Catholics dictating terms

Catholic hospitals provide care for people from the moment of conception to the moment of natural death and pain is alleviated by all the wonderful options available today with the use of morphia and other pain relieving medications. Anyone is welcome to be treated in a catholic hospital What we don't offer is prodeath medical care because it is the antithesis of good medical care. Catholic doctors and nurses want to save and preserve life not to hasten its end.

"Why the need to try to force catholic institutions to betray their own "mission" Large catholic hospitals have always provided care from the moment of conception to the moment of natural death .Why the need to try to force them into offering abortion and other services that go against catholic teaching?
What has changed?"

Uhh, gee, Mary. No one IS forcing catholics to betray their nonsensical beliefs. But if they want to enjoy the benefits of government funding, they have to stay within the law. And why don't you quit beating around the bush - catholic hospitals provide care "from the moment of conception to the moment of natural death" except when the mother wants even directions to where she can learn about abortion (a legal medical procedure), or natural death can be put off to soak up some more insurance money keeping gramps in pain and on life support. Remember, the suffering is good for you.

Why the need to try to force catholic institutions to betray their own "mission" Large catholic hospitals have always provided care from the moment of conception to the moment of natural death .Why the need to try to force them into offering abortion and other services that go against catholic teaching?
What has changed?

Obviously the RCC is not the only tax-exempt group lobbying Congress.

From guidestar.com:

“The tax-exempt The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith has a professional lobbying staff of approximately 528 in 28 offices nationwide, of those , two staff members based in Washington DC devoted 75% of their time, and the other devoted approximately 50% engaged in advocacy on (Congressional) legislative proposals related to federal hate crime laws, global anti-terrorism, the Middle East Peace Process, immigration issues, the use of government money to fund faith-based organizations and counter-terrorism proposals outside Washington, DC.”

The total revenue for the ADL in 2008 was $59,960,134 mostly coming from contributions and grants.

The largest of the lobbyists:(note the large sums of money being spent by health "profiteers" )

Lobbying Client Total 1998-2009

US Chamber of Commerce $606,758,180
American Medical Assn $220,832,500
General Electric $196,410,000
AARP $175,702,064
American Hospital Assn $174,890,431
Pharmaceutical Rsrch & Mfrs of America $173,403,920
AT&T Inc $150,471,757
Northrop Grumman $143,005,253
Exxon Mobil $138,886,942
National Assn of Realtors $138,417,380
Blue Cross/Blue Shield $136,317,077
Business Roundtable $134,030,000
Edison Electric Institute $133,995,999
Verizon Communications $132,534,841
Lockheed Martin $122,340,423
Boeing Co $121,528,310
General Motors $106,914,483
Southern Co $104,620,694
Freddie Mac $96,194,048
Altria Group $93,650,000

Would the move to end tax exemptions for any group generate the added taxes/contributions needed to pay for universal health care??

The money spent by the health-"profiteers" on lobbying should be spent on health insurance for those that cannot presently afford it.

Obviously the RCC is not the only tax-exempt group lobbying Congress.

From guidestar.com:

“The tax-exempt The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith has a professional lobbying staff of approximately 528 in 28 offices nationwide, of those , two staff members based in Washington DC devoted 75% of their time, and the other devoted approximately 50% engaged in advocacy on (Congressional) legislative proposals related to federal hate crime laws, global anti-terrorism, the Middle East Peace Process, immigration issues, the use of government money to fund faith-based organizations and counter-terrorism proposals outside Washington, DC.”

The total revenue for the ADL in 2008 was $59,960,134 mostly coming from contributions and grants.

The largest of the lobbyists:

Lobbying Client Total 1998-2009

US Chamber of Commerce $606,758,180
American Medical Assn $220,832,500
General Electric $196,410,000
AARP $175,702,064
American Hospital Assn $174,890,431
Pharmaceutical Rsrch & Mfrs of America $173,403,920
AT&T Inc $150,471,757
Northrop Grumman $143,005,253
Exxon Mobil $138,886,942
National Assn of Realtors $138,417,380
Blue Cross/Blue Shield $136,317,077
Business Roundtable $134,030,000
Edison Electric Institute $133,995,999
Verizon Communications $132,534,841
Lockheed Martin $122,340,423
Boeing Co $121,528,310
General Motors $106,914,483
Southern Co $104,620,694
Freddie Mac $96,194,048
Altria Group $93,650,000

Would the move to end tax exemptions for any group generate the added taxes/contributions needed to pay for universal health care??

Is the following due to the Nation of Israel's convictions or simply their restrictions?

Last update - 04:34 17/07/2009
Holocaust survivors: Israel's Leumi bank crueler than EU banks

By Cnaan Liphshiz, Haaretz Correspondent

Tags: Jewish World, Bank Leumi

Bank Leumi's refusal to return money that belonged to Jews murdered in the Holocaust seriously harms efforts to retrieve Jewish property from European banks, leaders of restitution organizations said Thursday at a demonstration in Tel Aviv. Bank Leumi denies these claims.

About 100 Holocaust survivors demonstrated outside the bank's head office, demanding that it return NIS 300 million they say belongs to Jews murdered during the Holocaust. The bank's management - which held an annual meeting in the building - did not send a representative to speak to the elderly men and women.
Mordechai Hareli, chairman of the organization representing Jewish forced laborers, said: "We're fighting against a Jewish institution which surpasses European banks in its level of hearltessness." Avraham Roet, founder of the Company for Location and Restitution of Holocaust Victims Assets, added: "The refusal to meet us is almost as infuriating as the appropriation of funds."

The demonstration was held by Roet's company and the survivors' umbrella group, the Centre of Organizations of Holocaust Survivors in Israel. It concerned money which the bank is accused of taking from European Jews, who deposited funds before the Nazis murdered them. The Company recently sued Bank Leumi for NIS 305 million. "

Catholic schools, hospitals and social welfare agencies were originally built up by the generosity of catholic people with little if any government funding despite the fact that catholics citizens paid their share of taxes to the IRS.
No one objected to the Catholic values of great hospitals then What has changed? Catholic hospitals remain committed to the values of great medical practice.

Farnaz,

Good posts on the state of the RCC. All I can see there today, in the priesthood hierarchy, especially from bishop up, is nothing but lust for power, wealth, corruption, a regression into the 14th century, and dragging little boys into closets.

tctowercover,

I have now met three more Turkish people in New York, but they are not poets. :(

Read the rest of this nauseating article in WaPo. See link below. Again, Vatican Nation is blaming others for its endless moral delinquency. It holds the Christian Orthodox, for example, guilty for the Italian investigation of Vatican Bank's laundering 200 million mafia dollars.

We allow this morally bankrupt FOREIGN NATION to legislate in our CONGRESS, and award it nonprofit status.
----------------------------
Vatican officials defend pope on abuse

Vatican officials defend pope on abuse

By FRANCES D'EMILIO
The Associated Press
Saturday, March 13, 2010; 11:58 AM

VATICAN CITY -- The Vatican on Saturday denounced what it called aggressive attempts to drag Pope Benedict XVI into the spreading scandals of pedophile priests in his German homeland.

It also insisted that church confidentiality doesn't prevent bishops from reporting abuse to police.

The Vatican's campaign to defend the pope's reputation and resolve in combatting clergy abuse of minors followed acknowledgment by the Munich archdiocese that it had transferred a suspected pedophile priest to community work while Benedict was archbishop there.

Benedict is also under fire for a 2001 church directive he wrote while a Vatican cardinal, instructing bishops to keep abuse cases confidential.

Germany's justice minister has blamed the directive for what she called a "wall of silence" preventing prosecution.

Skeptical about the Vatican's handling of abuse, a U.S.-based advocacy group for abuse victims, Survivors Network of those Abused for Priests, urged faithful to bring candles and childhood photos to vigils outside churches, cathedrals and German consulates across the U.S. this weekend to remind people to "call police, not bishops" in cases of suspected abuse.

CONTINUED

But the Holy See's so-called prosecutor for clergy sex abuse cases, providing some of the first statistics about his office's handling of allegations, decried what he called "false and defamatory" contentions that Benedict had promoted a "policy of cover up."

At the Vatican, rules on handling sexual abuse were "never understood as a ban on making a complaint to civil authorities," Monsignor Charles Scicluna told Italian bishops conference daily Avvenire.

But Irish bishops have said the document was widely taken to mean they shouldn't go to police. And victims' lawyers in the U.S. say the document shows the church tried to obstruct justice.

Scicluna contended that in countries that do not oblige bishops to go to authorities with allegations of abuse, "we encourage them to invite the victims to report these priests."

The Maltese prelate said the pope had taken on the "painful responsibility" of personally deciding to remove those priests involved in "particularly grave cases with heavy proof."

Those cases amounted to about 10 percent of some 3,000 cases handled by the Vatican in the last decade, what Scicluna described as a small fraction of the 400,000 priests worldwide, and cover crimes committed over the last 50 years.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/13/AR2010031300790.html?hpid=moreheadlines

Might not be "on-topic" but added information is always good:

Added information about the problems of the Vatican Bank can be found at

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Works_of_Religion

Added information about the Catholic sex abuse cases can be found at

http://www.answers.com/topic/roman-catholic-sex-abuse-cases?method=26&initiator=CANS

Added information about others who apparently have been unfair to Holocaust victims:

"Steven Erlanger

International Herald Tribune

01-20-2005

Israeli banks holding assets from European Jews killed in the Holocaust failed to make a determined effort to return the holdings to their heirs, and when they were returned, they were not returned at their proper value, according to a report by an Israeli parliamentary committee. The government of Israel, as custodian for a large part of the assets, also failed to make a serious effort to maintain their value or to return them to survivors or heirs, the report said."

The assets of Israeli banks are posted at:

http://duns100.dundb.co.il/ts.cgi?tsscript=/2009e/e30a4

The top two banks in Israel have over $600 billion in assets.

The Vatican is a foreign nation with representation at the United Nations. It was recently judged a foreign nation by an Apellate Court in this country, which denied Serbian Orthodox, Jews, and Roma survivors and their heirs of 200 nazi priests the right to sue Vatican Bank, since the Vatican, as a Foreign Nation, is by US law, protected from law suits by Americans.

These Nazi priests, who ran and owned concentration camps, are not to be confused with the current Nazi priests, i.e., those of subsequent generations.

The murdering Nazi priests deposited the loot in Vatican Bank, established by Pius XII, for the express purpose of investing Nazi loot.

Currently, Vatican Bank, is under investigation for laundering 200,000,000 Mafia dollars. That would be the Mafia, which has overrun Italy, and which assassinates elected officials who try to stem the flow of organized crime in Italy.

The Vatican has as its no. 2 man, William Cardinal Levada, formerly of the San Francisco and Portland Archdioceses, both of which he bankrupted by protecting pedophile priests.

The San Francisco pedophile priest ring, the largest in America, the Salesians, was known as Levada's boys to law enforcement. Levada, who is now in charge of pedophile priest cases worldwide, lied under oath, got pedophile priests breaks from standing trial, obstructed justice, walked in on a child molestation scene and shut the door.

The wealth of Vatican Nation, excluding Vatican City and Vatican Bank is estimated at fifteen billion.

The financial statement of Vatican City is held secret as is the worth of Vatican Bank.

Pedophile priest abuse is under investigation throughout Europe and the Pope's brother has been implicated in protecting pedophile priests, as reported by the New YOrk Times.

The Vatican continues to refuse to open its WWII archives.

How is it that this grossly immoral foreign nation receives nonprofit status in the United States and is permitted to legislated here?

http://www.theosophical.org/publications/questmagazine/julyaugust2000/somerville/index.php

"From Exclusivism to Convergence:
How We Relate to the Religions of Others; Part 2. Pluralism, Convergence, and Response

By James M. Somerville

Faced with the fact of divergence in the religious traditions of the world, some believers in a particular tradition are exclusivists, rejecting all other traditions as errors. Other believers are inclusivists, recognizing other traditions as lesser or imperfect forms of truth. As possible responses to religious diversity, there remain two other approaches: pluralism and convergence.
"

Obviously, Paula Kirby is an exclusivist!!

There are different opinions as to what a religion really is or what a non-profit is. To be fair therefore, there should be no tax-exemptions for any group and that includes the Democratic and Republican Parties. Faith and community initiative grant monies should also be cancelled and there should also be no tax deductions for contributions made to charities and non-profits like The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith:

“This organization has a professional lobbying staff of approximately 528 in 28 offices nationwide, of those , two staff members based in Washington DC devoted 75% of their time, and the other devoted approximately 50% engaged in advocacy on legislative proposals related to federal hate crime laws, global anti-terrorism, the Middle East Peace Process, immigration issues, the use of government money to fund faith-based organizations and counter-terrorism proposals outside Washington, DC.”

The total revenue for the ADL in 2008 was $59,960,134 mostly coming from contributions and grants.

Would the move to end tax exemptions for any group generate the added taxes/contributions needed to pay for universal health care??

And the attention of our favorite one-horned-one-eyed-flying-purple-catholic-hater. Two with one blow. How lucky for you.

Ah, Paula, you have attracted the attention of our long lost Turkish poet seer.

Notwithstanding the ranting of the Falwells and the Robertsons and the Hagees, the majority of the men to whom we refer as “founding fathers” were not christers, but were humanists – SECULAR humanists – men of enlightenment who were fully aware of the dangers of mixing religion with state government. Because of their experiences with this unhealthy admixture, they wrote the Constitution, and its Amendments – ratified by the population – in such a way as to assure that the Constitution would ALWAYS trump religion. The first president of the US never even considered himself a christer, regardless of the fact that he accompanied his wife to some church services, always careful to leave before taking communion.

It is ultimately ironic that the hypocritical and superstitious roman catholic church should be so vocal in DC, in its resistance to the rights of and for gay persons, even as it is continuing to pay out vast sums of money (how much of that provided by the taxpayers of the United States, and the citizens of those European nations who are still taxed to support the papist church?) to quietly settle untold numbers of homosexual priests’ child abuse cases in the US, Europe, and now Ireland. It seems almost certain that the future will see many other such cases brought in and by other countries which have been polluted by roman catholicism. This disgusting, superstitious, gutter “religion” maintained silence during the Holocaust; maintains silence on the application of the death penalty in backwards states such as Texas; the current Bronze Age pope has forbidden the use of contraceptives in precisely those nations in which the rise of HIV among heterosexual people has far surpassed that of the homosexual community -- and thereby assuring the future sickness and death of a host of humans. The catholic church, with its withdrawal of charitable works for and among the needy of DC, proves that it has abandoned any standing it might have had to pronounce, or even comment, on anything that concerns human morals.

This vile man-made institution cannot be permitted to suspend the Constitution or Bill of Rights, nor to influence the making of laws in this secular nation, to suit the purposes of its papist leader.. If it cannot obey the laws and rules by which the people of this nation have determined to govern themselves, it has no right to US taxpayer dollars.

Catholic Church’s attempt to blackmail Washington fails

Back in November, the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington DC gave our nation’s capital an ultimatum that if they pass laws in favor of same-gender marriage that the Church would stop many of their social service programs which would help in adoptions, homelessness, and health care.

The DC Archdiocese used the Churches charitable services as a way to blackmail the city into discriminating against an entire class of people who are not necessarily even Catholic. The city responded by passing a law recognizing the equal rights of those in the gay community anyway.

The fact is that charity ought not to be contingent on what mythology someone believes in or in this case who a person loves. If charity is contingent on factors other than need, then it really isn’t all that charitable.

You can read the rest of my response to this topic:
http://www.examiner.com/x-8928-Philadelphia-Atheism-Examiner~y2010m3d10-Catholic-Churchs-attempt-to-blackmail-Washington-fails

I will be responding to every issue posted in the 'On Faith' section. If you would like to be notified when my new response is up, please subscribe.

Bit of a rant? The author does not like the RCC as is patently obvious. Unfortunately, she chose far too many words to tell us what is readily apparent to most of us: government money + government rules. As near as I can tell, this is exactly what the RCC did in Washington, DC when it chose not to provide services (I.E. with government money). The government has every right to set the rules for such money, and any religion has the right tomake a choice about accepting funds under such rules.

It astonishes me how the RCC takes these positions while at the same time having a gay sex scandal in the Vatican. Surely they can recognize the greater wrong of using their charity work as a hostage to oppose policies they dislike.

Frankly, the tax payers should never have been giving them or any religious organization money in the first place. Let the religious volunteer in the secular charities that will take their place, and have their own charities do as they will.

Gay marriage

My concern is that more and more gay men get STD. It seems that gay men is easier to get an STD.
According to the report from the largest STD dating site == Positivefish.com ==(if I spell the site correctly), the gay subscribers
increased continually. Most of them are sexy.

This is a pretty daft question in my opinion. If you receive money from any organisation (and that includes religious organisations) to carry out a particular function, then you are obliged to follow the rulings of that organisation. If you find that incompatible with anything that you believe, then hand the money back. What is the argument?