The dominance of the Catholic Church in the primary school education system is “anything but healthy”, but to remove it entirely would lead to an “impoverishment” of pluralism in society, Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin has warned.
Dr Martin, speaking at the Diocesan Education Mass at Saint Patrick’s Campus, Dublin City University, on Tuesday, he told the assembled guests that a fair and balanced appraisal of the history of the Catholic Church should include “the story of great teachers who wished to share their own experience of Jesus, not as ideology, but as lived commitment to what is good and true and loving.”
He added that “removing the Catholic Church entirely from the realm of education would lead to an impoverishment of what pluralism means. Religion gives believers an integrated vision of life that today’s splintered society needs.”
He continued: “I am not saying that the current situation in which one Church dominates the patronage of such a large portion of Irish education should continue. . . Removing the church entirely from the world of education, however, can be in some cases the fruit of a deliberate misreading of Irish history.”
A group of doctors at a children’s hospital in Canada have written a policy on how they would implement the euthanasia of children, and seem to conclude that it could happen without parental consent.
Since Canada legalised “medical aid in dying (MAID)” as it is known in 2016, the issue of euthanasia for “mature minors” has been debated. The government has asked the Council of Canadian Academies to produce a report on this issue, as well as euthanasia for mental health issues and advance directives, by December this year.
However, a working group at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto have published an essay detailing the forming of their policy on assisted suicide in a paediatric setting – at present, just for those patients who are 18 or over, but arguing that it could apply to younger children.
The doctors consider MAID as “practically and ethically equivalent to other medical practices that result in the end of life”; in other words, that deliberately killing someone by euthanasia is morally the same as palliative care practices such as use of pain-relieving drugs or withdrawal of inappropriate interventions that sometimes result in the end of life, but are not carried out with that intention.
Furthermore, they explain that in Ontario, “young people can be and are found capable of making their own medical decisions, even when those decisions may result in their death”. If MAID is a normal medical procedure, then, they reason, children should also be considered capable to decide on euthanasia.
Pro-abortion activism will need to continue for up to five more years to ensure all women have access to completely unfettered abortion throughout the island of Ireland, the Abortion Rights Campaign has said.
Speaking at the launch of their seventh annual March for Choice, Dr Mary Favier, who is also incoming head of the Irish College of General Practitioners, said activists are worried about the “chilling” of abortion rights despite the vote to repeal the Eighth Amendment. The organisers of the march say they will fight until abortion is completely available in Northern Ireland, and available in the Republic in those few circumstances not already covered by the country’s proposed permissive legislation.
Regarding the ARC’s work to repeal the eight amendment and legislate for abortion, Dr Favier said the effort to change the law accounted for only 10 per cent of the work but the fight for its proper implementation will account for 90 per cent. Asking a country like Ireland to discuss, educate and plan such a drastic change will be “a long journey.”
“We have to push the message out in the general public. We need to start again developing our stories, our narratives and we need to push, push, push,” she said. “We can’t probably stop pushing for at least two years but probably nearer five.”
The Government’s proposal to totally remove the offence of blasphemy from both the Constitution and statute law would render as protected speech even the most vile denigrations of religion, former Attorney General, Michael McDowell, has said.
Speaking in the Seanad, Senator McDowell said that repealing the blasphemy provisions of the Defamation Act will mean nobody, in any circumstances, can ever be prosecuted for publishing something offensive to religious sensibility no matter how gross or grotesque. This would, he said, declare it absolutely “open season to say or do anything in public which outrages religious sentiment.”
Mr McDowell said he thinks most people do not know this is the intention of the Government, nor would they support it even if they knew. “I do not believe that the people would be happy to see every single vestige of protection of religion from premeditated and vicious blasphemy swept away in the name of liberalism – and I speak as a liberal on that. People are entitled to have some basic standards of decency or public morality enshrined in the law with regard to the protection of religion. It is not a great expansion of freedom to tear down every barrier surrounding the sacredness to individuals of their religious beliefs”.
More than 11 million U.S. parents – or 18% – were not working outside the home in 2016, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data.
The stay-at-home share of U.S. parents was almost identical to what it was in 1989, but there has been a modest increase among fathers. The share of dads at home rose from 4% to 7%, while the share of moms staying at home remained largely unchanged – 27% in 2016 versus 28% about a quarter-century earlier. As a result, 17% of all stay-at-home parents in 2016 were fathers, up from 10% in 1989.
A growing share of stay-at-home fathers say they are home specifically to care for their home or family, suggesting that changing gender roles may be at play. About a quarter (24%) of stay-at-home fathers say they are home for this reason. Stay-at-home mothers remain far more likely than dads to say they are home to care for family – 78% say so.
It will be 2019 before all pregnant women are automatically offered an anomaly scan to find out if their unborn baby suffers from a serious, terminal condition. The anomaly scans were meant to be made far more widely available on time for the new abortion legislation, which is due to come into force in January so as to allow women, whose baby has been diagnosed with such a condition, to abort the baby in a clinic or hospital in this country.
Only seven of the 19 maternity hospitals provide the 20-week scan as a routine. A partial service is provided in five others, where it is clinically indicated by a doctor but there is no anomaly scanning, according to the most recent survey.
There had been a plan to hire an additional 28 ultrasonographers, who deliver the scans, this year but it will be 2019 before full access is provided, according to the HSE’s Kilian McGrane in a response to Sinn Féin spokeswoman on health Louise O’Reilly.
Divorce rates among recently married couples in the UK have dropped to their lowest levels in almost thirty years, a new study has found. The drop coincides with a rise in the rate of cohabitation.
Figures from the Marriage Foundation show the number of couples divorcing after three years has more than halved, while among those who have stayed married for at least five years, divorce is down by more than a third (39 per cent). For those who have been together for more than a decade the rate is down by a fifth.
Harry Benson, research director of Marriage Foundation, told The Times: ‘Among all the talk of divorce and law reform, it’s easy to miss the good news story that today’s marriages are more stable than at any time since the 1970s. ‘Some level of relationship failure is inevitable. But today’s falling divorce rates contrast with far higher break-up rates among couples who don’t marry.’
Sir Paul Coleridge, founder and chairman of Marriage Foundation, said: ‘For those of us who are in the long-term business of confronting and combatting the national scourge of family breakdown, with all its attendant pain and suffering for children, it is rare to encounter genuinely good news.’
A professor of neurophysiology in Sweden is being investigated by his university for teaching that the differences between male and female behaviour sometimes has a natural basis rather than being fully explained by factors like upbringing.
According to the Sweden-based Academic Rights Watch, Prof. Germund Hesslow, has taught a course for years on “Heritage and Environment” in the Lund University medical program. In that course, he has addressed such topics as biological gender differences.
The watchdog organisation reports that Hesslow would sometimes be questioned by students who dislike that his teaching is not based on “the gender scientific approach adopted in politics.” Hesslow maintains that gender is not entirely socially constructed because empirical research has found that there are statistical gender differences in behavior that are biologically based.
He was asked by school administrators this month to apologize after his remarks drew the ire of feminist students.
In a statement emailed to The Christian Post about Hesslow’s claims, Lund University’s international press officer, Lotte Billing, said there has been criticism levelled against a lecture entitled ‘Nature, nurture and the biology of sex differences’ given at the medical program at Lund University. She confirmed that, ‘Lund University is currently investigating if the specific lecture was offensive in any way’.
Religious people are more tolerant of different viewpoints than atheists, according to just published research.
A study of 788 people in the UK, France and Spain concluded that atheists and agnostics think of themselves as more open-minded than those with faith, but are actually less tolerant of differing opinions and ideas. Religious believers “seem to better perceive and integrate diverging perspectives”, according to psychology researchers at the University of Louvain (UCL), Belgium’s largest French-speaking university.
Filip Uzarevic, who co-wrote the paper, admitted his surprise at the finding that, “when it came to subtly measured inclination to integrate views that were diverging and contrary to one’s own perspectives, it was the religious who showed more openness.”
Dr Uzarevic’s paper, called “are atheists undogmatic?”, examined mental rigidity in three different groups: atheists and agnostics; Christians; and a group of Buddhists, Muslims, and Jews. The study claims that non-believers measured lower than religious people in “self-reported dogmatism”, but were higher in “subtly-measured intolerance”.
The Minister for Health, Simon Harris, used social media to hit back at pro-life writers who had argued over the weekend that the Government’s proposed abortion bill is too radical and needs to be amended.
Writing on Twitter, Mr Harris said a “few opinion pieces in Sunday papers today attempting to re-run or re-fight referendum on the 8th. We had the Referendum. The people spoke. They had lot of information in advance of making their decision – including a detailed draft law. Time to get on with it and pass the law.”
During the campaign, the head of the Referendum Commission, Judge Isobel Kennedy, stressed the people were voting solely on whether or not to repeal the 8th amendment, and not on the proposed legislation.
Breda O’Brien begun the critique of the Government’s plans in a piece in the Irish Times on Saturday noting that pro-choice campaigners already want to abolish even the meagre restrictions the bill would impose. David Quinn wrote in the Sunday Times that there is far less support for the Govt’s radical legislation than for repealing the Eighth Amendment according to RTE’s extensive exit poll done on the day of the referendum itself. Finally, Wendy Melady wrote in the Sunday Independent that the Government want to supply abortion free of charge but not genuine medical treatments.
As if to prove her point, the Times Ireland on Monday confirmed that this year’s budget will include new expenditure to pay for abortion. The paper also reported that Mr Harris on Saturday will join a March for Choice which is dedicated to calling for ‘free, safe and legal’ abortion provision.
