Luxembourg to Strip Monarch's Power for Not Signing Bill Allowing Euthanasia

H.R.H. Grand Duke Henri of Luxembourg

From LifeNews
By Steven Ertelt

The parliament in the tiny European nation of Luxembourg plans to remove Grand Duke Henri's power to approve laws because he refuses to sign a bill that would legalize euthanasia. In February, the parliament approved a bill to make the country the third to allow the practice.

Lawmakers approved allowing doctors to help patients kill themselves without facing any legal consequences.

The measure is due to have a final reading and vote later this month, but the Grand Duke, who holds executive power similar to a president and must sign off on bills for them to become law, opposes the measure.

Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker told Reuters on Tuesday that the parliament would put forward a vote on a resolution to change the nation's constitution to strip the Grand Duke of that power.

"That means he will only technically enact laws," Juncker said of the potential bill.

Juncker is a member of the Christian Social Party, which generally opposed the bill, but he said he expected a debate on the Grand Duke's power along with the final vote on the euthanasia bill in the coming weeks.

Just 30 of the 59 members of the nation's parliament approved the euthanasia bill back in February. Nearly all of the members of Juncker's Social Christian Party voted against it.

Catholic leaders are continuing a lobbying campaign with the hopes of defeating it on the final reading and they are joined by medical and physicians groups.

Under the bill, patients can request help in dying in a living will or advanced directive and doctors must get a second opinion that patients are in a "grave and incurable condition" before killing them.

The measure also creates a national commission that will evaluate every case to ensure the law and its guidelines are followed when patients are killed.

Melanie Phillips: "War Is Being Waged Against Civilisation"

Melanie Phillips, the British journalist and author, has written the most clear and perceptive analysis of the Islamic terrorist attack in Mumbai. What she sees and so many other commentators do not, is that this atrocity is not a random act or the result of local grievances. It is, rather, another carefully chosen battle in Islam's worldwide war on Western civilization.

While the atrocity in Mumbai was underway, other battles were and are being waged in India's eastern state of Orissa and in scores of other places around the world wherever there is a sizable Muslim population. Indeed, the more than 10,000 terrorist attacks waged since 9/11 have one, overarching, geopolitical goal -- the worldwide dominion of Islam. Unfortunately, Europe's leaders, and soon America's, continue to welcome enemy infiltrators among us, are willing to bankrupt our national economies with a UN Global Tax that purports to address "the root causes" of terrorism, under the false assumption that these "incidents" are the result of poverty and high unemployment, and in the one area calling for a high degree of multinational collaboration, they fail to see that it is all of the West that is under siege -- Christian, Jew, Hindu, the "I'm spiritual not religious" crowd, secularist and atheist.

The delusion under which the West continues to operate will come to an end; but how many wake-up calls like Mumbai must there be, how many thousands more must die, and how horrific must the catastrophe be before the West arises from its slumber?

The Shameful Betrayal of a Courageous Pastor

From Catholic Culture
By Philip F. Lawler

St. Mary's church in Greenville, South Carolina, is a model Catholic parish, with an outstanding young pastor. The liturgy is beautiful and reverent; the religious instruction is meticulous and orthodox; the lay people are numerous and active. There is a busy school (run by the Nashville Dominicans), and each year there are dozens of adults welcomed into the Catholic Church at the Easter Vigil.

But that's not why you've heard so much about St. Mary's in the past two weeks. In fact, the success of the parish is not why I'm writing about it today.

St. Mary's has suddenly become the focus of nationwide attention because of what the pastor said-- or rather, what the media said he had said-- about people who had voted for Barack Obama.

Read the rest of this entry >>

Another Priest Urges Confession for Catholics who Voted for Pro-Abortion Obama

From LifeSiteNews
By Kathleen Gilbert

A California priest has garnered international attention and strong praise for pointing out the moral peril of Catholics who voted for President-elect Barack Obama despite being aware of his agenda to aggressively promote abortion.

"If you are one of the 54 percent of Catholics who voted for a pro-abortion candidate, you were clear on his position, and you knew the gravity of the question, I urge you to go to confession before receiving communion," wrote Fr. Joseph Illo, pastor of St. Joseph's Catholic Church in the Stockton diocese, in a letter to his parishioners. "Don't risk losing your state of grace by receiving sacrilegiously."

Fr. Illo's kind but firm letter, dated November 21, mapped out at length the complex but grave moral situation, and took pains to outline the extent to which his admonition pertains to any particular Catholic voter.

“If you voted for a pro-abortion candidate, I cannot say for certain if you should refrain from Holy Communion. I don’t know what you were thinking," wrote Fr. Illo. "But voting for a candidate who promises ‘abortion rights,’ even if he promises every other good thing, is voting for abortion. It is a grave mistake, and probably a grave sin. No issue can compare with the legalized destruction of a mother’s child.

"I am writing to you because I love you and I care about your relationship with God," said the letter. "I am also writing because God requires this of me as a Catholic priest."

Read the rest of this entry >>

Obama Keeping Promises Made to Homosexual Groups

From OneNewsNow
By Jim Brown

President-elect Barack Obama is moving swiftly to appoint homosexual activists to positions within his administration.

Politico.com reports that 10 national homosexual organizations are working with the Obama transition team to get more openly homosexual people appointed to the incoming administration. Obama's transition team has also reportedly named at least seven openly homosexual people to transition panels assigned to review federal departments and agencies. Three of the seven homosexuals on transition panels have held high-level positions in the Clinton administration.

Matt Barber, director of cultural affairs with Liberty Counsel and Liberty Alliance Action, says Obama is keeping his promises to the homosexual lobby.

"Obama, throughout the campaign, signaled...very quietly, but nonetheless signaled on his web page and elsewhere that he essentially had signed off on every major demand of homosexual pressure groups," he said. "So it's not surprising that he has now allowed some of these radical activists to become part of his administration."

According to the Washington Blade, Obama officials also named President Bush's former ambassador to Romania, Michael Guest, to a transition panel assigned to review issues pertaining to the State Department.

Administrator of Charleston Diocese "Stepped In It"

Barbara Kralis, a prominent writer for various Christian and conservative publications has written an excellent, two-part defense of Father Jay Scott Newman who wrote the following to his congregation at St. Mary's Catholic Church in Greenville, South Carolina:

"Voting for a pro-abortion politician when a plausible pro-life alternative exists constitutes material cooperation with intrinsic evil, and those Catholics who do so place themselves outside of the full communion of Christ's Church and under the judgment of divine law. Persons in this condition should not receive Holy Communion until and unless they are reconciled to God in the Sacrament of Penance, lest they eat and drink their own condemnation."

In her article entitled "Administrator of the Catholic Diocese of Charleston stepped in it...", Kralis makes clear that not only is "Fr. Newman's Catholic parish very supportive of his courageous stand," he is backed by many members of the hierarchy throughout the United States and in Rome, and his statement is solidly grounded in "natural law and the written Word of God, proclaimed by the Catholic Church through its Sacred Tradition and through its Solemn and Ordinary Magisterium."

Whatever institutional politics prompted Monsignor Martin T. Laughlin's shameful repudiation of Father Newman's pastoral guidance, it points up the urgent need for the appointment of a competent, faithful bishop in Charleston whose heart and mind are one with the Church and its founder.

Barbara Kralis' article is here:

Part One

Part Two

Conservatives Have Important Political Value

From Aberdeen News
By Jon D. Schaff

The election drubbing recently taken by Republicans has given rise to much soul searching on the part of conservatives. What is the future of conservatism?

The conservative serves an important role in any regime. This is perhaps best illustrated by the story, perhaps apocryphal, of the slave who would ride behind a victorious Roman general during the triumphant return to Rome whispering in his ear “All glory is fleeting.”

The conservative's task is similar. It is for him to whisper in our ears “there are limits.” Human reason is not sufficient to solve all problems. Sin cannot be eradicated from the human soul. Society is sufficiently complex that it makes central planning difficult, if not impossible.

In the 19th century, Alexis De Tocqueville noted democracy's dangerous tendency to trust in the “indefinite perfectibility of man.”

But the conservative teaches that perfection is impossible. I recently asked a group of students what “utopia” means. They responded “a perfect society.” True enough, as this is how we often use the word. But “utopia” literally is from the Greek for “nowhere.” In other words, the perfect society is impossible.

Our love of even good things, conservatives teach us, must be a moderate love. To turn any particular thing into the sin qua non of justice is actually to do injustice.

The conservative reminds us that progress always comes with a cost. Perhaps one error of contemporary conservatives is to believe that the market is the sole of justice, perhaps promoting an immoderate love of the “progress” of economic change.

Conservatism suggests there is something worth conserving. As Abraham Lincoln famously put it, if conservative means favoring “the old and tried against the new and untried,” then he was a conservative. Lincoln gets at a central conservative truth: there is wisdom stored up across the ages that one discards at great peril.

Human order is a fragile thing. C.S. Lewis reminds that even war is not outside the norm of the human condition; war only “aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it,” and “human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice.”

It took roughly 4,000 years to build a civilization that was not brutal and vulgar. We are to be reminded that the now seemingly barbaric “eye for an eye” was actually a major advance in human decency. If you kill one of mine I will only kill one, as opposed to all, of yours. Yet civilization is fragile, on a precipice as Lewis puts it. Conservatives do their job best when they remind us of the value of the past and to innovate only with great trepidation.

This is why conservatives question the redefining of marriage, the diminution of the sacredness of human life in the name of “choice” and the rejection, indeed outright mockery, of traditional religion. If Western civilization was built on the solid foundation of the Christian church and the morality it promoted (if not always practiced), then only a certain kind of ideological arrogance suggests that we can casually dispense with that foundation and retain the fruits of that civilization.

Conservatives will prove the faithful opposition if they successfully remind that majority that even audacious hope needs its limits.


Jon D. Schaff is associate professor of political science at Northern State University in Aberdeen, North Dakota. The views presented here are the author's own and do not represent those of Northern State University.