This week we welcomed more than 500 people to Newcastle City Hall for The Atonement: Lina’s Project. This survivor and victim-led event was important for our community to come together and witness the diocese admit, with shame, the church’s cover-ups and failures to report allegations of child sexual abuse.
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This event was only one step in an ongoing effort to support survivors, their families, and friends and the wider community towards healing.
We’re now seeking suggestions, thoughts and feedback from the community on additional initiatives which the diocese can undertake in the future. Anyone can submit their feedback via linasproject.com.au. In 2018, the diocese will be consulting with survivors and the community to plan a permanent memorial, and this memorial will be in a prominent place in the grounds of Sacred Heart Cathedral.
In addition, the diocese will also be working with schools within the region on how acknowledgement might be made in their settings, and from 2018, September 15 will be a perpetual day of remembrance in the Catholic Diocese of Maitland-Newcastle.
- Bishop Bill Wright, Catholic Diocese of Maitland-Newcastle
Strong objection
Lyle Shelton, of the Australian Christian Lobby, is ‘afeared’ that the call for same-sex marriage is just a smokescreen for ‘the radical LGBTQIA agenda’.
This agenda, according to Lyle, includes a move by gender-deplorables to infiltrate our schools using a ‘Safe Schools Program’ as a Trojan horse to groom our youngsters to alter their gender identification, rather than encouraging all students to be accepting of same-sex-attracted and transgender kids instead of bullying them to the point of suicide, as the program claims to do.
Personally, I care not what gender any of my kids and grandkids prefer to inhabit, as long as they try to be kind, decent humans and use the good brains they were born with, especially in learning to distinguish what is the truth.
An agenda that I do object to most strongly is the ‘Christian’ one that sees youngsters, before their powers of protective critical thinking have had any time to form, brainwashed with dodgy religious doctrine including far-fetched yarns of a god making a woman pregnant, risings from the dead and other stories that can for a time turn a child’s brain to mush.
“Give me the child to the age of seven and I will show you the man,” said St Ignatius Loyola, Founder of the Jesuits, originally it seems, a quote from Aristotle.
Good old Lyle is one of the horsemen, not of the Apocalypse, but “of those armies of the night, those superstitious forces of bigotry and fright!”
That quote from Philip Adams, apparently via Isaac Asimov.
If there are any gods out there, (which I seriously doubt) please save us from these ACL types who relentlessly seek to loosen our common sense grip on the real world.
Les Hutchinson
Individual opinion
This same-sex marriage vote is an individual’s opinion and right to vote for whatever they believe is the right decision for this nation and its future. Those who decide to vote no should not be bullied by the constant avalanche of YES advertisements, media campaigns, billboards and local written chalkboards of 'Vote Yes' Australia-wide!
Everyone has their reasons for why and how they're voting and no one else has the right to try to change their mind. Those who are voting no are NOT resting their hopes on you I'm sure, they are hoping you vote keeping in mind the effect this vote will have on this country and its future that affects all of us. One more point, those who vote NO are not discriminating against anyone. It's a personal vote and people will vote based on their own morals, beliefs, and opinions – not yours.
