India Arrests Priest Wanted in U.S.

Police in southern India have arrested a Roman Catholic priest wanted in the United States on charges of sexually assaulting a teenage parishioner in Minnesota, officials said Monday.

The Rev. Joseph Palanivel Jeyapaul appeared Monday in a New Delhi court and will be held in custody pending a formal U.S. request for his extradition, to be filed along with case evidence, government officials said. Processing the request could take up to three months.

Police detained Rev. Jeyapaul on Friday near the southern Indian town of Erode after Interpol issued an alert, police sub-inspector Pugal Maran said.

Rev. Jeyapaul, 57, an Indian citizen, has denied molesting a 14-year-old girl in 2004 when he was working at the Blessed Sacrament Church in Greenbush near the Canadian border.

He returned to India in 2005 to visit his ailing mother, and was asked not to return to the Minnesota church after being accused of having an inappropriate relationship with a 16-year-old.

The criminal case relating to the 14-year-old was filed later. Rev. Jeyapaul never returned to the U.S.

Vatican officials recommended Rev. Jeyapaul’s removal from the priesthood, but the local Indian bishop instead sentenced him to a year in a monastery through a canonical trial.

Rev. Jeyapaul was one of many foreign priests brought to the U.S. to help fill shortages in American parishes.

Complete Article HERE!

RGOD2: From exclusion to inclusion, making Catholicism truly universal

COMMENTARY

Pope Benedict’s statements on March 9 attracted significant media attention as the Roman Catholic Church in the United States prepares for battle to defend “traditional marriage” in several states while thwarting same gender marriages. His comments were seen by the LGBT community as another direct attack on us claiming we are “injurious to society.”

Injuring society has connotations of violence. Marriage has to be defended from those injurious qays, one might think. In reading the whole statement, however, the Pope is much more critical of heterosexuals than homosexuals, particularly those who live together “out of wedlock.” He is speaking about millions of people who outnumber us qays considerably.

When I was working as a parish priest, 99% of the heterosexual couples who came to me seeking marriage were already living together. Their relationships were honest, good and deserved the blessing of God, community and their families. To demonize them or to claim their relationships were injurious would have been far from the truth of my experience and indeed theirs.

They are our allies and represent a significant body of experience from responsible and caring human beings who are deeply troubled by the statistic that one out of two marriages fail in the USA. They are part of a movement to reform the way we express love and lifelong commitment and are trying to prevent the heartache and trauma caused by failed marriages that indeed can be very injurious to the men women and children who are victims of them.

However, the Holy Father felt it was important to instruct the bishops of Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota that the task of defending the sanctity of marriage and respect for human sexuality is among the most important pastoral duties of bishops today. In his statement, Pope Benedict recalled a quote from his letter Sacramentum Caritatis, in which he said:

[T]he good that the Church and society as a whole expect from marriage and from the family founded on marriage is so great as to call for full pastoral commitment to this particular area. Marriage and the family are institutions that must be promoted and defended from every possible misrepresentation of their true nature, since whatever is injurious to them is injurious to society itself.

I grew up in a Northern Irish Protestant home where Roman Catholicism was misunderstood and deeply feared. My grandmother was Roman Catholic and my brother married a devout Roman Catholic who brought up her children in her faith tradition.

Even though most families were “mixed marriages” or were only a generation away from them, the hostility directed towards the Catholic community and misrepresentation of them in Northern Irish society was similar to the prejudice that was directed towards LGBT people. We had to find out for ourselves what Catholics were really like. This was difficult given we attended separate schools and lived in segregated neighborhoods. I had very few Catholic friends growing up and did not set foot in a Catholic church until I was in my mid-teens.

The parallel to fear and misrepresentation of LGBT people is worth noting. We can hate Catholics universally in the same way LGBT people can be feared or hated universally. Just because the Pope says we are “injurious to society,” we should not see Catholicism as something intrinsically evil. I have found the process of getting to know people and what their religious beliefs mean to them can be enriching.

I have two wonderful Catholic friends who exemplify what is best about their faith and they would not agree with the Holy Father’s position on a whole range of issues yet are still devoutly Catholic.

Maxensia serves a very poor community in the Centre of Kampala. She is HIV-positive and has gathered 3,000 Ugandan women who care for a loved one with AIDS. She is deeply involved in the life of her Catholic community as well and serves on a number of church bodies.

She told me of an experience where a woman who was HIV-negative had the courage to stand in a conference rooms of clergy, bishops and lay leaders and asked them to respond to her dilemma of how she can have sex with her HIV-positive husband. Maxensia’s voice still rises in amazement at the response of the conference to this weeping woman.

“No one could give her an answer,” she told me. This convinced her more than anything that the church’s position on a whole range of sexual issues was indeed injurious from both a personal pastoral perspective and a deeply flawed societal policy. Sometimes the response of the church can be so outrageously unjust or out of touch that the victim wins new allies.

Maxensia has become an ally of the LGBT community as a result of how the Church treats married couples who are positive and negative and desperately seek responsible encouragement to live out their love and commitment. When I returned to Uganda in 2010 after a 13-year absence for fear of the homophobes there, the population of this relatively small country had risen from 20 million to 33 million. The churches and the government were encouraging their people to breed like rabbits. More than anything I saw in Kampala, the rise of religious-based homophobia, a corrupt and violent government or the rise of HIV, population growth on this scale scared the hell out of me. This is totally unsustainable and opens the Ugandan society to issues of food scarcity and security. What is more injurious to family life than war and famine?

My second Catholic heroine, professor Margaret Farley, works from the ivory tower of Yale University as a former ethics professor but has spent a lot of time on women’s developing higher education in Africa. I met her several years ago at a conference in Dublin where she was presenting a 21st century view of Catholic sacramental marriage that included same gender couples. Brilliantly informed and cool as a cucumber, she appeared on Irish television where she would calmly state why she disagreed with the Pope and could still remain a faithful Catholic.

Her book “Just Love” moves the concepts of justice to the forefront of the Catholic understanding of marriage. For example, she reinterprets the Catholic position on procreation more broadly to include couples who may not be able to have children but can still be “fruitful” by caring for other people’s children. I want to revisit her position in another column because she convinced me that marriage is indeed a sacrament and she would also claim most heterosexual Catholic marriages are not actually sacramental by her definition, particularly around issues of mutuality. So I want to come back to this because it is enormously valuable in the current debate.

Farley’s theological framework on marriage was deeply influential on my understanding of marriage as we entered into the debate on Proposition 8 in California. She would have been a great advocate for the LGBT community if we had “leaned into the wind” on defining marriage from a religious perspective and not only about a civil partnership.

From Kampala to Yale, there are wonderful examples of deeply caring inclusive Catholics who represent a significant yet not dominant voice of the Church’s witness. They remain Catholics but do not agree with the present policies of the Papal Curia. They are a kind of “loyal opposition” and remain thorns in the flesh of certainty and conformity.

My life and my spirituality are enriched by knowing them and their courage to be themselves is an inspiration. They have helped me break out of my own cultural ignorance and affirmed our common humanity. Jesus had many confrontations with the clergy of his day and he commented that they “heaped huge burdens on people’s shoulders without offering as finger to lift them.” I can recognize similar traits in some of the clergy and institutions in the 21st century and need to be vigilant about my own participation in this “holier than thou” mentality which is ultimately deeply injurious to all of us.

Complete Article HERE!

Clerical Abusers and the First Amendment

COMMENTARY

Religious institutions have constitutional protections, but they are not above the law. Unfortunately, that has not stopped the Roman Catholic Church and other religious groups from arguing that the First Amendment shields them from civil lawsuits for negligent supervision and retention of employees who sexually abuse children.

Most state courts that have considered the issue have rejected this claim by churches, recognizing that holding religious employers liable for failure to monitor employees in sex-abuse cases does not interfere with constitutionally protected religious freedoms.

However, courts in Missouri, Wisconsin and Utah have twisted the First Amendment into a shield for organizational liability for pedophile clergy. In an outrageous case, a Missouri appellate court summarily dismissed a negligence case brought against the Archdiocese of St. Louis by an individual who said he had been abused by a priest. His suit charged the archdiocese with negligent failure to supervise the priest, who had a past record of child sexual abuse. The court threw out the complaint, saying that Missouri law does not allow it because judging the supervision of the priest would require inquiry into religious doctrine, which it contends would violate the First Amendment.

This bizarre conclusion would grant churches a special exemption from neutral, generally applicable laws designed to protect children. The United States Supreme Court now has an opportunity to reverse this erroneous interpretation of the Constitution. The justices should grant the plaintiff’s petition for review, which they are scheduled to consider on Friday.

Since some 20 states have not ruled on this issue, the Supreme Court can provide urgently needed clarity. It should firmly declare that the First Amendment does not exempt religious entities from accountability for exposing children to harm.

Complete Article HERE!

Pope denounces gay marriage lobby, evil of premarital sex, cohabitation in US bishops’ speech

Pope Benedict XVI waded deep into U.S. campaign politics Friday, urging visiting U.S. bishops to beef up their teaching about the evils of premarital sex and cohabitation, and denouncing what he called the “powerful” gay marriage lobby in America.

As debate over health care coverage for birth control rages in the United States, Benedict said there was an urgent need for Catholics in America to discover the value of chastity — an essential element of Christian teaching that he said had been subject to unjust “ridicule.”

Benedict has long championed traditional marriage between man and woman, as well as opposition to premarital sex and fidelity within marriage. But his strong comments to visiting U.S. bishops took on particular significance given the culture wars that have erupted in the U.S. this campaign season.

U.S. bishops are currently locked in an election year battle with the Obama administration over federal funding for birth control.

In addition, bishops have been at the forefront of the campaign against same-sex marriage, with at least five U.S. states scheduling ballot measures on the issue in coming months. Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the head of the U.S. conference of bishops and archbishop of New York, unsuccessfully lobbied against the legalization of gay marriage in his state.

The 84-year-old pope acknowledged his comments might sound anachronistic or “countercultural,” particularly to the young. But he told bishops to not back down in the face of “powerful political and cultural currents seeking to alter the legal definition of marriage.”

“Sexual differences cannot be dismissed as irrelevant to the definition of marriage,” he said.

He also denounced what he called the failure of priests and bishops to instruct Catholics in core church teachings on human sexuality, saying many Catholics seem unaware that living together outside of marriage was “gravely sinful, not to mention damaging to the stability of society.”

The entire Christian community, he said, must recover an appreciation of the virtue of chastity.

“Young people need to encounter the church’s teaching in all its integrity, challenging and countercultural as that teaching may be; more importantly they need to see it embodied by faithful married couples who bear convincing witness to truth,” he said.

Benedict said a weakened appreciation for traditional marriage and the widespread rejection of responsible sexuality had led to “grave social problems bearing an immense human and economic cost.” He didn’t elaborate on what the cost was.

Groups of visiting U.S. bishops have been traveling to Rome for the past several months as part of bishops’ regular once-every-five-year visits with the pope and senior Vatican officials.

Complete Article HERE!

NY Catholic bishops lobby against abortion and victim’s rights

Cardinal Timothy Dolan, head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and archbishop of New York, urged Gov. Andrew Cuomo and state lawmakers Monday to reject pending bills to codify abortion rights and open a window for victims of child sex abuse to sue for old incidents.

Joined by other Catholic bishops from around New York, Dolan said they were “bolstered” by Cuomo’s assurances Monday that following last year’s legalization of gay marriage, which they opposed, he’ll protect their religious freedom not to sanction such marriages. “We were worried that perhaps the law might force us to violate our conscience,” he said.

New York has about 7.3 million Catholics, about 40 percent of the state’s population, said Dennis Poust, spokesman for the New York Catholic Conference.

In retrospect, the bishops would have been “more vigilant” if they had thought there was a distinct possibility that the same-sex marriage bill would pass, Dolan said.

Regarding abortions, Dolan said that rather than expanding that legal right, they want to see more restraint. He said Cuomo listened attentively on that but gave them “no assurances.”

“We feel a high responsibility to speak up for the baby in the womb,” Dolan said, adding their lawyers raise concerns that Catholic hospitals or providers might be forced to participate. In New York City, 40 percent of pregnancies end in abortion, he said, calling that “a tragedy.”

The pending legislation in the Senate and Assembly contains “conscience clauses” saying it will not alter existing protections in state or federal law that permit providers to refuse to provide abortions on moral or religious grounds. Sponsors say the bill establishes the “affirmative” right of an individual to choose or refuse contraception, including abortion of a fetus that can’t survive outside the uterus. That’s basically defined as within 24 weeks of a woman’s last menstrual period.

In her sponsor’s memo, Assembly Member Deborah Glick said New York legalized abortions in 1970, followed by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling three years later, and its scope was clarified in subsequent federal court decisions. New York’s laws have never been updated, and her bill would also remove “unenforceable” provisions in the penal law that criminalize abortions and prohibit the sale of nonprescription contraceptives to minors, the Manhattan Democrat wrote.

Dolan said opening a one-year window for sex abuse suits now barred by a statute of limitation would devastate parish finances for ongoing programs. He didn’t have a cost estimate but said that was the experience in other states that did it.

“The perpetrators don’t suffer. There’s no burden on them. What suffers are the services and the ministries of the apostolates that we’re doing now. Because where does the money come from? So the bishops of 30 years ago that allegedly may have reassigned abusers, they don’t suffer. They’re dead. So the people that suffer are those who are being served right now by the church. We feel that’s a terribly unjust burden.”

After meeting with Republican Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos, Dolan said the Long Island Republican indicated he shares their “great reservations” about the abortion rights bill, and also their apprehension about the sex-abuse bill “as a classical violation of American jurisprudence.”

Dolan said Cuomo saw that point in their earlier meeting. “He’s a good lawyer. He reminded us of his allegiance to classical jurisprudence that would see a great benefit to the protection of the statute of limitations to see the innocent are protected and that justice is done,” he said.

Cuomo spokesman Josh Vlasto said the governor has always and still supports the reproductive rights bill, and he is still reviewing various legislative proposals to change the statute of limitations on claims of child sex abuse.

Skelos’ office did not immediately reply to requests for comment Monday.

Assemblywoman Margaret Markey, a Queens Democrat, is chief sponsor of the current bill. She says abuse is an issue across society, and the scandals at Penn State, Syracuse University and other schools undercut the claim her bill is anti-Catholic. She said research shows that 20 percent of children are affected, the trauma is lifelong and for many victims that one-year window is the only way to get justice.

Complete Article HERE!