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Politics : Support the French! Viva Democracy! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ManyMoose who wrote (6973)	12/26/2012 8:58:40 PM
From: average joe	Respond to of 7824

France monitoring traditionalist Catholics for 'religious pathology' h/t Tom Clarke Catholic News Agency December 26, 2012 Interior Minister Manuel Valls in Lyon, France on Sept.14, 2012. Credit: fhrhone via Flickr.com (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) Paris, France, Dec 13, 2012 / 04:37 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- A French cabinet member announced that the government will monitor certain groups for "religious pathology," including a traditionalist Catholic organization, and will shut them down if it is discovered. “The objective is to identify when it's suitable to intervene to treat what has become a religious pathology,” Interior Minister Manuel Valls told a conference on the official policy of secularism, according to Reuters. “The aim is not to combat opinions by force, but to detect and understand when an opinion turns into a potentially violent and criminal excess,” he said at the Dec. 11 conference. Valls' remarks come in the wake of President Francois Hollande's announcement Dec. 9 that he would create the “National Observatory of Secularism” to promote France’s policy and to “formulate propositions for the transmission of 'public morality,' giving it a dignified place in schools.” Hollande's announcement of the observatory was made on the anniversary of the adoption of a law in 1905 that established secularism as state policy in France. It was accompanied by the decision to honor the sociologist Emile Poulat, who helped to “promote secularism as an essential value of our living-together.” Secularism (laïcité in French) has received a boost from Hollande's Socialist government, which believes it was weakened under former President Nicolas Sarkozy. Valls said that the government would be monitoring violence among religious radicals, including Salafist Muslims and Civitas, an organization of lay Catholics which is associated with the Society of Saint Pius X. He said that Civitas is observed because its political protests flirt with “the limits of legality … All excesses are being minutely registered in case we have to consider dissolving it and defending this before a judge.” Civitas is “a political movement inspired by natural law and the social doctrine of the Church … engaged in the establishment of the social Kingship of Christ” throughout the world, and in France in particular. It demonstrates against secularism and policies which denigrate Christianity. According to Reuters, Valls offered radicals Islamists, traditionalist Catholics, and ultra-orthodox Jews “who want to live separately from the modern world” as examples of religious extremists. Under the secularist policy, the government will identify “sects” and disband faith-based groups it deems to suffer from “religious pathology.” On Oct. 31 of this year, the Tunisian imam Muhammad Hammami was expelled from France because he defended violence against women and made anti-Semitic speeches at his Parisian mosque. “We decided to be uncompromising against all those who utter hate speech against the Republic and our values,” Valls said at the time. In March 2012, an al-Qaeda supporter murdered three soldiers and four Jews in Toulouse, which Valls said at the conference “showed how quickly religiously radicalized people could turn to force.” Secularism in France discourages the display of religion in the public square. In 2004, Muslim women were barred from wearing hijabs in public schools. Education minister Vincent Peillon told the Dec. 11 conference that the classes on secular morality would emphasize the French secularist values of equality and fraternity. In an interview with Le Journal du Dimanche, he said that secular morality is to “understand what is right and to distinguish good from evil.” “Secularism is not about simple tolerance … it is a set of values that we have to share.” catholicnewsagency.com

To: ManyMoose who wrote (6973)	3/26/2013 2:56:29 PM
From: average joe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7824

Les misérables: Despite welfare state and wine, unhappiness reigns in France Facebook \| Twitter \| Email \| Instapaper Scott Barber Tuesday, Mar. 26, 2013 Anne Hathaway in a scene from Les Misérables. A new study has found the French are far less happy than their standard of living would predict, and blames psychological and cultural issues — such as the school system — for the phenomenon. Universal Pictures / The Associated Press France has good wine, a great culture, a 35-hour work week and a miserable population. A study by the Paris School of Economics shows that despite having all the things needed for a good life, the French are among the unhappiest people on the planet. “It has now become common knowledge that the French are much less happy and optimistic than their standard of living would predict,” says The French Unhappiness Puzzle: The Cultural Dimension of Happiness by researcher Claudia Senik. She suggests that French schools and the loss of prestige in the world may have contributed to the country’s unhappiness. Despite free access to health care, hospitals, public school and universities, dissatisfaction is so prevalent in France it ranked worse than Iraq and Afghanistan in a survey of expectations for 2012, according to a WIN-Gallup poll. Ms. Senik analyzed a number of European polls and surveys to determine “differences in self-described happiness across countries of similar affluence.” Among her findings: - The French unhappiness is mirrored “by a low level of trust in the market and in other people”; - “French natives … are less satisfied with the state of the economy in the country, with the state of democracy, with the state of the education system”; - The proportion of people agreeing that “for most people life is getting better” is particularly low in France. One study asked participants to use an emotive scale (from happiness and enjoyment, to stress and anger) to answer questions like: “Did you smile a lot yesterday?” “It turns out that France ranks first in terms of negative affects and last in terms of positive affects!” Ms. Senik wrote. “This is driven by the particularly high number of French respondents reporting feelings of anger and worry and the low frequency of feelings of enjoyment and happiness.” With a generous welfare state, relative economic stability and 35-hour work weeks, what do the French have to complain about? It’s not the language, as surveys show “francophone individuals are happier than English-speaking” people in Canada. Similar results were found in other multilingual nations such as Belgium and Switzerland. Instead, Ms. Senik points to the “influence of psychological and cultural factors … where culture is understood as a real and not a purely nominal phenomenon.” France ranked worse than Iraq and Afghanistan in a survey of expectations for 2012. Thomas Coex/AFP/Getty Images The study notes that French emigrants are less happy than the natives in the countries they move to, while the opposite is true for immigrants to France. There is also a correlation between the time spent living in France and an individual’s unhappiness. “This suggests that there is something in the culture that makes French people miserable,” Ms. Senik wrote. The socialization of children, especially in the public school system, is the most likely culprit, she claims. “I think the role of the primary school system in France is partly to blame,” Ms. Senik told The Local online news site. “If unhappiness is partly due to someone’s mentality, then people are forming that negative mentality at an early age in primary schools.” The tough grading system could be a factor, she said, since “it is very difficult to get good grades,” in French public schools. Another factor could be the lost “grandeur of the old Francophone empire and influence France used to have in the world,” she said. “People might not always be conscious of this, but they are feeling it. It’s a feeling of decline in terms of international influence.” Ms. Senik thinks many in France feel skeptical and uneasy about the “new world” order. “There is something deep in the French ideology that makes them dislike market-based globilization.” The solution could be to “learn more foreign languages,” and to travel more, Ms. Senik told The Local. This would help the French “fit more easily into this globalized world.” National Post nationalpost.com