Dolan is attempting Re-defining “Religious Liberty” for America

I live in a heavily Jewish neighborhood in Los Angeles. Every Friday I see many of my neighbors walking (it is not permitted to drive on the Sabbath) with their families. Some of them wear clothing that would have been used in nineteenth century Eastern Europe. Some men simply wear conservative suits and yamaka their wives dressed in black or dark blue ankle length dresses.

My next-door neighbor is an Evangelical Protestant. Every Sunday, he and his wife, dutifully climb into their SUV and drive to their church for worship. The Buddhists down the block own a Thai restaurant and have a neatly manicured lawn. There is a gay couple a few doors down the street, one is an agnostic and the other is an atheist. There is a Church of Religious Science located at the end of our street. The Minister and his partner (a Roman Catholic) came to dinner a few weeks ago.

When I think of “Religious liberty” I think of my neighborhood in LA. Religious Liberty for me, and many Americans, means that you are free to follow your own conscience on matters of belief. That no one, no institution and most certainly not the government have the right or the power to dictate to you what you may or may not believe, or what dietary or adult consensual sexual practices you may or may not engage in predicated on those beliefs.

The Buddhist couple, although they are vegetarians, serve meat dishes to their customers who wish to purchase and eat meat. The local supermarket stocks and sells both kosher foods and bacon. When the city repaved our street, the Religious Science Church down the block offered its parking lot to local residents, so that they had a place to park their cars. They did not require us to convert to Religious Science for that convenience. Occasionally Jehovah Witnesses ring the doorbell, I am polite but have absolutely no desire or intention of joining their religion. The Hasidic Jews have not threatened to burn down the Religious Science Church because the Minster is gay and has a male partner.

I would be offended and vocal, if any of my neighbors were attacked or maligned because of their beliefs, or if some entity attempted to force them to change their beliefs. I hope my neighbors would also stand by me, if I were attacked or maligned due to my beliefs, or some entity attempted to forcibly change my beliefs. That is my understanding of “Religious Liberty.” However, Archbishop Dolan of New York City, the current president of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops [NCCB] has a radically different understanding of “Religious Liberty.”

“Citing the famous preamble to the Declaration of Independence, Dolan wrote that the rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” are now “increasingly and in unprecedented ways under assault in America” because of administration policies.”

He goes on to list six items he believes impinge on “Religious Liberty.” These include:

1. Proposed regulations that requires private health insurers to cover contraceptives for patients who wish to use contraceptives.

2. Proposed requirements those religious aid groups, who accept federal money, to include condoms in their HIV prevention campaigns.

3. Dolan claims that “the religious conscience exemptions” in the proposals from the Department of Human Services “are not broad enough.”

4. Dolan also cites the administration’s challenge to the “ministerial exception” rule, which will be argued Wednesday (Oct. 5) at the U.S. Supreme Court, which could determine whether churches have to conform to employment discrimination laws for workers who are not clergy.

5. Dolan also blasted the White House’s decision not to defend the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which defines marriage as the union of one man and one woman.

6. Dolan voiced frustration that neither he nor the previous USCCB president, Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, received responses to private letters sent to Obama. Dolan said that’s partly why he decided to take the feud public.

Essentially, Dolan wants,

1. For your health insurance NOT to cover the cost of contraceptives that you chose to use.

2. To use your tax dollars as he wishes, without requirements attached for the use of public funds.

3. To be able to invoke “religious conscience exemptions” at will and at his personal discretion.

4. To apply “ministerial exception” not only to clergy, but also to secretaries, gardeners, custodians, bookkeepers, choir directors, musicians, housekeepers, accountants, security guards, and any other person employed by the Church. That means these employees, as a condition of their continued employment, had better agree with the NCCB.

5. The NCCB not elected representatives, to decide policy decision and civil law.

6. The President of the United States (and all other elected officials and Judges) to “consult” privately with the NCCB in the formation/implementation of laws.

Where did the Roman Catholic Hierarchy get the idea that they have the right and the power to do all of this stuff? The Emperor Constantine and fifteen centuries of dictating moral laws in Europe and Catholic colonies. Oh, and that little exercise of over ruling the California State Supreme Court on Prop 8 (with a huge check written by the Mormon Church’s leadership in Salt Lake City).

Thankfully, President Obama and the Federal government are choosing to follow the example of most Roman Catholics (and many Catholic theologians/priests) and simply ignore Archbishop Dolan, the NCCB and the Vatican. True Religious Liberty grants religious entities the freedom to make the laws of their religion, which may be voluntarily followed by their believers, but it does not grant them the power to dictate the law of the land, so far.

Full Article HERE!

Pope disappoints hopes of Catholics and Protestants

Pope Benedict’s visit to his German homeland was bound to provoke harsh words from his critics. The surprise of the event was how bluntly he took his own Church to task and disappointed Protestants ready to work with him.

Despite his frail physique and soft-spoken style, the 84-year-old pontiff delivered a vigorous defense of his conservative views and brusquely rejected calls for reforms, some of which even had cautious support from some bishops.

At the end of his four-day visit on Sunday, Benedict predicted “small communities of believers” would spread Catholicism in future — and not, he seemed to say, the rich German Church, which he hinted had more bureaucracy than belief.

Some Church leaders fear they may end up with only small communities if they don’t consider reforms. Record numbers of the faithful have officially quit the Church in recent years, often in protest against clerical sex abuse scandals.

“The pope was demanding, almost hard — not in his manner, but in the essence of his words,” Berlin’s Tagesspiegel daily commented. “Nobody should be fooled by his fragility.”

“The pope sees the signs of the times, but interprets them not as a demand to courageously open up the Catholic Church but, on the contrary, to close its ranks.”

Breaking down faith barriers is a major issue in the land of the Protestant Reformation. Christians are equally divided between Catholics and Protestants in Germany and intermarriage and ecumenical cooperation make both sides ask why old divisions still exist.

Politicians from President Christian Wulff down publicly told the pope they hoped his visit would help to bring the churches closer. One suggestion was to allow Protestant spouses of Catholics to take communion when they attend Catholic mass.

“ECUMENICAL DISASTER”

Benedict made a historic gesture for interchurch unity by presiding over a prayer service with a Protestant bishop in the Erfurt monastery where the 16th-century reformer Martin Luther lived as a monk before he split with Rome.

But in his speech to Protestant leaders there, he bluntly told them they were mistaken to expect him to come bearing gifts, like a political leader coming to negotiate a treaty.

His hosts, who would have been happy with vague words about the need to look into some problems, instead heard a short lecture about how Christian faith could not be negotiated.

Benedict’s Protestant host in Erfurt, Bishop Nikolaus Schneider, stressed the bright side of the meeting — the pope’s positive words about Luther’s deep faith — and added: “Our heart burns for more, and that was clear today.”

German media were less diplomatic. “An ecumenical disaster,” wrote the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper, blasting Benedict’s treatment of Protestant leaders as “spectacularly half-hearted, patronizing and callous.”

The lay Catholic group We Are Church said the faithful should stop hoping for help from Rome. The churches in Germany should simply “declare the unspeakable 500-year-old split in Christianity to be ended,” it said in a statement.

“Let’s do what unites us,” it declared.

Catholics weren’t spared either. Another reform proposal was to allow Catholics who divorce and remarry to receive communion at mass, something now barred to them because the Church upholds the sanctity of the first marriage.

Even Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, head of the German Bishops’ Conference, said before the visit he hoped to see some change in coming years to prevent the rising number of divorced Catholics feeling excluded from the Church.

Benedict passed over that idea in silence.

PRAY AND OBEY

By contrast, Benedict was loud and clear in criticizing the German Church as too bureaucratic and focused on organizational changes rather than on the zeal of true faith, which he said was the key to confronting its problems.

He told this to the lay Central Committee of German Catholics (ZdK), some of whose members have called for moderate reforms such as allowing women deacons to help at mass or ordaining older married men to counter the shortage of priests.

If a stranger from a far country visited Germany, he told them, he would find it materially rich and religiously poor.

“The real crisis of the Church in the Western world is a crisis of belief,” Benedict said. “If we don’t find a way to really renew the faith, all structural reform will remain ineffective.”

The next day, he repeated this message to a wide range of lay Catholics working with and for the Church. He said they could only face the challenges ahead if they closed ranks with their bishops and with the Vatican.

“It is not a question here of finding a new strategy to relaunch the Church,” he said, but of putting strategy aside and “living the faith fully, here and now.”

ZdK president Alois Glueck was not convinced. “It’s not a question of either promoting introspection and prayer or changing Church structures,” he said. “We have to link both these things.”

Munich’s Sueddeutsche Zeitung, the most influential daily in the pope’s native Bavaria, summed up the trip with the headline: “He came, he spoke and he disappointed.”

Full Article HERE!

Nun scolds Catholic Church about sex abuse

A Roman Catholic nun says the church hasn’t properly addressed the issue of sexual abuse at the hands of priests since the Mount Cashel orphanage scandal of the 1980s.

Sister Nuala Kenny, a pediatrician who was a member of a commission that looked into child sexual abuse by priests in St. John’s, N.L., from 1989-91, said the reaction from clergy was to turn a blind eye to the abuse and to move the offending priest to a new parish.

“It nearly killed me to be a nun, a baby doctor, sitting there listening to people describe what had happened when men of God, priests of my church, had offended against their children and teenagers,” Kenny told about 200 people at the Dalbrae Academy in Mabou.

“It nearly broke my heart. The devastation that occurred was truly heartbreaking, but I thought we learned something, I thought we wrote something important.”

The commission that Kenny served on recommended the creation of the Canadian Conference on Catholic Bishops ad hoc committee on child sexual abuse.

Without participation by Canadian bishops to deal with the systemic problems that made sexual and physical abuse possible, the church can’t begin to heal itself so it can tackle other problems, such as declining church attendance, she said.

“We have not addressed, ‘Why has it happened the way it has happened? Why have we dealt with it the way we have?’ ”

Full Article HERE!

Priesthood should be open to male, female, married or celibate – Fr Sean McDonagh

The call by the retired Bishop for Derry for the Church to change its position on mandatory celibacy for priests does not go far enough, according to Association of Catholic Priests co-founder, Fr Sean McDonagh.

The Columban priest was responding to comments made on the Church’s policy on celibacy by Dr Edward Daly in his memoirs A Troubled See: Memoirs of a Derry Bishop.

Dr Daly, who was Bishop of Derry between 1974 and 1993, describes celibacy in his book as, “an obligation that has caused many wonderful potential candidates to turn away from a vocation, and other fine men to resign their priesthood at great loss to the church.” Elsewhere Dr Daly writes, “If things continue as they are, a lot of parish communities will not have a priest in a few years’ time, and those that they have will be older, weary and greatly overworked.”

He asks why celibacy should be “the great sacred and unyielding arbiter, the paradigm of diocesan priesthood?”

In his memoirs, Dr Edward Daly said he hoped, “that senior members of the clergy and laity make their views more forcefully known” on the issue of celibacy and he said these were views that were often expressed privately but seldom publicly.

Responding, Fr Sean McDonagh called on the Irish hierarchy to support the retired Bishop’s call rather than going “down the cul de sac” of a married diaconate, which, he warned, would “clericalise laity” instead of looking to a “different kind of priesthood.”

Speaking to UK Catholic weekly, The Tablet, Fr Sean McDonagh commented, “I would go further than that – it should be open to male, female, married or celibate.”

He told ciNews that he was not the first voice in the Church to call for women priests, and referred to Cardinal Martini of Milan’s writings, and biblical scholar, Professor Jerome Murphy O’Connor.

Fr McDonagh also called on the bishops to conduct a survey among the laity to assess people’s level of satisfaction with the new translation of the Roman missal, which he said had been “imposed” by Rome. The Columban missionary told ciNews that a number of women in his congregation last Sunday had voiced their opposition to the new translation and particularly to the use of non-inclusive language.

Fr McDonagh, who is a linguist, urged anyone who is unhappy with the new translation to write to the bishops and outline their difficulties. He added, “The anecdotal line is that everyone is happy with it.” But he said, “People should tell the truth about what has happened. People were not consulted on it.”

“I would like to see, within a year or a year and a half at the most, a really good survey done to find out what people really think of it.” The survey, he said, needed to include all age groups.

Referring to Vatican II, the ACP co-founder said its basic insight had been that the liturgy is for everyone and that the Church should be facilitating participation. “If you are starting to use archaic language, you are not facilitating partnership and participation for a lot of people – why do that?” he asked.

Referring to the fact that just 200 students out of 55,000 who sat the Leaving Certificate studied Latin, Fr McDonagh asked, “What has Latin got to offer?” and he suggested to ciNews that the proponents of the new translation are “operating out of a world that doesn’t exist.”

He queried whether they were intent on returning to pre Vatican II approach “when the laity were basically an audience and could not participate because they did not understand or speak Latin?”

Fr McDonagh said the new translation demonstrated “incompetence” in the decision to follow a literalist translation rather than use dynamic equivalence.

Full Article HERE!

Theologian Hans Küng on Pope Benedict ‘A Putinization of the Catholic Church’

On Thursday, Pope Benedict XVI arrives in Germany for a long-awaited visit. Prominent Swiss theologian Hans Küng explains to SPIEGEL why the papal visit will do little to help the crisis in the Church and compares Benedict to Vladimir Putin in the way he has centralized power.

Full Interview HERE!

Hans Küng, 83, was one of the Catholic theologians who, like the then-theology professor Joseph Ratzinger, helped shape the Second Vatican Council at the beginning of the 1960s and pushed for more openness within the Catholic Church. In 1979, Küng, who was teaching theology in the German city of Tübingen at the time, publicly criticized the dogma of papal infallibility. The Vatican responded by revoking his permission to teach. Today, Küng is still a Catholic priest and heads the Tübingen-based Global Ethic institute, which he founded.