Lithuania, France

Lithuania: the president of the bishops on ongoing challengesThe ten-year experience in a Soviet forced labour Camp in Siberia and the challenges that the Lithuanian Church is called to address today in Lithuanian society were the themes addressed by the President of the Lithuanian Bishops’ Conference (CEL), Msgr. Sigitas Tamkievièius in the speech delivered at the CCEE meeting of press officers and spokespersons in Vilnius. The bishop drew a comparison between the punishment on the Communist regime and the difficult role of the bishop in our times. The bishop underlined “the importance of feeling close to God” during the period of his imprisonment many years ago as well as during the Episcopal service, which he administered for the past 20 years. As relates to the challenges that the Catholic Church is called to address in the country, Msgr. Tamkievièius mentioned a general tendency present across society, that confines religion to the private sphere. “People tend to have an aversion vis a vis the needs imposed by priests and bishops, especially as regards ethical code”, namely, in the areas of bioethics and in the treatment of embryos and in vitro fertilization, a very delicate and topical issue. The Lithuanian parliament next week will vote on a new law on the subject. Msgr. Tamkievièius also spoke of Lithuania as a member of the European Union, stating that because of the opening of borders, the country has lost many youth who went to Western countries to work, but at the same time he views EU membership as a challenge to the nation’s “capacity to find a way to preserve Christian identity across society”.France: card. Vingt-Trois on the “gender theory”A “sinister”, “unarticulated” understanding of human sexuality, where the affective aspect is not considered: the archbishop of Paris Cardinal André Vingt-Trois, thus described the presence of the “Gender Theory” in French schoolbooks due to be adopted middle and higher education programs for sixteen-year old pupils. The “gender theory” was conceived thirty years ago in the United States. Accordingly, in modern societies, the difference between men and women is sociological – rather than strictly biological – and therefore sexual orientation counts more than the biological gender. This theory, the prelate said in an interview to “Radio Notre-Dame” reported by L’Osservatore Romano, “is a way to address the human experience of sexuality in a systematic manner with the claim that sexual orientation is a purely cultural construction”, “no physiological or psychological predisposition” continued cardinal Vingt-Trois “but just the personal choice of a sexual orientation” that frees individuals from all normative frameworks given by nature and by society at large. The archbishop of Paris underlined that sexual symbolic representations play a fundamental role in personality-building and that therefore introducing the theory within school programs would be like “proposing a sexuality that is reduced to sexual intercourse, failing to realize that this relationship is articulated in the development of the human person”. The prelate also criticizes the general framework of sexual education in French schools, “focused on sexually transmissible diseases, on providing counselling for their prevention and on pregnancy interruption, that represents the passe-partout”. For the archbishop of Paris, one of the saddest aspects of this vision is that “when the educators are unable to deliver an authentic introduction to affective life, they are reduced to making it a theme pertaining to natural sciences”. The affective energy of young people, concludes the prelate, isn’t just an hormonal phenomenon. It’s is part and parcel of themselves that should always enable them develop “within a human relationship”.