Homosexual Bill Introduced in Poland

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, Feb. 14 — Poland may be mostly Catholic, but its left-leaning government has introduced a bill legalizing cohabitation between people of the same sex, the French news agency reported. Joanna Sosnowska, a Democratic Left Alliance deputy who prepared the bill, said it was a necessary step for Poland's entry into the European Union.

A referendum on Poland's entry into the EU is scheduled for 2003. Sosnowska said EU standards prohibit discrimination against people of “different sexual orientations.”

Her bill, modeled after France's civil solidarity pact law, which states that people's sex does not make any difference in terms of cohabitation, would grant homosexual couples some of the benefits now restricted to married couples. Adam Schulz, spokesman for the Polish bishops conference, called the bill an “attack against the institutions of marriage and the family.”

“We agree that Poland needs to discuss not only Polish integration to the EU but also the values used to develop Poland's future after this ... and the qualities Poland will bring to it,” he said. But that should be done “without copying the shameful models promoted in certain EU countries.”

San Giovanni Rotondo Friars Launch Pio TV

THE GUARDIAN, Feb. 11 — As devotees of Padre Pio anticipate the canonization this year of the Capuchin friar with the stigmata, the friars at San Giovanni Rotondo, where he lived, are launching a television station that will make the saint better known.

Tele Padre Pio will transmit images of people praying at his crypt and recollections of those who knew him. The friars will need more than $321,000 for a satellite deal, but Internet users will be able to follow broadcasts at www.teleradiopadrepio.it.

The London daily, in reporting on the plans, did not fail to take a few stabs at the Church. It echoed the Italian newspaper La Repubblica's reference to San Giovanni Rotondo as the “Las Vegas of the faith,” noted that bingo player in town seek the padre's intercession for the right numbers, and dredged up ancient charges against the friar's involvement with young women. If the allegations were never proven, as The Guardian states, why bring them up at this point?

India's Bishops in Plea to Government

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, Feb. 20 — The Catholic Bishops Conference of India said that it has received news of four attacks on Catholics in the past month, including one on a church in the southern state of Karnataka Feb. 17, the French news agency reported. Also, a priest in Chattisgarh state was attacked in January.

“We thought the attacks on Church institutions and its personnel had become a thing of the past,” Archbishop Oswald Gracias of Agra, secretary general of the conference, said in a statement. “We urge the competent authorities to nab the culprits immediately and take lawful action against them.”

Police arrested nine Hindu extremists for the attack on the church in the city of Mysore, which injured several worshippers, the Associated Press reported Feb. 18. The assailants demanded that the priest there end what they said were efforts to convert local villagers, who are mainly Hindu.