Hello
Tomorrow I will be inaugurated and will officially commence my term as your trustee. I really looking forward to serving our catholic school community. Thank you all for your support.
Part of our job as trustee is to be informed about events, issues and challenges that we as catholic school supporters face.
During my reading this week I came across a few articles that I think you might be interested. One article is about the persecution of Christians and the other is about the misguided politicians who want to put an end to catholic education in Alberta.
It is important that you are informed about these events as go forward we Catholics in Ontario could find ourselves in the same predicament.
In up coming blogs I will try and provide you with articles that have been published that show why it is our constitutional right to have publicly funded education.
In the mean time, I ask that you pray for the protection of our rights to Catholic Education and that God may open the eyes of those that oppose this freedom.
Article number 1
CBC.CA News
Former education minister calls for single school system
Thu Dec 2 2010, 3:50pm ET
Section: Canada
Former Alberta Education Minister Dave King is
calling for end to public funding for separate schools.
?We want little Catholic kids to be educated beside
little Protestant kids, beside rich kids, poor kids,
Indian kids, refugee kids,? said Dave King, education
minister during the Peter Lougheed era.
?I believe in our kids being educated together.?
King has created a website and an online petition to
put an end to religious schooling in Alberta.
?The second thing that concerns me is that we're
conveying an advantange to one religious group that
isn't available to others,? he said.
?There are no Mormon separate schools, or Jewish
schools or Sikh separate schools.?
Education Minister Dave Hancock says people have a
constitutional right to a Catholic education.
?It would require significant movement to change the
constitution,? he said.
?It's been done ? Newfoundland did it, Quebec did it
? but I don't see any political will any real public
groundswell saying that they don't want to have what
we've got now.?
© 2010 CBC. All Rights Reserved.
Article Two
Toronto Star
Thrown to the lions; Christianity is arguably the most persecuted
religion in the world
Sun Dec 5 2010
Page: IN1
Section: Insight
Byline: Ron Csillag SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Illustrations: Bullet holes scar a stone relief of the Virgin Mary at the Syrian Catholic Church in Baghdad on Nov. 1, 2010, the day after seven security force members
and 46 Christian worshippers were killed when U.S. and Iraqi forces stormed the cathedral. They were attempting to free dozens of hostages held in an attack claimed
by Al-Qaeda gunmen. AHMAD AL-RUBAYE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Earlier this month, Christians who are free to observe
their faith gathered in churches around the world for
the annual International Day of Prayer for the
Persecuted Church. They recited pre-written
invocations for fellow Christians who face violence
and oppression.
Maybe pew-bound Christians should instead heed the
sentiments of escaped American slave Frederick
Douglass: "I prayed for 20 years but received no
answer until I prayed with my legs."
Certainly, there are many reasons to take action:
Terrified Christians in Iraq are still mourning the
50-plus deaths in an Oct. 31 attack against
worshippers attending mass at Our Lady of Salvation
church in Baghdad, in which a militant group called
the Islamic State of Iraq sprayed the sanctuary with
bullets.
Asia Bibi, a 45-year-old Christian mother of five in
Pakistan, remains on death row - after spending more
than a year in prison - for allegedly blaspheming the
Prophet Muhammad. Last week, a court blocked a
presidential pardon until an appeals court hears her
case. Also in Pakistan, police said two Muslim
extremists shot a Christian to death in Punjab
province shortly after the victim was granted bail in a
"blasphemy" case - and less than a week after Islamic
militants in the same province killed four members of
a Christian family for their faith.
In Uzbekistan, a Christian man has been fined the
equivalent of seven years' salary for possessing a
movie about Jesus.
The Vietnamese government has announced the
continuation of a massive military operation to "wipe
out" Christians in the central highlands who refuse to
join the state-approved church.
Christianity is arguably - and perhaps
counter-intuitively - the most persecuted religion in
the world. And the reason for the blissful
obliviousness to that fact of well-fed Christians in the
West is "ignorance," says Michael Horowitz, a U.S.
Jewish activist who has written on Christian
persecution. Horowitz contends this lack of
awareness "is fostered by preconceptions and
conventional wisdoms that lead many in the West to
dismiss anti-Christian persecution as improbable,
untrue, impossible."
Persecution of Christians just doesn't compute. After
all, it's the faith of record in the world's richest and
most powerful countries, where Christians have been
ensconced for centuries.
And given Christianity's well-documented history of
brutality, modern-day elites are more conditioned to
think of Christian believers as the persecutors, not the
victims, says Horowitz.
But the face of Christianity has changed drastically.
"There's still the mindset that Christianity is white,
Western and European," says Paul Marshall, of the
Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., and a former
senior fellow at the Center for Religious Freedom.
Today, he points out, two-thirds of the world's
Christians live outside the West. "The average
Christian, if one can use that term, is now a Nigerian
woman," Marshall says. And numbering 2 billion,
there are plenty of Christians to oppress.
Virtually every human rights group and Western
government agency that monitors the plight of
Christians worldwide arrives at more or less the same
conclusion: Between 200 million and 230 million of
them face daily threats of murder, beating,
imprisonment and torture, and a further 350 to 400
million encounter discrimination in areas such as jobs
and housing. A conservative estimate of the number
of Christians killed for their faith each year is
somewhere around 150,000.
Christians are "the largest single group in the world
which is being denied human rights on the basis of
their faith," the World Evangelical Alliance has
noted.
In a report to a conference on Christian persecution
hosted by the European Parliament last month, the
U.S. Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life put it
this way: while Muslims and Jews worldwide and
Baha'is in Iran certainly suffer too, Christians were
"harassed" by government factors in 102 countries
and by social factors, such as mob rule, in 101
countries.
"Altogether, Christians faced some form of
harassment in two-thirds of all countries," or 133
nations, the report said. Muslims also face
"substantial" harassment, the Pew report found, but in
fewer countries.
Christians face harassment in more countries "than
any other religious group," a Pew Forum
spokesperson told the Star.
FPinfomart.ca Page 21
Put in sharper focus, "at least" 75 per cent of all
religious persecution in the world is directed against
Christians, the conference was told.
The euphemistic term "harassment" encompasses
vigilante and terrorist attacks against Christians in
more than a dozen Muslim countries. In Sudan, an
estimated 1.5 million Christians have been murdered
by the Islamic Janjaweed militia, including some who
were crucified. In Nigeria, 12 states have introduced
sharia law. Thousands of Christians were killed in the
ensuing violence.
In Saudi Arabia, the only faith permitted by law is
Islam. Christians are regularly imprisoned and
tortured on trumped-up charges of drinking alcohol,
blaspheming or owning religious artifacts.
In Egypt, Coptic Christians are still reeling from a
church attack last January in which eight worshippers
were killed. "The situation is deteriorating and is very
tense," Sam Fanous, a leader of Toronto's Coptic
community, told the Star from Cairo. He said that
after Friday Muslim prayers, streets fill with
anti-Coptic protests.
In historically tolerant Indonesia, Islamic militias
have bombed churches in majority Christian regions
and killed or forcibly converted thousands.
China, meantime, continues to shutter "underground"
churches and ship pastors to prison.
Open Doors International, a group that reaches out to
persecuted Christians, lists the 10 most repressive
countries for minority religions and Christians in
particular: North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Somalia,
Maldives, Afghanistan, Yemen, Mauritania, Laos and
Uzbekistan.
The plight of Christians in Communist and formerly
Communist countries is "slowly easing," says
Marshall, but getting worse in India and across the
Muslim and Arab world, where even to own a Bible
means courting danger.
The reasons for this torment are complex, but
generally in these places Christianity is seen as a
proselytizing faith and a vehicle for Western
imperialism and colonialism. "There is a tendency to
associate Christianity with the West," Marshall says.
So why aren't Christians marching in the streets and
demanding action the way Jews did on behalf of their
Soviet brethren in the 1970s and '80s?
"Because most of the persecution of Christians is not
happening in our own backyard and the issue is not
generally reported in the mainstream media," says
Corey Odden, CEO of The Voice of the Martyrs
Canada, which is dedicated to raising awareness and
support for persecuted Christians around the world.
"The lack of understanding comes from a lack of
knowledge."
