Tag Archives: roman catholic church

Sarah Teather on equal marriage – “I tied myself up in ridiculous intellectual knots”

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Sarah Teather has written the following public post on Facebook:

Next week marks 8 years since the Marriage (same sex) Act gained Royal Assent and became law. When the proposal for gay marriage came to parliament I tied myself up in ridiculous intellectual knots trying to find a way to navigate official Catholic teaching on marriage and my liberal instincts and campaigning history on gay rights. In the end, I voted against the bill. Wise friends said to me then that it didn’t fit with what they knew of me and I would regret it. They were right. In the years since as friends and acquaintances have got engaged and married I have inwardly cheered and thanked God that I was then in an irrelevant minority. I think this anniversary is a good time to say more publicly that I was wrong then and I am delighted now that gay people have the right to be married.

Posted in News | Also tagged and | 20 Comments

Daily View 2×2: 3 December 2009

Good morning and welcome to Daily View. With just 28 days until the end of a year, what an ideal time to hear Delia on Woman’s Hour and prepare for Christmas – whatever your gender.

Today is the anniversary both of Elvis’s ’68 Comeback Special and the awful Indian Bhopal disaster where, in 1984, a chemical leak killed thousands and injured hundreds of thousands. The Guardian has a photo series.

Today we also sing happy birthday to Eamonn Holmes and remember International Day of Disabled Persons.

2 Big Stories

Gays won’t go to heaven, says cardinal

Over in the Telegraph is the latest skirmish in the battle between Catholics and homosexuals.

“Transsexuals and homosexuals will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven and it is not me who says this, but Saint Paul,” said Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan, 76. In remarks which outraged gay rights groups, he claimed that people were not born gay, but chose to embrace homosexuality of their own free will.

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Opinion: In praise of Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor

To my deep amazement, it was standing room only at 9.30 am Mass at St Piran’s Catholic Church in Truro, Cornwall, on Easter Sunday. I arrived shortly before the service started but could only get a space on the floor at the back. Every bench and chair was occupied. It was easily the best church attendance I have seen for over a decade.

And for a practising Catholic like me, it was an inspiring – not to say, astonishing – sight, given the accepted wisdom that God is irrelevant, churchgoing is in terminal decline, and the only people who …

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged and | 40 Comments
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