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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!
Forced castrations reportedly found in Roman Catholic care
Underage sexual abuse victims were castrated in Dutch Roman Catholic psychiatric wards in the 1950s, according to the Rotterdam-based newspaper NRC Handelsblad.
Castration was performed on young men who were thought to be homosexual, but also as a means of punishing those who blew the whistle on abusers, the paper quotes sources as saying.
NRC discovered proof of the forced castration of one young man and strong evidence that at least ten other abuse victims were subjected to the removal of their testicles. The proof includes court documents, medical records, letters from lawyers and private correspondence.
According to the paper, the practice was reported in 2010 to the Deetman Commission which completed its investigation of sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic church last December. The commission, led by former cabinet minister Wim Deetman of the Christian Democrat party (CDA), made no mention of the castration of abuse victims in its final report.
NRC also writes that a prominent Dutch politician tried to secure a royal pardon for Catholic brothers convicted of sexual abuse at Harreveld, a former boarding school in the Netherlands. The politician was Vic Marijnen, who later became Dutch prime minister.
Marijnen was chairman of the Harreveld board of governors at the time when the abuses took place. He was also vice-chairman of the Netherlands’ main Catholic child protection agency and leader of the Catholic People’s Party (KVP), which later merged with Protestant groups to create the Christian Democrats.
In a reaction, the church-installed Deetman Commission says it did not publish any findings on the castration of abused minors in its final report because it had “too few leads for further investigation.” The commission did not report on the actions of Vic Marijnen because “the case was unmistakeably tied to circumstances which could be traced back to an individual person.” In its final report, the commission left most identities anonymous as a means of protecting individuals’ privacy.
Complete Article HERE!
Catholic bishops pressured Komen over Planned Parenthood
When he visited the United States four years ago, Pope Benedict XVI blessed a box of silver ribbon-shaped pins for breast cancer charity Susan G. Komen for the Cure and sent them to its founder, Nancy Brinker.
Brinker was touched by the gesture and thanked the pontiff in person on the day of his departure.
“He took my hands and blessed me for my work. I couldn’t help myself. I burst into tears,” she recalls in her memoir, “Promise Me: How a Sister’s Love Launched the Global Movement to End Breast Cancer.”
Pope Benedict’s blessings marked a high point in the Komen charity’s relationship with the Catholic church. But even before the papal jetliner touched down at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington in 2008, American church leaders had already begun to emerge as critics of Komen’s longstanding ties to Planned Parenthood, the women’s health organization whose services include birth control and abortion.
Internal Komen documents reviewed by Reuters reveal the complicated relationship between the Komen Foundation and the Catholic church, which simultaneously contributes to the breast cancer charity and receives grants from it. In recent years, Komen has allocated at least $17.6 million of the donations it receives to U.S. Catholic universities, hospitals and charities.
Church opposition reached dramatic new proportions in 2011, when the 11 bishops who represent Ohio’s 2.6 million Catholics announced a statewide policy banning church and parochial school donations to Komen.
Such pressure helped sway Komen’s leadership to cut funding to Planned Parenthood, according to current and former Komen officials. The decision, made public in January, and Komen’s reversal only days later, sparked an angry outcry from both sides of an intensifying American debate over abortion.
The anti-abortion movement gathered momentum last year when hundreds of newly elected Republicans entered office across the country and ushered in a wave of local and federal legislation aimed at restricting abortion services and family planning.
“From a moral point of view, and that’s what this is about, it has to do with cooperation and doing things contrary to the church’s teaching,” Bishop Leonard Paul Blair of Toledo said of the agreement the Catholic Conference of Ohio reached on diocese donations.
“In today’s world, there are a lot of entanglements of many things and one has to exercise a certain prudence about standing firm on principle and church teaching and the moral conscience,” he told Reuters in an interview.
Komen officials at the Dallas-based charity declined to speak on the record about relations with the Catholic church.
THE SHIFT
The earliest signs of discord came in 2005, when South Carolina’s Catholic diocese pulled out of the local Komen fundraiser. It was followed over the next four years by individual dioceses in Arizona, Indiana, Florida, Missouri and other states, where bishops either spoke out against Komen or took steps to stem donations to the charity, mainly because of its Planned Parenthood link.
The momentum picked up in 2011 when top Ohio clerics met in Columbus. High on their agenda was the question of whether the state’s nine dioceses should participate in Komen fundraisers.
No Planned Parenthood clinics in Ohio receive Komen money. But the bishops decided that diocese funds should no longer benefit the charity, for fear that money sent from local Komen affiliates to the Dallas headquarters could wind up in Planned Parenthood’s coffers or help fund research on stem cells collected from human fetuses, according to church officials.
Planned Parenthood was receiving between $500,000 and $700,000 annually in Komen grants to fund cancer screenings and education for low-income women, many with nowhere else to turn. The charity says it does not fund embryonic stem cell research.
The Ohio bishops would soon be joined by the North Dakota Catholic Conference, which cautioned its nearly 190,000 parishioners against donating to Komen. The charity’s officials in California also say they received their first request in two decades to meet with Catholic bishops, who expressed concern about Planned Parenthood but took no action.
The Ohio and North Dakota pronouncements nearly doubled the number of dioceses that have questioned Komen’s support for Planned Parenthood or severed financial ties with the charity, bringing the total to at least 23 of the 195 Catholic dioceses in the United States.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has no official policy on donations to Komen because funding activities take place at the local level, according to conference spokeswoman Sister Mary Ann Walsh. That could change as more bishops speak out on the issue, though another conference official said the national body has no plans to take up the question.
Observers say the local bishops’ focus on Komen and other social issues reflects a larger conservative shift within the American church since New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan became chairman of the Conference in November 2010.
Under Dolan’s leadership, the conference last year set up a new ad hoc committee on religious liberty to oppose government policies that conflict with church teachings on abortion, contraception and gay marriage.
That move coincided with the rise of social conservatives in Congress and state legislatures during the 2010 elections and has gathered pace during the 2012 presidential campaign.
“It’s an ideal time for them to push both Democrats and Republicans to acquiesce to their demands, because nobody wants to be seen as disrespecting religion,” said Jon O’Brien of the advocacy group, Catholics for Choice, which opposes the Vatican on matters related to sex, marriage and family life.
THE DILEMMA
But even as opposition to Komen continues, some Catholic recipients of Komen money have promoted their ties with the breast cancer charity to the media. Other institutions carry hypertext links to Komen on their Web sites and some display the Susan G. Komen for the Cure logo, including a pink ribbon.
In Ohio, tens of thousands of dollars in Komen grants have gone to some of the same institutions that bishops there proposed as funding alternatives to Komen.
Georgetown University in Washington has received $15 million in Komen grants. Catholic institutions overall collected $7.4 million from the charity in 2011 alone, while Planned Parenthood’s receipts totaled $684,000 during the same year.
The grants, and the warm reception for Komen among some Catholic institutions, underscore the common interests of charity and church in protecting women against a devastating and deadly disease. But some outside observers say the money also raises ethical questions about the bishops’ opposition role.
“It is morally inconsistent, and difficult to explain, why you would condemn donations but continue to accept grants. It makes no ethical sense at all,” said Arthur Caplan of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Bioethics.
Some parishioners agree.
“It is blatantly hypocritical,” said Al Mancuso, a 42-year-old Cleveland resident who regularly attends church and volunteers at church functions but opposes the Ohio bishops’ stance on Komen and Planned Parenthood.
Michele Allen, a 40-year-old mother of two from Lyndhurst, Ohio, said: “This happens every election cycle. The church is a little too politicized. This association with the Republicans and all these pro-life issues around the primaries is too connected with politics.”
Catholic officials say there is nothing inconsistent about criticizing Komen’s spending policies while accepting money from the charity. They argue that church-affiliated institutions can reach some of the poorest and most underserved women without spending funds in ways that conflict with Catholic teachings.
“I don’t see any kind of ethical or moral concern here,” said the Rev. Tadeusz Pacholczyk of the National Catholic Bioethics Center, an agency that analyzes healthcare and life science issues from the standpoint of church moral tradition.
“The concern is at the front end, when you’re donating money to an entity that’s taking that money and using it in a contradictory way.”
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!