It was news to me when I received an email with a link from the North East Reader that the Evangelists are engaged in Child trafficking, moving children way from North east India to the Southern States of India, to get Grants from the Churches!
The Churches in turn get Grants from the Vatican and other Christian Groups Funds marked for religious conversion.
Please read my posts on this under Christianity.
The phenomenon may be new to India.
But it is rampant in Africa and I am providing a Link towards the end of this post.
“New Delhi, Aug 6 : Promising proper education, pastors are trafficking children from the north-eastern states to Tamil Nadu and Karnataka with an oblique motive to get grants from churches and abroad, the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights said in a damning report to the Supreme Court.
Inquring into recent rescue of hundreds of children trafficked from the NE states and housed in Homes illegally run by pastors in the southern states, NCPCR found that girls were even asked to give massage to the directors of these Homes and molested.
Analysing the situation in a detailed report, NCPCR said insurgency coupled with the virtual absence of government officials at the sub-district and block level to address the education, health and developmental problems have made the entire north-east an easy hunting ground for middlemen to lure out children from parents in the name of providing them proper education.
“All-out effort are being made by pastors and other category of persons who are reaching out to source areas through middlemen for getting children in order to obtain financial support from churches within the country or donations from outside,” the NCPCR said in response to a direction from the apex court to inquire into the incidents.
The source areas for the pastors are Tamnglong, Senapati, Chandel, Bishnupur, Churachandpur and Imphal in Manipur, North Cachar Hills in Assam and Meghalaya. The destination states are TN, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala.
“The main reason for children being sent out by the poor parents to far off places in southern states is due to their high expectation of quality education for their children which is not available at their own places,” the Commission said.
The other main reasons for the parents agreeing to send their children far away were no easy access to schools; lack of basic infrastructure such as road connectivity, power and hospitals; insurgency and lack of a sense of security among parents to send children walking to schools; poor financial status of parents preventing them from putting children in boarding schools; and absence of governance in sub-district and block level to address education, health and developmental problems of vulnerable families.
This provides a perfect opportunity for middlemen to exploit the situation and is being taken advantage of by pastors. But, the children get caught between the devil at home and the deep sea in the Homes in southern states, NCPCR said.
..”The book opens with a literally earth shaking event: the 2010 earthquake that devastated Haiti and the rush to adopt it engendered. Joyce focuses immediately on the infamous case of Laura Silsby’s band of bible-thumping pseudo missionaries from Idaho who were arrested trying to leave Haiti with 33 children and charged with kidnapping. Silsby and her Reverse Robinhoods felt justified and self-righteous, about taking from the poor to give to the rich, even building a resort in the Dominican Republic for adopters. A fit beginning to describe the zealousness that drives evangelicals to “save” children physically and spiritually.
In the end, many if not most churches dissociated themselves from Silsby after she was charged with kidnaping. The adoption industry and adoption advocates put the incident, like all adoption horror stories, in a neat little box labeled anomalies and continue right along, business as usual simply moving from country as they close adoptions in order to end the corruption. Not unlike claims that women cannot get pregnant from “legitimate” rape, Chuck Johnson at the Saddlebrook Church, argued that claims of fraud had been blown out of proportion, saying: “We have no indication of real, true corruption.”
There has been no woman Pope in the History of The Catholic Church.
Christianity is touted to be a religion which treats every one equally, it is its USP.
But no woman?
Pope Joan.
There is also the controversy that Jesus Christ had left Christianity in the hands of Mary Magdalene.
Why are women not allowed and what is so unique in Men ?
In Hinduism, right from the Vedic Ages, there have been many Rishis, like Gargi to Modern ‘Amma(Ma Anandmayi)’
” There has never been a female pope. There is a myth about a Pope Joan that in recent times has been revived, but which has been clearly rebutted by scholars.
Wikipedia has a good outline of the Pope Joan myth here:
– Roman Catholic Answer
The Pope is the Bishop of Rome, if he is not a Bishop when elected to the Papacy, he is tonsured, ordained a lector, then an acolyte, then a deacon, then a priest, and finally consecrated a bishop. Up until the ninth century, bishops were never elected popes as bishops never moved out of their diocese. Regardless, he is always a bishop, and only a man can be consecrated a bishop, so, no, there has never been a female pope.
– In the legend she was supposed to have been very talented, and, disguised as a man, to have risen through the church hierarchy to become pope, sometime in the Middle Ages.
It has been a popular story since the thirteenth century, but no one has ever found any reason to believe it actually happened.
Since there have always been women who felt they were really men, it is most likely that one was unmasked trying to become a priest. This would have started a rash of ‘what if she hadn’t been discovered’ stories, culminating in the Pope Joan myth.(wiki answers)
Ordaining of Woman in Catholic Church.
As more Protestant denominations, including the Church of England, have begun ordaining women, the Catholic Church’s teaching on the all-male priesthood has come under attack, with some claiming that the ordination of women is simply a matter of justice, and the lack of such ordination is proof that the Catholic Church does not value women. The Church’s teaching on this matter, however, cannot change. Why can’t women be priests?
Answer:
In the Person of Christ the Head
At the most basic level, the answer to the question is simple: The New Testament priesthood is the priesthood of Christ Himself. All men who, through the Sacrament of Holy Orders, have become priests (or bishops) participate in Christ’s priesthood. And they participate in it in a very special way: They actin persona Christi Capitis, in the person of Christ, the Head of His Body, the Church.
Christ Was a Man
Christ, of course, was a man; but some who argue for the ordination of women insist that His sex is irrelevant, that a woman can act in the person of Christ as well as a man can. This is a misunderstanding of Catholic teaching on the differences between men and women, which the Church insists are irreducible; men and women, by their natures, are suited to different, yet complementary, roles and functions.
The Tradition Established by Christ Himself
Yet even if we disregard the differences between the sexes, as many advocates of women’s ordination do, we have to face the fact that the ordination of men is an unbroken tradition that goes back not only to the Apostles but to Christ Himself. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church (para. 1577) states:
“Only a baptized man (vir) validly receives sacred ordination.” The Lord Jesus chose men (viri) to form the college of the twelve apostles, and the apostles did the same when they chose collaborators to succeed them in their ministry. The college of bishops, with whom the priests are united in the priesthood, makes the college of the twelve an ever-present and ever-active reality until Christ’s return. The Church recognizes herself to be bound by this choice made by the Lord himself. For this reason the ordination of women is not possible.
Priesthood Not a Function But an Indelible Spiritual Character
Still, the argument continues, some traditions are made to be broken. But again, that misunderstands the nature of the priesthood. Ordination does not simply give a man permission to perform the functions of a priest; it imparts to him an indelible (permanent) spiritual character that makes him a priest, and since Christ and His Apostles chose only men to be priests, only men can validly become priests.
The Impossibility of Women’s Ordination
In other words, it’s not simply that the Catholic Church does not allow women to be ordained. If a validly ordained bishop were to perform the rite of the Sacrament of Holy Orders exactly, but the person supposedly being ordained were a woman rather than a man, the woman would no more be a priest at the end of the rite than she was before it began. The bishop’s action in attempting the ordination of a woman would be both illicit (against the laws and regulations of the Church) and invalid (ineffective, and hence null and void).
The movement for women’s ordination in the Catholic Church, therefore, will never get anywhere. Other Christian denominations, to justify ordaining women, have had to change their understanding of the nature of the priesthood from one which conveys an indelible spiritual character on the man who is ordained to one in which the priesthood is treated as a mere function. But to abandon the 2,000-year-old understanding of the nature of the priesthood would be a doctrinal change. The Catholic Church could not do so and remain the Catholic Church.
The Pope’s right hand man has blamed the ‘devil and the media’ for the latest Vatican documents scandal.
Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone has made the accusations in response to a scandal over leaked Vatican documents in the Italian media.
Cardinal Bertone told an Italian Catholic weekly that journalists reporting on the leaks scandal are ‘pretending to be Dan Brown, inventing stories and replaying legends’.
Brown is the best selling author of ‘The Da Vinci Code’ and ‘Angels and Demons’.
The Associated Press reports that Vatican has been on the defensive ever since sensitive documents alleging corruption and exposing power struggles began appearing in the Italian media in January.
A recently published book contained dozens of documents from Pope Benedict XVI’s own desk and is seen as part of a plot to undermine Bertone’s authority.
Pope Benedict XVI has also complained about media reports that: “Went well beyond the facts, offering an image of the Holy See that doesn’t correspond to reality.”
Now Cardinal Bertone’s interview with Famiglia Cristiana has taken the complaints to a new level.
He blasted the ‘vehemence’ of some Italian newspapers in seeking to create divisions between the pope and his collaborators where there weren’t any.
“The truth is that there’s a will to create division that comes from the devil,” said Cardinal Bertone.
“The Holy See isn’t perfect and none of us wants to hide the church’s shadows and defects.
“But the Italian media in particular has gone too far, violating the privacy rights of both the pope and the people who correspond with him by publishing leaked documents.”
He also said that, contrary to media reports depicting factions opposed to him within the Vatican bureaucracy, he enjoys ‘an extraordinary climate of communion’ with his colleagues. Bertone added: “Personally, I don’t sense any sign of cardinals or church personalities being involved in any conquest of some phantom power.”
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