Sentenced after confessing more than a decade of sexual abuse

How long before he was arrested on Aug. 24 did Benton, Arkansas, First Baptist Church leaders know about allegations of sexual abuse against David Pierce?

Music minister there for 29 years, Pierce was sentenced on Aug. 27 to 10 years in prison.

Repeating a behavior often seen when Baptist clergy are charged with and/or convicted of sexually abusing parishioners, Greg Kirksey, former president of the Arkansas Baptist State Convention, wrote a letter asking the court for leniency on behalf of Pierce.

For example, in Illinois a Baptist newspaper editor was forced to resign after publishing a news story about charges of sexual misconduct filed against a Baptist minister.

It was 2002 and Pastor Leslie Mason was slated to be nominated to preach the keynote sermon at the annual meeting of the Illinois State Baptist Association.

Instead, Mason, then 34, now former pastor of Olney Southern Baptist Church in southern Illinois, faced charges of sexually assaulting two teenage girls who had attended his church. In a plea bargain, Mason pleaded guilty to two class-one felonies in exchange for dismissal of eight remaining counts.

He received a seven-year sentence – one year less than the period of abuse documented in court records.

Prize-winning, 19-year-veteran editor Michael Leathers was forced to resign to ensure that reporting like the Mason sex-abuse story “doesn’t happen again.” Thus Leathers and professional Baptist journalism in Illinois were added to the list of Mason’s victims.

As of this writing, North Carolina Biblical Recorder Editor Norman Jameson has not suffered a similar fate for publishing the story of a recent Baptist sexual abuse indictment. Whether there will be other official backlash, remains to be seen, given demonstrated Southern Baptist priorities in such matters.

Protecting church members from victimization isn’t the priority it should be the Southern Baptist Convention. They argue that church autonomy makes it a matter of individual church concern, and offer general guidance to member churches.

In 2008, the SBC made Number Six on Time Magazines list of under-reported news stories by refusing to create a central SBC database of church staff and clergy convicted or indicted on charges of molesting minors.

Meanwhile, Christa Brown of the Survivors Network wrote at Stop Baptist Predators:

How tragic that so many [at Benton First Baptist Church] were so wounded over such a long period before Pierce was finally stopped. This tragedy speaks to the need for Baptists to create a place where people may safely report clergy abuse with the expectation that their reports will be responsibly assessed and acted on.

Truly.

Baptist, Buddhist, Jewish and others for health reform

Michael Mansur of the Kansas City Star writes:

There was no screaming. No shouting. Security hauled no one off. … for more than two hours Sunday afternoon, about 250 Kansas Citians clapped and supported a panel of religious leaders — including Buddhist, Jewish and Baptist — who called for a moral response to the national health care crisis. The forum was at Community Christian Church.

The core message: With 46 million in the U.S. uninsured (35.9 million uninsured Americans) and millions more underinsured, “it is time to do something.”

The Rev. Eric Williams, pastor of Calvary Baptist Temple in Kansas City “and other panel members” said it is time to end the fusillades of misinformation, fear and division: “Call it what you want, but let’s get something done.”

Beyond partisanship: Pope Benedict XVI’s ‘Caritas in Veritate’

In the University of Chicago Divinity School column Sightings, Rick Elgendy argues that the wedge-politics of the culture wars have no support in Pope Benedict XVI’s Caritas in Veritate:

Though frequently presumed to be the source of authority for those who would, say, deny communion to pro-choice politicians, Benedict here refuses to accept the ideological categories assumed in American politics: The same theological commitments that inform his convictions about the integrity of life demand a reimagining of prevailing social arrangements. Catholic and non-Catholic onlookers alike might hope that the encyclical will inspire political discourse that reexamines the standard binaries and turns to principled and civil conversation before partisan rancor (as Benedict himself did, by most reports, in his recent meeting with President Obama, in sharp contrast to how others dealt with the president’s Notre Dame commencement appearance).

Writing for Human Events, Ave Maria Law School’s Rev. Michael P. Orsi says no, Catholics must still be anti-abortion/pro-life at the expense of any health care reform legislation. He does so in an argument that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops violated fundamental principles by reasserting its longstanding position that “decent health care is not a privilege, but a basic human right and a requirement to protect the life and dignity of every person.”

Mark Silk responds, and quotes with telling effect from Caritas in Veritate:

Nowadays we are witnessing a grave inconsistency. On the one hand, appeals are made to alleged rights, arbitrary and non-essential in nature, accompanied by the demand that they be recognized and promoted by public structures, while, on the other hand, elementary and basic rights remain unacknowledged and are violated in much of the world[107]. A link has often been noted between claims to a “right to excess”, and even to transgression and vice, within affluent societies, and the lack of food, drinkable water, basic instruction and elementary health care in areas of the underdeveloped world and on the outskirts of large metropolitan centres. The link consists in this: individual rights, when detached from a framework of duties which grants them their full meaning, can run wild, leading to an escalation of demands which is effectively unlimited and indiscriminate. An overemphasis on rights leads to a disregard for duties. Duties set a limit on rights because they point to the anthropological and ethical framework of which rights are a part, in this way ensuring that they do not become license. Duties thereby reinforce rights and call for their defence and promotion as a task to be undertaken in the service of the common good. Otherwise, if the only basis of human rights is to be found in the deliberations of an assembly of citizens, those rights can be changed at any time, and so the duty to respect and pursue them fades from the common consciousness. Governments and international bodies can then lose sight of the objectivity and “inviolability” of rights. When this happens, the authentic development of peoples is endangered[108]. Such a way of thinking and acting compromises the authority of international bodies, especially in the eyes of those countries most in need of development. Indeed, the latter demand that the international community take up the duty of helping them to be “artisans of their own destiny”[109], that is, to take up duties of their own. The sharing of reciprocal duties is a more powerful incentive to action than the mere assertion of rights.

Catholic neoconservative George Weigel attempts to escape that passage by arguing that it should be disregarded as a compromise by Pope Benedict XVI “to maintain the peace within his curial household.”

A strange argument to make about this pope who has backed up not a step in the face of one firestorm after another.

Agree or not, to understand the meaning of Pope Benedict XVI, do better to take Silk’s approach:

Read that carefully. The pope is saying that an asserted (or legislated) “right to excess” is wrongly made equivalent to those things that are objectively and inviolably “elementary and basic rights”–such as “elementary health care.” His point is that the affluent have to recognize that they have a duty to take steps to guarantee that the rights of the needy are not violated.

Prophetable blogversation about the Anti-Christ

John D. Pierce at Baptists Today Blogs writes:

Someone at prophecies.org has revealed the staggering news that (drum roll, please) President Barack Obama is the Anti-Christ.

Unless it was an earlier president?

For his part, Pierce goes on to say:

My professors through the years explained that biblical prophecy is more about speaking truth to a current situation that predicting future events. Less crystal ball, more course-correction warnings.

We feel the entire piece is worth your time. Read it here.

Let us talk together of hate, and the end of it

The Anatomy of Hate is a film which is intended to help us better understand one another, to talk together of our differences and so turn away conflict.

CNN describes it as a “filmmaking odyssey [whose creation] took” filmmaker Mike Ramsdell on a six-year journey “to the white supremacist movement, to Christian fundamentalists with an anti-gay agenda and across the globe to the Middle East. There he spent time with Muslim extremists, Palestinians fighting the Intifada, Israeli settlers and soldiers and with American troops serving in Iraq.”

Ramsdell says he wanted to know why we hate:

What I found was, for me, life changing. There was no boogieman, no devil, nor any single person or group of evil at the center of all this violence, war, and hate. Instead I found a planet full of creatures doing their best to fill the void of existence with limited psychological tools, and emotional shortcomings – myself included. And instead of embracing these shortcomings and using them as empathetic links to our fellow men, I discovered that our psyche turns them into mythological monsters that we can project onto others, declaring those ‘others’ as inferior, evil, or deserving of death.

The CNN story is here.

Clips from the film are here

Catholic right drifts into troubled waters

Today’s NYT piece by David Kirkpatrick led both Grant Gallicho and Mark Silk to note how the Catholic right has put itself at odds with the church’s social justice position.

Gallicho, himself Catholic, analyzed the comments of Bishop Nickless of Sioux City. Nickless told the NYT:

Preserving patient choice (through a flourishing private sector) is the only way to prevent a health care monopoly from denying care arbitrarily, as we learned from HMOs in the recent past. While a government monopoly would not be motivated by profit, it would be motivated by such bureaucratic standards as quotas and defined ‘best procedures,’ which are equally beyond the influence of most citizens. The proper role of the government is to regulate the private sector, in order to foster healthy competition and to curtail abuses.

Gallicho responded:

Government monopoly?
Patient choice?
Does the bishop understand that in several states insurers operate virtual monopolies?
Or that many Americans have no choice when it comes to health insurance? That they take what they can get or else they go broke–or they can’t get it, suffer a catastrophic illness, and break the rest of us?
Are we to believe that the profit motive is better than “bureaucratic standards”?
Is that church teaching too?

Silk summarizes church teaching as recently reflected in Pope Benedict’s encyclical, Caritas in Veritate. Silk writes:

As I’ve pointed out here, the pope’s encyclical teaches that food, drinkable water, “basic instruction and elementary health care” are all “elementary and basic rights.” Sure there’s politics and prudential judgment involved in determining the best way to provide people with health care, but so is there in determining the best way to provide people with food and drinkable water and breathable air.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has a Web site where it takes a stand for the broad, generous health care reform which church social policy implies. And against abortion. Which the Christian Right is attempting to use as a wedge issue by arguing there is unequivocal support for abortion in the various health reform proposals.

Carefully sorting abortion out produces equivocal results that do not support towering rhetoric from either side of the health reform debate. Consider the recent work of Beliefnet’s Steve Waldman on that issue.

As a result, Conservative Catholic bishops who are joining the Christian right on that may find themselves at odds with both church policy and reality.

Comparing the health reform bills and proposals

Here [.pdf] is a side-by-side comparison of the leading comprehensive health care reform proposals.

It is provided by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation.

Please read all 44 pages of it.

Then the next time someone asks whether you “have read the bill,” you can correctly answer “bills,” and discuss the key issues with confidence.

British ‘tough love’ for their NHS & U.S. conservatives

The British have one message for their National Health Service, and another messaged for American conservatives in general and perhaps for the Christian Right drive to stop health reform in this country.

British journalist Claire Rayner writes for the Guardian about National Health Service problems:

There has been an absolutely astounding response to the report the Patients Association released yesterday, detailing examples of neglect of elderly and vulnerable patients. While I was as ever hopeful that the people who so bravely volunteered to take part in this work would feel it had been worthwhile, the response has been staggering. I was shocked and touched reading the stories of patients’ families who have suffered and it seems the rest of the country has been as well.

She outlined a plan of correction and then turned to the awful things being said in the U.S. about the NHS and how “they don’t want a similar system of their own:”

Much as I would like to respond to their ill-informed opinions with a crisp “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn what you think,” let me instead point out that any intelligent American Republican should be able to see clearly that the anger we are expressing shows just how good the NHS normally is. And exposing the fact that we have a few rotten apples (so rare in the US, according to the self-aggrandising politicians I have heard slagging off our system) and are determined to seek them out and deal with them shows how much we care about our vulnerable, frail, and helpless elders.
I have no doubt that eventually this uproar will lead to the finding and application of the necessary remedies and ensure that future care for them will be what it should be – that is, gentle, dignity-protecting and life-extending as far as possible. If the national anger we are hearing in this country, where we love and value our NHS, doesn’t prove to you that we don’t have so-called “death panels” nothing will.

British Journalist Frances Beckett writes:

Anton Chaitkin is just the latest rightwing American commentator to claim that Barack Obama’s healthcare proposals are Nazi. The history editor of the Executive Intelligence Review called them “a revival of Hitler’s euthanasia killing programme”.
. . .
That’s how much the extreme right and the vested interests like the pharmaceutical companies hate healthcare schemes that give security to the poor. Attlee and Bevan, fortified by a large parliamentary majority and strong public support as well as their own courage and political will, pressed on regardless. It instantly transformed the lives of millions of Britons – not just the poorest, but those on moderate fixed incomes too.

Marjorie Ellis Thompson in a column calling for conservative reform of the NHS, writes:

It is sad that the scaremongers appear to be winning the war of words in the US and that they have misrepresented the NHS, using both British patients and doctors who had thought they were appearing in a documentary, not an attack-dog ad.

The British are quite clear about having been misled by American conservatives into appearing in attack ads. The London Daily Mail reports:

Furious Kate Spall and Katie Brickell claim that their views on the NHS have been misrepresented by a free market campaign group opposed to Mr Obama’s reforms in a bid to discredit the UK system.
. . .
Ms Spall, whose mother died of kidney cancer while waiting for treatment in the UK, told The Times: “It has been a bit of a nightmare.
“It was a real test of my naivety. I am a very trusting person and for me it has been a big lesson. I feel like I was duped.”

British Conservative Party leader David Cameron is also quite clear about his support of the NHS. He rebuked a party member “who went on US television to attack the NHS, dismissing his views as ‘eccentric.’ ” In an email to the members of his own party, Cameron he wrote:

One of the wonderful things about living in this country is that the moment you’re injured or fall ill – no matter who you are, where you are from, or how much money you’ve got – you know that the NHS will look after you.

Yesterday the Religion News Service summarized the Christian Right argument against health reform:

Although an estimated 45 million Americans lack health insurance, federation backers said they support the current system. “There may be problems,” said Bishop Harry Jackson, pastor of Hope Christian Church in suburban Maryland and chairman of the High Impact Leadership Coalition, “but it is working.”

As opposed to a system more like the British system which, as British Conservative Party leader Cameron explained, covers everyone?

Archdiocese of Leon, Mexico, unable to pay medical bills

David Agren of Catholic News Service writes:

Saying that falling Sunday collections have left the Archdiocese of Leon, Mexico, unable to pay the medical bills of its infirm priests, Archbishop Jose Martin Rabago has called on Catholics to continue supporting the church financially in spite of the current economic crisis.

Archbishop Martin told reporters Aug. 23 that the archdiocese had an $18,000 deficit during the first half of 2009 as collections fell. He said financial projections show the deficit would grow to more than $85,000 by the end of the year.

Read the rest of the story here.

Obama’s dethroning of Osama bin Laden

In Commonweal, an independent magazine edited and managed by lay Catholics, Jack Miles writes:

President George W. Bush first used the fateful phrase “war on terror” in an address to Congress on September 20, 2001, identifying what he later called “the defining struggle of our time.” And though initially the 9/11 attacks united the West while embarrassing and dividing the Muslim world, in time the rhetoric of a “war on terror” reversed those terms. With just three words, the president managed to transform Osama bin Laden from a criminal fugitive into a historic military commander, the head of a new, potentially world-changing army of fanatics. The subsequent invasion of Iraq, centerpiece of the Bush war on terror, only confirmed bin Laden in many Muslim eyes as a Saladin rather than a mass murderer.

Erasing the phrase “war on terror” from the U.S. diplomatic lexicon, the Obama administration has both dethroned Bin Laden and “replaced a grandiose, counterproductive fantasy with realistic attention to a set of grievous but real problems,” Smith argues.

Read the entire piece: After the War on Terror.