A European ruling banning crucifixes in Italian schools should be overturned, nine European governments said in an appeal Wednesday, the Associated Press reports.

The European Court of Human Rights ruled that crucifixes in Italian public schools violate religious and education freedoms last November. The case, part of a larger debate over the role of religious symbols in public places, has sharpened divisions between secular and religious advocacy groups.

Italian courts have previously ruled that the display of crucifixes is part of Italian national identity and not an attempt at conversion, an argument expanded by New York University legal scholar Joseph Weiler on behalf of the governments of Italy, Armenia, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, Malta, San Marino, Romania and Russia, who are appealing the ruling.

The decisions of the court — an arm of the Council of Europe, the continent's premier human rights watchdog — are binding on the council's 47 member states and therefore have an impact far beyond Italy.

"The democratic cohesion of society is dependent on the ability to uphold national symbols around which all society can coalesce," Weiler said. "It would be a strange (if Italy) had to abandon national symbols, and strip from its cultural identikit, any symbol which also had a religious significance."

Crucifixes are commonly displayed in Italian schools and public places.

In its Nov. 3 ruling, the European court said the crucifix could be disturbing to non-Christian or atheist pupils. It added that state-run schools must "observe confessional neutrality in the context of public education," where attendance is compulsory.

The original case was heard by a seven-judge panel. The appeal hearing was heard by a "grand chamber" of 19 judges, indicating the tribunal believes the case deals with an important issue. A ruling is expected in September or October.

The case was brought by Soile Lautsi, a mother of two who claimed public schools in her northern Italian town refused eight years ago to remove the Roman Catholic symbols from classrooms. She said the crucifix violates the secular principles the public schools are supposed to uphold, and the right to offer her children a secular education.

She filed her case with the European Court of Human Rights in July 2006, after Italy's Constitutional Court dismissed her complaint.

Elsewhere in Europe, strongly secular France, where crucifixes are not seen in public schools, banned students from wearing "conspicuous" religious symbols in a law seen as aimed at Muslim headscarves. France, Belgium and Spain are considering limits on face-covering Muslim veils as well.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 4:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (14)
        

Shaukat Malik is a Muslim-American Certified Public Accountant from Potomac. He left his native Pakistan in 1972 and has been living in the United States since 1980.

Western patience and capacity for continued spending on the Afghan war is running thin. The United Kingdom and other NATO countries are facing increasing opposition at home. The British Petroleum oil spill has added to the urgency for a speedy resolution in Afghanistan. We have reached a very critical stage in the Afghanistan war.

Creating a civil society in Afghanistan is a long-term project that may take a decade. Taliban rule of the 1990s, followed by nine years of continuous war and unrest, have destroyed local government and infrastructure necessary for bringing order to the ordinary lives of Afghans.

However, at least in Pakistan, where there is indeed an elected parliament, the politicians must earn their credentials and not allow critics to label them as useless rubber-stamp parasites hanging around for their monthly paychecks.

Time has come for Pakistan’s politicians to show maturity and counter criticism that they are inept, unqualified and unable to handle the problems of Pakistan. A free press in Pakistan has enough material for any politician to understand Pakistan’s important role in the war against terror and how it can directly influence the outcome of the war in neighboring Afghanistan.

Ordinary Pakistani citizens must be convinced that the war against the Taliban is their war, and not just America’s war. The Taliban has supported Al-Qaeda. The organization that carried out the 9/11 murder of more that 3,000 innocent Americans in New York cannot be allowed to establish its headquarters in Pakistan to kill innocent Pakistanis. The Taliban are no different from cancer cells and must be neutralized or eliminated.

The Taliban are clients of Pakistan’s Islamic parties, who openly support and share their ideology and are their natural allies. Many members of the Assembly, especially those from the religious parties and the right, are sitting on the fence when it comes to openly condemning the mad Taliban. They see the National Assembly as a rubber-stamp body that pays them a monthly stipend.

It is imperative that Pakistan’s elected National Assembly, led by the Pakistan People’s Party, validate military action by the Pakistan Army against the Taliban and Pakistan’s support of U.S. action in Afghanistan. Unless and until the voters' representatives are seen and heard condemning the Taliban by passing a resolution, all action against the Taliban will be seen by many Pakistanis as America's war against terror imposed on the people of Pakistan.

Each member should then visit his constituency to explain the reasons for passing such a bill. Those who oppose such a bill can be identified as friends of Pakistan’s enemies.

A bill should also be passed in the elected National Assembly authorizing monitoring of all madrassas and conversion of all madrassas to regular schools with the help of regional school boards in Pakistan using all available resources. The U.S. stands ready to help.

Madrassas should no longer be allowed to become recruiting grounds for suicide bombers, Taliban and murderers hiding behind the burqa of religious education.

As a matter of fact, all madrassas' names should end in School, thereby killing any hope of a fascist mullah trying to use it as his private military academy. We should teach music and social sciences in madrassa schools to broaden the thought process of students, who presently are focused and stuck on hate.

The Taliban complain that the government is not fully implementing the Hadood laws in Pakistan, and given the chance, they would transform Pakistan into a Caliphate with a fascist Mullah at the helm. We should deny them the opportunity to exploit outdated Islamic laws whose equivalents can be found in Pakistan’s penal code.

Pakistan’s Supreme Court must look at the Hadood ordinance and Sharia-based laws to establish whether they are just and fair, especially, in the context of today’s Pakistan. This process of studying and analyzing Sharia laws through a process of Ijtehad -- reasoning -- is already being employed in Turkey, as part of Turkey's exercise to make its laws more compatible with their European neighbors.

Turkey is doing this to join the common market, but the net beneficiaries are Turkey's Muslim population. Pakistan should do the same by studying what Turkey has done and incorporating it into Pakistan’s legal system. This will have the powerful effect of neutralizing the extremist element in Pakistan.

In a Pakistan where every madrassa is monitored and the citizens are on the same wavelength as the politicians and the military, any Taliban running from U.S. action on the Afghan border will find it difficult to quickly disappear into the frontier wilderness or safe houses in Pakistan.

These actions are a pre-requisite for a Taliban-free Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 1:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)
        

A reliquary containing the blood of Blessed Mother Teresa, along with her crucifix, rosary and sandals, will be put on display at Baltimore area churches this week, the Archdiocese of Baltimore announced.

On Friday, Bishop Denis Madden will celebrate a Mass at 12:10 p.m. at the Baltimore Basilica, which was visited by the candidate for sainthood in May 1996, a year before her death.

The relics are coming to Baltimore as part of a tour of North America organized by Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity in honor of the 100th anniversary of her birth. The missionaries operate Gift of Hope, a hospice center for AIDS patients in the former convent of St. Wenceslaus Church in East Baltimore.

The relics will be received at Gift of Hope at 4 p.m. Wednesday and may be venerated by visitors until 8:30 p.m. Mass will be celebrated at 8 a.m. Thursday at St. Wenceslaus, followed by a holy hour and veneration of relics until noon.

Thursday evening, the relics are to be transported to Our Lady of Pompei in Highlandtown where a Mass will be celebrated in Spanish at 5:30 p.m., followed by a holy hour, rosary and veneration until 8:30 p.m.

Mass will be celebrated at 8 a.m. at St. Leo in Little Italy on Friday, followed by a holy hour, rosary and veneration until 11 a.m.

Mother Teresa first visited Baltimore in 1992 to celebrate the opening of the AIDS hospice, according to the archdiocese.

“Any man, woman or child feeling unloved with nowhere to go is welcome to come here," she said. "I have no gold or silver to give you but I’m giving you my sisters.”

Mother Teresa died in 1997 at the age of 87. She was beatified -- a step toward sainthood -- in 2003 by Pope John Paul II.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 12:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (66)
        

Pope Benedict XVI is creating a new Vatican office to fight secularization and "re-evangelize" the West — a tacit acknowledgment that his attempts to reinvigorate Christianity in Europe haven't succeeded and need a new boost, the Associated Press reports.

Benedict announced the new office during a vespers' service Monday, confirming reports in the Italian media of a handful of new Vatican appointments expected to be announced before the pope goes on summer holiday and the Vatican bureaucracy slows down.

Benedict said parts of the world are still missionary territory, where the Catholic Church is still relatively unknown. But in other parts of the world like Europe, Christianity has existed for centuries yet "the process of secularization has produced a serious crisis of the sense of the Christian faith and role of the Church."

The new pontifical council, he said, would "promote a renewed evangelization" in countries where the Church has long existed "but which are living a progressive secularization of society and a sort of 'eclipse of the sense of God.'"

The pontiff's announcement came as he marked the feasts of Saints Peter and Paul, a major feast day in Europe that is traditionally celebrated with representatives of the Orthodox church. While ties with some Orthodox remain strained, both churches have found a common ground in their fight against secularization.

Benedict didn't say who would head the new office, but Italian media have said he would tap Monsignor Rino Fisichella, who as head of the Pontifical Academy for Life is the Vatican's top bioethics official.

Fisichella created a minor uproar last year when he defended Brazilian doctors who aborted the twin fetuses of a 9-year-old child who was raped by her stepfather. His call for mercy sparked heated criticism from some hardline conservative members of the Pontifical Academy who questioned his suitability to lead the institution.

The pontiff is also expected to name a new head of the Vatican's main evangelization office for missionary work, the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, since its current head Cardinal Ivan Dias, 74, is in poor health, Italian media reports have said.

The office is currently in the spotlight because Dias' predecessor, Cardinal Crescenzio Sepe, is under investigation by Italian prosecutors in a sprawling corruption scandal involving his business transactions at the congregation, which owns millions of dollars in Roman real estate.

Prosecutors are trying to untangle an alleged web of kickbacks involving billions of euros (dollars) worth of contracts for such mega-projects as preparing 2000 Holy Year events in Rome, the 2009 Group of Eight summit and rebuilding the quake-shattered town of L'Aquila.

Sepe's real estate transactions at the Congregation are under scrutiny since they involved some of the key figures implicated in the probe, including Premier Silvio Berlusconi's disaster chief Guido Bertolaso.

On Monday, the Vatican sought to clarify the role of the Congregation, acknowledging that with such a complicated portfolio of real estate there could be "errors of valuation and fluctuations in the international market."

In a statement, the Vatican said it had over the years realized the need to improve profitability and run the office more professionally and with higher standards.

Sepe has denied wrongdoing and insisted he acted for the good of the church in his transactions. He has denied point-by-point the three main accusations against him concerning his 2001-2006 tenure at the congregation and three deals involving the sale, renovation and renting of congregation-owned properties.

Other appointments expected soon concern a new chief for the Vatican's powerful Congregation for Bishops, which vets bishops appointments around the world; one for the Vatican's office for promoting unity with other Christians; and the appointment of a commissioner to take over the scandal-plagued Legionaries of Christ, which was discredited after its founder was discovered to have abused seminarians and fathered at least three children.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 5:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (29)
        

Belgium insisted Monday in a dispute with the Vatican over credibility that Belgian law enforcement authorities — not the potentially biased Catholic Church — will investigate sexual abuse cases involving clergy, the Associated Press reports.

A panel created by Belgian bishops 12 years ago to look into abuse cases disbanded on Monday, saying last week's seizure of its 500 case files rendered its existence pointless. Its chief, Peter Adriaenssens, accused authorities of betraying the trust of hundreds of victims and using his group to tap into information and testimony from abuse victims.

"We were bait," said Adriaenssens, a child psychiatrist. He urged Belgian authorities to clarify to abuse victims — many of whom talked after being promised anonymity — "what is going to happen" to the allegations they made to his church-appointed commission.

Belgium's government doesn't appear to be concerned about having pushed the panel to the sidelines, despite an outburst from the Vatican that Thursday's police raid was an unprecedented intrusion into church affairs.

"I respect Peter Adriaenssens, but his commission was created by the Church," Glenn Audenaert, head of Belgium's judiciary police, said after last week's police raids. "That commission cannot start a prosecution. Only the justice department can."

In Belgium, it has been doing that with unusual force.

On Thursday, scores of police officers seized documents, computers, DVDs and CDs at the Belgian archbishop's residence in Mechlin, north of Brussels, and detained a dozen Belgian bishops who were meeting there. Also detained for nine hours and told to surrender his cell phone was the Vatican's envoy to Belgium.

Using power tools, police also opened up a prelate's crypt in Mechlin's St. Rombout Cathedral looking for documents. Simultaneously, police carted off 500 sexual abuse case files against Belgian clergy from the office of Adriaenssens' panel in Leuven, just east of Brussels.

As the Adriaenssens' commission stepped down, it said it was now up to Belgian bishops "to care for victims and follow-up their complaints" of sexual abuse.

Rik Torfs, a canon law expert, says the Catholic Church has a poor record of doing that.

"It has failed badly in its treatment of many of these cases," he said. "The church always found their fate less important than its own prestige. In that sense, today's papal protests are unimpressive."

The commission Adriaenssens led was founded in 1998 to investigate sexual abuse by clergy. For long a do-nothing group with fast changing leaders, its case load in its first 10 years of existence never exceeded 30.

What accelerated matters was the April 24 resignation of Belgium's longest-serving bishop, Roger Vangheluwe. He stepped down after admitting sexually abusing a young boy both when he was a priest and archbishop casting a vast cloud over former Archbishop Godfried Danneels who retired last January.

The resignation came after reports of hundreds of abuse cases worldwide exposing cover-ups by bishops and evidence of long-standing Vatican inaction to stop it.

Since Adriaenssens took charge of the abuse investigation panel in April, its case load rose to 475 as hundreds of men — now in their 60s and 70s — have come forward.

Only 100 agreed that their cases could be relayed to justice officials. Adriaenssens said his panel had planned to issue a report to the Belgian bishops in October.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 4:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)
        

An ideologically split Supreme Court ruled Monday that a law school can legally deny recognition to a Christian student group that won't let gays join, with one justice saying that the First Amendment does not require a public university to validate or support the group's "discriminatory practices," the Associated Press reports.

The court turned away an appeal from the Christian Legal Society, which sued to get funding and recognition from the University of California's Hastings College of the Law. The CLS requires that voting members sign a statement of faith and regards "unrepentant participation in or advocacy of a sexually immoral lifestyle" as being inconsistent with that faith.

But Hastings, which is in San Francisco, said no recognized campus groups may exclude people due to religious belief or sexual orientation.

The court on a 5-4 judgment upheld the lower court rulings saying the Christian group's First Amendment rights of association, free speech and free exercise were not violated by the college's nondiscrimination policy.

"In requiring CLS — in common with all other student organizations — to choose between welcoming all students and forgoing the benefits of official recognition, we hold, Hastings did not transgress constitutional limitations," said Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who wrote the 5-4 majority opinion for the court's liberals and moderate Anthony Kennedy. "CLS, it bears emphasis, seeks not parity with other organizations, but a preferential exemption from Hastings' policy."

Justice Samuel Alito wrote a strong dissent for the court's conservatives, saying the opinion was "a serious setback for freedom of expression in this country."

"Our proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express 'the thought that we hate,'" Alito said, quoting a previous court decision. "Today's decision rests on a very different principle: no freedom for expression that offends prevailing standards of political correctness in our country's institutions of higher learning."

Leo Martinez, Hastings College of the Law's acting chancellor and dean, said the ruling "validates our policy, which is rooted in equity and fairness."

But the decision is a large setback for the Christian Legal Society, which has chapters at universities nationwide and has won similar lawsuits in other courts.

"All college students, including religious students, should have the right to form groups around shared beliefs without being banished from campus," said Kim Colby, senior counsel at the Christian Legal Society's Center for Law & Religious Freedom.

The 30-member Hastings group was told in 2004 that it was being denied recognition because of its policy of exclusion.

According to a society news release, it invites all students to its meetings.

"However, CLS voting members and officers must affirm its Statement of Faith," the statement said. "CLS interprets the Statement of Faith to include the belief that Christians should not engage in sexual conduct outside of a marriage between a man and a woman."

Kennedy said "the era of loyalty oaths is behind us."

"A school quite properly may conclude that allowing an oath or belief-affirming requirement, or an outside conduct requirement, could be divisive for student relations and inconsistent with the basic concept that a view's validity should be tested through free and open discussion," Kennedy said.

Justice John Paul Stevens was even harsher, saying while the Constitution "may protect CLS's discriminatory practices off campus, it does not require a public university to validate or support them."

Stevens, who plans to retire this summer, added that "other groups may exclude or mistreat Jews, blacks and women — or those who do not share their contempt for Jews, blacks and women. A free society must tolerate such groups. It need not subsidize them, give them its official imprimatur, or grant them equal access to law school facilities."

The Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, called the decision a "huge step forward for fundamental fairness and equal treatment."

"Religious discrimination is wrong, and a public school should be able to take steps to eradicate it," Lynn said. "Today's court ruling makes it easier for colleges and universities to do that."

In another case, the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal from some Texas parents who wanted to stop their school district from regulating when students can pass out religious-themed material to their classmates.

The court refused to hear an appeal from some parents from the Plano Independent School District.

The district in 2005 told elementary students religious-themed material could only be passed out before and after school, at recess, at three school parties or at designated tables. Middle and secondary students could add in lunchtime or between classes.

Parents say the policy dilutes students' free speech rights. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled for the school district and the Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal.

The case is Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, 08-1371.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 3:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)
        

The Vatican issued an unprecedented public rebuke Monday of a leading cardinal who had questioned the church's policy of celibacy and openly criticized the retired Vatican No. 2 for his handling of clerical sex abuse cases, the Associated Press reports.

In a statement, the Vatican said only the pope can make such accusations against a cardinal, not another so-called prince of the church.

In April, Vienna's archbishop, Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, accused the former Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, of blocking a probe into a sex abuse scandal that rocked Austria's church 15 years ago.

Schoenborn also accused Sodano of causing "massive harm" to victims when he dismissed claims of clerical abuse as "petty gossip" on Easter Sunday.

Schoenborn has been a leading figure in the abuse crisis, forcefully denouncing abuse, presiding over service of reparations for victims and openly calling for an honest examination of issues like celibacy.

Schoenborn's comments about Sodano were remarkable in that they were directed at Pope John Paul II's No. 2, who has already come under fire for his alleged stonewalling of a Vatican investigation into the founder of the Legionaries of Christ, who was found to have abused seminarians and fathered at least three children.

Sodano still wields enormous influence in Vatican circles as the dean of the College of Cardinals.

Such a public and formal reprimand of a cardinal is extremely rare — particularly for one like Schoenborn, who has long been close to Benedict, his onetime professor, and is seen as a possible papal contender himself.

The Vatican on Monday sought to clarify Sodano's "petty gossip" comment, noting that the pope himself had used the same phrase a week earlier, referring to the need to have "courage to not be intimidated by the petty gossip of dominant opinions."

The phrase, and Sodano's repetition of it, had sparked widespread criticism that the Vatican simply didn't appreciate the significance of the clerical abuse scandal. It suggested that the pope himself and his collaborators believed that the hundreds of reports that were flooding in of children being raped and sodomized by priests, and the questions that were being asked about the Vatican's handling of such cases, were mere gossip, not serious crimes.

The Vatican that interpretation was "erroneous," although it didn't explain what the pontiff or Sodano meant by the phrase. The Vatican said both men felt compassion for victims and condemnation for those behind the abuse.

The Holy See issued the statement after Schoenborn met with the pontiff in a private audience Monday. The audience was then broadened to include Sodano and the current Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone.

The Vatican communique said Schoenborn had wanted to "clarify the exact sense of his recent comments" concerning celibacy and Sodano. It said Schoenborn "expressed his displeasure for the interpretations."

When asked by The Associated Press for further comment, Schoenborn's spokesman said the cardinal would not be available for an interview.

Previously, cardinals who have stepped out of line questioning church policy or doctrine have quietly issued their own mea culpas.

Schoenborn made the comments April 28 to a select group of Austrian journalists. The comments were later summarized by the Catholic news agency Kathpress and picked up by media around the world.

In the discussion, Schoenborn blamed Sodano for having blocked an investigation of sex abuse allegations against the late Austrian Cardinal Hans Hermann Groer.

The scandal surrounding the late Vienna archbishop broke in 1995, when a former student at a boy's seminary in the town of Hollabrunn alleged that he abused him repeatedly in the early 1970s. Other accusations followed. Groer stepped down shortly after the first allegations surfaced — officially due to old age. He died in 2003 but never admitted any guilt.

Schoenborn, who succeeded Groer as Vienna archbishop, said the pope — known then as Joseph Ratzinger and head of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — had immediately pushed for an investigative commission when abuse allegations against Groer arose.

However, he said, others in the Vatican — described by Schoenborn as the "diplomatic track," meaning the secretariat of state, a clear reference to Sodano — did not let this happen.

His comments were intended to defend the pope at a time when Benedict himself was coming under fire for his handling of abuse cases both during his time as archbishop of Munich and as the head of the Vatican's doctrine office.

The Vatican statement Monday recalled that "in the church, only the pope has the competence to deal with accusations against a cardinal; other instances can have a consultation function, but always with the necessary respect for the people involved."

In other comments on April 28, Schoenborn was quoted as saying the quality of a gay relationship should be taken into greater consideration, the church needed a new perspective on the remarriage of divorcees, and it was no secret the Vatican government was "in urgent need of reform."

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 2:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (31)
        

Dan Jackson was elected president of the North American Division of Seventh-day Adventists Monday at the General Conference Session in Atlanta. The 16.3 million-member church is headquartered in Silver Spring.

The 61-year-old Jackson, currently president of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Canada, was appointed by the church’s 246-member nominating committee and confirmed by the General Conference Session delegation, an international body of 2,410 appointed members and the highest governing body in the church.

“God never calls us to do things we are capable of, and this thing is so much bigger than me. But He has called, and I accept this with the greatest humility and with extreme gratitude to Don Schneider,” Jackson said in a statement.

Jackson succeeds Schneider, who has served as president since 2000.

“Elder Jackson is a wonderful Christian whose leadership has demonstrated a commitment to the mission of the Seventh-day Adventist Church," Schneider said.

A graduate of Canadian Union College (now Canadian University College) and Andrews University, Jackson has served the church as a pastor, teacher and administrator. With the exception of five years of service in the Southern Asia Division, has lived and ministered in Canada. He has served as a pastor, teacher and administrator.

Seventh-day Adventists are in Atlanta this week for the 59th General Conference Session, a business meeting of the global church held once every five years.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 12:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
        

The following was written by J. Samia Mair, Sister Eileen Eppig, and Ted Chaskelson on behalf of the Muslim-Christian-Jewish Dialogue Group of Baltimore.

In the fall of 2007, Muslims and Christians from the Baltimore area established an interfaith group to learn more about each other’s religion and to promote understanding and peace on a wider scale. Later realizing that the discussion would benefit tremendously with the addition of the Jewish perspective, members of the Jewish community were invited to join.

Our participation in this dialogue has resulted in increasing appreciation of one another and our respective religious traditions; in praying for and otherwise supporting one another, and in raising our awareness of events that we might not have otherwise noticed.

Sadly, it is senseless killings that are the events that come -- more and more -- to the notice of the entire world. All three of our member religions are aware that a responsibility rests on all of them. None can say that such killings are problems for other religions, but not for us. The burden of responsibility rests on Jews, Christians and Muslims, to do what we can to end such killings. For this reason we have submitted a Jewish, Christian and Muslim perspective showing that all three religions call for an end to this violence.

Jewish Perspective
In the book of Genesis, God creates the first human family, and in that very first human family, we have the first murder. Cain murders his brother Abel. Perhaps the reason for placing that event within the very first human family, is to tell us that every murder -- then and now -- is a murder in our one human family. That like it or not, we are all related to each other in a single worldwide family. And this means that if we are to have any hope for a better world, we must change how we educate our children.

All children, all over the world, must be taught that we are one family. They must be taught that it does not matter if the shape of another person's eyes is different, or if the color of their skin is different, or if their religion is different, or even if some of them don't believe in any religion and don't even believe that God exists. They are still -- every one of them -- your brothers and sisters. And we have a responsibility to all of them, and they have a responsibility to all of us. That responsibility is that we must not speak words of hatred about our brothers and sisters. Speaking words of hatred leads to actions of hatred, and actions of hatred lead to killings, and killings lead to wars. Once the poison of teaching hatred starts, that poison will spread far and wide. There are no borders it cannot cross, and there is no country that is safe from it. Does this mean that people can never argue about something? Of course not. There will always be things people will argue about. But if no words of hatred are used, then people can search for the truth together without killings or wars.

I think this search for the truth usually ends up with the realization that each side has something in its favor that is true. So then, the next search together is to see how to use this realization, in order to be good to each other. In the Hebrew Bible, the book of Proverbs tells us that "Death and life are in the power of the tongue." (18:21) May God help us to teach this to all our children.

Christian Perspective
It saddens us when brothers and sisters are killing and wounding each other since we are all children of the same God and Creator, all brothers and sisters of the same Father. Our brother Jesus, who followed in the tradition of the Hebrew prophets, taught us how to live together. His path is not easy, for it is one of self-emptying love.

As the very minimum Jesus says, “You know the commandments: you must not kill …” (Mark 10:19) It’s that simple. This is a basic moral principle. But the teaching of Jesus goes further. “You must love your neighbor as yourself.” (Matthew 22:39) Not only do we need to refrain from killing, but we must love each other, wishing the best for each other. And should we love only our neighbor? “You have heard it said,” declares Jesus, " ‘you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies … so that you may be children of your Father in heaven.” (Matthew 5:43-45)

We need not only to refrain from killing our enemies, but to love them. This is self-emptying love, which requires a high degree of moral development. When we hate another or kill another, we hate and kill ourselves, as members of one body, one family. We bring only more darkness into the world instead of making the world a place of light, a place where our God is at home.

How do we love our enemies? Jesus advises, “Do not judge … do not condemn … grant pardon” (Luke 6:37). Again, this teaching requires spiritual practice. We are challenged to curb our anger and our egos and find ways of respecting others and allowing for difference. This is what our Muslim-Christian-Jewish Dialogue is all about. “Blessed are the peacemakers,” says Jesus, “for they shall be called children of God.” (Matthew 5:9)

Muslim Perspective
The Prophet Muhammad, may God bless him and grant him peace, said: “Near the establishment of the Hour there will be days during which religious ignorance will spread, knowledge will be taken away and there will be much Al-Harj, and Al-Harj means killing." (Bukhari)

Every day it seems that some senseless killing of another human being brings this hadith to mind. It becomes all the more repugnant when done in the name of religion, as our religions teach us that life is a sacred gift from God. And this respect for life not only extends to those who share our same beliefs or who are otherwise like us, but to all of humanity. The Qur’an states:

“... if anyone slays a human being-unless it be for murder or for spreading corruption on earth-it shall be as though he had slain all mankind; whereas, if anyone saves a life, it shall be as though he had saved the lives of all mankind.” (5:32)

It is by Divine design that humanity is diverse, “For, had God so willed, He could surely have made you all one single community.” (16:93) But God willed diversity and He did so for a purpose,

“O men! Behold, We have created you all out of a male and a female, and have made you into nations and tribes, so that you might come to know one another. Verily, the noblest of you in the sight of God is the one who is most deeply conscious of Him. Behold, God is all-knowing, all-aware.” (49:13)

God tells us in this verse that beneath our outward differentiations, we are a single humanity, sharing the same history and meeting the same destiny. Appreciating our human oneness allows us to put aside our differences and engenders compassion and love for one another. It is then we can begin to understand the implications of killing our brothers and sisters, no matter what they believe or where they live. It is then we can grieve together as children of Adam and work collectively towards justice and righteousness.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 5:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
        

The pope on Sunday called the raids carried out by Belgian police investigating priestly sex abuse "surprising and deplorable" and voiced his support for the Belgian bishops who were held during the searches, the Associated Press reports.

In a message of solidarity to the head of the Belgian bishops' conference, Pope Benedict XVI said justice must take its course but also asserted the right of the Catholic Church to investigate abuse alongside civil law enforcement authorities.

It was first time the pope himself had commented on the June 24 raids, and his message to Monsignor Andre Joseph Leonard capped a daily ratcheting up of the Vatican's criticism. On Saturday, the No. 2 Vatican official said the raids were unprecedented even under communism.

In the raids, police searched the home and former office of former Archbishop Godfried Danneels, taking documents and his personal computer. The raid came as the country's nine bishops were starting their monthly meeting; the men were held for nine hours and — along with diocese staff — had to surrender their cell phones.

Police and prosecutors have not said if Danneels is suspected of abuse himself or simply had records pertaining to allegations against another person.

Separately, police seized the records of an independent panel investigating sexual abuse by priests, some 500 cases in all. The head of the panel called the raid a huge violation of the privacy of people — mostly men now in their 60s and 70s — who have lived with the shame of abuse.

Benedict said he wanted to write to Belgium's bishops "at this sad moment" to express his solidarity "for the surprising and deplorable way in which the searches were conducted." He noted that the monthly meeting of the bishops was to discuss precisely clerical abuse.

He stressed that such crimes are handled by both civil and canon law "respecting their reciprocal specificity and autonomy."

"In that sense, I hope that justice takes its course, guaranteeing the fundamental rights of people and institutions with respect to the victims, recognizing without prejudice all those who are committed to collaborating with justice and refuting all that which seeks to obscure its noble goals," he wrote.

The Belgian justice minister, Stefaan De Clerck, stressed that the procedures used in the raids were correct and that the bishops were treated normally, according to the Belga news agency. He bristled at the criticism by Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican No. 2, saying his suggestion that the raids were unprecedented even under communism had been excessive, based on false information.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 12:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
        

A Baptist minister who toured the country to talk about his conversion from Islam to Christianity is no longer the dean of Liberty University's theological seminary following allegations he fabricated or embellished facts about his past, the Associated Press reports.

The university founded by Rev. Jerry Falwell said that a board of trustees committee concluded Ergun Caner made contradictory statements. Although it didn't find evidence that he was not a Muslim who converted as a teenager, it did discover problems with dates, names and places he says he lived, a statement said.

Caner will remain on the Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary faculty, but won't be dean when his term expires on June 30.

"Caner has cooperated with the board committee and has apologized for the discrepancies and misstatements that led to this review," the school said.

A phone number listed for Caner in Lynchburg, where Liberty is located, was not in service.

An unlikely coalition of Muslim and Christian bloggers, pastors and apologists led the charge to investigate the preacher with video and audio clips they claim show Caner making contradictory statements.

Caner has been a celebrity in evangelical Christianity since 2001, when he and his brother began appearing on news shows and other venues to discuss Islam in the aftermath of 9/11.

The author and charismatic speaker became dean of the seminary at Liberty in 2005. Since then, enrollment has roughly tripled to around 4,000 students.

He told The Associated Press in 2002 that he was born in Sweden to a Turkish father and Swedish mother, who brought the family to Ohio in 1969, when he was about 3 years old. He said he accepted Christ as a teenager at a Baptist church in Columbus, and then pursued ministry, getting a degree from Criswell College, a Baptist school in Dallas.

Since questions arose about contradictory, he changed the biographical information on his website and asked friendly organizations to remove damning clips from their websites. But the questions didn't go away, leading to the Liberty investigation.

While few doubt that Caner was raised as a Muslim, they question changing biographical details in his speeches and whether he was a believer to the extent he told audiences.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 7:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
        

A hidden-camera video showing Jews being harassed on the street in a Moroccan neighborhood of Amsterdam has led Dutch authorities to consider combating hate crimes with "decoy Jews" — undercover police officers wearing yarmulkes, the Associated Press reports.

Enthusiasm for the unusual idea is a sign of the ongoing tension between the Muslim minority and the rest of the Dutch population over issues of immigration and crime.

The idea of using "decoy Jews" to detect and arrest bigots has been embraced by both a prominent Moroccan politician and by Amsterdam's acting mayor, who is Jewish. Law enforcement officials say the idea is feasible but would only be of limited practical use due to entrapment concerns.

"It's important that it not provoke any intent to commit a criminal act that wasn't there in the first place," Justice Minister Ernst Hirsch Ballin told parliament in a debate Thursday night on how to combat discrimination.

Of course "it would be wrong to consider wearing a yarmulke itself a provocation," he said.

The idea of using police disguised as Jews was first mooted by member of parliament Ahmed Marcouch in a speech earlier this month.

"We've done similar things with other kinds of crime," he said. "I'll act as a decoy Jew myself if necessary."

But the idea gathered momentum after the hidden-camera video aired on television last week. It was produced by the Joodse Omroep, a small Jewish broadcaster that gets an allotted amount of airtime each month on Dutch public TV stations.

For the video, two youths and a Rabbi wearing yarmulkes went walking in a primarily Moroccan neighborhood in Amsterdam. The footage showed them quickly being subjected to a range of ill-treatment, from dirty looks to insults — and even, from one man, a Nazi salute.

Decoy Jews are "not a solution to fighting anti-Semitism in general," said Ronny Naftaniel, the head of the Center for Information and Documentation Israel, a pro-Jewish group that has lobbied for the idea.

"But they could be used to fight a certain aspect: that Orthodox Jews are becoming unable to walk in public without being afraid of intimidation," he said.

Naftaniel said the main problem in policing hate speech crimes is that they are difficult to prove after the fact. With an undercover agent, offenders would be caught instantly, he said.

The number of instances of reported anti-Semitism in Amsterdam rose in 2009 from the previous year, according to government data, from 17 to 41. Discrimination cases on the basis of skin color or country of origin rose from 232 to 336 in the same period, while anti-gay cases rose to 89 from 55.

But those rises may reflect a public campaign encouraging people to report hate crimes. Hirsch Ballin told parliament Thursday police had seen no real increase in anti-Semitism.

"The number of incidents rises and falls, and is connected to tensions in the Middle East," he said.

He promised to devote more resources to investigating hate crimes, as well as to more education in schools and a quicker legal process for discrimination-linked cases.

His spokesman Wim van der Weegen said Friday that it would be up to individual prosecutors to decide whether or not they wanted to use decoy Jews. He said such sting operations need be approved in advance by a judge.

Using surveillance cameras in certain areas is another option, Van der Weegen said.

Amsterdam Mayor Lodewijk Asscher told a local television station this week he was open to the idea of using decoy Jews and other "unorthodox methods" to combat racism and homophobia.

However, his spokeswoman, Tessel Schouten, said Friday the city doesn't yet have any specific plans to do so.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 5:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

The Vatican said Friday it was astonished and outraged that Belgian police investigating priestly sex abuse had conducted raids that also targeted the graves of two archbishops, the Associated Press reports.

The Vatican summoned the Belgian ambassador to the Holy See to convey its anger over the raids, which also included the home and offices of the retired archbishop of Belgium. The ambassador was called in for a meeting with the Vatican's foreign minister.

In a statement, the Vatican said any sinful and criminal abuse of minors from members of the church must be condemned and repeated that there is a need for justice and amends.

But it added, "The Secretariat of State also expresses astonishment at the way in which the search took place." It expressed "outrage over the violation of the tombs."

On Thursday, police raided the home and former office of former Archbishop Godfried Danneels, taking documents and Danneels' personal computer. Police and prosecutors did not say if Danneels was suspected of abuse himself or simply had records pertaining to allegations against another person. He was not questioned.

Investigators also opened the graves of archbishops in the St. Rombouts Cathedral in Mechlin, north of Brussels, looking for possibly incriminating documents, said Jean-Marc Meilleur, spokesman for the Brussels public prosecutor.

Archbishop Andre-Joseph Leonard, Belgium's current archbishop, condemned the search of the cathedral, saying that is stuff for "crime novels and 'The Da Vinci Code.'"

Separately, police seized the records of an independent panel investigating sexual abuse by priests, some 500 cases in all. The victims are mostly men now in their 60s and 70s.

This also drew the condemnation of the Vatican, which said it regretted the violation of the confidentiality due the victims of child abuse.

The Brussels prosecutor's office said the raids followed recent statements to police related to the sexual abuse of children within the church.

It was the latest development in a sex abuse scandal that has shaken the Roman Catholic Church in Europe and beyond for months.

Reports of rape and other sexual abuse of minors in seminars, schools and other church-run institutions have piled up. Victims have come forward accusing priests of abuse and bishops of covering up crimes in order to safeguard the church's name.

Pope Benedict XVI has begged forgiveness from victims and promised to "do everything possible" to protect children.

News of the Belgian raid was welcomed by the U.S. victims group SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, which urged police and prosecutors across the world to use their full powers to gain access to church records. By contrast, the group criticized the Vatican's reaction.

"Vatican officials who criticize the Belgian police raid of the Brussels church hierarchy should be ashamed of themselves," Joelle Casteix of SNAP said in a statement Friday. "While Roman church officials talk about stopping abuse, Belgian police officials take action to stop abuse."

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 2:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (42)
        

The Vatican is asking a federal judge to reject an attempt to question Pope Benedict XVI under oath in a Kentucky sex abuse lawsuit on the grounds that there has been no evidence of a link to church officials in Rome, the Associated Press reports.

The arguments filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Louisville also say that forcing Benedict, a head of state, to give a deposition would violate international law. The U.S. considers the Vatican to be a sovereign nation.

The lawsuit accuses the Vatican, referred to in papers as the Holy See, of orchestrating a coverup of priests sexually abusing children throughout the U.S.

Louisville attorney William McMurry asked to depose Benedict and other Vatican officials in a motion in March and the filing on Thursday is a response. McMurry has also asked that the Vatican turn over administrative documents and respond to questions related to the abuse scandal in the U.S.

Attorneys for the Vatican argue that thousands of documents provided in a lawsuit against the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Louisville several years ago have turned up no connection to Rome. The Louisville archdiocese reached a settlement in 2003 with more than 240 abuse victims represented by McMurry for $25 million.

McMurry will have an opportunity to reply to the Vatican's latest arguments in a response to the court.

While U.S. dioceses have been sued over abuse by priests, the Kentucky lawsuit is the first U.S. case to make it to the stage of determining whether victims have a negligence claim against the Vatican. Filed in 2004 by three men abused by priests in the Louisville diocese, it argues in part that U.S. bishops should be considered employees or officials of the Holy See.

The Vatican's filing said McMurry had access to "thousands and thousand of pages of documents" from the Louisville archdiocese suit and has not found any trail that leads to the Holy See.

"There is no evidence whatsoever in the archdiocesan files showing that the archbishop was the Holy See's 'employee' or that the archbishop followed a mandatory Holy See policy relating to the handling of child sexual abuse by priests," the Vatican said in the filing.

McMurry has said the court will use Kentucky law to determine the employment relationship between the Vatican and American bishops.

"I have yet to meet a Catholic, expert or otherwise, who does not believe that the Holy See has the absolute right to control the day-to-day activities of a bishop's work," McMurry said in an e-mail message to The Associated Press last week.

Vatican attorney Jeffrey Lena said the "employment and 'secret policy' theories concocted by Mr. McMurry are little more than a lawyer's speculative confabulations, as the archdiocese documents demonstrate."

The Vatican is also asking U.S. District Judge John G. Heyburn to rule first on a motion to dismiss the lawsuit. The motion filed by Vatican lawyers in mid-May argued that U.S. bishops are not Vatican employees and that Rome therefore can't be held liable for their actions.

Foreign nations are typically immune from civil actions in U.S. courts, but there are exceptions to the Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act which courts have said could be applied in the Kentucky case.

Bringing a head of state like the pope to a deposition in the U.S. is nearly an impossible legal hurdle to overcome, said Jonathan Levy, a Washington attorney who has sued the Vatican on behalf of Holocaust victims.

"I doubt very much a U.S. court would want to make an order that it knows it's not going to be able to enforce," Levy said. "How can a federal judge force a head of state to attend a deposition?"

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 5:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

The governors of Louisiana and Texas say Sunday will be a day to pray about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the Associated Press reports.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal issued a proclamation declaring a day of prayer for perseverance in coping with the environmental crisis caused by the spill.

In Texas, Gov. Rick Perry is urging Texans to pray for the healing of individuals, the rebuilding of communities and the restoration of entire Gulf coast environment.

Experts say the current worst-case estimate of what's spewing into the Gulf is about 2.5 million gallons a day from the blown well, polluting shorelines from Louisiana to Florida.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 4:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)
        

Police raided the home and former office of the recently retired archbishop of Belgium on Thursday, carrying off documents and a personal computer as part of an investigation into the sexual abuse of children by Roman Catholic priests, the Associated Press reports.

Police and prosecutors would not say if former Archbishop Godfried Danneels was suspected of abuse himself or simply had records pertaining to allegations against another person.

Separately, police seized the records of an independent panel investigating sexual abuse by priests, some 500 cases in all. The head of the panel called the raid a huge violation of the privacy of people — mostly men now in their 60s and 70s — who have lived with the shame of abuse.

The raids followed recent statements to police "that are related to the sexual abuse of children within the church," said Jean-Marc Meilleur, a spokesman for the Brussels prosecutor's office. He would not offer specifics on the case.

Police took documents, but did not question Danneels at his home in the city of Mechlin, north of Brussels, said Hans Geybels, the spokesman for the former archbishop.

"They did take away his computer," he said.

Geybels added Danneels was fully cooperating. "The cardinal believes justice must run its normal course. He has nothing against that," he said.

Armed with a search warrant, police entered the archbishop's office at 10 a.m. (0800GMT) just as the country's nine bishops were starting their monthly meeting with Archbishop Andre-Joseph Leonard, Danneels successor, who took over in January.

Also present was Archbishop Giacinto Berloco, the papal nuncio to Belgium and Luxembourg.

Officials said all were held for nine hours and — along with diocese staff — had to surrender their cell phones.

Danneels was a leading liberal voice in Europe's church before he retired in January.

But he returned to the limelight when, in late April, Belgium's longest-serving bishop, Roger Vangheluwe, resigned after admitting to having sexually abused a young boy during the time Danneels was archbishop.

The resignation led a former priest, Rik Deville, to say he warned Danneels at least 15 years ago that Vangheluwe had abused a boy. Danneels said in April, "I cannot remember such a discussion."

Meilleur said the search of Danneels home and office was unrelated to the Vangheluwe case. "This is a new case that came to us recently," he said.

The head of the sexual abuse investigation panel, child psychiatrist Peter Adriaenssens, criticized the raid, saying there was no need to seize the documents of all 500 cases being looked into by the committee.

Only 100 complainants were ready for their names to be revealed to justice authorities, he added.

The panel has been around for years, and had dealt with only around 30 cases of alleged abuse until the past year, when abuse cases by Catholic clergy began surfacing worldwide and its workload skyrocketed.

It has complained bitterly about lack of cooperation from the church in the past.

Vatican officials said that for the time being there would be no comment on the raids.

The sex abuse scandal has engulfed the church in Europe — and beyond — for months, with reports of abuse of in seminars, schools and other church-run institutions. Reports that priests have abused children or bishops have covered up for them have outraged the faithful.

The scandal has touched on Pope Benedict XVI's German homeland. This month, Benedict begged forgiveness from victims and promised to "do everything possible" to protect children.

The comments came during a Mass celebrated by 15,000 priests at St. Peter's Square marking the Vatican's Year of the Priest — a year marred by revelations of hundreds of new cases of clerical abuse in Europe, Latin America and elsewhere, cover-ups by bishops and evidence of long-standing Vatican inaction.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 4:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

A Jewish dance group was attacked with stones by a group of children and teenagers during a performance at a street festival in the Germany city of Hannover, police said Thursday. One dancer suffered a leg injury and the group then canceled their performance, the Associated Press reports.

The teenagers also used a megaphone to shout anti-Semitic slurs during the Saturday afternoon attack, Hannover police spokesman Thorsten Schiewe said.

Police said the incident is under investigation and that they do not have an exact number of attackers yet. Schiewe said there were several Muslim immigrant youths among the attackers.

Two suspects, a 14-year-old and a 19-year-old, were being questioned, he said.

Alla Volodarska, whose Progressive Jewish community of Hannover group held the performance, told The Associated Press in an interview that members were still in shock.

"What happened is just so awful," Volodarska said. "The teenagers started throwing stones the moment our dance group was announced, even before they started dancing."

Volodarska said she did not attend the event herself, but had talked to several members of the eight-person dance group since the incident. She said one dancer, a woman in her forties, was injured by several stones that hit her leg.

"There were many kids throwing stones, many of them, but we don't know the exact number," she said, adding that the community had performed Israeli group dances at many festivals in the past and never experienced this kind of hostility before.

Volodarska said that the festival took place in Sahlkamp, an immigrant neighborhood of Hannover.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (15)
        

The Illinois State Police has revoked the appointment of the agency's first Muslim chaplain, citing only information revealed during a background check, the Associated Press reports. A national Muslim advocacy group Wednesday blamed the move on Islamophobia.

Kifah Mustapha, a Chicago-area imam, was appointed the agency's first Muslim chaplain in December. Community groups had praised Mustapha's appointment as a nod to the growing diversity among the agency's nearly 2,000 officers.

But within days, the appointment came under criticism from the Investigative Project on Terrorism, a Washington-based think tank.

The group alleged that Mustapha was linked to the Palestine Committee of the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood, a popular movement in the Muslim world that advocates the formation of Islamic governments in the Middle East. It also alleged he raised money for the Holy Land Foundation, a now-defunct Islamic charity whose founders were sentenced last year for funneling money to the Palestinian militant group Hamas. The group cited internal documents and a list of unindicted co-conspirators.

Mustapha hasn't been charged with any crimes. Messages left Wednesday for Mustapha weren't immediately returned.

According to a statement from the Illinois State Police, after Mustapha underwent training in December and was issued state identification and a bulletproof vest, it was discovered that he had not undergone background checks required to serve in the volunteer position.

Mustapha's appointment was rescinded Friday, but that action wasn't publicly disclosed until late Tuesday after media inquiries.

"Due to information revealed during the background investigation, Sheikh Kifah Mustapha's appointment as a volunteer ISP Chaplain has been denied," ISP spokesman Master Sgt. Isaiah Vega said in an e-mail. "Specific details of background investigations are confidential and cannot be discussed."

Vega declined to say whether there was a connection between the think tank's allegations and Mustapha's dismissal.

But the Council of American-Islamic Relations in Chicago, which is representing Mustapha, said the imam was told that was why his appointment was put on hold.

Ahmed Rehab, CAIR's executive director in Chicago, called it discrimination against Muslims, especially since Mustapha hasn't been formally accused of wrongdoing.

"The ISP is kowtowing to the run-of-the-mill fear-mongering that Islamophobes have devoted their careers in order to avoid a public relations controversy," he said.

Steve Emerson, executive directr of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, on Wednesday defended the group's original report, saying it merely published content linking Mustapha to fundraising for terrorists.

He said his group was prompted to investigate after news of the appointment was published on the website of the Mosque Foundation in Bridgeview, one of the Chicago area's oldest and largest mosques. Mustapha is an imam and director there.

Emerson dismissed charges of Islamophobia as "empty diversions and without merit" in an e-mail.

CAIR planned to file a lawsuit and a complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on Mustapha's behalf.

"He knows that he's a good man and he's a good leader and that he really wanted to serve in this capacity to help," Rehab said. "He feels he was unfairly denied."

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 5:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

Jermaine Jackson, who performed with his brother Michael as a member of the Jackson 5 and later became a high-profile convert to Islam, tells the BBC World Service that the faith would have saved him.

"I felt that if Michael would have embraced Islam he would still be here today and I say that for many reasons," Jackson tells the BBC's Ed Butler. "Why? Because when you are 100 per cent clear in your mind as to who you are and what you are and why you are and everybody around you, then things change in a way that’s better for you. It’s just having that strength. God is so powerful. He was studying. He was reading a lot of books, because I brought him books from Saudi Arabia. I brought him books from Bahrain. I was the one who originally put him in Bahrain because I wanted him to get out of America because it was having a cherry-picking time on my brother."

Butler asks whether Michael was willing to convert.

"Not that he wasn’t willing to convert," Jackson responds. "All of his security became Muslims because he trusted Islam, because these are people who would lay their lives down and also who were trying to be the best kind of human beings they could possibly be not for Michael Jackson, for Allah. So having those people around, you knew that you would be protected because it is protection from God.

"Michael was most concerned about children around the world going to bed without food. He would talk about it. And he was concerned about our planet, what we are doing to this planet because of greed. And that was his whole thing to bring an awareness. He was doing these things before the Al Gores, and global warming-ists, he was on it. And he sung about it. He did videos about it. Spent millions and millions and millions of dollars on videos just to show the world for three minutes, look at what we are doing."

More excerpts from the interview, which is scheduled to air Friday, after the jump.

On Michael’s child molestation charges and the posthumous adoration he should have received in life

Butler: Did you ever believe the child molestation charges brought against him?

Jackson: Do you believe them?

Butler: Well they were certainly discounted in court.

Jackson: He was cleared on all counts. The child Jordan Chandler came and said he had never touched him. His father committed suicide. And that’s what I mean about the media to attack my brother and to shame him around the world because of something that they know he did not do. And still a lot of people don’t want to believe it. The love that they are giving my brother now he is dead, is the love they should have shown him when he was alive. The FBI investigated my brother for 17 years and found nothing. And then they just vindicated him after his death. So that’s the BS that America does. It’s bullshit. And I will say they clearly should have given him that when he was alive. That would have made him feel better within his heart.

On life after Michael and being the Jackson family ‘rock’

Butler: What’s it been like since Michael’s passing?

Jackson: It’s been tough. There aren’t no words to describe the feeling. It’s a feeling that one would only know once they experience it. We are just learning to live with it. We’ll never get over it and it’s very tough.

EB: Do you miss him?

JJ: I miss him very, very much because we’ve been so connected throughout our lives, since the very beginning. We share a history that’s just unbelievable, from childhood all the way up to adult age. And what comes to mind is the memories of the tours and music and even before that, us just around the house, going to elementary school and things like that, it’s amazing.

Healing comes from performing the songs, accepting awards on his behalf, doing tributes and things like that because it’s just something that you can’t explain. You have to just remember all the good memories and all the things that he did and that he’s still doing and inspiring through his music and through his whole belief in trying to make this world a one-ness. That was his message in his music and his belief. That was his wake up.

Butler: You were there talking to the media on the day he died in Los Angeles. You were described as a “rock” to the family. Is that a role you recognise?

Jackson: I don’t really look at it like that. I just step forward and take charge. I don’t like hearing things that are not true about my family, it disturbs me quite a bit and I just have to say something and I have to let the world know that’s not who we are, this is who we are. And when the media takes a left-turn then I have to get them back on track.

On visiting Michael’s body in the morgue and how the media only understood him after death

Butler: Shortly after he died you spoke movingly about going to visit his body in the morgue. And you said at the time “I thought all about what they put him through”. Who are they?

Jackson: The media, the conspiracy, there are always people out to get you in your life when you are successful. My description of Hollywood is a beautiful woman with a sore on the side of her face and if you kiss her you will get infected. That’s Hollywood. And they smile in your face and they mean something else. Everybody that pats you on your back is not your friend. And they understood Michael after he was gone, they didn’t understand him while he was here.

On protecting Michael’s legacy and that of the Jackson family

Butler: Do you see your role now as protecting Michael’s legacy?

Jackson: Not just my responsibility, the whole entire family’s. Jackie’s, Rebbie’s, Tito’s, Marlon’s, Randy’s, Janet’s, La Toya’s, myself. It’s all of our role, to keep not just his legacy alive but the whole entire Jackson family. Because we are a family first, before all of this music and success. We’re family. We were a family before that, even if that goes away we will continue to be a family.

Jermaine on his unborn daughters and naming his son ‘Jermajesty’

Butler: You have seven kids yourself now, having lots of kids seems to run in the Jackson tradition.

Jackson: Well there's seven, and I'm having two more girls. The reason being is because I have six boys and one girl now, so when I have two more girls I'll be just like my father - three girls and six boys.

Butler: Have you planned names for them yet?

Jackson: Mecca and Medina.

Butler: No J's this time? You have six Js. Jermaine Junior, you've got a Jermajesty.

Jackson: Yes. He's the nine year old. ...But there is Jermaine Junior, Jeremy, Jourdynn, Jaimy, Jaafar and Jermajesty, and my daughter Autumn, who is the one girl.

Butler: How did you come up with a name like Jermajesty? It’s extraordinary.

Jackson: Jermajesty’s name came from not knowing what I’m going to name him and it’s part of my name which is J-E-R-M-A and instead of going I-N-E, I just said Jermajesty. And when I named him I didn’t think it was going to do anything but the media jumped on it. But the name was made up. I didn’t want him to have a nickname like Jerm or something so I said call him his name, Jermajesty, that’s his name, Jermajesty.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 7:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (17)
        

A former German bishop accused of physical abuse, alcoholism and sexual harassment apologized for his misconduct on Wednesday and agreed to stand by his decision to resign, the Associated Press reports.

Germany's Augsburg diocese said in a statement that it has reached a written agreement with the Rev. Water Mixa that his decision to step down as its Roman Catholic bishop is final.

In a separate letter by Mixa, which was published on the diocese's website Wednesday, he also apologized for his shortcomings without specifying them in detail.

Mixa, 69, who served the Augsburg diocese from 2005 to 2010, offered his resignation on April 22 after accusations surfaced that he had hit children decades ago as a priest and allegations of financial misconduct in the congregation.

Pope Benedict XVI accepted Mixa's resignation on May 8, but earlier this month the bishop said members of the Augsburg diocese and two German bishops had forced him to resign against his will. But earlier this week fresh allegations surfaced, including that Mixa had made sexual advances at two priests.

In neighboring Austria, the country's Catholic cardinal also took steps designed to put the church sex scandal behind it. Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn unveiled measures designed to prevent clerical abuse and help victims.

"The wall of silence has to be broken," he told reporters in Mariazell, a famous Austrian shrine to the Virgin Mary. "This is ... cannot be allowed to repeat itself."

The measures — set to take effect July 1 and approved by all of Austria's bishops_ foresee a unified approach by church abuse complaint centers to probe and deal with allegations against priests and employees of church-run institutions.

In Germany, Wednesday's statements from Mixa and his diocese are the latest twist in the unusually public controversy surrounding his exit, which came at the height of the abuse scandal that rocked the church in Germany and elsewhere in the first half of the year.

The agreement between the diocese and Mixa states that the bishop "will not question his resignation again."

It also says that Mixa will move out of the bishop's residence, comply with the pope's invitation to meet with him in Rome, and will no longer hold anybody else responsible for having forced him to resign.

In his letter, Mixa asks for forgiveness for his "many mistakes," without naming them.

"I am not only apologizing, but also asking for forgiveness for everything I did not do right, and I am especially asking all those people for forgiveness who I did not treat the right way, whose expectations I did not fulfill, and who I disappointed," Mixa wrote.

Mixa's admission of misconduct and surprising turnaround comes only a week after he told Germany's Die Welt newspaper that he had been pressured by his peers to sign the letter of resignation, that he repealed the offer three day later, and that it was based on a sexual abuse claim that was later dropped.

Reacting to Mixa's earlier accusations, Germany's Roman Catholic bishops confirmed Tuesday that a secret file detailing alleged misconduct by a former bishop was sent to the Vatican before the pope accepted his resignation in May.

The bishops did not specify which accusations they were referring to, but the statement came the day after German media widely reported the secret file contains allegations that Mixa is an alcoholic and that two priests claim he made sexual advances toward them.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 11:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

A second man is expected to change his not-guilty plea in the arson fire that destroyed a predominantly black Massachusetts church hours after Barack Obama was elected president, the Associated Press reports.

Thomas Gleason Jr. has a change-of-plea hearing scheduled Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Springfield. Gleason had been scheduled to go to trial on civil rights and other charges later this week.

His lawyer, Mark Albano, declined to comment when reached Monday.

Gleason is one of three white men charged with burning down the Macedonia Church of God in Christ on Nov. 5, 2008, the day after Obama was elected the nation's first black president.

Last week, Benjamin Haskell pleaded guilty in a deal that calls for him to spend nine years in prison.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 5:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

A Mexican man says that leaders of an influential Roman Catholic religious order knew their founder was a child molester and did nothing to stop him, the Associated Press reports.

Jose Raul Gonzalez is seeking unspecified damages from the Legionaires of Christ in a lawsuit filed Monday in Connecticut. The international group has its U.S. headquarters in the state.

Gonzalez says the Reverend Marcial Maciel (mahr-cee-AHL' mah-cee-EL') was his father, and started sexually abusing him when he was a little boy. The 30-year-old Gonzalez says the abuse continued for years. Maciel died in 2008.

Legion officials have acknowledged Maciel fathered at least one child, a girl, and abused seminarians, but insist they only recently learned of his double life. A recent Vatican investigation concluded Maciel lived a "life devoid of scruples."

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 6:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (22)
        

Shaukat Malik is a Muslim-American Certified Public Accountant from Potomac. A native of Pakistan, he arrived in the United States in 1980.

We have all seen the devastation of nuclear bombs as confirmed by Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even today the good people of these two cities are affected by the nuclear radiation injected by these bombs. To be honest, the enormity of long-term devastation that a single nuclear weapon can cause is such that it prohibits their use.

Countries that possess it use it to scare would-be invaders, and each other. It is more like a permanent “Boo!”

Iran is a one-party Islamic theocratic state ruled by mullahs who follow the Shia brand of Islam. The mullahs control Iran’s oil revenues. By using an interlocking system of financial patronage they exercise complete control over a strong regular army and a large private army, the Basijs (religious police) -- estimates include 7.5 million men and 5 million women ensuring compliance with Islamic laws -- and a legislature whose candidates must be approved by the council of mullahs in Qom, Iran’s Vatican. Like the Soviet Union of past, Iran is a police state, in which you are under constant surveillance.

Still, Iran is much more democratic than, say, Saudi Arabia, as women are part of the workforce. But it is not a democracy, as opposition to the party of God is not allowed. The opposition we saw last year on the streets of Tehran -- which was only opposing election results and not the writ of Imam Khomeni, who has the same stature as Pope in the Catholic Church -- was quickly suppressed.

There is a long proxy war being fought between mainly Sunni theocratic Saudi Arabia and theocratic Shia Iran. This war is being fought through sponsoring Islamic parties, including the Hizbollah in Lebanon, which wish to establish theocratic states all over the Muslim world. The viciousness of this war is evident on the streets of Baghdad, where men have been executed in Shia and Sunni neighborhoods and their bodies dumped on the pavement.

The suicide bombers in Afghanistan are infused with a religious ideology that promises paradise to them and to all the innocent people they might kill.

A state that is run by the dictates of religious ideology is a dangerous animal; a theocratic state cannot be challenged by anyone in opposition, because to challenge it is tantamount to committing blasphemy.

Who is going to stop emotional mullahs from threatening or even using a nuclear weapon? It is precisely this fear of mullahs that has caused the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council -- including China and Russia, hitherto supporters of Iran -- to vote at last in favor of a sanctions resolution against the Islamic republic.

The only country with nuclear weapons in the Middle East is Israel, but Israel is a functioning democracy with a vibrant opposition that will ensure that the bombs are purely for deterrence -- a permanent “Boo” to would-be invaders. However, Israel should also open channels of communication with Iran through Turkey to iron out issues with Iran. War has never solved anything, as is evident from Iraq and Afghanistan.

For Iran to join this club, it must shed its theocratic status and stop supporting Shia movements in Lebanon and elsewhere whose aim is to establish theocratic states using Iran’s model. This is precisely why the world would never tolerate or allow theocratic Saudi Arabia from acquiring a nuclear bomb. Saudi Arabia must learn from Iran’s experience and stop supporting theocratic forces in the Muslim world that wish to impose one-party, Taliban-style states.

It is up to Iran to make a choice. The oil- and gas-rich nation has the potential to transform itself from a pariah state into one that is the envy of the Middle East.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 2:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (23)
        

For every hurricane, earthquake or flood, there is help: food, bottled water, crews of volunteers nailing shingles to brand new roofs.

What even grateful recipients of that aid might not realize, the Associated Press reports, is that much of it comes from an unlikely hodgepodge of religious groups who put aside their doctrinal differences and coordinate their efforts as soon as the wind starts blowing.

Southern Baptists cook meals from Texas to Massachusetts. Seventh-day Adventists dispense aid from makeshift warehouses that can be running within eight hours. Mennonites haul away debris, Buddhists provide financial aid and chaplains with the Billy Graham Rapid Response Team counsel the traumatized and grieving.

This "juice and cookies fellowship," as one organizer calls it, is mostly invisible to the public, but it provides interfaith infrastructure for disaster response around the country that state and federal officials could scarcely live without.

"Think of us as the United Nations of disaster relief," said Diana Rothe-Smith, executive director of National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster, the main umbrella group for coordinating emergency response from private agencies.

Although "Vo-ad," as it's usually called, includes groups with no religious affiliation, the bulk of its 50 or so members are relief arms of churches and other faith-based organizations. The organization, which formed in 1970, has grown from seven founding members and this spring signed a memorandum of understanding with the Federal Emergency Management Agency that will help its members respond quicker to disasters.

"There's a tendency when disasters happen to look at government, but there's an inherent risk in taking a government-centric approach to disaster response," said FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate.

The national group, which also works through state-level versions of the coalition, provides essential on-the-ground knowledge that government responders don't have time to develop on their own, Fugate said.

Southern Baptist Disaster Relief, for instance, is famous for its ability to prepare tens of thousands of hot meals at disasters from Hurricane Ike to flooding in New England. The North Carolina Baptist Men, for example, have three food trailers that can serve a combined 75,000 meals a day.

"The Red Cross distributes the meals, but it's Southern Baptists doing the cooking," said Lin Honeycutt, a volunteer with the North Carolina group for more than 20 years.

The denomination apparently developed its affinity for mass meals after a hurricane hit Texas in the early 1960s, but the vast group — there are more than 10,000 Southern Baptist disaster volunteers in North Carolina alone — can do everything from dispensing supplies to cleaning out inches of mud in flooded basements.

Deciding who does what has been a delicate process of building confidence in the capacity of groups as different as Jews and Scientologists, according to Bill Adams, director of Disaster Response Services for the Christian Reformed World Relief Committee and a former NVOAD president.

"Just getting all those people at the same table is a miracle, when you think about it," Adams said.

The groups' specialties have developed gradually in the course of responding to specific disasters. Adventists, for example, really began ramping up their warehousing expertise after Hurricane Andrew in 1992, according to Steve Stillwell, assistant to the Director for Adventist Community Services Disaster Response for the Carolina Conference.

"There were literally football fields 6-feet-deep of donated clothes and items that nobody could use, that ended up going to the landfill," he said. "Andrew was the biggest waste of resources. We directed our skills and training to the better utilization of donated resources, and we've been refining it ever since."

Theology may not play a role in how the specialties develop, but it can present a thorny question for religious believers who don't agree on much beyond the need to help victims of disasters.

Last month, a FEMA videographer was rebuked after telling volunteers not to wear church T-shirts in a video about tornado cleanup to avoid any religious message.

"There may be separation of church and state in government, but in a disaster we all work together," Fugate said.

Nevertheless, religious volunteers are sensitive to accusations of proselytizing to vulnerable, desperate people. After Haiti was devastated in January by an earthquake, Hollywood star John Travolta was criticized for bringing counselors from the Church of Scientology, to which he belongs, along with supplies to the island nation.

In a bid to address concerns, NVOAD's membership last year ratified a set of 10 principles for spiritual care, including the admonition that "Disaster response will not be used to further a particular political or religious perspective or cause."

"We feel we can be who we are and believe ultimately Christ is the answer, but to do it with respect has been our legacy," said Jack Munday, director of the Billy Graham Rapid Response Team, which has more than 3,200 trained chaplains and crisis volunteers.

The delicate compromises and organizational development may be important, but for the people who benefit from the groups' service, the result is all that matters.

Moses Jones, 54, had to evacuate his home in Lake Charles, La., along with his parents, children and sister when Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005. When they returned a month later, the house that had seen three generations of his family was uninhabitable.

"The wind blew off the the siding, the shingles," he said. "I couldn't live there."

Eight teams of volunteers from the Christian Reformed World Relief Committee arrived shortly after, and today Jones said his house is in better shape than it was before Katrina. The particular denominations of his volunteers means little to him compared to the work they did.

"It was like angels came to help me," he said. "I'm Yahweh-blessed, godly blessed. I really feel that way."

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 5:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

A New Hampshire sex offender is asking the state's highest court to allow him to go to church with a chaperone, the Associated Press reports.

The case of 35-year-old Jonathan Perfetto of Manchester marks the first time the New Hampshire Supreme Court is being asked to rule on whether a probation condition that effectively bars church attendance violates a person's constitutional rights to religious freedom.

Perfetto was convicted in 2002 of possessing child pornography. A condition of his probation is that he have no contact with children. A lower court denied Perfetto's request to attend Jehovah's Witnesses services with a church elder acting as a chaperone.

The New Hampshire Civil Liberties Union and Perfetto maintain the chaperone would eliminate any risk to children. The state says public safety trumps Perfetto's religious rights.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 10:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

When Jake and Elwood Blues, the protagonists in John Landis' cult classic "The Blues Brothers," claimed they were on a mission from God, the Catholic Church apparently took them at their word, the Associated Press reports.

On the 30th anniversary of the film's release, "L'Osservatore Romano," the Vatican's official newspaper, called the film a "Catholic classic" and said it should be recommended viewing for Catholics everywhere.

The film is based on a skit from "Saturday Night Live." In the story, Jake and Elwood -- played by John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, respectively -- embark on an unlikely road trip featuring concerts, car chases, clashes with the police and neo-Nazi groups, and attempts at revenge from a spurned lover, all, ostensibly, to raise money for the church-run orphanage where they grew up.

But aside from a brief appearance from Kathleen Freeman as a wrist-slapping nun referred to as "The Penguin" and the brothers' periodic claim that they were on a mission from God, spirituality does not play a significant role in the film.

In addition to Belushi and Aykroyd, the film featured an all-star cast including musicians James Brown, Cab Calloway, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, John Lee Hooker, and Chaka Khan, in addition to noted actors John Candy, Carrie Fisher, Charles Napier, and Henry Gibson, and cameo roles for Frank Oz, Steven Spielberg, Landis, Mr. T, and Paul Reubens (Pee Wee Herman).

With the recommendation, "The Blues Brothers" joins the list of dozens of films recommended by Catholic authorities that includes Cecil B. DeMille's "The Ten Commandments," "Jesus of Nazareth" from Franco Zeffirelli," Mel Gibson's "The Passion of The Christ," Victor Flemming's "Joan of Arc," and "It's a Wonderful Life" from Frank Capra.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 1:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)
        

From time to time, we post an item that might not deal directly with religion, but airs a conflict between competing values that we believe might interest our readers. This report from the Associated Press is one such item.

A Rhode Island boy whose school banned a hat he made because the toy soldiers on it carried tiny guns was awarded a medal on Friday for his patriotic efforts, the Associated Press reports.

Lt. Gen. Reginald Centracchio, the retired head of the Rhode Island National Guard, gave 8-year-old David Morales a medal called a challenge coin during an appearance on WPRO-AM's John DePetro show.

Centracchio said the second-grader should be thanked for recognizing veterans and soldiers.

"You did nothing wrong, and you did an outstanding job," he said. "We can only hope that kids of your caliber will continue to defend this country."

Centracchio also gave David a certificate that allows him to call himself a brigadier general.

David was assigned to make a hat last week for a project at the Tiogue School in Coventry. He chose a patriotic theme and glued plastic Army figures to a camouflage baseball cap. But school officials said the hat ran afoul of their no-weapons policy because the Army men held tiny guns.

The school has said David was offered the chance to wear the hat if he replaced the toy soldiers holding weapons with ones that didn't have any. Centracchio said that didn't make sense because soldiers are armed, and met with school administrators Thursday to share his concerns.

David said he felt great and called it an honor.

"I think it's really special," he said. "I'm going to definitely enjoy this day for a long time."

Also Friday, the Rhode Island chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union said it sent a letter to Coventry Superintendent Kenneth DiPietro saying the school's policy was an unconstitutional violation of students' free speech. It called on the district to revise the policy.

DiPietro did not immediately return a message seeking comment.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 11:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

A man who claims he is the son of Legionaries of Christ founder Marcial Maciel plans to sue the group, saying the Roman Catholic clergyman molested him for years, the Associated Press reports.

Jose Raul Gonzalez of Mexico plans to file the claim of fraud and negligence Monday in Connecticut against the worldwide Legionaries of Christ, said his attorney, Jeff Anderson. The order has its U.S. headquarters in the state.

Gonzalez' mother, Blanca Lara Gutierrez, has said the late Rev. Marcial Maciel led a double life, had two children with her, adopted another, then sexually abused two of the three.

Lara Gutierrez said she was 19 when she met the priest, then 56, who passed himself off as "Jose Rivas," an employee of an international oil company, a private investigator and a CIA agent. She said she didn't discover his real identity until 1997, through a magazine article.

After decades of vehemently denying abuse allegations against Maciel, Legion officials have recently acknowledged the priest fathered at least one child, a girl who now lives in Spain, and sexually abused seminarians. Leaders of the religious order have met several times with Gutierrez but have not publicly affirmed her claim. Maciel died in 2008 at age 87.

Gonzalez has acknowledged previously asking the Legion for $26 million to keep quiet, saying Maciel had promised him and his brothers a trust fund. Anderson said in an interview Friday that Gonzalez had only asked for "what, in effect, had been promised to them."

A U.S. spokesman for the Legion, Jim Fair, said he could not comment because he had not seen the lawsuit.

The Vatican had conducted an investigation of the Legion and concluded last month that Maciel had committed grave and "objectively immoral actions" that constituted true crimes in some cases and showed a "life devoid of scruples and authentic religious meaning."

Maciel created a "system of power" built on silence, deceit and obedience that enabled him to lead a double life that allowed the abuse to go unchecked and unquestioned, the Vatican said.

The statement was stunning, since the priest had enjoyed such favor at the Vatican under Pope John Paul II, who admired the order's conservative outlook and its success in fundraising and recruiting seminarians at a time when the ranks of priests were dwindling.

The Holy See has said that Pope Benedict XVI would appoint a delegate to lead the order after the investigation showed the Legion needed profound reform to survive, given Maciel's enormous internal influence on the group.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 5:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
        

Leaders of a group that encourages evangelical Christians to care for the environment say the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico raises moral challenges for the country, the Associated Press reports.

The Revs. Jim Ball and Mitchell Hescox, leaders of the Evangelical Environmental Network, are visiting southern Louisiana to pray with people who have lost jobs because of the spill.

Joining them is the Rev. Galen Carey of the National Association of Evangelicals.

Ball says they took a boat ride off the coast Thursday and were saddened by sights of oil-spattered marshes where birds were nesting.

He says the oil spill is a stain on the nation's stewardship of God's creation, and should inspire people of faith to embrace cleaner energy sources. Ball says how the nation responds to the disaster is a matter of values.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 5:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
        

Muslims around the globe remain uneasy about the U.S. and are increasingly disenchanted with President Barack Obama, according to a poll that suggests his drive to improve relations with the Muslim world has had little impact, the Associated Press reports.

Even so, the U.S. image is holding strong in many other countries and continues to be far better than it was during much of George W. Bush's presidency, according to the survey.

There is one glaring exception: Mexico, where 62 percent expressed favorable views of the U.S. just days before an Arizona law cracking down on illegal immigrants was signed in April, but only 44 percent did so afterward.

The findings by the Pew Global Attitudes Project, conducted in April and May in the United States and 21 other countries by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, come amid a global economic downturn and U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The poll has been measuring the views of people around the world since 2002.

Among the seven countries surveyed with substantial Muslim populations, the U.S. was seen favorably by just 17 percent in Egypt, Turkey and Pakistan and 21 percent in Jordan. The U.S.'s positive rating was 52 percent in Lebanon, 59 percent in Indonesia and 81 percent in Nigeria, where Muslims comprise about half the population.

None of those figures was an improvement from last year. There were slight dips in Jordan and in Indonesia, where Obama spent several years growing up. Egypt saw a 10-point drop, even though Obama gave a widely promoted June 2009 speech in Cairo aimed at reaching out to the Muslim world.

In all seven of those countries, the percentage of Muslims expressing confidence in Obama has also dropped since last year. Only in Nigeria and Indonesia do majorities of Muslims voice confidence in him; in Obama's worst showing, just 8 percent in Pakistan do.

The survey found that majorities of the public in Turkey, Jordan, Egypt, Indonesia, Lebanon and Pakistan say the U.S. could someday be a military threat to their country.

"You get a sense of Muslim disappointment with Barack Obama," said Andy Kohut, the Pew president, who attributed it to discontent with U.S. policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and to expectations raised by Obama's Cairo speech.

The surveys were taken before Israel's deadly May 31 clash with a flotilla of boats trying to break the blockade of Hamas-controlled Gaza, which sparked widespread condemnation of Israel.

In the rest of the world, the U.S. and Obama generally fare better.

The 6 in 10 in Germany and Spain who view the U.S. favorably has doubled from the lows reached under Bush. The U.S. image is also significantly better than it was under Bush in Russia, China, France, Argentina, South Korea and Japan. Obama is broadly supported, but the percentages expressing confidence in him have ebbed in 14 countries polled.

In only five countries do majorities think the U.S. considers other nations when setting its foreign policy. Support for U.S. anti-terrorism efforts and Obama's handling of economic problems is generally strong, but there is significant opposition to American involvement in Afghanistan and little faith that a stable government will emerge in Iraq.

The poll also found that:

* In the seven Muslim nations polled, the portion of Muslims saying suicide attacks are sometimes justified ranged from 39 percent in Lebanon to 5 percent in Turkey. Nowhere did Muslims give majority support to Osama bin Laden or his al-Qaida terrorist group.

* In every nation but Poland, China and Brazil, most are unhappy with how things are going in their country, though dissatisfaction has grown in only three countries in the past year. Attitudes about each country's economic situation are similarly negative, though a bit brighter than a year ago.

* Nine in 10 Chinese are happy with their country's economy, by far the highest mark of any nation polled. China is seen more positively than negatively in 15 countries, and in eight countries China is viewed as the world's leading economic power — up from two who said so last year.

* Only in Pakistan does a majority favor Iran having nuclear weapons. In most countries, economic sanctions against Iran's nuclear program get higher support than military action. But significant numbers are prepared for a showdown: In 16 countries, more people who oppose Iran's nuclear program consider stopping Tehran from getting such weapons more important than avoiding a military conflict.

* More people in every country except Egypt and Jordan said the environment should be a priority, even at the cost of economic growth and jobs. But only in nine countries are half or more willing to pay higher prices to address global warming.

* Three-fourths of Brazilians say their team will win this year's World Cup soccer tournament, easily the most confident showing of the countries polled. Just 13 percent of Americans picked the U.S.

The Pew Global Attitudes Project was conducted by the Pew Research Center in 22 countries from April 7 through May 8, though the exact dates varied by country. Interviews were mostly conducted face-to-face, though telephone interviews were used in the U.S., Britain, France, Germany, Spain and Japan.

Sample sizes ranged from 700 people in Japan to 3,262 in China. National samples were used in all countries except China, India and Pakistan, where those interviewed were disproportionately urban. The margin of sampling error ranged from plus or minus 2.5 percentage points in China to 5 points in Germany.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 4:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (17)
        

Israel agreed Thursday to ease its three-year-old land blockade of the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, hoping to quell international outrage over its deadly raid on a flotilla bound for the Palestinian territory, the Associated Press reports.

In one of the major changes, Israel will allow in more desperately needed construction materials for civilian projects, provided those projects are carried out under international supervision, government and military officials said. Israel has barely allowed in goods such as cement and steel, fearing Hamas militants could use them to build weapons and fortifications. The policy has prevented rebuilding thousands of homes and other buildings damaged in Israel's war with Hamas last year.

An Israeli military official told The Associated Press all foods would be allowed in to the impoverished territory, effective immediately. Authorities had previously allowed a short and constantly changing list of foods in, but the list has been growing incrementally in recent months.

Israel is maintaining its naval blockade intended to keep weapons shipments out of the hands of Hamas.

"This is a step in the right direction," said Cristina Galach, spokeswoman for the European Union presidency.

However, Hamas was not satisfied.

"We want a real lifting of the siege, not window-dressing," said Hamas lawmaker Salah Bardawil.

The easing is evidence of the intense pressure Israeli leaders felt after an international outcry over the raid on a blockade-busting flotilla on May 31. Israeli commandos killed nine pro-Palestinian activists and both sides claimed they acted in self-defense.

Israel imposed the blockade in 2007 after Hamas, which calls for Israel's destruction, violently seized control of Gaza. For the most part, only basic humanitarian goods have been allowed in for a population of 1.5 million. Egypt has cooperated by blockading its land border with Gaza, but it opened it days after the flotilla raid to allow thousands of Palestinians to leave.

Israel's shift came just one week after President Barack Obama, the country's most important ally, said the blockade was unsustainable and called for scaling it back dramatically. Israel made the decision after extensive consultations with European and American officials.

"This morning, the government of Israel took decisions to liberalize the system under which civilian goods may enter the Gaza Strip, to expand materials for projects inside Gaza which are under international supervision," government spokesman Mark Regev said.

"But of course we must remain with the security procedures that prevent the import into Gaza of weapons and war materials that strengthen the Hamas military machine," he said, indicating the naval blockade would

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 10:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

Tens of thousands of black-clad ultra-Orthodox Jews staged mass demonstrations on Thursday to protest a Supreme Court ruling forcing the integration of a religious girls' school, the Associated Press reports.

Protesters snarled traffic in Jerusalem and another large religious enclave, crowded onto balconies in crowded city squares, and waved posters decrying the court's decision and proclaiming the supremacy of religious law. There were no reports of violence.

The showdown shined a spotlight on a wide array of social issues Israel has been grappling with for years, including discrimination inside the Jewish community, the disproportionate clout of the country's ultra-Orthodox minority and the precarious state of the country's education system.

Parents of European, or Ashkenazi, descent at a girls' school in the West Bank settlement of Emanuel don't want their children to study with schoolgirls of Mideast and North African descent, known as Sephardim.

The Ashkenazi parents insist they aren't racist, but want to keep the classrooms segregated, as they have been for years, arguing that the families of the Sephardi girls aren't religious enough.

Israel's Supreme Court rejected that argument, and told the parents that the school must be integrated. It ruled that the 43 sets of parents who have defied the integration efforts by keeping their daughters from school were to be jailed on Thursday for two weeks.

Police said 50,000 people converged in downtown Jerusalem in support of the Ashkenazi parents. An additional 20,000 demonstrated in the central city of Bnei Brak.

Most of the demonstrators were men wearing the long beards and heavy black clothing typical among ultra-Orthodox Jews. "The Supreme Court is fascist," said one poster. "The prisoners of Emanuel are the messengers of the Jewish people," read another

Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said 10,000 police were deployed to maintain order at the demonstrations. Both police and rescue services were on heightened alert.

Sephardi religious leaders have not publicly criticized the demonstration or the parents' conduct, suggesting a reluctance to drive a wedge within the religious community.

"This is an example of something that should have been passed to a rabbinical court," said Nissim Zeev, a lawmaker from the conservative Sephardic political party Shas. "It's out of proportion, and a bit puzzling, that the high court should impose a prison sentence on these parents."

Still, Zeev said the Sephardi girls had the right to choose to attend a mixed school. "If the children are together under one roof, then they are entitled to the same education," he said.

Israel's ultra-Orthodox minority of some 650,000 Jews — just under 10 percent of the nation's population — is an insular community that has been known to riot over the state's intrusion into its affairs.

On Wednesday, ultra-Orthodox hurled rocks and bottles and torched garbage bins to protest a hotel construction project that they say will disturb Jewish graves.

The ultra-Orthodox have also come under criticism for maintaining a separate, state-funded school system that focuses on religious studies and gives short shrift to the general studies that form the basic core curriculum of schools where secular or modern Orthodox Israelis study.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 9:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (21)
        

An anti-abortion protester arrested in 2007 had a First Amendment right to demonstrate on a sidewalk near the entrance the building that houses the Liberty Bell, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday.

The decision overturns lower-court rulings that upheld the arrest of Christian evangelical leader Michael Marcavage, the Associated Press reports. Marcavage, who lives in suburban Lansdowne, had been sentenced to a year's probation for refusing a National Park Service order to move to a nearby designated demonstration area.

The appeals court tossed the two charges on free-speech and procedural grounds. The three-judge panel said Marcavage caused no more of a disturbance than other people near the Liberty Bell entrance, including a cancer-survivors group and the drivers of horse-drawn carriages hawking their services.

Marcavage founded a group, Repent America, that opposes abortion, homosexuality and the teaching of evolution.

He has been arrested repeatedly during protests up and down the East Coast. He successfully challenged a 2004 arrest for picketing at a Philadelphia street festival for gays and lesbians, but a Massachusetts court last year upheld a disorderly conduct conviction based on his refusal to stop using a megaphone at Salem's famed Halloween celebration.

At his trial in the Liberty Bell case, the government failed to prove Marcavage physically blocked anyone from the tourist attraction. Instead, park service rangers voiced concern for tourists seemingly distressed by Marcavage's graphic speech about abortion.

The judges lauded the rangers' desire to maintain order on a busy Saturday, but they found the law "tips" in Marcavage's favor.

"The government in effect ratified what it perceived as listener hostility to Marcavage's speech when it silenced that speech. That act, coupled with its impetus, constitutes a content-based restriction on speech," Judge Michael Fisher wrote for the panel.

Marcavage will now pursue his related civil suit, which seeks damages and an order blocking the park service from restricting other demonstrators, his lawyer said.

"It happens all the time. If they don't like what you're saying, they order you to leave," said lawyer C. Scott Shields.

Federal prosecutors in Philadelphia were reviewing the opinion before deciding whether to appeal, according to spokeswoman Patty Hartman.

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Categories: Abortion, Christianity, Church and State, Evangelicalsm, Law and Courts, Politics
        

A former German bishop said Wednesday his peers in the Roman Catholic church pressured him into resigning over abuse allegations and that he is considering appealing his case to the Vatican court, the Associated Press reports.

The Rev. Walter Mixa's claims — published in an interview by the daily Die Welt — prompted immediate rebuttals from both his former diocese in Augsburg and the archdiocese in nearby Munich, which said in a statement "everything was done according to the rules."

Mixa, the most prominent cleric within the German catholic hierarchy to lose his post over the country's spiraling abuse scandal, offered his resignation on April 22 over allegations that he hit children decades ago as a priest. He had initially denied the reports, only to add later that he may have slapped kids.

After he offered to resign, public prosecutors launched an investigation into an allegation of sexual abuse against Mixa, but ended up dropping the case.

In the interview, the former bishop said his resignation letter to Pope Benedict XVI was drafted by other clerics.

"The pressure under which I signed the prewritten resignation was similar to purgatory," Mixa was quoted as saying.

"Three days later, I repealed it in a letter to the pope," he said. "During those days I was desperate not knowing what to do."

Nonetheless, the pontiff accepted the resignation on May 8.

Mixa said he will talk to Benedict in July about "how the situation should develop from here" adding that the pope had invited him for the meeting. He also said he is considering addressing the pope's court of appeals.

Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi confirmed the pope will receive Mixa in the coming weeks but the acceptance of the resignation as Augsburg bishop is not expected to be up for discussion. Recourse to the Vatican court is possible though the court is free to reject the case.

Mixa said in the interview he is physically fit, but "for the soul it is different, after the horrible pressure I was under during the last months."

He said he thought it was cruel that background briefings for the press were given about the alleged abuse before anybody had talked to him directly.

"It was a baseless allegation founded only in vague rumor," Mixa said. "And my vicar general was involved."

Mixa also named several auxiliary bishops and said Munich archbishop Reinhard Marx and the head of the German bishops conference, Robert Zollitsch, should have acted "more brotherly."

Marx's spokesman Bernhard Kellner said, however, that "everything was done according to the rules."

The Augsburg diocese stressed in a statement it did not publicize the sexual abuse case, which was not known at the time Mixa signed his resignation.

Zollitsch's office could not immediately be reached for comment.

Before Mixa's resignation, Zollitsch had publicly called on his fellow bishop to take leave while the allegations against him were looked into; instead, Mixa offered his resignation.

Among the allegations in the German abuse scandal that broke early this year are charges that Benedict, during his time as Archbishop of Munich in 1980, allowed known pedophile priest to work with children. The priest was later convicted of sexual abuse.

Benedict last week publicly asked abuse victims for forgiveness.

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One of three white men charged with burning down a predominantly black Massachusetts church hours after President Barack Obama's election has pleaded guilty to civil rights charges, the Associated Press reports.

Benjamin Haskell pleaded guilty in federal court Wednesday to charges of conspiracy and damaging religious property because of race, color or ethnic characteristics.

Under the terms of a plea deal with prosecutors, he faces a sentence of nine years in prison. Sentencing is scheduled for Sept. 29.

The 23-year-old Haskell is one of three men charged in connection with the fire that destroyed the Macedonia Church of God in Christ in Springfield, Mass. The fire was set in the early morning hours of Nov. 5, 2008, the morning after Obama was elected as the nation's first black president.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 12:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

A Muslim civil rights group wants the U.S. government to allow a Virginia man stuck in Egypt for weeks to return to the U.S., the Associated Press reports.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations says 26-year-old Yahya Wehelie (yah-yah we-HEEL'-ee) was interrogated aggressively by FBI agents in Cairo and placed on a no-fly list. He and his 19-year-old brother Yusuf apparently attracted FBI attention after a long stay in Yemen.

Government agents allowed Yusuf, who says he was chained to a wall at an Egyptian police facility for several days, to return to the U.S.

An Egyptian security official speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media confirms there is a Somali-American stranded in Cairo waiting for his name to be lifted from the no-fly list.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 11:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
        

Israel will significantly ease its bruising land blockade of the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, officials said, in an effort to blunt the widespread international criticism that has followed a deadly Israeli commando raid on a blockade-busting flotilla.

Senior Cabinet ministers were meeting to limit restrictions on what gets into Gaza — materials Israel says militants could use in their battle against the Jewish state — to a short list of goods, some of them desperately needed by Gaza civilians, the Associated Press reports.

But the Israeli naval blockade that was at the root of the deadly raid that prompted the international outcry will remain intact.

It also wasn't clear whether key raw materials for industry would be permitted to enter again and whether Israel would end its ban on Gazan exports.

The three-year-old embargo has shuttered hundreds of Gazan factories, put tens of thousands of people out of work and brought the territory's fragile economy to a standstill. Travel restrictions that confine most of Gaza's 1.5 million people to the territory are also likely to remain in effect.

Israel, with Egypt's cooperation, has blockaded the Palestinian territory by land and sea ever since Hamas militants, with a violent anti-Israel agenda, seized control of Gaza in 2007.

For the most part, only basic humanitarian goods have been allowed in.

Items such as cement and steel, badly needed to rebuild homes and businesses after Israel's war in the territory last year, have barely been allowed in. Israel says militants can use them to build weapons and military fortifications.

Under the new guidelines, those materials will be allowed in to an undetermined extent in coordination with the United Nations, but won't be freely available to private citizens, Israeli officials said. Restrictions on things like school supplies, books, computers and toys are expected to be lifted.

"It would be nice for Gaza residents to be able to receive previously banned items such as paper, toys and computers," said Sari Bashi, an Israeli activist whose Gisha rights group has been fighting to open Gaza's borders. "But Gaza residents need to be able to receive raw materials in order to engage in productive, dignified work."

The blockade was designed to keep out weapons, turn Gazans against their militant Hamas rulers and pressure the Iranian-backed Hamas to free a captive Israeli soldier. It did not achieve those aims, however, and both weapons and goods sold at black market prices continued to flow into the territory through a large network of smuggling tunnels built under the Gaza-Egypt border.

The blockade did not provoke an international outcry until Israeli commandos killed nine Turks two weeks ago in a raid on a Gaza-bound flotilla that sought to draw attention to the blockade's effects.

With pro-Palestinian activists promising to keep blockade-busting boats coming, Israel has been scrambling to find ways to ease the embargo and its own growing international isolation.

Relaxing the restrictions on goods that go through Israeli-controlled land crossings is less complicated than easing the sea blockade. Israel is afraid that weapons ships will stream into Gaza if the naval blockade is lifted, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowing that Israel would "not allow the establishment of an Iranian port in Gaza."

On Wednesday, a top Israeli security chief warned against lifting the sea blockade, saying that even international inspectors would not be able to keep Israel safe.

The Haaretz newspaper on Wednesday quoted international envoy Tony Blair as hailing the expected vote by the Israeli ministers.

"It will allow us to keep weapons and weapon materials out of Gaza, but on the other hand to help the Palestinian population there," Blair was quoted as saying. "The policy in Gaza should be to isolate the extremists but to help the people"

Blair represents the Quartet of Mideast negotiators — the U.S., European Union, U.N. and Russia.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 7:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

Hundreds of sightseers drawn to the remains of a six-story-tall statue of Jesus Christ that was struck by lightning and erupted into flames stopped Tuesday to snap pictures or gaze at the ruined structure, the Associated Press reports.

The "King of Kings" statue, one of southwest Ohio's most familiar landmarks, had stood since 2004 at the evangelical Solid Rock Church along Interstate 75 in Monroe, just north of Cincinnati.

The lightning strike set the statue ablaze around 11:15 p.m. Monday, Monroe police dispatchers said.

The sculpture, about 62 feet tall and 40 feet wide at the base, showed Jesus from the torso up and was nicknamed Touchdown Jesus because of the way the arms were raised, similar to a referee signaling a touchdown. It was made of plastic foam and fiberglass over a steel frame, which is all that remained Tuesday.

Church officials said they didn't know exactly what prompted the nickname commonly used by people in the area. The nickname is the same used for a famous mural of the resurrected Jesus that overlooks the Notre Dame football stadium.

The fire spread from the statue to an adjacent amphitheater but was confined to the attic area, and no one was injured, police Chief Mark Neu said.

Estimated damage from the fire was set at $700,000 — $300,000 for the statue and $400,000 for the amphitheater, Fire Capt. Richard Mascarella said Tuesday.

The Ohio State Highway Patrol was at the scene Tuesday to prevent traffic jams and potential accidents from motorists stopping along the highway to take photographs.

Some people were scooping up pieces of the statue's foam from the nearby pond to take home with them, said church co-pastor Darlene Bishop.

"This meant a lot to a lot of people," she said.

Keith Lewis, of nearby Middletown, arrived at the church around 7 a.m. Tuesday to photograph the remains for his wife. Lewis said he had viewed the statue as both an oddity and an inspiration.

Cassie Browning, a church member from Dayton, said she was driving home when she saw smoke and noticed the statue was missing.

"It meant so much to so many people," Browning said.

Travelers on I-75 often were startled to come upon the huge statue by the roadside, but many said America needs more symbols like it. So many people stopped at the church campus that church officials had to build a walkway to accommodate them.

Bishop said the statue will be rebuilt.

"It will be back, but this time we are going to try for something fireproof," she said.

The 4,000-member, nondenominational church was founded by Bishop and her husband, former horse trader Lawrence Bishop.

Lawrence Bishop said in 2004 he was trying to help people, not impress them, with the statue. He said his wife proposed the Jesus figure as a beacon of hope and salvation.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 3:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (90)
        

French police are banning a street party whose organizers planned to serve alcohol and pork-based sausage in a heavily Muslim Paris neighborhood, the Associated Press reports.

Police said Tuesday that the party, called "Sausage and booze," was banned because it could have been viewed as a provocation in the Goutte-d'Or neighborhood of northern Paris, where Muslims pray on the streets on Fridays because there are not enough mosques. Alcohol and pork are banned in Islam.

Organizers said they were organizing Friday's party to protest Islam's encroachment on traditional French values in the neighborhood. The party was backed by several extreme-right associations. Muslim groups had announced a counterparty serving halal food.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 11:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)
        

A University of California, Irvine, disciplinary committee ruled that a Muslim student group should be suspended for at least a year because of a protest that disrupted a talk by Israel's ambassador and led to the arrest of 11 students, according to documents released Monday.

The letter from a student affairs disciplinary committee to Muslim Student Union leaders said the group was guilty of disorderly conduct, obstructing university activities, furnishing false information and other violations of campus policy, the Associated Press reports.

University spokeswoman Cathy Lawhon said the committee's decision will be a binding recommendation to the campus' office of student affairs if a planned appeal by the group does not succeed.

MSU attorney Reem Salahi said the committee relied on evidence relied that was "inadequate and problematic" but declined to outline the group's challenge in detail. She said the decision, if sustained, would leave Muslim students without an organization representing their interests.

"It really does have very lasting constitutional implications," she said. "It's a chilling effect for Muslims on campus and their right to associate."

Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren was repeatedly interrupted and called "murderer" and "war criminal" by pro-Palestinian students as he was giving a talk on the Middle East peace process in February.

Eleven students were cited on charges of disrupting a public event after they were requested to refrain from heckling but did not.

Orange County district attorney spokeswoman Susan Schroeder said criminal charges have yet to be filed and it was unknown if or when they would be.

The MSU condemned the ambassador's appearance but insisted it did not organize the protests.

The disciplinary committee, however, said a review of online message group conversations and minutes from an MSU meeting revealed that the group did engineer the protests and instructed participants to lie about its involvement.

The group's preparations allegedly included scripting statements for protesters to make during the event and instructing participants to cheer at disruptions.

"Be VERY LOUD, firm and strong ... but remain composed and under control. Do not let your emotions get the best of you. Remember that this is a planned/calculated response and not a venting session," the committee quoted organizers as telling participants in meeting minutes.

The committee also ruled that the group should be put on disciplinary probation for a year following its suspension, which ends in August 2011, and that members collectively complete 50 hours of community service.

The letter, dated May 27, was released following a Freedom of Information Act request by the Jewish Federation Orange County.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 7:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

A federal appeals court has decided not to immediately hear the case of a Connecticut school district that wants to hold high school graduations inside a megachurch, the Associated Press reports.

In denying the town of Enfield's request Monday, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals noted that the school board had already decided to hold the 2010 graduations on school grounds even if the appeal succeeded.

The town wanted the court to overturn a temporary injunction issued by U.S. District Court Judge Janet Hall. The judge found that holding the June 23 and 24 graduations at the 3,000-seat First Cathedral Baptist Church would amount to an unconstitutional government endorsement of religion.

Hall is expected to hear the full lawsuit before next year's graduation plans are set.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 5:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

Rabbis Itchel Krasnjansky and Peter Schaktman hail from different branches of Judaism and hold starkly contrasting views on whether same-sex couples should be permitted to form civil unions in Hawaii.

What they have in common, the Associated Press reports, is the ear of Republican Gov. Linda Lingle, who has until June 21 to announce whether she may veto the only pending civil unions legislation in the nation.

Lingle, in the final months of her second and last term, faces a momentous decision that carries political and legal implications, AP correspondent Herbert A. Sample writes. For the rabbis, with whom the governor has consulted on the issue, her choice is about much more.

Krasnjansky, who heads the Orthodox community group Chabad of Hawaii, said the Torah teaches that homosexuality, and by extension same-sex marriage, "is not something that should be condoned or should be legalized," he said.

But Schaktman, who leads the Reform Temple Emanu-El, insists Judaism teaches that all people regardless of sexual orientation are and should be treated as "children of God," and thus should not face discrimination.

"Civil unions are a legal arrangement," he said. "Therefore, anyone who uses religion to oppose civil unions is purely using religion to further homophobia."

Lingle is Jewish, but has rarely — if ever — publicly discussed her faith in considering an issue. Lingle's office did not respond to phone or e-mail questions about her religious affiliation.

The debate between Krasnjansky and Schaktman mirrors that of Hawaii's Christians. Catholic, evangelical and conservative pastors have waged a months-long effort to prod the Legislature and now Lingle to block the measure, HB 444. Mainline Protestant and more liberal preachers have worked to get the bill signed.

The bill would allow gay and straight couples to establish government-recognized relationships with the same legal rights and responsibilities as married couples.

Civil unions and same-sex marriage have roiled Hawaii since the 1990s, generating some of the largest rallies at the state Capitol.

The state Supreme Court in 1993 ruled that the state could not discriminate against gay couples who wanted to marry. Five years later, voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment authorizing the Legislature to ban same-sex marriages, which it did soon after.

Proposals to permit civil unions never gained much traction. But in January, the state Senate passed a bill that had stalled last year. It stalled again in the House, but on April 30, the final day of the legislative session, the House revived, passed and sent the measure to Lingle.

The governor met with both sides before leaving June 4 for a two-week trip to Asia. She is due back June 19, and by June 21, she is required by law to identify the bills still on her desk that she might veto. By July 6, she must sign or veto those measures, or allow them to become law without her signature.

Earlier this month, she described how divided Hawaii and its small Jewish community are on the issue, citing as an example the two rabbis she knows personally.

In interviews, Schaktman and Krasnjansky said they got little sense which way the governor was leaning during several conversations with her in recent months.

Krasnjansky said he addressed religion with Lingle, whom he describes as a personal friend. He contends that the Torah, in the Book of Leviticus, clearly deems homosexuality a sin. "The question is, whether the Torah's teachings are eternal and binding, or not," he said.

He also worries that civil unions will legitimize homosexuality in the eyes of young people, and steer them away from heterosexual relationships that have formed the bedrock of Jewish survival for centuries.

If people are drawn to civil unions, he said, "then they wouldn't recognize the blessings of marriage, of family."

"The governor is very interested in her Jewish heritage and...the traditions and the teaching of Judaism," Krasnjansky added. "I tried to share with her my understanding of the Jewish view on this matter."

That kind of talk rankles Schaktman, who said no one branch of Judaism can claim ownership of Jewish teachings.

Lingle's suggestion that the Jewish community is torn over HB 444 also troubled Schaktman.

"I think it was misleading for her to imply that there's split in the Jewish community," he said. "It's fair to say the majority are in favor of it."

Schaktman, who noted that Lingle attends Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services at his temple, said he shied from using his view of Judaism's teachings to advocate for civil unions.

Rather, he stressed that civil unions would not impact any religion, nor would it validate homosexuality.

It is up to Krasnjansky and like-minded religious leaders to oppose homosexuality, Schaktman contended. "That's not Gov. Lingle's job, and they have no right to expect her or the state to promulgate their morality," he added.

In his last conversation with the governor, Schaktman said he encouraged her "to not do necessarily the expedient thing (but) to really search her conscience to do what is right."

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 5:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (59)
        

A Saudi court convicted a man and sentenced him to four months in prison and 90 lashes for kissing a woman in a mall, a government-owned daily reported Thursday.

Saudi religious police arrested the man and two women after seeing them on mall cameras "engaging in immoral movements in front of other shoppers," the Al-Yom newspaper said.

The man, who is in his 20s, was seen with a woman "sitting on one of the chairs, exchanging kisses and hugs." It was unclear what the other woman was doing. Neither the man nor the women were identified by name.

The kingdom's powerful religious police, under the control of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, enforce Saudi Arabia's strict interpretation of Islam, which prohibits unrelated men and women from mingling.

Zealous officers routinely jail unrelated couples found sitting together in restaurants or coffee shops.

The policemen also patrol public places to ensure women are covered and not wearing makeup; shops are forced in most places to close several times a day for Muslim prayers and men go to the mosque and worship.

Such kissing busts have increased as economic pressures have made it harder for young couples to marry and as the ultraconservative kingdom grapples with a push to relax its strict social mores.

Young men often must pay more than $50,000 in dowry and gold before their brides' families will accept marriage — a huge burden in a country where economists put male unemployment at over 20 percent.

But the Saudi establishment remains divided on how far separation rules should go.

King Abdullah has been encouraging change in the oil-rich kingdom since becoming crown prince in 1982, and has intensified his efforts since assuming the thrown in 2005.

Male and female students can study together at the newly opened King Abdullah Science and Technology University, launched by the Saudi monarch last year. Abdullah dismissed a prominent hard-line cleric who criticized the policy.

But in April, the head of the religious police fired the chief of the Mecca branch for suggesting that women and men should be able to mix freely, showing that such reforms have their limits.

The newspaper said the man sentenced for kissing will receive his 90 lashes in three batches, and is banned from malls for two years.

The women will be tried in another court.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (64)
        

Pope Benedict XVI begged forgiveness Friday from abuse victims for the sins of priests and promised to "do everything possible" to ensure that Roman Catholic clerics don't rape or molest children ever again, the Associated Press reports.

AP correspondent Nicole Winfield writes that Benedict's pledge was similar to comments he has made in the past. But it was uttered in the highly symbolic setting of a Mass in St. Peter's Square, concelebrated by 15,000 white-robed priests, all marking the end of the Vatican's Year of the Priest — a year marred by revelations of hundreds of new cases of clerical abuse, cover-ups in several nations and Vatican inaction to root out pedophiles.

In his homily, Benedict lamented that during what should have been a year of joy for the priesthood the "sins of priests came to light — particularly the abuse of the little ones."

"We too insistently beg forgiveness from God and from the persons involved, while promising to do everything possible to ensure that such abuse will never occur again," he said.

He said in admitting men into the priesthood and in forming them as clergymen "we will do everything we can to weigh the authenticity of their vocation and make every effort to accompany priests along their journey, so that the Lord will protect them and watch over them in troubled situations and amid life's dangers."

His comments were similar to those reported by the Vatican during his private meeting with abuse victims in Malta in April, during which the pontiff had tears in his eyes as he heard the stories of men molested by priests as children.

Benedict also made similar comments last month en route to Portugal, in which he acknowledged that the "sins from within the church" were responsible for the scandal, not the media or some outside anti-Catholic lobby.

As such, Friday's comments were a public admission of the sins of priests, a request for forgiveness from their victims and God, and pledge to take action — all delivered before priests who came to Rome from around the world to support the pontiff and the priesthood itself amid the scandal.

Victims groups who had been hoping for a mea cupla and clear-cut action plan to protect children weren't satisfied.

"A promise is nominally more helpful than an apology. But promises are usually easy to make, hard to keep and broken often if there's no oversight or penalties," said Barbara Blaine, president of the U.S. victims group SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests.

She said the crux of the problem remained the "nearly limitless power" of bishops and a church structure and culture that allows them to be "virtually answerable to no one." She said that had allowed abusive priests to remain in the ministry for decades.

Benedict's own legacy has been tarnished by the scandal, since he was archbishop of Munich in the 1980s when he approved therapy for a suspected pedophile who was allowed to resume pastoral duties while being treated. The priest, the Rev. Peter Hullermann, later was handed a suspended sentence for molesting a boy.

In addition, Benedict's legacy at the Vatican office that dealt with sex abuse has come under scrutiny.

Benedict said the scandal had shown the need for a purification of the church.

"Had the Year for Priests been a glorification of our individual human performance, it would have been ruined by these events," he said. "But for us what happened was precisely the opposite: We grew in gratitude for God's gift."

A Spanish priest who attended Friday's Mass, the Rev. Davide Torrijus, concurred.

"We have all suffered during the year of the priests" because of the scandal, he said. "It was good for the pope to show also the positive aspects — gratitude for the gift."

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (42)
        

Pope Benedict XVI strongly defended celibacy for priests as a sign of faith in an increasingly secular world during a rally Thursday that drew some 15,000 priests from around the world to Rome, the Associated Press reports.

Benedict didn't directly mention the clerical abuse scandal that has rocked the Catholic Church for months, but he referred to what he called "secondary scandals" that showed "our own insufficiencies and sins."

Benedict's comments came during an evening vigil service in St. Peter's Square to mark the end of the Vatican's year of the priest — a year that has been marred by revelations of hundreds of new cases of clerical abuse, cover-up and Vatican inaction to stop it.

There had been speculation that Benedict might again refer to the scandal, following his recent comments en route to Portugal during which he acknowledged that it was born of the "sin within the church" and not from outside elements. Previously, Vatican officials, Vatican publications and cardinals had blamed the scandal on the media, the Masons and anti-Catholic lobbies, among others.

But Benedict didn't directly address it Thursday night. He is due to celebrate a final Mass on Friday before the rally comes to a close.

On Thursday, he responded to preselected questions from five priests and none asked for his thoughts about the scandal. One asked him to speak instead about what he called the "beauty of celibacy," which he said was so often criticized in the secular world.

The pope acknowledged that celibacy was itself "a great scandal" in a world where people have no need for God. But he called it "a great sign of faith, of the presence of God in the world."

Against the so-called scandal of such faith "there are also secondary scandals, that of our own insufficiencies and sins that hide the true scandal," he said.

While the pope didn't directly address the crisis, priests visiting Rome for the rally spoke openly about it, saying it was painful — even shameful to them since it reflected badly on all of them.

"Well, I think it was really first a matter of pain, of sadness then a bit of shame because in Belgium we had bishops, not priests who had to resign," said Belgian priest the Rev. Jean Pierre Herman.

"The church isn't perfect. Priests are men. Among priests there are those who will become saints, there are good priests and there are criminals as well. So it happens," he said.

Said the Rev. Fernando Cerero from the diocese di Coatzacoalcos in Mexico, "We felt much shame and sadness, but this is an opportunity (for priests) to reflect on our ministry."

"It is an opportunity for holiness," he said.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 5:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (12)
        

The Russian Orthodox Church called Wednesday for an end to the "monopoly of Darwinism" in Russian schools, saying religious explanations of creation should be taught alongside evolution, Reuters reports.

The British news agency says Russian liberals have vowed to fight efforts to include religious teaching in schools. Russia's dominant church has experienced a revival in recent years, worrying rights groups who say its power is undermining the country's secular constitution.

The report continues:

"The time has come for the monopoly of Darwinism and the deceptive idea that science in general contradicts religion. These ideas should be left in the past," senior Russian Orthodox Archbishop Hilarion said at a lecture in Moscow.

"Darwin's theory remains a theory. This means it should be taught to children as one of several theories, but children should know of other theories too."

Read the rest of the Reuters story.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 5:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (24)
        

Former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich — a recent convert to Catholicism — is in Poland promoting a documentary he co-produced on Pope John Paul II's role in defeating communism, the Associated Press reports.

Gingrich, a Republican, is preaching to the converted: the Polish-born pope is revered, and Poles credit him with inspiring the struggle that eventually helped bring down the Soviet-backed communists in eastern Europe.

Gingrich said Wednesday that his film, "Nine Days that Changed the World," is still needed to remind young Poles, secular historians and people worldwide of John Paul's anti-totalitarian convictions. The film, which will be screened at American universities this fall, is also being translated into Chinese and Spanish in hopes it will inspire people in Cuba and elsewhere, Gingrich said.

"We believe the pope's message of freedom through faith and his principle that no government can get between you and God is a principle that is relevant in every country, for every person around the world," Gingrich said at a news conference in Warsaw attended by the film's director and the other producers, among them his wife, Callista Gingrich.

The film tracks a visit John Paul made to Poland in 1979 and the electrifying effect it had on Poland's anti-communist opposition.

Within just over a year, Lech Walesa's Solidarity freedom movement was born. Walesa and other activists have said the massive crowds that came out during the nine-day visit to see the pope encouraged opposition activists by giving them a sense of large-scale opposition to the communist regime. John Paul's sermons, though subtle, also challenged the communists' authority and called for freedom.

Gingrich, a Georgia congressman, said he converted to Catholicism last year. Previously he was a Baptist, but started growing closer to Catholicism after marrying Callista_ a lifelong Roman Catholic — 10 years ago. He was also inspired by seeing Pope Benedict XVI during his 2008 visit to the United States.

"It was a process which had occurred over about a nine year period," he said. "I was catching up with what had happened to me, I wasn't making a decision. The decision was sort of unveiling itself."

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The Vatican secretary of state said Wednesday that while the sex abuse scandal has been painful and damaging to the church, it has also shown the need for a spiritual renewal, the Associated Press reports.

Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican secretary of state, made the comments to priests who gathered at the Vatican to mark the end of the church's Year of the Priest — a year that has been marred by hundreds of revelations of priestly abuse and Vatican inaction to stamp it out.

Bertone said the revelations had harmed the credibility of the church. But he said they had also provided a "providential realization" of the need for a "new season of spiritual renewal and rebirth."

Pope Benedict XVI is expected to address the priests Thursday night during a vigil service, and again Friday during a Mass.

There is some speculation that Benedict may again refer to the scandal, following his recent comments en route to Portugal during which he acknowledged that it was born of the "sin within the church" and not from outside elements. Previously Vatican officials, Vatican publications and cardinals had blamed the scandal on the media, the Masons and anti-Catholic lobbies, among others.

On Wednesday, during his weekly general audience, Benedict urged prayers for the priests gathered for the event, which has taken on something of the feel of a rally in support of the pontiff amid the scandal.

"Thousands of priests from all around the world have come to Rome to praise the Lord and renew their commitment," Benedict said. "I invite you all to participate at this event with prayers."

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 6:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)
        

Shaukat Malik is a Muslim-American Certified Public Accountant from Potomac. A native of Pakistan, he arrived in the United States in 1980.

The flotilla incident is an unfortunate accident born out of Israel’s need to maintain its naval blockade of Gaza and the activists' objective of breaking Israel’s blockade. Instead of abseiling from helicopters onto the lead ship, which resulted in the loss of innocent lives, Israeli patrol boats could have escorted the flotilla to port.

Hamas’s non-recognition of Israel and demanding the return of Palestinians to a pre-1967 Jerusalem is undiluted rhetoric and must be treated as such. Declaring Hamas as terrorists, naval blockades and tit-for-tat bombings have not yielded any positive results. They have effectively derailed the peace process. Gaza has essentially become an internment camp.
Blockades leave unhappy memories. We should not forget the British blockade of Palestine in 1945 that forced flotillas carrying Jewish immigrants from Europe to turn back.

We must remember that Hamas won the 2006 elections in Palestine. Hamas won 76 of the 132 parliamentary seats, giving the party the right to form the next cabinet under the Palestinian Authority's president, Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of Fatah. A reason for their victory was the corruption of the Fatah government.

In today’s unsettled world, beset by recession and America’s economy destroyed by Wall Street robbers and the BP oil spill, it is extremely important for Israel to take the lead in peace efforts. A peaceful Middle East is extremely important for winning America’s war on terror. Terrorist recruiters are celebrating the flotilla incident.

Islamic parties, when forced to face reality, will change. This is confirmed by the ruling AKP Islamic party in Turkey, which has today transformed the nation into a benchmark for a functioning democracy in the Muslim world.

We cannot rule out a similar outcome with Hamas and Fatah wings of Palestine if they are allowed to form a government and are put through the rigors of meeting the needs of Palestinians in a democratic set up.

Israel can redeem itself from the flotilla fiasco by engaging Hamas and Fatah for a concerted and honest peace effort in the Middle East. America’s envoy to the Middle East, George J. Mitchell, can play an important role in this effort. Hamas and Fatah must mend fences between them if they seriously want the peace process to move forward. The U.S. Congress must openly support the Obama administration in this effort by confirming such an effort through a resolution that celebrates a two-state solution.

As children of Abraham, the Israelis and Palestinians are connected by religion, history and geography, and the present situation demands that we must move forward and secure a peaceful coexistence between permanent neighbors.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 3:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)
        

California's political watchdog agency will fine the Mormon church for contributions to help pass the state's gay-marriage ban two years ago, the Sacramento Bee reports.

Roman Porter, executive director of California’s Fair Political Practices Commission, tells Bee reporter Jim Sanders that the church has agreed to the $5,539 fine, which is scheduled for agency aciton on Thursday. Sanders continues:

The fine stems from 17 non-monetary contributions totaling $36,928 that were made by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints within about two weeks of the November 2008 election, an FPPC report said.

The watchdog agency concluded that timely disclosure was not made of the Proposition 8 contributions as required by state elections law.

In a written statement Tuesday, the Mormon church said it had not misrepresented contributions but had erred in timeliness of reporting.

Read more at sacbee.com.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 1:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (43)
        

A Connecticut school board has voted to appeal a federal court ruling that would keep the town's two high school graduation ceremonies out of a megachurch, the Associated Press reports.

Tuesday night's 5-4 vote by Enfield's Board of Education reverses a board decision last week to let stand the temporary injunction issued by U.S. District Court Judge Janet Hall.

Hall found that holding the June 23 and 24 graduations at First Cathedral Baptist Church in Bloomfield would amount to an unconstitutional government endorsement of religion.

Attorney Vincent McCarthy, who's representing the school district, plans to file with the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

American Civil Liberties Union attorney David McGuire says he's disappointed by the decision but believes the injunction will be upheld.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 5:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)
        

The Anglican Communion has responded to the consecration of Mary Glasspool, the openly gay Annapolis priest who was became a bishop in Los Angeles last month, by suspending U.S. Episcopalians from serving on ecumenical bodies, the Associated Press reports.

The U.S. church opened a rift in the global communion, and within its own ranks, seven years ago by electing a gay man, V. Gene Robinson, as bishop of New Hampshire. Conservative African Anglicans have taken a lead in opposing moves in the United States and Canada to promote gays and to bless homosexual relationships.

Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury and spiritual leader of the Anglican Communion, had called for a moratorium on appointing homosexuals to leadership positions. He asked for action against the Episcopal Church after Glasspool, formerly canon to the bishops of the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland, was made an assistant bishop of Los Angeles.

The Anglican Communion is an association of 44 regional and national member churches, most founded by Church of England missionaries, with more than 80 million members in more than 160 countries.

The Rev. Canon Kenneth Kearon, secretary general of the Anglican Communion, announced Monday that Episcopalians had been downgraded from members to consultants in formal ecumenical dialogues, annual meetings between Anglicans and clergy in other churches intended to build friendship and better understand one another's traditions and issues of mutual concern such as points of theology and ways of worshipping.

Kearon said he had also written to the primate of the Anglican Church of Canada to ask whether it has formally adopted a policy backing same-sex blessings.

The Canadian church's governing General Synod is meeting this week, and is discussing whether to debate a motion on the issue.

The Episcopal News Service said the Rev. Katherine Grieb, an Episcopal priest and professor of New Testament at Virginia Theological Seminary, was downgraded from member to consultant to the Inter Anglican Standing Commission on Unity Faith and Order.

Those who were stripped of membership in ecumenical dialogues, according to ENS, were the Rev. Thomas Ferguson and Assistant Bishop William Gregg of North Carolina, both involved in the Anglican-Orthodox Theological Dialogue; Bishop C. Franklin Brookhart of Montana had been a member of the Anglican-Methodist International Commission for Unity in Mission; and the Very Rev. William H. Petersen, professor of ecclesiastical and ecumenical history of Bexley Hall in Columbus, Ohio, who was serving on the Anglican-Lutheran International Commission.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 3:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
        

Evangelical Christian leaders overwhelmingly support artificial means of birth control, according to a pair of recent surveys touted Tuesday by the National Association of Evangelicals.

“Most associate Evangelicals with Catholics in their steady leadership in pro-life advocacy, and rightly so,” NAE President Leith Anderson said in a statement. “But it may come as a surprise that unlike the Catholic church, we are open to contraception.”

Nearly 90 percent of respondents to the monthly Evangelical Leaders Survey of NAE board members in April said they approved of artificial methods of contraception. That tracks closely with the 90 to 91 percent of Evangelicals who told Gallup last year that hormonal/barrier methods of birth control were morally acceptable for adults.

Sseveral leaders included caveats, the NAE reports, including objections to drugs or procedures that terminate a pregnancy once conception has taken place. George Brushaber, president emeritus of Bethel University, said contraception should be used “with proper biblical and medical guidance.”

Added Randy Bell, of the Association for Biblical Higher Education: “Personally, I don’t believe there are any Scriptural prohibitions to most common methods of contraception. I can say from personal experience that God can defeat such methods if he chooses to do so.”

Read more at nae.net.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 3:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (16)
        

Afghans have burned an effigy of Pope Benedict XVI out of anger over claims charities preached Christianity in the Muslim country, the Associated Press reports.

U.S.-based Church World Service and Norwegian Church Aid deny spreading Christianity. The government suspended them last week while investigating allegations in an Afghan television report.

More than 1,000 people marched Tuesday in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif, demanding organizations that proselytized in Afghanistan be banned.

The crowd roared approval as protesters doused the effigy of the pope in kerosene and lit it.

They shouted: "Death to America! Long Live Islam!"

Aid workers say the allegations increase the threat to staff already at risk for insurgent attack.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 2:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
        

Groups that have long demanded that women be ordained Roman Catholic priests took advantage of the Vatican's crisis over clerical sex abuse to press their cause Tuesday, demanding the Vatican open discussions on letting women join the priesthood, the Associated Press reports.

Representatives of a half-dozen Catholic reform groups marched on St. Peter's Square on the eve of a three-day rally marking the end of the church's yearlong celebration of the priest. Vatican officials have said the during the rally Pope Benedict XVI may apologize for the decades of rapes and molestation that children suffered at the hands of priests.

The umbrella group Women's Ordination Conference said the Vatican shouldn't be celebrating the priesthood while "turning a blind eye when men in its ranks destroy the lives of children and families."

"While the hierarchy spends their time covering up scandals and throwing major celebrations for themselves, Catholic women are working for justice and making a positive difference in the world," said Erin Saiz Hanna, the Women's Ordination Conference executive director.

She spoke at a news conference before a dozen members of the reform groups marched to the Vatican in a bid to hand out flyers to tourists, priests and other passers-by. Police stopped them when they reached the square and asked them to leave, which they did.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 11:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (52)
        

The future of a prominent Southern Baptist preacher who converted from Islam may depend on which version of his past is closer to the truth, the Associated Press reports.

Ergun Caner's supporters know him as a devout Muslim who discovered Jesus Christ at an Ohio church and became a popular leader at Liberty University, the Virginia evangelical school founded by the Rev. Jerry Falwell.

His critics have a different version: an opportunist who exaggerated vague boyhood memories in his Muslim family to paint himself as a one-time extremist while enriching himself and sowing tension between the world's two largest faiths.

Lately, his critics are easier to find than his friends. Prominent Evangelical leaders who in the past blurbed his books, promoted him as an expert and defended him against charges of inflammatory anti-Muslim remarks have been publicly silent since Liberty announced it would investigate the claims against Caner.

"Part of you is going, Haha, I told you so, and another part is saying, That's really sad," said Kelly Wentworth, executive director of the Atlanta-based American Islamic Fellowship, which works to strengthen bonds between Muslims and other religious believers.

Caner has been a polarizing figure since shortly after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, when he and his brother, Emir, emerged as leading Christian critics of Islam.

"Ergun and Emir Caner are trophies of God's grace," wrote Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, in the foreword to "Unveiling Islam" by the Caners. "Once devout followers of Allah, now of Jesus of Nazareth."

Land is one of several Evangelical leaders contacted by The Associated Press for this story who either did not respond or declined to comment.

Much of their credibility came from their personal history — their testimony, in evangelical Christian terminology. Ergun Caner claimed at various times in front of various audiences to have emigrated to the U.S. as a radical Muslim teenager from Turkey, until becoming a Christian at an Ohio church.

Bloggers — both Muslim and Christian — have chipped away at this story for months, producing video and audio evidence of Caner apparently contradicting himself, and posting court documents showing that Caner's family lived in Ohio starting when he was a small boy.

Neither Caner brother has responded to repeated requests for comment. Students at Lynchburg, Va.-based Liberty have rallied to his side, creating a Facebook group proclaiming their support.

"We know Dr. Caner to be a man of integrity," said Alane Moore, president of the seminary's student government.

"He's very down to earth. The same guy you see on stage at campus church on a Wednesday night is the same guy you'll see in the office and the same guy you'll see in Walmart," she said.

If the inquiry finds he fabricated sections of his past, though, that could change, according to author Kevin Roose.

"It's not as if he's accused of lying on his taxes or something totally immaterial to his work," said Roose, author of "The Unlikely Disciple," about the semester he spent at Liberty. "This is his testimony, and Christians take testimony very seriously. It's a story that authenticates you in your Christian journey."

On the surface, Caner seems unperturbed, occasionally posting humorous musings on summer classes to his Twitter account. But in the weeks before Liberty launched its inquiry, Caner and others were trying to remove material used by his blogger critics from the spotlight.

An April radio broadcast by Focus on the Family called "From Jihad to Jesus" featured a 2001 sermon in which Caner talked about having been raised in Turkey and trained to participate in a jihad against the West.

It has since been removed from the Focus site at Caner's request, a publicist there said.

Several videos of Caner posted to YouTube by a London-based Muslim student named Mohammad Khan, one of the earliest bloggers to zero in on Caner's biography, have been removed over copyright complaints by Liberty University's seminary and by John Ankerberg.

Ankerberg, a Chattanooga, Tenn.-based minister, hosts a TV show on which Caner has been a guest at least eight times, according to Caner's website. He did not respond to a request for comment.

Caner's longtime critics are not being as reticent.

"He's done enormous harm," said Charles Kimball, director of religious studies at the University of Oklahoma and former director of the Middle East Office for the National Council of Churches.

"To listen to someone like Caner, you'd think house meetings to decide what to blow up next are daily fare for all Muslims," Kimball, an ordained Baptist minister, said.

Muslim organizations say that's why these questions about Caner's past should have been raised years earlier.

"We've known for some time that his past is not what he's portraying," said Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Washington, D.C.-based Muslim civil rights and advocacy group. "But the whole 'former Muslim' gig is quite profitable these days. It plays well to certain audiences."

The contradictions in Caner's story don't add up to a repudiation of his ministry, though, argues Hussein Wario, author of "Cracks in the Crescent" and a convert from Islam to Christianity.

Wario points out that no one has questioned some core elements of Caner's story: namely, that his father was a Turkish Muslim active in his local mosque, and that Caner was a Muslim until he converted as a teenager.

"There are enough discrepancies in Dr. Caner's stories to raise doubts, but not enough to dismiss him as a fraud," Wario said.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 5:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)
        

"Repentant drug dealers and gang members streamed into Allan Tibbels' home Thursday without knocking. Children who once went hungry dove into food spread on the kitchen table. Community leaders from Baltimore's Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood and elsewhere sat together, swapping stories of inspiration.

"The scene, said Susan Tibbels, reflected nothing less than her husband's lifelong dream."

So begins the wonderful story in Friday's Baltimore Sun story on the life of Allan Tibbels, the Sandtown fixture whom Sun colleagues Jacques Kelly and Erica Green describe as "a pious man who expressed his convictions through hammers and nails and drywall."

Tibbells died early Thursday. The story continues:

For nearly 21 years, Mr. Tibbels was the force behind Sandtown Habitat for Humanity, an organization that built and renovated nearly 300 homes in one of the city's most blighted areas.

"He was an inspiring moral example," said Michael Sarbanes, the former head of the Citizens Planning and Housing Association and a top official in the city school system.

Many of the stories friends shared about Mr. Tibbels started with the curiosity about a white man in a wheelchair moving his family into a impoverished black neighborhood. All ended with a way that he had changed their life.

"Everything was always about Sandtown," said LaVerne Stokes, a co-executive director of the Habitat program and an owner of one of the rebuilt homes. "Even on his deathbed, he was still talking about the community. Our community knows that if anybody loved them, he did."

Read the rest of the story at baltimoresun.com.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 10:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
        

Greek Cypriot leaders made a blistering attack on Turkey for its occupation of northern Cyprus as Pope Benedict XVI began a pilgrimage to the divided island Friday bringing a message of peace to the region, the Associated Press reports.

Addressing Benedict, the head of Cyprus' Orthodox Church, Archbishop Chrysostomos II said that "Turkey has barbarously invaded and conquered by force of arms 37 percent of our homeland."

Chrysostomos said that Turkey "continues to carry out its obscure plans which include the annexation of the land now under military occupation, and then a conquest of the whole of Cyprus."

His comments came as Benedict began a sensitive three-day day visit to Cyprus, an island divided between ethnic Turks and Greeks and viewed by the Vatican as a bridge between Europe and the Middle East.

Chrysostomos also said the Turks "ruthlessly sacked" Christian artworks, saying they were seeking to make Greek and Christian culture disappear from the north. He urged the pope's help to ensure protection of the sacred Christian monuments and in the struggle against the Turks.

The pope did not respond to the archbishop's remarks. Instead, in his comments from an archaeological site where St. Paul is said to have preached in the 1st century and to have been whipped by Roman soldiers, Benedict spoke of the cooperation between Catholics and Orthodox Christians.

Earlier, the pope also declined to blame Turkey for the killing of Catholic bishop in Turkey on the eve of the trip to Cyprus.

In remarks to journalists aboard the plane to Cyprus, Benedict said he was deeply saddened by the killing Thursday of Bishop Luigi Padovese, but believed the killing was nonpolitical and would not cloud his trip.

Turkish officials have said Padovese was killed by his driver, who has been charged with murder and appears to be mentally unstable.

The pope appeared to accept Turkey's explanation about the killing, saying it was not "a political or religious assassination, it was something personal."

"This has nothing to do with the themes and realities of this trip," the pope said. "We must not give responsibility to Turkey or the Turks."

Still, the pope spoke in his arrival remarks of the "challenges that Catholics face, sometimes in trying circumstances" in the Middle East. He made only an indirect reference to Cyprus' division, urging patience to resolve "the future of your island."

The visit is expected to be a test of whether the pope has found his diplomatic feet after his linking of Islam to violence during a speech in Germany led to outrage in the Muslim world — and nearly forced the cancellation of a trip to Turkey in 2006.

Cyprus police spokesman Michalis Katsounotos said Friday that, while there was no heightened risk to Benedict's safety following the bishop's killing, security was stepped up anyway. He said that more than 1,000 police will be mobilized for the duration of the visit.

The pope is meeting in Cyprus with prelates from the region to set an agenda for an October meeting in Rome to build a strategy to stem an exodus of Christians from the Holy Land, Iraq and elsewhere because of violence and economic hardship. The Middle East includes ancient Christian communities.

Cyprus was ethnically split in 1974 when Turkey invaded after a coup by supporters of union with Greece. Turkish Cypriots declared an independent republic in the north in 1983, but only Turkey recognizes it, and it maintains 35,000 troops there.

The pope, speaking about the problems of both the division of Cyprus and the Middle East region as a whole, said that "violence is not the solution."

The trip also comes days after the island's leaders — Greek Cypriot President Dimitris Christofias and the newly elected president of the breakaway Turkish Cypriots, Dervis Eroglu — resumed peace talks after a two-month pause.

Christofias said in his welcoming remarks that the pope's presence "conveys a powerful message of peace overcoming hatred and war."

"Cyprus is in need of your words of peace, given the difficult situation it faces in its occupied territory," he added. He too touched on the issue of destruction of Christian monuments, saying that "for a period over 35 years, our cultural and religious inheritance in the occupied areas is being systematically desecrated and destroyed, a fact that is a loss to all of humanity."

The Turkish north has also published a book showing the destruction of mosques, cemeteries and other signs of Turkish culture in the south.

There are no plans for Benedict or any other Vatican officials to visit northern Cyprus, the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said. But he did not rule out a meeting with Muslim representatives.

The Cypriot ambassador to the Holy See, George F. Poulides, said Benedict will be staying at the Vatican Nunciature, located right on the so-called Green Line in Nicosia — the U.N.-patrolled buffer zone between bullet-pocked buildings and army sentry posts separating the ethnically divided communities.

There are also problems between Cypriot Catholics and Orthodox Christians, who are dominant in the south. Some hardline Orthodox clerics, who view the pope as a heretic, say Benedict should stay in Rome to avoid provoking the island's 800,000 Orthodox.

Doctrinal, theological and political differences caused the Orthodox and Catholic churches to formally split in the 11th century. Officials from both churches have been engaged in talks in recent years to heal "The Great Schism," but opposition to reconciliation still lingers.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 10:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
        

A coalition of religious and conservative leaders is trying to stop a proposed Comedy Central cartoon that puts Jesus Christ in a modern-day context — before it even gets started, the Associated Press reports.

The newly formed Citizens Against Religious Bigotry said Thursday that it believes the "JC" series would be offensive. They accuse Comedy Central of a double standard in mocking Christian figures and beliefs while recently refusing to let "South Park" depict the Prophet Muhammad for fear of offending Muslims.

"You don't have to be a Christian to be offended by this," said Brent Bozell, head of the watchdog Media Research Center.

Comedy Central said last month that "JC" is one of two dozen series it has in development. The concept is to depict Christ as a "regular guy" who moves to New York to "escape his father's enormous shadow."

Network spokesman Tony Fox noted that "JC" is nothing more than an idea now, without even a completed script. In television, only a minority of projects in development ever make it on the air.

Fox said the groups should save their energy for when a decision is made about whether the series will ever be completed.

Aside from Bozell's group, the coalition also includes the Catholic League, the Parents Television Council and talk show host Michael Medved. They said the coalition had written to 250 Comedy Central advertisers to alert them to the show and already had 93,000 petition signals against it.

Comedy Central was the target of an Internet threat this spring from a Muslim group for a "South Park" episode that supposedly showed Muhammad in a bear costume. Like other media organizations, it resists showing a depiction of Muhammad because many Muslims consider a physical description of the prophet to be blasphemous.

Such depictions of Muhammad in other media have resulted in death threats by fundamentalist Muslims against the purveyors.

"Does that indicate that Christians then are punished because they aren't crazy?" Medved asked, "that they get punished because their religion does not encourage threats of violence?"

Fox would not discuss Comedy Central's response to threats of violence. The network's programs haven't avoided the issue of some of the rabid forms of Islamic behavior, with two "South Park" episodes addressing it this spring after the show's creators were annoyed by the network's efforts to alter their work.

The protesters said they hadn't encouraged any advertisers to boycott the network yet, saying they hoped making the issue public would encourage Comedy Central to leave the idea on a shelf.

"I don't think they're going to have the guts to go ahead and do this," said Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 6:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (24)
        

A Pentecostal bishop who heads a church in Catonsville has been arrested and charged with sexually assaulting one of his parishioners, Baltimore Sun colleague Nick Madigan reports.

Roan Samuel Faulkner Sr., 62, was taken into custody Wednesday and charged with second-degree sex offense, attempted second-degree rape, perverted practice and fourth-degree sex offense.

Faulkner is being held at the Baltimore County Detention Center in lieu of $300,000 bail. He is scheduled for a bail review hearing Thursday.

The incident Roan is accused of occurred at the victim's office on Baltimore National Pike, a statement from the police said. The accuser is a 43-year-old woman who attends Roan's church. Police have expressed concern that there may be other victims "because of Faulkner's position with New Life Pentecostal Ministries," in the 200 block of Melvin Ave.

Police say the victim contacted the department on May 29 to report an assault and told them the incident occurred Feb. 21. The woman, who has attended New Life Pentecostal Ministries for several years, told police she had been having some family difficulties and that Faulkner met with her in her office to "spiritually advise her," the police statement says.

During the meeting, police say, Faulkner sexually assaulted the woman and forced her to perform a sexual act. She told police she had been scared to report the incident but that she has experienced "physical and mental injuries."

Detectives are asking anyone who might have information about the case to contact the Baltimore County Police Department's Special Victim's Unit at 410-887-2223.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 4:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (25)
        

Sister Mary David Olheiser and Sister Helenette Baltes professed their vows together in 1936 as two of the 21 new sisters to join the Sisters of the Order of St. Benedict that year. At the time, their central Minnesota Roman Catholic monastery was overflowing with youth and energy.

Sixty-two years later, the Associated Press reports, the classmates and old friends are together again. St. Benedict is taking St. Bede back into its fold. The smaller group is facing demographic realities by closing its Wisconsin monastery and moving 29 remaining sisters back to Minnesota.

"It's just a blessing," said Helenette, 94, of her reunion with the 92-year-old Mary David.

It also reflects the massive changes in the lives of nuns in their lifetimes, as once-flourishing orders merge or close. A 2009 Georgetown University study for the National Religious Vocation Conference found the median age in Catholic women's orders to be in the mid 70s, and that 34 percent of religious women's orders surveyed had no new candidates for the sisterhood. About half of those orders with new candidates had at most one or two in the pipeline.

When 83 nuns including Sister Helenette departed for Eau Claire in 1948, they left about 1,200 Benedictine nuns at the monastery in St. Joseph. Today there are about 250, a number that drops by about a hundred every 10 years. But it's enough to make it the biggest Benedictine women's order in the United States. The median age at St. Benedict is 77, the youngest nun there 39 years old.

"In the larger church, vocations to religious communities tend to rise and fall, and right now in most of the world there is a decline in young people entering religious life," said St. Benedict Prioress Nancy Bauer, 57. "I would say there's numerous factors. It's just how it is."

Helenette and Mary David are typical of the women once so common to sisterhood. Helenette was born in 1915, the seventh of 12 children in Sleepy Eye, where her father had recently moved the family after landing a job at a dairy.

A new Catholic Church had just opened there, and when the family couldn't find a house, the priest offered room in the old church. "So that's where I was born, right there in the church," Helenette said. By her teen years, various relatives were urging Helenette to join a convent.

Mary David was born in 1918 in Dickinson, N.D., the third of five children; her mother died when she was still a girl. "I was the middle child, with the middle child psychology — I was the assertive one," Mary David recalled. She devoured books and loved learning, and took strongly to the Benedictine nuns who taught her at school.

By the time she was 14, Mary David informed her father she wanted to attend the Benedectine-run boarding school next to the monastery in St. Joseph. By 17 she was a novice, after she convinced the nuns who ran the school to bend the rules that she was supposed to wait until she turned 18.

Mary David and Helenette took their vows together in 1936. Soon after, Mary David left to work in a Benedictine monastery in Washington state, where she would remain until 1950; she's spent most of the rest of her life in St. Joseph, where she was a dean at the College of St. Benedict and a canon lawyer for the nearby Diocese of St. Cloud. "Only because I was in a religious life could I have done all that," said Mary David, who at 92 is still fit and sharp.

Helenette spent the next dozen years in St. Joseph, teaching music and playing the organ, before she decided to join the group that was headed about 170 miles southeast to start a new monastery in Wisconsin.

"That was a very difficult decision, the attachment to the convent where I made my vows," Helenette said. "But the holy spirit led me there."

The group started from scratch, building first a monastery that won architectural awards, then a secondary school and a health care center. By the mid-1960s the monastery reached a high point of 115 sisters.

Then the numbers started to fall. The group closed its school in 1978 and converted it to a retreat and conference center that the sisters operated until earlier this year. Those facilities are now up for sale.

In recent years, leaders of St. Bede's began to discuss their options in the face of what Prioress Michaela Hedican called "some basic sociological shifting." The dwindling group last took on a new member in 1995.

The group approached several larger monasteries, but the historic connection to St. Benedict made it a good fit. The sisters of St. Benedict voted last August to absorb St. Bede. "We really felt it was a gift, to get that sort of infusion of new members all at once is something we haven't experienced for many years," said Sister Kara Hennes, 63, the St. Benedict treasurer.

Recent years have seen mergers by numerous religious orders around the country; Sister Michaela called it "the wave of the future." So far, six sisters of St. Bede, Helenette among them, moved to the Benedictine long-term care facility in St. Cloud; by August, most of the rest are scheduled to move into the monastery in St. Joseph, after which St. Bede will be formally "suppressed" in a mass at the St. Benedict Chapel.

The Washington, D.C.-based National Religious Retirement Office started tracking the merger of Catholic orders in 1989, and in that time reports that about 130 female orders have merged and are now operating as about 45 orders, director Sister Janice Bader said.

Mary David, who still lives at the monastery in St. Joseph, said she can't wait to spend more time with her old friend. "Pretty soon I'll probably be joining her there," she said.

Of the 29 returning St. Bede sisters, 11 were from the original group that moved to Wisconsin in 1948. Besides Helenette, another was Sister Therese Roth, who at 94 moved into the St. Scholastica care facility in Minnesota a few weeks ago.

There, in her new home, Sister Therese died on May 22, and the number of remaining St. Bede sisters dropped from 29 to 28.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 1:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

A Roman Catholic bishop was stabbed to death in southern Turkey on Thursday, a day before he was scheduled to leave for Cyprus to meet with the pope, the Associated Press reports.

Luigi Padovese, the pope's apostolic vicar in Anatolia, was attacked outside his home in the Mediterranean port of Iskenderun. Dogan news agency video footage of the scene showed the bishop lying dead in front of a building.

Mehmet Celalettin Lekesiz, the governor for the province of Hatay, said police immediately caught the suspected killer.

He said the man, identified only as Murat A., was Padovese's driver for the last four and a half years and was mentally unstable.

"The initial investigation shows that the incident is not politically motivated," Lekesiz said. "We have learned that the suspect had psychological problems and was receiving treatment."

Padovese, who is the equivalent of the bishop for the Anatolia region, was scheduled to leave for Cyprus on Friday to meet with the pope, who is visiting the island, and fellow bishops from around the region for preparations before the church's synod of bishops on the Middle East. The Synod is scheduled for October.

No one answered phones at his church in Iskenderun.

The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, told The Associated Press in Rome that the Vatican felt "immense pain, consternation, bewilderment and stupor" over the death and noted that it showed the "difficult conditions" that the Catholic community in the region lives in.

He said the pope's upcoming visit to Cyprus and the upcoming synod of bishops on the Middle East showed "how the universal church is in solidarity with this community."

The killing is the latest in a string of attacks in recent years on Christians in Turkey, where Christians make up less than 1 percent of the 70 million population.

In 2007, a Roman Catholic priest in the western city of Izmir, Adriano Franchini, was stabbed and slightly wounded in the stomach by a 19-year-old man after Sunday Mass. The man was arrested.

The same year, a group of men entered a Bible-publishing house in the central Anatolian city of Malatya and killed three Christians, including a German national. The five alleged killers are now standing trial for murder.

The killings — in which the victims were tied up and had their throats slit — drew international condemnation and added to Western concerns about whether Turkey can protect its religious minorities.

In 2006, amid widespread anger in Islamic countries over the publication in European newspapers of caricatures of Islam's Prophet Muhammad, a 16-year-old boy shot dead a Catholic priest, Father Andrea Santoro, as he prayed in his church in the Black Sea city of Trabzon. The boy was convicted of murder and sentenced to 18 years in prison.

In a 2006 telephone interview with The Associated Press, following another knife attack that injured another priest, Padovese expressed concern over the safety of Catholics priests in Turkey.

"The climate has changed," he said. "It is the Catholic priests that are being targeted."

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 11:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Catholicism, International, People
        

The Rev. Jason Poling is Pastor of New Hope Community Church in Pikesville.

Amid the many difficulties faced by anyone writing about the events in the Middle East of the past few days is what to call those aboard the Gaza flotilla. Many news outlets have referred to these “passengers” as “pro-Palestinian activists.” In its plainest sense, the term denotes someone advocating a political or social cause by means of deliberate “action.” But in common parlance the term connotes a particular type of action -- namely, non-violent action. (We do not refer to the 9/11 terrorists as “activists,” though they certainly were taking deliberate action to advocate a political cause.)

For those aboard five of the six boats, this name makes some sense. According to reports from both sides, the passengers on these boats did not offer violent resistance to the Israeli armed servicemen who boarded their ships. Their ships were commandeered and sent to the Israeli port of Ashdod, where the humanitarian goods on board were unloaded and prepared for shipment to Gaza. The activists were processed to ensure they did not present a terror risk, and released.

This, I submit, is exactly what John Lewis would have done if he had planned the mission.

Most readers will remember that John Lewis, currently a Democratic congressman from Georgia, was among the “Freedom Riders” who through their fearless activism brought down legal segregation in the Southern states. Though he was arrested and beaten on multiple occasions, he held unswervingly both to his political goal and to his nonviolent principles. For good reason President Obama gave him a signed picture from his Inauguration declaring, “Because of you, John.”

Now, I do not know anything about Congressman Lewis’ position on the State of Israel beyond the fact that he co-sponsored a resolution congratulating Israel on its 60th anniversary (along with over half of his House colleagues, including Roscoe Bartlett, Albert Wynn and some 264 others in between). His few public statements on the Middle East have stressed the need for peace in the region, and urged all parties involved to seek nonviolent resolutions of their differences. I had the privilege of taking a class on the civil rights movement in college with Julian Bond, whom Lewis defeated in a 1986 Democratic primary to win that House seat; Bond had a number of things to say about Lewis but I don’t recall that any of them involved Israel. So I could be wrong about this, and I will gladly clarify if the Congressman or his staff say so.

The point of the Freedom Rides, as with all nonviolent action in the civil rights era, was to demonstrate the injustice of Jim Crow laws by firmly, respectfully and nonviolently breaking them, then suffering the consequences. The idea was that by receiving unjust punishment for breaking unjust laws, they would shame the nation into upholding the civil rights of all its citizens.

Many trace this strategy to the Sermon on the Mount, in which Jesus says that if someone tries to sue you for the shirt off your back you should give him your pants, too (Matt. 5:40, my (broad) translation) – standing there naked, the interpretation goes, will demonstrate how outrageously you are being treated and shame your persecutor (or a just judge) into ensuring that the basics of human survival aren’t wrested from you in a parody of justice.

The Freedom Riders would be met by local mobs, whom local police would allow free rein for a time before dragging activists like Lewis into prison. Although the Kennedy administration called on them to observe a “cooling off period,” the Freedom Riders continued their work and enlisted more and more people to join their efforts, including such prominent figures as Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin. Throughout, they continued the disciplined pursuit of their ends by nonviolent means.

So, it seems did those on five of the six ships in the Gaza flotilla. They were warned not to proceed by the Israeli Defense Forces, but continued to do so in hopes of bringing attention to a blockade they considered unjust. But the “activists” aboard the Mavi Marmara had another strategy in mind. IDF commandos landing aboard that ship were swarmed by “activists” wielding knives, metal bars, slingshots and projectiles. Some of these “activists” actively repelled them, throwing soldiers off the boat or to a deck 30 feet below, even taking their firearms and turning them on the IDF forces.

If you don’t like a blockade, you can break it by applying either military or diplomatic pressure. Five of the boats were involved in “activism” of the second kind (though it does take some hair-splitting to claim that you’re being nonviolent while the guys on the lead ship aren’t … it’s not as if the Freedom Riders traveled with a bunch of Black Panthers). The Mavi Marmara was involved in the former, though. This was not activism. This was a military action. The fact that the “activists” attacked the IDF forces with primitive weapons does not mean that they were not employing deadly force; indeed, the videos available across the internet gives every impression that their efforts were aimed at kidnapping or killing the Israelis.

And if you take military action against military forces you can hardly expect a nonviolent response, whatever you call yourself.

Yet my colleagues in the World Council of Churches have joined the rogue states of the world (as well as those that ought to know better) in reflexively blaming Israel for the tragic loss of life that resulted from this “protest.” For its General Secretary, the Rev. Dr. Olav Fykse Tveit, the people carrying envelopes full of cash but no passports, with stashes of bulletproof vests and night-vision goggles, attacking armed commandos with lethal weapons, were “civilians,” “innocent people who were attempting to deliver humanitarian assistance.”

One can agree with the WCC that the blockade of Gaza is unjust, even worthy of nonviolent direct action in hopes of ending it. But to call an armed thug a “civilian” is to decisively abandon reality, and to thus betray Jesus’ command issued only a few verses earlier that we are to let our yes be yes and our no be no (Matt. 5:37). And it is, furthermore, to besmirch the good name and great deeds of heroes like John Lewis to lump them in with the “activists” on the Mavi Marmara.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: International, Islam, Jason Poling, Judaism, People, Politics
        

Former megachurch pastor Ted Haggard, who fell from grace amid a sex scandal, is starting a new church in Colorado Springs, the Associated Press reports.

Haggard made the announcement Wednesday during a news conference at his home.

Incorporation papers for a new church were filed three weeks ago, he said. Haggard previously indicated that he and his wife incorporated the church for accounting purposes but predicted they would return to some type of ministry one day.

Haggard resigned as senior pastor of the 14,000-member New Life Church after a male prostitute alleged Haggard paid him for sex over three years.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 5:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)
        

Farmers sold pigs to help raise money to build the towering cross on southern Illinois' highest point as a year-round testament to faith. The 11-story monument draws thousands of visitors each year, and supporters say it has promoted self-growth and reflection for nearly half a century.

But over the years, the Associated Press reports, the once-glistening structure about 130 miles southeast of St. Louis began to show its age. The 650 or so white porcelain panels that cover the concrete and steel frame rusted or fell off. Some remained attached with only coat hangers and bailing wire.

A group cobbled together $360,000 of the $550,000 needed to restore the Bald Knob Cross of Peace, including a $20,000 grant from the state of Illinois. Now, AP writer Jim Surh reports, a Chicago-area atheist who objects to the grant as a bit of unconstitutional pork has threatened to sue if the group doesn't return the money to the state.

Pitching the project as the renovation of a major tourist attraction "is a nice cover story," Rob Sherman said in a telephone interview Wednesday. But the retired Chicago-area radio talk show host who successfully fought Illinois' "moment of silence" in public schools said he thinks it would be more appropriate to use the money for such public interests as schools and roads. If it isn't returned, he promised "a long and expensive" lawsuit.

That didn't deter the Friends of Bald Knob Cross. The money was used long ago as a down payment on the renovation of the monument near Alto Pass, Ill., said Bill Vandergraph, a minister and Friends board member.

"We're not shaken in any way," Vandergraph said Thursday. "We're trying to stay low-profile, and that's not out of fear. We're absolutely not intimidated."

His group applied for the money only after a state senator said they'd be eligible for it, he said. And, the landmark has proven versatile, housing federal government transmission equipment and used by Union County's conservation department.

Standing sentry over forests and much of the region's orchards and burgeoning wine country, the cross has been a fixture on the 1,025-foot-high Bald Knob Mountain for nearly a half century.

Easter services have been held on the mountain since 1937. Rural mail carrier Wayman Presley and pastor William Lirely envisioned a huge cross there that would be visible for miles and serve as testimony year-round.

Their fundraising efforts got a big boost in 1955 when Presley was featured on television's "This is Your Life." Donations poured in. Schoolchildren and Sunday school classes collected coins for the cross.

Widow Myrta Clutts called the cross "the greatest idea I'd ever heard" and pledged $100 to the project when she didn't have $10 to spare. Clutts considered her pig Betsy an instrument of God when the animal gave birth to 21 piglets, three times the normal litter. She sold 14 of the pigs, paid her $100 pledge and had $400 left to pay her bills.

Presley set up a barn on Clutts' farm, where more than 1,700 piglets were produced from Betsy's original litter. Each was given to farmers who raised them and donated money from their sale — by some accounts, at least $30,000 — to the Bald Knob Cross fund.

Work began on the cross in 1959 and was finished four years later.

Vandergraph said he expects the rehab to be done by September, regardless of whether Sherman files a lawsuit.

Sherman previously sued to have a state law requiring a daily "moment of silence" in Illinois public schools overturned. A federal judge ruled in his favor in January 2009, saying the law showed an unconstitutional intent to introduce prayer into schools.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 5:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (19)
        

A federal judge on Monday ruled that Enfield High School and Enrico Fermi High School will not be able to hold their graduations at First Cathedral, culminating a months-long debate over whether it is unconstitutional to host students' ceremonies at the megachurch, Baltimore Sun sister paper (and this blogger's first employer) The Hartford Courant reports.

The Enfield school system plans to appeal the judge's decision, Courant reporter Jenna Carlesso writes. Her report continues:

U.S. District Court Judge Janet Hall last week heard closing arguments in a legal challenge that five Enfield residents — two high school seniors and three parents — filed to block the town from renting the 3,000-seat Christian church in nearby Bloomfield. The graduations are scheduled for June 23 and 24.

In her ruling Monday, Hall wrote that the school system's decision to hold graduations at First Cathedral violates the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

"By choosing to hold graduations at First Cathedral, Enfield schools sends the message that it is closely linked with First Cathedral and its religious mission, that it favors the religious over the irreligious and that it prefers Christians over those that subscribe to other faiths, or no faith at all," Hall wrote. "In addition to the character of the forum, the history and context of the decision to hold the graduations at First Cathedral also support the conclusion that, in doing so, Enfield Public Schools has endorsed religion."

Vincent McCarthy, lead counsel for Enfield's public schools and senior Northeast counsel for the American Center for Law & Justice, said he will seek "an expedited appeal to the 2nd Circuit in New York."

"We will ask them to take a look at this decision and we will ask them to overturn it," he said Monday.

The Enfield Board of Education voted in April to rent First Cathedral for its graduation ceremonies. That vote prompted a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union and a group called Americans United for Separation of Church and State, seeking a court injunction to bar the town from using the church. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of the two students and three parents, all requesting anonymity, who alleged that using the church was an unconstitutional endorsement of religion by government. The plaintiffs wanted the graduations held in a nonreligious setting.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 1:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (44)
        

Shaukat Malik is a Muslim-American Certified Public Accountant from Potomac, a poet and a political analyst. He left his native Pakistan in 1972 and has been living in the United States since 1980.

The brutal murder of eighty Ahmadi Muslims in two mosques in Lahore last week by the Taliban confirms the contamination of the Indian-Pakistani subcontinent’s non-violent Sufi Islam, practiced for more than a thousand years, with the Saudi brand of Islam imported during the war against the soviets.

Madrassas financed by Saudi/Iranian money teach an ideology of Islam that mistakenly assumes anyone and everyone not agreeing with them is an infidel deserving of extermination. The Taliban have embraced this ideology and are supported by the Islamic parties in Pakistan.

Muslim clerics must be reminded that a person’s religion is determined by God, and as good Muslims they must submit to the will of God.

In the early days of Islam only a few rich individuals had the written volumes of the Quran, and these individuals along with their clerics had a monopoly over interpreting the Quran. An advisement was transformed into complete prohibition to control human behavior in a mostly illiterate population. Interpretations concerning women and minorities were also misinterpreted to control 50 percent of any population.

Islamic laws were introduced in Pakistan in December 1984 by a military dictatorship through a fake referendum. The time has come for Pakistan’s government to introduce a bill guaranteeing complete freedom of religion while at the same time repealing Islamic laws that clearly violate the rights of women and minorities.

Madrassas and religious establishments are safe houses for would-be terrorists and must be inspected to remove criminals hiding behind the veil of religion.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 11:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (66)
        

Pro-Palestinian activists sent another boat to challenge Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip on Tuesday and Egypt declared it was temporarily opening a crossing into the Palestinian territory after a raid on an aid flotilla that ended with Israeli soldiers killing nine activists, the Associated Press reports.

The raid provoked ferocious international condemnation of Israel, raised questions at home, and appeared likely to increase pressure to end the blockade that has deepened the poverty of the 1.5 million Palestinians in the strip. Turkey, which unofficially supported the flotilla, has led the criticism, calling the Israeli raid a "bloody massacre."

Amid the increasing tensions, the Israeli military said it carried out an airstrike in Gaza on Tuesday, and an Islamic militant group said three of its members were killed after firing rockets into southern Israel. Israeli authorities say the rockets landed in open areas and caused no injuries.

Two militants infiltrating into Israel from Gaza were killed in a separate incident Tuesday, the military said.

The pro-Palestinian flotilla had been headed to Gaza with tens of thousands of tons of aid that Israel bans from Gaza. After days of warnings, Israel intercepted the flotilla under the cover of darkness early Monday, setting off a violent melee that left nine activists dead and dozens of people, including seven soldiers, wounded. Most of the dead were believed to be Turks.

Israel said 679 people were arrested, and about 50 of those had left the country voluntarily. Hundreds who refused to cooperate remained jailed and subject to deportation.

Israel says the Gaza blockade is needed to prevent the Iranian-backed Hamas, which has fired thousands of rockets into the Jewish state, from building up its arsenal. It also wants to pressure Hamas to free an Israeli soldier it has held for four years.

Critics say the blockade has failed to weaken Hamas but further strapped an already impoverished economy. It also has prevented Gaza from rebuilding after a devastating Israeli military offensive early last year.

Egypt, which has enforced the blockade with Israel since Hamas militants seized control of Gaza in 2007, said it was opening the border for several days to allow aid into the area.

The governor of Egyptian's northern Sinai district, Murad Muwafi, said it was a humanitarian gesture meant to "alleviate the suffering of our Palestinian brothers after the Israeli attack."

Several thousand Gazans made a furious rush to the Egyptian border, hoping to take advantage of a rare chance to escape the blockaded territory.

Cars with suitcases piled on their roofs streamed to the border, while many others lugged overstuffed bags on foot. Dozens of Hamas police with automatic weapons are patrolling the area to maintain order.

"We are working to help residents take advantage of this opportunity," said Hamas Interior Ministry spokesman Ihab Ghussein. "We hope it will be open all the time, not just as a response to yesterday's events."

Greta Berlin said the Free Gaza Movement, which organized the flotilla, would not be deterred and that another cargo boat was off the coast of Italy en route to Gaza. A second boat carrying about three dozen passengers is expected to join it, Berlin said. She said the two boats would arrive in the region late this week or early next week.

"This initiative is not going to stop," she said from the group's base in Cyprus. "We think eventually Israel will get some kind of common sense. They're going to have to stop the blockade of Gaza, and one of the ways to do this is for us to continue to send the boats."

Protests have erupted in a number of Muslim countries including Turkey, which unofficially supported the flotilla, Indonesia and Malaysia, where a Palestinian man slashed himself outside the American Embassy.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, an outspoken critic of Israel, told lawmakers Tuesday that the Israeli raid was an attack "on international law, the conscience of humanity and world peace."

"This bloody massacre by Israel on ships that were taking humanitarian aid to Gaza deserves every kind of curse," he said, demanding that Israel immediately halt its "inhumane" blockade of Gaza.

Turkey's Foreign Ministry said four Turkish citizens were confirmed slain by Israeli commandos and another five were also believed to be Turks. Israeli authorities were still trying to confirm their nationalities.

Thousands of pro-Islamic and nationalist Turks have poured into the streets in Istanbul and Ankara since the report of the Israeli raid. Protesters with Palestinian and Turkish flags shouted "Down with Israel!" outside Israeli diplomatic missions.

Within Israel, the raid sparked intense debate over why the military operation went awry.

Israel sent commandos onto the six ships carrying nearly 700 activists after mission organizers ignored the government's call to bring the cargo to an Israeli port, where it would be inspected and transferred to Gaza. In most cases, the passengers quickly surrendered. But on the largest ship, the Turkish-flagged Mavi Marmara, the forces encountered resistance.

Israeli commandos rappelled on ropes from a helicopter one by one and army videos showed them being attacked by angry activists with metal rods and one soldier being thrown off the ship. Others jumped overboard to escape the angry mob. Israeli authorities said they were attacked by knives, clubs and live fire from two pistols wrested from soldiers. The soldiers then opened fire, killing nine.

Israeli military analysts said it was a mistake to send commandos to board the ship and the military could have used non-lethal weapons such as tear gas. They also said the intelligence-gathering was faulty.

Retired Gen. Shlomo Brom asked why the ships' engines weren't sabotaged instead.

"There were certain objectives to this operation. One was not to let the vessels get to Gaza, but the other objective was to do it without any damage to Israel's image," Brom told The Associated Press. "Certainly it failed."

The daily Maariv, in a front-page headline, called the raid a "debacle."

Sabine Haddad, spokeswoman for the Israeli Interior Ministry, said 679 people were arrested and handed deportation orders. By midafternoon Tuesday, some 50 people had left the country voluntarily. But hundreds refused to cooperate and were sent to jail.

"The rest said they wanted to go to jail and are at Beersheba jail going through a process of deportation," she said. She said judges were hearing the cases and that almost everyone would be expelled within the next few days.

She said more than half of those arrested were from Turkey, with others coming from more than 30 other countries, including Britain, Algeria, Jordan, Kuwait, Germany and the U.S. Israeli police said four Arab Israeli citizens would face criminal charges.

Israel did not allow access to the activists, but a handful who were deported arrived home Tuesday, including a Turkish woman and her 1-year-old son, six Greeks and three German lawmakers.

"There was a massacre on board," said the woman, Nilufer Cetin, whose husband, Ekrem, is the ship's engineer and was still in Israeli custody. "The ship turned into a lake of blood."

Turkey said it was sending three ambulance planes to Israel to return 20 Turkish activists injured in the operation and had other aircraft ready to get other activists. About 400 Turks took part in the flotilla.

The flotilla was the ninth attempt by sea to breach the blockade Israel and Egypt imposed after Hamas violently seized the territory. Israel allowed five seaborne aid shipments through but snapped the blockade shut after its 2009 war in Gaza.

There was little call in Israel for an end to the blockade. Israelis have little sympathy for Gaza, which sent thousands of rockets and mortar rounds crashing into Israel for years before last year's war.

Tensions along the Israeli-Gaza border were tense following the naval raid.

The Iranian-backed Islamic Jihad said three of its fighters were killed Tuesday shortly after firing rockets into southern Israel. Israeli authorities say the rockets landed in open areas and caused no injuries.

The Israeli military confirmed its airstrike, and Gaza's chief medical examiner also said there were three deaths.

On Tuesday morning, the Israeli military said Gaza militants infiltrated Israel and exchanged fire with troops. Israeli rescue services said two militants were killed, but the military would not immediately confirm that.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)