Mother’s Day for Peace

from Mother's Day Gift Store

Happy Mother’s Day! Have you visited your mother yet? Maybe taken her out to eat? Or sent her flowers? Chocolates? A card? Or even bought her jewelry? Your wife too, if she’s a mother or mother to be. On Mother’s Day we honor our mothers, and this is how we do it. You have no excuse for having forgotten. Television commercials have been reminding you since Easter!

Unfortunately the economy sucks right now and a lot of in this country are out of work, underemployed, struggling with tuition increases at our colleges, paying off student loan or credit card debt, stretched thin because we are trying to help family and friends get by, trying to get by on insufficient retirement assets, or whatever. If that’s the case, just go see or call your mother. Mothers are always happy to hear from their children.

But if you want to be creative and distinct, tell your Mom you are going to take her to celebrate Mother’s Day in the way it was historically conceived, and take her to a peace rally!
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Pope Benedict on Economic Justice

This is a good article on the encyclical from the Vatican on the global economic meltdown.  Matters of theology are of no concern to me, and I often have opinions that are diametrically opposed to those of the Catholic church’s hierarchy on most other things.  When it comes to issues of economic and social justice, however, the Vatican often has good things to say.

Pope Benedict’s long awaited encyclical calls for a radical rethinking of economics so that it is guided not simply by profits but by “an ethics which is people-centered.”

“Profit is useful if it serves as a means towards an end,” he writes in Caritas in veritate (Charity in Truth), but “once profit becomes the exclusive goal, if it is produced by improper means and without the common good as its ultimate end, it risks destroying wealth and creating poverty.”

It is very elastic so prescription canada de cialis stretches around a man’s penis during sexual intercourse, or around a baby during labour. viagra best Sometimes everything would be fine and other times I would find it incredibly difficult to get or maintain an erection. There has long been confusion among many men about the difference between soft viagra pills and viagra. Also throughout your pregnancy your ligaments (the tough, flexible tissues that connect your bones) viagra 100 mg are stretching to support the growing uterus (womb). He decries that “Corruption and illegality are unfortunately evident in the conduct of the economic and political class in rich countries…as well as in poor ones.” He also says that “Financiers must rediscover the genuinely ethical foundation of their activity, so as not to abuse the sophisticated instruments which can serve to betray the interests of savers.”

via Georgetown/On Faith: Pope Benedict on Economic Justice – Thomas J. Reese.

The irony is that such a large percentage of people who cling fiercely to the Vatican’s pronouncements on sexual morality, right to life issues and such are also those most likely to ignore the social justice messages, whereas those who might find the social justice message appealing, are also likely to be bothered by the more puritanical aspects of their faith.  Ironic, no?