Saint of the gutters set to be canonised

 Mother Teresa of Kolkata, the Nobel laureate known for dedicating her life to helping the poorest of the poor, will be made a saint of the Roman Catholic Church, the Vatican said on Friday.
 The Vatican didn’t provide further details, but according to a report in Avvenire, the official newspaper of the Italian Catholic bishops’ conference, Mother Teresa’s canonization would probably occur on Sept, 4, 2016, the day before her feast day. Pope Francis has cleared the way for sainthood by approving a decree recognising a second miracle attributed to her intercession with God - a necessary event for such a move in the church.
 Known as the "saint of the gutters", the diminutive nun is expected to be canonised -- formally made a saint -- in early September. It was not clear if the ceremony would take place in Rome or if the pope would travel to India to preside over it.
 Mother Teresa, who died in 1997 at the age of 87, become an international icon of charity in the 20th century but has also been criticised for trying to convert people to Christianity. She was beatified in 2003 by the late Pope John Paul II. Beatification, which requires one miracle, is the last step before sainthood, which requires two.
 The church believes saints are holy men and women who lived extraordinary lives of virtue and are believed to be in Heaven with God.
 Francis, who has made concern for the poor a major plank of his papacy, was keen to make Mother Teresa a saint during the Church's current Holy Year, or Jubilee, in which Catholics are called on to emphasise the need for mercy and compassion in the world.
 Mother Teresa's second miracle involved the inexplicable healing of a Brazilian man who was suffering from a viral brain infection that resulted in multiple abscesses with hydrocephalus, according to Church officials.
 Relatives prayed to Mother Teresa and he recovered, leaving his doctors at a loss to explain how. A Vatican medical commission deemed the sudden recovery "inexplicable in the light of present-day medical knowledge," according to Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, the chief promoter of the sainthood cause.

"CHRISTMAS GIFT"

 In Kolkata, Sunita Kumar, spokeswoman for Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity religious order said the nuns were "over the moon" when they got the news. "We thought her whole life was a miracle. Her whole life was dedicated to the poor and there was nothing else in her mind than service. Everyone was accepted and there was no obstruction in her work," she told Reuters.
 Archbishop Thomas D'Souza of Calcutta told Reuters the news from Rome was "the best Christmas gift," adding, "Her entire life and work was for the poor. Now it is in a way officially recognised. We are grateful to God."
 In the years since her death, some critics accused her and the order of having ulterior motives, saying their real aim was to convert people to Christianity. The order has denied the allegations, saying, for example, that most of those helped in the Kalighat Home for Dying Destitutes in Kolkata were non-Christians with just a few days left to live and noting that conversion is a lengthy process.
 The order has also denied allegations of financial mismanagement of the huge sums it received from donor.
 Mother Teresa was born Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu of Albanian parents in Macedonia in 1910 in what was then part of the Ottoman Empire.  She founded the Missionaries of Charity to help the poor on the streets of Kolkata and the religious order later spread throughout the world. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979.
(Reuters)

Dechristianisation campaign: Who's behind it?

 Over 53 years ago, on June 25, 1962, the United States Supreme Court decided in Engel v. Vitale that a prayer approved by the New York Board of Regents for use in schools violated the First Amendment by constituting an establishment of religion. The following year, in Abington School District v. Schempp, the Court disallowed Bible readings in public schools for similar reasons.
 
 Who's behind such campaigns? Answer: Devil. The proponents of Devil have been tirelessly working for dechristianisation in various countries. Undoubtedly, they had some successes here and there while indulging in their campaign against Christianity.  What happened -- is happening now -- in Iraq and Syria is another form of dechristianisation. Unfortunately, this campaign has been going on in many countries.

  The latest is from Britain. A two-year inquiry into the place of religion in modern society has concluded Britain is no longer a Christian country and should stop acting as if it is a Christian country. The Commission on Religion and Belief in Public Life, chaired by former senior judge Baroness Butler-Sloss and involving leading religious leaders from all faiths, called for public life in Britain to be systematically dechristianised.

 Western countries have debated many times before whether Christianity is a friend or foe of society, but perhaps never so dramatically as during the French Revolution. From about 1790 to 1800, the revolutionary government exiled or executed thousands of Catholic clerics and tried to expunge all traces of France’s Christian past from public life. "The dechristianisation campaign could be seen as part of a broader intellectual movement which sought to question the place of religion within public life. Many enlightened thinkers thought that religion was a matter of private judgement and should not be dictated by secular authorities," Dr Andrew Thompson, an historian at Queens' College, Cambridge University, said in an interview. 

  The Arizona Book Banning and Burning Board, a division of the Arizona Dept of Education, outlawed any teaching of or reference to the Bible in its schools. The Board found both "books" of the Bible: the Old Testament and the New, in  violation of Arizona’s HB2281 (aka the Ethnic Studies Bill) by being "totally biased in favor of the Jews" and teaching the "superiority of the Jewish race."
   According to the Board, the book’s claim that the Jews are God’s chosen people specifically violates three of the four main prohibitions of HB2281. The Bible is "designed primarily for readers of a particular ethnic group" and it "advocates ethnic solidarity instead of treating people as individuals". It also promotes  "resentment towards a race or class of people" in fact dozens of them: the Egyptians whom it accuses of enslaving the Jews, the Babylonians, "hairy men," "scarlet" women, the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah the Medes, the Persians, worshippers of Baal, the Philistines, the Assyrians, the Samaritans, the Hittites, and 143 other  tribes. The Board also mentioned about some outrageous and laughable observations, which are nothing sacrilege.

 Jerry Newcombe, author, TV producer and activist, wrote about an incident involving Bible. "In our own backyard here in Broward County, Fla. has arisen a disturbing story of a twelve year old boy (Giovanni Rubeo) getting in trouble with his teacher for having the audacity of reading the Bible to himself during free time, when the children were free to read whatever they wanted to. But his teacher singled out the Bible (a Christmas gift Gio treasures) because it was allegedly inappropriate to read in the school. In her own words, it was "the book he's reading as opposed to the curriculum for public school. Again, this was during free time," he wrote.

 She had told Giovanni on previous occasions not to read the Bible, so she called the student's father to berate him, leaving a message, saying, "He's not permitted to read those (religious) books in my classroom. He said if I told him to put it away, you (the dad) said not to do that."

 Let's come back to the British report. The Commission on Religion and Belief in Public Life's report says "three striking trends in recent decades have revolutionised the landscape on which religion and belief in Britain meet and interact. The first is the increase in the number of people with non-religious beliefs and identities."

 "The second is the decline in Christian affiliation, belief and practice and within this decline a shift in Christian affiliation that has meant that Anglicans no longer comprise a majority of Christians. The third is the increase in the number of people who have a religious affiliation but who are not Christian".

 According to wire reports, the British report highlights figures showing the decline in people who say they are Anglicans from 40 per cent in 1983 to less than a fifth in 2013. "The increase in those with non-religious beliefs, the reduction in the number of Christians and an increase in their diversity, and the increase in the number of people identifying with non-Christian religions: these are the settled social context of Britain today and for the foreseeable future, as is the unsettled and unsettling context of the international environment," the 150-page report says.
  Its central recommendation is for a UK-wide consultation exercise to draw up a 21st century equivalent to the 'Magna Carta' to define the values at the heart of modern Britain instead of the UK government's controversial "British values" requirements, the Daily Telegraph reported.  The report provoked a warning from the Church of England. It apparently said the report is dominated by the old fashioned view that traditional religion is declining in importance and that non-adherence to a religion is the same as humanism or secularism.
  Christianity has survived 2000 years. The advent, life, passion, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ is to save the mankind. Devil can't succeed by stalling this glorious mission of Jesus. Lets wait and see.