Word: secularism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Gaulle's new constitution begins with words from the constitution of the old Fourth Republic: "France is a Republic, indivisible, secular, democratic and social." It continues with the echoing phrase, "of the people, by the people, for the people." Minister of Justice Michel Debré, who had a big hand in writing the new constitution, denies that De Gaulle opposes a democratic Parliament. Says he: "French democracy threatened to perish because Parliament was also the government, the administration, and even sought to administer justice. The role of a Parliament is not to govern. It is to vote laws...
...extremists on either side of the running church-and-state debate. Clancy asserts that the all-out "separationists" are really a minority, and just as dogmatic in their way as the dogmatic churches they oppose. Cohen refers to the same group as "latterday Jacobins." Instead of regarding the secular as the neutral arena where conflicts of principle may be fought out, he says, the Jacobins have turned secularism into a weapon...
Outraged by this secular trespass on rabbinical authority, and fearful lest the new policy encourage "mixed" marriages, two orthodox members of Ben-Gurion's Cabinet resigned. Last week the National Religious Party introduced a motion of noconfidence. "We can retreat from the peninsula of Sinai," said one leader, "but not from the law of Sinai." Ben-Gurion won the vote of confidence...
...divorcing nation in Western Christendom? Last week this phenomenon absorbed some 1,000 delegates from six countries at the National Catholic Family Life Convention in Buffalo. The Rev. Lucius F. Cervantes, Jesuit sociologist at Denver's Regis College, blamed the American obsession with romantic love. "The American secular image of marriage and the family is schizoid in its romantic inability to face reality. Prudential consideration in the seeking of one's life partner, such as the desirability of similar backgrounds, interests and ideals, seems to these teenagers a mere censorious haggling of killjoy elders and the unromantic benighted...
...against Christianity, East Germany's Communists try to abolish as many religious rites as possible, but they have found that even certified atheists have a hankering for ceremony. Result: an atheist liturgy in which the Communists have substituted "name-givings" for christenings, "youth dedications" for confirmations and "secular funeral orations" for religious burials. Latest addition: the "socialist wedding...