Crux: Poland this summer won’t get the pope it wants, but the one it needs

Yet there are also signs of underlying weakness, including declines in seminary enrollment and recruitment to religious orders, and mounting frustration with perceived clericalism and indifference to laity. One recent study, for example, found that few of Poland’s more than 10,000 Catholic parishes actually have the pastoral and finance councils involving laity anticipated by canon law.

There’s also evidence that an increasing number of Poles are questioning Church teaching, with a survey last year by Warsaw’s Center for Public Opinion Research finding that three-quarters of Poles part company with the Church on homosexuality, contraception and extra-marital relationships.

Politically, the Church finds itself struggling to manage its relationship with the ruling Law and Justice party, which came to power in October 2015 with strong Catholic support, and which is still perceived as tightly allied with the Church.

Last month, for instance, one Polish priest publicly suggested that anyone who protests the government should be denied Communion.

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Science Alert: Europe announces that all scientific papers should be free by 2020

This week was a revolutionary week in the sciences - not because we discovered a new fundamental particle or had a new breakthrough in quantum computing - but because some of the most prominent world leaders announced an initiative which asserts that European scientific papers should be made freely available to all by 2020.

This would legally only impact research supported by public and public-private funds, which are a vast portion of the papers produced annually; however, the goal is to make all science freely available. [...]

To that end, while a spokesperson for the Competitiveness Council admits the 2020 target "may not be an easy task", all are quick to stress the importance of the council’s new resolve. "This is not a law, but it’s a political orientation for the 28 governments. The important thing is that there is a consensus."

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BBC: The newlyweds with no country to call home

Based on data from 30 countries in 2010, Eurostat estimated one in 12 marriages in Europe were between people of different nationalities. In Switzerland, it was about one in five, compared with about one in 11 in the UK and hardly any at all in Romania. In Australia, nearly one in three marriages in 2014 was mixed. In Singapore, where the number of marriages in 2014 was the highest since 1997, transnational marriages accounted for 37% of those unions up from 23% in 2003. And the US Census Bureau revealed that in 2011, in 21% of married households in America, at least one of the spouses was born outside the US. [...]

Despite economic policies that encourage the globalisation that make transnational marriages inevitable, young couples like Han and Stuart, and people who’ve been married for years, have become unexpected victims of hardening attitudes towards migration.

“There has been increasing stress on ‘managed migration’ by governments to try to maximise economic benefits from migration, and control types of migration not seen as so beneficial,” Katharine Charsley, an academic at the University of Bristol, said by email. Spouses who migrate are selected as a matter of the heart, “rather than selected for their skills to fill shortage occupations by the state”.

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The Times of Israel: In Tel Aviv, thousands protest Israel’s ‘fascist’ incoming defense minister

An estimated 2,000 people poured into central Tel Aviv on Saturday night to protest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s pick of Yisrael Beytenu head Avigdor Liberman as Israel’s new defense minister in last week’s coalition shakeup. [...]

The rally, organized by the Joint (Arab) List, the left-wing Meretz party, and the left-wing Peace Now organization, was held under the headline “Building the opposition: A new way for Israel.” [...]

The marchers were joined by leftist members of the Knesset, including Meretz leader Zehava Galon and Joint List chairman Ayman Odeh. [...]

In an effort to allay concerns over his appointment, Liberman has promised to act in a “responsible” manner while in office. During a joint press conference Wednesday with Netanyahu, the new defense minister pledged his commitment to “peace and to a final status agreement, and to understanding between us and our neighbors.”

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The Guardian view on disappearing Christianity: suppose it’s gone for ever? Editorial

This decline in self-identification probably has very little to do with belief. The people in the pews have always been heretics with only the vaguest notion of what official doctrines are, and still less of an allegiance to them. The difference is now that they are outside the pews, even if they still hold the same vague convictions about a life spirit or a benevolent purpose to the universe. [...]

Over the last 50 years “religion” has come to stand for the opposite of freedom and fairness. This is partly an outcome of the sexual revolution and of the long and ultimately futile resistance to it mounted by mainstream denominations. “The religious” now appear to young people as obscurantist bigots whose main purpose is to police sexuality, especially female sexuality, in the service of incomprehensible doctrines. Institutional resistance to the rights of women and of gay people was an exceptionally stupid strategy for institutions that depends on the labour of both. But the Church of England was so much a part of the old imperial state that life in post-imperial Britain was never going to be easy. [...]

Such an enormous change is bound to have implications for the rest of us. A post-Christian Europe will of course have a morality but it won’t be Christian morality. It will likely be less universalist. The idea that people have some rights just because they are human, and entirely irrespective of merit, certainly isn’t derived from observation of the world. It arose out of Christianity, no matter how much Christians have in practice resisted it. Although human rights have become embedded in our institutions at the same time as religious observance has been in decline, they could become vulnerable in an entirely post-Christian environment where the collective memory slips from the old moorings inherited from Christian ethics

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