"These images make me think the world is coming to an end," he said.

"They are things you can't imagine happening, and people blindly support them."

The 55-year-old father of six, who owns a food kiosk in Wakiso, blamed the West for invading his culture and destroying its values.

He believes foreign governments are sponsoring LGBTQ people and their activities in the country.

"The people who call themselves LGBTQ activists are now recruiting many people, including our children," Lubega said.

"They don't know what they are doing, but they are destroying people's lives by engaging them in unethical activities. The West want to make our country Sodom and Gomorrah, and we won't accept it."

Last year in May, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni signed into law a measure calling for life imprisonment for anyone convicted of same-sex activity.

The law also calls for the death penalty for "aggravated homosexuality," which involves cases of same-sex relations involving people who are HIV positive, children and other vulnerable people.

Many LGBTQ Ugandans have since fled to neighbouring countries to escape homophobia.

Lubega, who wants the government to ban LGBTQ rights groups, is a staunch Catholic, and like many of his co-religionists opposes Pope Francis' recent move to allow priests to administer blessings to same-sex couples.

The organisation of Catholic bishops in Africa and Madagascar stated earlier this month that they will refuse to follow Francis' declaration.

The bishop of Lira Diocese, the Rt Rev. Sanctus Lino Wanok, has launched a campaign against all forms of LGBTQ identity or activism in northern Uganda, calling LGBTQ advocates to repent and seek God's blessings.

"It's shameful to see some people promoting sin and luring people to join in committing sin," Wanok told RNS.

"People must not accept homosexuality because it's a mockery of God, our creator."

They are among the religious leaders, government officials and some rights group activists who have blamed the West for promoting LGBTQ acceptance in the country, saying the activities have recently increased with pro-gay activists targeting school-going children.

A Catholic LGBTQ activist who asked for anonymity for his safety praised Francis' declaration permitting priests to offer blessings to same-sex couples.

However, he said the pope approval has only prompted the government and citizens to increase attacks on their members.

He said families have disowned LGBTQ members, churches have given strict instructions not to allow them in the church's compounds, landlords have evicted them and some have lost jobs.

"We live in fear because we cannot identify as gay, lesbian or transgender," said the activist.

"Pope Francis should give clear instructions to bishops and priests to allow LGBTQ members to worship God and nourish their spirits."

The Western world has for years called on African governments to give LGBTQ people equal rights by decriminalizing same-sex sexual acts and protecting their rights.

In June last year, the United States imposed visa restrictions on dozens of Uganda officials in response to the country's anti-gay laws.

"As Africans, we should be very careful and not accept everything white people tell us," warned catechist Charles Kiwuwa from the Archdiocese of Tororo in the eastern region of Uganda in an interview with RNS.

"They have told us that polygamy is a sin because they know most Africans embrace it and that homosexuality is righteousness because we disagree."

The Catholic leaders have begun a countrywide campaign to fight "agents of homosexuality" in the country who they believe are being supported by foreign governments to spread LGBTQ activism in schools and other institutions.

The church leaders have expressed concern over increasing cases of same-sex attraction among the youth and school-going children, accusing these agents of luring school children with money and other luxurious gifts to recruit them.

"As a church, we have decided to fight homosexuality to save our children and the country from collapsing because the Bible teaches us that homosexuality is evil, as read in Genesis Chapters 18 and 19," the Rev Richard Nyombi told RNS.

Nyombi, the parish priest of Mapeera Nabulagala in Kampala, said religious leaders had fought same-sex attraction from time immemorial, both in the Bible and today, and they are unwilling to allow foreign culture to influence the country.

"We are preaching against homosexuality during Mass and other gatherings to help our brothers and sisters not fall prey to the vice and for those who have already been lured into the practice to repent and follow God's way," he said.

Church leaders have been meeting with youth, parents, children, elders and government officers in an effort to curb the spread of "immoral" behaviour among people, especially children.

The leaders have also been advising parents during Masses and other gatherings to warn their children against same-sex attraction and to urge them to be content with what their parents have given them, so they are not tempted by money.

"We have started to sensitize children in schools and homes against the vice of homosexuality," said the Rev. Fr Francis Xavier Kikomeko, the parish priest of Kisubi in Kampala, who also said they offer weekly workshops.

"We want to make children and parents aware that homosexuality is a sin, and pro-gay activists should never influence them to join LGTBQ groups because it's evil and not accepted in the Bible."

Source

• Tonny Onyulo is an author at Religion News Service
• First published in RNS. Republished with permission.

It does not imply that God is nowhere outside the Church, Anglican priest and theologian Professor Nigel Biggar said in discussion with The Tablet in Dublin about the divine commission and colonialism.

Biggar is the emeritus Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford. He made the comment when he was in Dublin to deliver a talk on coping with the past and lessons from colonialism and cancel culture.

"God is outside the Church," Biggar said.

He pointed out that the New Testament makes it clear that the Holy Spirit is not confined to the Church.

"The Holy Spirit is out there in the world. The world is God's world and God was there first."

He said the Christian gospel is relevant to people of other faiths.

"First of all it can illuminate things that people already intuit but are not quite sure of. Sometimes it does result in a radical change as well as a kind of clarification."

He dismissed the assumption that "Christian missionaries were the lackeys of empire" and were "complicit in the abuses of colonial rule."

Colonial rule was not always abusive, he said.

Colonial officials, on the whole, did not want missionaries in the colonies, he explained.

He went on to cite the East India Company's ban on missionaries in India until the early part of the 19th century.

"It is often the case, whether, in New Zealand or Canada, missionaries were among humanitarians who lobbied the imperial Government to stop abuses."

Cancel culture

In relation to the so-called 'cancel culture', Biggar said those who cancel do so "because they can't answer."

He asked why management in publishing houses and universities are "so willing to indulge the illiberal clamouring of woke junior members.

"It is fine for young colleagues or any colleagues to have progressive opinions. But I don't quite understand why the adults in some publishing houses or universities yield so readily," he said.

He blamed European post-modernist philosophies for encouraging people to regard all hierarchies and all social orders as "designed to entrench oppressive power" and which must be uprooted "by whatever means possible."

Source

• The Tablet

As the late Moana Jackson commented, the meaning of Te Tiriti will be talked about in each generation because it is about a relationship between Maori and Pakeha and relationships must always be worked on.

Here, we focus on the learning of te reo Maori by non-Maori in relation to Te Tiriti and the Maori concept of whakapapa in the hope of continuing the conversation and the relationship.

For full disclosure, we are married. Pania is Ngati Porou and her father is a native speaker. Brian is Pakeha. We both learned te reo Maori as a second language as adults. We will come back to this later.

The learning of te reo Maori by non-Maori has become cool. Growing numbers of non-Maori are enrolled in te reo courses and there are many new resources to support their learning. It cannot be separated from Tiriti concerns and whakapapa.

Several authors have commented on this phenomenon of non-Maori enthusiasm for te reo Maori and Maori knowledge, highlighting the complex nature of the motivations involved.

Alison Jones, a Pakeha scholar in Indigenous education, notices how the demand by non-Maori to have te reo echoes the colonising demand to have Maori land.

Catherine Delahunty, a Pakeha activist in environmental and social justice, reminds non-Maori to "stay in our lane", and warns that if we don't, we effectively co-opt and attempt to control things that don't belong to us.

Nicola Bright, a senior researcher of Tuhoe and Ngati Awa descent at the New Zealand Council for Educational Research (NZCER), tells us Maori should benefit first from the revitalisation of te reo Maori.

Georgina Tuari Stewart, a scholar who explores the nexus between culture and education, alerts us to the need to accept the limits of our ability to know in relation to Maori knowledge.

In our own work, as academics focused on Indigenisation and decolonisation of education systems, we talk of New Zealand and Aotearoa as two different countries occupying the same land. Te Tiriti is about relations between these two countries.

A whakapapa perspective on language

We see the learning of te reo Maori with a whakapapa lens. We refer to whakapapa as the emergence of new entities from their previous forms. Inherent in our understanding is an acceptance that entities have a natural right to have their whakapapa respected.

For most non-Maori, languages have been commodified and are available on demand. We liken this to having a language supermarket. Customers can buy various products "off the shelf" to allow them to learn any language they like.

These days, the supermarket is virtual and the products are digital apps. We see the dark irony in Maori having to shop for their own language in this supermarket.

In this commodified world, language is understood as a symbolic code that can be learned to express your thoughts. Learning a new language just means learning a new code. This is a distinctly colonising and capitalist view of language which cuts right across whakapapa, treating language as a disembodied entity, fixed through a vocabulary and a set of rules.

Viewed through whakapapa, a language is inherent in the worldviews and experiences of the people who emerge with it. Seen this way, languages cannot be separated from the people who speak them and who have inherited them from their ancestors.

Could non-Maori learning te reo be akin to colonisation?

The learning of te reo Maori, whether we like it or not, is already in the public domain. Anyone can learn it and we encourage everyone to do so. But if not done well and ethically, it could be another wave of colonisation.

If we go about learning te reo Maori as if it were a symbolic code or a commodified product that will provide certain (economic and self-investment) benefits, several things become apparent.

Since we learn a commodified version of te reo, we are not part of any processes of emergence alongside the people whose heritage te reo Maori is. This commodified form is in fact part of whakapapa for many non-Maori. It has emerged from our experiences and worldview and is a form of appropriation.

The taking of other people's stuff and refashioning it for our purposes is indeed colonisation. But there is also great potential for growth as people and as a nation because learning a language can change you.

In whakapapa terms, the presence of te reo Maori in your life has become part of the emergence of the next versions of you and your descendants. The bottom line is to understand and respect whakapapa.Read more: Learning to live with the 'messy, complicated history' of how Aotearoa New Zealand was colonised

Honouring te Tiriti

Non-Maori people must first acknowledge the right for te reo to emerge in the world along with the people whose own emergence is intimately entwined with it through whakapapa. That's iwi Maori.

This is a difficult task because many non-Maori are so used to believing that, in theory at least, they can know and possess anything (if they want to and put in the effort). Respecting whakapapa then involves non-Maori in a necessary self-limitation which runs counter to their own cultural development in a capitalist, exploitative and predatory culture.

Non-Maori must figure out how to acquire te reo Maori without possessing it. It might help to return to our idea of two countries overlapping in time and space - New Zealand and Aotearoa. Honouring Te Tiriti then asks those of us who live in New Zealand to honour what happens in another country, Aotearoa.

We would never say, for example, that we have claims over what happens in China, nor that because we speak Chinese we have some special insight or claim over China or Chinese people. Adopting a similar stance with respect to te reo Maori as the native language of Aotearoa will bring us closer to being able to respect its right to have natural emergence through whakapapa.

For us, even though we converse with each other every day in te reo Maori, one of us speaks Maori and the other doesn't.

• Brian Tweed and Pania Te Maro are married. Brian is a Senior Lecturer at Massey University and Pania is an Associate Professor also at Massey University.
• First published in The Conversation. Republished with permission.

"Today, there are new colonial forces moving into Fiji," says Archbishop Peter Loy Chong of Suva.

"There is the fear of China and Chinese extractive industries and companies. There are powerful multinational corporations taking their places. Big nations like Australia, USA, New Zealand and China are exerting political influence in Oceania."

The Fijian island chain is home to about a million people. It has mineral deposits including gold and copper and thriving fishing and timber industries.

On Fiji's 52nd anniversary of independence from Great Britain, Chong spoke out about his concerns and fears for the island nation.

Chinese companies have been active in the Pacific region and the United States and Australia are trying to strengthen ties with the area's governments, he says.

Last month, Fiji held military exercises with the U.S., Britain, Australia and New Zealand.

Local communities do not participate in decision-making, he says.

Instead, decisions about trade, foreign debt and capital investments are made with little or no input from the majority of the people affected.

The "divide between the state-elites and local communities hinders true participation,".

Chong says Fiji is experiencing "uncertain times."

"We live in fear. It is dangerous to speak your mind for truth and justice. I have been threatened for speaking out," he says.

"In globalisation, nation states have not disappeared, but they now operate within a different context.

"Nation states retain power, but they must wield that power in collaboration with other powerful nations and multinational corporations. In reality, it is the multinational corporations that rule the world."

Fiji is a religiously diverse country. Two-thirds are Christian, with the predominant denomination being Methodism. About 10 percent of the country is Catholic.

The Catholic Church has two key roles in Fiji's political history, Chong says. These are to:

• set forth the requirements of just social action set forth in the Bible and Catholic social teaching
• denounce social, economic, or political actions and structures in the name of justice and the Kingdom of God.

"The Church wants to build a just society and it seeks to do so on the solid foundation of four fundamental values: truth, freedom, justice and love.

"In its commitment to a just society, the Catholic Church seeks to enhance true democracy in Fiji," he says.

"On behalf of the Fiji Catholic Church, I pray that all Fijians collaborate for a truly independent, democratic and just society where the principles of participation, subsidiarity, human dignity and freedom is practiced."

Source

• Crux Now

Matthew Tukaki has written to the Pope to ask that he formally renounce the doctrine of discovery, a 15th-century idea that European nations could claim lands if they were not occupied by Christians.

The doctrine is being blamed by some indigenous activists for the evils of colonialism, even though Portugal and Spain started building their empires before it was issued and England broke with the Catholic Church 200 years before James Cook arrived in New Zealand.

Jones says Tukaki has overstepped the mark.

"I know many Maori who are incredibly proud of their Catholic whakapapa.

It's blended as part of identity.

The New Zealand Maori Council needs to focus on the pockets of dysfunction that are blighting the lives of some of our people and stop grandstanding and don't utter another word attacking one of the established churches of New Zealand," he says.

Earlier in the month at a forum Far North iwi Ngati Kahu also raised its concerns about the Doctrine of Discovery, calling on the government to repudiate it.

Professor Margaret Mutu said it undermined the government's commitment to implement the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

"The Doctrine of Discovery underpins our legal system and relies on the myth that white Christians are superior to all other peoples. It gives them permission to dispossess, enslave and exterminate other races, cultures and religions."

"It was used to take the Foreshore and Seabed from us in 2005 and shapes the government's Treaty claims settlement policies and practices today."

"The Doctrine originated from the Catholic Church in the 1400s and despite petitions from indigenous communities, they have refused to repudiate it.

Our hope is that our Government will ask the Vatican to change its position."

Source

• waateanews.com
• rnz.co.nz
• Image: nbr.co.nz

While not addressing the colonisation of Aotearoa specifically, popes have on several occasions repudiated and apologised for the doctrine of discovery going back as far as 1537.

What is the doctrine of discovery?

The Doctrine of Discovery and the attendant idea of terra nullius do not have a precise definition.

Essentially the idea is this: that sovereignty and land ownership were transferred to European Christians simply by dint of their arrival in the "New World."

Papal bulls issued by Pope Nicholas V Dum Diversas in 1452. and Pope Alexander VI issued Inter Caetera in 1493 provided the legal and political justification for European monarchs to conquer and claim lands inhabited by indigenous peoples.

"It is a shameful blight not only on our history here in New Zealand but right across the first nations world where an old, archaic and quite frankly outdated document is not repudiated by the Vatican," Tukaki says.

Apologies and repudiations have been made:

Pope John Paul II

• In 1992 in Santo Domingo on the 500th Anniversary of Christopher Columbus landing there, Pope John Paul II confessed and begged forgiveness for the sins of the Church in the Spanish conquest of America.
• He repeated a similar confession March 12, 2000, when, kneeling at the Holy Doors of the Great Jubilee. He begged forgiveness for Catholics who had violated "the rights of ethnic groups and peoples, and [for showing] contempt for their cultures and religious traditions."

Pope John XXIII
Pope John XXIII's 1962 encyclical Pacem in Terris pointed toward the United Nations and its role in protecting human rights, says Fr. Michael Stogre, author of That the World May Believe: The Development of Papal Social Thought on Aboriginal Rights.

"Subsequent teaching, particularly from Vatican II on, has certainly abrogated that earlier teaching," Stogre said.

Pope Paul III
In 1537, Pope Paul III issued a bull Sublimus Dei in which he stated: "Indians and all other people who may later be discovered by Christians, are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession…of their property, even though they be outside the faith of Jesus Christ.

And that they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty and the possession of their property; nor should they be in any way enslaved."

This bull is controversial because it's unclear whether it was ever promulgated outside the Vatican.

In Medieval and Renaissance Europe it fell to popes to issue bulls, but it was the job of kings to promulgate and enforce them in their kingdoms.

Source

• newshub.co.nz
• edgenorth.ca
• catholicregister.org
• thespinoff.co.nz
• upstanderproject.org
• Image: thespinoff.co.nz

On Saturday, Brian and Hannah Tamaki and about 100 Destiny Church supporters arrived at Ihumatao.

Hannah Tamaki said she was there "supporting the people on the ground".

Mana Movement leader Hone Harawira arrived at the same time as the Tamakis.

Harawira and Tamaki seem to be better tuned to the "people on the ground" than mainstream New Zealand.

A revolution underway?

"Even though he arrived at Ihumatao with members of the Destiny Church which was odd to me, he's representing an important Maori constituency in doing so," says Christine Rose on the Daily Blog.

"Some people have been scathing of the popular support the Ihumatao protestors have received. There have been accusations of bandwagoning," she says.

Rose, however, suggests another explanation; Ihumatao is a unifying cause.

She says they are:

• frustrated with past injustices that are perpetuated today
• sick of the privilege of corporates
• angry at the ruination of shared heritage, of desecration for money
• sick of political complacency, of the conservatism of power

"Ihumatao is being described as a revolution, this era's Springbok Tour, our Bastion Point, the biggest Maori movement of our time," she says.

Who is listening?

In 2017 The Ihumatao protesters attended the Fletcher shareholders' meeting

They had obtained the right to attend by buying Fletcher shares.

They didn't get much airtime. Board chairman Sir Ralph Norris had the microphone one was using to ask questions turned off to silence her.

The shareholders' feeling towards the protesters was hostile.

Just shrug and forget it

"Aucklanders have got used to crass developments, and the steamrollering of the past, and feel powerless to stop it," says Rob stock writing on Stuff.

"Our tendency is to shrug and just push it from our minds.

"The truth is Fletcher is building at Ihumatao not because it is a good idea, but because it is convenient."

Source

• nzherald.co.nz
• thedailyblog.co.nz
• stuff.co.nz
• stuff.co.nz
• Image: nzherald.co.nz

Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters has announced support for the memorial and the refurbishment of the nurses' training centre to mark the centenary of the arrival of a ship from New Zealand which was carrying sick passengers.

"One hundred years ago the New Zealand passenger ship Talune arrived in Apia, with flu infected passengers on board. The consequences of that arrival were devastating," Peters said.

"We acknowledge that almost all Samoan families were impacted in some way by the epidemic and we respectfully join with Samoa to mark the centenary today as National Health Day."

On 7 November 1918, the New Zealand passenger and cargo ship Talune arrived at Apia from Auckland.

On board were people suffering from pneumonic influenza, a highly infectious disease already responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths around the world.

Although the Talune had been quarantined in Fiji, the New Zealand administration in Samoa allowed sick passengers to disembark with no quarantine checks.

The disease spread rapidly, killing an estimated 20 percent of the population - at least 8,500 people - in less than two months.

In New Zealand, the number who died was 8573.

According to a 1947 United Nations report, the epidemic in Samoa ranked as one of the most disastrous epidemics recorded anywhere in the world during the 20th century, so far as the proportion of deaths to the population is concerned.

The commemoration was marked with a public holiday, church service and ceremony at the mass grave at Vaimea, one of the dozens of mass graves that dot the country.

The New Zealand High Commissioner to Samoa represented the government at commemoration services in Apia.

Source

• tvnz.co.nz
• radionz.co.nz
• scoop.co.nz
• radionz.co.nz
• nzhistory.govt.nz
• Image:en.wikipedia.org

This challenges one of the most widely cited reasons for Christianity's popularity, that it spread from the "bottom-up" by empowering lower classes and promising to improve the lives of the less privileged in the afterlife.

The finding is in a just-published study in the journal 'Nature Science Communications' which studied 70 Austronesian cultures in the region.

One of the report's authors, Auckland University's Quentin Atkinson, said: "We have this data on these 70 different cultures across the Pacific and they have different political structures, their cultures are different sizes - so different population sizes - and different levels of inequality."

Atkinson said the authors studied two hypotheses on Christianity's spread in the Pacific: whether leaders converted their people, or whether the people forced their leaders to convert.

He said the researchers looked at three different factors:

• The strength of the political structure
• The degree of inequality
• Population size and degree of isolation

After assessing Christian missionary efforts from 1668 to 1950, the researchers found:

• The adoption of Christianity typically took less than 30 years, and societies with political leadership and smaller populations were fastest to convert
• Social inequality did not reliably affect conversion times

The results suggest that Christianity's success in the Pacific can be attributed to a top-down process.

It was not an egalitarian doctrine empowering social underclasses.

"If you go back to some of the records of the early missionaries, a couple of the successful missionaries actually explicitly talk about deliberately targetting the leaders because that's where they see the power," Atkinson said. "The level of inequality didn't affect the conversion type. So that supports the top-down argument."

Listen to interview

Source

• radionz.co.nz
• nature.com
• youtube.com
• nzherald.co.nz
• Image: aiucentre.wordpress.com

The comment comes just hours after confirmation that Fritch will join a Pacific Islands Forum delegation to meet Pope Francis at the Vatican next month. The forum coincides with the COP23 climate change conference in Germany.

The pro-independence opposition party, Tavini Huiraatira, said it wondered whether it was the same Édouard Fritch who, for 30 years, defended the French nuclear weapons tests as being clean.

It also pointed out that Fritch castigated the Tavini politician Antony Geros for hanging a crucifix on the territorial assembly wall in 2004.

It added that Fritch has been urging a separation of the state from the church.

Fritch is the former son-in-law of the veteran French Polynesia politician and five-times president 86-year-old Gaston Flosse.

He was the second in command in Flosse's pro-France Tahoeraa Huiraatira party and his heir-apparent. But the two have subsequently fallen out.

Fritch's supporters went on to form a new party, the Tapura Huiraatira. Flosse's party has since lost more than half its deputies to it.

Fritch became president of French Polynesia in September 2014 after his predecessor Flosse was forced to resign over a conviction for corruption.

Flosse had stepped aside after failing to secure a pardon from President Francois Hollande over the conviction which was upheld by France's highest court in August 2014.

Flosse was convicted for running a vast network of phantom jobs to support his political party in one of the biggest cases of its kind in French legal history.

He was sentenced to a four-year suspended jail term, a large fine, and banned from public office for three years.

He recently announced he intends to stand in the 2018 elections

• RNZ
• BBC
• RNZ
• RNZ
• Wikipedia
• Image: BBC

"I think he knows that in Kiribati the churches are very influential with the government. That's why he came to visit me," said Mea.

Anton Bakov, a Russian businessman who is the head of the Russian Monarchist Society, wants to revive the Romanov empire, which ended in 1917 with the Bolshevik revolution.

He says the islands of Kiribati would make a peaceful and neutral location for his planned 'alternative Russia'.

Bakov wants to buy three uninhabited islands in the Southern Line Islands to build a resort complex, and also create what he calls an ‘alternative Russia'.

The Kiribati Government's Foreign Investment Commission is still considering Bakov's proposal and a decision is expected soon.

"I don't know his background," said Mea. "I met him. We came together from Nadi to here, and they visited me with some members of parliament."

"But I only know that they are going to develop it as a resort"

Mea said he is reasonably happy about the deal as long the Russian millionaire leases the land and does not buy the island.

"More or less. Because that island there is doing nothing. It is better we get some money from it."

" Building a resort is a good idea. I can't see anything wrong with it provided that it is controlled by the government."

In 2014 Bakov purchased 96 hectares of land on the outskirts of Niksic, the second largest city of Montenegro.

He planned to build residents and a tourist resort, a Palace of the Romanovs in exile, an Orthodox monastery and international scientific centre.

Source

• cookisland news.com
• mondo.rs
• radionz.co.nz
• radionz.co.nz
• Image: static.mond.rs

Accepting children into family life was a more inclusive process. Traditional Samoan values promoted the protection of children, not the infliction of suffering upon them.

He says when the missionaries arrived in Samoa from Europe, they didn't bring just the gospel.

They also brought their own culture, and biblical interpretations, with them.

The missionaires own world view flavoured the kind of Christainity they preached.

Nove said this discovery opened his eyes, and took him on a journey which challenged many of the old ways he had accepted to be true.

"We all contend with a kind of legacy that is left over from our parents, or from a previous generation," he said.

"My own parents had the best intentions when they smacked me: It was considered the proper way to discipline a child."

"When I entered into parenthood myself, I took that learning with me, and started smacking my own children. But then I learned that there are more and better ways of parenting."

Nove says becoming an adult is a process, rather than an automatic change of attitude.

"I started talking to my children more, and sharing my feelings with them."

"I discovered that parenting can be a classroom in itself.

If we are not prepared to learn from our children, then we are not prepared to give the best mentoring and teaching that we have to give them, ourselves."

Reverend Nove Vailaau is an ordained minister at the Congregation Christian Church in Samoa.

He carries out his ministry in Porirua East, New Zealand.

Source

• stuff.co.nz
• Image:d20umr41za4hgv.cloudfront.net/

Mr Juppé was Prime Minister from 1995 to 1997 under President Jacques Chirac, who made the controversial decision to resume nuclear testing in French Polynesia.

Mr Juppé, 70, is a member of the right-wing Les Républicains, and has been considering a bid for the French presidency in 2017.

The lobby trail last week led him to Tahiti where he met with several of the territory's anti-nuclear organisations.

After a two-hour meeting, Mr Juppé emerged to say the assertion France held until 2009 that its nuclear testing programme was clean was not based on fact.

"The affirmation which was to say that nuclear tests were clean is not right," Mr Juppé said.

"It is not the truth. Nuclear tests had, and still have, an impact on the environment which is worrying, it also has an impact on peoples' health."

Despite receiving more than 1000 applications, the French state only ever granted 19 people compensation for harm caused by nuclear testing at Mururoa and Fangataufa atolls between 1966 and 1996.

Current socialist president François Hollande also promised to revisit compensation laws when he visited Tahiti in February.

The legacy of decades of nuclear testing lingers in French Polynesia, where the effects of the 193 tests and the secrecy of the French state remained contentious.

It took until 2009 for Paris to acknowledge that harm had been done.

Frustrated with a lack of progress, the French Polynesian Assembly in 2014 passed a motion to ask France for close to $US1 billion in compensation, and Richard Tuheiava, an assembly member, last month pressed the case at the United Nations, something which Mr Juppé urged against.

"We will look for the path to reconciliation," he said. "We need to trust each other again."

Susanna was born in 1945 in Ouvea in the Loyalty Islands, but grew up in Poindimie on the east coast of New Caledonia.

She was a member of the Foulards Rouges in the late 1960s, which mobilised young Kanaks and their supporters to the cause of independence.

Susanna Ounei was a founder of the Groupe de femmes kanak exploitées en lutte (GFKEL), the feminist organisation that was one of the founding members of the Front de Libération Nationale Kanak et Socialiste (FLNKS) in 1984.

The photograph above shows Susanna at a Diplomacy Training Programme organised with the Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Pacific (CEPAC), Suva, 1997 (photo c Nic Maclellan)

She worked as Assistant Director (decolonisation) with the Pacific Concerns Resource Centre (PCRC) in Fiji in the mid-1990s. Through the Omomo Melen project, she carried the voice of indigenous and colonised women to the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995.

Susanna Ounei first came to New Zealand in early 1984 to learn English, after losing her job in Noumea because of her involvement in the Kanak independence movement.

In 1986 she married New Zealander David Small who became a Canterbury University academic after completing a PhD in Education in 1994 on the politics of colonial education in New Caledonia.

In 1997 their marriage broke down and Susanna remained on the island of Ouvea in New Caledonia until returning to Wellington with her two adoptive children in 2000.

While she was a parishioner of St Anne's parish in Newtown Susannah came up with the idea that the way to consult the diverse Newtown community was through a market.

Others agreed as in many of their home countries the market is a gathering place for a community, this is where communication takes place - layers that are often not obvious in the more commercially orientated market places in New Zealand.

A pilot market in November 2008 followed and a group of 8 to 12 people from across the community have maintained a commitment to organize the current market.

Susanna is survived by her two children, Toui and Jessie, in Wellington and her wider whanau in New Caledonia.

She lay in state on Tapu Te Ranga in Wellington before her funeral which took place on Thursday.

She is being be taken back to New Caledonia for burial.

Source

• Facebook
• nzccss.org.nz
• notices.nzherald.co.nz
• Image: Nic Maclellan

Francis said corruption is not only present in politics but almost everywhere, including the institution he leads.

"Even in the Vatican there are cases of corruption," he said.

Francis's comments came in response to a question from two young Kenyans

"Corruption is something that gets inside of us, it's like sugar," Francis said.

"But it ends badly. When we have too much sugar, we end up with diabetes, or our country ends up being diabetic."

"Every time we accept a bribe and we put it in our pocket, we destroy our hearts, our personalities, and our country," he said.

The Pontiff then directly addressed those engaged in corruption, though he did not mention anyone by name.

The money they steal, he said, won't follow them to the grave, adding that after they're gone, all that is left are "the hearts wounded by these examples" as well as starving children who have no food because it was stolen.

"Corruption is a path to death," Francis said.

Kenya ranks 145 out of 174 countries in the Transparency International 2014 index.

Recently, the country's president was forced to fire several cabinet ministers on corruption charges.

Answering a series of questions posed to him at the Kasarani stadium in Nairobi, Francis also warned against tribalism and said a lack of education and jobs was fuelling radicalisation.

While visiting a Nairobi slum, Pope Francis launched a blistering attack on "new forms of colonialism" that exacerbate the "dreadful injustice of urban exclusion".

Earlier, at a United Nations office in Nairobi, the Pope said a failure by world leaders to confront climate change in a meeting in Paris would be a catastrophe.

Speaking to priests, religious and seminarians in Kenya, the Pope criticised indifference and said a person without prayer is as ugly as a dried fig.

Anyone who does not think he or she can live a life of poverty, chastity and obedience should leave and start a family, he added.

Sources

• The Tablet
• The Tablet
• Crux
• Catholic Herald
• The Guardian
• Image: Independent

The Pacific Conference of Churches General Secretary, Reverend Francois Pihaatae, says Papuans are being killed and tortured merely because they want self-determination, a right guaranteed by the United Nations of which Indonesia is a member.

He said 500,000 Papuans have died since Indonesia annexed the territory in 1961.

Pihaatae said the situation in Papua was made worse by Indonesian denials when the evidence of abuse was clear.

"Social media makes it impossible for Indonesia to hide the atrocities committed by its security forces on a people who want to determine their political future for themselves."

The call came after the killing of a student in Timika and Indonesia's denials at the United Nations General Assembly of human rights abuses in the territory.

Rev Pihaatae said that despite the obvious, overwhelming evidence, the Indonesian government insulted the intelligence of Pacific people by its denials.

"Our leaders' silence will not make the issue go away," Pihaatae said.

"In the name of humanity we, the Pacific churches, call on our leaders to end this bloodshed and bring injustice in Papua to an end."

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• Facebook
• Image: freewestpapua.org

"A common sign of this secularization is the emergence of social, political, and economical spheres in which religious influence is declining."

Boniface says the Papua New Guinea constitution has two pints of reference: ‘our noble traditions' and ‘the Christian principles'.

"The question is what happened to those noble traditions and the Christian principles since the time when European culture and civilization met the people of PNG?"

He says when a culture/civilization meets another culture/civilization changes will take place and there is the danger that the dominated society gets disorientated because of all the changes; that it loses its bearings.

Source

• wantokniuspepa.com
• Image: materialworldblog.com

An Auckland academic says the real issue with violence against women in Papua New Guinea is not sorcery, but gender inequality.

Evangelina Papoutsaki says unequal gender relations which are the result of the post-colonial times and Christianity, are being used to justify violence against women.

Father Franco Zocca said earlier this year that only scientific enlightenment and a massive education effort could help overcome sorcery beliefs in the region.

But Papoutsaki does not believe the Catholic Church is helping women in the country by focussing on sorcery.

"It's nonsense that the Catholic Church declares war on witchcraft and sorcery. They should fight for equal treatment for women and gender equality," she says.

"They shouldn't attack the end result. The issue is not witchcraft, they are approaching it from the wrong perspective."

"Christianity comes in with a different belief system and sits on top of another society with different spiritual practices and they both try to struggle to exist together," she says.

"Nowadays," she says, "women need to be ashamed about their body. They need to cover it."

"All of a sudden women became objects of shame."

Associate Professor Evangelina Papoutsaki, an academic at Unitec, has worked and lived in Papua New Guinea as a journalism educator.

She has been doing research in Papua New Guinea for 10 years.

Source

• Pacific Scoop
• Image: screenshot theguardian.com