Cherie Blair says it’s ‘dangerous’ for women to stay at home to look after their children, who benefit if their mother works. But the evidence says not

I have always thought her a silly person. This just confims my suspicions. “Friends of Hans Kung” Says it all really. Cafeteria Catholics of the worst sort.

Watching a trendy-lefty mouth off is always an enlightening experience. The rote recitation of tropes, the intolerance of dissent and the dogged denial of reality are all trademarks.

It reminds me of nothing so much as the (apocryphal?) story of a member of the royal family on a visit to a poor neighbourhood during the 1930s, who was heard to ask the children, ‘Why, oh why, do you live like this?’

On the Telegraph website, Mrs Blair/Mz Booth also said that women should try to ‘have it all’. Yes, a nurse married to a man with a cublcle job is really, really keen on living the feminist dream – NOT.

The ultimate victory of men’s dominance over women is to tie all economic value to roles men have.  The fact women can now do them is only  a half-liberation because then we get the irony that women doing traditional roles outside that paradigm get the joy of being put down not just by men but now also by women.  Until we value women’s roles in the home not just their ‘earning’ roles, we have no liberation.  We have sell out

Indeed the sacraments will work in the end. But, he should have been made to publicly recant his very public support for abortion. His stand on this excommunicated him .
 This is not a judgement it is Gods law.

I recall my wife deciding that she wanted to stay home after our first child was born, some 27 years ago.  We had two incomes and a nice lifestyle.  We cut our income and lifestyle in half.  My wife, to this day, thinks it was among the best decisions we have made.  Life was financially more difficult, less jammed packed with fun things to pay for and do.  Life was enormously more rewarding, more fun and its all something we have never regretted.  It made me come home earlier from work as well!!

How dare she say this !!! Who and what does she think she is ???!!!!

Well said…..couldn’t agree with you more !

 ’Nobody should EVER be refused entry into the Church’
That has to be the dumbest absolute statement i have ever seen on these boards. Really Mr Oddie, not even avowed Communists, or Freemasons who have entered the church with the sole purpose to destroy it from within? Oh but wait, that’s OK because ‘there is ALWAYS a good reason for wanting to be a Catholic’. Even if it’s to destroy from within it seems. But wait, what’s that i hear you say….
‘The sacraments of the Church always work in the end’
Really, i must have missed that little gem in Catechism Class. All who receive the sacraments are saved, no matter what the condition of their soul when they receive them? I think you might want to tell that to St Paul. Where exactly Mr Oddie, do you derive is fact from? So everyone who receives the sacraments is saved (eventually)! Mr Oddie has proclaimed it so, right before he criticised someone for making Judgements on another soul.
You response is so deplorable im having a hard time believing its genuine…….

I think an RCIA director would ask someone to leave, or the prospective convert would leave, if he or she was in the situation you described. But baptism should not be outright refused in my view. Someone is inclined to God and His Will if he or she asks for it, in the manner that the Church teaches and with the intention of receiving the grace which washes away original sin.  

But who looked after Mrs Blair when she was a child.A stay at home grandma and Mother?She owes a debt of gratitude to them .

Well Done Ms Sebelius’s Bishop! and at least she exhibits some level of respect for complying. Nancy Pelosi is a disgrace, poor girl.
I don’t feel entirely comfortable giving opinions about who should or should not be allowed to receive sacraments. But that’s the dilemma with prominent people who effect legislation completely contrary to Gods laws. Tony (we don’t do God) Blair’s reception into the Church was plain wrong to me because he was so obviously at odds with Catholic Moral teaching on so many key issues.

When public figures convert to Catholicism it is often very en-heartening and inspiring. Converts like Anne Widdecombe. She became Catholic because her moral compass led her to Rome. 

William Oddie is also one convert to the faith I am very thankful for, even if he disagrees with me on this one.

There is a simple solution. The churches should use their influence to campaign for a minimum wage, one that would allow a single wage-earner to raise a family.  

I am happy for you that your decision worked out well for yourself and your wife. However, these days many young couples simply cannot afford a mortgage or today’s high rents, while losing one income. It is now a luxury to be a stay-at-home mother as I was. In addition, the article above has been carefully edited. Cheri Blair’s reason for saying that it was dangerous for women to stay at home, was that they are then in a very vulnerable position if their marriage breaks up. Which is exactly the position I found myself in – little work experience for many years, no pension because I trusted that my marriage was for life and serious long-term health problems which in any case made full-time work impossible.

Women can simply not afford to give up work, for most educated women it is not mentally stimulating enough, can be lonely and isolating and puts them in a weak position. Once upon a time, being a homemaker was a full-time job but now with automatic washing machines etc, there is no excuse for women not doing some sort of work and it is valuable for children to see their mothers as independent, intelligent, equal adults – not drudges. Dumb cows make good mothers, but we have brains equally as good as men’s.  As I have said elsewhere, society cannot afford to lose so much of the talent and workforce of society. 

That woman is a very dangerous woman the women that wish to make a life of peace should stay away from! She is a terrorist lover that never sees anything positive in teaching good morals to youths, that is why she was ready to represent a Muslim girl that could not abide by simple secular rule that others accepted to abide by.
Also recall their evil role with Gadhafi, how they milked Libya, only to set the man up and murder him. If Gadhafi was that evil as they claimed before killing him, why were they not killed alongside him, because in our world, the same people that claim to be fighting terrorism, often kill or punish those that associate or even cross path with suspected terrorists.. What then is the different between the unholy marriage of most Western criminal leaders who wined and dined with Gadhafi, and Gadhafi himself? Show me your friends and I will tell who you are…
Please keep this womans’ view away from people that wish to live normal family lives, to her family comes later, it is all about money, money, money, even from demons. Her husband and her cooked up selfish propaganda lies to destroy Iraq even Libya(He was Ghadafis’ whatever assistant till the time he got him killed), for their wicked personal benefits while hundreds of thousands of innocent souls perished  This woman is anti-Christian values and is in fact anti-Christianity! Any real woman that is blessed with a family but does not take pleasure in taking care of her family first before anything else is not worth being called a woman! For what use is she then, or how is she better than a woman that a man can pick on the street for a night?

 That is the love of Capitalism.. the slow death of mankind.. Living the sick American/Western dream of greed, selfishness and wickedness.

I totally agree with however Hans Kung is not a cafeteria catholic, the guy is a heretic though not formally declared as YET. Also, the mere fact that both parents are absent about 85% of the child’s life suggest to the fact that these generations lack discipline, respect for elders and indifferent to the Faith thus would eventually apostatized which is the MAJOR cause of secularization in Europe and not the Teachings of VII.

Moreso asserting that automatic washing machines, etc would make no excuse for mothers to work thus make them drudges is just silly in fact the opposite would result. Without mothers tending and caring to their little ones which no amount of money can buy resulted in this deplorable state of European families. Do you want us to enumerate the disfunctionality of this generation? Unprecedented divorce rate, broken families, disrespect toward parents and elders, rampant pornograhy, crime, violence, immorality, 50 million deaths by abortion every year, where ones morals is as good as any others etc.

Agreed,but it is wrong to criticise the millions of women who see it as a privelege to rear families

“….my supposed hatred of women (my wife and daughters were astonished).”

The good relationship between a father and his daughter(s) is quite different from any other normally accepted good relationship between a man and a woman/women – in work/business, as a colleague or as a friend. 
The husband/wife relationship is a unique one.

“Well, Cherie Blair has sounded
off again, in her usual arrogant Left-wing elitist manner: this time
giving us an almost archetypal specimen of feminist hostility to
traditional marriage.”

## Manner is not content – surely what matters is not how or by whom a thing is said, but whether what is said is good logically or morally or in some other way.
“She never had any trouble getting high-quality child-care (or expensive hairdressers or high-powered cranky lifestyle gurus).”

## But how are her arrangements any objection to the worth of the substance of her case ? If “It’s all very well for *her* to talk, because *she* can afford to say what she does” is a valid argument against what she says – how does the same objection not undermine what the Popes say ? They don’t have to bring up children, or feed or clothe or bathe or sit up at night or educate them – Catholic mothers do. Even if they are dirt-poor, as many of them are. It is all very well for them to talk – they are not the ones who have to bear the consequences of what they require of others. The spectacle of people who give orders without having to be affected by them is an unattractive one; this Olympian detachment from the consequences one’s will imposes on others by requiring the to behave in a certain way was not imitated in the Incarnation, or in the Passion.

Having umpteen children in some dirt-poor region or country can’t be good for the children if the sanitation is basic or non-existent. If US politicians who are not “pro-life” enough for their detractors are complicit in allowing abortions, & can be refused the Eucharist, even though they have never aborted a single foetus – how is the Pope not complicit in bringing children into the world so that they can have beri-beri, or be blinded, or suffer some other misery resulting from living in unhygienic conditions ? His moral pressure occasions these latter, more certainly than the lack of moral pressure by politicians to do away with abortion causes the former. Urging abstinence from sexual activity is good as far as it goes – but it doesn’t go far. In the world that most peple live in, a lot of people are not going to be abstinent. “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride”.  

“Likewise, for the inner relationship of the family to be
complete, they also need to say a ‘yes’ of acceptance to the children to
whom they have given birth…”

## How would he get on if he were the father of a family with (say) six children, lost his job as (say) an accountant, and had a mountain of school fees, & a mortgage to pay, and a sick wife to look after ? The Pope probably has no “job satisfaction”, but he has “job security”.

To quote:

“”The experiences of an extremely rich, jet-setting, self-employed,
flexitime QC are largely meaningless … to the large numbers of mothers
of young children, who long to stay at home with them but cannot afford
to. They are nonsense to people who cannot find flexitime working, much
of it done from home, as she says she did. All these mothers face much
harsher choices than Mrs Blair ever has, and are hardly likely to be impressed by being told what’s best for them by someone like her.”"

## No doubt. That being so, how does what the Pope requires withstand the criticism of last two  sentences any better ? No doubt Mrs. Blair is richer than Croesus, especially when her hubby’s earnings are added to hers – but even she does not live in quite the surroundings that Popes do. Do the Blairs have a chapel with an original Michelangelo on the cieling ? The Pope does. And a rather nice garden:

“The Vatican Gardens (Italian: Giardini Vaticani) in Vatican City are urban gardens and parks which cover more than half of the Vatican territory in the South and Northeast. There are some buildings such as Radio Vatican within the gardens.

The gardens cover approximately 23 hectares (57 acres) which is most of the Vatican Hill. The highest point is 60 metres (200 ft) above mean sea level. Stone walls bound the area in the North, South and West.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gardens_of_Vatican_City

## The Blairs may well be humungously well-heeled, but do *they* have 57 acres of garden ?  With fountains & sculptures ? One expects a Queen not to be in the bread-line, but the Founder of Christianity seems to have been less affluent than most of the Churches, the CC included. The garden of Eden may had four rivers – but no sculptures, and certainly no original Michelangelos.

People in the FW aren’t *allowed* to have, or, don’t have, problems ? OK. If she were an unemployed, battered, Jamaican paraplegic, would that make her opinions less unwelcome ? That sounds like PC silliness in reverse.

Disqualifying a statement by drawing attention to some features of it – date, society of origin, morals of its first holders, familiarity to its opponents, group of origin, wealth or poverty lf those who hold it, etc. – does not make it untrue, inaccurate, uncalled-for, or unworthy of notice. Unwelcome, maybe. So what is wrong with what she has said ?

She seems to have touched a raw nerve in some people – which nerve, is not clear. 

“Nobody should EVER be refused entry into the Church: this is not some
Pall Mall club in which we have a blackball.”

## Unfortunately this nonsensical “club theory” of the Church seems to be almost universal. Maybe it is “all too human” to regard the Church – which is meant to be the polar opposite of a club – as a club.

To think of it as a club is uncomfortably close to thinking of the Church as a fortress that we can retreat into: but the parable of the leaven in the lump, the comparison of the disciples with lights in the world, the Great Commission to “Go forth”, and the Incarnation & the Passion, all point in the opposite direction: we are meant to “get stuck in” the world, without belonging to the world – just as God in Christ has done so. Fortress Christianity is not an option, because that leads to the Church becoming a “holy huddle” – which is what some Pharisaic piety was. Which was fine for the Pharisees, but no good to the “unclean” people Jesus made a point of mixing with. FC is not missionary, or Catholic, or Apostolic, even if it makes a first-rate club. 

“Let’s start with a very intriguing quote from a former Archbishop of Canterbury. He said, “The church is the only society on earth that exists for those who are not its members.” [Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple, quoted in Feasting on the Word, Year A, Volume 1, p. 336]”

http://christchurchredding.org/Sermons/2_6_11_Salt_and_Light/

“Because of my book What
will Happen to God? — a critical and largely negative study of feminist
theology–…”

## It’s a good read, though it’s a bit too short. “Ungodly Rage” by Donna Steichen, on feminist theology  in the USCC, is c.400 pages long, and very readable. STM that “What
will Happen to God ?” would have been better and stronger, had it been 50-100 pages longer.  BTW, is there going to be a sequel to, or a revised edition of, “The Roman Question” ?   

“‘Nobody should EVER be refused entry into the Church’

That has to be the dumbest absolute statement i have ever seen on these boards.”

## It seems clear enough from the context that good will, honesty, understanding, and deliberation on the part of the aspiring entrant are presumed. Posts are not theological teatises, so it’s not fair to judge a post with the rigour that a theological censor might use.  The emphasis is on “ever”, & not on “nobody”. if “nobody” had been emphasised, the objection might stand. If the OP’s meaning is “No one who is in good faith should ever be refused entry into the Church”, that may not be an absolutely valid statement; since some exceptions to even the most certainly true  statements can always be discovered. But most people most of the time do not go looking for the exceptions. Should leprechauns be refused entry into the Church ? That would depend – but it seems unlikely that the OP had them in mind. So they can be ignored, for the time being at least.

“”The sacraments of the Church always work in the end”"

“Really, i must
have missed that little gem in Catechism Class. All who receive the
sacraments are saved, no matter what the condition of their soul when
they receive them?”"

## The OP said, & implied, nothing about salvation. The sacraments can be efficacious themselves, without bearing any fruit in the recipient. The valid and licit consecration of a Host, however piously & faithfully & orthopractically  & orthodoxly performed by a validly-ordained priest in good standing & of unblemished character who fully intends to do what the Church intends in her sacramental ministry (I think that covers everything), will all go for nothing, if the recipient is not in a state of grace.

“The sacraments always work in the end”, in that sense at least. That they do so, does not logically require that they will be efficacious, at least when received. Some of them can “revive”, if the obstacle to their operation is removed – so (IIRC) someone who makes a bad Communion (which is a sacrilege, & thus a mortal sin). if and when he or she repents of the sacrilege, can then receive the grace of the sacrament, which until then has been inoperative because of the bad disposition of the receipient.

The doctrine of the revival or reviviscense of sacraments isn’t basic stuff: it is logically dependent on the recognition that the Church has a sacramental economy, which is itself a consequence of the Incarnation. Which is itself, arguably, logically dependent on the Grace of God. The ins & outs of sacramental theology require some knowledge of Catholic theology – which a lot of people don’t have.  But salvation is not through what we know, even in theology – it is through Christ.

Or you can use your freedom to love your neighbor while still retaining the freedom that makes the act a loving choice in the first place. 

“Nobody should EVER be refused entry into the Church”.

I don’t see that at all, sorry. Someone who is unwilling to accept the doctrines of the church (who publicly rejects them) is obviously in the wrong place, and should be excommunicated from Day 1.

If Mr Blair had gone through one of those ceremonies where they ask “Do you renounce Satan and all his works?” I can imagine that his response would have been “Hey, let’s look at the broader picture here. Well, obviously, I can’t be expected to reject all his works, not in this day and age, can I? We’ve moved on a bit from the old ideas of Good and Evil, haven’t we?”