Signs and Wonders 04.16

No respect. Coptic Orthodox Christians in Egypt mourned the death of their spiritual leader, Pope Shenouda III, who died on March 17 at age 88 after serving in that role for more than 40 years. He was the 117th patriarch of the that church, which traces its history to about A.D. 40, when the disciple Mark, the same Mark who authored the Gospel of Mark, brought Christianity to Egypt. So what did Egyptian Muslims do to commemorate the death? Leaders of the Islamic Salafist movement thanked Allah for Shenouda's death, calling him the "head of the infidels." According to Compass Direct News, the Salafists now make up 20 percent of Egypt's parliament and are hostile toward Christians. A Salafi teacher, Sheik Wagdy Ghoneim, said, "We rejoice that he is destroyed. He has perished." Ghoneim said on March 18, the day after Pope Shenouda died, "May God have His revenge on him in the fire of hell-he and all who walk his path." To be fair, not all Muslims feel the same way. Compass Direct reported, "The leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, the largest Islamic group in the country, issued a statement expressing his condolences over the Coptic pope's death."

Good money after bad. According to a report from European Dignity Watch, the European Commission is using economic development funds to pay for abortions. The report, "The Funding of Abortion through EU Development Aid," says that Marie Stopes International, one of the world's largest abortion providers, received more than $30 million from the European Union. The Reproductive Health Supplies Coalition, a partnership that includes the United Nations Population Fund, provides abortion kits to developing countries and was given close to $32 million over a 30-month period ending in June 2011. It's hard to imagine the Through the Looking-Glass universe in which $62 million used to pay for abortions is somehow labeled economic development. The tragedy is that we don't have to imagine it. It's reality, and we live in it.

Is this really a good idea? Sweden is attempting to implement a gender-neutral society, and its online National Encyclopedia has introduced a gender-neutral pronoun, "hen," that it hopes will replace "he" and "she" in most public and private discourse. Sweden has been gender bending for decades. In 1944, while the rest of the world was fighting totalitarianism, Sweden maintained its neutrality, sold steel to the Nazis and legalized same-sex sexual activity. Its parliament legalized "gay marriage" in 2009 by a vote of 261 to 22. The country's "enlightened" attitudes regarding sexuality could result in cultural extinction. Sweden's birthrate, like much of Europe, is below replacement levels. The country lost population in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Today, it's holding its own, but largely because of immigration. Many of the immigrants are Muslim, who now make up about 5 percent of the population, and growing rapidly.

No surprise. A new study from China shows that women who have had abortions have mental health problems during subsequent pregnancies. The study, reported by C-Fam, the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, said the "adverse mental health effects of induced abortion are far more severe than those of miscarriage and they persist longer." The original study, published by the Bulletin of Clinical Psychopharmacology, finds that women who had an induced abortion a year or more prior to the pregnancy were 49 percent more likely to experience depression and 114 percent more likely to suffer from anxiety in the first trimester of subsequent pregnancy compared to women with no abortion history.