China - at it again.

Two Catholic priests in China's "underground" church have been detained for over a month after trying to join a pilgrimage, an overseas group said, as the government seeks to quell protest threats before the Olympics.
Zhang Jianlin and Zhang Li, priests from near Zhangjiakou city in Hebei province, next to Beijing, sought to join thousands of other Catholics on the annual pilgrimage on May 24 to the Our Lady of Sheshan shrine near Shanghai, the Connecticut-based Cardinal Kung Foundation said in an email on Monday.
"Both priests disappeared while they were in the hands of Chinese authorities," said the Foundation, which is highly critical of Chinese state restrictions on religion. "There has been no news on these two priests since their arrests."
China is preparing to host the Beijing Olympic Games that start on August 8. The government says citizens can practice religion in state-registered settings and has vowed Games visitors will be free to worship.
But wary authorities have also been seeking to stamp out signs of unrest, including dissent from religious believers critical of state controls.
China's 8 to 12 million Catholics are divided between a state-sanctioned church and an underground church that rejects government ties.
Members of the state-approved church also honour the Pope as a spiritual authority, but the government restricts formal contacts with Rome, which has had no diplomatic ties with Beijing since 1951.
Hebei, where the two missing priests come from, is an epicentre of the underground church. The two men were going to Sheshan, where the popular pilgrimage was this year restricted by strict police checks.
Police and government offices in Xuanhua District, Zhangjiakou, where the priests come from, refused to answer questions about them or said they had no knowledge of the case.
"Nobody would be detained unless they were suspected of violating the law," said an officer from the district public security office. She refused to give her name.
Pope Benedict, who has made improving relations with China a main goal of his pontificate, has said the Beijing Olympics would be "of great value to humanity".
He will send a Hong Kong bishop to represent the Church at the Olympics opening ceremony but no diplomatic breakthrough with China is imminent, a senior Vatican official said last week.

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The Seven Deadly Sins enter the 21st Century!

The Vatican has brought up to date the traditional seven deadly sins by adding seven modern mortal sins it claims are becoming prevalent in what it calls an era of "unstoppable globalisation".

Those newly risking eternal punishment include drug pushers, the obscenely wealthy, and scientists who manipulate human genes. So "thou shalt not carry out morally dubious scientific experiments" or "thou shalt not pollute the earth" might one day be added to the Ten Commandments.

MODERN EVILS
Environmental pollution
Genetic manipulation
Accumulating excessive wealth
Inflicting poverty
Drug trafficking and consumption
Morally debatable experiments
Violation of fundamental rights of human nature

The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that "immediately after death the souls of those who die in a state of mortal sin descend into Hell". The new mortal sins were listed by Archbishop Gianfranco Girotti at the end of a week-long training seminar in Rome for priests, aimed at encouraging a revival of the practice of confession - or the Sacrament of Penance in Church jargon. According to a survey carried out here 10 years ago by the Catholic University, 60% of Italians have stopped going to confession altogether. The situation has certainly not improved during the past decade. Catholics are supposed to confess their sins to a priest at least once a year. The priest absolves them in God's name.
Talking to course members at the end of the seminar organised by the Apostolic Penitentiary, the Vatican department in charge of fixing the punishments and indulgences handed down to sinners, Pope Benedict added his own personal voice of disquiet.
"We are losing the notion of sin," he said. "If people do not confess regularly, they risk slowing their spiritual rhythm," he added. The Pope confesses his sins regularly once a week.
In an interview with the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, Archbishop Girotti said he thought the most dangerous areas for committing new types of sins lay in the fields of bio-ethics and ecology.
He also named abortion and paedophilia as two of the greatest sins of our times. The archbishop brushed off cases of sexual violence against minors committed by priests as "exaggerations by the mass media aimed at discrediting the Church".

ORIGINAL DEADLY SINS
Pride
Envy
Gluttony
Lust
Anger
Greed
Sloth

Father Gerald O'Collins, former professor of moral theology at the Papal University in Rome, and teacher of many of the Catholic Church's current top Cardinals and Bishops, welcomed the new catalogue of modern sins.
"I think the major point is that priests who are hearing confessions are not sufficiently attuned to some of the real evils in our world," he told the BBC News website. "They need to be more aware today of the social face of sin - the inequalities at the social level. They think of sin too much on an individual level.
"I think priests who hear confession should have a deeper sense of the violence and injustice of such problems - and the fact that people collaborate simply by doing nothing. One of the original deadly sins is sloth - disengagement and not getting involved," Father O'Collins said. The Jesuit professor now teaches at St Mary's University in Twickenham.
"It was interesting that these remarks came from the head of the Apostolic Penitentiary," he said. "I can't remember a time when it was so concerned about issues such as environmental pollution and social injustice. It's a new way of thinking."

First Church In Qatar

DOHA -- A bitter debate has broken out in the tiny, oil-rich Gulf state of Qatar over construction of the Muslim country's first Christian church, set to open next month in time for Easter.
Critics have branded the concept as "repulsive" while supporters said building places of worship for other religions is a right guaranteed by Islam.

One former minister insisted there should have been a public referendum.
"The cross should not be raised in the sky of Qatar, nor should bells toll in Doha," wrote columnist Lahdan bin Issa al-Muhanadi in the Doha daily Al-Arab -- adding an apology in case the concept upset any readers in this country of 900,000, of whom only 200,000 are native Qataris.
The former dean of the sharia (Islamic law) school at Qatar University, Abdul Hamid al-Ansari, disagreed, saying having "places of worship for various religions is a fundamental human right guaranteed by Islam."
Ansari has written several newspaper articles welcoming the Roman Catholic Church in Doha, which is called St. Mary's and will be inaugurated on March 15 by Vatican envoy Cardinal Ivan Dias.
Four other Christian denominations are also planning to build churches in Qatar, whose ruling family and most of its small native population adheres to a strict rigorous doctrine of Islam known as Wahhabism.
Once St. Mary's opens, neighbor Saudi Arabia, which also practices Wahhabism, will be the only Arab nation in the Gulf that bans churches.
Gas-wealthy Qatar has opened up since current ruler and staunch US ally Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani seized control and ousted his father in a 1995 palace coup.
Qatar's leaders have even hosted Jewish rabbis and Christian clerics alongside Muslim religious scholars at annual inter-faith forums.
But Ansari sees the old influence in the current opposition. He attributes it to "a fanatic culture resulting from religious teaching (stipulating) hatred for the other and from social norms that denied non-Muslims their rights on the basis of old political and security considerations that have become obsolete."
St. Mary's parish priest, Father Tomasito Veneracion, a Filipino, stressed in comments to the daily Al-Raya that the church would be "merely a place for collective prayer."
It would not have crosses outside the building or serve as a platform for proselytizing, he said, adding that it would finally provide a place of worship for those who up to now were forced to practice religious rituals at home.
It would be open in time for the solemn Easter holy day, which this year falls on March 23.
For other Christians, construction of an Anglican church will begin in May, according to Qatar's Anglican priest Canon William Schwarz.
Building has already begun on a Greek Orthodox Church and another for Copts.
The Vatican website estimates about 100,000 Qatar residents are Christian. Most are Indians, Filipinos, Lebanese and Western nationals who, despite praying in private, have celebrated Christmas publicly for about a decade.
The debate meanwhile has spilled into the letters pages of Doha's dailies.
Engineer Rashed al-Subaie, in a letter to Al-Watan, agreed Christians should be allowed to practice their faith but should do so "in line with public morals without being given licenses to set up places of worship."
Christians should "worship their God in their homes," not publicly, he wrote.
Lawyer and former justice minister Najib al-Nuaimi also objected to building churches in Qatar on "legal and social" grounds.
"Qatar is a Muslim -- not secular -- state, as per its constitution. There should have been a referendum on the building of these churches in order to ensure they are socially accepted," he told Agence France-Presse.
But Ansari hit back at those citing Islamic texts to justify their rejection, notably Muhanadi who has quoted the Prophet Mohammed saying "no two religions will come together in the Arabian peninsula."
"This does not mean that churches should be banned in Qatar because [Islamic] religious scholars believe it applies to Hijaz -- specifically Mecca and Medina," Islam's two holiest cities in Saudi Arabia, Ansari said.
"Let's all welcome the presence of churches in Qatar as a demonstration of Islamic tolerance and human brotherhood," he said.
Agence France-PresseFirst Posted 12:59:00 02/19/2008

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