About that ‘smear’ campaign directed at the Pope

Mary Kate Cary, former White House speechwriter for President George H.W. Bush, writes in U.S. News & World Report:

For the hierarchy of the church to imply that the controversy is a “challenge” coming from outside the community of believers is just wrong. The people who are most worked up about the charges of sexual abuse are not the so-called enemies of the church, but the young Catholic victims and their families, the lay parishioners and parents of children being raised in the church, and the good priests whose reputations are being tarred by this. At another Easter Mass in my neighborhood, at a parish so full of young families they have overflow seating in the gym every Sunday, the monsignor got a standing ovation after saying he thought the children would have been better protected if women had been in the leadership of the church in the first place, and that the bishops involved should resign. I’ve never seen a standing ovation in church in my life. It’s the community of believers who are as mad as hell. Really, it’s heartbreaking.

‘Once a rising star in denominational life’ Dwight McKissic

Ouch? Regarding African-American Baptist pastor Dwight McKissic’s April 7 excoriation of the Southern Baptist Convention for failure to live up to its 1995 renunciation of racism and slavery, Bob Allen of the Associated Baptist Press wrote:

McKissic, once a rising star in denominational life until he disagreed publicly with influential leaders over a decision to stop appointing missionaries that use a “private prayer language,” said most systemic, institutional and individual racism in SBC life is “passive, not intentional.”

Well, he didn’t call McKissic a “has been,” even if the summation was lame. That disagreement was a full-bore, denominational uproar in which McKissic’s stand played an important role. Most spectacularly, in August of 2006, McKissic gave a sermon at the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary chapel in which he discussed his use of private prayer languages. Seminary president Paige Patterson did not have the sermon posted on the school website. Debate & turmoil. In June of 2007, McKissic resigned from the seminary board of trustees.

Ok. Was Enid, Oklahoma, pastor Wade Burleson also “once a rising star” until he disagreed publicly with influential leaders over private prayer languages (and other matters)? Specifically associated with his role as a member of the International Mission Board, from which he resigned in 2008 — an experience he documents in “Hardball Religion: Feeling the Fury of Fundamentalism.”

Maybe not the right characterization, but the official SBC reaction to McKissic is still dismissive. Allen writes that “Sing Oldham, vice president for convention relations at the SBC Executive Committee” said that “a motion referred by the convention in 2009 to study ways to more actively involve ethnic churches and ethnic leaders in serving the needs of the SBC.” And McKissic’s blog post “will certainly be a resource.”

We’ll see.

Sexual abuse added to child porn allegations against former prominent Bishop Lahey

Former prominent Canadian Bishop Raymond Lahey, who last August brokered a $15-million settlement for victims of sexual abuse by priests of the diocese of Antigonish in Nova Scotia and who was already facing child porn charges, is being accused in a civil lawsuit of sexual abuse by a former resident of the infamous Mount Cashel Orphanage in St. John’s.

Lahey was arrested in September for possessing and importing child pornography. At the time, Ronald Martin, who launched a class-action lawsuit on behalf of himself and others who were sexually abused by priests in the Roman Catholic diocese of Antigonish and who saw Lahey frequently while negotiating the settlement, said the incident “was the ultimate revictimization for every single one of us.”

Lawyer John McKiggan explains that a core goal of the Antigonish settlement was to compensate abuse survivors while avoiding the revictimization which inevitably occurs in a public trial.

The Roman Catholic Church in Canada sought last year to minimize the issue, but Halifax Archbishop Anthony Mancini has set a somewhat different tone, saying last week:

We have been hit by a violent wind of protest and criticism, and not without cause.

The most recent claim against Lahey involves abuse which is alleged to have occurred in the early 1980s, “before Lahey rose through the ranks in the Roman Catholic Church, eventually becoming a bishop,” CBC reported.

Court allows FBC Jax Watchdog case against Assistant State Attorney to proceed

A Florida federal district court refused this week to dismiss the claim by blogger Tom Rich (FBC Jax Watchdog) that Assistant Fla. State Attorney Stephen Siegel violated Rich’s right to speak anonymously, and trampled on the Establishment Clause because defendants had no secular purpose for their actions.

The lawsuit alleges Siegel issued subpoenas that helped Jacksonville police officer Robert Hinson — who was a member of First Baptist Church of Jacksonvilla, Fla. — identify Rich when there was no evidence of criminal activity.

Dismissed in the same action were civil claims against State Attorney Angela Corey for her office’s role.

Rich’s claims against the police officer and against First Baptist were unaffected because they weren’t involved in this motion to dismiss.

Emerging standards for unmasking anonymous bloggers were certainly not met in Rich’s case.

To prevail in this instance, Rich must now prove the violations he alleges. But even at this juncture, the case is a caution for those who would twist legal authority to unmask an anonymous blogger without compelling legal justification. Abuse of power has a price.

[H/T: Religion Clause]

SBC racism, sexism and repentance

Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) actions toward women “fall short of Biblical standards (Acts 2:17-18)” and require public apology, prominent Southern Baptist and African-American pastor Dwight McKissic argues on April 1 — an apology like the SBC’s 1995 renunciation of racism and slavery.

There are good historic and modern reasons for such an apology:

The SBC was formed in 1845 when women were not allowed to vote in the vast majority of SBC churches. Consequently, women by and large did not attempt to register as delegates/messengers to the annual SBC meetings. In 1885 women were excluded by the vote of the convention from being seated as delegates. The convention voted to only accept “brethren” as representatives from churches to the annual meetings. Josiah Lawrence made a motion to seat women as “messengers” in 1917 and the vote actually occurred in 1918 with overwhelming approval.

McKissic

McKissic also cites well-known examples of modern Southern Baptist mistreatment of women [1, 2, 3], finally weaving mistreatment of Southern Baptist women, SBC racism and the sexual abuse of SBC women together around the case of now-imprisoned former pastor Daryl Gilyard.

Results of the earlier renunciation suggest that apology to SBC women, while clearly merited, would accomplish little of measurable value. For as McKissic demonstrates via damning examples in his April 7 blog, there are still serious problems:

• There was no black representation on the Great Commission Resurgence Task Force. McKissic brought that to the attention of Frank Page at the Louisville Airport in June ’09. Page called SBC President Johnny Hunt, who corrected the oversight, which McKissic calls “symptomatic of the problem.”
• “Ten years after the ’95 racial reconciliation and apology statement, there has not been one African American appointed to a position as the Chief Executive Officer of a SBC entity,” although there are three vacant spots.
• At the Southern Baptists of Texas Evangelism Conference in February, SBC Evangelist Jimmy Davis “communicated that President Obama was not a Christian” and “encouraged the Southern Baptist of Texas Convention to ‘pray that God providentially remove President Obama from office.’” Yes, something about the image of all of those Anglo Southern Baptists kneeling in prayer against Obama does seem racist.
• Baptist Deacon Bill Fortner in a blog entry described President Obama as “the Tragic Negro,” a characterization which McKissic accurately characterized as “clearly racist and beyond the pale.”
• An Anglo SBC church in Louisiana refused to let Anglo missionaries who had adopted children of color speak in their church because of the color of their children.
• “A Black Baptist Arkansas Pastor who disassociated himself from the SBC in recent years” explained to McKissic that during a missions trip to Mexico with an Anglo Southern Baptist congregation, “one of the Anglo mission team members use racial slurs” for which, when confronted, he did not apologize.
• Ergun Caner, president of Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary, preached a sermon at First Baptist of Jacksonville, FL., in which he said to “approving laughter” that Black churches take up “twelve offerings.” Caner went on to relate:
  

  “… you go to a Black church gentlemen, you are not going to have on a blue suit, you are going to have blue shoes to match, and your handkerchief is going to match your tie, and your whole outfit is going to match your car. It’s BEAUTIFUL. And ladies: when we talk about black church, we’re talkin’ about hats. And I’m not just talkin’ Easter hats as some of you may wear, I’m talkin’ ’bout satellite dish hats. [laughter]. Big enough to receive a signal, with a curtain rod goin’ down the front that you can just pull the curtain across.”

How the SBC can accomplish a resurgence while driving away people of color and, woman by woman as well as church by church, spiritually inspired women, is unclear. Thus McKissic suggests changing the name of the organization to “The International Baptist Convention” to create the opportunity for “a new start in a new millennium.” Which might work almost as well as the 1995 renunciation of racism and slavery (the one he dissects by recent example).

Here they went again

Accused of molesting two girls in the United States, Father Joseph Jeyapaul , has for the last five years worked for Catholic schools in India:

Bishop Victor Balke of Minnesota first reported the allegations to the Vatican and the priest’s Indian bishop in 2005, according to a letter released by a lawyer representing the victim in a civil lawsuit.

Attorney Jeffrey Anderson “presented documents from the Crookston, Minnesota, diocese and from local police that accuse Father Joseph Jeyapaul of molesting two teenage girls starting six years ago:”

A girl who was considering becoming a nun was threatened by Jeyapaul if she did not accept his advances, according to the documents. They say he arranged to be with his victims alone — usually at his rectory.

Anderson says the bishop and the Vatican kept the problem a secret, permitting the priest to flee to India, to protect the reputation of the church.

Remind you of anything?

Great Repentance Resurgence (GRR) hits a wall

Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) repentance of “systemic, institutionalized, and historic negative attitudes toward women, races, and dissenters” called for by prominent African-American pastor SBC pastor Dwight McKissic was to involve electing a black SBC president this summer. That was to be Fred Luter, senior pastor of Franklin Avenue Baptist Church in New Orleans, who doesn’t plan to run [Associated Baptist Press]:

Luter

Luter said in an e-mail April 3 that McKissic isn’t the only person who has suggested that he seek office, but he has not agreed to be nominated. “There are a lot of guys throughout the convention who would like to see that happen,” Luter said. “I truly appreciate their trust and confidence in me, however that will not happen this year.”

GRR plan B? Or maybe move right on to debate over the Great Commission Resurgence?

The Guardian gets Williams, even if the Catholic hierarchy doesn’t

Skipping the polling data we reviewed the Guardian in an editorial agrees with us [our bold face]:

This morning the BBC will broadcast [Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams] recorded remarks on the Irish Catholic crisis, in which he says, quite in passing, that the church there has “lost all credibility”. This perception is so widely shared, and so close to the truth, that to say it out loud has provoked an enormous row. After the interview was made public, Williams produced an uncharacteristically political apology – which is to say that he regrets the offence he has caused, but not the offending remark; the Roman Catholic archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, could be heard on Radio 4 yesterday biting back the word “insult” when he was asked about it.

The Lead tipped us off about how understandable William’s remark was. As the Guardian observed:

No one can blame Williams for pointing this out, nor indeed for getting his own back for years of patronising comments and aggressive behaviour from the Roman church. The official Vatican observer at the last Lambeth conference appeared to say that the Anglican communion was suffering from Parkinson’s disease. Pope Benedict has personally encouraged the schism in the Anglican churches over homosexuality and most recently announced, to the consternation of even his own church here, a scheme to allow the Anglican opponents of women priests to convert in groups.

Both the conflict, and absent clear-eyed Catholic confrontation with the real circumstances, the decline to which Williams correctly alluded will almost inevitably continue.

The ‘New Atheists’ shovel sand against the tide

Madeleine Bunting writes:

But perhaps New Atheism’s publishing success is a case of winning a battle and losing the war. John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge point out in God is Back that the main religions are currently experiencing massive expansion across most of the world. One of the biggest drivers of growth is China; by 2050 it could be the biggest Muslim nation, and the biggest Christian one. What numerous countries are now demonstrating from the US to Asia, from Africa to the Middle East and Latin America, is that modernisation, far from entailing secularisation, is actually leading to increased and intensified forms of religiosity. According to Micklethwait and Wooldridge, the future across most of the globe is going to be very religious.

To the sceptical European, this is a lonely and unintelligible prospect. So, scanning my stuffed bookshelf, which of these defences of God are going to help explain this enduring appeal? Start with Karen Armstrong’s A Short History of Myth: “we are meaning-seeking creatures” who “invent stories to place our lives in a larger setting … and give us a sense that, against all the depressing and chaotic evidence to the contrary, life has meaning and value”. That helps explain why the bestselling religious book in the US is The Purpose Driven Life (the first chapters of which are published on the net as What on Earth Am I Here For?). The faithful are not mugging up on critiques of reason for an argument with New Atheism, but turning to religion to offer meaning and purpose.

Read the entire piece here.

Cardinal Angelo Sodano’s cautionary speech and history

Mark Silk offers a cautionary analysis of “the unprecedented speech by the dean of the College of Cardinals, Angelo Sodano, prior to Pope Benedict’s Easter address.”

It was to Sodano that George W. Bush went in 2004 seeking more enthusiastic polical support from Catholic bishops in the U.S. Bush reportedly complained that, “Not all the American bishops are with me.”

Silk neatly summarizes Sodano’s extraordinary career, observing that he is “known as the key Vatican defender of the Church’s most exalted sex abusers: Marcial Maciel Delgollado (founder of the Legionaries of Christ) and Cardinal Hans Hermann Wilhelm Groër, the archbishop of Vienna.” And now he’s taking a lead role in dealing with the pope’s handling of sex-abuse allegations against priests?

Read the entire piece here.