TODAY IN GOD:
RELIGION NEWS BITES FOR YOUR SNACKING PLEASURE
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Blair to Join Catholic Church After He Leaves Downing Street
LONDON — Tony Blair will declare himself a Roman Catholic on leaving Downing Street, according to a priest close to him.

Father Michael Seed, who is known for bringing high-profile politicians and aristocrats into the Catholic fold and who says Mass for the Blairs in Downing Street each week when they are in London, made the prediction to friends at a recent memorial service.

Last night, when contacted by The Times, he did not deny his comments, but said he did not know if Mr Blair would ever be received “formally” into the Roman Catholic Church.

To do so he would have to take part in a ceremony called the rite of Christian initiation for adults, followed by confirmation and taking the sacrament of Holy Communion.

Father Seed said: “He’s been going to Mass every Sunday. He goes on his own when he is abroad, not just when he is with his wife and children.”

Another church source said that many of the early saints and martyrs were not baptised. Such people were held to have had a “baptism of desire”.

He said that Mr Blair was a Catholic by desire and that this did not necessitate a formal conversion. “He is an ecumenical Catholic,” said the source. “He is a liberal Catholic. In terms of his private life, he is a Roman Catholic.”

Although technically an Anglican, Mr Blair only “darkened the door” of Anglican churches on state and other formal occasions, he added.
FOR THE FULL STORY (THE TIMES UK) CLICK HERE

French workers biggest whiners, Irish happiest: study
LONDON – French workers are the world’s biggest whiners, according to a study published Monday which said the Irish complain least about their lot.

Britons come second to their Gallic cousins in the moaning stakes, followed by Sweden, the United States and Australia. Japanese workers have the lowest morale, but don’t complain so much.

The lowest levels of whining were found in the Netherlands, Thailand and Ireland, according to the study by the FDS research group.

“It is interesting to note that after France, Britain and Sweden, the world’s biggest workplace whingers are Americans, despite their having by far the highest levels of income,” said FDS chief Charlotte Cornish.

“Compare them to Thai workers: while real levels of income are more than eight times higher in the States, more workers in the US feel their pay is a problem than in Thailand,” she added.

The study, entitled “What Workers Want, A Worldwide Study of Attitudes to Work and Work-Life Balance”, draws on data from 14,000 employees in 23 countries.

They were notably asked about their satisfaction with issues including pay levels and their work-life balance, as well as average working hours.

In terms of worker morale, Dutch workers are the happiest, followed by their Thai and Irish counterparts. The lowest morale of all is found in Japan, followed by Germany, said the study.

The study’s authors noted that rightwing French President-elect Nicolas Sarkozy shouldn’t expect things to become happier anytime soon, as he prepares to shake up notoriously strike-prone France.

“The UK and US, with their marked competitive individualism and unequal wealth distribution, both appear towards the top of the world’s list of whingiest workers,” said Cornish.
FOR THE FULL STORY (AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE VIA YAHOO NEWS) CLICK HERE

Vatican denies hiding the full truth about the end of the world
The Vatican tried yesterday to draw a line under a conspiracy theory that has dogged the Catholic Church for decades – that it was harbouring details of the predicted apocalypse.

The Pope’s second-in-command, Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, denied that the Church was suppressing a vision of the end of the world said to have been revealed by the Virgin Mary to three shepherd children on a hillside at Fatima in Portugal exactly 90 years ago.

The three “Secrets of Fatima” were written down by one of the children, Lucia Dos Santos – who became a Carmelite nun – and sent to the Vatican in a sealed envelope. Two of the “secrets” were made public, apparently predicting the inferno of 20th-century world war and totalitarianism and the eventual reconversion of Communist Russia to Christianity.

Pope John Paul II suggested that the third “secret” predicted the 1981 attempt on his life. He failed to satisfy conspiracy theorists however, with many accusing the Vatican of disclosing only part of the last Fatima secret.

Antonio Socci, a Catholic journalist and author of The Fourth Secret of Fatima, said that he had at first accepted John Paul’s explanation. His researches led him to believe however that the late Pope’s revelation had been “partial”.

He said that the undisclosed portion of the “secret” predicted a crisis of faith in the West and the collapse of the Church hierarchy in the face of a tidal wave of “apostasy and heresy”. Marco Tosatti, a Vatican watcher and author of The Prophecies of Fatima, also said that the Vatican was believed to be “hiding something” so as “not to alarm millions of the faithful”.

But yesterday, as tens of thousands gathered at Fatima, 130 kilometres (81 miles) north of Lisbon, to mark the 90th anniversary of the “visions”, Cardinal Bertone insisted that the idea that the secret predicted “catastrophic world events” or the collapse of the Christian Church were “pure fantasy”.
FOR THE FULL STORY (THE TIMES UK) CLICK HERE

Bible sparks obscentity row
Hong Kong – A debate raging over the morals of Hong Kong’s racy media took a bizarre twist Wednesday with revelations that a decency watchdog had been flooded with obscenity complaints about the Bible.

The Television and Entertainments Licensing Authority (Tela), which oversees the publishing industry, said it had received 208 complaints that text within the holy book was indecent.

“I can confirm that the complaints were received,” said a Tela spokesperson. “The thrust of the complaints was that the Bible was obscene, that different parts of the Bible were offensive to readers.”

Tela refused to divulge details of the complaints, but local media reported that they referred to acts of violence, rape and cannibalism reputedly contained in the Old and New Testaments.

Reports speculated that the sudden flurry of messages sent to Tela was sparked by a Chinese-language website www.truthbible.com, which had exhorted readers to pressure Tela to reclassify the Bible as an indecent publication.

The news comes amid a row in Hong Kong over the classification as indecent of a sex survey in a student journal which questioned respondents on bestiality and incest.

The Obscene Articles Tribunal issued the ruling on Chinese University publication “CU Student Press”, sparking angry calls from students that authorities were eroding freedom of speech in the southern Chinese city.
SOURCE: AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE VIA IOL.CO.ZA

Wiccans Keep the Faith With a Religion Under Wraps
DUMFRIES, Va. — Above the woman’s fireplace hangs her wedding picture, taken in a Lutheran church years ago. Below it, on the mantelpiece, is a small Wiccan altar: two candles, a tiny cauldron, four stones to represent the elements of nature and a small amethyst representing her spirit.

The wedding portrait is always there. But whenever someone comes to visit, the woman sweeps the altar away. Raised Southern Baptist in Virginia and now a stay-at-home mother of two in this Washington suburb, she has told almost no one — not her relatives, her friends or the other mothers in her children’s playgroups — that she is Wiccan.

Among the most popular religions to have flowered since the 1960s, Wicca — a form of paganism — still faces a struggle for acceptance, experts on the religion and Wiccans themselves said. In April, Wiccans won an important victory when the Department of Veterans Affairs settled a lawsuit and agreed to add the Wiccan pentacle to a list of approved religious symbols that it will engrave on veterans’ headstones.

But Wicca in the civilian world is largely a religion in hiding. Wiccans fear losing their friends and jobs if people find out about their faith.

“I would love to be able to say ‘Accept us for who we are,’ but I can’t, mainly because of my kids,” said the suburban mother, who agreed to talk only on the condition of anonymity. “Children can be cruel, and their parents can be even more cruel, and I don’t want my kids picked on for the choice their mommy made.”

She worries that because most people know little about Wicca, they will assume she worships Satan. She fears that her family and friends will abandon her and that the community will ostracize her.

David Steinmetz, professor of the history of Christianity at Duke Divinity School, said, “Wiccans have so many things stacked against them, from what the Bible says about the practice of magic to the history in this country of witch trials, that the image of them adds up to something so contrary to the consensus about genuine religion that still shapes American society.”
FOR THE FULL STORY (NEELA BANERJEE IN THE NYT) CLICK HERE

Bishop T.D. Jakes: Living Large, and Letting Go
He’s about to turn 50, and to celebrate his 25th wedding anniversary. It’s time to take stock.

Is he happy? Satisfied?

Why wouldn’t he be? This is the fabulous Bishop T.D. Jakes. Neo-Pentecostal preacher of the famous mega-church Potter’s House in Dallas. He is a best-selling author, TV personality and head of TDJ Enterprises, which produces books, music and films. His church now has more than 30,000 members and when he last preached in Atlanta he drew more people than Billy Graham ever has. He lives in a mansion, drives a fancy car and wears sharp clothes. He is very, very big, literally and figuratively.

Still, he pauses a long time. “I am becoming satisfied,” he says finally. “I feel like I have little to prove and none to impress. I’m starting to settle in like a bear in a cave in winter. I’m a lot more comfortable in my own skin than I used to be. I’m finding my own sweet spot and I’m enjoying these years.”

This is what he recommends — for you and for me, for all of us. This is at the heart of his latest book, “Reposition Yourself: Living Life Without Limits.”

“Most people I encounter, they’re not happy,” he says in a recent interview in the restaurant of the Four Seasons Hotel. “And we’re acting like it doesn’t matter. Either they’re in debt or their relationships are not going well.” The reason, he says, is that “we get stuck, we get trapped, either we have economic demands, or we need to fit in, or we have too many expectations for ourselves. We’re enslaved, we’re imprisoned by decisions made 20 years ago.”

And we get defined by people when they first meet us. “Oh, T.D. Jakes, preacher. But they put a period there where they should put a comma. I’m a lot of other things, too. . . . I want to do something else with the second half of my life.”

This is the perspective that comes with age. “Life itself is our most precious resource . . . and time. . . . We’re not where we were in our 20s. We’re losing our parents, our children are in their adolescence, and no matter how successfully busy we are, we are overwhelmed. It’s not about how to get money. Success is about being fulfilled.”
FOR THE FULL STORY (SALLY QUINN IN THE WASHINGTON POST) CLICK HERE