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Vatican has Ten Commandments for drivers  
  

By NICOLE WINFIELD, Associated Press
Tuesday, June 19, 2007

VATICAN CITY -- The Vatican on Tuesday issued a "Ten Commandments" for motorists to keep them on the road to salvation, warning drivers against the sins of road rage, abuse of alcohol or even simple rudeness.
  
The unusual document from the Vatican's office for migrants and itinerant people also warned that automobiles can be "an occasion of sin" -- particularly when used to make a dangerous passing maneuver or when used by prostitutes and their clients.

And it suggested prayer might come in handy -- performing the sign of the cross before starting off and saying the rosary along the way. The rosary was particularly well-suited to recitation by all in the car, it said, since its "rhythm and gentle repetition does not distract the driver's attention."

Cardinal Renato Martino, who heads the office, told a news conference the Vatican felt it necessary to address the pastoral needs of motorists because driving has become such a big part of contemporary life.

He cited World Health Organization statistics that said an estimated 1.2 million people are killed in road crashes each year and as many as 50 million are injured.

"That's a sad reality, and at the same time, a great challenge for society and the church," he said.

He noted that the Bible was full of people on the move, including Mary and Joseph, the parents of Jesus -- and that his office is tasked with dealing with all "itinerant" people on the roads -- from refugees to prostitutes, truck drivers and the homeless.

The document, "Guidelines for the Pastoral Care of the Road," extols the benefits of driving -- family outings, getting the sick to the hospital, allowing people to get to work and seeing other cultures.

But it laments a host of ills associated with automobiles: Drivers use their cars to show off; driving "provides an easy opportunity to dominate others" by speeding; and drivers can kill themselves and others if they drink, use drugs or fall asleep at the wheel.

It warned about the effects of road rage, saying driving can bring out "primitive" behavior in motorists, including "impoliteness, rude gestures, cursing, blasphemy, loss of sense of responsibility or deliberate infringement of the highway code."

It called for drivers to obey speed limits and to exercise a host of Christian virtues: charity to fellow drivers, prudence on the roads, hope of arriving safely and justice in the event of crashes.

Martino's initiative was sure to make headlines in Italy, where car culture is deeply entrenched -- this is the home of Ferrari and Fiat -- and where weekend highway deaths make the evening news on a regular basis.

The Rev. Keith Pecklers, a Jesuit professor of liturgy at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, said Martino was clearly responding to an underreported social concern: an increase in traffic deaths in places like Italy and Spain because of speeding, as well as an increase in road rage, aggressive driving and DUI in places like the United States.
"It may be surprising for people because we're accustomed to the church speaking out about sexual matters, capital punishment, immigration," he said. "The point Cardinal Martino is making is that driving is itself a moral issue. How we drive impacts on the lives of ourselves and others."
Pecklers dismissed any suggestion that Martino's "Ten Commandments" were at all sacrilegious, saying it was "creative pedagogy" that would certainly get people's attention. He stressed that they could never be considered binding in the way the official Ten Commandments are.

The Rev. Thomas Williams, a Rome-based theologian, concurred.

"It might be a little flippant but it's not sacrilegious," he said.

But for some, the document was at least reason to poke fun at the Vatican.

"Overtaking is a sin? Well, then I'm a murderer, I'll turn myself in immediately," quipped movie director Dino Risi, whose classic film "The Easy Life" -- "Il Sorpasso," or "The Overtaking" -- ends with a car crash.

"I think the Vatican has lost its marbles," he added, according to the ANSA news agency.

There was no indication Pope Benedict XVI had approved of, or even read, the document. It was signed by Martino and his secretary -- as is customary for lower-level documents that are routinely put out by the offices of the Vatican's vast bureaucracy.

Martino is known as something of a loose cannon at the Vatican, and occasionally his pronouncements have gotten him into trouble.

In 2003, he was rebuked by Vatican officials for telling a press conference the United States treated Saddam Hussein "like a cow" after his capture. A senior Vatican official called in reporters several days later to stress that Martino was expressing his personal opinion and not the view of the pope.

Martino hasn't shied away from controversial topics, either. Just last week he said Roman Catholics should stop donating money to Amnesty International because it had adopted a new policy calling for women to have access to abortion services in some circumstances.

The cardinal, who was the Vatican's U.N. envoy for 16 years, has also expressed support for genetically modified foods and he has backed scientists who question the seriousness of climate change.



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Quoted Text
Pilgrim spreads message of God’s love
Trekker, 65, stops at shrine as part of his journey of faith around the world

BY JOE MAHER Gazette Reporter

George Walter is both a pilgrim and a hermit.
He has logged 38,000 miles on foot, walking to spread the message of God’s love over the past 37 years.
Walter’s life journey has taken him to 41 countries and 24 states. He has no expenses and depends on the largesse of those he encounters. People invite him into their homes for dinner and buy him groceries in supermarkets.
   Walter’s robe is literally a patchwork, swatches of light blue denim he stitched together. A thick white rope serves as a belt. His sandals are made from tire rubber.
   “I just trust in God to provide for me day by day,” he said.
   Growing up, Walter spent eight years in Catholic school and 12 years in seminary in his native Pennsylvania and in Ohio.
   But when he completed his studies, he didn’t feel he was ready to be ordained with the rest of his class.
   Walter, who spent a couple of days at the Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha Shrine in Fonda this week and is now in Auriesville, recalled his 1967 conversation with the bishop: “I have all the knowledge but my faith is weak.” The bishop suggested he take a year off.
   “So I dropped out,” he said during an interview at the Kateri Shrine on Wednesday.
   He said one morning in 1968, while living near Boulder, Colo., he looked at the Rocky Mountains and realized that man wasn’t responsible for the beautiful landscape; God was.
   “That was the first time in my life I knew God was real,” he said. Walter said he decided to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, to walk where Jesus did. In 1970, he boarded a freighter in New Orleans and it took him to Barcelona, Spain.
   One year and 4,000 miles later, he arrived in the Holy Land. There, he said, God spoke to him: “This pilgrimage is over, but you will be a pilgrim for the rest of your life.”
   Since then, he has been walking for God, spreading this message: “God loves you very much, and if you open your heart to his love you will have peace now and forever.”
   Tuesday afternoon, with severe thunderstorms closing in, Walter pitched his tent near Reservoir Road, just a few miles from the shrine and the comfort of its retreat house.
   Walter said he used a purifying filter to get a drink from a creek, and then used the creek to take a bath. He said the violent storms that rolled in later were not a concern. “I was in my tent.”
   Walter has a Web site and often stops along his route to check his e-mail at a library. He also relies on the Internet for his maps.
   “I tell people: I’m not no-tech, I’m low-tech. I don’t carry a cellphone or a laptop, but I’m not averse to using them,” he said.
   Walter, who will turn 66 next month, said he is not affiliated with any particular order.
   “My bishop said I’m an order of one,” he laughed.
   “A pilgrim has to be alone. If you have more than one then you have a community and a whole different dynamic,” he added. Walter has spent the last six winters near his hometown of Pittsburgh.
   “Eight months I’m a hermit and four months I’m a pilgrim. I walk May, June, July, August,” he said.
   When he’s not walking, Walter said, he prays and reads the Bible cover to cover. He also pens a report on his latest trek and plans the next one.

MEREDITH L. KAISER/GAZETTE PHOTOGRAPHER George Walter begins his journey Thursday from the Kateri Shrine in Fonda to the Auriesville Shrine near Fort Hunter.
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Wow! What a guy, huh?


When the INSANE are running the ASYLUM
In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. -- Friedrich Nietzsche


“How fortunate for those in power that people never think.”
Adolph Hitler
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I think I love this guy....


...you are a product of your environment, your environment is a product of your priorities, your priorities are a product of you......

The replacement of morality and conscience with law produces a deadly paradox.


STOP BEING GOOD DEMOCRATS---STOP BEING GOOD REPUBLICANS--START BEING GOOD AMERICANS

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Quoted Text
Bishops take aim at politicians
Prelates target positions taken about abortion

BY ERIC GORSKI The Associated Press

   Three years after a few outspoken U.S. Roman Catholic bishops tied together presidential politics, abortion and the Communion rail, leaders of the nation’s largest denomination are starting to speak out again.
   Only this time, the political climate is much different.
   The Catholic presidential hopeful under criticism for championing abortion rights is a Republican instead of a Democrat, the general election might pit two candidates who believe abortion should remain legal, Democrats control both chambers of Congress and immigration reform has surfaced as a major issue.
   As most of the nation’s 268 active Catholic bishops met for a private retreat this week in New Mexico, questions were building about how prominent their voices will be in the 2008 race.
   Will some follow the example of Bishop Thomas Tobin of Providence, R.I., who last month called the pro-abortion rights position of Catholic GOP candidate Rudy Giuliani, “pathetic and confusing”? Will abortion dominate the bishops’ statements on the election, or will immigration and poverty?
   Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput said in an interview with The Associated Press that offi cial Catholic involvement depends on which candidates and issues emerge from primary season. A vocal proponent of calling on Catholic politicians and voters to follow church teachings, Chaput also made it clear he thinks the time for behind-the-scenes diplomacy with politicians is over.
   “I personally think that anybody that is pro-choice as a Catholic is not being faithful to his Catholic identity, and I think that people who are Catholics, when they look at those issues, should take that into consideration when they vote,” Chaput said before leaving for the retreat. “I didn’t name names last time, and I’m not going to name names this time. But I think if you study people’s history and their records, you know the people.”
   In 2004, scrutiny fell on Democrat John Kerry, a Catholic who supports abortion rights. Archbishop Raymond Burke of St. Louis did name names, saying he would deny Communion to Kerry. Several other bishops, Kaput included, stressed that politicians should refrain from the sacrament if they support abortion rights, which they consider a “foundational” issue.
   Chaput helped craft a statement in summer 2004 that left the question of whether to deny Communion to an individual up to each bishop. Some bishops, Chaput said, felt pressured to take a stand after Burke’s comments and proposed that no one speak out on important issues without consulting the bishops as a group.
   “I think a lot of folks just don’t want the pressure to explain themselves,” Chaput said.
   Chaput said his more aggressive posture grew partly out of frustration from his personal meetings with politicians, who often would just “look at you vacantly.”
CHANGE HORSES
   “If a horse is dead, get on a different horse,” Chaput said. “I think being more aggressive, more assertive doesn’t in any way violate the principles we have to follow” under laws governing nonprofi t involvement in politics.
   The most effective approach, Chaput argues, is educating Catholic voters, which in turn could influence politicians. However, if bishops conclude the major-party nominees in 2008 are “indifferent to the important issues if everybody is taking the same negative position, perhaps there will be no motivation to talk about it at all,” he said.
   Given that scenario, Archbishop John Myers of Newark, N.J., said in an interview, “the principal involved is to try to figure out which of the candidates comes closest to the full gamut of Catholic teaching, in particular when you talk about the life issues — which candidate is closer, if one is.”
   John Allen Jr., a senior correspondent for the independent National Catholic Reporter, said U.S. bishops who want to withhold Communion from Catholic politicians can find support in Pope Benedict XVI’s comments — made to reporters en route to Brazil this year — that essentially endorsed the idea that Mexican legislators who voted to legalize abortion have separated themselves from the church.
   “If you are an American bishop who is inclined to move in that direction, you’re going to feel like the pope has got your back,” Allen said.
   Yet abortion also could share the spotlight with immigration. U.S. bishops have called for “comprehensive reform” that highlights immigrants’ contributions and promotes a pathway to citizenship, and many have been vocal about it.
   “Those bishops who did not feel represented by what some of their brother bishops were saying in ’04 feel this is their opportunity to correct public impressions, to remind people the church is not a one-issue faction,” he said.
   Tobin’s criticism of Giuliani came in a May 31 “open letter” published in the Providence diocesan newspaper, responding to an invitation Tobin received to a Giuliani fundraiser. Giuliani has said he is personally opposed to abortion, but does not want to impose his view on others. Tobin likened Giuliani’s stance to that of Pontius Pilate, saying Pilate “personally found no guilt in Jesus,” but handed him over to be crucified anyway.
   More recently, 18 Catholic Democrats in the U.S. House caught the attention of a bishop who, like Tobin, is not widely known. The Democrats condemned Pope Benedict’s recent statements about the Mexican politicians, writing that “religious sanction in the political arena directly conflicts with our fundamental beliefs about the role and responsibility of democratic representatives in a pluralistic America.”
   Bishop Arthur J. Serratelli of Paterson, N.J., responded in his diocesan newspaper this month that the letter’s authors are “arrogant to insist that the church does not have the right to her own teaching.”
   “I think there is a dynamic in the [bishops] conference towards wanting to put down serious markers on what the bishops themselves have declared to be the premiere civil rights issues of our time,” said George Weigel, a Pope John Paul II biographer and a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington.
   Still other Catholics would like to see a range of issues highlighted by U.S. bishops in 2008. Alexia Kelley, executive director of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, cited statements leading up to the recent Group of Eight summit in Germany, including Pope Benedict’s call for the urgent need to eliminate “extreme poverty.”
   “Abortion globally happens in the context of extreme poverty, as well,” Kelley said. “You need to address both in order to respect human dignity.”
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Baptists create
gender strategy job

   SAN ANTONIO — The Southern Baptist Convention has created a new job of national strategist on gender issues, who will work with gays and lesbians who believe they can overcome their homosexuality.
   Bob Stith, who served as pastor of Carroll Baptist Church in Southlake, Texas, for 37 years, started the new job June 1.
   On June 13, at the SBC annual meeting in San Antonio, Stith said he hopes to bring men and women “to wholeness in Jesus Christ.” He hopes the ministry will help gays and lesbians “come to a place where this temptation doesn’t dominate their life.”
   With more than 16 million members, the Southern Baptist Convention is the largest Protestant denomination in the country. Several evangelical groups, including Exodus International and Focus on the Family, run programs teaching that homosexuality is a sin that can be overcome.
   Gay rights groups and many medical professionals say faithbased programs advocating “reparative therapy” for gays and lesbians are dangerous to patients.  



  
  
  
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Gay rights groups and many medical professionals say faithbased programs advocating “reparative therapy” for gays and lesbians are dangerous to patients.  


They called themselves patients....so are they saying they are sick?????

Someone please make up my mind.....oh, no I'll do that.....besides I cant make up my mind, I can only make up my bed.......


...you are a product of your environment, your environment is a product of your priorities, your priorities are a product of you......

The replacement of morality and conscience with law produces a deadly paradox.


STOP BEING GOOD DEMOCRATS---STOP BEING GOOD REPUBLICANS--START BEING GOOD AMERICANS

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Funny...I thought the same thing. Why would they take advice from the medical profession unless the medical profession looks at same sex 'anything' as a disease or disability or sickness? It was vague when they mentioned 'medical profession'....did they mean 'mental health professionals'?

I have actually heard of quite a few gay and lesbian people that have chosen a heterosexual lifestyle over the gay lifestle through this faith based 'reparative therapy'. I really don't know that much about it in detail...only what I have heard or read.


When the INSANE are running the ASYLUM
In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. -- Friedrich Nietzsche


“How fortunate for those in power that people never think.”
Adolph Hitler
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Thou shalt wonder about driving commandments
BY DALE McFEATTERS Scripps Howard News Service
Dale McFeatters is a columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service.

   WASHINGTON — The Vatican, a state that at 108 acres is too small to have traffi c jams, much less road rage, has issued Ten Commandments intended to ease both.
   Over here, automotive commandments tend to come in bumper-sticker form, like the religiously themed “If you want to know whether there’s an after-life, just mess with this truck.” (Inscription sanitized for your protection.)
   The first commandment — actually No. 5 on the original tablet — is “You shall not kill.” Hard to quarrel with that. The second is, “The road shall be for you a means of communion between people and not of mortal harm” — meaning don’t hurt anybody either.
   The commandments are the work of Cardinal Renato Martino, who heads the Vatican’s office of migrant and itinerant people (surely this sounds better in Latin) and who became alarmed at U.N. figures showing that 1.2 million people a year die in vehicle crashes.
STAYING CALM AND ALIVE
   The church tries to take care of its flock’s other needs, so it’s only logical and proper that it try to keep the faithful from plowing into the back of an 18-wheeler.
   Martino sounds like a gentle, not to say naive, soul. Commandment No. 3 says, rather like a fortune cookie, “Courtesy, uprightness and prudence will help you deal with unforeseen events.” Try sharing that thought on the Jersey Turnpike at rush hour.
   But in a news conference to introduce the commandments, the cardinal said thoughtless driving leads to “impoliteness, rude gestures, cursing, blasphemy, loss of sense of responsibility.” His biography says he served as a Vatican diplomat in Manhattan, so he knows whereof he speaks.
   While in this country, he surely must have seen some TV car commercials. Yet Commandment No. 5 enjoins, “Cars shall not be for you an expression of power and domination, and an occasion of sin.” There goes a whole bunch of marketing campaigns. What else is a hulking-great SUV for if not power and domination? “Blessed are the meek” is not going to move a whole lot of Hummers off the lot.
A PLAGUE ON YOUR VEHICLE?
   The cardinal probably wouldn’t go for this because it’s a little too Old Testament, but I would be a whole lot more inclined to exercise courtesy, uprightness and prudence if he could find a way for me to inflict biblical plagues — only on the deserving, mind you.
   Driving home the other night, a guy in an expensive sports car, a Porsche, raced past a whole line of cars waiting for a red light by blasting up the right-turn-only lane and then cutting back into line, forcing me to stomp hard on the brakes.
   Now, if Martino could see his way clear, I would like to fill that Porsche with flies, lice, frogs, locusts, hail, sick livestock and darkness, and cover the driver with boils. I’d feel better and he would be a better driver for it. You don’t want to know what sick livestock will do to leather upholstery.
   To show my generosity of spirit, I would forgo turning his antifreeze into blood. Cardinal Martino’s commandments are working already.
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I commend Cardinal Martino for his efforts. But in all do respect, when was the last time his alarm went off in the morning at 5am so he and his wife could get the kids up and dressed and ready for school or day care. Not to mention, getting himself/herself ready for work? Then either drop the kids off to daycare/school, fight morning rush hour traffic and go to a job that is a 100 miles and hour job,work through lunch and breaks along with an ungreatful boss? Only to get out of work to fight rush our traffic again, stop and pick up the kids, go home, cook/eat dinner, do homework with the kids, mow the lawn, do a load of laundry, give the kids their baths/showers, read them a story, put them to bed. And at the end of the week collect a paycheck that reflects only a small percentage of the work you actually do. And then IF you have time, go to church on Sunday for 1 hour and be thankful for all you have. Then wake up Monday morning and start all over again.

Clearly Cardinal, your intentions are in the right place and thank you for looking out for us, but you really are living a life that is a bit out of touch here with the real world. The only road rage you might encounter is people upset while trying to get too close to the Popemobile!


When the INSANE are running the ASYLUM
In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. -- Friedrich Nietzsche


“How fortunate for those in power that people never think.”
Adolph Hitler
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Jews for Jesus member files free-speech lawsuit
The Associated Press

   OYSTER BAY — A suburban town barred a member of the evangelical group Jews for Jesus from distributing information in a public park, the member said in a lawsuit accusing the town of suppressing free speech.
   Police repeatedly escorted Susan Mendelson out of John J. Burns Town Park in Massapequa when she tried to hand out literature and talk to people about the group last summer, according to the lawsuit, filed June 22 in a Brooklyn federal court. The suit names the Long Island town and various officials.
   Mendelson’s first run-in with Oyster Bay authorities came at a July 2006 concert by R&B singer Dionne Warwick. After a second encounter in August 2006, Mendelson, 52, of Manhattan, was ticketed for “distributing leaflets at a public event.” A town law prohibited people from making speeches, displaying signs or distributing notices in parks or beaches without town permission — which the town had no mechanism for providing, according to Mendelson’s lawsuit.
   Nassau County District Court Judge Sondra Pardes threw out the citation in April. The judge said it violated Mendelson’s First Amendment rights, a view shared by Mendelson’s lawyer.
   “By objecting or preventing my clients from giving their message, it’s a serious detriment to the message that the Jews for Jesus is committed to getting out there,” said the lawyer, Frank Amoroso.
   The San Francisco-based group was founded in 1973. Followers describe themselves as Jews who believe Jesus is the messiah foretold by Jewish scripture, to the dismay of critics who say the group misappropriates Jewish traditions to try to convert Jews to Christianity.
   Oyster Bay Supervisor John Venditto said the town and the group were working to make arrangements for Jews for Jesus to distribute materials during concerts this summer, perhaps from tables set up for the purpose.
   “We don’t want people running through the crowd, shoving literature in their face,” Venditto said.  



  
  
  

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Quoted Text
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Pope: Other Denominations Not True Churches


LORENZAGO DI CADORE, Italy — For the second time in a week, Pope Benedict XVI has corrected what he says are erroneous interpretations of the Second Vatican Council, reasserting the primacy of the Roman Catholic Church and saying other Christian communities were either defective or not true churches.

Benedict approved a document released Tuesday from his old office, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which repeated church teaching on Catholic relations with other Christians.

While there was nothing doctrinally new in the document, it nevertheless prompted swift criticism from Protestants, Lutherans and other Christian denominations spawned by the 16th century reformation.

  "It makes us question the seriousness with which the Roman Catholic Church takes its dialogues with the Reformed family and other families of the church," said the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, which groups 75 million Reformed Christians in 214 churches in 107 countries.

"It makes us question whether we are indeed praying together for Christian unity," the alliance said in a letter to the Vatican's key ecumenical official, Cardinal Walter Kasper, charging that the document took ecumenical dialogue back to the pre-Vatican II era.

One of the key developments from Vatican II, the 1962-65 meetings that modernized the church, was its ecumenical outreach.

Another key change was the development of the New Mass in the vernacular, which essentially replaced the old Latin Mass. On Saturday, Benedict revived the old Latin Mass, saying it was wrong for bishops to deny it to the faithful because it had never been abolished. Traditional Catholics cheered the move, but more liberal ones called it a step back from Vatican II.

Benedict, who attended Vatican II as a young theologian, has long complained about what he considers the erroneous interpretation of the council by liberals, saying it was not a break from the past but rather a renewal of church tradition.

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith said it was issuing the new document on ecumenism because some contemporary theological interpretations of Vatican II's ecumenical intent had been "erroneous or ambiguous" and had prompted confusion and doubt.
The new document -- formulated as five questions and answers -- restates key sections of a 2000 text the pope wrote when he was prefect of the congregation, "Dominus Iesus," which riled Protestant, Lutheran and other Christian denominations because it said they were not true churches but merely ecclesial communities and therefore did not have the "means of salvation."

"Christ 'established here on earth' only one Church," said the document released as the pope vacations at a villa in Lorenzago di Cadore, in Italy's Dolomite mountains.

The other communities "cannot be called 'churches' in the proper sense" because they do not have apostolic succession -- the ability to trace their bishops back to Christ's original apostles -- and therefore their priestly ordinations are not valid, it said.

The Rev. Sara MacVane, of the Anglican Centre in Rome, said there was nothing new in the document.

"I don't know what motivated it at this time," she said. "But it's important always to point out that there's the official position and there's the huge amount of friendship and fellowship and worshipping together that goes on at all levels, certainly between Anglican and Catholics and all the other groups and Catholics."

The document said Orthodox churches were indeed "churches" because they have apostolic succession and that they enjoyed "many elements of sanctification and of truth." But it said they lack something because they do not recognize the primacy of the pope -- a defect, or a "wound" that harmed them, it said.

"This is obviously not compatible with the doctrine of Primacy which, according to the Catholic faith, is an 'internal constitutive principle' of the very existence of a particular Church," said a commentary from the congregation which accompanied the text.

Despite the harsh tone of the documents, they stressed that Benedict remains committed to ecumenical dialogue.

"However, if such dialogue is to be truly constructive it must involve not just the mutual openness of the participants but also fidelity to the identity of the Catholic faith," the commentary said.

The top Protestant cleric in Benedict's homeland, Germany, complained that the Vatican apparently did not consider that "mutual respect for the church status" was required for any ecumenical progress.

In a statement headlined "Lost Chance," Lutheran Bishop Wolfgang Huber argued that "it would also be completely sufficient if it were to be said that the reforming churches are 'not churches in the sense required here' or that they are 'churches of another type' -- but none of these bridges is used in the 'answers."'

The document, signed by the congregation prefect, American Cardinal William Levada, was approved by Benedict on June 29, the feast of Saints Peter and Paul -- a major ecumenical feast day.

There was no indication why the pope felt it necessary to release the document, particularly since his 2000 document summed up the same principles. Some analysts suggested it could be a question of internal church politics, or that the Congregation was sending a message to certain theologians it did not want to single out. Or, it could be an indication of Benedict using his office as pope to again stress key doctrinal issues from his time at the Congregation.

In fact, the only theologian cited by name in the document for having spawned erroneous interpretations of ecumenism was Leonardo Boff, the Brazilian who was a target of the former Cardinal Ratzinger's crackdown on liberation theology in the 1980s.
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senders
July 11, 2007, 1:47pm Report to Moderator
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Just asserting the fact that they have a vote at the UN......


...you are a product of your environment, your environment is a product of your priorities, your priorities are a product of you......

The replacement of morality and conscience with law produces a deadly paradox.


STOP BEING GOOD DEMOCRATS---STOP BEING GOOD REPUBLICANS--START BEING GOOD AMERICANS

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bumblethru
July 11, 2007, 2:51pm Report to Moderator
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And they are a nation unto themselves! And one of the richest that is tax exempt!


When the INSANE are running the ASYLUM
In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. -- Friedrich Nietzsche


“How fortunate for those in power that people never think.”
Adolph Hitler
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