Sunday, Busy Sunday In Europe

ASSOCIATED PRESS, July 26—Americans traveling in Europe were once charmed—or exasperated—by the tendency of so many shops and services to close on Sunday. But no more. Shop-keepers blame customers in newly capitalist societies for busier and busier Sundays, said an AP report.

“We have to go with the times. People who work find it good to shop when they want,” Linda Krappe told AP who opens her train station tea store in Berlin on Sundays.

New Sunday customs seem to have taken quick hold. In France and Switzerland, old laws protecting Sunday are being removed from the books.

“The current rest-day and shop-closing laws just don't fit the attitudes and lifestyles of the population any more,” Zurich's city government is quoted saying in a proposal to allow Sunday store hours.

However, the Third Commandment's call for Sabbath rest is a serious obligation, Pope John Paul II wrote recently. And bishops agree that customers must guard the Sabbath.

“If people did not go shopping on Sunday, the stores would be closed,” said Father Adam Schulz, spokesman for Poland's bishops.

Grandmother of Jesus Draws Thousands to Quebec

QUEBEC GAZETTE, July 26—About 40,000 people visited the 2,000-seat chapel of St. Anne in Quebec to venerate her relic, a wrist-bone, on her feast day this year, said the Quebec Gazette.

St. Anne's lineage in tradition is long: she is the grandmother of Jesus. It was in her womb that the Blessed Virgin Mary was immaculately conceived — that is, conceived by her father, St. Joachim, and mother, St. Anne, but shielded from original sin by God.

St. Anne has been venerated as a protectress throughout the history of the Church, though she is not mentioned in any of the canonical books of the Bible. Martin Luther, who later disapproved of her veneration, credited her with saving his life as a young man — and entered a monastery to repay her.

She has always been a favorite in Quebec, where radio broadcasts until recently used to air prayers to her during her novena, said the report.

Scientists Say Darwin's ‘Myth’ Won't Do in 21st Century

OTTAWA CITIZEN, July 26—The 19th-century theories of adventurer Charles Darwin are on trial again, said the Ottawa Citizen. But this time his detractors are sophisticated scientists, in the international court of peer review.

Professor Michael Behe of Pennsylvania's Lehigh University and author of Darwin's Black Box says organs such as the human eye could not have evolved through chance mutations weeded out by natural selection: they are far too complex to have evolved step by small step over millennia. In fact, without all of their components in place and functioning together, they would be useless.

His book has been widely criticized by fellow biologists, but also widely read by them since its appearance in 1996. None of the book's international body of reviewers has challenged his central thesis, said the report, which summed it up: “Darwinism has no solid explanation for the complexities unearthed by modern molecular biology.”

Darwin said, “my theory would absolutely break down” if a complex organism were found that could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive small modifications, said the article.

But, says Behe, the eye and many smaller systems are just that. They require an “Intelligent Designer,” he said.

New Zealand geneticist Michael Denton also questions the theory. He challenged the idea that wholly new species can be created by tiny evolutionary steps in his book: Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, saying that “the Darwinian theory of evolution is nothing more nor less than the great cosmogenic myth of the 20th century.”