians before being assessed and voted upon by a panel of cardinals who will pass on their conclusions to the Pope.
The Vatican has not yet confirmed the report released by Agi.
In May earlier this year, despite reports in the Italian press that Blessed Teresa of Calcutta’s canonisation would take place on September 4, 2016, a Vatican spokesman said the the date was hypothetical and could not be confirmed.
Brazilian Fr Elmiran Ferreira Santo, prompted the Vatican’s investigation into Mother Teresa’s cause, when one of his female parishioners had prayed for the intercession of Mother Teresa to cure her husband who had been diagnosed with several brain tumours.
Father Santos said that the patient subsequently improved, was taken out of the intensive care unit and, within two days, was given a clean bill of health and discharged.
“When a complete recovery of his health was seen and the doctors could not explain how, I understood that Blessed Mother Teresa had helped,” said Father Santos.
He said he reported the case to the sisters, who in turn told their superior.
The news spread and eventually he received a telephone call in mid-June 2015 from a friend in Rome telling him that the Vatican was looking at a possible miracle attributed to Mother Teresa and that two Vatican representatives would be flying to Brazil in a week’s time to look at the evidence.

How Pope Francis can save the Jesuits

How Francis can save the Jesuits

by Jon Anderson
posted Thursday, 12 Nov 2015


Pope Francis celebrates Mass with 300 of his Jesuit confreres
at the Church of the Gesu in Rome
(CNS photo/Paul Haring)


The world’s largest male religious order is suffering an identity crisis and a decline in vocations. Can the first Jesuit pontiff lead it out of the doldrums?

The election of Pope Francis in 2013 gave the Catholic Church its first Jesuit pope and has sparked interest in the order that formed him. Yet this is not a boom time for the Society of Jesus. Like most other religious orders, it is experiencing declining numbers and a serious problem in attracting new vocations. It has also, since the 1960s, been dealing with an identity crisis that has weakened the intellectual self-confidence that the Jesuits used to be famous for.

The election of Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio SJ came as a surprise not least because Jesuits have historically served popes rather than become popes. In this sense, having a Jesuit pope is rather like having a civil servant as prime minister.

Francis himself has a complicated relationship with his order, dating back to his time as provincial superior in Argentina in the 1970s. Perhaps a sign of this was that he chose his papal name after St Francis of Assisi, and not after the Jesuit co-founder St Francis Xavier, as many at first assumed.

His election also came at a time of declining Jesuit influence. There are currently only three Jesuit cardinals, all of whom are aged over 80, so it is unlikely that we will see another Jesuit pope in the near future. In its traditional heartland of Spain, the Society long ago lost much of its former influence. In the longer term, since the Second Vatican Council it has been difficult to see a distinctively Jesuit position on the future of the Church: while the late Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini of Milan was a figurehead for liberal Catholics, figures such as Henri de Lubac provided serious intellectual heft for theological conservatives.

This situation is a long way from the one that prevailed when St Ignatius Loyola founded the order in 1534. The Society quickly gained a reputation for being fiercely disciplined and militant in its defence of Catholic orthodoxy. Ignatius had carried over his soldier’s background into his new religious life. Central to his method were an absolute loyalty to the papacy (though the Society’s relations with individual popes could be spiky), a reforming zeal that opposed the corruption then widespread in the Church, and a strong missionary approach in both Europe and the New World.

Within a century of its foundation, the Society had made an enormous impact, becoming in many ways the driving force of the Catholic Reformation. This was the time of extraordinary figures such as Francis Xavier; Matteo Ricci, who led the original mission to China; and the Hungarian primate Cardinal Péter Pázmány, who not only led the Catholic revival in his country but also established himself as a theologian, philosopher and creator of the modern Hungarian literary language.

This was also when the Society gained its reputation as a serious intellectual force. Ricci and Pázmány were certainly formidable scholars, and to take just one example, the modern science of linguistics would be very much impoverished without the Jesuit missionaries who studied the languages of Mexico and Brazil.

More recently, one associates the order with major thinkers such as de Lubac and Cardinal Avery Dulles. On the level of popular culture, it is no accident that when Jesuit-educated William Peter Blatty wrote The Exorcist, the two scholar-priest heroes of his novel should have been Jesuits.

As an order, the Jesuits have also been dogged by controversy since their early years. Their intellectual tradition has often been interpreted, and not always wrongly, as a tendency to deviousness and intrigue. The Society was banned as a subversive body in post-Reformation England, officially suppressed in Bismarck’s German Empire and persecuted by the Nazis. They were suppressed by the Spanish Republic and regarded with suspicion by General Franco’s regime due to their Basque roots.

Every anti-Catholic conspiracy theory seems to feature the Jesuits in a starring role. Ulster unionists used to worry about Jesuit influence in a future united Ireland, despite the fact that most Irish Jesuits went abroad to the missions. But today the idea of the Jesuits trying to take over the world is scarcely credible.

In common with many other parts of the Catholic Church, the order’s declining numbers mean that it is increasingly having to live off the credit – material and intellectual – built up by previous generations. To take one Jesuit institution, the University of Deusto in Bilbao is today perhaps better known for its engineering faculty than its theology faculty, and as a centre of Basque nationalism rather than Jesuit thought. Perhaps it is significant that, these days, conspiracy theories are more likely to revolve around Opus Dei than the Jesuits.

The Society has long been the largest male religious order in the Catholic Church, and remains so today. But there were more than 30,000 Jesuits worldwide in the 1960s, while currently there are barely 16,000. The Jesuits have retained a great deal of weight mainly because the other orders have also been in long-term, and often steeper, decline.

The one thing that above all else has prevented the Society’s membership collapsing is that it continues to generate vocations on a large scale in South Asia, and it undoubtedly does a huge amount of good work in India through its involvement in healthcare and education. But its presence in India is not necessarily without its problems.

Since Matteo Ricci’s mission to China in the 16th century, the Jesuits have pioneered the practice of “inculturation” in their mission work. Ricci himself gained a deep knowledge of Chinese culture, and was willing to make adaptations to the style and language of worship to make the Catholic message more comprehensible to the Chinese people, while remaining within the bounds of orthodoxy.

But as far back as the 1960s, the Holy See was expressing concerns that the Indian Jesuits had taken inculturation too far, and were integrating aspects of Hindu worship such as the Om mantra, or building churches modelled on Hindu mandirs, to the point where they were running the risk of becoming functionally Hindu and only nominally Christian. The same concerns have been raised on a regular basis ever since.

While many of the issues facing the Jesuits are common to the Church as a whole over the past 50 or so years, the Society has experienced some controversies in particularly sharp form. Key to this was the dynamic leadership of Fr Pedro Arrupe, superior general between 1965 and 1983, who had little patience for the distinctive traditions of the Society. At the 1975 General Congregation, a worldwide gathering of Jesuits, Fr Arrupe managed to refashion the Society’s identity so that it was dominated by social justice concerns.

Even at the time, the Arrupe doctrine had its detractors. It wasn’t so much that the critics objected to a focus on social justice – the preferential option for the poor was well established in Catholic social teaching – but that it seemed to have been articulated in political rather than religious terms. The danger was that, if what the Jesuits were saying was barely distinguishable from what secular humanists would say, this would undermine their identity as a Catholic order, rather than as a left-leaning social justice movement.

This, of course, dovetailed with the growing controversy over the liberation theology movement in Latin America, and it was no surprise that the Jesuits, given their intellectualism and their historic strength in the region, would be more affected than other orders.

This was a murky and violent period in South America, but it was more complicated than is often assumed. As Jesuit provincial in Argentina, Jorge Mario Bergoglio had opposed those in the order who had essentially gone over to Marxism. But in the 1980s he himself would clash with the Society’s leadership, as his populist pastoral style did not find favour with the then superior general Fr Peter Hans Kolvenbach.

In some ways, Pope Francis is a traditional Jesuit, notably in that he isn’t particularly interested in liturgical questions; but he is very unusual in preferring popular devotion to sociology.

The most solid evidence of the old Jesuit intellectual tradition is the worldwide network of educational institutions founded by the Society. In the United States, historically Jesuit universities such as Georgetown, Fordham and Marquette still have healthy enrolments and enjoy a good reputation as solid research institutions.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of Britain, where Heythrop College is currently facing closure, having relied for many years on the Society to bail it out of its financial difficulties.

But Jesuit institutions have not been immune to the pressures facing other sectors of Catholic education, with a long-term question mark over how well they can maintain their Catholic identity. In particular, colleges run by the religious orders used to rely on having a substantial intake of students following a vocation. With a steadily declining number of vocations, the risk is that these colleges become virtually indistinguishable from secular institutions, with their Catholic heritage just becoming a piece of window dressing, as unimportant as the historically Protestant heritage of most Ivy League universities.

Much of this will depend on the activity of university theology departments, but in the absence of students training for the religious life, many theology departments have gone over to intellectual fashions that rely more on the secular zeitgeist than on Christian tradition. It is not clear whether some Jesuit institutions are providing much more than a veneer of Ignatian jargon.

Yet the outlook may not be entirely bleak. The order has sufficient resources that it will probably be a going concern for the foreseeable future. There is anecdotal evidence that, in the United States at least, the Francis papacy has sparked some interest in Jesuit vocations. (But given the very long formation period for Jesuits, even a modest rise in vocations now is not going to provide a quick fix for a rapidly ageing order.)

Ultimately, the question facing the Society of Jesus is the same as that for other Catholic institutions in decline: how can it assert its relevance in a secularising society without losing its Catholic identity?

The Jesuit intellectual tradition should be a fundamental resource, and Pope Francis has certainly given the order a new prominence. But whether the order can revive is really a matter of whether it can generate a coherent sense of mission.

Jon Anderson is a freelance writer

This article first appeared in the Catholic Herald magazine (13/11/15)

IRAQ / Kurdistan: Ban on 18-year-olds choosing their religion is anti-Christian

For Kurdish bishop, ban on 18-year-olds choosing their religion is anti-Christian
Mgr Rabban al Qas criticises Iraq’s Parliament for rejecting an amendment to a controversial law. If a parent converts to Islam, his or her children are automatically Muslim and unable to change religion upon reaching legal age. For the prelate, this constitutes "genocide" in a country that knows neither freedom nor respect. Now he fears it might be extended to Kurdistan.



Baghdad (AsiaNews) – Mgr Rabban al-Qas, bishop of Amadiyah and Zaku (Dohuk, Iraqi Kurdistan), said that a decision late last month by the Iraqi parliament to reject an amendment to a controversial religious law goes against Christians and other Iraqi minorities.

Speaking to AsiaNews, the prelate noted that the failure to amend the law could have serious “repercussions in Kurdistan,” where it is not yet applicable. As it snuffs out their desire for freedom, the law “will drive Christians away,” accelerating a process that is already underway.

"We are facing a genocide in a country that knows only death and liberticidal laws,” Mgr al-Qasr said. Here there is “neither freedom nor respect”.

The law at the heart of the controversy involves the religion of minors. Under existing legislation, children are considered automatically Muslim if one of the parents converts to Islam. An amendment proposed by Christian legislators, backed by parliamentarians from a number of parties and other religious groups, would cancel that provision but mustered only 51 votes in favour and 137 against.

The amendment would allow minors to retain the religion of birth until the legal age of 18. This would have allowed young people to choose their religion instead of being automatically classified as Muslim even against their will.

For young men and women, changing religion is a trying experience, especially in a country whose dominant religion punishes apostasy with the death penalty and where an extreme version of Islam is fast spreading.

In his talk with AsiaNews, the bishop of Amadiyah and Zaku did not mince words. His diocese is in Dohuk Governorate on the border with Turkey and Syria, and is currently sheltering hundreds of thousands of Christian refugees from Mosul and the Nineveh Plain.

Speaking about the rejection, he said that "It is not just a political project. There are also traces of an Islam that wants to eliminate minorities: a faith that prevents you from coming back or change if you are Muslim. If you change your religion, it will be forever. Such a mentality has nothing that is human. "

“Not only have they taken homes and property from Christians,” he lamented, “but now they also want to take their willpower, hope, freedom of religion and freedom to choose for the future.”

The law contains a double standard that patently violates the individual right to religious freedom and the equality of religions because it establishes the primacy of Islam at the expense of the principles of citizenship, social justice, and religious freedom.

"Once it was possible to change religion at the age of 18,” Mgr al-Qas said. “Now that is outlawed. This is a serious decision by the government in Baghdad behind which one finds fanatical groups and extremist groups that did their utmost to ensure that parliament would reject the amendment.” Sadly, fighting for change “was not enough,” the prelate added.

For now, the law “has not yet come into force” in Kurdistan, Mgr Rabban explained. The Autonomous Region still upholds civic liberties and “allows people to choose”. For the Iraqi government however, “this is a big mistake, and one cannot exclude that in the future it may also touch us” in Kurdistan.

"The most moving intervention during the synod" by Francis Phillips

Let’s not forget the most moving intervention during the synod
by Francis Phillips
posted Friday, 30 Oct 2015

Pope Francis arrives to celebrate the closing Mass 

of the Synod of Bishops on the family in St Peter's 

Basilica at the Vatican October 25 

(CNS photo/Paul Haring)

The synod heard the story of a couple who were cruelly separated but remained faithful

After reading various commentaries on the recent Synod on the Family, mainly those on the conservative spectrum, I am left with one memorable image. It is not from the Pope’s own rich storehouse of metaphors or from anything said by any cardinal. It is the image of two young people in love and hoping to marry – and then cruelly separated. But the story doesn’t end on a note of pessimism; for seventeen years, while the man was imprisoned by an unjust regime and his fiancée did not know whether he was alive or dead, she kept faithful to their mutual promise of a life together until, miraculously, they were reunited and could get married as they had hoped.

Who was telling this story? Their daughter, Dr Anca-Maria Cernea, President of the Association of Catholic Doctors of Bucharest, Romania who addressed the Synod on 16th October in an impassioned speech that was more inspiring for me than all the official reports put together. A member of the Romania Greek Catholic Church, Dr Cernea told the assembly that her father “was a Christian political leader who was imprisoned by the Communists for 17 years. My parents were engaged to marry – but their wedding took place 17 years later. My mother waited all those years for my father, though she didn’t even know if he was still alive. They have been heroically faithful to God and to their engagement.”

It is the witness of couples such as this that is often lost in discussions about the Synod and marriage. In this respect Dr Cernea’s parents strike me as every bit as holy in their example of fidelity to their engagement, as the parents of St Therese of Lisieux, whom I recently blogged about and who were canonised during the Synod. So often we are tempted to settle for less, to try for the minimum amount of virtue necessary to be considered a “good” person. Essentially, self-denial is hard and we instinctively flee from it.

But it is the self-sacrifice of couples like Louis and Zelie Martin of Lisieux, or of Dr Cernea’s parents in Bucharest, that are the lifeblood of the Church, as well as providing a wonderful example of a lived faith to their own children.

People might point out that as Dr Cernea’s parents were only engaged, they were not bound by marriage vows and were therefore free to separate. That may be true; but Dr Cernea wanted to present this dramatic image of faithful love between a man and a woman in order to remind the Synod Fathers of the high seriousness of this self-giving commitment.

As Dr Cernea went on to say, her parents’ example “shows that God’s grace can overcome terrible social circumstances and material poverty.” It simply has to do with trusting in God and not in oneself. I rather wish the Pope could have emphasised this more in his concluding speech, rather than seeming to obliquely criticise the conservative cardinals.
Again, instead of hearing press reports filtered down with all the possible spin that could be put on them both by the media and certain mischievous clerics, why could we not have heard from the Synod Fathers that, as Dr Cernea could see so clearly, the Church is engaged in a spiritual battle in defence of life and families?

Perhaps, in the consumer-happy, comfortable western world, we get easily distracted from this abiding truth. But coming from Romania, which was run for decades by an evil regime that tried to degrade its population both spiritually and materially, Dr Cernea knows what is really important. As she reminded the cardinals, “the Church’s mission is to save souls” and that “evil in this world comes from sin. Not from income disparity or “climate change”. The solution, she told them is simple: “Evangelisation. Conversion.”

She spoke movingly of the Romanian bishops, none of whom, despite the suppression of the Church in their country, betrayed their “communion with the Holy Father. “Our bishops asked the community not to follow the world; not to cooperate with the Communists.” Dr Cernea concluded this hard-hitting address with the plea to her listeners: “Now we need Rome to tell the world: “Repent of your sins and turn to God, for the Kingdom of Heaven is near.”

Who do these words remind me of? Oh yes – the words of Jesus himself. Please could we have the kind of teaching on marriage that laypeople such as Dr Cernea understand so clearly and which seems to have been lost during the recent press conferences given by some of the Synod members?

'Digital Contraception' by Bill Donaghy

DIGITAL CONTRACEPTION

I wonder if I should just stop there, with that phrase, attached to this image, and allow us time to ponder this picture?In this crowd of popearazzi, (if I might coin a phrase,) an older woman, face radiant like Moses on the mountain, bathed in sunlight, gazes without obstruction on Pope Francis, who appears to be looking at her. She's not touching him but is clearly touched. The younger woman, hand actually grasping the Shepherd's hand, holds in her other hand a smartphone, through whose 3 x 5 screen she stares at a pixelated image of the actual man just five feet away from her. Granted, she too is touched. Joyful and smiling, but there is something sociologically intriguing about this image. Which of these two is having an actual, personal encounter? A communion of persons even if only a fleeting face to face gaze?

I think we all know where this is going. And you may have strong feelings on it. Either you think this idea of a kind of "digital contraception" is an overreaction to the now ubiquitous presence of technology that keeps coming between us, our conversations, our meals, our face to face encounters, or you see it as a sign of the impending collapse of humanity, slipping now into the Narcissistic pool of our own self-absorbed selfies. I don't subscribe to either extreme, but I do believe we have issues.

Some history. Facebook launched 11 years ago this year. YouTube is just 10, and Twitter is 9 years old. The first iPhone debuted only 8 years ago. What a decade it's been. The digital revolution is in full swing. A tsunami of smartphones brimming with the above and other social-sharing apps has washed over nearly every continent and it seems to be omnipresent, popping up even in the most remote of Third World villages. It's important we talk about its effect on us as persons, called to interpersonal relationships. I hope to do this in a circumscribed manner. So let's shift gears for a few paragraphs and then we'll return to this pregnant phrase, pardon the pun, of "digital contraception."

Decades before the digital revolution, in fact, shortly after the sexual revolution of the late 60's, the theology of the body debuted. It's a biblical and philosophical reflection on the human person by St. John Paul II; a glorious life giving vision of the potential of human love. It speaks of how our sexual complementarity as created by God is meant to be a fruitful sign, imaging the gratuitous gift-giving nature of God Himself, Who lavished on creation from the very beginning a design of communion and complementarity that, when embraced, is creative and efficacious on many levels. It's an extensive catechesis on the human person as imago dei, a being fully realized in relationship, in family, for God in His deepest essence, as St. John Paul II wrote, "is not a solitude. God is a family."

Those who have reflected upon this beautiful teaching of the Holy Father, who have opened their hearts, minds, and bodies to its life-giving truth, can certainly attest to this fruitfulness in their own lives. When one receives the teaching, which in essence is Christianity itself, the gospel "reloaded", then the walls come tumbling down. Illusions are blown away. Misconceptions about who God is and who we are get a proverbial facelift and our faith is lifted! One finally sees within one's masculinity or femininity, not a confused and solitary shuffling around for meaning and purpose that we must construe by ourselves, but a divine dance. A holy communion. A divine romance.

Circling back… Today, the life-giving joy that flows from living the theology of the body shines all the more brighter as we live and move and breathe in this increasingly suffocating, contraceptive culture. When I speak of contraception and of a contraceptive mentality in the present culture, it isn't merely the biological block. It isn't merely latex or a pill that is the issue. That exterior contraception is really the manifestation of a deeper interior contraception. An emotional contraception. A kind of spiritual contraception that holds back the heart and soul of one person from another. We see it everywhere. We struggle with it at multiple levels. In our frenetic activism we've failed as receivers. We've neglected to become that naked heart to the real and raw encounters of everyday life.

In his beautiful reflections on our common home, in Laudato Si, Pope Francis wrote "We were not meant to be inundated by cement, asphalt, glass and metal, and deprived of physical contact with nature." (Laudato Si, 44) Can we add our little gadgets to this list?

Pope Francis advised us that "the accumulation of constant novelties exalts a superficiality which pulls us in one direction. It becomes difficult to pause and recover depth in life… a constant flood of new products coexists with a tedious monotony. Let us refuse to resign ourselves to this, and continue to wonder about the purpose and meaning of everything." (Laudato Si, 113)

These naked hearts, open to encounters with the real world of persons and signs and wonders often feel as though they are the person who escaped from Plato's dark cave of self-inverted shadows and they've seen the light. They return to the cave changed. They try to express what they've seen and heard and touched with their hands but everyone in the cave is touching screens.

This wall of smartphones that we've seen in the photos and videos of the recent of Pope Francis are certainly not  intrinsically evil, or even sinful, but it sure seems strange. In a certain sense, these phone walls can be just as much a block to the life-giving call of humanity to love as other forms of contraception. I think you all know what I'm talking about. You all have experienced it in your own lives perhaps within the lives of your own family or friends, or in restaurants, movie theaters, workplaces, sidewalks and even busy streets. Millions of people dozens of times a day hold up before their very faces a thin wall. A 3 x 5 screen that while aiding us remarkably in communicating with others, too often hinders the communion with the real flesh and blood right in front of us.

Again, Pope Francis insights here are spot on. In the Joy of the Gospel, he wrote that some people "want their interpersonal relationships provided by sophisticated equipment, by screens and systems which can be turned on and off on command. Meanwhile, the Gospel tells us constantly to run the risk of a face-to-face encounter with others, with their physical presence which challenges us, with their pain and their pleas, with their joy which infects us in our close and continuous interaction. True faith in the incarnate Son of God is inseparable from self-giving, from membership in the community, from service, from reconciliation with others. The Son of God, by becoming flesh, summoned us to the revolution of tenderness." (Evangelii Guadium, 88)

During the recent visit of Pope Francis to the United States, watching video and looking at photographs from the various places he went, I was struck again by this reality of "digital contraception". I fall into the same struggle, I wrestle as much I'm sure as anyone with the wonder of these little gadgets but it leaves me wondering. Many of us touch these screens so many more times a day then we touch other people's hands and little heads of children, and blades of grass and the bark of trees. Our touchscreens have left us out of touch with a very real world in which we've been placed by God. I think we need once again to possess our possessions rather than have our possessions possess us. Let's all make a promise to be more present, to be more of that naked heart who can really receive the other person in front of us. For as C.S. Lewis once wrote, "Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses."

By Bill Donaghy