No more taxes for religious ed

Chalk one up for the Constitution and common sense in sex ed.

 

Lawsuit Settlement Pulls HHS Funding for Silver Ring Thing Abstinence Program

From The Roundtable on Religion and Social Welfare Policy:

In a closely watched case, a federal agency has agreed to settle a lawsuit filed against it by suspending funding for a sexual abstinence program accused of using taxpayer dollars to present religious messages.

Under the agreement, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) agreed to withhold the $75,000 grant it made to Silver Ring Thing, which runs faith-based sexual abstinence education programs for teenagers throughout the country. The case had been brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which alleged that the group violated the First Amendment because the federally-funded program's abstinence message was not adequately separated from religious components.

Contraception? Not in my tropical backyard

The founder of Domino's is founding a town to embody his conservative Catholic ideals. I wonder if there will be any low-income housing?

Abortions, pornography and contraceptives will be banned in the new Florida town of Ave Maria, which has begun to take shape on former vegetable farms 90 miles northwest of Miami.

Tom Monaghan, the founder of the Domino’s Pizza chain, has stirred protests from civil rights activists by declaring that Ave Maria’s pharmacies will not be allowed to sell condoms or birth control pills. The town’s cable television network will carry no X-rated channels.

The town will be centred around a 100ft tall oratory and the first Catholic university to be built in America for 40 years. . . .

Monaghan, 68, sold his takeaway chain in 1998 for an estimated $1 billion (£573m). A devout Catholic who has ploughed millions into religious projects — including radio stations, primary schools and a Catholic law faculty in Michigan — Monaghan has bought about 5,000 acres previously used by migrant farmers.

The Sunday Times titled this article Pizza pope builds a Catholic heaven. I hope that's a typo and the venerable Times meant "Catholic haven." Heaven as a place to force conformity, to refuse to change and be changed by the whole uncooperative world? I don't think so. I don't think either of these Catholics thought so either.

Update: According to Working for Change, Monaghan is developing low-income housing in Ave Maria and nearby towns. Good. But this article also tells of his plans to have Mass said hourly in a town of 30,000 souls. Does this seem like an irresponsible, if not impossible, use of ministerial time in a nation with one priest to every 2,200 Catholics?

Cycles of abuse in Genesis

(another reflection for class; it was on Genesis 7-22)

It’s funny how limited are the notions of Bible stories we acquire from the lectionary. I never realized that Abraham (twice) basically handed Sarah over to sexual servitude, and so I never saw that she visits the same oppression on Hagar by forcing Hagar to bear Abraham’s child. Abraham betrays Sarah in this way because he fears violence against himself, yes, but he puts himself and Sarah in harm’s way because he was following God’s promise of wealth and descendants. In fact, the animals Sarah’s prostitution brings in facilitate God’s covenant with Abraham (15:10 ff.) What would have happened if the couple had stayed home, or if Abraham had owned Sarah as his wife?

Despite these depressing themes, this section carried a beautiful surprise in the story of Hagar naming God (16:13). Although Hagar is forced to submit to abuse from both Abraham and Sarah, she sees the face of God and owns her faith by giving God a name. One translation—David Rosenberg’s in The Book of J—renders Hagar’s exclamation “You are the God I lived to see and lived after seeing,” showing the importance to her of this spiritual encounter and her unique status as God’s servant, outliving the encounter. Even in this problematic selection, full of God’s followers behaving badly, the seeker finds a story of the God of justice, who raises up the lowly.

Disturbing accusations in New York

From the Village Voice:

Who knows whether Cardinal Edward Egan is sleeping soundly these days. But as head of the New York archdiocese—as the top Roman Catholic prelate in the state—he'd have every reason to be restless after the recent advent of a little-noticed lawsuit.
The suit, now pending in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, was filed on December 13 by Bob Hoatson—a 53-year-old New Jersey priest considered a stalwart ally among survivors of sexual abuse by clergy. Hoatson, the now-suspended chaplain for Catholic Charities in Newark, is suing Egan and nine other Catholic officials and institutions, claiming a pattern of "retaliation and harassment" that began after Hoatson alleged a cover-up of clergy abuse in New York and started helping victims.

But that's not all his lawsuit claims. Halfway through the 44-page complaint, the priest-turned-advocate drops a bomb on the cardinal: He alleges that Egan is "actively homosexual," and that he has "personal knowledge of this." His suit names two other top Catholic clerics in the region as actively gay—Albany bishop Howard Hubbard and Newark archbishop John Myers.

It's not that Hoatson has a problem with, as the suit puts it, "consensual, adult private sexual behavior by these defendants."

No, what Hoatson claims is that, as leaders of a church requiring celibacy and condemning homosexuality, actively gay bishops are too afraid of being exposed themselves to turn in pedophile priests.

Hoatson and his attorney save their worst accusations for Bishop Hubbard, accusing the other two bishops named of consensual sex between adults, but alleging that Bishop Hubbard solicited teenage boys for sex in a park. If this is true, such a terrible breach of pastoral trust absolutely needs to be brought to light, and I feel comfortable with erring on the side of believing the victimized. But in the Albany diocese, Bishop Hubbard is not percieved as guilty of the crime of failure to prosecute bad priests, even if he is guilty of the motives his accusers allege. He's been a leader in working toward diocesan transparency and outreach to victim/survivors of clergy abuse, and he's a personally involved and pastoral church leader. I deeply hope that these accusations are nothing but lies, but it's hard to understand why Hoatson and Aretakis would fabricate motives when the crime they claim isn't in evidence.

On Jesus' call to hate your family

One of the classes I'm taking this term is on biblical spirituality, or applying the Bible in faith contexts as opposed to analyzing it historically and critically. We have to write weekly small reflections on Scripture passages, which I'll be posting here. This week we were supposed to pick one that's been personally relevant to us.


Luke 14:25-33

Jesus’ call to renounce all our “possessions” and earthly attachments helps us develop a mindset that will protect us from despair when life’s losses inevitably come. This message is more familiar and comfortable to Christians than the anti-family rancor this text also seems to communicate. This year, as I started to build a life independent of my family, I began to perceive a meaning in this text that is actually helpful to my own spirituality. Jesus’ elaboration shows that he wants his followers not to rely more than is wise on their family connections: even if your family is as strong as ten thousand troops, your spiritual life may demand that you seek peace, going another way from what your family situation alone would suggest. Furthermore, both of Jesus’ examples suggest that it is still okay to love your family and to act in their best interest. The king seeks a peace treaty because he doesn’t want his troops to die, and the builder wants to see the tower completed. But the troops don’t dictate the terms of engagement in battle, and in life as a disciple of Jesus, even the people dearest to you are only one component of what will lead to the hoped-for outcome. Ultimately, Jesus tells his disciples in this paragraph not that we shouldn’t love our family, but how we should love them. It’s important that he calls us to “take up our cross” immediately after warning us that we need to be prepared to lose everything most dear to us. We need to keep our family’s role in our life proportionate so that we can listen to the call of Christ, but part of that call is to attend to our responsibilities with love and wisdom.

Be heard by bishops

So much to post about as the evil of sex abuse continues to blow up all over the country . . . But first, something with a deadline. Anne Y. Koester of the Georgetown Center for Liturgy advises the USCCB Committee on Women in the Church and in Society, and she's presenting to the bishops on the concerns of Catholic women in Generation Y. If you were born with two X chromosomes after 1982, email her at aky2(at)georgetown(dot)edu with thoughts, including but not limited to answers to the following questions. Ms. Koester is nice, and this is a great opportunity to speak truth to power.

1a. What do you find most fulfilling or most meaningful about being
Catholic?



1b. What do you find least fulfilling or least meaningful about being
Catholic?



2a. What does the Catholic Church offer that is helpful to you as a
young woman of Generation Y?



2b. What does the Catholic Church need to offer that it presently does
not for it to be helpful to you?



3. What questions do you have for Church leaders (ordained and lay), or
stated differently, what do you believe Church leaders need most to pay
attention to in the contemporary U.S. Church and in the larger society?



Please feel free to add any other comments you might have that are not
covered by these questions.

Michael Jackson could sing JPII's poems

Sad Catholic irony reaches new heights.

From Reuters:

Father Giuseppe Moscati of the Edizioni Musicali Terzo Millennio, which specializes in church music and organizes musical events at the Vatican, said his company had the rights to 24 of Pope John Paul's prayers and wanted to put together a group of international artists to set them to music.

"We have been contacted by people close to Michael Jackson who have expressed interest and we are thinking about it," Moscati said.

He dismissed the recent controversy surrounding Jackson, who is living in Bahrain after a Californian court acquitted him of child molestation charges last June.

"He has been cleared of all charges," Moscati said.

No words. None. Only that I'd like to hear John Allen Jr.'s explanation for this one.

Bet you've never had this problem

When I took my first theology class (Feminist Biblical Interpretation, which ought to tell you something) I bought the first serious Bible I've ever owned. I mean, I had some before that--the kid kind that are disappointing Christmas presents, and then an old and musty one I bought because I liked the gilding on the pages. I used to flip through it looking for annotations from the little old lady who owned it before, and sometimes even read the Psalms. But then in college I got my New Oxford Annotated Bible, an impressive tome with the editors' names on the cover, which must be a hell of a feeling. It's a good version, with exotic Apocrypha and useful historical background, and sometimes I even read it *not* for class. (Although study Bibles aren't really the best for meditation, especially if you're a word junkie like I am who gets all wrapped up in the footnotes.) Anyway. A class I'll be taking this semester (Biblical Spirituality, rumored to be awesome, they had to move it to a bigger classroom, which I somehow find hilarious at a divinity school) recommends The Catholic Study Bible, which I'm sure is also a lovely work.

The respective merits of the Bibles aren't really the issue. (My current has inclusive language, which I don't think the Catholic Study B does, being, uh, Catholic, but then it would be nice to be using the same text as the lectionary.) No, the thing is, two Bibles? Owning two Bibles? For some reason the second Bible seems to me like a third cat or a fourth kid, something whose acquisition makes you "that lady with the [blank]s." You'd be surprised how often people check out my bookshelves, and I think it's important to maintain an image that will allow people who don't believe what I do to the extent that I do to take my opinions seriously. I think people who know me come to know that I am absolutely crazy about God, but I generally try not to word-for-word open with that. I find the image of being crazy about religion even less conducive to good conversations.

It is bad--quite bad--enough that my obviously holier roommate just put up a crucifix in the kitchen. And of course I can't petition for its removal, because it's a crucifix! And I can't get rid of an extra Bible, because it's a Bible! You don't just jettison a Bible for the latest model!

Maybe I can remove all the images from the kitchen during Lent. And conceal that extra Bible on my roommate's shelf.