Category: Church & State

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Catholic Church Historical Reversal: Backed Civil Unions In New Hampshire

For the first time ever, the Roman Catholic church is endorsing civil unions, announcing its second historic reversal in only two weeks.

The Roman Catholic church of New Hampshire suddenly endorsed civil unions on March 19, just 48 hours before a state legislature vote that has been pending for two years. In an equally surprising move, on March 4, the Roman Catholic church of Maine ceased all external opposition to this year’s full marriage equality ballot campaign in Maine.

Historically, Roman Catholic officials have opposed virtually every regulation, policy, and law proposed to protect LGBT people nationwide, including all proposals for civil unions. However, faced with the choice of either retaining New Hampshire’s full marriage law which was signed on 3 June 2009, or else repealing it and replacing it with civil unions instead, church officials decided – for the first time ever – to endorse civil unions for LGBT people.

In a statement issued on March 19, church officials claimed that they are endorsing civil unions only in an attempt to repeal full marriage for same-gender couples. They called the replacement of full marriage with the inferior civil unions an “incremental improvement.”

In lockstep, the National Organization for Marriage, a Roman Catholic church affiliate, also issued a companion surprise announcement the same day, also endorsing civil unions in New Hampshire for similar reasons. NOM was founded by Catholics, is staffed by Catholics, and appears to be mostly funded by Catholic laity and church officials. NOM’s membership rolls and finances are secret, some of its government filings are incomplete or contradictory, and it violates campaign finance disclosure regulations in every state where it opposes marriage equality.

Monday’s reversal in New Hampshire is just as profound as the decision by church officials two weeks ago to withdraw from this year’s public marriage battle in Maine. Neither decision was made independently, and both had to be coordinated with higher church officials. The Manchester Diocese, which is what the Roman Catholic church in New Hampshire calls itself, is a corporation sole and is subordinate to the Ecclesiastical Province of Boston, Massachusetts, which oversees Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont.

Among New Hampshire’s 1,315,809 residents, only 24% (309,987) are Catholic. Consequently, this sudden, last-minute switch by religious leaders only hours before the deadline may not have much impact upon the legislative votes being taken tomorrow. Four recent polls indicate that about 63% of all New Hampshire voters favor retaining the current full marriage law.

In addition to local impacts in Maine and New Hampshire, both of the Catholic church’s recent historic reversals may also help this year’s marriage equality efforts in 18 other states, especially New Jersey, North Carolina, and Minnesota. In New Jersey, advocates need just 15 more votes from the 120-member legislature to override the governor’s recent veto of a law which could upgrade civil unions to full marriage. In Minnesota and North Carolina, the church has been lobbying to ban marriage for all same-gender couples by amending those states’ constitutions so that marriage equality laws can’t even be considered. New Hampshire Bishop Peter Libasci gave no indication of when, whether, or how his church’s endorsement of civil unions in New Hampshire will affect church campaigns in other states.

Within its own religious ranks, Roman Catholic officials are continuing to reinforce Pope Benedict XVI’s formal view of bisexual, lesbian, and gay sexuality as “an intrinsic moral evil,” “intrinsically disordered,” and “inherently evil.” Moreover, the church still promotes the widely discredited “ex-gay” reparative therapy, which they claim cures patients of the sexual orientation that they are born with using a mixture of firm hope, additional prayer, new apparel, and/or life-long celibacy. Such reparative therapies have been discredited and denounced by every major mental/medical health professional organization as ineffective, painful, and dangerous to patients because of higher death rates from suicide.

Complete Article HERE!

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Stakes are high for church as ‘failure to report’ case unfolds against Kansas City bishop

The charge is only a misdemeanor, but if prosecutors are able to win a conviction against Kansas City Roman Catholic Bishop Robert Finn, they could be opening up a whole new front in the national priest abuse crisis.

Finn is accused of violating Missouri’s mandatory reporter law by failing to tell state officials about hundreds of images of suspected child pornography found on the computer of a priest in his diocese.

Experts say a criminal conviction against Finn, the highest-ranking church official charged with shielding an abusive priest, could embolden prosecutors elsewhere to more aggressively pursue members of the church hierarchy who try to protect offending clergy.

“Cases can sit like land mines in files for a long time and suddenly come to light,” said Matthew Bunson, a senior fellow at the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology and co-author of a book, “Pope Benedict XVI and the Sexual Abuse Crisis: Working for Reform and Renewal.” ‘’Those cases may ultimately involve leaders in the church.”

Finn and the Catholic Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph each were charged last year with one count of failing to report. The case involves the Rev. Shawn Ratigan, who remains jailed on state and federal charges accusing him of producing and possessing child pornography. Both have pleaded not guilty, and a judge is scheduled to hear multiple motions in the case Tuesday, including one to dismiss the charges.

“We do not believe that either the facts or the law support a finding of guilt on the misdemeanor charges, and we look forward to a just and fair resolution of them,” the diocese told The Associated Press in an e-mailed statement.

Finn has acknowledged being told in December 2010 about hundreds of photographs of young children found on Ratigan’s laptop computer. Many of the photos focused on the crotch areas of young children who are clothed, though one series showed the exposed genitals of a girl thought to be 3 or 4 years old.

The bishop also has acknowledged that a parish principal warned the diocese of suspicious behavior by Ratigan, including that he was taking compromising pictures of children and let them sit on his lap and reach into his pocket for candy. Those warnings occured more than six months before the photos were found.

Instead of ordering the photos to be turned over to police, or telling the Missouri Children’s Division about them, Finn sent Ratigan out of state for a psychiatric evaluation. When Ratigan returned to Missouri, Finn sent him to the Sisters of St. Francis of the Holy Eucharist, where he would say Mass for the sisters and be away from children.

Only after the church received reports that Ratigan had violated orders from the diocese to stay away from children did the diocese turn over to police last May a disk containing the photos from Ratigan’s computer.

“From the church’s perspective, having your bishop declared a criminal is a big deal, even if it’s only a misdemeanor,” said Douglas Laycock, a religious liberty specialist at the University of Virginia School of Law. “For them, it’s not about the fine, it’s about the statement being made.”

The maximum sentence for the crime is a $1,000 fine and one year in jail, but there’s little chance the bishop would be put behind bars. Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker said some people thought she shouldn’t have filed the charge against Finn, while others thought the charge should have been more serious.

“The prosecutor is not in the business of pleasing people,” she said.

Finn told a grand jury he thought Vicar General Robert Murphy was the diocese’s designated reporter. Murphy testified that even though he was head of a team formed to respond to claims of child sex abuse by priests, he had never been trained on being the mandatory reporter, nor officially assigned that duty.

Separation of church and state also is a significant issue for the church, Laycock said.

“Say a bishop has to report to police everything he knows about a priest under his supervision,” Laycock said. “If child abuse is involved, it may be a sensible and constitutional law. But it certainly intrudes on the supervisory relationship of a bishop and priest.”

Tuesday’s motions hearing comes a day after the trial begins in Philadelphia in a case involving Monsignor William Lynn, the first U.S. church official charged with child endangerment for keeping accused priests in the ministry.

Terry McKiernan of BishopAccountability.org, which manages a public database of records on clergy abuse cases, said the two cases represent a shift toward holding the Catholic Church hierarchy legally accountable for failing to warn parents or police about abusive priests.

“There’s been a lot of attention directed against the Ratigans of the world, but not a lot of attention until recently on the Finns of the world,” McKiernan said. “That’s what makes the church very nervous. It will be devastating for the church if the attention is directed at people like that.”

Complete Article HERE!

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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!

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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!

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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!