“None of us was baptized a priest or bishop: we were all baptized as lay people, men and women. We are protagonists of the Church.”
Pope Francis made that remark on Sunday after the recitation of the Angelus prayer.
In his prayer intention for October, the Pope says, “We pray that the laity, especially women, may participate more in areas of responsibility in the Church.”
Incisive feminine presence
At the Angelus, Pope Francis highlighted the contribution that lay women can make.
“Today we still need to make greater space for a more incisive feminine presence in the Church – I mean a lay presence – but underlining the feminine aspect, because women are often put to one side.”
The Pope also encouraged the integration of women in places where important decisions are made.
And, as in his video message accompanying his prayer intention, he warned against falling into clericalism, which “diminishes the lay charism and even ruins the face of Holy Mother Church.”
Shelter Island Presbyterian Church. (Credit: Eleanor P. Labrozzi Photo)
Tomorrow, Monday, the Better World Book Club will meet at 3 p.m. in Fellowship Hall of the SI Presbyterian Church. Sponsored by the Church’s Mission Team, the club welcomes folks from all religious and spiritual backgrounds to read and discuss selected books that deal with profound subjects especially meaningful to current world challenges. The club has been in existence since February of 2019, according to club member Marilynn Pysher, and they meet every several months for lively discussions facilitated by group leader Lynn Franklin. Attendees, male and female, come from all over the East End as well as Shelter Island. Since COVID, attendees are asked to bring their own chairs and mask up.
The title for Monday’s meeting, “Everyday Ubuntu, Living Better the African Way,” written by Mungi Ngomae, Archbishop Tutu’s granddaughter, gives examples and suggestions on how to overcome division and be stronger together. All are encouraged to attend Monday, Oct. 12 even if they haven’t yet read the book.
Some of the books that have been discussed at previous meetings are:
“Just Mercy: A story of Justice and Redemption” by Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal practice dedicated to defending people on death row.
“The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World” by His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
“Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life” by David Brooks.
“White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism” by Robin Diangelo.
When Donald Trump’s latest supreme court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, arrives before the Senate judiciary committee for her confirmation hearings on Monday, Democrats will be out to raise an alarm that Barrett could help strike down the Affordable Care Act in the very first case she hears.
But in the weeks leading up to the hearings, Republicans have been out for something else entirely: a holy war.
The future of the supreme court hinges on the Barrett hearings. But the hearings will be backgrounded by a political fight over religion that is potentially as important as the question of whether Barrett replaces Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the late liberal justice, on the court.
If Republicans can make it look like Democrats are attacking Barrett, a conservative Catholic, for her religious views, they believe, that could stir enough political anger to rescue a couple of tight Senate races in the elections on 3 November – and potentially save the teetering Republican Senate majority.
Democrats hope to defeat the Barrett nomination on the merits.
But they also hope to take control of the Senate next month, claim the White House, and then pass a bulwark of laws on key issues – healthcare, reproductive rights, marriage equality, voting rights, the climate emergency – to withstand what could be decades of tendentious rulings by a supreme court with as many as three Trump-appointed justices on it.
The current Senate judiciary committee chair, Lindsey Graham, who happens to be among the most endangered Republican incumbents, explained the Republican strategy last month on Fox News, saying Democratic protests over credible sexual assault allegations against Trump’s supreme court nominee Brett Kavanaugh helped Republicans in the 2018 midterm elections.
“Kavanaugh really did help Republicans pick up Senate seats because they went too far,” Graham said.
In a transparent attempt to whip up a comparable spectacle around the Barrett nomination, Senate Republicans have produced an ominous video featuring tense footage from the Kavanaugh hearings and accusing Democrats of a “radical power plot” to attack Barrett over her religious beliefs.
But prominent Democrats have urged a minimum of pageantry during the Barrett hearings and a focus on Barrett’s views on the healthcare law, abortion, same-sex marriage and other issues.
“It is going to be really important to not give Lindsey Graham and the rest of the Republicans a moment of righteous vindication over a circus-like atmosphere,” the former Democratic senator Claire McCaskill said on a popular politics podcast this week.
“So I just think this is one of those times when some of our most passionate supporters that are so angry on behalf of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, that they’ve got to realize that there is a better way than flooding the halls with women in handmaid costumes.”
To protest against the Barrett nomination earlier this month, activists stood outside the supreme court wearing red robes and white bonnets, recognizable from the TV series based on the Margaret Atwood novel of female subjugation, The Handmaid’s Tale.
Democrats should focus on the threat posed to healthcare by Barrett, who in 2017 published a critique of Chief Justice John Roberts’ 2012 ruling to uphold the Affordable Care Act, said Ben Jealous, president of the progressive People for the American Way group. On 10 November, just one week after the election, the supreme court is scheduled to hear a separate case that could vacate the law.
“The confirmation hearings have to be all about what the nomination is about: destroying healthcare for millions of Americans,” Jealous said. “Anybody who wants to make this about a nominee’s personality, or even the life they’ve lived so far, is missing the point.”
Democrats on the committee acknowledge they do not currently have the votes to stop the nomination from moving forward, and Senator Cory Booker said last week that procedural stalling measures would not work – because the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, could merely change the rules to keep the nomination on track.
Progressives must not write off the Ginsburg seat as lost, however, said Neil Sroka of the progressive Democracy for America group.
The former Democratic senator Claire MacCaskill chided progressives that ‘they’ve got to realize that there is a better way than flooding the halls with women in handmaid costumes’. Photograph: Alex Edelman/EPA
“America elected Democrats to fight for a bolder progressive vision for the future of the country,” he said. “And sometimes fighting means taking on difficult battles even if you’re not sure if it’s possible that you can win.”
Sroka said it was “appalling” and “laughable” that after having stood behind Trump’s Muslim bans, Republicans would accuse Democrats of elevating religious prejudice.
“Religious tests have no place in public life, and Democrats are the one party in the country right now that have been consistent on that,” Sroka said.
Throughout the Trump presidency, McConnell has prioritized the confirmation of conservative judges. But the measures he has taken to confirm Barrett in what could be the waning days of the Trump administration, which to movement conservatives would represent the culmination of a decades-long design on the supreme court, were seen as extraordinary even for him.
All other business in the Senate has adjourned for two weeks over health concerns following an outbreak on Capitol Hill of Covid-19 – but the Barrett hearing will proceed “full steam ahead”, McConnell announced.
Two of the Republican senators on the committee, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Mike Lee of Utah, announced last week that they had tested positive for Covid-19 after attending a White House event to celebrate the Barrett nomination. Many others who attended the event also later tested positive, including the president and first lady, leading to whispers in Washington of a new nickname for the nominee: Amy “Covid” Barrett.
Graham, who has refused to be tested for coronavirus himself, has said that recuperating senators could attend committee hearings virtually, in an unusual arrangement that Booker said was inappropriate for the consideration of a lifetime supreme court appointment.
“We now have members of our committee who have fallen ill, and I pray for their wellbeing, but this just further highlights that this process is just wrong,” Booker told the Pod Save America podcast.
Jealous said it was ironic that the Republicans were taking health risks to secure the confirmation of a nominee who could, within weeks, begin dismantling a crucial healthcare law.
“Literally you have senators who are exposed to Covid because of a super-spreader event, refusing to get tested, so that they don’t have to quarantine, so that they can make a vote to appoint a judge who will take away healthcare from their neighbors in the midst of a pandemic,” said Jealous.
The Republican rush to confirm Barrett, Sroka said, betrayed their awareness that neither the nominee nor the confirmation process has the support of the American people.
“If they knew that the American people were on their side, and they knew that they had the support of the public on the issues that they’re trying to force through this court, they wouldn’t need to do what they’re doing right now,” Sroka said.
“But they know that they can’t win a fair fight, so they’re going to use every bit of power they have to force this agenda on us for a generation, while they still have it.”
“We live in a historic moment marked by difficult challenges”, Pope Francis said in a video messages aired during Saturday’s global launch of “Countdown”, organized on a global level by TED to find prompt solutions to the climate crisis.
Covid-19, he continued, is forcing us to choose between what does and doesn’t count.
We do not have much time, according to scientific evidence, Pope Francis emphasized. He then extended an invitation to undertake a ”journey” together. That journey, he said, is one of “transformation” and “action”. Its objective, he explained is to construct within the next decade “a world capable of responding to present generations, inclusive of everyone, without compromising the possibilities of future generations”.
This journey corresponds to the “integral ecology” that the Pope presented in his encyclical Laudato si’. The first step to take together is education in the care of our common home.
The second step is to focus on water and nutrition. “Access to drinkable and safe water”, the Pope reiterated, “is an essential, universal human right”. Adequate nutrition requires “non-destructive agricultural methods”. These methods need to become the “fundamental goal of the entire cycle of food production and distribution”, Pope Francis said.
Step three on the journey is the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy. This transition needs to be not only rapid and capable of supplying future energy requirements, but also attentive to how this “affects the poor, local populations and those who work in the energy sector”. Included in this third step is not to invest “in those companies who do not meet parameters of integral ecology and rewarding those who concretely engage in the transition phase”.
Renewing economy
Moving into the topic of the economy, Pope Francis called the current system “unsustainable”. It is an urgent moral imperative, he said, to think about many things differently such as “production, consumption, our wasteful culture, short-term vision, the exploitation of and indifference to the poor, the increase in inequality and the dependence on harmful energy sources”.
New relational concepts
“Integral ecology”, Pope Francis explained, “suggests a new concept of relating between ourselves and nature”. This new concept will lead to a “new economy”, one that views production as directed toward “the integral well-being of the person”, and the “improvement, not the destruction of our common home”. Politics is involved in this renewed mentality, if it is perceived as one of the “highest forms of charity”.
“Yes, love is interpersonal, but love is also political. It involves all peoples and it involves nature.”
Finally, Pope Francis concluded his video intervention renewing his invitation to “undertake this journey”. “As the term ‘Countdown’ indicates”, this journey is “urgent”, he said.
“Every one of us can play a valuable role if we all of us join this journey today. Not tomorrow, today. Because the future is constructed today, and it is not constructed alone, but in community and in harmony.”
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The book was welcomed back by bemused … our surprise this beautifully bound book was dropped into the returns … to return any overdue library books they might have, with the … -spirited act to return this book after so many years. …
“Mary, the Mother who cared for Jesus, now cares with maternal affection and pain for this wounded world. Just as her pierced heart mourned the death of Jesus, so now she grieves for the sufferings of the crucified poor and for the creatures of this world laid waste by human power.
Completely transfigured, she now lives with Jesus, and all creatures sing of her fairness. She is the Woman, ‘clothed in the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars’ (Rev 12:1).
Carried up into heaven, she is the Mother and Queen of all creation. In her glorified body, together with the Risen Christ, part of creation has reached the fullness of its beauty.
She treasures the entire life of Jesus in her heart (cf. Lk 2:19,51), and now understands the meaning of all things. Hence, we can ask her to enable us to look at this world with eyes of wisdom.”
(Pope Francis, Laudato si’, 241)
Under the direction of Paolo Ondarza #SeasonOfCreation Instagram: @vaticanmuseums @VaticanNews Facebook: @vaticannews
It seems as if the end is in sight. Four and a half years after voters chose it in a referendum, the process of taking Britain out of the European Union is drawing to a close.
The final act may yet be calm or chaotic, but in any event, at least politics will no longer be dominated by an ill-tempered argument between the tribes of Leave and Remain. We can move on from the minutiae of fish quotas and customs declarations and get back to the bread-and-butter issues that really matter.
Yet, while the formal Brexit process may end, Brexitland is here to stay.
Brexit has mobilized deep divisions over identity and values that have been building in the electorate for many decades and these are not going away. The debate over EU membership has been so protracted and painful because it is about far more than Britain’s relations with its European partners.
Britain has been reshaped by mass immigration, rising ethnic diversity, and an expansion of higher education. The EU referendum activated the new divides opened up by these changes, creating political identities – Remain and Leave – and banners for voters with different world views and priorities to rally behind. These Leaver and Remainer identities are now more widely shared, and intensely felt, than any other form of political attachment. The political fight is different because everyone knows whose side they are on and whom they oppose.
A Black Lives Matter protest in central London on 29 June 2020. Photograph: Henry Nicholls/Reuters
We can see the conflict between the Brexit tribes creeping into the issue after issue, even as Brexit itself falls down the political agenda. Leave and Remain tribes divide in their views of institutions, politicians, and issues from higher education to environmentalism. The Brexit tribes divide even in their views of how to respond to the Covid-19 crisis.
The divides recur because what Leave and Remain capture and symbolize are fundamental differences in voters’ outlooks and priorities. Leave has become the identity of choice for voters more attached to traditional social identities and more anxious about rapid social change. Remain has become the badge of voters who embrace the growing openness and mobility of recent decades and are keen to accelerate it.
These differences in outlook are differences in degree, not kind. All groups in British society have shifted in a liberal, inclusive direction. The socially conservative pensioner of 2020 is far more likely to be at ease with diversity or gay marriage than their parents or grandparents were. Large numbers of people just a generation ago were openly prejudiced against other races and quite happy to say so. Condemnation of racism today is near-universal.
Yet while everyone is shifting in the same direction, they are doing so at different rates. Most Leave voters condemn prejudice and discrimination as social ills, but they have a narrower understanding of what racism means and what are the best solutions to fight it. Most Remain voters are not woke puritans seeking to shut down legitimate opponents, but people strongly motivated by the cause of anti-racism, who can find it hard to understand others who do not share their expansive interpretation of this cause.
This is the heart of the Brexitland conflict: a rapidly changing society throws up identity conflicts that require sensitivity and respect for shades of grey to work through, but the polarising politics of “us against them” that Brexit has catalysed works against this.
Partisans see the best in their own group and the worst in their rivals. It is all too tempting for a socially liberal Remainer to reach for stereotypes of ignorance and prejudice to dismiss a Leave voter. It is all too easy for a Brexiter to read a Remainer’s anti-racist passion as the fashionable hypocrisy of the privileged. Partisan stereotypes are chronically available to all of us. They are part of how we make sense of a complex world. But they also have a strong polarising effect. It is easier to shout down our opponents than see things from their point of view.
Politics all too often makes this worse. Tribal attacks and partisan stereotypes are temptations that political leaders and activists indulge eagerly when in a tight spot. Stoking outrage at the evils of the other tribe is an effective way to motivate supporters and distract attention from your own failings. We see no shortage of this behaviour every time a new identity conflict emerges. Demonising political opponents may deliver a short-term advantage, but in the long run it polarises politics further by keeping partisan stereotypes at the forefront of voters’ minds.
A supporter of Scottish independence on 19 August 2020 at Bannockburn. Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images
While identity conflicts look set to continue, they will be fought out on very different terrain once the issue of Brexit itself finally fades. While predicting the direction of politics is a fool’s errand – few had heard of Covid-19 a year ago – a couple of issues loom large as potential flashpoints.
The first is Scotland. A new Scottish Parliament will be elected next May and the SNP will treat a strong performance as a mandate to begin the campaign for a new independence referendum. The SNP has made great gains by mobilizing Scottish resentments against England and Westminster. It is quite possible that Boris Johnson’s Conservatives will look to return the favor, mobilizing English nationalist sentiment against Sturgeon’s supporters. The risk, as with Brexit, is that once such resentments are mobilized they become hard to control.
However, the next moment of mobilization of identity conflicts does not have to come from the side of the nationalist or traditionalist right. Although the years in the run-up to the referendum were dominated by the mobilization of voters threatened by diversity and immigration, the next wave of identity conflicts could be sparked by liberals organizing to accelerate change.
The Black Lives Matter protests that gripped British cities in the spring could be a sign of things to come, as liberal voters press politicians to embrace and support changes they see as desirable. The past decade of Ukip, Donald Trump, and Brexit has belonged to politicians who mobilized those most threatened by the changes reshaping our societies. The next decade may yet belong to those who give voice to the voters who embrace change.
In the health sector, business development is not just about innovation, but also saving lives.
While research and development starts at a small scale, what does it take to bring medical devices to the public?
Maltese medical devices company BrainTrip developed a diagnostic tool capable of detecting early-onset dementia at a fraction of the cost and time of standard diagnoses. In need of guidance to scale up their business, BrainTrip turned to the Enterprise Europe Network, the largest global network supporting small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) co-financed by the European Union.
Jurij Dreo and David Sakić bonded over their research work on dementia. In 2019, they took this shared interest and co-founded Maltese medical devices company BrainTrip. The company developed an affordable and easy-to-use solution for early-stage dementia screening – known as an ‘EEG’ (electroencephalogram).
At a small scale, this diagnostic tool was more effective and rapid than the standard dementia diagnosis. Yet, the company needed to overcome funding and regulatory hurdles to have the desired impact on the medical sector.
BrainTrip approached the Malta Council for Science & Technology, a partner of the Enterprise Europe Network located in Kalkara. The network, with its 3,000 experts from more than 600 member organisations based in 60 countries worldwide, is a valuable source of support for SMEs in accessing EU funding and partnerships.
With the support of the Enterprise Europe Network, BrainTrip gained access to EU regulatory and marketing experts. Specifically, the Malta contact point for the Network organised a meeting with a medical device certification expert at the BrainTrip premises. Over a two-day period, the expert answered all of their questions about the certification process for medical devices on the EU market. Another integral component of the Network’s support was matching BrainTrip with business coaches and mentors who could provide expert insight at the national and EU level.
“Without the Network, expert advice would have cost an arm and a leg. And we wanted to keep our arms and legs,” says Dreo.
Up to scale
Thanks to the Network’s guidance, BrainTrip is gearing up to enter the market with a proof of concept for a non-invasive dementia screening device, at a fraction of the time (15 minutes) and cost (€100 to €150) of a standard diagnosis. Prior to March 2020, BrainTrip was preparing to run clinical trials in various European health centres or hospitals. With the sustained support of the Network, BrainTrip looks forward to expanding staff and business prospects with EU funding as well as through the Rockstart Health accelerator and other partnerships with pharmaceutical and healthcare companies throughout Europe.
For more information and to find out how your local Enterprise Europe Network can support your business, visit www.enterprise-europemalta.com
Independent journalism costs money. Support Times of Malta for the price of a coffee.
“I was concerned that I might get infected. Everyone was afraid,” says 32-year-old World Health Organization (WHO) data collector Myat Mon Yee.
Since March, Ms. Mon Yee, a computer studies graduate from South Dagon Township in Yangon, has been working at the South Okkalapa Hospital in the former capital. The hospital was planned as the Women’s and Children’s Hospital but has been transformed into a COVID-19 treatment centre.
Not surprisingly, she was initially quite concerned about working with an infectious disease about which very little was known, except that it was killing people and making others very sick: front line health workers throughout the world have been contracting COVID-19 at a higher rate than almost any other group, except perhaps the elderly. Many doctors, nurses and administrative staff have died.
“But I thought about other health personnel and charity workers who were willing to work, and even volunteer, and that took some of my fear away”, she continues. “And when I started work, I found that the facilities were very well taken care of, which allayed my fears.”
Myat Mon Yee
Myat Mon Yee collects data on COVID-19 infections at the South Okkalapa Hospital in Yangon.
For a national health emergency plan to be effective, Government and health workers must have highly reliable data,which means staff such Ms. Mon Yee play a crucial role.
“Data is the light at the end of the tunnel”, says Dr Fabio Caldas de Mesquita, who heads up the WHO’s HIV, Viral Hepatitis and TB teams in Myanmar. “We need to know how many people are being treated and how many beds are available for new patients; a little about the patients’ gender, age, and the state of their illness, and of course where they live and who they have been meeting; and we need to know how many tests are being done, and how many test kits remain available.”
“We need to know what drugs are being used by the patient; what protective equipment is needed for health care staff; and how many staff are working on treatment and response: these may just seem like numbers, but they are key to decision-making during the crisis,” says Dr de Mesquita.
Airport staff unload cargo of PPE supplied by UNICEF at Yangon International Airport, Myanmar.
‘You need to be brave’
In February it quickly became apparent that the Ministry of Health and Sports did not have enough people to undertake this technical role, so WHO hired three people willing to run the risks associated with hospital work, including Ms. Mon Yee.
“You need to be brave to work in infectious diseases,” says Dr de Mesquita. “Many applicants for jobs in Myanmar refused the work when they discovered they were going to be working on COVID-19 at hospitals. It was the same in 1987 when I began working with HIV and we didn’t know exactly how it infected people.”
At work, Ms. Mon Yee wears a mask and face shield, carries sanitizer, and frequently washes her hands. She is provided with protective clothing, including a cap and gown, and the facilities are regularly disinfected.
But she also has to take precautions when she returns home, which she shares with her 95 year old grandmother, her 70 year old mother, her sister, and niece. “When I get home, I don’t talk to anyone. I immediately shower and soak my clothes in soapy water. I spray disinfectant on all my things, and I stay isolated for an hour”.
Preparing for the second wave
Despite her precautions, Ms. Mon Yee is very aware that there is no cure for COVID-19, and is concerned about a second wave hitting Myanmar.
“The recent increases in the infection rates have made me very anxious”, she says. “I am happy to be able to contribute to the Government and WHO’s response, and am grateful for this opportunity, but I worry about other health workers, who are becoming fatigued.
“We just hope the patients will recover quickly from COVID: I want the pandemic to be over soon, and for everyone to be safe.”
BRUSSELS: EU commissioner Mariya Gabriel has tested positive for Covid-19, she said on Saturday, the first top Brussels official known to have caught the coronavirus.
Gabriel, the EU commissioner for research and innovation, had already announced on Monday that she would self-isolate after a member of her team tested positive for the virus. “After a first negative #COVID19 test on Monday, my second one is positive,” said Gabriel, who is Bulgaria’s representative to the 27-member EU executive.
“I have been in self-isolation since Monday and continue staying at home, following the established regulations. Keep yourself healthy and stay safe!” she said. The EU commission is headquartered in the Belgian capital of Brussels, which is currently one of the worst hit cities in Europe by the virus, along with Madrid and Paris. The commission’s president Ursula von der Leyen on Monday briefly went into self-isolation after a close contact with a positive case, but her two tests came back negative.
