Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper accepted and ate a communion wafer at a Catholic mass and didn’t pocket it as critics have alleged, his spokesman said on Wednesday.
Harper, a devout Protestant, attended last week’s state funeral for Canada’s former governor general, Romeo LeBlanc, during which a Catholic priest offered him a communion host.
YOUTUBE
TV images, some of which have been posted on YouTube, showed Harper receiving the host. The camera remained on the prime minister for several seconds but it did not show him actually place the wafer into his mouth.
“At the end of the service, he was offered communion. He accepted communion and he consumed it,” Dimitri Soudas said on Wednesday, quoted by Canadian media.
Soudas spoke in L’Aquila, Italy, where Harper was attending a G8 meeting.
A Catholic official, vicar general Brian Henneberry, raised the controversy by openly wondering what Harper had done with the wafer.
Henneberry, who is chancellor of Saint John in New Brunswick, where the funeral took place, said it would be scandalous had the prime minister put it in his pocket.
The speaker of Canada’s Senate, Noel Kinsella, rushed to Harper’s defense.
“I would like to state that I personally witnessed Prime Minister Harper consume the host that was given to him by Archbishop Andre Richard,” Kinsella said in a statement. “As a Catholic, I was therefore pleased to see the prime minister of Canada express his solidarity and communion with all those present in the sanctuary.”
POPE
After the G8 summit, Harper is due at the weekend to have an audience with Pope Benedict.
According to Catholic tradition, the host is a representation of the body of Jesus Christ, and some critics of Harper’s actions point out that Church law dictates that non-Catholics abstain from receiving communion.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
POLITICAL PATRIARCHS: Recent clashes between Thailand and Cambodia are driven by an escalating feud between rival political families, analysts say The dispute over Thailand and Cambodia’s contested border, which dates back more than a century to disagreements over colonial-era maps, has broken into conflict before. However, the most recent clashes, which erupted on Thursday, have been fueled by another factor: a bitter feud between two powerful political patriarchs. Cambodian Senate President and former prime minister Hun Sen, 72, and former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, 76, were once such close friends that they reportedly called one another brothers. Hun Sen has, over the years, supported Thaksin’s family during their long-running power struggle with Thailand’s military. Thaksin and his sister Yingluck stayed
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
Residents across Japan’s Pacific coast yesterday rushed to higher ground as tsunami warnings following a massive earthquake off Russia’s far east resurfaced painful memories and lessons from the devastating 2011 earthquake and nuclear disaster. Television banners flashed “TSUNAMI! EVACUATE!” and similar warnings as most broadcasters cut regular programming to issue warnings and evacuation orders, as tsunami waves approached Japan’s shores. “Do not be glued to the screen. Evacuate now,” a news presenter at public broadcaster NHK shouted. The warnings resurfaced memories of the March 11, 2011, earthquake, when more than 15,000 people died after a magnitude 9 tremor triggered a massive tsunami that
RSS