In a homily at a teachers' commissioning Mass at the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart last month, Cardinal Dew said "prayer must be learned and discovered in families".

"I believe one of our major challenges today is to help families to pray together," the cardinal said.

"It will not just happen automatically."

Cardinal Dew linked this challenge with the concept of mercy.

Referring to the book, "The Name of God is Mercy", Cardinal Dew said Pope Francis states that God goes to extraordinary lengths to enter into our hearts.

"It is a powerful thought to know that you and I are able to provide opportunities for God to enter the heart of another: - the heart of your students; the heart of a fellow staff member; the heart of someone you find difficult to get on with; and - our own heart," Cardinal Dew said.

"Are our hearts open and ready to let God in?" he asked.

"Last week I was reading an article in the latest Tui Motu magazine entitled ‘Relentless Mercy'.

"I was quite disturbed to see this in print: ‘It is undeniable that the common perception in the West is that Christianity is the purveyor of judgement, exclusion, condemnation and punishment.'

"I had heard all of that said before but to see these words in print did actually shake me," the cardinal said.

"God does not enter our hearts through judgement, exclusion, condemnation and punishment. God enters our hearts, the hearts of your pupils, through mercy."

"When we truly believe God is kind and merciful, compassionate, generous, loving and forgiving, then we will be like that too, because we imitate the God we believe in," Cardinal Dew added.

"When we are like God then we have the amazing gift as people in Catholic education to enable others to open their hearts so that God may enter in," he concluded.

Source

• wel-com.org.nz
• Image: Wel-Com

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops declined to comment on the Obama administration's latest modification to the Health and Human Services mandate that many Catholic employers are challenging in court.

But other organisations defending plaintiffs in some of the 44 current legal challenges to the HHS mandate said the modifications would not help most of their clients.

Significantly, the Catholic Health Association, which a year ago expressed initial support for the Obama mandate, offered no endorsement of the administration's latest proposal.

Under the latest proposal, Catholic dioceses will probably be exempted from coverage by the HHS mandate. Catholic hospitals, social agencies and universities will not — though the administration proposed other ways to provide the required benefits without any direct financial or administrative involvement by objecting religious non-profits organisations.

The government's plan is to allow Catholic hospitals and universities to offer employee health plans that do not directly provide free contraception and other "preventive services" for women.

Employees or insured students who wanted contraceptive coverage would be able to arrange it through outside insurance companies, at no cost to themselves and without financial or even administrative support of the faith-based institution.

For-profit companies and non-profits that do not have an explicitly religious mission, such as pro-life organisations, could not avail themselves of this stand-alone policy.

Yuval Levin, of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, said in a National Review Online post that that new proposal "betrays a complete lack of understanding of both religious liberty and religious conscience.

"Religious liberty is an older and more profound kind of liberty than we are used to thinking about in our politics now. It's not freedom from constraint, but recognition of a constraint higher than even the law.... It's not the right to do what you want; it is the right to do what you must."

National Catholic Register

Catholic News Service

National Review Online

Image: Salon