The patriarch who started a baby boom
At the Institute for Family Studies website, the economist Lyman Stone explained how Patriarch Ilia II single-handedly started a baby boom in Georgia.
The Orthodox leader promised to personally baptise and become a godfather to any third child (or higher) born to a married couple in the country. Since he made this promise a decade ago he has baptised 30,000 babies – 35 per cent of the third-or-higher births.
Before the policy, Georgians “weren’t having enough kids to keep the population stable”. After the patriarch’s promise, “the fertility rate rocketed to above-replacement levels and has stayed there for nearly a decade”, Stone said.
What’s more, financial incentives for childbearing were introduced in 2013 and their effect was on the birth rate was “substantially smaller”, said Stone.
Fertility changes of this kind are extremely uncommon, he said. But Georgia, he noted, is unique: 90 per cent of its 3.4 million citizens are Orthodox and Patriarch Ilia is “widely trusted and respected”.
How memes save a bishop from boredom
At the Washington Post, Auxiliary Bishop Richard Umbers of Sydney explained how he found the time to make memes. They are simple to do – a simple editing tool, he said, means you can add your own text to a picture. (One of his memes that went viral was of a deer recoiling from an outstretched hand. The text read: “At the Our Father.”)
Even though they can go wrong and cause offence, “it’s worth taking the gamble”, he said – “it’s my hope that a well-timed meme can open eyes to eternal truths that, once grasped, will never leave minds and imaginations.”
Meme-making “gets to the heart of why I got into this bishop business to begin with”, he said. Much of the job is laborious paperwork. When he gets to “page 64 of a report on occupational health and safety” and reads about the fixing of a broken dishwasher, he thinks about the “wonder and mystery” of his original calling to the priesthood, and imagines the Apostles “leaving their boats and following after Jesus on a great adventure, going out into the world to make fishers of men”.
He said: “That’s the way the internet beckons to me – truly a sea without shores.”
Nagasaki’s memories of martyrdom
“I’ll cut to the chase,” wrote Shaun McAfee at ncregister.com. “Go to Nagasaki.” The city is not just a great holiday destination, but a holy pilgrimage site too.
“I call Nagasaki the Rome of the Far East,” McAfee wrote: “it is the site of the greatest of Christian persecutions since the great emperors of Rome brutalised the primitive Church.” As well as the beautiful cathedral, there are sites such as Nishizaka Hill, the place where thousands died, to “[pave] the way for a vineyard in the Far East with their glorious blood.”
✣Meanwhile…
✣ In 2014, a mural appeared on a wall near the Vatican depicting Pope Francis as a superhero. The council had it scrubbed off, but the image will now be reproduced on T-shirts to support Vatican charitable projects.
Graffiti artist MauPaul, who has drawn Banksy-style street art showing the Pope playing noughts and crosses on the wall, told AFP that he saw Francis as a “symbol of hope” in a crisis-hit world.
✣ That is not the only Catholic merchandise which is raising eyebrows. The Thomistic Institute at the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception has commissioned mugs which say: “Your dog isn’t going to heaven.”
The friars believe the tongue-in-cheek message contains an important truth, about God being sufficient for our happiness. But on Twitter, Fr Peter Totleben OP stressed that “This doesn’t imply any destruction of dogs at the eschaton. Merely that nothing about a dog survives its death, unlike people.”
Fr Totleben said that it was nonetheless possible that God might re-constitute your dog at the end of the world.
Meanwhile, philosopher CC Pecknold suggested a possible “compromise”: “There might be dogs in heaven, and they will all belong to you, but none of them would be the dog you love now.”
✣The week in quotations
The most pure prayer Pope Francis on Adoration Address to Vincentians
Some Catholics seem embarrassed by the abortion issue Bishop Michael Campbell of Lancaster says Catholics must be pro-life Bishop Campbell’s Blog
[Cardinal Parolin] has a poisoned mind … He believes in democracy, not faith Cardinal Zen Crux
Ambassadors …pander to Islam more than Christianity Bishop Matthew Kukah, chairman of the West African bishops’ interfaith committee CNS
✣Statistic of the week
883 Number of years the soon-to-be-closed Himmerod monastery has been functioning Source: AP
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