News from around the Catholic world for the week ending 27 June.
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• Pope Francis to visit South Korea;
• Sudanese Christian mother released from death row, then arrested while attempting to flee Sudan
• Archbishop of Canterbury meets Vatican’s cricket team ahead of September clash
• Ethics classes set to roll out to kindergarteners
• 24-hour prayer campaign to stop the decriminalisation of abortion in NSW
TRANSCRIPT
BOBBIE: Pope Francis has announced plans to visit South Korea in August for the beatification of 124 Korean martyrs.
The beatification is scheduled for August 16, and will honour Korean Christians killed during the 17th and 18th Centuries.
The Holy Father’s schedule includes attendance at the Asian Catholic Youth Festival in Seoul, Mass in Haemi’s Castle and in Daejeon’s World Cup Stadium for World Asian Youth Day and a final Mass in Seoul’s Cathedral, which will be offered for peace and reconciliation.
The Pope is set to meet relatives of the Seoul ferry disaster victims, the South Korean President and Korean Bishops. He is also planning to pay a visit to the House of Hope, a residence for disabled people, the School of Love religious communities and the Sanctuary of the Martyrs of Sae So Mun.
This will mark Korea’s first papal visit since St John Paul II was there for the second time in 1989.
Pope Francis has also announced plans to visit to Sri Lanka and the Philippines in January, 2015.
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Meriam Ibrahim, the Christian woman who was last month sentenced to death in Sudan, was been acquitted of her charges and released, but is now facing seven years in prison for allegedly falsifying travel documents.
Ms Ibrahim was released with her two small children on Monday. She had been accused by her brother of abandoning her Muslim faith, and was sentenced to hang for refusing to renounce Christianity.
Ms Ibrahim, whose father was a Muslim, was raised as a Christian by her Ethiopian Orthodox mother and married a Christian man in 2011. However, the law states that children must follow their father’s religion, and that Muslim women are prohibited from marrying non-Muslims.
International pressure had been mounting on Sudan since the sentence gained widespread media attention last month. Ms Ibrahim was 8 months pregnant at the time and delivered her baby in prison.
Following a court appeal earlier this week Ms Ibrahim was released and attempted to leave the country with her husband, who is a U.S. citizen. She was detained at Khartoum airport, with authorities claiming she was travelling on falsified documents.
The US State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said Sudan’s Government had given assurances the family is safe, but they are now facing seven years in prison.
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Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury Reverend Justin Welby had his first encounter with the Vatican’s cricket team recently, ahead of September’s clash between Anglicans and Catholics.
For the first time in history The Vatican and the Church of England will face off for a cricket match at England’s famous Lord’s Cricket Ground.
The Vatican has recently recruited an Indian batsman and a Sri Lankan bowler to its St Peters XI cricket team. Reverend Justin Welby, who is the Anglican Communion’s highest cleric, said he was unperturbed by the new recruits and joked that “we all know God is English”.
“This is the first cricket match between the two since the Reformation,” he said with a grin. “There will be no intervention on the other side,” he added.
The Vatican, the word’s smallest state, has recruited cricketers from five countries. St Peter’s Cricket Club, an initiative of Australia’s Ambassador to the Holy See John McCarthy, was founded last year and includes 300 seminarians and priests from Catholic colleges and seminaries around Rome. The best players were selected for St Peter’s XI and will tour England in September.
More on that story via Vatican Radio.
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From next month, children in Kindergarten will join their older peers across Australia in undertaking “philosophical ethics” classes.
The classes are being coordinated by a company called ‘Primary Ethics Limited’ formed by the St James Ethics Centre, an independent organisation seeking to promote secular ethics.
Supporters claim the purpose is to “encourage children to progress their ethical reasoning skills”.
A video on the Primary Ethics website [primaryethics.com.au] says the topics covered include common capacities for suffering, the interests of others, the common good, where moral duty lies, what makes for moral character, and so on.
While the company claims it seeks to highlight some of the issues with moral relativism, Parent Ethics Class Facilitator Angela Robertson says that she aims to make students see “there [is]no right or wrong answer”, that whatever opinion they form through their reasoning is “valid”.
In a 2011 submission Dr Bernadette Tobin of the Plunkett Centre for Ethics highlighted some key issues with the curriculum, including its failure to form children in virtue before asking them to engage in ethical reasoning.
“On my view (which I take from Aristotle) ethical development comes in stages,” the submission reads.
“The framework itself is not sufficiently attentive to the structure of moral development. It focuses too much on ethical or moral ‘dilemmas’, on ‘exceptions’ to ethical ‘rules’ and not enough on an appreciation of the great ethical truths,” it says.
“So it is likely to encourage either scepticism about ethics (the idea that truth is not at stake when you are doing ethics) or utilitarianism in ethics (the idea that truth is at stake but that there is only one ethical truth: you should always do whatever will ‘maximise good consequences’).”
View the full submission to parliament (PDF)
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The Greens Party have sought to introduce a bill in the NSW Parliament to decriminalise abortion.
Abortion is currently a crime in New South Wales, but is allowed if a doctor deems the pregnancy to be a serious threat to the mother’s physical or mental health during or after the pregnancy.
Since 1971, one medical practitioner has been charged in relation to an abortion in New South Wales.
Greens Member for the NSW Legislative Council Dr Mehreen Faruqi announced last Thursday that she would be placing a bill on notice to remove abortion from the criminal code.
Dr Faruqi said, “Today, I will give notice for what I believe to be the first abortion decriminalisation bill in NSW history.”
Dr Faruqi cited “Zoe’s Law”, an amendment that seeks to acknowledge harm done to unborn children, as inspiration for the bill.
She said, “Over the last year, and particularly since the debate on foetal personhood laws, I have been talking to women around Sydney and regional NSW who have told me that the time has come for an end to the criminalisation of a woman’s rights over her own body.”
Hansard parliamentary records indicate that the motion was not put forward as planned on the date of Dr Faruqi’s announcement.
In a response, Australian pro-life group “Light Up the Darkness” has launched a national prayer campaign to combat the new developments. The campaign will call on participants to contribute a Holy Hour at their local parish towards filling up a 24 hour prayer schedule nation-wide.
If you would like to sign up to the roster, or for more information, visit the Light Up the Darkness website at lightupthedarkness.net.
View SMH’s coverage of this story.
Music Credit: Waking Up by Dexter Britain.
