The Norwegian bishops have joined more than 30 Christian communities in that country in issuing a declaration in support of “biological reality” and against movements such as gender ideology and “queer theory.”
In their statement, the 31 signatories — including the Norwegian Catholic Bishops’ Council, the Norwegian Lutheran Missionary Society, Foursquare Norway, and the Value Alliance — point out that there are “only two biological sexes: male and female. A person’s sex is decided at the moment of conception.”
“The idea that there is a subjective gender and a self-chosen ‘gender identity’ that is freely chosen and based on feelings is the result of ideology and has no foundation in biology or science,” the statement says.
In recent years in many countries, authorities have promoted gender ideology to young students. The signatories in their letter describe it as “extremely problematic” to “confront children and young people in the classroom with the idea that there are ‘boys, girls, and other genders.’”
“This influence can lead to confusion, insecurity, and destructive life choices for many children and young people,” the statement says.
The statement argues that “government bodies and public authorities abuse their mandate and power when they try to pressure citizens and organizations to conform to ‘queer theory’ in relation to gender, sexuality, and marriage.”
In addition to its criticisms of gender ideology, the statement also criticizes artificial insemination and surrogacy, calling their use “a breach of God’s creative will and the rights of the child.”
“A human being is created from the egg of a woman and the sperm of a man,” it says. “Neither mother nor father or other family members are dispensable or superfluous in the life of a child.”
The signatories write that they are “against bullying and exclusion, manipulation and coercion, harassment and hatred, ostracism and violence in all its facets,” but they stipulate that they ”will not make any concessions at the expense of biblical truths, even if these truths conflict with political guidelines or current social trends.”
“We believe that much of what is known under the modern terms ‘gender diversity’ and ‘sexual diversity’ is not based on medical knowledge and natural science,” they write. “This gender ideology is also incompatible with our Christian faith and understanding of reality.”
“[It] is important to show that the Christian anthropological vision, its vision of what a person is, what it means to be a woman or a man, is consistent with empirical data,” the bishop said. “A Christian understanding of life is eminently concrete.”
“Trying to adjust reality based on personal perception is a risky undertaking, especially when it begins to make impossible promises to the vulnerable, lonely, and wounded,” the prelate pointed out.
The signatories “have no illusions about the complexity of human life and relationships,” the bishop said. “We want to accompany complex situations compassionately and creatively.”
Varden noted that a growing number of people harmed by gender ideology are beginning to speak out about it. He pointed to the Tavistock gender identity clinic in England, which for years treated children as young as 10 who were experiencing gender dysphoria with “puberty blockers” and hormone treatments. The government closed the clinic down in 2022 following a critical independent review.
“The consequences of the Tavistock clinic affair in England are a well-known example of dealing with these injuries; it is by no means the only one,” he said. “The choir of voices that want to be heard is getting louder and louder. That’s a good thing.”
The bishop said the signatories of the letter are seeking to “contribute constructively.”
“Our statement is neither angry nor over-the-counter,” he said. “It arises, in prayer, from our commitment to our nation and our desire to build it.”
“We reaffirm the preciousness of life, every person — in whom we want to recognize a sister, a brother, a potential friend, by seeing them as far as possible as God sees them, that is, with immense hope,” he said.
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Teddy Howell, a Michigan third grader, dressed as a priest. / Stephani and Sean Howell
St. Louis, Mo., May 6, 2023 / 04:00 am (CNA).
When “The Bible in a Year” podcast hosted by Father Mike Schmitz shot to the top of the charts at the start of … […]
Austin, Texas, Dec 19, 2019 / 02:10 pm (CNA).- Pro-life group Texas Right to Life has been issued a $7,500 fine by the Texas Ethics Commission for illegally funding a political radio ad for the 2018 re-election campaign of a Republican state senator, Texas sources have reported.
The ethics commission’s general counsel, Ian Steusloff, told The Dallas Morning News that corporations are normally banned by state law from politically funding candidates or representatives currently in office.
The commission issued the fine to Texas Right to Life, the state affiliate of National Right to Life, in November after it was found that the group’s corporate branch, not its political action committee, had paid $37,915 for a radio ad for the campaign of Senator Bob Hall.
Kimberlyn Schwartz, director of media and communication for Texas Right to Life, told The Dallas Morning News that the group had already “self-corrected and self-reported” the error, and said that the ethics commission “is known for targeting citizens and nonprofits, including Texas Right to Life.”
“Due to the commission’s web of rules aimed at limiting free speech, average citizens find it very difficult to be engaged in the political process without incurring hefty fines and lengthy court battles,” Schwartz added.
The Dallas Morning News reported that the funds were used to air radio ads on Dallas stations featuring Hall’s voice starting in December 2017. The ads included a disclosure that they had been paid for by Texas Right to Life.
The expenses were disclosed in a January 2018 finance report, and attributed the funds to Texas Right to Life’s corporate arm.
In February 2018, Texas Right to Life issued a correction, noting that the source of the funds had been “inadvertently” misidentified and that they instead came from its political action arm, just before an ethics complaint was filed against the group.
In March 2018, Texas Right to Life provided documentation to show that their corporation had reimbursed their political action committee for the funds.
That same month, the Texas Catholic Conference of Bishops encouraged Catholics to sever ties with the group and instead give their time and efforts to other pro-life groups, including Church-sponsored pro-life ministries, after taking issue with Texas Right to Life’s stance on multiple political problems, as well as their voter guide.
In a parish advisory notice issued to Catholic churches in the state, the bishops objected to the group’s opposition to incremental pro-life reforms, such as laws that restrict certain types of abortion rather than outlaw the act entirely, and mentioned “conflicts on end-of-life reform” and issues with the organization’s voter guide among their concerns about the organization.
“The bishops have been compelled to publicly correct Texas Right to Life’s misstatements on end-of-life care and advance directives,” the bishops stated.
“Texas Right to Life implied that the legislation the bishops were supporting allowed euthanasia and death panels rather than the reality that the legislation reflected the long-standing Church teaching requiring a balance of patient autonomy and the physician conscience protection.”
The bishops added that the group’s voter guide excluded pro-life members of the Texas legislature, and “was not based on a fair analysis of a legislator’s work.”
In response, Texas Right to Life issued a statement that they were “disappointed but not surprised” by the bishops’ “uncharitable mischaracterizations” of the group.
“What’s the Eucharist?” Kent Shi, a 25-year-old Harvard graduate student, asked that question when he attended eucharistic adoration for the first time. The answer put him on a path to conversion. / Julia Monaco | CNA
Cambridge, Massachusetts, Apr 16, 2022 / 09:03 am (CNA).
One convert’s journey to Catholicism began with an invitation to an ice-cream social.
Another says he instantly believed in the Real Presence the moment someone explained what the round object was that everyone was staring at during eucharistic adoration.
For a third, the poems of T.S. Eliot — and a seemingly random encounter with a priest on a public street — led to deeper questions about truth and faith.
Their paths differed but led them to the same destination: St. Paul’s Catholic Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where they are among 31 people set to be fully initiated into the Catholic Church during the Easter vigil Mass on Saturday, April 16.
That number of initiates is a record high for St. Paul’s, a nearly century-old Romanesque-style brick church whose bell tower looms over Harvard Square.
A scheduling backlog caused by the COVID-19 pandemic is partly responsible for the size of this year’s group of catechumens (non-baptized) and candidates (baptized non-Catholics.) But Father Patrick J. Fiorillo, the parochial vicar at St. Paul’s, believes there’s more to it than that.
“There’s definitely a significant segment of people who started thinking more deeply about their lives and faith during COVID-19,” Fiorillo said. “So, coming out of Covid has given them the occasion to take the next step and move forward.”
Fiorillo is the undergraduate chaplain for the Harvard Catholic Center, a chaplaincy based at St. Paul’s for undergraduate and graduate students at Harvard University and other academic institutions in the area. This year, 17 of the 31 initiates are Harvard students.
“Everybody assumes that, because this is the Harvard Catholic Center, that everybody here is very smart and therefore has a very highly intellectual orientation towards their faith,” Fiorillo told CNA.
“That is definitely true of some people. But I would say the majority are not here because of intellectually thinking their way into the faith. Some are. But the majority are just kind of ordinary life circumstances, just seeking, questioning the ways of the world, and just trying to get in touch with this desire on their heart for something more,” he said.
Fiorillo says welcoming converts into the Church at the Easter vigil is one of the highlights of his ministry.
“It’s an honor. It gives me hope just seeing all this new life and new faith here. So much in one place,” he said.
“When I tell other people about it, it gives them hope to hear that many young people are still converting to Catholicism, and they’re doing it in a place as secular as Cambridge.”
Prior to the Easter vigil, CNA spoke with five of St. Paul’s newest converts. Here are their stories:
‘This is what I’ve been looking for’
Katie Cabrera, a 19-year-old Harvard freshman, told CNA that she was excited to experience the “transformative power of Christ through his body and blood” at Mass for the first time at the Easter vigil.
A native of Dorchester, Massachusetts, she said she was baptized as a child and comes from a family of Dominican immigrants. Her father, who grew up in an extremely impoverished area, lacked a formal education, but always kept the traditions of the Catholic faith close to him in order to persevere in difficult times.
Her father’s love for her and his Catholic faith deeply inspired Cabrera, and served as an anchor for her faith throughout her life.
Growing up, however, Cabrera attended a non-denominational church with her mother. Because she felt the church’s teachings lacked an emphasis on God’s love and mercy, Cabrera eventually left.
“Even though I Ieft, I always knew that I believed in God,” Cabrera said. “So, I was at a place where I felt kind of lost, because I always had that faith, but I didn’t know what to do with it.”
After she arrived at Harvard, she accepted a friend’s invitation to attend an ice-cream social at the Harvard Catholic Center — “and that was like, sort of, how it all started,” she told CNA.
Once she was added to the email list for the center’s events, she felt a “calling” that she “really wanted to officially become Catholic” after many difficult years without a faith community.
Catholic doctrine about the sacraments was no hurdle for Cabrera, as she credits Fiorillo with explaining the faith well.
“There was a void that existed in my heart,” she said. “As soon as Father Patrick started teaching about marriage and family, theology of the body, and the sacraments, I was like, ‘This is what I’ve been looking for my whole life.’”
‘What’s the Eucharist?’
“What is that thing on the thing?”
Kent Shi laughs when he recalls how perplexed he was the first time he attended eucharistic adoration at St. Mary’s of the Assumption in Cambridge.
Someone helpfully explained that what Shi was looking at was the Eucharist displayed inside a monstrance.
“What’s the Eucharist?” he wanted to know.
For many non-Catholics considering entering the Catholic Church, the Real Presence can be a major obstacle.
Not Shi. He says that once the Eucharist was explained to him that day, he instantly believed.
Shi, 25, told CNA that he considered himself an agnostic for most of his life, meaning he neither believed nor disbelieved in God.
Between his first and second years as a graduate student in Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, however, he accepted Christ and started attending services at a Presbyterian church.
One day in the summer of 2021, a crucifix outside St. Paul’s that Shi says he “must have passed multiple times a week for months and never noticed” caught his eye, and deeply moved him.
Shortly after, he accepted a friend’s invitation to attend eucharistic adoration at St. Mary’s even though he “didn’t know what adoration meant.” Unaware of what he was about to walk into, Shi asked a friend what the dress code was for adoration. His friend replied, “Respectful.”
And so, respectfully dressed in a button-down shirt and slacks, Shi sat in the front row with his friend, only a few feet from the monstrance. That’s when the questions began.
It wasn’t long after that encounter that Shi began attending Mass at St. Paul’s and the parish’s RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults) program. Shi asked CNA readers to pray for him and his fellow RCIA classmates.
“There’s a lot of prodigal sons and daughters here, so we would very much appreciate that,” he said, “especially me.”
Poetry and art opened the door
For Loren Brown, choosing to attend a secular university like Harvard proved to be “providential.”
The 25-year-old junior from La Center, Washington, said he comes from a “lapsed” Catholic family and wasn’t baptized.
He didn’t think much about the faith until the spring semester of his freshman year, when, he says, Catholic friends of his “began to question my lack of commitment to faith.”
Later, when students were sent home to take classes virtually due to the pandemic, he had time to reflect and began to read some of the books they’d recommended to him. The poetry of T.S. Eliot (his favorite set of poems being “Four Quartets”) and the “Confessions” by St. Augustine, in particular, “pulled me towards the faith,” he said.
Brown describes his conversion as a “gradual process” which backed him into a “logical corner.” But a chance meeting with a priest also played a pivotal role.
One day in the summer of 2021 while walking back to his dormitory he encountered a man wearing a priestly collar outside St. Paul’s Church on busy Mount Auburn Street.
It was Father George Salzmann, O.S.F.S., graduate chaplain of the Harvard Catholic Center.
“He asked me how I was doing, what I was studying, and we immediately found a common interest in St. Augustine,” Brown told CNA.
“You know, there’s this great window of St. Augustine inside St. Paul’s and you should come see it,” Brown remembers the gregarious priest telling him. Salzmann wound up giving Brown a brief tour of the church, which was completed in 1923.
The next week, Brown found himself sitting in a pew for his first Sunday Mass at St. Paul’s. He hasn’t missed a Sunday since, a routine that ultimately led him to join the RCIA program that fall.
Brown says he now realizes that coming to Harvard was about more than majoring in education.
“What I wanted out of Harvard has completely changed,” he said. “Instead of an education that prepares me for a job or a career, I want one that forms me as a moral being and a human.”
‘I can’t do this alone. Please help me.’
Verena Kaynig-Fittkau, 42, is a German immigrant who came to the U.S. 10 years ago with her husband to do her post-doctoral research in biomedical image processing at Harvard’s engineering school.
The couple settled in Cambridge, where they had their first child. Two subsequent pregnancies ended in miscarriage, however. That second loss was overwhelming for Kaynig-Fittkau, who says she was raised as a “secular Lutheran” without any strong faith.
“It broke me and a lot of my pride and made me realize that I can’t do things by myself,” she told CNA.
She found herself on knees one Thanksgiving, pleading with God. “I can’t do this alone,” she said. “Please help me.”
She says God answered her prayer by introducing her to another mother, who she met at a playground. She was a Christian who later invited Kaynig-Fittkau to attend services at a Presbyterian church in Somerville, Massachusetts.
In that church, there was a lot of emphasis on “faith alone,” she said. But Kaynig-Fittkau, who now works for Adobe and is the mother of two girls, kept questioning if her faith was deep enough.
Then one day she stumbled upon a YouTube video titled “The hour that will change your life,” in which Father Mike Schmitz, a Catholic priest from the Diocese of Duluth, Minnesota, known for his “Bible in a Year” podcast, speaks about the Eucharist.
Intrigued, she began watching similar videos by other Catholic speakers, including Father Casey Cole, O.F.M., Bishop Robert Barron, Matt Fradd, and Scott Hahn, each of whom drew her closer and closer to the Catholic faith.
Familiar with St. Paul’s from her days as a Harvard researcher and lecturer, she decided to attend Mass there one day, and made an appointment before she left to meet with Fiorillo.
When they met, Fiorillo answered all of her questions from what she calls “a list of Protestant problems with Catholicism.” She entered the RCIA program three weeks later.
Recalling her first experience attending eucharistic adoration, she said it felt “utterly weird” to be worshiping what she describes as “this golden sun.”
A conversation with a local Jesuit priest helped her better understand the Eucharist, however. Now she finds that spending time before the Blessed Sacrament is “amazing.”
“I am really, really, really excited for the Easter vigil,” Kaynig-Fittkau said. “I can’t wait, I have a big smile on my face just thinking about it.”
The rosary brought him peace
Another catechumen at St. Paul’s this year is Kyle Richard, 37, who lives in the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Boston and works in a technology startup company downtown.
Although he grew up in a culturally Catholic hub in Louisiana, his parents left the Catholic faith and joined a Full Gospel church. Richard said he found the church “intimidating,” which led him eventually to leave Christianity altogether.
When Richard was in his mid-twenties, his father battled pancreatic cancer. Before he died, he expressed a wish to rejoin the Catholic Church. He never did confess his sins to a priest or receive the Anointing of the Sick, Richard recalls sadly. But years later, his non-believing son would remember his father’s yearning to return to the Church.
“I kind of filed that away for a while, but I never really let it go,” he said.
Initially, Richard moved even farther away from the Church. He said he became an atheist who thought that Christianity was simply “something that people used to just soothe themselves.”
Years later, while going through a divorce, he had a change of heart.
Feeling he ought to give Christianity “a fair shot,” he began saying the rosary in hopes of settling his anxiety. The prayer brought him peace, and became a gateway to the Catholic faith.
Before long, he was reading the Bible on the Vatican’s website, downloading prayer apps, and meditating on scripture.
A Google search brought him to St. Paul’s. Joining the RCIA program, he feels, was a continuation of his father’s expressed desire on his deathbed more than a decade ago.
“I think he would be proud, especially because he was born on April 16th and that is the date of the Easter vigil,” he said.
I guess this is what it’s come to. Catholic bishops are obliged to sign statements that affirm Catholic teachings. Otherwise, apparently, Catholics assume that the Church’s position has changed.
Not surprising, I suppose, considering Bergoglio is in the process of switching out Jesus’ commandments with his own always left-leaning opinions.
Varden is a spiritual phenomenon! His orthodoxy is pure refreshment and especially the Nordic church is seeing a growth in desire for holiness that has declared that the old ways of secular selfishness are no longer satisfying! Latin and the growth of the 1962 Missal are at the forefront of this joyous news!
Expect to hear in the news that Norwegian churches are ablaze.
These religious groups ought to be applauded for their display of common sense.
Yes very cleverly united with Luther’s team: Bergoglio can hardly Cancel-Culture heretical ecumenical partners from Synodal Ecumenical New Church…
Truth is truth no matter where it is found.
Wonderful. Praying for more from N. America, Africa, et al.
I guess this is what it’s come to. Catholic bishops are obliged to sign statements that affirm Catholic teachings. Otherwise, apparently, Catholics assume that the Church’s position has changed.
Not surprising, I suppose, considering Bergoglio is in the process of switching out Jesus’ commandments with his own always left-leaning opinions.
(Sigh.)
Will we *never* stop crucifying our Lord?
God bless Norway.
Articulate common sense and courage out of Norway.
It is good to see the phrase ‘biological reality’ being used, it is sad that such is necessary.
Or as in “traditional marriage”. What a shame we even have to draw that distinction.
Varden is a spiritual phenomenon! His orthodoxy is pure refreshment and especially the Nordic church is seeing a growth in desire for holiness that has declared that the old ways of secular selfishness are no longer satisfying! Latin and the growth of the 1962 Missal are at the forefront of this joyous news!
Deo gratias !