Thousands of tickets for open-air Masses during Pope Benedict XVI's visit to Britain this week are yet to be sold just days before he is due to arrive.

The Pope starts his visit in Scotland on Thursday. The largest organised event is an open-air Mass at Bellahouston Park in Glasgow on the opening day of his four-day trip to the UK.

The capacity has been reduced to 80,000 after a slow take-up of tickets.

Dioceses in England and Wales have also reported thousands of unfilled places for a London vigil in Hyde Park on Saturday and the service to beatify Cardinal Newman in Birmingham on Sunday.

Officials have blamed the early start, with pilgrims having to leave home at 2am in order to board official coaches heading to the venue, rather than the cost of tickets.

The Roman Catholic Church of England and Wales remains confident that the first-ever state papal visit to Britain will prove a success.

LONDON - God no longer has any place in theories on the creation of the Universe due to a series of developments in physics, British scientist Stephen Hawking said in extracts published Thursday from a new book.

In a hardening of the more accommodating position on religion that he took in his 1988 international best-seller "A Brief History of Time", Hawking said the Big Bang was merely the consequence of the law of gravity.

"Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist," he writes in "The Grand Design", which is being serialised by The Times newspaper.

"It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the Universe going," added the wheelchair-bound expert.

Hawking has achieved worldwide fame for his research, writing and television documentaries despite suffering since the age of 21 motor neurone disease that has left him disabled and dependent on a voice synthesiser.

In "A Brief History of Time", Hawking had suggested that the idea of God or a divine being was not necessarily incompatible with a scientific understanding of the Universe.

But in his latest work, Hawking cites the 1992 discovery of a planet orbiting a star outside our own Solar System as a turning point against Isaac Newton's belief that the Universe could not have arisen out of chaos.

"That makes the coincidences of our planetary conditions — the single Sun, the lucky combination of Earth-Sun distance and solar mass — far less remarkable, and far less compelling as evidence that the Earth was carefully designed just to please us human beings," he wrote.

Hawking argued earlier this year that mankind's only chance of long-term survival lies in colonizing space, as humans drain Earth of resources and face a terrifying array of new threats.

He also warned in a recent television series that mankind should avoid contact with aliens at all costs, as the consequences could be devastating.


Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/create+Universe+Hawking/3473347/story.html#ixzz0yOXX6KgZ

“There’s no longer evidence for a need of God, even less of Christ. The so-called traditional churches look like they are dying.”

It matters who said this. If it came from Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens – the Four Horsemen of the New Apocalypse – few would accept it as an objective assessment. But the author of this quote was Pope Benedict XVI.[1]

The Pope’s candor fits well with other research sponsored by churches. When you count the people in the pews on Sunday rather than having a pollster ask whether or not they attend church, fewer than 18% attend church regularly.[2] From 1980 to 2005 in the Southern Baptist Church, baptisms of people between eighteen and thirty four – in other words, their next generation of leaders – fell 40 percent, from 100,000 in 1980 to 60,000 in 2005.[3]

But the U.S. population grew by 27% during those 25 years, so the Baptists would have had to baptize 127,000 in 2005 just to stay even; they really fell by 52%.[4] In 2006, the Southern Baptists – who claim almost six times more members than any other white evangelical church – made a concerted effort to baptize one million people. Not only did they fall over two-thirds short, they actually baptized even fewer than they had the year before.[5]

You might think that some faith group must have grown during the last thirty years, and you’d be right: atheists and nonbelievers more than doubled in the eleven years between 1990 and 2001, from 14 million to 29 million: from 8% of the country to 14%. There are more than twice as many atheists and nonbelievers as there are evangelical Christians.[6] And since it’s hard to believe that all atheists/nonbelievers would be willing to confess that to pollsters, the number is probably much higher. From 2000 to 2005, church attendance fell in all fifty states.[7]

Nor is this trend a new phenomenon: American churches have not kept up with population growth in over a century.[8]

Then, to add insult to injury, when a sampling of non-Christians were asked to rate eleven groups in terms of respect, they rated evangelicals tenth. Only prostitutes ranked lower.[9]

Are believers more moral? No. When pollster George Barna – himself an evangelical – looked at seventy moral behaviors, he didn’t find any difference between the actions of those who were born-again Christians and those who weren’t. His studies and other indicators show that divorce among born-agains is as common as, or more common than, among other groups. One study showed that wives in traditional, male-dominated marriages were three times more likely to be beaten than wives in egalitarian marriages.[10]

Evangelicals constitute not 25 percent of the U.S. population – as they have claimed – but at most 7 percent, and their numbers are falling, not rising. All these numbers come from the churches themselves. (Wicker, p. 67) While evangelical women make up at least 3.5% of the population (half of 7%), they make up about 20% of the women who get abortions.[11]

“The Spirit,” as the Gospel of John says, “blows where it will.” Where is it blowing now? Adding together the data from pollsters, evangelical researchers and Pope Benedict XVI, it’s not a stretch to say the Spirit – the spirit of life and the truth that can make you more free – has settled in the land of atheists, nonbelievers, and church alumni.

The Divine Mercy Care Pharmacy in Chantilly proudly and purposefully limited what it would stock on its shelves. But it turns out that no birth control pills, no condoms, no porn, no tobacco and even no makeup added up to one thing:

No customers.

The self-described "pro-life" pharmacy went out of business last month, less than two years after it opened to great fanfare, with a Catholic priest sprinkling holy water on the strip-mall store tucked between an Asian supermarket and a scuba shop.

No word on whether he returned for last rites.