Christianity 666 – Page 2 – Sometimes Christians are their own worst enemy

January 8, 2019August 5, 2023

Rewarded in this lifetime

The Auckland Rainbow Community Church’s Stewart Peter Lineham has been honoured for his services to religious history and the community.

The 2019 New Year’s Honours List includes Peter Lineham for his services to religious history and the community.

Lineham who recently retired from his position at Massey University after 40 years has written and lectured extensively on the religious history of New Zealand, from Māori prophets to Catholic missionaries, during his distinguished career, with his earliest work focussing on the 18th and 19th-century history of British Protestant sects.

He has written several books on New Zealand’s religious history, including Transplanted Christianity: Documents illustrating New Zealand church history, which is now in its fifth edition and more recently Sunday Best: How the Church Shaped New Zealand and New Zealand Shaped the Church.

Lineham has been an active member of the Auckland Rainbow Community Church, serving also as a board member.

He has previously spoken to express about the role Christianity has played and continues to play in many LGBT people’s lives, despite the historic conflict between religion and LGBT people.

Speaking to express in 2015, Lineham said “a lot of young people never give Christianity or any kind of religion a thought, and quite a lot of gay people are pretty angry with religion. Most people in our fellowship have been through feelings like this themselves, and when they have confronted condemnation and misunderstanding they quickly walk away.

“But I think that there are lots of examples of religion which really does work in helping people and giving them a kind of anchor in life. I think a lot of this is at a personal level rather than as part of a church. A lot of the decline is a decline in church-going, rather than belief and longings” Lineham says.

Lineham says he sees the nature of participation in church changing to reflect society’s values and for LGBT people that will be a positive.

[ Lineham is well aware he targets children with his message!]

“My sense is that when churches allow room for people’s own sense of search for spirituality and don’t shove answers down their throat, they do pretty well”
“I think in our present culture people prefer to belong to something more intimate and meaningful and for gay people that is great.”

source

July 26, 2018November 9, 2022

Peado Michael Shirres influential in Maori Churches

Shirres taught a generation of Anglicans that sin can co-exist ok with holiness.

A Catholic priest who admitted abusing at least five children in New Zealand and earlier worked in Canberra was never reported to police, the church says.

And one of the women he abused says she believes there’s almost certainly Australian victims.

Five historical complaints were made in 1993 against Dominican Order member Father Michael Shirres, a priest and theologian who died in 1997, Auckland Bishop Patrick Dunn said on Wednesday.

However while Shirres confessed to offending over several decades, police were never alerted because the victims wanted privacy, the bishop said.

He was instead put through an independent sex offender program and removed from priestly work. He later apologised.

“At that time the policy with historic cases, as distinct from current cases, was to prioritise the wishes of the complainant,” Bishop Dunn said.

“We respected their wishes and realised that if we did not, people would not be prepared to come forward.”

He said the church’s practice was to encourage complainants to go to the police and the Dominican Order worked to support those who had come forward.

A highly regarded figure in communities in New Zealand’s Far North from the 1970s, Shirres lectured Maori theology in Auckland and authored several books.

In the 1960s, he was chaplain at the Australian National University in Canberra for several years and was there at least until 1964.

Whangarei resident Annie Hill told AAP within her parish there was talk Shirres has was already an abuser when he returned to Auckland in 1966.

She was abused from age five and has been left with post-traumatic stress disorder.

“He didn’t suddenly get off the plane back in his home country and become a child abuser,” she said.

Ms Hill, who took compensation from the church in the 1990s, said she was now compelled to speak out because she felt the Dominican Order in recent years had venerated Shirres despite repeated warnings.

“My father raised this with them in 1966. I raised it with them again in the early ’90s and then in 2016 I went back to them and said again: ‘I believe there are other victims. What are you doing to make inquiries?’” she said.

“At the level of action, empathy and understanding, nothing has happened.”

Dominican Friars Provincial Anthony Walsh – the order’s regional head – is overseas but a spokesman for his office in Victoria said the order would check archives to see if any accusations had been made against Shirres in Australia, although it was not immediately aware of any.

The order said it would reply later in the week.

Abuser NZ priest worked in Australia

July 7, 2018

Flashback: July 2008, Christian doctrine offensive to Muslims, says Archbishop of Canterbury

Along with the acceptance of LGBT as a norm, these secular humanist issues have been justified and promoted here in New Zealand for decades by the joint Catholic-Anglican-Methodist venture of St Johns College, Trinity College and the Catholic Institute of Theology, all based out of the University of Auckland. There were no papers available on apologetics or defending the faith.

Christian doctrine offensive to Muslims, says Archbishop of Canterbury

Key elements of Christian doctrine are offensive to Muslims, the Archbishop of Canterbury has said in a letter to Islamic scholars.

By Ben Farmer

9:22PM BST 15 Jul 2008

Dr Rowan Williams also spoke critically of the violent past of both religions and Christianity’s abandonment of its peaceful origins.

His comments came in a published letter to Islamic leaders, intended to promote closer dialogue and understanding between the two faiths.

However they come just months after Dr Williams was forced to clarify comments in which he said some parts of Islamic law will “unavoidably” be adopted in Britain.

The comments are also made as the once-a-decade Lambeth Conference begins in Canterbury. Up to a quarter of bishops are boycotting the event, as the Anglican Church faces continuing division over the issues of women bishops and homosexual clergy.

The wide-ranging letter, which covers difficult issues including religious freedom and religiously-inspired violence is in response to a document written last year by Muslim scholars from 43 countries.

Discussing differences between the religions, Dr Williams acknowledges that Christian belief in the Trinity is “difficult, sometimes offensive, to Muslims”.

The Trinity is the Christian doctrine stating God exists as the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit and conflicts with Islamic teaching that there is one all-powerful God.

Speaking about the history of the two religions, Dr Williams said they had been too often confused with Empire and control.

He said: “Despite Jesus’ words in John’s gospel, Christianity has been promoted at the point of the sword and legally supported by extreme sanctions; despite the Qur’anic axiom, Islam has been supported in the same way, with extreme penalties for abandoning it, and civil disabilities for those outside the faith.

“There is no religious tradition whose history is exempt from such temptation and such failure.”

He goes on: “What we need as a vision for our dialogue is to break the current cycles of violence, to show the world that faith and faith alone can truly ground a commitment to peace which definitively abandons the tempting but lethal cycle of retaliation in which we simply imitate each other’s violence.”

The 17-page letter, called A Common Word for the Common Good, is in response to a letter from Muslim leaders written last September.

That letter, A Common Word Between Us and You, was signed by 138 Muslim scholars to declare the common ground between the two religions.

Dr Williams described the Muslim document as hospitable and friendly and added: “Your letter could hardly be more timely, given the growing awareness that peace throughout the world is deeply entwined with the ability of all people of faith everywhere to live in peace, justice, mutual respect and love.”

His own dense and meticulous letter did not mention sharia Islamic law at all. He received widespread criticism from politicians and other clergy for his comments in February and later told the General Synod he took responsibility for his “unclarity” and “misleading” choice of words.

March 25, 2018

It’s only taken years: Churches push for inclusion in Royal Commission into abuse

Anglican Archbishop Philip Richardson (left) and Cardinal John Dew from the Catholic Church.

The Anglican and Catholic churches are making their most concentrated push yet to get the Royal Commission into abuse expanded to fully include them.

Anglican Archbishop Philip Richardson and Catholic Cardinal John Dew have met with the commission chair Sir Anand Satyanand.

“The Anglican Church needs to collaborate fully with the Royal Commission and we need the terms of reference to be extended in a way that allows that to be possible,” Archbishop Philip Richardson said.

“That’s the best way of addressing long-term hurt and long-term consequences.”

The Anglicans’ top General Synod committee is now also writing to the Prime Minister and the Children’s Minister calling for an expanded commission.

Some leading non-clerical Catholic voices have previously called for such an expansion – but now their top clergy are getting vocal too.

“We are saying that if they are going to move on to a stage of investigating institutions … then we would welcome having church institutions also included so that we too can learn from whatever failings might have occurred in the past,” Bishop Patrick Dunn, who heads the Catholic Bishops’ Conference, said.

The inquiry’s draft terms exclude scrutiny of abuse in institutions in cases where the state had no involvement.

So the case of a child sent into church care by the state would be treated differently to a child sent to, say, a Catholic school by their parents and abused there.

The government’s made its preference clear – even down to the email address of the inquiry: royalcommission.statecare@dia.govt.nz.

However, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, despite giving repeated interviews expressing this preference, has not said exactly why non-state agencies could not be included.

Survivors of sexual abuse by priests have been campaigning for an expansion, with some saying they would refuse to give their story to any Royal Commission that did not hold the institution to account in their case.

The Australian inquiry into child sex abuse heard 1100 complaints of abuse had been made against the Anglican Church from 1980 to 2015, and four times that against the Catholics.

“Certainly the Australian example is very salutary but we would have taken exactly the same position whether the Australian inquiry had been held or not,” Archbishop Richardson said.

As for other Christian churches, the consensus seems to be they all wanted to be scrutinised by the Royal Commission here, he said.

He was asking to meet Children’s Minister Tracey Martin, but is clearly keen to leave the government room to move.

“If the terms of reference are not extended, how can the church’s accountability be reflected? And we want to have those conversations with the [political] ministers … we’re really not sure what that might look like.”

The original whistleblower into Catholic clerical child abuse, US priest Tom Doyle, has said it would unheard of to try to have a second, separate inquiry into abuse in churches.

A Royal Commission spokesperson said Sir Anand had met the churchmen, was meeting a wide range of people and was not commenting on the content of any submissions.

She did not say if the public consultation on the draft terms of reference would be extended beyond the end of April or not.

Churches push for inclusion in Royal Commission into abuse

March 23, 2018

Religious academics KNOW they target Children with the LGBT message!

From the Church of England’s refusal to discipline William Yate when he was banished from Northland almost two centuries ago, until today, the churches have long been responsible for covering up those abusing children here in NZ. These same religious leaders are now openly targeting the sexualisation of Children into special communities with the LGBTQI++etc philosophy (that sex with anyone is ok because they claim our evolution from animals means that it’s only natural to follow our carnal instincts).

As lauded feminist lecturer Helen Bergin (Catholic Institute of Theology) claimed in her Auckland University School of Theology classes, “…life would be so boring if there were only two genders”. It was her desire that children be given opportunities at a young age to experiment sexually so they can chose their new gender. It was from these classes that Eugene Sisneros graduated while at St Matthews, only to take the Anglican Church to the Human Rights commission to normalise his behaviour as a role model for Anglican children. St Matthews recently held the thanksgiving service for the 2018 Pride Festival.

There needs to be a Royal Commission of Inquiry into NZ religious organisation’s child sexual abuse, modelled after the recent Australian one.