The French National Assembly has voted to approve a bill that would outlaw some pro-life websites.
The Socialist government wants to criminalise sites which it says “exert psychological or moral pressure” on women not to abort. The proposed offence would be punishable by up to two years’ imprisonment and a €30,000 fine.
Archbishop Georges Pontier of Marseille, president of the French bishops’ conference, has written to President François Hollande expressing his concern about the bill.
Archbishop Pontier urged Hollande to not allow the bill’s passage, calling it a “serious infringement of democratic principles”.
French law already prevents pro-lifers from demonstrating outside abortion clinics. Supporters of the bill argue that pro-life tactics have now moved online and must be stopped.
The bill will now need to pass through the French senate, which blocked the legislation earlier this year.
Dominique Tian, MP for Les Républicains, said there was a “very heavy atmosphere in parliament” and accused the government of “attacking freedom of expression”.
Cardinal George Pell has said that “a number of regularly worshipping Catholics” are “unnerved by the turn of events” in the Church.
In a talk at St Patrick’s Church, London, Cardinal Pell said one cause for concern was false theories of conscience and the moral law.
Cardinal Pell was giving a talk on St Damien of Molokai as part of St Patrick’s series of talks for the Year of Mercy. But he also reflected on Catholicism today. He said that while Pope Francis has “a prestige and popularity outside the Church” greater than perhaps any previous Pope, some Catholics are currently uneasy.
Later in his talk, the Australian cardinal, who has been asked to lead Pope Francis’s financial reforms and is a member of the Pope’s “C9” group of advisors, criticised some of the ideas about conscience which are now current in the Church.
Cardinal Pell said that emphasising the “primacy of conscience” could have disastrous effects, if conscience did not always submit to revealed teaching and the moral law. For instance, “when a priest and penitent are trying to discern the best way forward in what is known as the internal forum”, they must refer to the moral law. Conscience is “not the last word in a number of ways”, the cardinal said. He added that it was always necessary to follow the Church’s moral teaching.
The cardinal told the story of a man who was sleeping with his girlfriend, and had asked his priest whether he was able to receive Communion. It was “misleading”, the cardinal said, to tell the man simply to follow his conscience.
He added that those emphasising “the primacy of conscience” only seemed to apply it to sexual morality and questions around the sanctity of life. People were rarely advised to follow their conscience if it told them to be racist, or slow in helping the poor and vulnerable, the cardinal said.
His comments come after three years of debate on the Church’s teaching regarding Communion for the divorced and remarried. Cardinal Pell was among the senior figures who have publicly upheld the traditional doctrine repeated in Pope John Paul II’s Familiaris Consortio – that the remarried should not receive Communion unless they are living “as brother and sister”.
But some prominent Catholics have suggested a different approach. For instance, Cardinal Blase Cupich has argued that someone’s conscience might tell them to receive Communion, and that “conscience is inviolable”.
Cardinal Pell quoted Blessed John Henry Newman’s writings on conscience, in which Newman rejected a “miserable counterfeit” of conscience which defines it as “the right of self-will”. He noted that Newman was defending Popes Pius IX and Gregory XVI, who in Cardinal Pell’s words, “condemned a conscience which rejected God and rejected natural law.”
The cardinal also paid tribute to St John Paul II’s “two great encyclicals”, Veritatis Splendor and Evangelium Vitae, which present the moral law as something binding in all cases.
Asked whether some Catholics’ unease about the state of the Church was related to false theories of conscience, Cardinal Pell said: “Yes, that’s correct.”
He added: “The idea that you can somehow discern that moral truths should not be followed or should not be recognised [is] absurd”.
“We all stand under the truth,” the cardinal said, pointing out that objective truth may be “different from our understanding of the truth”.
He also said that while doctrine develops, there are “no backflips”.
Lithuanian Archbishop Gintaras Grusas said citizens are anxious about military threats from neighbouring Russia but said support from Europe and the United States helped calm those fears.
The US-born archbishop, president of the Lithuanian bishops’ conference, told Catholic News Service, “The old Soviet empire mentality is still alive, and there are many in Russia who consider the three Baltic states part of that empire.
“But Lithuanians have fought hard to re-establish their independence and are committed to maintaining it. They’ve shown they’re willing to pay a price for freedom – and they’re showing it again today in the turnout of volunteers for military service,” said the Vilnius archbishop.
In early 2017, NATO plans to send 3,000 troops to Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Poland, to counter Russia’s military buildup in the Baltic region.
In a November 29 interview with Catholic News Service, Archbishop Grusas said the projected US-led deployments had provided “some reassurance,” but cautioned that concern remained high because of repeated airspace violations and the stationing of heavy weaponry in Russia’s military enclave of Kaliningrad, on Lithuania’s western border.
“There are always tensions because we’re close to the Russian border and hard to defend, so having our NATO partners’ boots on the ground here shows we’re not left on our own,” Archbishop Grusas said.
“As a church, we’re following Pope Francis in encouraging prayers for peace. We’re also maintaining a community spirit and helping people seek truth when a lot of negative propaganda is being spread by Russian-language media and the internet.”
Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia became independent from the Soviet Union in 1991. They joined the European Union and NATO in 2004, gaining protection under the alliance’s Article 5 collective defence guarantee.
However, all three have increased defence spending sharply and stepped up anti-tank defences since Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and military involvement in Ukraine. The buildup of radar, air defence systems and nuclear batteries in Kaliningrad is believed likely to impede NATO reinforcements in the Baltics during a crisis.
Lithuania’s government reintroduced military conscription in 2015 and has circulated civil defence pamphlets advising citizens what to do in the event of a Russian invasion.
Lithuanian Foreign Minister Linas Linkevicius told the BBC on November 18 that there was a danger that Russian President Vladimir Putin could seek to test NATO’s military preparedness before the January inauguration of Donald Trump, the new US president.
In his interview, Archbishop Grusas said NATO’s European member-states had long been urged to meet their agreed share of defence spending, adding that he believed Trump’s threats to scale down US military commitments unless this happened were “nothing new.”
“This was most probably campaign rhetoric – even a negotiating stance to push the Europeans to pay their share – so I took his pre-election comments with a grain of salt,” said the 55-year-old archbishop, who was born in Washington DC, and worked as a marketing consultant with IBM after gaining a mathematics degree at the University of California at Los Angeles.
“Steps have been taken since the US election to reassure NATO members the US position won’t be changed. But we’re in an uncomfortable position for Moscow geographically and fearful of no longer being seen as independent nations,” he said.
Catholics make up about 78 per cent of Lithuania’s 3 million inhabitants, compared to about 20 per cent in Latvia and less than 1 per cent in Estonia. All three Baltic States are home to substantial Russian minorities: 6 per cent in Lithuania, 26 per cent in Latvia and 25 per cent in Estonia.
Pope Francis has met with director Martin Scorsese, whose new film, Silence, about Jesuit missionaries in 17th-century Japan, was screened this week in Rome.
The Vatican says that during the Pontiff’s “very cordial” meeting on Wednesday with Scorsese, Francis mentioned he had read the novel on which the film is based. Francis is a Jesuit who joined the order while a young man in Argentina with the idea of becoming a missionary in Japan, although health problems stop him achieving this ambition.
The Pope thanked Scorsese for his gift of two paintings. The work of an 18th-century Japanese artist, the paintings served as a reference for some of the details in the film.
Some 300 Jesuits studying or working in Rome attended the screening of Silence on Tuesday at the Pontifical Oriental Institute. Scorsese answered the audience’s questions afterwards.
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