LOVE MEANS NOT EXCUSING SIN (Letter to Dom Post, Oct 1)

I feel sorry for women who can’t marry each other (Knockback for couple on wedding, September 30), in their church of choice, but Christ made it very clear: Christians must obey Church teaching.

 

Rev Jenny Dawson makes the common mistake of conflating love and charity. “Love” means many things to many people but for Jesus it meant only the love of God (charity), which includes love for everyone. True Christian “inclusiveness” means loving God in all people as Jesus did, but not excusing sin in anyone, as Jesus himself did not.

 

And when I say “God” I mean the God of Moses who proscribed homosexual acts as an abomination, and the God of Sts Paul, Timothy, Jude and Peter who all reiterated this divine teaching. Scripture itself would seem to be very good reason why “the mainstream churches in New Zealand have struggled” with this issue. There’s pain involved, yes; but Christians follow Christ, who died in pain on a cross.

 

As to Pope Francis and his opinions on LGBTQ people, Pope Francis is not the Church. And “accepting and embracing” doesn’t mean condoning.

 

As to the plight of the Paekakariki Protestants, most likely a heterodox church somewhere will be happy to bless them soon.

LIVES AND DEATHS IN THEIR HANDS (Letter to Dom Post, Sept 30)

 

It's only logical that midwives are ”fearful of 24 hour work days” (September 29). It’s a truly awful situation which can only get worse.

 

This Ministry of ‘Health’ (more accurately a Ministry of Sickness) chaos can be sheeted home to abortion. While doctors and nurses in our hospitals continue daily, routinely, to mutilate and murder the unborn babies who are “in their hands”, of course midwives will struggle to care for the babies selected to live who equally “are in their hands”. We can only expect their morale and wellbeing to be zilch.

 

And they wonder why tertiary DHBs are “acutely short of midwives”.

'LIFE-LONG ANGLICAN" A WISHFUL THINKER (letter published in Dom Post, September 29)

The Paekakariki “life-long Anglican”('Gay village' vetoes church nuptials) who’s disappointed with the Anglican ruling against homosexual weddings has to be a wishful thinker.

She must have known that the Anglican Church, like all other Christian churches – including those at Kapiti Uniting Parish - has historically opposed same-sex relationships. Why should she expect the Church to bless hers?

Christianity opposes same-sex relationships because they are opposed to God. “Male and female He made them ... to go out and multiply.” So why does she think she and her partner are “uniting under God”?

The Anglican Church is not being “discriminatory”. It's just acting according to its beliefs. It celebrates and blesses marriages.

But same-sex unions are not, and cannot be, marriage “under God”.

CHURCH OF NICE, STATE OF NASTY

They tell me that the other day at Mass in the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit, Palmerston North, the congregation were virtually instructed to vote Labour tomorrow (or maybe today, given our new voting arrangements).

There's a line in the biography of Dietrich von Hildebrand which haunts me. One of the greatest Catholics of the 20th century, the philosopher von Hildebrand's discernment and courage in denouncing National Socialism meant he was listed as No 1 enemy of the Nazis, while the German bishops kept their heads down.

His bio was written by his wife Alice, also a highly respected Catholic thinker, who in the words of Cardinal Ratzinger has "done a great service in giving us this fascinating portrait", and the line which resonates with me is, "Woe to the religious leader who does not warn his flock that the wolf is at the door!"

The wolf is of course Labour's leader Jacinda Ardern, whose evil agenda of 'decriminalising' abortion and legalizing euthanasia merits her the title of New Zealand's own Hillary Clinton. But during the US election campaign another priest told me he couldn't or wouldn't pray for victory for Donald Trump - which means he must have preferred the alternative option of Clinton, presumably because he had no idea what she was on about. As the priest at the cathedral can have no idea that electing Jacinda would mean death for our most vulnerable citizens, either.

The Catholic Church in New Zealand in this century, like the German bishops in the 1930s, has opted for the quiet life. It qualifies for the title awarded to the modern Church in the US by Michael Voris.

Voris, a fervent Catholic, says what US Catholics have now is "The Church of Nice".

In New Zealand during this election campaign our own Church of Nice has done its best - in a nice way - to usher in the State of Nasty.

LETTING PEOPLE LIVE (Letter to Dom Post, September 21)

I’m with Rosemary McLeod (Kissing goodbye to social justice, September 21) on huge salaries, houses (expensive, leaky, in short supply), on "monster" tenants and landlords, rewritten building codes, student loans, and especially on hospitals and mental health in "permanent crisis".

Then she asks, "What could be more important than helping people live decent lives?" The answer to that is, what’s more important is letting people live.

‘Health services’ which routinely and deliberately kill thousands of patients are a monstrous disservice which serves up only sickness - a psychological sickness characterized by the symptoms McLeod quite rightly deplores.

New Zealand kissed "goodbye to social justice" the day we legalised abortion.

CATHOLICS DITHERING (letter to Dom Post, September 19)

Unfortunately, teenagers aren’t likely to share Dean Burrows’ “annoying rationality" in "fathoming the difference between euthanasia and suicide”. Teenagers are profoundly influenced by their culture and if that culture favours the sick and elderly ending their own lives they’ll naturally assume it’s okay for them to do it too.

Burrows’ shallow thinking is shared however by Jacinda Ardern, and not just on euthanasia but abortion, which she wants ‘decriminalised’.

Anecdotally it seems Catholic voters don’t know that. Catholic bishops have failed to warn their flock of the horrifying prospect of electing New Zealand’s own Hillary Clinton, and those in the know are dithering and squirming.

Left-leaning Catholics are reluctant to abandon their traditional vote for Labour, and nine years of leaving the most vulnerable to their own devices tempts right-wing Christians to desert Bill English.

So it’s not surprising the polls are all over the place. Obviously, one person’s “annoying rationality” is not necessarily another’s.

APOSTASY AT ST PAT'S (letter to DomPost, Sept 11)

St Patrick’s College rector Neal Swindells doesn't “like the word abstinence”(Schooling up on sex ed, September 9) but if “some students are gay” - which considering the brouhaha over LGBT 'rights' they're quite likely to think, but at that age can hardly know - at a Catholic school they like heterosexuals must be taught abstinence.

 

His school teaches “the IUD, the pill and emergency contraceptives”. Swindells knows that’s opposed to Catholic doctrine and in fact, far from sanctioning it, Pope Francis has praised the Church for maintaining that opposition.

 

The students seem to have been taught that “the greatest commandment” is to treat others as you would like to be treated. In fact the greatest commandment is to “love the Lord your God”.

 

Swindells says guilt is something “the Catholic Church imposed in the 1960s and 70s”. ‘Guilt’ is the pejorative now pinned on that spontaneous, natural feeling of regret for wrongdoing which has been around since Adam and Eve, and for which the Catholic Church alone supplies the remedy, in the confessional.

 

St Patrick’s Board of Proprietors and parents need to be aware that the college staff appear to have abandoned their Catholic beliefs. What they’re teaching is apostasy.

 

ARDERN IS NZ'S HILARY CLINTON (letter to Dom Post, Sept 7)

The Wall Street Journal says Jacinda Ardern is New Zealand’s version of Canada's Justin Trudeau, although more like Trump on immigration, and Ardern’s offended.

I say that her opinions on abortion and euthanasia make Ardern look like New Zealand’s Hilary Clinton.

And the pity of it is, she won’t find that offensive.

BRING BACK THE POMPOUS FAMILY DOCTORS (letter to Dom Post, Sept 7)

If “any parent” whose child does not attend school is liable to a fine (Mother in court over truant kids, September 7) why is only the mother in court? Where’s the father of the 15 year-old who tragically took her own life, whose mother got “no help at all”? Where’s the father of the runaway whose mother’s household was busy and crowded? And the father of the 13 year-old whose mother forced her to drive because she herself was drunk?

 

Rosemary McLeod reckons that “when abortions were impossible to get” (Fathers and their youthful follies, same date), when pregnancy happened “young men could shrug a woman off with no consequences”. As a matter of fact, back then you’d never had read four stories of children abandoned by their fathers in a single issue of the newspaper.

 

If only there were still “pompous family doctors” who refused the pill or an abortion on moral grounds, there would be far fewer children now “of solo mothers who’ll never know their fathers.”

BENNETT'S IN TOUCH WITH REALITY (letter to Dom Post, Sept 5)

I don’t see why there should be a furore over Paula Bennett implying that gang members have fewer rights than other people. She proved herself to be more in touch with reality than The Dominion Post (September 5), or ‘human rights’ lawyer Michael Bott, who are woefully behind the times.

Because the fact is we launched ourselves headlong down the ‘slippery slope to fascism’ in 1977, on the day we legalised abortion. Even though our Bill of Rights enshrines the right not to be deprived of life, we legally deprive around twelve thousand unborn citizens of their right to life every year.

That’s why a Government minister can now make the suggestion Bennett did, and why the media claim that most New Zealanders now think euthanasia is a great idea, and why some want to remove all legislation around abortion, to allow partial birth abortions and the practice of leaving live aborted babies to die, as they do in Victoria.  

I do wish people could be consistent, and acknowledge that unborn babies – who are undeniably human - have the same human rights as gang members and the rest of us do.

A princess and strange gods

Some mourner on telly tonight, during the media frenzy over the anniversary of Princess Diana’s death, recalled saying at the time that “no one expected this”.

I beg to differ. ‘I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt not have strange gods before me.’

My intuitive distrust of the Ruataniwha Dam (letter printed and illustrated in Dom Post, September 4)

Having lived in the utterly beautiful Bay all my life, I was relieved to see respected journalist Marty Sharpe (Beast should never have been let out of paddock, September 1) vindicate my intuitive suspicions in regard to the Ruataniwha Dam.

Really you can justify water-intensive cultivation such as dairy only in the rainshadow of the Ruahines. The Takapau Plains have been abused, their signature pine and poplar plantations cut down to accommodate enormous irrigators, laneways cut ruthlessly through pasture with cows mooching disconsolately to and from their unsightly sheds, leaving behind a trail of muck.

The saddest aspect of all this dollar-driven frenzy is the awful waste of money on lawyers, on ‘Eastlight ringbinders’ and a Board of Inquiry, money which could have been spent subsidising sheep and beef cattle farmers’ own water preservation and storage, and on research and promotion of crops which like lots of sun and not much rain.

Hawke’s Bay’s future lies with tourism at least as much as farming. We owe it to the land and our children to restore its beauty, and to the rivers their natural flow.