The decision to keep the cap marks a crossroads for Catholic education. The Catholic community should be proud of its schools, but if it is to secure their future it has to recognise the new and more hostile political reality. Most crucially, it must make the most of its assets – the communities of people in each school who make them the success they are.
For example, it can propose contemplation sessions, a very open prayer with a ritual gesture, where families would be welcomed just as they are today. The spiritual demand is enormous. The need for a break, too.
What’s to be said about poverty, chastity, and obedience in a world that, for the most part, places its hope in material riches, generally identifies chastity with frigidity, and values individual freedom above all else?
Today belief in God is often seen as a naiveté. For many, believing in God is like believing in Santa and the Easter Bunny, nice, something for the kids, a warm nostalgia or a bitter memory, but not something that’s real, that stands up to hard scrutiny and indeed stands up to the dark doubts that sometimes linger below the surface of our faith. Where’s there evidence that God exists?
China's two main Protestant organizations have launched a five-year blueprint that includes writing a secular version of the Bible. They agreed to cooperate with the principle of Sinicization; to insist on self-government; to reflect the core values of socialism; and to espouse the leadership of the Communist Party.
There is of course no need for Catholic leaders in India to actively proclaim a refusal to participate in nationalist projects; this would be a foolhardy venture in the current climate. But there is similarly no need for us to contribute to nationalist rhetoric by asking that we become more Indian. Our call is to be more Christian, loving all without distinction.
At the heart of the opposition to Amoris Laetitia is the fear that, in opening the door to the readmission of divorced and remarried Catholics to Holy Communion in some circumstances, the Pope is changing traditional Church teaching. I don’t think that, strictly speaking, this does amount to a development of doctrine.
Information technology and social media aren’t my mother tongue. I’m a digital immigrant. I wasn’t born into the world of information technology but migrated into it, piece-meal. I first lived in some foreign territories. I was nine years old before I lived with electricity. I had seen it before; but neither our home, our school, nor our neighbors had electricity. Electricity, when I first saw it, was a huge revelation.
American veterans who fought in the Vietnam War are offering hundreds of bicycles to poor students as way to ease people's suffering in parts of the country still dealing with the effects of the conflict. "We want to supply these bicycles for Vietnamese students from poor families in remote areas so that they can pursue their studies," said Michael Shuman, a former U.S. Marine.
Moral outrage is the antithesis of morality. Yet it’s everywhere present in our world today and is everywhere rationalized on the basis of God and truth. We live in a world awash in moral outrage. Everywhere individuals and groups are indignant and morally outraged, sometimes violently so, by opposing individuals, groups, ideologies, moral positions, ecclesiologies, interpretations of religion, interpretations of scripture, and the like.
