Catholic Church – Christianity 666

July 14, 2023July 30, 2023

Christians: Trans is never OK

Christians, being “trans” is never OK. Transsexuals are not “OK” with God. Claiming anyone can change gender is not OK with God. Not even in the privacy of one’s own home. And anyone saying they support those who claim they or anyone can change their gender is never “OK” with God.

This seems a strange thing to say to those who claim their religion is “Bible based”, but it still needs to be said. I can’t think of anything worse than hearing a preacher or Christian politician say “I don’t mind what you do in your own home” so they are liked more by their audience, or need the money or votes. Or maybe because they just don’t care.

But seriously, it’s not OK with God for people to claim that others can change their sexual identity, and especially not through surgery or drugs.

I can’t think of any preachers or wannabe politicians who claim “rape is OK as long as it’s done in private,” or “child abuse is OK as long as it’s done in private”.

And yet many Christians seem to make the statement that being trans (or any other sexual deviancy, sodomy, etc) is “OK as long as it’s done in private/their own home/ bedroom”.

Being trans isn’t OK with Jesus!

Most I’ve met, or have worked or lived with, have been abused, groomed, rejected or neglected . Those things are never OK and shouldn’t be what someone forms an identity around.

Christians should instead be seeking to deal with the issues that underlie the self hatred:

Abuse: verbal, physical or sexual is never OK
Grooming or indoctrination by parents, predators or teachers is never OK.
Rejection hurts, but shouldn’t lead to self hatred.
Neglect or abandonment shouldn’t lead to self hatred either.

And often it’s a combination of issues, so Christians; being trans is never OK.

When they’re screaming out telling you their new gender, it’s a sign of the hurt underneath.

Christians should be helping their recovery from the above underlying issues, not telling these people that the cause of their distress is that they’re in the wrong body, or that their deviant behaviour is OK, just as long as they hide it from us.

God made us in his own image, male and female,. God knew us before we were born, and we were created to be holy, sacred, to be partakers of his own divine nature. And it’s never too late to start that journey.

Post Views (since 10 Nov 22): 273

October 18, 2022November 9, 2022

Former Catholic Bishop of Auckland questioned over recommending priest facing abuse allegations

The former Catholic Bishop of Auckland has come under intense questioning at the abuse in care inquiry over recommending a priest, who had three allegations of abuse made against him, for a teaching job.

The Catholic Church appeared at the Royal Commission hearing in Auckland on Monday.

Bishop Patrick Dunn was responding to complaints made about Tongan priest Sateki Raass.

Raass was convicted in March 2019 for assaulting a person under 16, and he was sentenced to do 100 hours of community service. He later resigned from the priesthood.

He was a priest under the control of the Bishop of Tonga but was working in the Auckland Diocese.

Bishop Dunn was asked by counsel for the inquiry Katherine Anderson why he recommended Raass for a school teaching job nearly two years after he had been convicted.

“The principal [of the school] was also aware of the situation and felt it would not be a problem,” Bishop Dunn said.

The teaching position did not eventuate.

Bishop Dunn said in hindsight, Raass holding a teaching position would have been unwise.

“In some ways, yes, but on the other hand, he is a pretty talented man and comes from a family of teachers.”

Anderson asked the bishop if he understood his views might be seen as unrelenting support for Raass.
‘’You know you have had personal knowledge of three reports of abuse and you have been aware, at least in 2013, that he had been suspended in Tonga. It is a very strong sense of a commitment you have got for this person,” Anderson said.

Bishop Dunn replied: ‘’It is not a strong sense of support for him per se, but all through my life I have tried to help people who have had convictions to get their life back on to an even keel.”

He did not think it was unwise, but that it might not have been the right time, he said.

Raass was sent to live at a presbytery near a Catholic school. The school chair wrote to Bishop Dunn asking why it had been allowed.

‘’The actual choice of Balmoral was made within hours, so he had to move somewhere,” Bishop Dunn said.

“The police had no objection to the move. Later, the bail conditions were changed. I don’t think the police ever saw Sateki Raass as a threat to primary school children.’’

Bishop Dunn said he was kept at arm’s length from the complaints, as it was investigated by the church’s professional standards committee.

“So the complaint went to them and I was always kept at a distance from the actual complaint, so I was not an investigator as it were.”

The Archbishop of Wellington, Cardinal John Dew, spoke to the Royal Commission last year and he was back on Monday.

He reiterated the apology given on behalf of the Catholic Church in March 2021.

“Abuse is wrong, it should never be part of the church. I, and all of us, are ashamed on it. We are working hard to put safeguarding practices in place and we will continue to work on that.

“We will continue to work on what we have discovered during the time of this royal commission.”

The mission of the Catholic Church today was to build a safe church, Cardinal Dew said.

Dr Paul Flanagan, a lay member of the Catholic Church’s National Safeguarding and Professional Standards Committee, told the inquiry that abuse of trust was never acceptable.

“Such an abuse of trust in Catholic faith communities is shameful. It is shameful that people in authority who may have known about the abuse did not act in the victims’ favour.

“Whether bishops, priests, brothers, sisters, even parents, the level of abuse that we know of is painful to us all, so we need to support those who come forward to disclose abuse done to them and support them through which ever process they prefer.”
nzherald.co.nz

Post Views (since 10 Nov 22): 123

July 26, 2018November 9, 2022

Peado Michael Shirres influential in Maori Churches

Shirres taught a generation of Anglicans that sin can co-exist ok with holiness.

A Catholic priest who admitted abusing at least five children in New Zealand and earlier worked in Canberra was never reported to police, the church says.

And one of the women he abused says she believes there’s almost certainly Australian victims.

Five historical complaints were made in 1993 against Dominican Order member Father Michael Shirres, a priest and theologian who died in 1997, Auckland Bishop Patrick Dunn said on Wednesday.

However while Shirres confessed to offending over several decades, police were never alerted because the victims wanted privacy, the bishop said.

He was instead put through an independent sex offender program and removed from priestly work. He later apologised.

“At that time the policy with historic cases, as distinct from current cases, was to prioritise the wishes of the complainant,” Bishop Dunn said.

“We respected their wishes and realised that if we did not, people would not be prepared to come forward.”

He said the church’s practice was to encourage complainants to go to the police and the Dominican Order worked to support those who had come forward.

A highly regarded figure in communities in New Zealand’s Far North from the 1970s, Shirres lectured Maori theology in Auckland and authored several books.

In the 1960s, he was chaplain at the Australian National University in Canberra for several years and was there at least until 1964.

Whangarei resident Annie Hill told AAP within her parish there was talk Shirres has was already an abuser when he returned to Auckland in 1966.

She was abused from age five and has been left with post-traumatic stress disorder.

“He didn’t suddenly get off the plane back in his home country and become a child abuser,” she said.

Ms Hill, who took compensation from the church in the 1990s, said she was now compelled to speak out because she felt the Dominican Order in recent years had venerated Shirres despite repeated warnings.

“My father raised this with them in 1966. I raised it with them again in the early ’90s and then in 2016 I went back to them and said again: ‘I believe there are other victims. What are you doing to make inquiries?’” she said.

“At the level of action, empathy and understanding, nothing has happened.”

Dominican Friars Provincial Anthony Walsh – the order’s regional head – is overseas but a spokesman for his office in Victoria said the order would check archives to see if any accusations had been made against Shirres in Australia, although it was not immediately aware of any.

The order said it would reply later in the week.

Abuser NZ priest worked in Australia

Post Views (since 10 Nov 22): 57

March 25, 2018

It’s only taken years: Churches push for inclusion in Royal Commission into abuse

Anglican Archbishop Philip Richardson (left) and Cardinal John Dew from the Catholic Church.

The Anglican and Catholic churches are making their most concentrated push yet to get the Royal Commission into abuse expanded to fully include them.

Anglican Archbishop Philip Richardson and Catholic Cardinal John Dew have met with the commission chair Sir Anand Satyanand.

“The Anglican Church needs to collaborate fully with the Royal Commission and we need the terms of reference to be extended in a way that allows that to be possible,” Archbishop Philip Richardson said.

“That’s the best way of addressing long-term hurt and long-term consequences.”

The Anglicans’ top General Synod committee is now also writing to the Prime Minister and the Children’s Minister calling for an expanded commission.

Some leading non-clerical Catholic voices have previously called for such an expansion – but now their top clergy are getting vocal too.

“We are saying that if they are going to move on to a stage of investigating institutions … then we would welcome having church institutions also included so that we too can learn from whatever failings might have occurred in the past,” Bishop Patrick Dunn, who heads the Catholic Bishops’ Conference, said.

The inquiry’s draft terms exclude scrutiny of abuse in institutions in cases where the state had no involvement.

So the case of a child sent into church care by the state would be treated differently to a child sent to, say, a Catholic school by their parents and abused there.

The government’s made its preference clear – even down to the email address of the inquiry: royalcommission.statecare@dia.govt.nz.

However, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, despite giving repeated interviews expressing this preference, has not said exactly why non-state agencies could not be included.

Survivors of sexual abuse by priests have been campaigning for an expansion, with some saying they would refuse to give their story to any Royal Commission that did not hold the institution to account in their case.

The Australian inquiry into child sex abuse heard 1100 complaints of abuse had been made against the Anglican Church from 1980 to 2015, and four times that against the Catholics.

“Certainly the Australian example is very salutary but we would have taken exactly the same position whether the Australian inquiry had been held or not,” Archbishop Richardson said.

As for other Christian churches, the consensus seems to be they all wanted to be scrutinised by the Royal Commission here, he said.

He was asking to meet Children’s Minister Tracey Martin, but is clearly keen to leave the government room to move.

“If the terms of reference are not extended, how can the church’s accountability be reflected? And we want to have those conversations with the [political] ministers … we’re really not sure what that might look like.”

The original whistleblower into Catholic clerical child abuse, US priest Tom Doyle, has said it would unheard of to try to have a second, separate inquiry into abuse in churches.

A Royal Commission spokesperson said Sir Anand had met the churchmen, was meeting a wide range of people and was not commenting on the content of any submissions.

She did not say if the public consultation on the draft terms of reference would be extended beyond the end of April or not.

Churches push for inclusion in Royal Commission into abuse

Post Views (since 10 Nov 22): 31

March 23, 2018

Religious academics KNOW they target Children with the LGBT message!

From the Church of England’s refusal to discipline William Yate when he was banished from Northland almost two centuries ago, until today, the churches have long been responsible for covering up those abusing children here in NZ. These same religious leaders are now openly targeting the sexualisation of Children into special communities with the LGBTQI++etc philosophy (that sex with anyone is ok because they claim our evolution from animals means that it’s only natural to follow our carnal instincts).

As lauded feminist lecturer Helen Bergin (Catholic Institute of Theology) claimed in her Auckland University School of Theology classes, “…life would be so boring if there were only two genders”. It was her desire that children be given opportunities at a young age to experiment sexually so they can chose their new gender. It was from these classes that Eugene Sisneros graduated while at St Matthews, only to take the Anglican Church to the Human Rights commission to normalise his behaviour as a role model for Anglican children. St Matthews recently held the thanksgiving service for the 2018 Pride Festival.

There needs to be a Royal Commission of Inquiry into NZ religious organisation’s child sexual abuse, modelled after the recent Australian one.

Post Views (since 10 Nov 22): 88