While boasting about the "economic miracle" he claims to have achieved before Covid-19 disrupted life across America, the president described having a conversation with God about his track record as president.

"We built the greatest economy in the history of the world, and now I have to do it again," he said, repeating a debunked claim about his administration's economic successes during a campaign stop in Mankato, Minnesota.

"You know what that is?" Trump asked. "That's God testing me. He said, ‘You know, you did it once.' And I said, ‘Did I do a great job, God? I'm the only one that could do it.'''

According to Trump, God wasn't too pleased with his boast.

"[God] said, ‘That, you shouldn't say. Now we're going to have you do it again,'" he said as his audience broke into laughter.

"I said, ‘OK, I agree. You got me,'" he said. "But I did it once. And now I'm doing it again." Continue reading

Interfaith leaders gathered on the steps of St Paul's Anglican Cathedral in Wellington to hold their Bibles and other sacred texts for a photo opportunity.

But this was a photo of a very different kind to the one in which Trump held up a Bible on the steps of an Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C.

The US President had stood in front of Washington's St John's Episcopal Church clutching an upside-down copy of the Bible amongst a backdrop of anger over the death of black man George Floyd at the hands of a police officer.

World media has widely reported the angry response to Trump's photo, which came after law enforcement teams used violent tactics against peaceful protesters in order to clear the way for the President to walk to the church.

In response, the Dean of St Paul's Cathedral, the Very Rev. David Rowe, felt it was time to re-imagine Trump's photo through the lenses of peace, love and solidarity.

He invited interfaith and cultural leaders to stand on the steps of the Cathedral, holding their sacred texts, to model a more positive alternative.

Members of the Sikh, Muslim, Baha'i, Jewish, Protestant and Catholic communities were among those in attendance.

Some members of the group held signs saying Love your neighbour, and Aroha ki tou hoa tata.

"We wanted to just say ‘there is another way, a peaceful way,' and to express our unity and working together for the common good," Rowe said.

Source

• movementonline.org.nz
• stuff.co.nz
• Image: stuff.co.nz

Politico first reported the plan, which is currently being drafted as an executive order, which President Trump has yet to see.

Critics argue the move is merely a political one, an effort to shore up support from evangelical Christians in advance of the 2020 election. And it could come with complications. Continue reading

Farid Ahmed, who lost his wife in the shootings, was among 27 survivors of religious persecution from all over the world who met president Trump last Wednesday.

He thanked the president for the leadership and support he had shown "by standing up for humanity, standing up for religious groups and their rights."

"Thank you for supporting us during the 15 March tragedy in Christchurch," he said.

"God bless you and God bless the United States."

Prime minister not surprised

New Zealand's prime minister, Jacinda Ardern said Ahmed's warm comments to the US president did not surprise her.

"I don't think I have ever heard or indeed met an individual who has had so little reason to be forgiving and yet is so incredibly forgiving," she said.

"He is a man full of love and compassion, and he exudes that in every interaction he has.

It doesn't surprise me at all he's doing that abroad and continuing to be a person that just promotes love and humanity."

During the Christchurch National Remembrance Service on March 29, Ahmed thanked "New Zealanders for coming together to show the world that New Zealand is a peaceful country".

"I have chosen peace, I have chosen love, and I have forgiven," he said.

Source

• christianpost.com
• tvnz.co.nz
• Image: White House

The southernmost barrier roughly marks the international boundary between the United States and Mexico, between San Diego, Calif., and Tijuana, Baja California.

The area is patrolled 24/7 by US Border Patrol agents in SUV's and helicopters.

Cameras monitor the area to spot anyone who might try to cross the border illegally.

But it was not always this way, according to Deacon José Luis Medina, the administrator of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in San Ysidro, a San Diego neighborhood just north of the border.

Deacon Medina was born in Tijuana.

"We have a good relationship between Mexico and San Diego," Deacon Medina told America.

"A lot of people come from Tijuana to go shopping here. We're not very happy with the wall."

Our Lady of Mount Carmel will be the site of a 40-foot "Welcome the Stranger" sculpture.

The monument to the Virgin Mary, which will be surrounded by a meditation garden, was inspired by the Statue of Liberty and commissioned by the San Diego Organizing Project.

Bishop Robert McElroy of San Diego supports the project.

"The president wants to build the wall, and we want to build a bridge," Deacon Medina said.

"We are Christians. Our faith tells us that everyone is a human being."

The sculpture will stand in stark relief to the increasingly militarized border.

During his presidential campaign, Mr. Trump vowed to build a "great border wall."

Earlier this year, thepresident visited San Diego to see eight border wall prototypes, but community members say the "Welcome the Stranger" statue is not meant as a political statement.

"This has nothing to do with politics," said David Gonzalez, who has been a parishioner at Our Lady of Mount Carmel for 20 years.

"This is who we are and what we believe in. We welcome people."

It is personal for Mr. Gonzalez, whose mother was born in Mexico. He also has undocumented friends in the community who "are doing very well, helping the economy and everything," he said. Continue reading

First, the Supreme Court handed down a favorable decision in NIFLA v. Becerra, agreeing that pro-life crisis-pregnancy centers shouldn't have to post information about abortion.

Then, Justice Anthony Kennedy, the Court's long-time conservative swing vote, announced his retirement.

This has opened the way to what will inevitably be an intense battle over his replacement, along with the core principles Kennedy helped to defend.

Above all, advocates and legislators seem to have one word in their minds as they prepare for this fight: Roe.

Over the past 45 years, Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that upheld a woman's right to obtain a legal, pre-viability abortion, has become infamous—loved by pro-choice feminists, reviled by the pro-lifers who see themselves as defenders of the unborn.

At many points throughout his long career on the Court, Kennedy provided the decisive vote in cases that dealt with controversial cultural questions, including LGBT rights and religious freedom.

He has been particularly influential in abortion-related cases, in part because his views have been mixed: While he has generally voted to uphold the fundamental principles outlined in Roe, he has at times expressed a deep moral ambivalence about abortion itself.

Without him on the Court, pro-life advocates see an opportunity to secure a firmly anti-abortion majority.

Overturning Roe v. Wade is not a straightforward political maneuver achieved in a few easy steps.

But now that Kennedy has stepped aside, pro-life advocates see an opportunity to tilt the Court toward their cause—and they have a clear strategy for making it happen. "We know what we've got ahead of us.

It's the fight of our lives, literally," said Marjorie Dannenfelser, the head of the pro-life advocacy group Susan B. Anthony List. "If this is the Roe vote, then it is the most consequential battle since 1973."

The story that has been told about Kennedy and abortion is one of indecision and persuasion.

According to a 1998 book by a former Supreme Court clerk, Edward Lazarus, Kennedy had been open, three decades ago, to casting a vote in a case that would have returned the question of abortion to the states.

But in 1992, Kennedy—a devout Roman Catholic and Ronald Reagan appointee—joined Justices David Souter and Sandra Day O'Connor in authoring Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which upheld Roe while allowing for certain regulations and limits on abortion.

Not all critics have considered the book's account trustworthy, but its larger story about Kennedy's posture on abortion is evident in his judicial record.

His vote was essential in Casey, but he also wrote the opinion that upheld Congress's ban on so-called partial-birth abortions.

In 2016, he joined the Court's liberal justices in Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt, a decision that pushed back against abortion restrictions in Texas.

But just last week, he also joined the conservative majority in NIFLA v. Becerra; in his concurring opinion, he compared California's requirements for crisis-pregnancy centers to the free-speech restrictions imposed by authoritarian regimes.

As a result, Kennedy has not won many ardent admirers among advocates and scholars with firm positions on abortion. Continue reading

• Image: Desiring God

The idea behind that phrase has long been an important organizing principle for pro-life groups like Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council.

For many who work for these organizations — or who vote for candidates endorsed by them — being "pro-life, pro-family" is not a euphemism for opposing abortion and same-sex marriage.

It acknowledges that protecting children, including ones not yet born, often requires protecting and supporting their mothers and families too.

We are in the midst of a serious crisis for vulnerable children and families, though, and these "pro-life, pro-family" organizations have been largely silent.

The crisis is the Trump administration's practice of separating children from undocumented parents, even when the families are asking for asylum. In one particularly horrific case, a mother said that her baby was taken from her while she was breast-feeding.

The number of children being taken is so large that the administration, using the fear these children must feel as a means of deterring undocumented immigration, is apparently building "tent cities" around military bases to house them.

Given their support of the administration, and an unwillingness to speak critically about immigration policy, "pro-life, pro-family" organizations now risk being tied to these and other horrific practices.

Some church groups and leaders have followed their broad pro-life commitments in condemning these practices. Evangelical leaders like Russell Moore and Samuel Rodriguez have signed a public letter of protest to the administration.

"The traumatic effects of this separation on these young children, which could be devastating and long-lasting, are of utmost concern," they wrote.

On Wednesday, Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, denounced the Trump administration's immigration policy.

"We urge courts and policymakers to respect and enhance, not erode, the potential of our asylum system to preserve and protect the right to life," he said. Continue reading

• Image: Vimeo

With Kennedy gone, a more conservative Supreme Court could overhaul key aspects of the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act, legal scholars say.

And any new justice selected by President Trump would likely seek to weaken the Environmental Protection Agency, curtail its ability to fight global warming, and weaken its protections over wetlands.

The reason has to do with simple math.

As on many other issues, Kennedy has functioned as the court's swing vote on the environment, occasionally joining with the court's four more liberal justices to preserve some aspect of green law.

"He's been on the court just over 30 years, and he's been in the majority in every single environmental case but one. You don't win without Kennedy," said Richard Lazarus, a law professor at Harvard who has argued 14 cases in front of the Supreme Court.

"I think more than the other more conservative justices, Kennedy seemed open to embracing the idea that tough national laws were necessary to address some types of problems," he told me.

"He was concerned about private-property rights and the marketplace, but open to the necessity of tough environmental laws."

Other legal scholars and environmental advocates agreed.

"The loss of Kennedy is not good news for environmental regulation," said Ann Carlson, a law professor at UCLA and the co-director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.

The nation's highest court would now "almost certainly" be more hostile to environmental law than it has been since the founding of the EPA in 1970, said Jonathan Z. Cannon, a law professor at the University of Virginia.

"With the departure of Justice Kennedy, this is no time to mince words: We are in for the fight of our lives," said Trip Van Noppen, the president of the environmental-legal-advocacy group Earthjustice, in a statement. Continue reading

• Image: The Atlantic

The two countries are trading insults, with North Korea threatening to send four missiles into the sea off Guam, as a response to President Donald Trump's escalating rhetoric.

"The only way forth is that of dialogue, because the way of conflict is always wrong, says Italian Archbishop Silvano Tomasi.

The current crisis shows how international relations can easily break down when there is a determination "to violate the minimum standard of common sense in dealing with other people," he adds.

"That's why you need to invest time, energy, money, resources in preventing the necessity of arriving at these boiling points of crisis."

U.S. and South Korean Catholic bishops have also called for the U.S. and North Korea to deescalate the current threat of war between them.

Bishop Oscar Cantu, head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' international justice and peace committee, has written to Secretary Rex Tillerson urging Washington to avoid war and find a dialogue-based solution to the current tensions with Pyongyang.

Cantu says while the threat posed by North Korea should not be "underestimated or ignored," the "high certainty of catastrophic death and destruction from any military action must prompt the United States to work with others in the international community for a diplomatic and political solution based on dialogue."

He also says he and his colleagues support South Korean President Moon Jae-in's proposal to reopen negotiations with North Korea. Catholic bishops in South Korea aslo back this proposal.

Source

• Crux
• The Daily Caller
• Image: Daily Mail

The encounter will take place in the Vatican's Apostolic Palace, where the pontiff meets most heads of state who visit him.

The two have spoken about each other, but this will be the first time they actually address one another directly.

This will not, however, be the first time a U.S. president and the pope meet.

It won't even be the first time Francis has encountered an American president, as he's met with Barack Obama twice, once in Rome and once in Washington.

Ahead of Francis's meeting with Trump, it's worth looking back at previous times popes and presidents have intersected, and what was said about those meetings at the time.

That first time
The first sitting U.S. president to meet a pope was Woodrow Wilson, back on January 4, 1919. He encountered Benedict XV at the end of the First World War.

The first president to meet a pope was Ulysses S. Grant, who paid a visit to Pope Leo XIII in 1878, but it was after Grant had left office.

Theodore Roosevelt had an appointment with Pope Pius X for April 1910, but decided to skip it at the last minute due to his unwillingness to abide by the Vatican's protocol.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt was the only sitting president since Wilson who, while visiting Italy, didn't meet with the pope.

It happened in 1943, when he traveled to the country to see Allied military installations as part of a November 20-December 9 tour that took him to several countries, including Malta, Senegal, Tunisia, and Egypt.

Roosevelt wasn't snubbing the pope: Rome was occupied by the Germans at the time, and the only part of Italy the president visited was Allied-occupied Sicily.

Back to Wilson. Continue reading

Sources

• Crux article by Inés San Martín, an Argentinean journalist who covers the Vatican in Rome for Crux.
• Image: Bella Naija

Thanks to a new website, you can ship your cremated remains to a Republican lawmaker should you die as a result of the plan. Continue reading

‘Nobody dies because they don't have access to health care,' GOP lawmaker says. He got booed.

Three years after our marriage, I became eligible for citizenship, passed the citizenship test, proudly took the oath of allegiance, sang the "Star-Spangled Banner", waved my little souvenir flag, and - with a few tears - began a wonderful new life.

One of the things a prospective citizen studying for that citizenship test learns about is the Bill of Rights - a powerful testament to the American love of freedom, especially so, for me, in the Fourth Amendment:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath of affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Have you perhaps heard about the "checkpoints" that are so familiar in the Arab Middle East? A "checkpoint" is nothing more or less than an unreasonable search, always with the risk of arrest by the mukhabarat or secret police.

How grateful I was, how liberated I felt, to be at last the citizen of a free country where such searches and seizures were forbidden by the most basic law of the land.

But does the Fourth Amendment apply to me, a Muslim-American citizen in a simple hijab? Does it apply at Los Angeles International Airport?

On February 23, 2016, I arrived at LAX booked on a Turkish Airlines flight to Istanbul and then to Gaziantep. Gaziantep is a city in South-Central Turkey, near the Syrian border, where my aged mother and two brothers are living as refugees from the Syrian wars. Continue reading

• Lubana Adi cares for her three children at home in Los Angeles County and volunteers in the neighborhood school.

Donald J. Trump and Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the president and the pope, are the world's most famous populists. But they are in conflict.

To grasp why Pope Francis has become the flag-bearer of the global anti-Trump resistance, consider his Feb. 17 appearance at a university campus in Rome, where one of the students who asked him a question was a Syrian woman, Nour Essa.

The pope knew her well. Hers was one of three families, all Muslim, he had brought back with him on the return flight from his visit to a refugee camp in Lesbos, Greece. He has helped dozens of refugees make new lives in Italy.

Two families live in the Vatican itself, whose high walls and fortress features are these days at odds with the border-dissolving pope within.

In the courtyard of the university, Roma Tre, where Ms. Essa has won a scholarship to study biology, she asked Francis to respond to Europeans who believe migrants threaten the continent's Christian culture.

Migration, he told her, is not a danger but a challenge, a spur to growth that has expanded Europe's culture, not weakened it.

"When there is this welcoming, accompaniment, integration, there's no danger with immigration," he said. "A culture is received and another offered. This is my response to fear."

The pope's populism is not intended for popularity — a fickle thing, and anyhow, his soars far above any politician's — but proximity. This is a pope who likes to come in close.

As Europe's borders stiffen and nativist movements gain footholds in elections, such bold assertions of universal humanity, backed by action, have made Francis a bridge maker in an age of wall building.

In part because he anticipated the current political crisis long before it happened, his Greek-chorus commentary on the upheavals matters. Continue reading

• Austen Ivereigh is the author of "The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope" and a contributing editor for the Catholic news site Crux.

Witches from around the US say they will be casting a mass spell every night of a waning crescent moon until he is no longer president.

They began their mass hex programme last month.

Rather than calling on God for protection, the spell calls on spirits, which include the "Demons of the infernal realms,".

The spell is publicized on the Internet and includes a supply list such as an unflattering photo of Trump, a tarot card, a stub of an orange candle, and earth.

Father Vincent Lampert, who is the designated exorcist for the archdiocese of Indianapolis, said the witches are relying on evil that feeds on anger and revenge.

He pointed out that while spells only work on "the spiritually weak", they can cause serious problems for those who meddle with them.

"Anyone who would dare say they want to challenge that God is in charge is using the power of evil as their own. They should realize that we can't use the devil; the devil uses us. People can't control it and the devil ends up using them for his own purposes," he said.

Source

• RT
• CNA
• Image: wiccanspells.info

While hatred for and visceral fear of Muslims began long before President Trump's campaign hatched, his odious rhetoric and reckless decisions promise a potentially horrifying climax.

Given Trump's intentions for a "Muslim ban" and the fury his followers harbor for Islam, the backdrop for Islam in America right now consists of white nationalist fliers on college campuses, grisly hate crimes, tenuous civil liberties and profound suspicion.

Friends and family fear that anything appearing remotely "Muslimy" will provoke malice. There are also concerns that the "clash of civilizations" sought by Trump's advisers will embolden groups like the Islamic State, which seek those disaffected by the West as recruits.

Trump's presidency has become a moment of reckoning for the country's 3.3 million Muslims as their faith finds itself embattled, besieged by uncertainty and under duress.

Muslims face a temptation to embrace victimhood and retreat, but also a solace, as Islam has been in a similar place before.

In the dusty pages of old Sunday school books are the stories of early Muslim communities that thrived when their faith was beset with challenges.

Propelled forward by the universal themes of justice, equality and solidarity that form the Koran's bedrock, their enlightened struggle resonates under Trump's presidency.

Born in 610, Islam's call for social and economic reform became a radical response to the growing inequities in the city of Mecca.

Long honored tribal ideals had perished as wealth became disproportionately concentrated in the hands of a few oligarchs who controlled the city and all of its political, religious and economic affairs.

Prophet Muhammad sought to topple this entrenched social order with Islam's unprecedented message of equality, which embraced Mecca's indigent and marginalized.

Those who chose to convert to Islam in its nascent stages voluntarily chose to oppose this status quo despite the great personal cost.

Many sacrificed their lives, abandoned lives of privilege, severed bonds with family members, endured persecution and ignored ridicule because they were called to a purpose far greater than themselves. Continue reading

Sources

• The Washington Post, article by Jalal Baig, an oncologist and a writer in Chicago.
• Image: Time

Gomez said fears surrounding deportation are not new and many people were deported when Barack Obama was president.

However, he said the administration under President Donald Trump has set a harsh tone and shows a cruelty he does not like. Read more

Tamaki took to Facebook to blast United Future leader Peter Dunne, calling him a "rat" and a "pathetic specimen of a man", following Dunne posting an open letter to Donald Trump criticising the US President. Continue reading

Chaldean Catholic Archbishop Bashar Warda of Erbil, Iraq, was due to visit the US at the invitation of New Jersey politician, Chris Smith.

He intended visiting Washington DC and New York.

He was also planning to visit Mgr John Kozar, who is the president of the Catholic Near East Welfare Association.

Kozar said they had planned to discuss the persecution of Iraqi Christians.

He would like to visit Warda instead, but is not certain if he will be eligible to enter Iraq.

"I'm planning a visit to Iraq in March to continue to demonstrate the solidarity we have and to show them we haven't abandoned them and assure them that they are not forgotten.

"But I don't know — will I be permitted to enter that country? As we have stopped the flow from these listed nations, some of them are doing the same in kind."

Source

• Catholic Herald
• Angelus News