Notes on promotion

"Tom Forrest, a Redemptorist priest, is in charge. It was conceived in 1984 by Catholic charismatic and conservative Catholic student movement. Forrest said, `The object is to give Jesus Christ a 2,000th birthday gift of a world more Christian than not.' "The 1400 member Catholic charismatic Community of God's Delight in South Dallas will produce television programs which will be beamed to portable satellite receiving disks. "Forrest is planning to organize a retreat for the world's Catholic bishops in 1989. A world conference for 7000 priests is planned for 1990. Both conferences will provide these men with books and sermons on evangelism. "Other aspects include a papal proclamation of a decade of evangelism, a world wide prayer crusade and traveling evangelistic teams." From message by Tom Forrest, Redemptorist priest, at Indianapolis '90. "Now because I love being a Catholic, my job, my role in evangelism is not just to make Christians. Our job is to make people as richly and fully Christian as we can by bringing them into the Catholic church. No, you don't invite someone to become a Christian. You invite them to become Catholics. There are seven sacraments, and the Catholic church has all seven. On our altars we have the body of Christ; we drink the blood of Christ. As Catholics we have Mary. And that Mom of ours, Queen of Paradise, is praying for us till she sees us in glory. As Catholics - now I love this one - we have purgatory. Thank God! I'm one of those people who would never get to the Beatific Vision without it! it's the only way to go. Our job is to use this remaining decade evangelizing everyone we can into the Catholic Church." Richard Dawkins believes that children should grow up reading the Bible and has a soft spot for the Church of England. He also believes some of the historic atrocities of human behaviour were not inspired by religion, but were a result of our ruthless Darwinian past. And he believes in the possibility of a transcendent intelligence existing beyond the range of present human experience. It is just that he refuses to call it God. These are just some of the more surprising confessions to come from the man variously described as Britains angriest atheist and the self-appointed Devils chaplain. We meet in the North Oxford Gothic splendour of his grand house near the colleges of Oxford, of which his own, New College, is one of the grandest and oldest, founded by a Bishop of Winchester and steeped in the religious and choral tradition of the Church of England. I am at once curious and anxious. I want to tell him how strange it is to find my specialism under such articulate attack from a biologist; that if I believed in such entities I would say he was my Nemesis.