Stephen Hawking on Inequality Guardian/UK 1 December 2016
As a theoretical physicist based in Cambridge, I have lived my life in an extraordinarily privileged bubble. Cambridge is an unusual town, centred around one of the world’s great universities. Within that town, the scientific community that I became part of in my 20s is even more rarefied. And within that scientific community, the small group of international theoretical physicists with whom I have spent my working life might sometimes be tempted to regard themselves as the pinnacle.
So the recent apparent rejection of the elites in both America and Britain is surely aimed at me, as much as anyone. Whatever we might think about the decision by the British electorate to reject membership of the European Union and by the American public to embrace Donald Trump as their next president, there is no doubt in the minds of commentators that this was a cry of anger by people who felt they had been abandoned by their leaders. It was, everyone seems to agree, the moment when the forgotten spoke, finding their voices to reject the advice and guidance of experts and the elite everywhere.
I am no exception to this rule. I warned before the Brexit vote that it would damage scientific research in Britain, that a vote to leave would be a step backward, and the electorate took no more notice of me than of any of the other political leaders, trade unionists, artists, scientists, businessmen and celebrities who all gave the same unheeded advice to the rest of the country.
What matters now, far more than the choices made by these two electorates, is how the elites react. Should we, in turn, reject these votes as outpourings of crude populism that fail to take account of the facts, and attempt to circumvent or circumscribe the choices that they represent? I would argue that this would be a terrible mistake. The concerns underlying these votes about the economic consequences of globalisation and accelerating technological change are absolutely understandable. The automation of factories has already decimated jobs in traditional manufacturing, and the rise of artificial intelligence is likely to extend this job destruction deep into the middle classes, with only the most caring, creative or supervisory roles remaining.
This in turn will accelerate the already widening economic inequality around the world. The internet and the platforms that it makes possible allow very small groups of individuals to make enormous profits while employing very few people. This is inevitable, it is progress, but it is also socially destructive.
We need to put this alongside the financial crash, which brought home to people that a very few individuals working in the financial sector can accrue huge rewards and that the rest of us underwrite that success and pick up the bill when their greed leads us astray. So taken together we are living in a world of widening, not diminishing, financial inequality, in which many people can see not just their standard of living, but their ability to earn a living at all, disappearing. It is no wonder then that they are searching for a new deal, which Trump and Brexit might have appeared to represent.
It is also the case that another unintended consequence of the global spread of the internet and social media is that the stark nature of these inequalities is far more apparent than it has been in the past. For me, the ability to use technology to communicate has been a liberating and positive experience. Without it, I would not have been able to continue working these many years past.
But it also means that the lives of the richest people in the most prosperous parts of the world are agonisingly visible to anyone, however poor, who has access to a phone. And since there are now more people with a telephone than access to clean water in sub-Saharan Africa, this will shortly mean nearly everyone on our increasingly crowded planet will not be able to escape the inequality.
The consequences of this are plain to see: the rural poor flock to cities, to shanty towns, driven by hope. And then often, finding that the Instagram nirvana is not available there, they seek it overseas, joining the ever greater numbers of economic migrants in search of a better life. These migrants in turn place new demands on the infrastructures and economies of the countries in which they arrive, arrive, undermining tolerance and further fuelling political populism.
This is the first section of a longer article by Stephen Hawking
Monday, 12 December 2016
The Anne Frank Story
By Robert Fisk Independent Online 25 Nov. 2016
I’ve just visited the hiding place of some troublesome refugees who should make Donald Trump very angry. You only have to glance at the family’s papers to see how they fall under Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric. They fled a dangerous country full of extremists – a nation which threatened its own neighbours – and they sought their first new home for “economic reasons”. Worse still, they even tried to enter the United States. They were turned away – on the grounds that even if they had good reason to flee their persecutors, they didn’t have good enough reason to choose America as their place of refuge.
No, they’re not Syrians or Turkmens or Yazidis or Afghans. She was, of course, Anne Frank, the German Jewish girl who with her family fled the Nazis in 1933 and was given sanctuary in Holland – until Germany invaded the Low Countries in 1940 and she found herself under the rule of her own vicious country all over again. By 1941, her father Otto – realizing that the Nazis had in store for Jews in Holland the very same fate that was already being perpetrated against the Jews of Germany – sought visas to the United States. And the door was slammed in their face.
Anne Frank’s diary was the first book my mother wanted me to read "on my own" (without having it read to me) and this wonderful narrative of childhood-growing-into-adulthood, of fear and love and joy and fury – especially at the other refugees crowded into the family hiding-place behind Otto’s office on the Prinsengracht Canal in Amsterdam – has stayed with me all my life. It has been translated into 70 languages. It’s even been translated into Arabic.
No matter. So powerful, so tragic and so relevant is Anne’s story to us today that queues stand round the block in the cold Amsterdam rain to take their turn to walk up the stairs behind the false bookcase to see where these frightened Jewish men, women and children lived until, two years after they first hid here, the Gestapo arrived. You can still see – it’s so genuine, it allows of no clichés – the newspaper photographs of 1930s film stars (Ray Milland, Diana Durbin, Ginger Rogers) and of a very young Princess Elizabeth of England (plus sister Margaret and corgis) and of the Dutch royal family in exile whose nationality Anne wished to adopt after the war and whose pictures she glued to the wall of her room.
The Dutch nation would certainly have been more loyal to her than the Americans. Otto sought help for US visas from friends who were relatives of those who owned Macey’s department store. He had two brothers-in-law in the States. He wrote of the plight of his wife and two daughters. The State Department was not interested. Otto even pleaded for Cuban visas. He got one – on 1st December 1941 – but it was cancelled a week later when Germany declared war on Japan after Pearl Harbour. Thus did Japan as well as Hitler and the Americans join hands to doom the refugees on the Prinsengracht Canal. Roosevelt’s US – and Democratic – administration did a "Trump" on the Frank family.
Each time I read Anne Frank’s diary – and reader, if you haven’t read it, make up for lost time, as they say, and do so – I find something new which I missed on my previous journey through her pages. She wanted to be a writer. She wanted to turn her diary into a novel called The Secret Annex. And she wrote, on May 11th 1944, “my greatest wish is to become a journalist one day.” You can’t beat that.
But then her family was betrayed and three members of the Dutch Nazi Party and an Austrian (and therefore Reich) SS officer came storming up the staircase behind the false bookshelves on 4 August 1944. And that was the end of all of them. Except for Otto. He was eventually freed from Auschwitz by the Soviet army and travelled slowly back to Amsterdam to find that his family were dead. Edith died in Auschwitz, Margot and Anne at Bergen-Belsen, both of typhus. Anne, now 15 years old, died last. An old school friend says she caught sight of Anne in her last days and threw food to her over the camp barbed wire.
Four Dutch citizens helped Anne and her family and friends throughout their two years of solitude, at daily risk of their lives. They said later that it was a natural thing to do. Odd, that. Because today we are supposed to find it "unnatural" to help these people. I guess that’s Trump’s view. Yet in the streets around the Prinsengrach this week I found small cafes whose Dutch owners had written on their front doors the words: “Refugees welcome”. [Abridged]
I’ve just visited the hiding place of some troublesome refugees who should make Donald Trump very angry. You only have to glance at the family’s papers to see how they fall under Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric. They fled a dangerous country full of extremists – a nation which threatened its own neighbours – and they sought their first new home for “economic reasons”. Worse still, they even tried to enter the United States. They were turned away – on the grounds that even if they had good reason to flee their persecutors, they didn’t have good enough reason to choose America as their place of refuge.
No, they’re not Syrians or Turkmens or Yazidis or Afghans. She was, of course, Anne Frank, the German Jewish girl who with her family fled the Nazis in 1933 and was given sanctuary in Holland – until Germany invaded the Low Countries in 1940 and she found herself under the rule of her own vicious country all over again. By 1941, her father Otto – realizing that the Nazis had in store for Jews in Holland the very same fate that was already being perpetrated against the Jews of Germany – sought visas to the United States. And the door was slammed in their face.
Anne Frank’s diary was the first book my mother wanted me to read "on my own" (without having it read to me) and this wonderful narrative of childhood-growing-into-adulthood, of fear and love and joy and fury – especially at the other refugees crowded into the family hiding-place behind Otto’s office on the Prinsengracht Canal in Amsterdam – has stayed with me all my life. It has been translated into 70 languages. It’s even been translated into Arabic.
No matter. So powerful, so tragic and so relevant is Anne’s story to us today that queues stand round the block in the cold Amsterdam rain to take their turn to walk up the stairs behind the false bookcase to see where these frightened Jewish men, women and children lived until, two years after they first hid here, the Gestapo arrived. You can still see – it’s so genuine, it allows of no clichés – the newspaper photographs of 1930s film stars (Ray Milland, Diana Durbin, Ginger Rogers) and of a very young Princess Elizabeth of England (plus sister Margaret and corgis) and of the Dutch royal family in exile whose nationality Anne wished to adopt after the war and whose pictures she glued to the wall of her room.
The Dutch nation would certainly have been more loyal to her than the Americans. Otto sought help for US visas from friends who were relatives of those who owned Macey’s department store. He had two brothers-in-law in the States. He wrote of the plight of his wife and two daughters. The State Department was not interested. Otto even pleaded for Cuban visas. He got one – on 1st December 1941 – but it was cancelled a week later when Germany declared war on Japan after Pearl Harbour. Thus did Japan as well as Hitler and the Americans join hands to doom the refugees on the Prinsengracht Canal. Roosevelt’s US – and Democratic – administration did a "Trump" on the Frank family.
Each time I read Anne Frank’s diary – and reader, if you haven’t read it, make up for lost time, as they say, and do so – I find something new which I missed on my previous journey through her pages. She wanted to be a writer. She wanted to turn her diary into a novel called The Secret Annex. And she wrote, on May 11th 1944, “my greatest wish is to become a journalist one day.” You can’t beat that.
But then her family was betrayed and three members of the Dutch Nazi Party and an Austrian (and therefore Reich) SS officer came storming up the staircase behind the false bookshelves on 4 August 1944. And that was the end of all of them. Except for Otto. He was eventually freed from Auschwitz by the Soviet army and travelled slowly back to Amsterdam to find that his family were dead. Edith died in Auschwitz, Margot and Anne at Bergen-Belsen, both of typhus. Anne, now 15 years old, died last. An old school friend says she caught sight of Anne in her last days and threw food to her over the camp barbed wire.
Four Dutch citizens helped Anne and her family and friends throughout their two years of solitude, at daily risk of their lives. They said later that it was a natural thing to do. Odd, that. Because today we are supposed to find it "unnatural" to help these people. I guess that’s Trump’s view. Yet in the streets around the Prinsengrach this week I found small cafes whose Dutch owners had written on their front doors the words: “Refugees welcome”. [Abridged]
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/donald-trump-refugees-anne-frank-turned-its-back-a7436241.html
Monday, 7 November 2016
Just War Theory Is Obsolete
by
Sister Joan Chittister
Excerpted from Becoming Fully Human: The Greatest Glory of God (2005) with permission of Sheed and Ward.
The Tao Te Ching, the ancient Chinese manual on the art of living, reads:
Weapons are the tools of fear... a decent person will avoid them except in the direst necessity and, if compelled, will use them only with the utmost restraint ....Our enemies are not demons but human beings like ourselves. The decent person doesn't wish them personal harm. Nor do they rejoice in victory. How could we rejoice in victory and delight in the slaughter of people? Enter a battle gravely, with sorrow and with great compassion, as if attending a funeral. (c. 550 B.C.E.)
The problem is not a new one. Over seven centuries ago, people began to recognize that war was an attack on the innocent by the ruthless for the sake of the privileged. They wanted it stopped. And if that was an unrealistic goal, given the thirst for power in the human condition and the absence of any overarching negotiating bodies, they at least wanted it regulated. They wanted the innocent protected. After all, the people were not fighting their neighbors. They wanted the defenseless made secure. After all, war meant that armies were to fight armies, not civilians. So they turned to the church, which, by threat of eternal punishment, might be able to bring sense to chaos. They popularized and developed the just war theory, first articulated by Augustine, and for a while it seemed to make sense. But over time everything has changed: the nature of the world, the nature of war, the nature of weapons, and the nature of nations themselves.
Adults seem to have a problem understanding such things. Children see it clearly: Some second-graders asked their teacher what was going on between the United States and the place called Iraq. So the teacher said, "Well, think of it this way: Somebody in your neighborhood has a gun in her house. All the neighbors are afraid of it, and they go to Margaret, the owner of the gun, to ask her if she'll get rid of it. "And Margaret said yes, she would. But after a while, the people began to doubt that Margaret had really thrown the gun away. So they went to see her again and asked her if she still had the gun. And she said yes, she did. "So they told her that the fact that she had a gun made them afraid, so she had to get rid of it. "But Margaret said no, she wouldn't because it was her house and her gun. "So all the neighbors went back to their own houses, got out their own guns, pointed them at Margaret, and shouted that they would shoot if she didn't throw her gun away. "Then a child in the room spoke up and said, "Teacher, that is a really dumb story. It doesn't make any sense." Right. When is war "just," or is war .already obsolete now?
***
"You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake," Jeannette Rankin wrote. But we go on trying. Why? What exactly is to be gained? The powerful stay in power. The innocent are expelled from their homes. Children grow up with fear and hatred in their hearts. Who wins what?
***
For war to be just, the first criterion is that it must only be waged in the face of "real and certain danger." So when did we start waging war "just in case"?
***
"All war is insane," Madeleine L'Engle wrote. Killing doesn't stop killing. It just gives the world a new reason to do it called "vengeance." In the meantime, the poor get poorer and the strong get stronger. Nothing really changes.
***
After years of Nintendo and shopping mall video arcades, Americans know that no one bleeds and no one gets hurt in war. In fact, we teach our children to love it. Or, as Ellen Glasgow said, "The worst thing about war is that so many people enjoy it."
***
War is not what happens in the military. It is what happens in the hearts of the rest of us who applaud it. Marianne Moore, the poet, wrote, "There never was a war that was / not inward; I must / fight till I have conquered in myself what / causes war.
http://www.beliefnet.com/news/2005/02/just-war-theory-is-obsolete
Excerpted from Becoming Fully Human: The Greatest Glory of God (2005) with permission of Sheed and Ward.
The Tao Te Ching, the ancient Chinese manual on the art of living, reads:
Weapons are the tools of fear... a decent person will avoid them except in the direst necessity and, if compelled, will use them only with the utmost restraint ....Our enemies are not demons but human beings like ourselves. The decent person doesn't wish them personal harm. Nor do they rejoice in victory. How could we rejoice in victory and delight in the slaughter of people? Enter a battle gravely, with sorrow and with great compassion, as if attending a funeral. (c. 550 B.C.E.)
The problem is not a new one. Over seven centuries ago, people began to recognize that war was an attack on the innocent by the ruthless for the sake of the privileged. They wanted it stopped. And if that was an unrealistic goal, given the thirst for power in the human condition and the absence of any overarching negotiating bodies, they at least wanted it regulated. They wanted the innocent protected. After all, the people were not fighting their neighbors. They wanted the defenseless made secure. After all, war meant that armies were to fight armies, not civilians. So they turned to the church, which, by threat of eternal punishment, might be able to bring sense to chaos. They popularized and developed the just war theory, first articulated by Augustine, and for a while it seemed to make sense. But over time everything has changed: the nature of the world, the nature of war, the nature of weapons, and the nature of nations themselves.
Adults seem to have a problem understanding such things. Children see it clearly: Some second-graders asked their teacher what was going on between the United States and the place called Iraq. So the teacher said, "Well, think of it this way: Somebody in your neighborhood has a gun in her house. All the neighbors are afraid of it, and they go to Margaret, the owner of the gun, to ask her if she'll get rid of it. "And Margaret said yes, she would. But after a while, the people began to doubt that Margaret had really thrown the gun away. So they went to see her again and asked her if she still had the gun. And she said yes, she did. "So they told her that the fact that she had a gun made them afraid, so she had to get rid of it. "But Margaret said no, she wouldn't because it was her house and her gun. "So all the neighbors went back to their own houses, got out their own guns, pointed them at Margaret, and shouted that they would shoot if she didn't throw her gun away. "Then a child in the room spoke up and said, "Teacher, that is a really dumb story. It doesn't make any sense." Right. When is war "just," or is war .already obsolete now?
***
"You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake," Jeannette Rankin wrote. But we go on trying. Why? What exactly is to be gained? The powerful stay in power. The innocent are expelled from their homes. Children grow up with fear and hatred in their hearts. Who wins what?
***
For war to be just, the first criterion is that it must only be waged in the face of "real and certain danger." So when did we start waging war "just in case"?
***
"All war is insane," Madeleine L'Engle wrote. Killing doesn't stop killing. It just gives the world a new reason to do it called "vengeance." In the meantime, the poor get poorer and the strong get stronger. Nothing really changes.
***
After years of Nintendo and shopping mall video arcades, Americans know that no one bleeds and no one gets hurt in war. In fact, we teach our children to love it. Or, as Ellen Glasgow said, "The worst thing about war is that so many people enjoy it."
***
War is not what happens in the military. It is what happens in the hearts of the rest of us who applaud it. Marianne Moore, the poet, wrote, "There never was a war that was / not inward; I must / fight till I have conquered in myself what / causes war.
http://www.beliefnet.com/news/2005/02/just-war-theory-is-obsolete
Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump? The Independent view on who should win
A campaign that has exposed many flaws presents only one competent candidate Editorial
After 30 years, The Independent has reached the point in its existence when as many readers are in the United States as the United Kingdom, thanks to the expansion of our online readership. Moreover, the election on Tuesday is arguably the most important in America’s history, with the choice on offer to the US electorate staggeringly stark. Its outcome will also have ramifications for the rest of the world.
We accept that for many it is hard to be enthusiastic about either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. It is a sign of the dysfunction of America’s political system that a process which has dragged on for 18 months has thrown up the two least trusted and unpopular candidates in the country’s recent history. Were they running against almost any other opponent from the other party, both would be near-certain losers.
What has unfolded in the US since Mr Trump declared his candidacy in June 2015 has much in common with the wave of populism sweeping the rest of the West, fuelled by fear and resentment of immigration, globalisation and supranational institutions in general, and stoked by anger at apparently out-of-touch and self-perpetuating domestic elites who failed to prevent the financial and economic crash of 2008, the aftershocks of which still reverberate. These forces contributed heavily to the Brexit vote. They are driving nationalist parties in France and other European countries. In America, the beneficiary is Mr Trump.
But Mr Trump is a man of breathtaking ignorance, vanity and shallowness. He exhibits alarming racist and xenophobic beliefs. He has mocked and threatened Mexicans and Muslims. He has a staggering disregard for the truth. His contempt for women is a disgrace. He has dragged political discourse down to levels until now unimaginable in an American presidential election, to the point of urging his opponent be sent to jail.
Breaking earlier assurances, he refuses to release his tax returns, unlike every White House candidate since Richard Nixon. His admiration for autocrats and tyrants is sinister, to put it mildly. His casualness about nuclear weapons is frightening. His concept of foreign policy, insofar as he has one, is purely transactional: what’s in it for the US? If that means the end of the Nato alliance, too bad. Such attitudes set the worst possible example to a world that still looks to America for leadership. Mr Trump, in short, is utterly unfit for the most powerful office on earth.
Ms Clinton sits atop the most powerful machine in Democratic politics, probably in all US politics. But she is secretive to a fault, sealed away behind a praetorian guard of longtime advisers, and inclined – as Clintons are – to assume there is one rule for them and another for everyone else. Such a mindset helps explain the fiasco of the private email server she used while Secretary of State. One may criticise the FBI for reopening the matter days before the election, but her problem is entirely self-inflicted.
Campaigning, however, is not governing. If her record as Senator and Secretary of State is any indicator, she has the makings of an extremely competent president. It is hard to imagine a better-qualified candidate for the job (a job, admittedly, for which there is ultimately no adequate preparation).
As her debate performances showed, she is a master of the issues. In foreign policy she might be more assertive than Barack Obama, especially towards Russia and China – no bad thing, many would argue. But she is an internationalist who would maintain and foster the West’s key alliances, and work constructively on the great questions of the day, from the Middle East to human rights and global warming.
At home, she is well aware of the country’s needs, alive to the left-wing populism that made Bernie Sanders so dogged a primary opponent. Her instincts might make her defer to Wall Street, but her political nous will tell her otherwise. In a Clinton administration, Obamacare, the most significant healthcare advance since Medicare/Medicaid in the 1960s, would be preserved and improved. Mr Trump, by contrast, has vowed to rip Obamacare apart.
Most important, as she proved in the US Senate, Ms Clinton is a pragmatist who is able to work across the aisle. Nowhere are such qualities needed as in polarised and hyper-partisan Washington. It would be a tragedy if Americans failed to make her the 45th President. [Abrisdged]
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/editorials/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-us-presidential-election-the-independent-view-editorial-a7399646.html
After 30 years, The Independent has reached the point in its existence when as many readers are in the United States as the United Kingdom, thanks to the expansion of our online readership. Moreover, the election on Tuesday is arguably the most important in America’s history, with the choice on offer to the US electorate staggeringly stark. Its outcome will also have ramifications for the rest of the world.
We accept that for many it is hard to be enthusiastic about either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. It is a sign of the dysfunction of America’s political system that a process which has dragged on for 18 months has thrown up the two least trusted and unpopular candidates in the country’s recent history. Were they running against almost any other opponent from the other party, both would be near-certain losers.
What has unfolded in the US since Mr Trump declared his candidacy in June 2015 has much in common with the wave of populism sweeping the rest of the West, fuelled by fear and resentment of immigration, globalisation and supranational institutions in general, and stoked by anger at apparently out-of-touch and self-perpetuating domestic elites who failed to prevent the financial and economic crash of 2008, the aftershocks of which still reverberate. These forces contributed heavily to the Brexit vote. They are driving nationalist parties in France and other European countries. In America, the beneficiary is Mr Trump.
But Mr Trump is a man of breathtaking ignorance, vanity and shallowness. He exhibits alarming racist and xenophobic beliefs. He has mocked and threatened Mexicans and Muslims. He has a staggering disregard for the truth. His contempt for women is a disgrace. He has dragged political discourse down to levels until now unimaginable in an American presidential election, to the point of urging his opponent be sent to jail.
Breaking earlier assurances, he refuses to release his tax returns, unlike every White House candidate since Richard Nixon. His admiration for autocrats and tyrants is sinister, to put it mildly. His casualness about nuclear weapons is frightening. His concept of foreign policy, insofar as he has one, is purely transactional: what’s in it for the US? If that means the end of the Nato alliance, too bad. Such attitudes set the worst possible example to a world that still looks to America for leadership. Mr Trump, in short, is utterly unfit for the most powerful office on earth.
Ms Clinton sits atop the most powerful machine in Democratic politics, probably in all US politics. But she is secretive to a fault, sealed away behind a praetorian guard of longtime advisers, and inclined – as Clintons are – to assume there is one rule for them and another for everyone else. Such a mindset helps explain the fiasco of the private email server she used while Secretary of State. One may criticise the FBI for reopening the matter days before the election, but her problem is entirely self-inflicted.
Campaigning, however, is not governing. If her record as Senator and Secretary of State is any indicator, she has the makings of an extremely competent president. It is hard to imagine a better-qualified candidate for the job (a job, admittedly, for which there is ultimately no adequate preparation).
As her debate performances showed, she is a master of the issues. In foreign policy she might be more assertive than Barack Obama, especially towards Russia and China – no bad thing, many would argue. But she is an internationalist who would maintain and foster the West’s key alliances, and work constructively on the great questions of the day, from the Middle East to human rights and global warming.
At home, she is well aware of the country’s needs, alive to the left-wing populism that made Bernie Sanders so dogged a primary opponent. Her instincts might make her defer to Wall Street, but her political nous will tell her otherwise. In a Clinton administration, Obamacare, the most significant healthcare advance since Medicare/Medicaid in the 1960s, would be preserved and improved. Mr Trump, by contrast, has vowed to rip Obamacare apart.
Most important, as she proved in the US Senate, Ms Clinton is a pragmatist who is able to work across the aisle. Nowhere are such qualities needed as in polarised and hyper-partisan Washington. It would be a tragedy if Americans failed to make her the 45th President. [Abrisdged]
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/editorials/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-us-presidential-election-the-independent-view-editorial-a7399646.html
Wednesday, 2 November 2016
Catholics and Lutherans sign joint declaration 'accepting common path'
Harriet Sherwood Religion Correspondent Guardian/UK 31 October '16
After 500 years of schism, will the rift of the Reformation finally be healed? Pope Francis is beginning a year of events to herald growing cooperation between Protestants and Catholics. The events also commemorate 50 years of dialogue and cooperation between the two Christian traditions to overcome the divisions of the past.
Tolling bells marked the pope’s arrival at Lund Cathedral, which passed from the hands of the Roman Catholic church to the Lutherans in the 16th century as part of the epic sweep of change across Europe. In the presence of the Swedish king and queen, Francis prayed that “the Holy Spirit help us to rejoice in the gifts that have come to the church through the Reformation, prepare us to repent for the dividing walls that we, and our forebears, have built, and equip us for common witness and service in the world.”
In his homily, the leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics said the two traditions had “undertaken a common journey of reconciliation. Now, in the context of the commemoration of the Reformation of 1517, we have a new opportunity to accept a common path, one that has taken shape over the past 50 years in the ecumenical dialogue between the Lutheran World Federation and the Catholic church.”
The anniversary presented an “opportunity to mend a critical moment of our history by moving beyond the controversies and disagreements that have often prevented us from understanding one another,” he added. The separation “has been an immense source of suffering and misunderstanding”, he said.
The joint declaration, signed by Francis and Munib Younan, president of the Lutheran World Federation, said the past five decades of “sustained and fruitful ecumenical dialogue” had helped Catholics and Lutherans overcome many differences, and had deepened mutual understanding and trust.
The declaration said: “At the same time, we have drawn closer to one another through joint service to our neighbours – often in circumstances of suffering and persecution. Through dialogue and shared witness we are no longer strangers. Rather, we have learned that what unites us is greater than what divides us. While we are profoundly thankful for the spiritual and theological gifts received through the Reformation, we also confess and lament before Christ that Lutherans and Catholics have wounded the visible unity of the church. Theological differences were accompanied by prejudice and conflicts, and religion was instrumentalised for political ends.”
The two leaders prayed for wounds to be healed, saying: “We emphatically reject all hatred and violence, past and present, especially that expressed in the name of religion.”
Luther’s challenge to the corruption and elitism of the Roman Catholic church swiftly gained support across Europe, helped by new printing presses which allowed his theses, along with other papers, pamphlets and the newly translated Bible, to reach people. The Catholic church launched a counter-reformation.
Followers of Catholicism and Protestantism persecuted and fought each other for decades. By the middle of the 17th century, Europe was divided between a largely Protestant north and Catholic south. Recent moves towards closer coexistence have been resisted by hardliners on both sides, and few people have suggested that the Christian church could reunite even though Francis has made ecumenicalism a hallmark of his papacy. On Tuesday, the pope is due to celebrate mass in front of a crowd of up to 10,000 people in Malmö before returning to the Vatican.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/31/catholics-lutherans-joint-declaration-pope-francis-christian-sweden
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