A Future World Union of Church and State - and the End of Religious Freedom

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Trump sends congratulations to Pope Francis on 5 year anniversary

• Christopher White
  Mar 13, 2018
  NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT - Crux Now
  

NEW YORK - Despite perceptions in some quarters that they represent competing visions of the world, U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday reached out to Pope Francis, offering him congratulations on behalf of the American people on the fifth anniversary of his election to the papacy.

“My family and I treasure the memory of our visit to the Vatican last May. I was honored to discuss with you many of the urgent global issues of shared concern to the United States and the Holy See,” wrote Trump.

“Our conversation underscored the enduring importance of moral leadership in the international community, and of our continued close cooperation as we work to advance peace and defend human freedom around the world,” he continued.

In a closely watched half-hour meeting on May 24, Trump and Francis met for their first encounter and pledged their “joint commitment in favor of life, and freedom of worship and conscience,” according to the Vatican communiqué at the time.

“The discussions then enabled an exchange of views on various themes relating to international affairs and the promotion of peace in the world through political negotiation and interreligious dialogue, with particular reference to the situation in the Middle East and the protection of Christian communities,” it said.

Trump also met with Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin and British Archbishop Paul Gallagher, in effect the Vatican’s foreign minister, in keeping with the usual protocol for a visiting head of state.

“As you enter the sixth year of your pontificate, please accept my best wishes for the continued success of your ministry,” Trump wrote on Tuesday.

Following the May meeting, the Vatican issued a statement expressing their desire for a “serene collaboration between the state and the Catholic Church in the United States, engaged in service to the people in the fields of healthcare, education and assistance to immigrants.”

https://cruxnow.com/church-in-the-usa/2018/03/13/trump-sends-congratulations-to-pope-francis-on-5-year-anniversary/

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Pope and Trump focused on life, religious freedom and conscience, Vatican says

• Crux Staff
  May 24, 2017
  AUTHOR

U.S. President Donald Trump stands with Pope Francis during a meeting, Wednesday, May 24, 2017, at the Vatican. (Credit: AP Photo/Evan Vucci, Pool.)

Following this morning’s first-ever encounter between Pope Francis and U.S. President Donald Trump, a Vatican statement said that the two men focused on concerns they have in common during their half-hour together, including a “joint commitment in favor of life, and freedom of worship and conscience.”

Using the standard diplomatic verbiage, the statement referred to the discussion between Trump and Francis as “cordial.”

The Vatican statement, issued shortly before noon Rome time on Wednesday, some three hours after the meeting concluded, also said it’s hoped that there may be “serene collaboration between the state and the Catholic Church in the United States, engaged in service to the people in the fields of healthcare, education and assistance to immigrants.”

The Vatican communique indicated that Trump and Francis also discussed a variety of international issues.

“The discussions then enabled an exchange of views on various themes relating to international affairs and the promotion of peace in the world through political negotiation and interreligious dialogue, with particular reference to the situation in the Middle East and the protection of Christian communities,” it said.

The protection of persecuted Christians was a major point on the campaign trail for Trump, who vowed to make it a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy, and it’s also emerged as a major theme for Francis, who repeatedly has referred to a “vast ecumenism of blood” shared by new Christian martyrs from all denominations.

The statement noted that Trump also met with Italian Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Parolin, the pope’s closest aide, as well as British Archbishop Paul Gallagher, in effect the Vatican’s foreign minister, in keeping with the usual protocol for a visiting head of state.

In advance of the meeting, officials from both the Vatican and the White House emphasized they wanted a friendly encounter, and today’s statement strikes that tone. It avoided any direct mention of past flashpoints between Trump and the pontiff, such as the president’s call for building a wall along the U.S./Mexico border to halt the flow of immigrants or his reported

consideration of abandoning the Paris climate change agreement that Francis and his encyclical letter Laudato’ Si helped to inspire.

Francis, did however, find a subtler way of making his ecological case to Trump, presenting him with a copy of Laudato Si’ along with other papal texts.

From Rome, Trump departs on Wednesday for Brussels for a NATO summit before returning to the Italian island of Sicily for a gathering of G7 leaders.

So far, the White House has not issued a statement on the meeting with Francis. Trump is not scheduled for a press briefing while in Rome, though he met both the Italian Prime Minister, Paolo Gentiloni, and President Sergio Mattarella.

During his meeting with Gentiloni, Trump called Francis “something” and said he and the pope had a “fantastic meeting.”

In a statement issued later in the day, the White House largely confirmed the Vatican’s version of what had transpired in the meeting, adding one other detail: that the two sides had discussed anti-famine efforts.

“The President also renewed the commitment of the United States to fighting global famine,” a White House read-out of the meeting said. “As he relayed at the Vatican, the United States is proud to announce more than $300 million in anti-famine spending, focused on the crises in Yemen, South Sudan, Somalia and Nigeria.”

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Trump has to be happy with outcome of Pope summit

• John L. Allen Jr.
  May 25, 2017
  EDITOR - Crux Now
  

U.S. President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump meet with Pope Francis, Wednesday, May 24, 2017, at the Vatican. (Credit: AP Photo/Evan Vucci, Pool.)

ROME - If President Donald Trump had taken out a pen and a cocktail napkin to scribble a wish list for his first-ever meeting with Pope Francis - and, given the mercurial nature of the American leader, it’s certainly not impossible that actually happened - it’s hard to imagine he could have envisioned much more than what he got from the Vatican on Wednesday.

As has been widely reported, including by Crux, Trump’s team initially was reluctant even to schedule the May 24 encounter, feeling that they were drawing more than enough negative press at home and didn’t need to invite a story-line about a clash with a moral leader and perceived Trump antagonist.

It was only when people long involved in U.S./Vatican relations pointed out that no American president since FDR has come to Italy and not seen the Pope, and thus the narrative would be much worse if the U.S. leader were perceived as having delivered an intentional act of disrespect, that the meeting was planned.

RELATED: Pope Francis, Trump meet in ‘Odd Couple’ encounter

Once the meeting was confirmed, in the brief run-up much speculation suggested the get-together would be a pro-wrestling grudge match, with Pope Francis reprising his description of candidate Trump as “not a Christian” for his call for a border wall with Mexico, and reading the president the riot act on a laundry list of other issues, including climate change, anti-poverty efforts, war and peace, and any number of other flash points.

Certainly those tensions weren’t magically dissolved by the brief encounter between Francis and Trump on Wednesday, which lasted roughly a half-hour ahead of the pontiff’s regular Wednesday General Audience. There were reminders of them, such as Francis presenting Trump with a collection of his documents as pope, including his encyclical letter Laudato Si’, the first-ever to be entirely devoted to environmental protection.

That document helped provide moral inspiration for the Paris climate change agreement, which Trump reportedly is considering abandoning - and if he does, presumably he won’t be getting any thank-you notes from the Pontiff.

All that said, the meeting on Wednesday still has to be considered a win for Trump. As my Crux colleague Claire Giangravè put it yesterday on our Crux of the Matter radio show on the Catholic Channel, Sirius XM 129, Veni, vidi, vici … “he came, he saw, he conquered.”

First, when the two men met each other prior to the meeting, both seemed visibly tense. Francis wore the same somber expression he often does in formal settings, while Trump plastered an artificial smile on his face that seemed the dictionary-definition of awkward.

By the time the doors reopened at the end, however, both men seemed genuinely relaxed and at ease, with Francis even cracking a joke with Melania Trump about what she feeds her husband. (She responded with the name of a Slovenian delicacy that many Italians heard as “pizza,” causing a mini-frenzy.)

In other words, both leaders appeared to find a mutual comfort zone.

Beyond that, the statement released by the Vatican about the meeting roughly three hours after it ended was entirely congenial to Trump. It opened by stressing the good relations between the United States and the Holy See, including a “joint commitment in favor of life, and freedom of worship and conscience.” (The Italian version of the communique used the term “religious liberty” rather than “freedom of worship,” with the former generally being understood as a more expansive concept.)

RELATED: Pope and Trump focused on life, religious freedom and conscience

All three of those points were core issues for candidate Trump on the campaign trail, and he’s continued to stress them as president, recently issuing an executive order on religious freedom.

The statement also mentioned “the protection of Christian communities” in the Middle East, which is another area of common cause between this White House and the Vatican under Pope Francis. Both Trump and Vice President Mike Pence have vowed to step up U.S. efforts to defend persecuted Christians, while Pope Francis has made the Church’s new martyrs a signature concern, often referring to a “vast ecumenism of blood” uniting suffering Christians around the world.

The statement made no direct mention of areas of disagreement, and certainly carried no suggestion that the pope had wagged an admonishing finger at Trump. Even a brief reference to immigration wasn’t really about the policy question itself, but rather the care delivered by the Catholic Church in America to immigrants.

Granted, this was always how things were likely to play out. Francis is a man of dialogue who doesn’t make a habit of embarrassing visiting heads of state, and moreover, the Vatican needs good relations with the United States to achieve its aim of being a voice of conscience in global affairs.

On Trump’s side, beyond the fact that he was simply desperate for a good bit of news, he also knows that he was elected in part thanks to religious voters, including Catholics, and that he needs those folks to govern. Picking a fight with the pope, therefore, was never in his self-interest.

Even so, the dynamics on Wednesday were probably more than even a president determined to make things work could have anticipated, perhaps explaining why Trump gushed before leaving Rome on Wednesday that Francis is “something” and that their meeting was “fantastic.”

It’s worth remembering that TV’s original “Odd Couple” became close friends and made things work, despite their wildly different personalities. One half-hour meeting hardly means that’s destiny this time too … but at least from Trump’s point of view, it probably can’t help but seem a good start.

In 1979, almost a year into the papacy of John Paul II, a novel called The Vicar of Christ spent 13 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. The work of a Princeton legal scholar, Walter F. Murphy, it featured an unlikely papal candidate named Declan Walsh—first a war hero, then a United States Supreme Court justice, and then (after an affair and his wife’s untimely death) a monk—who is summoned to the throne of Saint Peter by a deadlocked, desperate conclave.

Once elevated, Walsh takes the name Francesco—that is, Francis—and sets about using the office in extraordinary ways. He launches a global crusade against hunger, staffed by Catholic youth and funded by the sale of Vatican treasures. He intervenes repeatedly in world conflicts, at one point flying into Tel Aviv during an Arab bombing campaign. He lays plans to gradually reverse the Church’s teachings on contraception and clerical celibacy, and banishes conservative cardinals to monastic life when they plot against him. He flirts with the Arian heresy, which doubted Jesus’s full divinity, and he embraces Quaker-style religious pacifism, arguing that just-war theory is out of date in an age of nuclear arms and total war. (This last move eventually gets him assassinated, probably by one of the governments threatened by his quest for peace.)

Murphy’s book is mostly forgotten, but his hook, the idea of a progressive pope who sets out to bring sweeping change to Catholicism, has endured in the cultural imagination. The priest-novelist Andrew M. Greeley’s 1996 potboiler White Smoke, for instance, culminates in the election of a modernizing Spanish cardinal, whose conservative opponents are undone by the wily politicking of two Irish American prelates. Two years ago, Showtime shot a pilot for a series called The Vatican, in which Kyle Chandler (a k a Coach Taylor from Friday Night Lights) played a rising-star New York cardinal with progressive views—only to spike the show, perhaps feeling overtaken by events, 10 months after Pope Benedict XVI unexpectedly resigned.

The possibility of a revolutionary pope isn’t one that most Vatican-watchers have taken seriously, and not only because a college of cardinals with members appointed by John Paul and Benedict seemed unlikely to elevate a true wild card to the office. The reality is that popes are rarely the great protagonists of Catholic dramas. They are circumscribed by tradition and hemmed in by bureaucracy, and on vexing issues Rome tends to move last, after arguments have been thrashed out for generations.

The arc of Jorge Bergoglio’s career follows a literary script: youthful success, defeat and exile, unexpected vindication and ascent.

Yet now we have a Pope Francesco in the flesh, and elements of Murphy’s vision have come to pass, or so it seems: the attention-grabbing breaks with papal protocol, the interventions in global politics, the reopening of moral issues that his predecessors had deemed settled, and the blend of public humility and skillful exploitation—including the cashiering of opponents—of the papal office and its powers.

The Church is not yet in the grip of a revolution. The limits, theological and practical, on papal power are still present, and the man who was Jorge Bergoglio has not done anything that explicitly puts them to the test. But his moves and choices (and the media coverage thereof) have generated a revolutionary atmosphere around Catholicism. For the moment, at least, there is a sense that a new springtime has arrived for the Church’s progressives. And among some conservative Catholics, there is a feeling of uncertainty absent since the often-chaotic aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, in the 1960s and ’70s.

That unease has coexisted with a tendency to deny that anything has really changed since the former cardinal and archbishop of Buenos Aires became pope. From the first unscripted shocker—his “Who am I to judge?” in response to a reporter’s question about gay priests—many conservative Catholics have argued that the press is seeing what it wants to see in the new pontiff. Taking his comments and gestures out of context, reporters are imposing a Declan Walsh frame on a reality in which continuity is still the order of the day.

The conservative observers are often right. Some of Francis’s gestures mirror moves his predecessors made to less fanfare or acclaim. Some of his forays into world affairs, like the opening to Cuba, build on Vatican diplomatic efforts begun before his time. Some of his leftward-tilting public statements—the critiques of global capitalism, the stress on environmental stewardship—are in step with the rhetoric of both John Paul and Benedict. Some of his headline-grabbing comments (on the compatibility of Catholic doctrine and evolutionary theory, say) get attention only because certain reporters have no real clue about what Catholicism teaches; others (like his alleged promise that pets go to heaven) because journalists will believe any story that fits the “maverick pope” narrative.

Yet the media are not deceived in thinking that Francis differs from his predecessors in substance as well as style. He may not be a liberal Catholic as the term is understood in an American or European context, but he has a different set of priorities than the previous two popes did. He reads the times differently, and elements of his agenda are clearly in tune with what many progressive Catholics (and progressives, period) in the West have long hoped for from the Church.

The exact details of that agenda can sometimes be difficult to discern. Phrases like master of ambiguity circulate among admirers and critics alike. But there are now a number of biographies of Francis/Bergoglio in English, and three of them, read together, give a provisional sense of where this pope is coming from. They also suggest why his pontificate, without being as deliberately revolutionary as the reigns of the liberal popes of fiction, might have dramatic consequences for the Church.

The arc of Bergoglio’s life and career follows a literary script: youthful success, defeat and exile, unexpected vindication and ascent. Each of his three biographers approaches the story in a different way. Elisabetta Piqué, a correspondent for the Argentine newspaper La Nación, has written an intensely personal work (Bergoglio baptized her two children); her Pope Francis: Life and Revolution draws richly on interviews with Argentinians touched by Bergoglio’s pastoral work. The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope, by the British Catholic journalist Austen Ivereigh, has the widest angle and the most depth, taking in Argentina’s distinctive history as well as the particular trajectory of its now most famous son. In Pope Francis: Untying the Knots, Paul Vallely, another British Catholic writer on religion, develops a distinctive interpretation of his subject.

But the basic narrative is there in all three treatments. The descendant of Italian immigrants to Argentina, devout from an early age and committed to the priesthood after a teenage epiphany, Bergoglio entered the Jesuit order in 1958, just four years before the Second Vatican Council opened in Rome. His training was long (Jesuits spend more than a decade “in formation”) and initially old-fashioned in its rigors; the order in Argentina devoted a great deal of its work to educating the national elite. But by the time he took his final vow and became a Jesuit in full, in 1973, the reforms of the Council and the turbulence that followed had dramatically changed his order, and divided it.

Many of Bergoglio’s fellow Jesuits believed they had a postconciliar mandate to make the pursuit of social justice the order’s organizing mission. In Latin America, the emerging Big Idea for what this meant was liberation theology, which promoted a synthesis between Gospel faith and Marxist-flavored political activism. Argentina’s provincial, the head of the country’s Jesuits, Ricardo O’Farrell, offered encouragement to these ideas. He backed priests who essentially wanted to live as political organizers among Argentina’s poor. He also supported a syllabus rewrite that was “heavy on sociology and Hegelian dialectics,” as Ivereigh describes it, and lighter on traditional Catholic elements.

But O’Farrell soon found himself dealing with a crisis: the number of men entering the order plummeted, and more-conservative Jesuits openly revolted. In the summer of 1973, he stepped aside, and at just 36, Bergoglio was elevated in his place. In many ways he made a success of things. The order’s numbers rebounded, and he won many admirers among the priests formed under his leadership. But he made enemies as well, most of them on the order’s theological and political left. Radical priests felt that their revolution had been betrayed, and a coterie of Jesuit academics fretted that Bergoglio’s program for Jesuits in training—which restored traditional elements abandoned by O’Farrell—was too reactionary, too pre–Vatican II. Ivereigh quotes one critic marveling that Bergoglio encouraged students to

go to the chapel at night and touch images! This was something the poor did, the people of the pueblo, something that the Society of Jesus worldwide just doesn’t do. I mean, touching images … What is that?

His leadership also coincided with the 1976 military coup and the “Dirty War,” during which left-wing Jesuits were particular targets for the junta’s thugs. Bergoglio was accused of complicity in the arrest and torture of two priests, a charge that Ivereigh and Piqué think is baseless; Vallely hedges, but seems to mostly concur. Indeed, all three biographers make clear that Bergoglio labored tirelessly behind the scenes to save people (not only priests) in danger of joining the ranks of the “disappeared.”

But he did not attack the Dirty War publicly, and the Jesuits under his leadership kept a low political profile as well. The entire Argentine Church was a compromised force during the junta’s rule, and Bergoglio probably couldn’t have played the kind of role that, say, the soon-to-be-beatified archbishop Oscar Romero played in El Salvador. But some in the order blamed his conservatism, as they saw it, for the absence of a clear Jesuit witness against the junta’s crimes.

Eventually these critics gained the upper hand. Not long after Bergoglio’s term ended in 1979, his policies were altered or reversed. Just over a decade later, following a period in which the Argentine Jesuits were divided into pro- and anti-Bergoglio camps, he was exiled from the leadership, sent to a Jesuit residence in the mountain town of Córdoba, and essentially left to rot.

Francis seems to be trying to occupy a carefully balanced center between two equally dangerous poles.

That exile lasted almost two years, and ended when John Paul II’s choice for the archbishop of Buenos Aires, Antonio Quarracino, reached out and picked Bergoglio to serve as one of his auxiliaries in 1992. The rescue made everything that followed possible, but it also completed the former provincial’s break with his own order. Ivereigh notes that over the next 20 years, during which he took many trips to the Vatican, Bergoglio never so much as set foot in the Jesuit headquarters in Rome.

Told this way—conservative Jesuit fights post–Vatican II radicalization, finds himself shunned by left-wing confreres, gets rescued by a John Paul appointee—the story of Francis’s rise and fall and rise sounds for all the world like The Making of a Conservative Pope. And indeed, a number of Catholic writers greeted Bergoglio’s election—some optimistically, some despairingly—with exactly that interpretation of his past’s likely impact on his papacy. But it seems fair to say that this interpretation was mistaken. So how, exactly, did the man who fought bitterly with left-wing Jesuits in the 1970s become the darling of progressive Catholics in the 2010s?

Piqué’s biography doesn’t even attempt to explain this seeming paradox. She blurs the tensions by treating Bergoglio’s 1970s-era critics dismissively—without really digging into the theological and political roots of the disputes—and then portraying Bergoglio the archbishop as basically progressive in his orientation. After succeeding Quarracino, she writes, he fought with “right-wing adversaries in the Roman Curia,” publicly showed annoyance at “obsessive strictness” on sexual ethics, and so on.

Vallely has a more creative argument. He suggests that Francis was essentially a pre–Vatican II traditionalist as provincial, and then, in exile, experienced a kind of theological and political conversion to his critics’ point of view. This is a fascinating idea, but perhaps too psychologically pat, and Vallely’s documentary evidence is interesting but thin. He makes much, for instance, of the older Bergoglio’s tendency to retrospectively criticize the too-hasty or overly authoritarian decision making of his earlier years. But much of this self-criticism seems more about style than about religious substance. And Vallely (like his sources) is rather too fond of false dichotomies: it’s supposed to be surprising, a sign of some radical interior change, that a theological conservative could be pastoral or want to spend time among the poor.

Bergoglio’s thinking clearly evolved. But the more plausible explanation for what’s going on emerges out of Ivereigh’s biography, which proposes a general continuity between the young provincial of the 1970s and the pope of today. To begin with, Ivereigh stresses that the younger Bergoglio was never a real traditionalist, never an enemy of Vatican II, never a foe of renewal or reform. Instead, he was trying to heed the warning of Yves Congar, the great mid-century Catholic theologian, that “true reform” must always be safeguarded from “false” alternatives. Bergoglio’s battles with radicals and liberals in his own order shouldn’t be interpreted as a case of the Catholic right resisting change. They should be understood as an attempt to steer a moderate course, to discern which changes are necessary and fruitful, and to reject the errors of both extremes.

This perspective undergirds Ivereigh’s larger argument that—the attention-grabbing “radical pope” language in his subtitle notwithstanding—there’s actually a greater consistency of views among Francis, Benedict, and John Paul than some press caricatures would suggest. Both of Francis’s predecessors were also men of Vatican II, liberals in the context of the Council’s debates who tried to rein in radical interpretations of its reforms and emphasize the continuity between the Church before and after. Like Francis, both were defenders of popular Catholic piety and mysticism—what Benedict, as Cardinal Ratzinger, called “the faith of the little ones”—against the condescension of certain progressive theologians. And both, like him, rejected fusions of Christianity and Marxism while offering at best a cheer and a half for capitalism.

Yet several crucial issues—some raised explicitly by Ivereigh, some implicit in all three biographies—set Francis’s background and worldview apart. They help explain why his pontificate looks much more friendly to progressive strands within Catholicism than anyone expected from the successor to the previous two Popes.

First, Jorge Bergoglio had a very different experience of globalization than Karol Wojtyła (who would become Pope John Paul II) and Joseph Ratzinger did in Europe, one shaped by disappointments particular to his country. For most of his life, his native Argentina was an economic loser, persistently underperforming and corruption-wracked. During the 1980s, inequality and the poverty rate increased in tandem; in the late ’90s and early 2000s, while Bergoglio was archbishop, Argentina endured a downturn and a depression. Where his predecessors’ skepticism of capitalism and consumerism was mainly intellectual and theoretical, for Bergoglio the critique became something more visceral and personal.

Second, in the course of his political experience in Argentina, he encountered very different balances of power—between the left and the right, between Church and state, and within global Catholicism—than either of the previous two popes confronted. As much as Bergoglio clashed with Marxist-influenced Jesuits, the Marxists in Argentina weren’t running the state (as they were in John Paul’s Poland, and in the eastern bloc of Benedict’s native Germany). They were being murdered by it. Likewise, the fact that the Church in Argentina was compromised during the Dirty War had theological implications: it meant that for Bergoglio, more-intense forms of traditionalist Catholicism were associated with fascism in a very specific, immediate way. And coming from the Church’s geographical periphery himself, Bergoglio had reasons to sympathize with the progressive argument that John Paul had centralized too much power in the Vatican, and that local churches needed more freedom to evolve.

Third, while highly intellectual in his own distinctive way, Francis is clearly a less systematic thinker than either of his predecessors, and especially than the academic-minded Benedict. Whereas the previous pope defended popular piety against liberal critiques, Francis embodies a certain style of populist Catholicism—one that’s suspicious of overly academic faith in any form. He seems to have an affinity for the kind of Catholic culture in which Mass attendance might be spotty but the local saint’s processions are packed—a style of faith that’s fervent and supernaturalist but not particularly doctrinal. He also remains a Jesuit-formed leader, and Jesuits have traditionally combined missionary zeal with a certain conscious flexibility about doctrinal details that might impede their proselytizing work. This has often made them controversial among other missionary orders, as in the famous debate over the efforts of Matteo Ricci. A Jesuit in China during the late 16th and early 17th centuries, Ricci was attacked for incorporating Chinese concepts into his preaching and permitting converts to continue to venerate their ancestors. That Ricci is currently on the path to canonization, and his critics are mostly forgotten, says something important about the value of Jesuit envelope-pushing within the Church. But it also says something important that Catholicism has never before had a Jesuit Pope.

Finally, Francis has a different base of support—and thus a different set of debts to pay, perhaps—within the Catholic hierarchy than the popes who preceded him had. He became a papal candidate at the 2005 conclave, and was elected pope eight years later, thanks to efforts made on his behalf by a small group of European cardinals, including Godfried Danneels of Belgium, Walter Kasper of Germany, England’s Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, and the late Carlo Maria Martini, himself a Jesuit and the former archbishop of Milan. In the John Paul era, all four men were among the most theologically liberal cardinals; Martini was regarded wistfully as a kind of might-have-been progressive pope.

If ongoing adultery is forgivable, then why not other forms of loving, long-standing sexual commitment?

Both Ivereigh (a former adviser to Murphy-O’Connor) and Vallely leave little doubt as to this group’s importance. What is in doubt is how Bergoglio, who reportedly urged his supporters to vote for Ratzinger in 2005 rather than prolong the vote, felt about their efforts in either conclave, and how he feels about them now. Clearly the liberal cardinals fastened onto him as a candidate because they saw him as theologically closer to the center of the conclave and more doctrinally reliable than any of their group; clearly his support within the 2013 conclave extended well beyond just the liberal faction. At the same time, it is striking that the men who arguably did the most to make Bergoglio pontiff were among the cardinals most in opposition to the previous two Popes.

These distinctive features of his background have helped define Francis’s agenda for the Church. The areas where he has the strongest mandate lie in governance: reforming the Vatican bureaucracy, purging corruption from the Curia, and reorienting the Church’s leadership toward the global South. These projects are natural extensions of his past experience, as are their rhetorical accompaniments—the public scoldings of worldly and careerist clergy, and the vision of a Church in which the “peripheries” (Africa, Latin America, Asia) bring renewal to the center.

So too with what looks like the broadest theme of his pontificate: his constant stress on economic issues, the Church’s social teachings, and the plight of the unemployed, the immigrant, the poor. The content here may not be different from previous papal statements on these subjects, but Francis returns to these issues much more often. His sharp, prophetic tone—the recurring references to the “throwaway culture” of modern capitalism, the condemnation of “an economy [that] kills”—seems intended to grab attention, to spotlight these issues, and to shatter the press’s image of a Church exclusively interested in sexual morality.

In this sense and others, Francis may indeed see his papacy as a kind of moderate corrective to the previous two. Rather than conceiving of himself primarily as a custodian of Catholic truth against relativizing trends, he seems to be trying to occupy a carefully balanced center between two equally dangerous poles. At one extreme are “the ‘do-gooders’ ” and “the so-called ‘progressives and liberals,’ ” as he put it in his closing remarks to last fall’s synod on the family. At the other extreme, to be equally condemned, are “the zealous” and “the scrupulous” and “the so-called—today—‘traditionalists.’ ”

To further that balancing act, his appointments, while hardly uniform, have filled the higher ranks of bishops and cardinals not only with more non-Europeans but with more men from the Church’s progressive wing. (The most prominent example is Blase J. Cupich, the new archbishop of Chicago, who was plucked from a minor diocese to run one of America’s most important sees.) Meanwhile Francis has shown explicit disfavor, not so much toward mainstream-conservative clerics, but toward those explicitly associated with traditionalism and the Latin Mass. Cardinal Raymond L. Burke, a Benedict appointee demoted to a mostly ceremonial position, is the famous case, but traditionalist-leaning bishops and religious orders have felt a chill wind at times as well.

Amid these moves, conservative Catholics have consoled themselves by noting that Francis is not at all like the left-wing Jesuits he feuded with in the 1970s. As he certainly is not: His economic vision offers a general critique of greed and indifference, rather than a specific social-democratic program, and there is nothing secularized about his style. He is devotional in his piety, supernatural and sometimes apocalyptic in his themes (complete with frequent mentions of the devil), and emphatic about the importance of the sacraments and saints. And he has stated clearly that he has neither the intention nor the capacity to alter the Church’s teachings on such issues as abortion and same-sex marriage.

All of this makes it imaginable that Francis could succeed in his balancing act. So long as doctrine doesn’t seem to be in question, a papal agenda focused on ending corruption in the Vatican and emphasizing a commitment to the global poor could successfully straddle some of the Church’s internal divides—not least because those divides aren’t always as binary as the language of “left and right” suggests. Many theological conservatives in the developing world are natural economic populists, and they’re perfectly happy with the way this pope talks about globalization and the free market. The allergy to some of his rhetoric is mostly confined to the American right, and even there it’s largely an elite-level phenomenon; Francis’s approval rating in the United States among conservative Catholics is about as high—that is, very high—as it is among Catholics who identify as moderate or liberal. And at least some in the latter groups mostly want the Church to de-emphasize the culture war rather than change specific teachings, so Francis’s rhetorical shifts may be enough to satisfy them.

But there are times when Francis himself seems to desire something more than just a change in emphasis. Even as he has officially reaffirmed Church teachings on sex and marriage, he has shown a persistent impatience—populist, Jesuit, or both—with the obstacles these teachings present to bringing some lapsed Catholics back to the Church. His frustration has emerged most clearly on the issue of divorce and remarriage: he has repeatedly shown what seems to be tacit support for the idea, long endorsed by Walter Kasper and other liberal cardinals, to allow Catholics in a second marriage to receive Communion even if their first marriage is still considered valid—that is, even if they are living in what the Church considers an adulterous relationship.

The argument, from Kasper and others, is that this would be strictly a pastoral change, a gesture of welcome and forgiveness rather than an endorsement of the second union, and so it wouldn’t alter the Church’s formal teaching on the indissolubility of marriage. The possible implication is that the post-sexual-revolution landscape is now as culturally foreign to the Church as China was in the age of Matteo Ricci, and that some cultural accommodation is needed before missionary work can thrive.

The problem for Francis is that Kasper’s argument is not particularly persuasive. Describing Communion for the remarried as merely a pastoral change ignores its inevitable doctrinal implications. If people who are living as adulterers can receive Communion, if the Church can recognize their state of life as nonideal but somehow tolerable, then either the Church’s sacramental theology or its definition of sin has been effectively rewritten. And the ramifications of such a change are potentially sweeping. If ongoing adultery is forgivable, then why not other forms of loving, long-standing sexual commitment? Not only same-sex couples but cohabiting straight couples and even polygamous families (a particular concern among African cardinals) could make a plausible case that they deserve the same pastoral exception, rendering the very idea of objective sexual sin anachronistic in one swift march.

This, then, is the place where Francis’s quest for balance could, through his own initiative, ultimately fall apart, bringing the very culture war he’s downplayed back to center stage. And it’s the place where his pontificate could become genuinely revolutionary. His other moves are changing the Church, but in gradual and reversible ways, leaving lines of conflict blurry and tensions bridgeable. But altering a teaching on sex and marriage that the Church has spent centuries insisting it simply cannot alter—a teaching on a question addressed directly (as, say, homosexuality is not) by Jesus himself—is a very different thing. It would suggest to the world, and to many Catholics, that Catholicism was formally capitulating to the sexual revolution. It would grant the Church’s progressives reasonable grounds for demanding room for further experiments. And it would make it impossible for many conservatives, lay and clerical, to avoid some kind of public opposition to the pope.

Such a development probably would not produce an immediate crisis or schism. But it would put the Church on the kind of trajectory that the Anglican Communion and other Protestant denominations have traced on these issues, and would make some eventual division much more likely. As pastoral experiments proliferated, geographical and cultural differences would matter more and more, and official Catholic teaching would effectively vary from country to country, diocese to diocese, in a more explicit way than it does today. (Already, the German bishops are telegraphing their intention to move ahead with a Kasper-like approach no matter what happens in Rome.) Open clashes within the hierarchy would become commonplace. Criticisms of the pope would become normal among the self-consciously orthodox, and the stakes would get higher with every subsequent papal election and intervention.

From the beginning, sexual ethics have been closer to the heart of Christianity and Christian life than many theological progressives now assume.

None of this would be exactly new: Catholic Christianity has never been monolithic, and similar divisions have opened up across the past 2,000 years. But those examples are not particularly encouraging, given that many major theological disputes have led, as you would expect, to major schisms, from the early splits with the Copts and Monophysites and Nestorians, to the separation from the Eastern Church, to the late-medieval Great Schism, and of course to the Protestant Reformation.

Perhaps the debates of the sexual revolution will look less significant in hindsight than controversies over the nature of Christ’s divinity or Reformation-era arguments about Papal authority and the Sacraments. But from the beginning, sexual ethics have been closer to the heart of Christianity and Christian life than many theological progressives now assume. Not for nothing did Philip Rieff describe ideals like monogamy and chastity as part of “the consensual matrix of Christian culture.” It’s not really surprising that in Protestant churches, these debates have often threatened or produced schism.

Which raises an important question: Is this what liberal Catholics want?

The answer, in my experience, is no. Most liberal Catholics would simply dismiss the argument I’ve just made. Some don’t see any reason the Church can’t enact one or two changes on sexual ethics while holding the line on other fronts; they think conservatives are exaggerating the extent to which the Church’s view of human sexuality is, like Jesus’s robe, a seamless garment. Others sincerely think that a shift like the one Cardinal Kasper is proposing really does amount to merely a pastoral tweak (like the post–Vatican II disappearance of meatless Fridays), and conservatives will grumble and then quickly learn to live with it.

More broadly, there’s an assumption that a distinction between practice and doctrine is sustainable, or at least sustainable over the decades or centuries required for conservative opposition to diminish. Indeed, many liberal Catholics would say that’s how the Church always changes. A teaching or an idea (the prohibition against usury, say, or the theological speculation that unbaptized infants who die go to Limbo) gradually becomes vestigial: Catholics ignore it and churchmen stop talking about it, and then eventually the hierarchy comes up with some official-sounding explanation (one that starts, “As the Church has always taught …”) for why it’s no longer really in force. The rest of Catholic teaching holds together just fine during this transition; there’s no danger of a Jenga effect, no thread-pulling that ends up unraveling the whole.

This view is widespread without always being made explicit. Sometimes it gets a full airing, though: in his new book, The Future of the Catholic Church With Pope Francis (in which the pontiff himself appears mostly in extremely selective quotation), the longtime papal critic Garry Wills offers a vision of the Catholic future in which the Church’s understanding of natural law, its opposition to abortion, and even the sacrament of confession are all destined for the same fate as the Latin Mass. (Wills already dispensed with the priesthood itself in Why Priests? A Failed Tradition, so disposing of a sacrament is relatively easy work.)

His view of Catholic history is ruthlessly consistent. The “development of dogma” really just means that doctrines come and go at history’s whim, and no idea or institution—save some kind of belief in Jesus’s divinity, presumably—is necessarily essential. Instead there’s just one damn thing after another, and if the Church teaches one thing in one age, reversing itself in the next is no big deal. Here his book boldly repurposes the views of G. K. Chesterton, who pointed out how impressively the Church shook itself free of the failing Roman empire, the dying medieval world, and eventually the ancien régime. To Chesterton, this proved the faith’s resilience and ultimately its capital‑T Truth. To Wills, it proves that the Church can just change the faith as it sees fit to suit a changing world.

Wills is an outlier among liberal Catholics, most of whom tend to be more modest and gradualist, and less inclined to take premises to their extreme. But most progressives share his basic conviction that conservative resistance on just about any doctrinal issue can eventually be overcome, and that Catholicism will always somehow remain Catholicism no matter how many once-essential-seeming things are altered or abandoned.

In the age of Francis, this progressive faith seems to rest on two assumptions. The first is that the changes conservatives are resisting are, in fact, necessary for missionary work in the post-sexual-revolution age, and that once they’re accomplished, the subsequent renewal will justify the means. The second is that because conservative Catholics are so invested in papal authority, a revolution from above can carry all before it: the conservatives’ very theology makes it impossible for them to effectively resist a liberalizing pope, and anyway they have no other place to go.

But the first assumption now has a certain amount of evidence against it, given how many of the Protestant churches that have already liberalized on sexual issues—again, often dividing in the process—are presently aging toward a comfortable extinction. (As is, of course, the Catholic Church in Germany, ground zero for Walter Kasper’s vision of reform.)

Contemporary progressive Catholicism has been stamped by the experience of the Second Vatican Council, when what was then a vital American Catholicism could be invoked as evidence that the Church should make its peace with liberalism as it was understood in 1960. But liberalism in 2015 means something rather different, and attempts to accommodate Christianity to its tenets have rarely produced the expected flourishing and growth. Instead, liberal Christianity’s recent victories have very often been associated with the decline or dissolution of its institutional expressions.

Which leaves the second assumption for liberals to fall back on—a kind of progressive ultramontanism, which assumes that papal power can remake the Church without dividing it, and that when Rome speaks, even disappointed conservatives will ultimately concede that the case is closed.

It is a brave theory. We will soon find out whether Papa Francesco intends to put it to the test.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/05/will-pope-francis-break-the-church/389516/

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A news interlude dominated by speculation about “golden showers” and a graceless president who described his latest detractor as an “untruthful slime ball” invites us to search for higher moral ground.

So it might be Providential that Pope Francis chose to make news last week in two ways. First, he did something that comes very hard to most public figures, and particularly to the current occupant of the White House: He apologized fervently for “grave errors.”

He also issued a remarkable document on holiness that seemed made for the moment — and, by the way, noted that we can “waste precious time” by being caught up in “superficial information” and “instant communication.”

Francis continued to preach his gospel of economic justice by warning that it is a “harmful ideological error” to cast “the social engagement of others” as “worldly, secular, materialist, communist or populist.” On the contrary, he saw holiness as demanding an engagement with “the destitute, the abandoned and the underprivileged.”

And he lifted up words from Leviticus we are unlikely to hear cited by President Trump: “When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress him.”

It’s not often that public figures hold themselves to the standards they apply to others. There was thus an instructive symmetry between what Francis said in his Apostolic Exhortation Gaudete et Exsultate (“Rejoice and Be Glad”) and his own moment of necessary penance.

In the document, the pope declared that “the lack of a heartfelt and prayerful acknowledgment of our limitations prevents grace from working more effectively within us.” Humans — every single one of us — fail, falter and fall. We do far better when we admit it.

And this is what the pope did Wednesday when he apologized for his terribly misguided defense of a Chilean bishop accused of covering up abuse by an infamous pedophile priest.

Many of us who admire Francis feared that his apparent standing up for the indefensible was a sign that the 81-year-old pontiff was incapable of recognizing the Church’s profound breach of trust when it placed institutional self-preservation above a concern for the suffering of those abused by priests.

Sometimes, your friends need to tell you how wrong you are. In this case, the task fell to Cardinal Sean O’Malley, a close Francis ally. O’Malley was appointed archbishop of Boston to begin healing the deep gashes left by the scandal there, and he read Francis whatever the Roman equivalent of the riot act is.

Francis responded with a letter to Chile’s bishops. “As far as my role, I acknowledge, and ask you to convey faithfully, that I have made grave errors in assessment and perception of the situation, especially as a result of lack of information that was truthful and balanced,” he wrote. “From this time I ask forgiveness to all those that I offended and I hope to do so personally, in the following weeks, in meetings that I will hold with representatives” of those affected.

Aside from his reference to a lack of “truthful and balanced” information — honestly, he should have known — Francis’s letter suggested the determination of someone capable of learning from his mistakes. It’s more than we’re getting from some other leaders we can think of.

This enhanced the credibility of Francis’s exhortation to the rest of us to imitate the humble day-to-day saints whom he referred to as “the middle class of holiness.”

He reiterated that the Church would continue to defend “the innocent unborn” but stressed the importance of seeing the “lives of the poor, those already born,” as “equally sacred.”

Francis added pointedly that while “a politician looking for votes” might see “the situation of migrants” as “a secondary issue compared to the ‘grave’ bioethical questions,” a true Christian would not.

It was hard to miss the message to U.S. bishops that letting antiabortion politicians off the hook on immigration and refugees would be a denial of their obligation “to stand in the shoes of those brothers and sisters of ours who risk their lives to offer a future to their children.”

Francis insisted that “the most decisive turning points in world history are substantially co-determined by souls whom no history book ever mentions.” That’s excellent news, because in our era, many whom the history books will mention are leading us nowhere good. Perhaps Francis can inspire in them some self-examination — and, more importantly, provoke a badly needed rebellion by the decent people who represent “the middle class of holiness.”

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The 'Cashless Society' and the Surveilance State - Precursor to the Mark of the Beast

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EU urged to act over social media and fake news

Sir Julian King is calling for limits on personal information harvesting and more transparency on the algorithms used to promote stories. Photograph: AP

A senior EU official has called for action against internet companies that harvest personal data, as Brussels prepares to move against those spreading “fake news” following the Cambridge Analytica revelations.

Sir Julian King, the European commissioner for security, wants “a clear game plan” on how social media companies are allowed to operate during political campaigns to be ready for the 2019 European elections.

The European commission’s digital strategy, to be outlined this month, has been given new impetus by the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which whistleblowers revealed that the data of 50 million Facebook users ended up in the hands of political consultancies for use in Donald Trump’s US election campaign and the UK’s EU referendum.

In a letter seen by the Financial Times, King wrote that the “psychometric targeting activities” such as those of the data analysis company are just a “preview of the profoundly disturbing effects such disinformation could have on the functioning of liberal democracies”.

King, the UK’s final European commissioner, is calling for limits on the harvesting of personal information for political purposes, more transparency on the internal algorithms that internet platforms use to promote stories, as well as disclosure by technology companies of who funds sponsored content on their websites.

His ideas are set out in a letter to Mariya Gabriel, the digital economy commissioner, who is leading the EU’s response to fake news.

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has already promised a law to ban fake news during election campaigns.

On Monday, Malaysia became one of the first countries in the world to introduce such a law, despite being urged by the UN not to rush the measures. Under the legislation, offenders could be sentenced to up to six years in prison. It has prompted fears of a clampdown on free speech before a general election.

King has previously called on the EU to redouble its efforts to debunk “pro-Kremlin disinformation”, and cited the work of the EU’s counter-propaganda unit, the East Stratcom taskforce. Set up in 2015 after Russia’s invasion of Crimea, the taskforce produces the EU’s Disinformation Review, a website that says it has found 3,500 cases of deliberately misleading news.

Critics say this work risks undermining freedom of expression and publishers’ rights. “The EU Disinformation Review seeks to control the right to freedom of expression by labelling publishers as ‘disinformation outlets’ and their content as ‘disinformation’, creating a chilling effect on the work of journalists that is central to democracy,” states a complaint by a group of lawyers to the EU ombudsman, published this week.

Led by Alberto Alemanno, a professor of EU law at HEC Paris business school, the group argues in a 13-page submission that the EU does not have a coherent method for deciding whether a publication is producing disinformation. The EU is also criticised for not giving publishers any notice of their complaint, meaning individual bloggers and publishers are subject to “arbitrary and capricious administration”.

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A radical proposal to keep your personal data safe

‘Convenient digital payment systems can also protect passengers’ anonymity and privacy.’ Photograph: Debra Hurford Brown/PA

Journalists have been asking me whether the revulsion against the abuse of Facebook data could be a turning point for the campaign to recover privacy. That could happen, if the public makes its campaign broader and deeper.

Broader, meaning extending to all surveillance systems, not just Facebook. Deeper, meaning to advance from regulating the use of data to regulating the accumulation of data. Because surveillance is so pervasive, restoring privacy is necessarily a big change, and requires powerful measures.

The surveillance imposed on us today far exceeds that of the Soviet Union. For freedom and democracy’s sake, we need to eliminate most of it. There are so many ways to use data to hurt people that the only safe database is the one that was never collected. Thus, instead of the EU’s approach of mainly regulating how personal data may be used (in its General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR), I propose a law to stop systems from collecting personal data.

The robust way to do that, the way that can’t be set aside at the whim of a government, is to require systems to be built so as not to collect data about a person. The basic principle is that a system must be designed not to collect certain data, if its basic function can be carried out without that data.

Data about who travels where is particularly sensitive, because it is an ideal basis for repressing any chosen target. We can take the London trains and buses as a case for study.

The Transport for London digital payment card system centrally records the trips any given Oyster or bank card has paid for. When a passenger feeds the card digitally, the system associates the card with the passenger’s identity. This adds up to complete surveillance.

I expect the transport system can justify this practice under the GDPR’s rules. My proposal, by contrast, would require the system to stop tracking who goes where. The card’s basic function is to pay for transport. That can be done without centralising that data, so the transport system would have to stop doing so. When it accepts digital payments, it should do so through an anonymous payment system.

Frills on the system, such as the feature of letting a passenger review the list of past journeys, are not part of the basic function, so they can’t justify incorporating any additional surveillance.

These additional services could be offered separately to users who request them. Even better, users could use their own personal systems to privately track their own journeys.

Black cabs demonstrate that a system for hiring cars with drivers does not need to identify passengers. Therefore such systems should not be allowed to identify passengers; they should be required to accept privacy-respecting cash from passengers without ever trying to identify them.

However, convenient digital payment systems can also protect passengers’ anonymity and privacy. We have already developed one: GNU Taler. It is designed to be anonymous for the payer, but payees are always identified. We designed it that way so as not to facilitate tax dodging. All digital payment systems should be required to defend anonymity using this or a similar method.

An unjust state is more dangerous than terrorism, and too much security encourages an unjust state

What about security? Such systems in areas where the public are admitted must be designed so they cannot track people. Video cameras should make a local recording that can be checked for the next few weeks if a crime occurs, but should not allow remote viewing without physical collection of the recording. Biometric systems should be designed so they only recognise people on a court-ordered list of suspects, to respect the privacy of the rest of us. An unjust state is more dangerous than terrorism, and too much security encourages an unjust state.

The EU’s GDPR regulations are well-meaning, but do not go very far. It will not deliver much privacy, because its rules are too lax. They permit collecting any data if it is somehow useful to the system, and it is easy to come up with a way to make any particular data useful for something.

The GDPR makes much of requiring users (in some cases) to give consent for the collection of their data, but that doesn’t do much good. System designers have become expert at manufacturing consent (to repurpose Noam Chomsky’s phrase). Most users consent to a site’s terms without reading them; a company that required users to trade their first-born child got consent from plenty of users. Then again, when a system is crucial for modern life, like buses and trains, users ignore the terms because refusal of consent is too painful to consider.

To restore privacy, we must stop surveillance before it even asks for consent.

Finally, don’t forget the software in your own computer. If it is the non-free software of Apple, Google or Microsoft, it spies on you regularly. That’s because it is controlled by a company that won’t hesitate to spy on you. Companies tend to lose their scruples when that is profitable. By contrast, free (libre) software is controlled by its users. That user community keeps the software honest.

• Richard Stallman is president of the Free Software Foundation, which launched the development of a free/libre operating system GNU

Copyright 2018 Richard Stallman. Released under Creative Commons NoDerivatives License 4.0

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/03/facebook-abusing-data-law-privacy-big-tech-surveillance

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Will There Soon Be One World Government? - STARTING THE BIBLE STUDY LESSON

This is the Second lesson of a thirty-two lesson course on vital issues of concern today. Featuring the major End-time prophecies and other great Bible themes, each lesson points to Scripture passages which answer today's most important questions.

To begin, you'll need a King James Version Bible which is the textbook for the course. Each lesson contains questions and Bible references. Carefully read each question. Find the text in your Bible, and look for the answer. It might be the entire verse, but usually the question is well answered in a single phrase. Copy the necessary portion of the verse on the line provided. The line is enclosed in quotation marks to indicate that you are quoting Scripture.

If you have a hard time finding the answer, first check to make sure you have the right verse. Then read the question again. If the verse still does not make sense, copy it anyway and go on to the next question. As you continue, the verses that follow should help to clarify it. When you are finished, it is always good to read through the lesson again. 

Will There Soon Be One World Government?

1.​Why does God tell us His plans in advance? John 14:29​
2.​ Who is one prophet Jesus said we ought to understand?  Mark 13:14 and Matt. 24: ​
 Read Daniel 2:1-30. Then find answers to these questions.

3.​ Why was King Nebuchadnezzar troubled? Daniel 2:3​
4.​ What did he ask the wise men to show him? Daniel 2:6​
5.​ Who had given him this dream? Daniel 2:28

​
6.​ What was the dream to reveal? Daniel 2:29​ Read verses 31-35. Then find answers to these questions.

7.​ What did King Nebuchadnezzar see in his dream? Daniel 2:31

​
8.​ Of what was the image made?  See Daniel 2:32

A. His head:​
B. His breast and arms:​
C. His belly and thighs:​
Now look in Daniel 2:33 for the rest

D. His legs:​
F. His feet:​

9.​What did Daniel tell the king the image’s head represented? Daniel 2:36-38​

10.​What nation did Nebuchadnezzar represent? Daniel 1:1​
11.​According to the interpretation, what would arise after Nebuchadnezzar’s golden kingdom? Daniel 2:39​
12.​When Babylon did fall, what two nations, symbolized by the image’s silver breast and arms, shared world rulership? Daniel 5:28

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13.​By what animal is Medo-Persia symbolized in Chapter 8? Daniel 8:3, 4, 20​

14.​What animal smote the ram? Daniel 8:5-7​

15.​What nation does this goat represent which would conquer Medo-Persia? Daniel 8:21​
16.​Like the others, how extensively would this third kingdom rule? Daniel 2:39

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17.​When the first king of Greece fell, the kingdom would be divided into how many parts? Daniel 8:8, 21, 22​

The great horn between the goat’s eyes represented Alexander the Great, who died at a young age without arranging for a successor to rule the conquered kingdom. True to prophecy, the territory was divided into four smaller kingdoms, and remained divided until superseded by the next world empire.

18.​What then came forth? Daniel 8:9​

19.​What kind of king was represented by this little horn? Daniel 8:23

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After Greece, the fourth and final nation to rule the world was the Roman Empire.

20. ​The ram was “great” (v.4), the goat was “very great” (v). How did the little horn compare with them? Daniel 8:9​

21.​ From its point of origin, what directions did this kingdom spread? Daniel 8:9​
​​ Rome, coming from the west, gained control of Egypt, Syria, and Palestine.

22.​ According to Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, this fourth kingdom would be as strong as what metal? Daniel 2:40

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23.​ What would then happen to this kingdom? Daniel 2:41​
The Roman Empire, the last to rule the world, was absorbed by Germanic tribes which divided up the territory and eventually became the modern nations of Europe.

24.​ How does the prophecy describe the attempts of later kings to unite themselves? Daniel 2:42, 43​

25.​What prophetic statement has prevented modern kings from uniting under one world government? Daniel 2:43

​
Time and again since the fall of Rome men have attempted to unite the world under a single government. But the word of God has declared that it cannot be done, and according to that decree all attempts have failed.

26.​ When will God set up His eternal kingdom? Daniel 2:44​
27.​ What will God’s kingdom do to the kingdoms of men? Daniel 2:44​
28.​ What represented God’s kingdom in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream? Daniel 2:45​
29. ​What did Daniel say about the certainty of the dream and its interpretation? Daniel 2:45

​
“The king answered unto Daniel, and said, Of a truth it is, that your God is a God of gods, and a Lord of kings, and a revealer of secrets.” Daniel 2:47.

The Imagery of Daniel 2:

Head of Gold = ​Babylon (605-539 BC)
Breast & Arms of Silver​ = Medo-Persia (539-331 BC)
Belly & Thighs of Brass​ = Greece (331-168 BC)
Legs of Iron​ = Rome (168 BC - AD 476)
Feet of Iron & Clay = ​Modern Nations of Europe (Since AD 476)

Stone = ​Kingdom of God

Chapter 8:

Ram​ = Medo Persia
Goat ​= Greece
Four Horns = ​Greek Divisions
Little Horn ​= Rome (Imperial and Papal phases)

In the Light of God’s Word...

* I understand that in the Bible God has accurately foretold world events long before they are to happen.
* I desire to understand the prophecies God has given for our time.

Answers to the lesson:

1. That... ye might believe
2. Daniel
3. To know the dream
4. The dream, and the interpretation
5. God
6. What shall come to pass
7. A great image
8. Gold; silver; brass; iron; part of iron and part of clay
9. Thou art this head of gold
10. Babylon
11. Another kingdom
12. The Medes and Persians
13. A ram
14. An he-goat
15. Grecia
16. Over all the earth
17. Four
18. A little horn
19. A king of fierce countenance
20. Exceeding great
21. Toward the south, and toward the east, and toward the pleasant land
22. Iron
23. The kingdom shall be divided
24. They shall mingle themselves with the seed of men
25. They shall not cleave one to another
26. In the days of these kings
27. Break in pieces and consume
28. The stone
29. The dream is certain, and the interpretation thereof sure

 [ A Future World Union of Church and State ]

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What is the Johnson Amendment? Trump’s Religious-Liberty Executive Order Undermines Church/State Law

President Donald Trump marks his first National Prayer Day in the White House by signing an executive order on religious liberty that is expected to severely weaken enforcement of one of the country’s foremost regulations separating church and state.

According to multiple reports, the order will instruct the Internal Revenue Service to use maximum discretion when enforcing legislation that prevents churches and other houses of worship from endorsing political candidates.

Related: Religious freedom efforts: Next front opens in battle on gay marriage

Known as the Johnson Amendment, the legislation states that tax-exempt organizations “are absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of [or in opposition to] any candidate for elective public office.”

http://www.newsweek.com/johnson-amendment-trump-religious-liberty-594630

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Trump signs executive order to 'vigorously promote Religious liberty'

 By Kevin Liptak, - CNN White House Producer

 5 May 2017

https://edition.cnn.com/2017/05/03/politics/trump-religious-liberty-executive-order/index.html

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• Emma Green
• The Atlantic - Aug 2, 2016

Why have some religious conservatives decided to support Donald Trump for United States president? Leaders have named their reasons: He’s promised to appoint pro-life Supreme Court justices; he’s allegedly good at business. But they have also consistently cited something else, perhaps more unexpected: the tax code.

Trump has promised to repeal the so-called Johnson Amendment, a 1954 provision that prohibits tax-exempt organizations from participating in political activities. Proposed by then-Senator Lyndon B. Johnson and later revised by Congress, it keeps churches and other non-profits from lobbying for specific causes, campaigning on behalf of politicians, and supporting or opposing candidates for office.

While opponents of the Johnson Amendment often frame their objections in terms of free speech, the provision’s primary impact may be financial. Right now, the IRS makes a clear distinction between non-profit groups—from charities and universities to certain private schools and houses of worship—and political organizations.

If the Johnson Amendment were repealed, pastors would be able to endorse candidates from the pulpit, which they’re currently not allowed to do by law. But it’s also true that a lot more money could possibly flow into politics via donations to churches and other religious organizations. That could mean religious groups would become much more powerful political forces in American politics—and it would almost certainly tee up future court battles.

Even though religious groups are some of the most vocal opponents of the Amendment today, it was originally about something else: communism. At the time when the measure was passed, McCarthyism was at its peak, and Johnson feared that right-wing groups, parading as charities, would attack his reelection campaign. Although the rule extended to religious groups, the former Purdue University professor James D. Davidson has argued that Johnson never specifically wanted to target religious groups.

According to the Catholic University of America professor Roger Colinvaux, some critics have argued that the Amendment’s history is the best argument against it: Because it was an ad hoc measure written to satisfy one skilled legislator’s political needs, they say, it should be repealed. But, as Colinvaux wrote in 2012, this already was a long-standing issue by the time Johnson took it up—the legal limits around political activity for non-profit groups “had dogged charitable tax status from the inception of the federal-income-tax exemption for charitable organizations.”

Congress first approved a tax deduction for donations to charitable organizations in 1917, but the boundaries around those organizations’ political activities weren’t exactly clear. In a 1930 decision, Slee v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, a Second Circuit Court judge made those boundaries clearer: He ruled that the government doesn’t have an obligation to subsidize the political activity of non-profit groups; and people can write off donations to these groups, which include religious organizations, but not if the groups are engaging in “political agitation,” or lobbying. In 1934, this rule officially became part of the tax code: “No substantial part of an organization’s activities” could involve “carrying on propaganda or otherwise attempting to influence legislation.”

There were two problems with this rule. First, the word “substantial” is vague and confusing. “People found that standard difficult to meet because they couldn’t identify it—they couldn’t quantify it,” said Miriam Galston, a law professor at George Washington University. “The IRS never gave any clear or precise guidelines.” Subsequent court decisions made this standard somewhat clearer: “Substantial” is somewhere between 5 and 20 percent of an organization’s operating budget and efforts, Galston said, and factors like mission and volunteer time have to be taken into account.

The other problem was that lobbying isn’t the same as electioneering—a non-profit group like a church might not spend time and money trying to get a bill passed in Congress, but it might promote a candidate for office with flyers and buttons and speeches. The Johnson Amendment clarified that the ban extended to political activity: Non-profits, including religious groups, couldn’t support candidates for political office without losing their tax-exempt status. In 1987, Congress clarified that this means non-profits can’t oppose candidates, either.

The IRS doesn’t often go after churches.

Since 2008, a group of predominantly conservative, Protestant churches have participated in Pulpit Freedom Sunday—a day started by the conservative legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, when hundreds of pastors across the country give explicitly political sermons in protest of the IRS’s rule. The movement has been growing, and religious leaders will often mail tapes of their sermons directly to the agency to showcase their defiance.

The IRS doesn’t often go after these churches, though. Agency leaders have emphasized the importance of educating religious organizations about what is and is not legal, rather than aggressively initiating audits or trying to revoke the non-profit status of houses of worship. The agency has rarely pursued this last option; one of the most prominent recent cases was in 1995, when it denied the non-profit status of an upstate New York church that took out a full-page ad in USA Today warning Christians not to vote for Bill Clinton in 1992.

In general, though, “the political climate has changed in the last four or five years, where attacks on the IRS has been more frequent, more virulent, and the IRS has become extremely defensive,” Galston said. Especially with the budget cuts of the last half decade, the agency has scarce resources for enforcement of the Internal Revenue Code. “They can’t, in my view, allocate the resources in such a way that they preclude proper enforcement of the other code sections,” Galston added.

Yet even beyond purposeful protests like Pulpit Freedom Sunday, religious leaders seem to openly defy the ban on participating in political activities. The televangelist Mark Burns has openly stumped for Trump, as has Liberty University president Jerry Falwell Jr. And at the start of the Democratic National Convention, the Decatur, Georgia, pastor Cynthia Hale prayed for Hillary Clinton to become president. Even if the IRS would not see these actions as formal violations of the law, the difference between pastors electioneering and speaking as private citizens “is a fine distinction that is easily evaded,” said Galston.

Critics of the agency, including some progressive religious groups, argue that the IRS should put more resources toward enforcing the electioneering ban. The main question, said Alan Brownstein, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, is not whether religious groups and leaders should be able to express their views—it’s whether that activity should be subsidized by the government. “Pastors can say whatever they want, as can anyone else,” he said. “The question is whether a tax-exempt institution can say whatever it wants and retain its tax-exempt status, and whether the pastor as an official can use his or her position in the tax-exempt institution to engage in electioneering.”

Although religious groups often participate in political and campaign activities in defiance of the law, only Congress could make these activities fully legal. And doing so would raise big questions about money: Would religious organizations get to keep their tax-exempt status if they were permitted to participate in campaigns and endorse candidates? More importantly, could people still make tax-deductible donations to religious organizations—effectively giving money to promote a particular candidate or campaign?

Congress could make the first change fairly easily: It could add language to the current provision adding a special exception for pastors and other religious leaders who want to talk politics from the pulpit, Galston said, although that might present constitutional challenges. It would be a little more complicated to legalize tax-deductible donations to politically active churches. As Galston pointed out, another provision of the tax code strictly bans charitable, tax-deductible contributions to organizations that engage in political activity. Moreover, all charitable organizations are forbidden from providing “private benefit” to any individual—which includes campaigning on their behalf. So Congress would have to amend those provisions as well.

It’s unlikely that a President Trump would be able to push this repeal through Congress.

The result would likely be two-fold: Social-welfare groups that currently file as 501(c)(4)s, for example, might apply to become 501(c)(3)s in order to get a better break on taxes, Galston said. Moreover, political donors might start directing more cash toward non-profits, since those donations would be tax deductible. If all of these changes were made—which seems fairly unlikely—the biggest beneficiaries would likely be the wealthy. Tax-deductible donations only benefit people who take itemized deductions; people with high incomes are significantly more likely to do so.

What’s unclear about Trump’s promise to repeal the Johnson Amendment, though, is whether he’s only intending to push a repeal of the rule for religious organizations. A broad change to the provision would likely cause minor-level chaos within the U.S. political system: There would no longer be any meaningful difference between charitable groups and lobbying organizations. The government would effectively be subsidizing the political activities of all schools, charities, churches, and scientific-research organizations. On the other hand, if Trump’s theoretical administration pushed for a repeal only for religious groups, legal challenges would almost certainly follow. “It would be a preference for religion against organizations that were not religious,” Galston said.

Realistically, it seems unlikely that a President Trump would be able to push this repeal through Congress—it would pose immense political and legal challenges for legislators, Republicans and Democrats alike. The proposal seems to serve more of a dog-whistle purpose during this 2016 presidential campaign season: It’s a signal to religious conservatives that Trump is their champion, and that he cares about religious-freedom issues. It might also be a message to rich conservatives, specifically: Here, Trump hints, might be a way to make tax-favored political donations.

For those Americans who want more, not less, religious influence on American politics, the repeal of the Johnson Amendment is the perfect campaign promise: a guarantee of increased political power, greater freedom of speech, and more control over political dollars for groups that widely feel their electoral influence slipping.

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With media attention focused on the national debate raging over health care, it would be easy to ignore the spending bill quietly making its way through the House of Representatives. Such proposals often dwell in the largely mundane machinations of the federal government, and technical disputes over its complicated provisions can fly under the radar.

But if you care about the separation of Church and State, this year’s bill might be worth paying attention to.

Tucked deep inside more than 200 pages of text is a tiny provision, recently added by the House Appropriations Committee, designed to defang the so-called Johnson Amendment  —  a section of the tax code that bars churches (a broad legal term that includes most faith groups) and other tax-exempt nonprofits from explicitly endorsing political candidates.

In its current form, the bill would effectively defund attempts by the IRS to take action against churches who violate the amendment by engaging in explicit political action. Any movement on the issue would necessitate a 90-day waiting period and require agents to notify two congressional committees and get sign-off from the head of the IRS. Nonprofits that lack a faith affiliation, meanwhile, would still be beholden to the amendment.

This isn’t the first attempt to hobble the statute. President Donald Trump has promised to “totally destroy” the Johnson Amendment, and weakened its enforcement in an executive order he signed back in May. The move, in turn, was celebrated by Religious Right leaders who have long championed repealing the provision as part of their “religious liberty” agenda, arguing it inhibits their free speech.

But experts say the GOP-led effort may be about something else, as the law is almost never enforced to begin with. Instead, the impetus for repealing the Johnson Amendment — especially quietly — may have less to do with ‘religious liberty’ and more to do with using religion as a means to create a new form of political power.

Repealing the Johnson Amendment is a solution in search of a problem

The debate over Johnson Amendment is relatively new, but the law has been around for more than half a century. Inserted into a 1954 tax bill by then-Sen. Lyndon Johnson, the provision prohibits nonprofits — both faith-based and others — from endorsing candidates or being explicitly partisan in their work. Groups that violate the ban risk losing their tax-exempt status.

The law went largely unchallenged for decades. In recent years, however, conservative (especially evangelical Christian) leaders have drummed up opposition to it, arguing it detrimentally impacts faith-based institutions. Since 2008, the right-wing group Alliance Defending Freedom has organized “Pulpit Freedom Sunday,” in which more than 1,000 pastors deliver political sermons and mail recordings of their remarks to the IRS, daring them to take action. The effort appeared to crescendo earlier this year: In February, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) introduced the Free Speech Fairness Act in the House, which would strike down amendment.

But while the IRS has sent sternly worded letters to churches that preach partisan politics from the pulpit, experts say only one church — Church at Pierce Creek in Conklin, New York — is known to have lost its tax-exempt status for violating the provision over the past three decades. After a lengthy legal battle, the church was punished for taking out a full-page ad against Bill Clinton in USA Today during his 1992 campaign for president. (In a twist, the church was represented by one Jay Sekulow — who now serves as one of President Trump’s many lawyers.)

“There have been very few organizations that have lost their exemption…The typical answer was to slap people on the wrist. There’s a real problem when the answer is ‘you lose exemption’ — the IRS would look for any way it could get around making that choice.”

“There have been very few organizations that have lost their exemption,” Philip Hackney, a LSU law school professor and the former IRS attorney, told ThinkProgress. “The typical answer was to slap people on the wrist. There’s a real problem when the answer is ‘you lose exemption’ — the IRS would look for any way it could get around making that choice.”

Hackney listed several possible reasons why the IRS doesn’t expend more energy cracking down on violations. The agency likely doesn’t have enough staff and resources to prioritize the issue, for example, and generally considers such violations to be a small problem. The bar for enforcing the rule is also unusually high: Investigating a church requires approval from high-level IRS officials, which Hackney said makes the process “very costly.”

Another equally important factor, however, is the threat of political blowback.

“There is a real danger to enforcing a provision on churches, particularly one that is such a salient issue on so many people,” Hackney said. “It’s politically problematic [for the IRS commissioner]…there is a natural tendency, because of the danger of touching this, to not do a ton of enforcing.”

Indeed, the IRS has faced political strife over similar disputes in the past. In 2013, the agency was accused of unfairly targeting conservative Tea Party groups for audit during the 2012 election.

“It’s politically problematic [for the IRS commissioner]…there is a natural tendency because of the danger of touching this to not do a ton of enforcing.”

Meanwhile, the exact number of churches investigated by the IRS remains a well-kept secret. When ThinkProgress asked IRS officials for data on churches or faith-based nonprofits who have been audited or had their tax-exempt status revoked for violations of the Johnson Amendment, they demurred. Spokespeople argued revealing such information would violate various tax laws. (Section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code, for example, prohibits the IRS from disclosing returns or return information.)

The IRS seems to have been less concerned about such laws in 2008, however, when the agency released a report on the “Political Activities Compliance Initiative” conducted under the George W. Bush administration. An alleged copy of the report, pointed out to ThinkProgress by Loyola University Chicago school of Law professor and issue expert Sam Brunson, reported that the IRS investigated 44 churches (in addition to other nonprofits) for violations of political action in the 2006 campaign season, but only sent four “written advisories” for “political intervention.” None appear to have been audited or stripped of their tax-exempt status.

The report appears to have been posted on the IRS website in 2008 and has since been referenced in several academic articles on the subject, but links to the document were seemingly scrubbed from IRS.gov around 2014 — shortly after the Tea Party targeting scandal.

The IRS has yet to respond to a ThinkProgress inquiry about the veracity of the report or why it has gone missing from their website.

Allowing churches to endorse candidates is really, really unpopular

Although Trump and a few conservatives have championed repealing the Johnson Amendment as something of a legislative Holy Grail, you’d be hard pressed to find many Americans who would say the same.

Why? Because the idea is wildly unpopular, including among faith groups.

A 2016 PRRI poll found that not only do 71 percent of Americans oppose allowing churches to openly back politicians while maintaining their tax-exempt status, but majorities of every major American faith community also feel the same way. White mainline Protestants, Catholics, and black Protestants all reject the idea in sizable numbers, as does the group whose leadership keeps pushing it anyway: 56 percent white evangelical Protestants oppose further politicizing their pulpits, according to the poll.

Some faith groups are even actively lobbying against a Johnson Amendment repeal. In April, 99 faith groups — including the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Presbyterian Church (USA), and the Episcopal Church — sent a letter to Congress speaking out against “any effort to weaken or eliminate protections that prohibit 501(c)(3) organizations, including houses of worship, from endorsing or opposing political candidates.”

“They’re doing this through a budget bill because they don’t think people notice budget bills. As a supporter of democracy … something this important deserves to be debated in public.”

The Los Angeles Times also published an editorial statement on Tuesday accusing Republicans of “engaging in stealth tactics” to gut the provision, which they say “could violate the Establishment Clause of the 1st Amendment.”

Groups like the Center for Inquiry  — which pushes for a more secular society “based on reason, science, freedom of inquiry, and humanist values”— have also been working to draw attention to the GOP’s actions. “They’re doing this through a budget bill because they don’t think people notice budget bills,” Nick Little, the Center for Inquiry’s legal director, told ThinkProgress. “As a supporter of democracy… something this important deserves to be debated in public.”

Nevertheless, the issue remains a focus of groups like ADF, who have incorporated activism around the Johnson Amendment into a larger fundraising strategy.

“As a practical matter, the ADF has found this issue to be very salient,” Brunson told ThinkProgress. He pointed to ADF’s website, which flanks its Pulpit Freedom Sunday page with donate buttons.

Churches as havens for “dark money?”

If the Johnson Amendment is almost never enforced — a fact acknowledged even by groups like ADF — and is deeply unpopular with the American public, then why repeal it?

Granted, Trump and Republican lawmakers would likely be showered in praise from the Religious Right if the provision gets passed. But the real drive may be about something else: money.

“There are groups, often among the evangelical right, who want to funnel large sums of money to political candidates,” Nick Little said.

As The Atlantic’s Emma Green pointed out last year, repealing the Johnson Amendment could prove catastrophic to political transparency efforts. If faith groups are allowed to retain their tax-exempt status but act in political ways, an individual may be more likely to contribute to a church or house of worship (which is tax deductible) than a political campaign (which isn’t tax deductible).

According to Philip Hackney, this tactic might quickly run into legal challenges, as other provisions of the tax code prohibit receiving deductions for political activity. But he added that churches still might play “fast and loose” with legal definitions.

“There are groups, often among the evangelical right, who want to funnel large sums of money to political candidates,” Little said.

And both Little and Hackney pointed to a larger issue that could arise in the absence of the Johnson Amendment: The influx of so-called “dark money” — political funds whose sources remain undisclosed — into churches. Churches are not required to publicize their large donors, meaning an individual could pump money into a church during an election cycle without ever having to make their donation public. The difference between a church and a Super PAC — neither of which are beholden to finance laws used to reign in campaign donations — would effectively vanish.

“You could have unlimited dark money flowing to a campaign if this gets passed, and there is nothing the IRS could do about it,” Little said. “They would be getting a double benefit.”

Sam Brunson was slightly less concerned about the potential impact of dark money, saying there are other parts of the tax code that would prevent a church from spending most of its money or time on political activities. The exact parameters of that hypothetical limit are a bit unclear, he said, but he doesn’t expect an “apocalypse” of dark money to overtake churches.

Still, Brunson acknowledged the Johnson Amendment helps protect faith communities that would prefer to remain apolitical, insulating them from political entities who could entice them with deep pockets. And even if dark money only has a limited impact on campaigns, he said, politicized megapastors with large churches in swing states could still turn the tide on Election Day.

“It probably doesn’t cost a church anything for a pastor to preach a sermon,” Brunson said.

The piece has been updated to clarify that Church at Pierce Creek’s lawyer was Jay Sekulow, now Trump’s lawyer.

https://thinkprogress.org/republicans-are-quietly-trying-to-turn-churches-into-dark-money-havens-9822579cb972/

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His plea is typical of a lingering superstition about the Establishment Clause, so far forbidden by the Johnson Amendment, which Trump promised to “totally destroy.” If the GOP, with its majorities, manage to shout it into law your recourse may be to a federal bench now being busily packed with Trumpite judges; so best of luck!

But is Dr. Bigot right about the First Amendment? No, he is not; he is appealing to a historical fiction. Among the twists and turns in church-state relations since 1791 is the idea that the first clause of the First Amendment merely bans established churches. In fact, the “establishment” of religion as to which Congress was originally to make “no law” is a broad category. including any scheme of official subsidy of sectarian causes and institutions. As Justice Black used to say, “no law means no law,” but you can forget that.

How do we know the foregoing facts about the Establishment Clause? We know because it originated, along with Thomas Jefferson’s great Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, in his collaboration with James Madison. Madison noticed that some earnest Virginia Baptists were being jailed, even in chains, for refusing to pay tax assessments in support of educational establishments offensive to their beliefs – indeed, regarded in some instances as blasphemous.

The hypothetical situation imagined above would be an explicit violation of the Establishment Clause as Madison and Jefferson conceived it and as Madison wrote it. That violation would be licensed by the tampering Republican tax-writers now contemplate. Their contemplated measure would bootleg into tax law the untaxed subsidy of religious purposes our third and fourth presidents sought to prevent. Its appeal is constitutional nonsense. But when was that ever a bar to Donald Trump’s purposes?

Contributing columnist Edwin M. Yoder Jr. of Chapel Hill is a former editor and columnist in Washington.

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CORRECTED ATTACHMENT

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Cashless Australia is Coming

Shopping centers, eateries and other retail outlets are getting rid of their ATMs in a move toward a cashless Australia. Retailers who were “cash only” will have to change their format. Retailers stand to gain a lot of information about their customers if payment forms are completely digital. They can track “big data” and identify consumer’s needs and wants in real time. The recent decision by the banks to eradicate ATM fees appears to be a public relations stunt as the use of ATMs gradually declines – most notably in retail precincts. 

Colliers International research has found that ATM withdrawals have been steadily on the decline for nearly a decade, falling by 28 per cent in both the number of ATM withdrawals and total amount withdrawn, from January 2009 to July 2017. 

In a CommBank Retail Therapy Study, 75 per cent of respondents said they use credit/debit cards as their primary payment method when shopping/dining in stores and 50 per cent said they will avoid a business if they have to queue for payment.

The value of ATMs has been declining, and consequently the rental fees have only increased incrementally. “Many banks and other independent ATM providers are choosing not to renew their leases within shopping centres and other retail precincts or using the move towards becoming cashless as a bargaining chip when renewing,” said Cameron Wakeham, the manager of retail leasing at Colliers International

Mr. Wakeham said, for retailers, it means that over the next few years they will all need to start taking their money digitally. “EFTPOS has always been an alternative option to cash – this service is on offer almost anywhere you go. But as we become more cashless, retailers will need to upgrade their technology to accept alternative payments, including payWave, Apple Pay and even bitcoins – cash only just won’t cut it anymore,” Mr. Wakeham said. “There will be sacrifices to be made and costs incurred with going cashless; retailers must also be prepared to be totally transparent with their earnings [something that] can be avoided when accepting cash.”

But the positives, particularly for food retailers, are the hygiene aspect, as there will be no more handling dirty money. There is also less room for human error, and from a security standpoint, it presents a safer option than holding large amounts of cash on the premises.

Matt Hudson, national director and head of retail leasing at Cushman & Wakefield, said being cashless has opened the option for the additional omni-channel customer platforms for brands to utilise, ensuring robust resilience to online marketplaces.

“New market entrants with merchant facilities like Google Square will increase their presence and the new cashless way of life will allow the building of loyalty programs through third party awards.”

A cashless society will make it very easy for governments to freeze assets of anyone outside the law. The coming no-buy, no sell laws that will be applied to those who refuse to worship according to the laws of the new world order religion will certainly make God’s true people suffer isolation from their usual way of living their lives. 

“And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.” Revelation 13:16, 17.

Source References

• Shopping centres prepare to go cashless as ATMs disappear ^[1]

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