Letters

Children's rights

Arnold Jago

Contents - Apr 2015 - Buy a copy now Editorial: Welcome! Vocations: Australia's seminaries flourishing in 2015 - Br Barry Coldrey Designer babies: Dolce&Gabbana versus Elton John - Fr Dwight Longenecker Tu es Petrus: From John XXIII to Pope Francis: Four recent stages of Catholicism - Patrick Morgan Contemporary challenges facing Catholicism: Interview with Cardinal Robert Sarah - Élisabeth de Baudoüin Today's prophets: where are they? - Anne Lastman Our homeland is in Heaven - Audrey English Pilate's inscription on the Cross - Andrew Sholl Religious schools may teach the faith: Canada's Supreme Court - AD2000 REPORT Palliative care protects human dignity - Pope Francis EWTN's new app for smartphones and tablets - Peter Westmore Letters: The Holy See's relations with China - Francis Vrijmoed Letters: Critique of secular psychology - Eileen Cronin Letters: Put not your faith in electronic gadgets! - Anne Lastman Letters: Jesus words from the Cross - Robert Bom Letters: Mary in Scripture and history - Allan Choveaux Letters: Children's rights - Arnold Jago Books: MARY: A CATHOLIC-EVANGELICAL DEBATE, Dwight Longenecker & David Gustafson - Michael E Daniel (reviewer) Books: INSIGHTS FROM GRECO-ROMAN TIMES: A Christian Response, by Rex Dale - Peter Westmore (reviewer) Books: THE MASS OF THE EARLY CHRISTIANS, by Mike Aquilina - Paul Simmons (reviewer) Books: Order books from www.freedompublishing.com.au Reflection: Good Friday Reflection - Fr Raniero Cantalamessa

About Gillian Triggs, president of Australia's Human Rights Commission ... Her report on children in immigration detention describes human rights of children being breached – assaults, mental health disorders, etc.

Whoever is responsible stands condemned. Particularly whoever put them on the smuggler's boats in the first place – their parents.

Most boat-people left from Indonesia, where they weren't at life-threatening risk, unlike millions world-wide whose situations are urgently dangerous, including many Australian-born children.

In our own country, over 150,000 per year are harmed or at risk of harm from abuse and neglect -- 40,000 per year need removal from their homes.

Meanwhile Australia's citizens sit watching televised child-abuse and adult-abuse every night. Their offspring do internet games featuring beheadings and splatterings -- or message their peers that they are disgusting and should kill themselves.

Australia's whole culture is a spiritual vacuum. About this, neither Mr Turnbull nor Julie Bishop can achieve any more than Mr Abbott.

Politicians can't/won't fix it. Perhaps the Church ...?

Yes, the Church must go on the warpath defending virtue and condemning vice – in politics, in the media and (of course) in the Church itself.

ARNOLD JAGO,
Nichols Point, Vic.

Reprinted from AD2000 Vol 28 No 3 (April 2015), p. 11