The English writer, theologian and heavily-mustachioed sage seemed an unlikely choice for the climax of an impassioned oration by a tiny, fiery Italian blonde.

But maybe not.

Chesterton was known as the "Apostle of common sense".

"Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer. That time has arrived. We are ready," she shouted in her thick, working-class Roman accent.

The audience whooped.

Part of Meloni's speech went viral.

"They want to call us parent 1, parent 2, gender LGBT, citizen X, with code numbers.

"But we are not code numbers … and we'll defend our identity.

"I am Giorgia. I am a woman. I am a mother. I am Italian. I am Christian!"

Some DJs, who were unhappy with Meloni's views on gay marriage, sampled her words and put a disco beat behind them to demonise her.

It backfired big time.

The song became a hit in Italian clubs and shot up the charts; far from discrediting Meloni, it only boosted her popularity.

Last week, that fiery, 45-year-old blonde became the first female prime minister of Italy, a major personal triumph in a still notably macho culture.

But the headlines all focused on Giorgia Meloni being "far-Right".

"The most dangerous woman in Europe," warned Germany's Stern magazine.

Meloni had even upset Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission.

Responding to a question on whether there were any concerns about the forthcoming elections in Italy, a sanctimoniously smirking von der Leyen replied, "If things go in a difficult direction, I've spoken about Hungary and Poland, we have tools."

They call Giorgia Meloni a fascist, but it's the impeccably liberal von der Leyen who behaves like one.

"We have tools," spoken like a true totalitarian.

Who would you trust when it comes to respecting a democratic decision?

The first elected leader of Italy for 14 years, a single mother from a poor home, or a failed German defence minister, the product of a wealthy elite who was shoehorned into the EU's top job without a single vote cast?

While there are valid concerns about the fascist origins of Meloni's party, what I hear when I listen to her are mainstream Conservative values.

Here is a politician who speaks up for the family and the nation.

She opposes globalisation which turns men and women into faceless units of consumption.

She says yes to secure borders and no to mass migration, yes to sexual identity and no to the alphabetti spaghetti of gender politics.

Why are these views of millions of middle-of-the road people now called "far-Right"? Continue reading

• Allison Pearson is a columnist and the chief interviewer of the Daily Telegraph.

Here is the main symptom, which my husband and I just had a fight about: He finds me irritating.

We had a talk (after fighting), and he is right: I am mothering him.

Smothering him.

Treating him like he is incapable of managing adulthood.

"I have a mother," he said. "I want a wife, a partner, a best friend."

It seems I cannot stop mothering.

I was an at-home mother during the formative years of my four daughters' lives.

I was also a stealth writer, penciling sentences on the back of the shopping list while waiting for a dance class to end, typing quietly before anyone was awake, selling essays on parenting to magazines and newspapers for modest sums.

But mothering always came first.

When my daughters got older, I worked full time in a state prison library, where I found that while incarcerated men might seem tough, many of them really needed a mother.

As my adult daughters moved away, my mothering skills were still useful in working with hundreds of inmates. I have always been good at mothering.

Apparently, I just don't know when to stop—or whether or not I am supposed to stop.

Thoughts about mothering and not mothering were gnawing at me when I heard Glenn Close's acceptance speech at the Golden Globes.

She had just won a best-actress award for her portrayal in "The Wife" of a woman long obscured by her husband's shadow.

"My mom...sublimated herself to my father her whole life," Ms. Close said.

Her words stunned me.

That was my mom.

That was a whole generation of moms.

I often felt sad for my mom for never figuring out who she was beyond her roles as a wife and mother.

But she didn't know how.

She didn't know where to begin.

Decades of sublimating herself to my father and her six children left her feeling betrayed and abandoned when that long chapter was over.

Ever after, she was unhappy, bitter, closed-off from life.

I loved her, but I never wanted to be her.

Glenn Close made many women in the audience wipe away tears of recognition. "Women, we're nurturers...but we have to find personal fulfillment," Ms. Close said. "We have to...follow our dreams."

I think of my daughters, now grown up, and how nurturing them was the most important work I ever did.

They long ago fledged from the nest.

Today I watch them following their dreams through a precarious and not always cooperative world.

I am proud of them.

Since my retirement, however, I have unconsciously slipped into mom-mode.

More specifically, my-mom's-mode.

I am smothering them, too. I am hovering. I am worrying. I am feeling unnecessary. I am acting like someone I do not care to be.

Maybe I need to retire from mothering, too.

Do mothers retire? Should we retire? Continue reading

• Valerie Schultz is a freelance writer, a columnist for The Bakersfield Californian and the author of Closer: Musings on Intimacy, Marriage, and God. She and her husband Randy have four daughters.
• Image: Bakersfield

They mean this in both the best and the worst possible ways: There are the predictable losses (lost sleep, lost money, lost time) as well as the wholly unexpected gains of loving a child beyond reason, beyond yourself.

What people do not tell you is that your children are bound to make unexpected and sometimes bewildering choices—and those choices have the power to change you.

Children will shake your sense of identity, challenge your beliefs and fundamentally alter who you are.

Anyone who has tried to pass on their religious faith to their children knows this to be true: You can be a good Catholic and raise a passel of atheists.

You can be a strident ex-Catholic and raise a priest—like I did.

My son would tell you that I have had a big influence on him.

He dives into the world in the same way I do, with the firm intention of changing it.

He works out his thoughts by writing them down.

He believes in the healing properties of tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches on a rainy day.

But when it came to making the biggest choice of his life—to convert to Catholicism and become a Jesuit priest—I was left to wonder what influence I had had on him or whether I had wielded any influence at all.

Many of the good Catholic mothers I have talked to are just as bewildered.

They did everything in their power to raise children in their faith only to see them adopt other religions or reject God altogether.

Some say they were defeated by a culture that increasingly values the material over the spiritual, or they point to the rigidity of doctrine, failures of individual priests, sexual abuse scandals, boring services and bad music.

Many blame themselves, although they struggle to say where exactly they went wrong.

Those whose children remain practicing Catholics have some ideas about why that may be the case, but they, too, are well aware that things could easily have turned out differently.

In a recent survey of more than 1,500 U.S. Catholic women, commissioned by America and conducted by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, 73 percent of women who are mothers said their children remain in the church.

Fifteen percent indicated that none of their children are now Catholic.

The remaining 12 percent reported a mixed result: Some of their children are Catholic and some are not.

Those results closely mirror an informal poll of America readers for this article conducted by social media.

Just over 25 percent of the more than 500 respondents said their children have left the church—a number that trends suggest will increase as the young children of many respondents grow up.

Nationally, nearly half of all children leave the faith of their parents once they reach adolescence. Continue reading

• Image: America

Young women who are actually still girls — but who already have a husband, and sometimes even a child: It is a fate shared by Abaynesh of Ethiopia, Ramgani of India and Nayane of Brazil.

Each has her own story and her own way of dealing with the situation. SPIEGEL ONLINE asked them to share theirs.

Nayane, 15 years old, from Brazil

Nayane and her twin sister Nayara have their eyes glued to their phones, which are vibrating with each incoming message.

Nayara hasn't left the house in three months, a punishment imposed upon her by the "Red Command," the drug gang that controls her community, for having a relationship with a man from a rival group.

Nayane is keeping her company during her confinement. They are lounging on the bed in a small weathered room in a house in Parque União, located in the Maré favela in northern Rio de Janeiro.

Nayane is holding her 10-month-old daughter Ana Sophia in her lap.

The twins are 15-years-old, but aren't currently attending school. At the moment, Nayane is getting ready to go to a funk music party — the same party where she once met the father of her daughter.

The young mother has his photo on her T-shirt. He was involved in drug trafficking and was shot to death during a police operation six months ago.

Brazil has the fourth largest number of child marriages in the world. Almost 1 million women between the ages of 20 and 24 were married before they were 15, and 3 million entered matrimony before turning 18.

The minimum age for marriage in Brazil is 16 with parental consent, but the age limit can be lowered in cases of pregnancy. Continue reading

Source and Image:

• Spiegel Online

In an interview with the magazine Credere, the Pope explained his decision to call a Jubilee Year of Mercy.

The Jubilee Year might help the faithful to recognise "the maternal dimension of God", the Pope observed.

He explained that he was speaking of "the tenderness, typical of a mother, God's tenderness that comes from his innate paternity. God is both father and mother".

At the conclusion of the interview, Pope Francis disclosed that he plans to make a number of public gestures to underline the theme of the Jubilee.

He said that "one Friday each month I will make a different gesture".

He did not discuss what those gestures might be.

Continue reading

An initial version of Bishop Rachel Treweek's writ of summons to be read aloud to the House of Lords referred to her as "right reverend father in God".

Bishop Treweek, from Gloucester, sent this back and now a revised version refers to her as "bishop".

"There may be women who'd be happy with ‘right reverend mother in God', but that doesn't sit comfortably with me," she said.

"There's something about the whole connotation of ‘mother' that has a sense of dependency for me.

"It's not how I want to be looked at. I see myself as a leader, as leading from among people."

Continue reading

However, too often we want to take control of this grace in a kind of a spiritual book-keeping, Pope Francis said during his homily at Mass this morning in the chapel at Casa Santa Marta.

"God's closeness is such that he is presented like a mother, a mother who talks to her baby, and sings lullabies to her baby... This is God's tenderness. And He expresses his closeness with tenderness: the tenderness of a mother".

God's love is free - the Pope continued - just as a mother's love is for her child. And the child "allows himself to be loved": "this is the grace of God."

"But many times, just to be sure, we want to control the grace."

He said that "in history and also in our lives we are tempted to transform grace into a kind of a merchandise, perhaps saying to ourselves something like "I have so much grace," or, "I have a clean soul, I am graced."

"In this way this beautiful truth of God's closeness slips into a kind spiritual book-keeping: 'I will do this because it will give me 300 days of grace ... I will do that because it will give me this, and doing so I will accumulate grace'."

"But what is grace? A commodity? That's what it appears. And throughout history this closeness of God to his people has been betrayed by this selfish attitude, selfish, by wanting to control grace, to turn it into merchandise".

"The grace of God - Pope Francis said - is another matter: it is closeness, it is tenderness. This rule is always valid. If, in your relationship with the Lord, you do not feel that He loves you tenderly, you are missing something, you still have not understood what grace is, you have not yet received grace which is this closeness".

Source

• Independent Catholic News

47. The Church is called to be the house of the Father, with doors always wide open. One concrete sign of such openness is that our church doors should always be open, so that if someone, moved by the Spirit, comes there looking for God, he or she will not find a closed door. There are other doors that should not be closed either. Everyone can share in some way in the life of the Church; everyone can be part of the community, nor should the doors of the sacraments be closed for simply any reason. This is especially true of the sacrament which is itself "the door": baptism. The Eucharist, although it is the fullness of sacramental life, is not a prize for the perfect but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak. These convictions have pastoral consequences that we are called to consider with prudence and boldness. Frequently, we act as arbiters of grace rather than its facilitators. But the Church is not a tollhouse; it is the house of the Father, where there is a place for everyone, with all their problems.

48. If the whole Church takes up this missionary impulse, she has to go forth to everyone without exception. But to whom should she go first? When we read the Gospel we find a clear indication: not so much our friends and wealthy neighbours, but above all the poor and the sick, those who are usually despised and overlooked, "those who cannot repay you" (Lk 14:14). There can be no room for doubt or for explanations which weaken so clear a message. Today and always, "the poor are the privileged recipients of the Gospel", and the fact that it is freely preached to them is a sign of the kingdom that Jesus came to establish. We have to state, without mincing words, that there is an inseparable bond between our faith and the poor. May we never abandon them.

49. Let us go forth, then, let us go forth to offer everyone the life of Jesus Christ. Here I repeat for the entire Church what I have often said to the priests and laity of Buenos Aires: I prefer a Church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a Church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security. I do not want a Church concerned with being at the centre and which then ends by being caught up in a web of obsessions and procedures. If something should rightly disturb us and trouble our consciences, it is the fact that so many of our brothers and sisters are living without the strength, light and consolation born of friendship with Jesus Christ, without a community of faith to support them, without meaning and a goal in life. More than by fear of going astray, my hope is that we will be moved by the fear of remaining shut up within structures which give us a false sense of security, within rules which make us harsh judges, within habits which make us feel safe, while at our door people are starving and Jesus does not tire of saying to us: "Give them something to eat" (Mk 6:37).

- Evangelii Gaudium "The Joy of the Gospel" is an apostolic exhortation written by Pope Francis.

CathNews is publishing Evangelii Gaudium in ‘bite-size' chunks, inviting people to read it reflectively, and use it for prayer.

I tried to use that one once on my current small group to see what they would do. They just stared at me and rolled their eyes. Then they laughed because they knew I was joking.

Maybe teenagers in 1995 were a lot more corny than teenagers in 2013. Or maybe it was just me.

There are things our daughters (and sons, too!) need to hear us say. And even though the clichés may encourage some of them and may look cute on a poster, they will most likely fall flat on young ears. Here is my best attempt to come up with 12 non-cliché things our daughters need to hear us say.

1. I have hope.

I could tell her "Have hope." But, I speak as a daughter here, it means more to me to see my parents have hope than for them to tell me to have hope. My hope (or lack thereof) speaks louder to her than my words about hope.

Show her you have hope - you trust God with your family, you have hope for her future, you see light in dark places. Continue reading

Source

• Emily in Chatting at the Sky
• Image: More4Kids

The protests follow the mid-pregnancy death of 31-year-old Savita Halappanavar of blood poisoning in Galway University Hospital after she had repeatedly asked for an abortion.

The bishops said they shared the "anguish and sorrow" of so many following the death of Mrs Halappanavar and her baby.

Repeating a statement they made last October, they said:

• Where a seriously ill pregnant woman needs medical treatment which may put the life of her baby at risk, such treatments are ethically permissible provided every effort has been made to save the life of both the mother and her baby.

• Whereas abortion is the direct and intentional destruction of an unborn baby and is gravely immoral in all circumstances, this is different from medical treatments which do not directly and intentionally seek to end the life of the unborn baby.

• Current law and medical guidelines in Ireland allow nurses and doctors in Irish hospitals to apply this vital distinction in practice while upholding the equal right to life of both a mother and her unborn baby.

Meanwhile, a London-based specialist in obstetrics and gynaecology has been named to head a health service inquiry into Mrs Halappanavar's death and make recommendations to try to prevent a similar incident occurring again.

He is Sri Lankan-born Professor Sir Sabarantnam Arulkumaran, who is on record as advocating liberal abortion laws.

As president of the International Federation of Gynaecology and Obstetrics in 2009, he co-authored an article in the International Journal of Gynecology and Obstetrics which said: "We would like to challenge and encourage societies and countries with restrictive abortion laws to look at the evidence available in favour of liberal abortion laws and debate the possibility of making the choice of termination of pregnancy a legal right for women."

Sources:

Irish Catholic Bishops Conference

The Guardian

The Irish Catholic

Image: Breaking News.ie

Essential Mums is full of daily news, features, fun stories and lots of helpful advice. It has everything you need to navigate the amazing journey of motherhood.

"Why Essential Mums, and not Essential Mums and Dads?" I hear you ask. Yes, we know Dads take just as active and important a role in children's upbringing (not to mention creation), and we are sure many of them will find lots of the content interesting and useful. They are welcome too.

But we wanted to make this site unabashedly a place for women, and acknowledge that while being a mum is amazing, fantastic (and sometimes exhausting and frustrating), it is also only one facet of a woman's life. We all juggle lots of balls every day, whether it be kids, work, relationships, finances, extended family or whatever.

So while we will cover everything from conception to teenagers, we also have plenty of lifestyle content - food, fashion, finances and the odd celebrity yarn - to round it off. There are tools like ovulation calculators, pregnancy calendars and baby name finders. You can check out how your child's primary school performed in this first round of National Standards, and join the comment and debate on any of our stories.

We wanted to make the site reflect the full journey of motherhood. Continue reading

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