The blue helmets of the UN are coming to police the streets of the USA.

Americas worst nightmare potentially just got the green light. The blue helmets of the UN are coming to police the streets of the USA. Foreign Military is now allowed to police the streets, arrest, and use force in combat.

In May 2016, the USA approved a set of principles that give the green light for UN peacekeeping troops AND POLICE to use force to “protect” citizens in armed conflicts, but the agreement does not specify exactly where. The Blue Helmets are coming, and the American police force could now be a part of a global police force.

These principles are illegal according to the Constitution, but somehow the US has agreed to them. The Obama administration has corrupted the entire American way of life and is preparing the way for the dictator Hitlary to use any force necessary to remove the second amendment from citizens.

It has long been discussed that the people of America would win a war against the police and military, and it has also long been considered that the UN would embed themselves within our borders for when the day of conflict comes to reinforce the police and military. Now, that day is in view; and the government of the United States is making dangerous plans which will begin the ugliest war in US history.

Over the course of the last few years, a lot has transpired from the Patriot Act to the NDAA, to tyrannical gun control, and many more bits of legislation which undermine the citizens rights. Over that time, while many Americans lay asleep, the foreign troops were arriving in droves. Vast amounts of reports from all over the USA have reported sightings of foreign military on our streets. However, under these new principles, they legally could be here under the UN’s principles.

The United Nations is now required to act in the times of crisis or conflict. The question is, does that include within the borders of the United States under the new Kigali principles? 

Over the past few years, a lot has come about. Which would lead America to this very point, where the possibility of UN forces would be allowed on US soil. The UN is weeding its way into the US to form a globalist government, but not without invoking the Arms Trade Treaty, which will revoke the second amendment (illegally).        More..

Nickelodeon makes history by featuring its first married gay couple in a cartoon

BY Molly Crane-newman

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Tuesday, July 19, 2016, 1:23 PM

Nickelodeon is making history by introducing a same-sex married couple in one of its cartoons for the first time.

The couple will appear in a July 20 episode of popular children’s show “The Loud House,” which is about a kid named Lincoln growing up as the only boy in a family with ten sisters.

In Wednesday’s episode, “Overnight Success,” Lincoln, invites his best friend, Clyde McBride, over for a sleepover, Buzzfeed reports.

When Clyde arrives, Lincoln announces, “Time to make history!” and then opens the door to his friend standing in the doorway with his two dads, who are doubly-as-diverse as an interracial couple, Howard and Harold McBride.             NYDailyNews

Researchers release findings on 'theories about atmospheric chemical spraying'

Published: 08/16/2016 at 8:57 PM

WASHINGTON – You’ve seen the contrails behind those high-flying jets – sometimes making crisscrossing patterns in the sky – above your home, your town, your city.

And you’ve heard the rumors. The government is spraying toxic chemicals, gene-altering concoctions, testing weapons of war.

But the first peer-reviewed study published on these mysterious “chemtrails,” as they are often called, found they are not the result of governments covertly conducting experiments on the public.

They’re just plain old water vapor.

Rather than “chemtrails,” say the researchers, they are actually “contrails,” which is short for condensation that produces water vapor that freezes around aerosols in the aircraft exhaust.

“We wanted to establish a scientific record on the topic of secret atmospheric spraying programs for the benefit of those in the public who haven’t made up their minds,” said lead researcher Steven Davis from the University of California, Irvine. “The experts we surveyed resoundingly rejected contrail photographs and test results as evidence of a large-scale atmospheric conspiracy.”

To find out what was going on, the team interviewed 77 scientists who should know what they’re talking about – they were either atmospheric chemists who specialize in condensation trails, or geochemists working on atmospheric deposition of dust and pollution.

Out of the group, 76 of the 77 experts said they hadn’t come across evidence of secret, large-scale spraying programs.

The evidence that the 77th had come across was “high levels of atmospheric barium in a remote area with standard low soil barium.”

The researchers were shown four images commonly circulated as “chemtrails,” and 100 percent of them said they were just ordinary contrails – and they provided peer-reviewed citations to back up their claims.

The researchers also suggested that contrails are more common these days simply because air travel is becoming more regular.

“Despite the persistence of erroneous theories about atmospheric chemical spraying programs, until now there were no peer-reviewed academic studies showing that what some people think are ‘chemtrails’ are just ordinary contrails, which are becoming more abundant as air travel expands,” said one of the researchers, Ken Caldeira from the Carnegie Institution for Science.

In other words, nothing to see up here.

Move along.

Of course, there’s a climate change tie-in. There’s always a climate-change link.

“Also, it is possible that climate change is causing contrails to persist for longer periods than they used to,” said Caldeira.

The team admits that their research probably won’t sway the opinion of anyone who already believes in “chemtrails,” but they hope that by providing a peer-reviewed study on the subject, people new to the topic will find something objective when doing their research.

“I felt it was important to definitively show what real experts in contrails and aerosols think,” said Caldeira. “We might not convince die-hard believers that their beloved secret spraying program is just a paranoid fantasy, but hopefully their friends will accept the facts.”

The research has been published in Environmental Research Letters. 
WND

a solemn appeal to Elder Ted Wilson, president of the SDA church

An After School Satan Club could be coming to your kid's elementary school

By Katherine StewartSpecial to the Washington Post

SALEM, Mass. — It's a hot summer night, and leaders of the Satanic Temple have gathered in the crimson-walled living room of a Victorian manse in this city renowned for its witch trials in the 17th century. They're watching a sepia-toned video, in which children dance around a maypole, a spider crawls across a clown's face and eerie, ambient chanting gives way to a backward, demonic voice-over. The group chuckles with approval.

They're here plotting to bring their wisdom to the nation's public elementary school children. They point out that Christian evangelical groups already have infiltrated the lives of America's children through after-school religious programming in public schools, and they appear determined to give young students a choice: Jesus or Satan.

"It's critical that children understand that there are multiple perspectives on all issues, and that they have a choice in how they think," said Doug Mesner, the Satanic Temple's co-founder.

On Monday, the group plans to introduce its After School Satan Club to public elementary schools, including one in Prince George's County, petitioning school officials to allow them to open immediately as the academic year starts. Chapter heads from New York, Boston, Utah and Arizona were in Salem on July 10 talking strategy, with others from Minneapolis, Detroit, San Jose, New Orleans, Pittsburgh and Florida participating online. The promotional video, which feels like a mash-up of a horror movie trailer and a "Saturday Night Live" sketch, will serve to promote the new club along with its website - Afterschoolsatan.com.

The Satanic Temple - which has been offering tongue-in-cheek support for the fallen angel in public arenas that have embraced prayer and parochial ceremonies - is bringing its fight over constitutional separation of church and state to the nation's schools.        More...

The Vatican is the only country in Europe that refuses to open all of its World War II archives

By GERALD POSNERJULY 29, 2016

On Friday, Pope Francis is to become the third Roman Catholic pope to visit Auschwitz. John Paul II was the first Polish pope in the church’s 2,000-year history. Auschwitz is less than an hour from where he was born, and his 1979 visit was poignant. Every bit as dramatic was the 2006 visit by the German-born Benedict XVI who had at 14 been a member of the Hitler Youth.

But Francis’ visit could be the most significant ever if he uses the symbolic backdrop to break with the policies of six predecessors over 70 years and order the release of the Vatican’s sealed Holocaust-era archives.

The debate over the church’s secret wartime files is not new. The Vatican is the only country in Europe that refuses to open all of its World War II archives to independent historians and researchers. The issue is more than simply an academic debate over the appropriate rules for public disclosure of historically significant documents. The church’s files are thought to contain important information about the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. The Vatican had eyes and ears in the killing fields: tens of thousands of parish priests who sent letters and reports to their bishops, who in turn forwarded them to the secretary of state in Vatican City. One of the monsignors in charge of reviewing those thousands of reports was Giovanni Battista Montini, later Pope Paul VI.

It is little wonder that historians are eager to study the Vatican’s Holocaust-era papers. The accounts by the parish priests may help answer lingering questions of when and what the Vatican knew about the Nazi murder machinery. The files are likely to shed light on whether the wartime pope, Pius XII, could have done more to try to stop the Holocaust. Also buried inside the secret archives are the early records of the scandal-ridden Vatican Bank, created during World War II. Those documents could resolve conclusively how much business the Vatican did with the Third Reich, as well as the extent of insurance company investments that yielded enormous profits from life insurance policies of Jews sent to Auschwitz, which I uncovered in my own reporting.

And finally, the church’s secret files might resolve the debate over whether several postwar refugee-smuggling networks that were run from Rome separately by an Austrian bishop, a German priest and a Croatian priest — and through which Nazi criminals escaped — were freelance operations, or instead parts of a program that had the pope’s blessing.

The church has since the 1960s released some wartime files, while refusing unfettered access by historians. In the 1990s, the administration of President Bill Clinton ordered federal agencies to release relevant Holocaust files, and also spearheaded an effort that persuaded several dozen other nations to do the same. The Vatican was an outlier.

The 2013 election of Pope Francis held out the promise for a change in the church’s longstanding policy of secrecy. While still the archbishop of Buenos Aires, he had been asked about the dispute over the Holocaust-era files. The Vatican, he answered, “should open them and clarify everything.” Many Vaticanologists thought he would use a 2014 visit to Israel to free the files. But Francis did not say anything publicly about the papers on that visit.

Francis last discussed the issue in a November 2014 interview with the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot. The pope asked: “Did Pius XII remain silent in the face of the extermination of the Jews? Did he say all he should have said? We will have to open the archives to know exactly what happened.” According to Francis: “There is an agreement between the Vatican and Italy from 1929 that prevents us from opening the archives to researchers at this point in time. But because of the time that has passed since World War II, I see no problem with opening the archives the moment we sort out the legal and bureaucratic matters.”

The 1929 agreement Francis cited is the Lateran Pacts between the Vatican and Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Italy. It gave the church full sovereignty over Vatican City. The agreement declared that the pope was not only the equivalent of a secular monarch but also endowed with divine rights. Instead of preventing the church from releasing its archives, as Francis suggested, the agreement invests the Vatican with inviolable powers to set its own policies independent of any interference from Italy. All that is required to open the long-sealed archives is a papal decree.

Jewish advocacy groups, human rights organizations and concentration camp survivors hope that Francis’ commitment to reform will trump the desire of Vatican traditionalists to keep the documents buried forever. On the very grounds where the Nazis murdered more than a million victims, most of them Jews, Pope Francis can do much more than have a photo opportunity and offer a generic condemnation of the depths of human depravity. By freeing the Vatican’s Holocaust-era files he will pay a singular and lasting tribute to the dead.           NY Times

The message of the True Witness finds the people of God in a sad deception, yet honest in that deception

God is leading out a people. He has a chosen people, a church on the earth, whom He has made the depositaries of His law. He has committed to them sacred trust and eternal truth to be given to the world. He would reprove and correct them. The message to the Laodiceans is applicable to Seventh-day Adventists who have had great light and have not walked in the light. It is those who have made great profession, but have not kept in step with their Leader, that will be spewed out of His mouth unless they repent. The message to pronounce the Seventh-Day Adventist Church Babylon, and call the people of God out of her, does not come from any heavenly messenger, or any human agent inspired by the Spirit of God.  

     The True Witness says, "I counsel thee to buy of me gold tried in the fire, that thou mayest be rich; and white raiment, that thou mayest be clothed, and that the shame of thy nakedness do not appear; and anoint thine eyes with eyesalve, that thou mayest see. As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten: be zealous therefore, and repent. Behold, I stand at the door, and knock; if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me. To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with me in my throne, even as I also overcame, and am set down with my Father in his throne" (Revelation 3:18-21).  2SM 66

The message to the church of the Laodiceans is a startling denunciation, and is applicable to the people of God at the present time.  
     "And unto the angel of the church of the Laodiceans write: These things saith the Amen, the faithful and true Witness, the beginning of the creation of God; I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of My mouth. Because thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked."  

     The Lord here shows us that the message to be borne to His people by ministers whom He has called to warn the people is not a peace-and-safety message. It is not merely theoretical, but practical in every particular. The people of God are represented in the message to the Laodiceans as in a position of carnal security. They are at ease, believing themselves to be in an exalted condition of spiritual attainments. "Because thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked." 

     What greater deception can come upon human minds than a confidence that they are right when they are all wrong! The message of the True Witness finds the people of God in a sad deception, yet honest in that deception. They know not that their condition is deplorable in the sight of God. While those addressed are flattering themselves that they are in an exalted spiritual condition, the message of the True Witness breaks their security by the startling denunciation of their true condition of spiritual blindness, poverty, and wretchedness. The testimony, so cutting and severe, cannot be a mistake, for it is the True Witness who speaks, and His testimony must be correct.  

     It is difficult for those who feel secure in their attainments, and who believe themselves to be rich in spiritual knowledge, to receive the message which declares that they are deceived and in need of every spiritual grace. The unsanctified heart is "deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked." I was shown that many are flattering themselves that they are good Christians, who have not a ray of light from Jesus. They have not a living experience for themselves in the divine life. They need a deep and thorough work of self-abasement before God before they will feel their true need of earnest, persevering effort to secure the precious graces of the Spirit.    3T 252, 253

The first chapter of Isaiah is a description of a people professedly serving God, but walking in forbidden paths

    The course pursued by Israel toward God called forth these words. It was a proof of the people's perversity that they manifested less gratitude, less attachment, less acknowledgment of ownership, toward God than the animals of the field manifest toward their masters. . . . The first chapter of Isaiah is a description of a people professedly serving God, but walking in forbidden paths (MS 29, 1911).  

     The professed people of God had separated from God, and had lost their wisdom and perverted their understanding. They could not see afar off; for they had forgotten that they had been purged from their old sins. They moved restlessly and uncertainly under darkness, seeking to obliterate from their minds the memory of the freedom, assurance, and happiness of their former estate. They plunged into all kinds of presumptuous, foolhardy madness, placed themselves in opposition to the providences of God, and deepened the guilt that was already upon them. They listened to the charges of Satan against the divine character, and represented God as devoid of mercy and forgiveness. The prophet writes of them, saying:  "Ah sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, a seed of evil-doers, children that are corrupters: they have forsaken the Lord, they have provoked the Holy One of Israel unto anger, they are gone away backward" 4BC 1137

Judah's Rebellion

1The vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah.

2Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth: for the LORD hath spoken, I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against me.

3The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master's crib: but Israel doth not know, my people doth not consider.

4Ah sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, a seed of evildoers, children that are corrupters: they have forsaken the LORD, they have provoked the Holy One of Israel unto anger, they are gone away backward.

5Why should ye be stricken any more? ye will revolt more and more: the whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint.

6From the sole of the foot even unto the head there is no soundness in it; but wounds, and bruises, and putrifying sores: they have not been closed, neither bound up, neither mollified with ointment.

7Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire: your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate, as overthrown by strangers.

8And the daughter of Zion is left as a cottage in a vineyard, as a lodge in a garden of cucumbers, as a besieged city.

9Except the LORD of hosts had left unto us a very small remnant, we should have been as Sodom, and we should have been like unto Gomorrah.

Meaningless Offerings

10Hear the word of the LORD, ye rulers of Sodom; give ear unto the law of our God, ye people of Gomorrah.

11To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me? saith the LORD: I am full of the burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts; and I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he goats.

12When ye come to appear before me, who hath required this at your hand, to tread my courts?

13Bring no more vain oblations (offerings); incense (prayers)  is an abomination unto me; the new moons (revivals) and sabbaths (worship), the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting.

14Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth: they are a trouble unto me; I am weary to bear them.

15And when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you: yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear: your hands are full of blood.

16Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil;

17Learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.

18Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.

19If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land:

20But if ye refuse and rebel, ye shall be devoured with the sword: for the mouth of the LORD hath spoken it.

Zion Corrupted

21How is the faithful city become an harlot! it was full of judgment; righteousness lodged in it; but now murderers.

22Thy silver is become dross, thy wine mixed with water:

23Thy princes are rebellious, and companions of thieves: every one loveth gifts, and followeth after rewards: they judge not the fatherless, neither doth the cause of the widow come unto them.

24Therefore saith the Lord, the LORD of hosts, the mighty One of Israel, Ah, I will ease me of mine adversaries, and avenge me of mine enemies:

25And I will turn my hand upon thee, and purely purge away thy dross, and take away all thy tin:

26And I will restore thy judges as at the first, and thy counsellers as at the beginning: afterward thou shalt be called, The city of righteousness, the faithful city.

27Zion shall be redeemed with judgment, and her converts with righteousness.

28And the destruction of the transgressors and of the sinners shall be together, and they that forsake the LORD shall be consumed.

29For they shall be ashamed of the oaks which ye have desired, and ye shall be confounded for the gardens that ye have chosen.

30For ye shall be as an oak whose leaf fadeth, and as a garden that hath no water.

31And the strong shall be as tow, and the maker of it as a spark, and they shall both burn together, and none shall quench them.            

Isaiah 1

Happy Sabbath

The LGBT Agenda

The Coverup - "Catholic Church controls Everything"

Historic archeological discovery of Egyptian statue unearthed in Tel-Hazor

By DANIEL K. EISENBUD \07/25/2016 13:55 

 When American Bryan Kovach agreed to volunteer for an excavation north of the Sea of Galilea last week, he had no idea he would personally uncover one of the most historic archeological discoveries in the Middle East.

Last Monday morning, during the dig in Tel-Hazor – the largest Biblical-era site in Israel, as well as a UNESCO Heritage Site – Kovach found a large limestone fragment of an Egyptian statue depicting an ancient official’s foot.          Jerusalem Post

Venezuela’s government accepts proposal for Vatican mediation in crisis

President Nicolas Maduro has accepted a proposal by the opposition to ask the Vatican to facilitate dialogue with Venezuela’s socialist government.

The Union of South American Nations’ Secretary General Ernesto Samper met late on Thursday with Maduro and afterward announced that he would ask Pope Francis to send a representative to Venezuela. Samper was in Caracas along with former Spanish President Jose Luiz Rodriguez Zapatero in an effort to revive a two-month-old attempt to bring the sides together to resolve the country’s economic and political crisis.

The opposition has pushed for Pope Francis’s intervention but also conditions its support for dialogue on the release of people it considers political prisoners and a commitment by Maduro to hold a recall referendum this year.

Vatican spokesman, Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, said on Friday that “in the past, the Holy See has manifested its willingness, in case the basis is there for its contribution to the dialogue.”

He added: “However, at the moment, no formal communication has reached the Nunciature or the Secretariat of State spelling out the substance and details of such a request.”       Catholic Herald

Democrats join Pope Francis on climate change

Mark Silk | July 26, 2016

A year ago, Pope Francis issued the encyclical Laudato Si’, his clarion call for international action to address the existential crisis of climate change. Yesterday, the Democratic party signaled it’s with the program by approving a platform that recognizes climate change as “an urgent threat and a defining challenge of our time.”

Of greatest significance is a section on global threats that declares the United States must take the lead in “forging a robust global solution to the climate crisis.” Here’s what that means:

We are committed to a national mobilization, and to leading a global effort to mobilize nations to address this threat on a scale not seen since World War II. In the first 100 days of the next administration, the President will convene a summit of the world’s best engineers, climate scientists, policy experts, activists, and indigenous communities to chart a course to solve the climate crisis.

The contrast with the Republican platform could not be starker. That document calls the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “a political mechanism, not an unbiased scientific institution.” It rejects “the agendas of both the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement.”

Opining that climate change “is far from this nation’s most pressing national security issue,” the Republicans pledge their support for “the development of all forms of energy that are marketable in a free economy without subsidies, including coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear power, and hydropower.” Without actually denying climate change, they have set forth a blueprint for doing nothing about it.

That’s not to say that the Democratic agenda doesn’t leave a good deal to be desired. It proposes to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, a level that some climate scientists believe will have disastrous consequences and which in any event cannot be achieved if, as the platform proposes, 2050 is the target date for having the economy running entirely on clean energy and reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent.

The learning curve remains steep. That’s why the promise of a climate change summit during the first 100 days of the next administration is critical. With the right people at the table, this will provide the marching orders for the World War II-scale mobilization to come.

I’d advise President Clinton to put her vice president in charge of the summit. Tim Kaine’s environmental record is far from perfect, but as governor of a coal-mining state with an endangered low-lying coastline, he learned how to negotiate the politics of climate change as well as anyone in national politics.

Plus Kaine is a Pope Francis Catholic. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he not only has Laudato Si’ on his shelf but has read it from cover to cover. And taken it to heart.       Religion News

Pope Francis Says World Is at War, but It’s Not a Religious Conflict

By JOANNA BERENDTJULY 27, 2016

KRAKOW, Poland — As he began his first official visit to Poland, Pope Francis on Wednesday said “the world is at war,” and he challenged the conservative governments of Central and Eastern Europe to soften their resistance to migrants seeking refuge.

The pope’s visit to the southern Polish city of Krakow to celebrate World Youth Day, a major event on the Roman Catholic calendar, began just a day after the horrific killing of a priest in France.

The priest, the Rev. Jacques Hamel, 85, was celebrating Mass in a small town in Normandy when two men with knives entered the church and slit his throat. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack.

Francis, 79, was clearly shaken by the attack, and he appeared solemn and pensive as he headed to Poland, the first stop on a trip to Central and Eastern Europe.

“The world is at war,” he told reporters on his plane from Rome to Krakow. “We don’t need to be afraid to say this.”          NY Times

 

5 faith facts about Dem. VP pick Tim Kaine, a Jesuit-educated Catholic

Kimberly Winston Religion News Service  |  Jul. 22, 2016

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton announced Tim Kaine, the junior Democratic senator from Virginia and former governor of that state, as her vice presidential running mate Friday.

Kaine, a Roman Catholic, will appear with Clinton, a Methodist, at next week's Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.

Here are five faith facts about the new vice presidential candidate.

1. He was taught by Jesuits.

Kaine was raised Catholic in the Kansas City area*. His parents were so devout, Kaine told C-SPAN, that “if we got back from a vacation on a Sunday night at 7:30 p.m., they would know the one church in Kansas City that had an 8 p.m. Mass that we can make.” He attended an all-boys Jesuit high school in Kansas City and worked for a year with Jesuit missionaries in Honduras, where he taught welding -- his father's trade -- and carpentry.

Celebrate World Youth Day! Get $10 off an NCR gift subscription. Enter code YOUTH at the checkout page.

He and his wife attend St. Elizabeth Catholic Church in Richmond, Va., which has a predominantly African-American congregation. He co-founded a men's study group there.

2. Kaine says he separates the personal from the political.

Kaine is personally against abortion and the death penalty and has sometimes spoken against same-sex marriage and gay adoption, all of which aligns with Catholic teaching. But he has taken different stances in his political life. He has upheld Roe v. Wade and told Chuck Todd of "Meet the Press": "I have taken the position, which is quite common among Catholics -- I have got a personal feeling about abortion, but the right rule for government is to let women make their own decisions."

As Virginia's governor, he oversaw 11 state executions. "I have a moral position against the death penalty," he said in 2012. "But I took an oath of office to uphold it. Following an oath of office is also a moral obligation."

He was fairly late to supporting same-sex marriage, saying in 2013, "I believe all people, regardless of sexual orientation, should be guaranteed the full rights to the legal benefits and responsibilities of marriage under the Constitution."

And while Kaine opposed gay adoption in 2005 -- also in line with Catholic Church teaching -- by 2012 he had reversed his position.

3. He favors allowing women to become priests.

When Pope Francis visited Washington, D.C., in September 2015, Kaine attended the pontiff's historic address to Congress. Before the speech, he issued a statement. "If women are not accorded equal place in the leadership of the Catholic Church and the other great world religions, they will always be treated as inferiors in earthly matters as well," Kaine said. "There is nothing this Pope could do that would improve the world as much as putting the Church on a path to ordain women."

4. Kaine is a fan of Pope Francis' "Laudato Si'."

Not all Catholics thought the pontiff should write an encyclical on a secular issue such as global warming, but Kaine agrees with Francis' framing of the issue as one of faith. "I'm sure he's not going to opine on whether a carbon tax is better than a cap-and-trade mechanism," Kaine said of the pope days before the encyclical was published in 2015. "That doesn't need to be where he goes -- but to say, 'You know, you guys and everybody in power these days, you've got the next generation's future in your hands, and you don't want to have to face that question later in life: With the science what it was, and with you having the opportunity to do something about it, why did you choose not to?'"

5. Kaine speaks openly about his faith.

“My faith is central to everything I do,” he once told the website Patch. “My faith position is a Good Samaritan position of trying to watch out for the other person.” And in a recent C-SPAN interview he said: “I do what I do for spiritual reasons. I’m always thinking about the momentary reality but also how it connects with bigger matters of what’s important in life.”        NCR Online

What do Donald Trump, Tim Kaine and Pope Francis have in common?

Christopher J. Hale @chrisjollyhale July 23, 2016

Drew Angerer—Getty Images Tim Kaine listens to testimony during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Capitol Hill, on May 26, 2016.

Christopher Hale is executive director at Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good and the co-founder of Millennial.

Hillary Clinton's VP pick was educated by Jesuit priests; he remains a devout Catholic—and he supports abortion rights

Here’s a quiz: What do Donald Trump, Tim Kaine and Pope Francis have in common?

Answer: all three men were educated by Jesuits, a religious order of Catholic priests whose most famous member is the Pope himself.

For Trump, his two years at Fordham University, a Jesuit school in the Bronx, seem to leave little impact on his life. After his sophomore year, Trump transferred to the Ivy league University of Pennsylvania

What compelled him to transfer from his hometown Jesuit university? “I decided that as long as I had to be in college, I might as well test myself against the best,” Trump said.

Ouch.

Tim Kaine is a different story. Kaine, who if elected, would be the second Catholic Vice President in American history (Joe Biden is the first), graduated Rockhurt High School in 1976, a Jesuit school in Kansas City.

“That high school experience with the Jesuits was a key part of my transition into an adult life where instead of just accepting the answers of my parents or others, I’ve been a person who wants to go out and find the answers on my own, and the Jesuits get credit for that,” Kaine says.

After being admitted to Harvard Law School, Kaine took a year off to volunteer with the Jesuits at a vocational school in El Progreso, Honduras. In Honduras Kaine learned to speak Spanish, a skill he will likely use on the campaign trail this fall.

According to Kaine, that year was a watershed time in his life. “I think of El Progreso everyday,” Kaine said. “The people, aside from my family, are the most important in shaping who I am today.”

He also claims his experiences with the Jesuits have inspired his public service: “I do what I do for spiritual reasons. I’m always thinking about the momentary reality, but also how it connects with bigger matters of what’s important in life.”

Kaine grew up in a very devout family. He told C-SPAN earlier this year that “when we got back from a vacation on a Sunday night at 7:30 PM, they would know the one church in Kansas City that had an 8 PM Mass that we can make.”

Kaine still attends Mass with his wife today at a predominantly African American parish in Richmond, where he once was a choir member before his demanding political schedule got in the way.

Kaine has had run-ins with the Church on social issues, most notably on abortion and the death penalty. Kaine supports abortion rights, which is against Catholic teaching.

Asked about this issue earlier this summer, Kaine responded: “I have a traditional Catholic personal position, but I am very strongly supportive that women should make these decisions and government shouldn’t intrude.”

That nuanced view will be difficult to swallow for many abortion rights activists within the Democratic Party and with many of his fellow Catholics who support the right to life from conception.

Kaine does, however, support many of the economic and social justice issues at the heart of the Church’s teaching, most notably support for comprehensive immigration reform.

During Pope Francis’s trip last fall, Kaine said he was moved to tears by the pontiff’s address to Congress. The Virginia Senator recently told me that he considered Pope Francis to be his hero.

After Francis’s address last September, Kaine said that Francis should force us to “ask what our motives are as a nation.”

He said it was the pope’s role to “challenge our thinking” as we face great questions about our nation’s common good.

Let’s hope he takes the same approach if he’s lucky enough to be elected this November.     Time

Tim KaineJesuit spirituality may make him an ideal candidate for one crucial progressive Democratic constituency: the ‘nones.’

By Elizabeth Drescher | July 25, 2016

(RNS) Tim Kaine, who describes himself as “boring,” may not be the running mate choice for Hillary Clinton that Democrats on the far left wanted. But his Jesuit spirituality may make him an ideal candidate for one crucial progressive Democratic constituency: the ‘nones.’

‘Nones’ are people who tell pollsters they have no institutional religious affiliation. Since they emerged in the election of Barack Obama as an important voting bloc, politicos have been struggling to figure out how to mobilize them. They comprise some 20 percent of registered voters and more than 25 percent of registered voters who favor Democrats. The Pew Research Center recently reported that nearly 70 percent of nones support Hillary Clinton.

That’s good news for Democrats. That is, if nones get to the polls on voting day, which is by no means a sure thing for a population more opposed to Trump than for Clinton. Keeping nones plugged into the election is strategically important for the Clinton campaign.

Here’s the rub: most nones don’t think religious views of political candidates matter. They’re far less likely than the religiously affiliated to think organized religions can “contribute to solving social problems,” according to Pew. Given this, candidates seeking to mobilize them based on their non-religious status face challenges that those courting evangelicals and other religiously affiliated voters don’t.

Still, while nones are not, by definition, engaged by institutional religion, the majority do believe in God or a higher power, sometimes pray, and otherwise find the spiritual throughout their lives. Strikingly few of them are atheists or hard agnostics. And a majority believe religion can “strengthen community bonds” and “play an important role in helping the poor and needy.”

So, does Tim Kaine’s Jesuit Catholic background offer anything that might appeal to spiritual nones?

Between the last election season and this one, I talked with more than 100 nones across America about their spiritual lives and surveyed several hundred more. My research shows that the Jesuit values that shape Tim Kaine’s politics correspond in many ways to the spirituality of nones.

Nones tend to take relationships with family, friends, and, for many, pets or other animals as the starting point for experiencing the spiritual. Their spirituality unfolds in appreciation of the sacred within the ordinary. Care for others, rather than any strict moral code, grounds their ethics.

For their part, Jesuits are challenged to be “men and women for others,” which means striving for greater achievement not for oneself, but in order to do more (magis, in Jesuit terminology) with your life so that the lives of others are improved. Greatness, that is, comess not from personal accomplishment per se but in helping ordinary people through the hardships and tragedies of life. We see Kaine’s embrace of magis in his representation of victims of housing discrimination as well as his equanimity, despite his personal religious convictions, in voting for women’s reproductive choice. This relational, service-oriented Jesuit spirituality is likely to be appealing to nones.

Nones who shared their stories with me were cosmopolitan. They embraced diversity, and preferred even fleeting spiritual connections over long-held religious traditions or doctrine. They were open to sharing spiritual experiences with others even when they did not share religious beliefs.

The Jesuit concept of cura personalis—“care for the whole person”—makes religious commitment a matter of valuing the distinctiveness of each, individual person and of diversity among people. This has marked Jesuit spirituality itself as a cosmopolitan spirituality that sees difference as a gift from God, not as a blemish on some imagined cultural or religious uniformity. This value is reflected in Kaine’s work as a Jesuit volunteer in Honduras and in his work on civil rights issues as a lawyer, a governor, and a senator.

It’s almost certain that Kaine would never mispronounce a book in the Bible, but bumbled biblical citations don’t matter to Jesuits — as they surely don’t to nones. What does matter to nones is cultivating diverse relationships of mutual respect and genuine caring, and appreciating and preserving the beauty and wonder of the world. Jesuits tend to express this ethical, activist spirituality in the ideas of “finding God in all things” and being “contemplatives in action.”

We’re unlikely to hear these Jesuit phrases in the campaign, but they are the spiritual backstory of Kaine’s politics and much of what he offers to a Clinton candidacy dogged by ethical questions. In choosing Tim Kaine, Hillary Clinton has shifted the religious narrative of the election away from the false equation of “religion” and “Christianity” with radical, conservative, evangelicalism. She’s found a way to speak spirituality to nones and also to lift up the moderate-to-progressive Christian faith of millions of religiously affiliated American voters.         Religion News

Just one hour of physical activity a day may undo the increased risk of early death

By Steven Reinberg

HealthDay Reporter

WEDNESDAY, July 27, 2016 (HealthDay News) -- Just one hour of physical activity a day -- something as simple as a brisk walk or a bicycle ride -- may undo the increased risk of early death that comes with sitting eight hours or more on a daily basis, a new study suggests.

"These results provide further evidence on the benefits of physical activity, particularly in societies where increasing numbers of people have to sit for long hours for work or commuting," said lead researcher Ulf Ekelund. He is a professor in physical activity and health at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences in Oslo, Norway.

"Unfortunately, only 25 percent of our sample exercised an hour a day or more," he said.

The study also found that watching TV for three hours or more a day was linked with an increased risk of early death, regardless of physical activity -- except among those who were the most physically active.

However, even among those who exercised the most, the risk of premature death was significantly increased if they watched five hours of TV a day or more, the researchers added.

It's not TV, per se, that is associated with an increased risk of dying early; rather, TV is a marker for sitting and not being active, Ekelund said.

In their review of 16 previously published studies that included more than one million people, the researchers divided the participants into four groups: those who got about 5 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise a day; 25 to 35 minutes a day; 50 to 65 minutes day; and 60 to 75 minutes a day.

The increased risk of early death ranged from 12 percent to 59 percent, depending on how much exercise the participants got, the findings showed.

"Indeed, those belonging to the most active group, and who are active about 60 to 75 minutes per day, seem to have no increased risk of mortality, even if they sit for more than eight hours a day," Ekelund said.

"Sit less, move more, and the more you move the better," he suggested.

The report, which did not prove that inactivity caused early death, was published online July 27 in The Lancet.

According to Dr. David Katz, president of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, "This important analysis fortifies the increasingly clear verdict from a large and growing body of evidence addressing physical activity and health: all movement is good movement."

Evidence is clear that moderately vigorous exercise has an array of health benefits, Katz said.

"If you don't exercise but can stand often, do. If you can't stand often but can exercise, do," he added. "Better still, do both. It's clear: all movement is good movement."

Not only does physical inactivity increase the risk of early death, it's expensive, according to another study published in the same journal issue.

In that study, researchers estimated the cost of being physically inactive based on the increased risk for type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and breast and colon cancer. In 2013 dollars, the study authors estimated that inactivity costs the United States about $28 billion annually.

"The current economic cost of physical inactivity is borne mainly by high-income countries. However, as low- and middle-income countries develop, and if the current trajectory of inactivity continues, so too will the economic burden in low- and middle-income countries who are currently poorly equipped to deal with chronic diseases linked to physical inactivity," study author Dr. Melody Ding, of the University of Sydney in Australia, said in a statement.       US News