Anglical mural upbraiding Catholic Church failure to ordain women priests

St. John’s, an Scottish Episcopal Church in Edenburgh, Scotland, has a tradition of murals which are an appeal to community conscience.

On their Web site, they explain:

Murals addressing contemporary issues relating to justice and peace have appeared at St John’s for many years. They are intended to provoke discussion and a response from passers-by on Princes Street. The murals are painted by Artists for Justice and Peace and planned by a small group including the Rector and Associate Rector of St John’s.

For the pope’s visit they offered the following mural commenting on the Roman Catholic Church’s refusal to ordain women priests, as the Scottish Episcopal Church has since 1994:

The pope is likely to have seen it, since the mural is along the procession route he followed.

The pope is meet Church of England Canon Jane Hedges this evening when he goes to Westminster Abbey for prayer. Four years ago, she was the first woman appointed as a residentiary canon at Westminster Abbey. She is a leading candidate to become the Church of England’s first female bishop.

Leadership secrecy is an ‘insult to Southern Baptists’

Norman Jameson, editor of North Carolina’s Biblical Recorder, gets right to the point:

Being a denominational journalist or any Baptist with a contrary opinion in the current era of Southern Baptist Convention upheaval sometimes feels a bit like a tick picker atop a rhino. It’s an important role, but the rhino is going to go where he will.

And nowadays, he gets there in secret.

His immediate concern is the closed-door session in which the SBC North American Mission Board on Sept. 14 “interviewed, discussed and voted on their new president behind closed doors.”

The 37-12 vote hiring Kevin Ezell for that job was ferreted out, but not announced.

As Jameson argues, secrecy is the longtime, continuously destructive rule at the Southern Baptist Convention.

For example:

• Ezell’s two predecessors were forced to resign in closed deliberations.
• An entire book, Misspending God’s money, deals with otherwise secret expenditures under former NAMB president Bob Reccord.
• Baptist Salaries, known and unknown deals with how little is known to the public about compensation to executives like Ezell.
• Great Commission Resergence Task Force meetings were closed and recordings of the deliberations sealed for 15 years.
• The powerful SBC Executive Committee meets primarily behind closed doors.

We agree with Jameson that the result is destructive:

Baptists want to believe in the work of our institutions. We want to continue supporting them. Closed doors indicate a lack of trust in us. It is hard to support an organization that doesn’t trust you.

Do Southern Baptists who refuse to put up with it have to leave the denomination?

ABP pierces SBC fog: Split NAMB vote for Ezell

The Southern Baptist Convention’s North American Mission Board voted 37-12 on Sept. 14 to appoint Kevin Ezell their new president.

In keeping with the Southern Baptist Convention’s frequent practice of keeping church members and the public at large in the dark, the NAMB didn’t release a vote count. Still hasn’t.

The independent Associated Baptist Press reports:

NAMB officials did not release a vote count, but according to multiple sources with knowledge of the board’s deliberations, the vote was 37-12. Ezell, pastor of Highview Baptist Church in Louisville, Ky., was a controversial choice, because during his tenure the church’s budget tripled, yet the congregation now gives little more to the Cooperative Program unified budget and SBC mission offerings than it did 10 years ago.

German Cardinal Walter Kasper too ill to visit GB

Of course Cardinal Walter Kasper has been ill “for some days,” but who knew he would not be accompanying the pope to England before it became known that he had commented:

When you arrive at Heathrow you think at times that you’ve landed in a Third World country.

Nick Squires in Rome and Martin Beckford of the London Telegraph wrote:

Cardinal Kasper, who recently retired as the president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity having headed it since 2001, said that Britain was a “secular and pluralist” country in which there was a “distance from God”, noting that there was “a crisis of faith” in much of the West.

He referred to the case of a British Airways employee, Nadia Eweida, who was suspended by the airline in 2006 after she refused to stop wearing a crucifix around her neck, and alluded to the activities of prominent atheists such as Professor Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion.

Cardinal Kasper made the remarks during an interview with the German magazine, Focus, and is said to be ignoring suggestions that he apologize.

So the remarks become an unretracted part of the pope’s [now ongoing] state visit to England, and is dubbed by Michael White of the Guardian, “only the latest contribution to what now amounts to a major motorway pile-up.”

There was a mosque/prayer room in the south tower

All of Richard Land’s contrived arguments about how close for a mosque is “too close” to Ground Zero for the Park51 center falls to hypocritical pieces when you realize that interred in the rubble are the remains of the mosque in the South Tower.

Call it a “prayer room” if you wish.

It was on the 17th floor, and it wasn’t the only space in the towers where faithful Muslims prayed:

Moreover, the prayer room was not the only example of Muslim religious practice in or near the trade center. About three dozen Muslim staff members of Windows on the World, the restaurant atop the north tower, used a stairwell between the 106th and 107th floors for their daily prayers.

Without enough time to walk to the closest mosque — Masjid Manhattan on Warren Street, about four blocks away — the waiters, chefs, banquet managers and others would lay a tablecloth atop the concrete landing in the stairwell and flatten cardboard boxes from food deliveries to serve as prayer mats.

During Ramadan, the Muslim employees brought their favorite foods from home, and at the end of the daylight fast shared their iftar meal in the restaurant’s employee cafeteria.

After 9/11, Muslims prayed at Ground Zero for their fellow Muslims who had been irretrievably interred in the rubble.

Samuel G. Freedman of the New York Times wrote:

Fekkak Mamdouh, an immigrant from Morocco who was head waiter, attended a worship service just weeks after the attacks that honored the estimated 60 Muslims who died. Far from being viewed as objectionable, the service was conducted with formal support from city, state and federal authorities, who arranged for buses to transport imams and mourners to Warren Street.

There, within sight of the ruins, they chanted salat al-Ghaib, the funeral prayer when there is not an intact corpse.

“It is a shame, shame, shame,” Mr. Mamdouh, 49, said of the Park51 dispute. “Sometimes I wake up and think, this is not what I came to America for. I came here to build this country together. People are using this issue for their own agenda. It’s designed to keep the hate going.”

The underlying truth of the counterfactual uproar over Park51 is fanning the flames of hate, Richard.

Let’s not call Delaware Republican Senatorial candidate Christine O’Donnell a ‘nut’

Unless we’re prepared to apply the same brand to any number of conservative Catholics. Casting Republican political electoral pessimism about O’Donnell aside, Mary Ann Kreitzer writes:

She’s pro-life across the board and pro-family, an unapologetic Christian. She opposes gun control and favors control of our borders. She opposes pornography and has called masturbation “a sin.” O’Donnell is a pro-abstinence Catholic and a fiscal conservative.

In that light, the video below is simply a sincere if not-quite-mainstream statement of conviction:

O’Donnell’s financial difficulties and exaggeration of her academic qualifications may be, however, far more difficult for her supporters to embrace.

Ezell must overcome a mismatch of experience and personality to NAMB restoration

Arkansas Baptist News Editor Charlie Warren welcomes Kevin Ezell aboard as president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s troubled, sprawling North American Mission Board. After two successive failed administrations and a discussion of merging it with the foreign-missions-focused International Mission Board, the NAMB is on the ropes.

All Ezell lacks for the job of restoration is appropriate experience and diplomatic skills.

Specifically:

[Emil] Turner, executive director of the Arkansas Baptist State Convention, commented prior to Ezell’s election, “It seems surprising to me that the search committee would recommend someone whose level of support for the North American Mission Board through the Cooperative Program and the Annie Armstrong Easter Offering could not sustain the work of NAMB were it to be duplicated widely across the convention…. I would hope that the new president of NAMB could be an example of commitment to the Cooperative Program as called for by the Great Commission Resurgence Task Force and to the Annie Armstrong Easter Offering.”

Ezell’s flippant, sarcastic response about concerns raised by David Hankins, Louisiana Baptists’ executive, and Turner fails the diplomacy test.

Moreover:

Complicating matters for Ezell, the Great Commission Resurgence Task Force recommendations, approved by messengers to the SBC annual meeting in June, ripped apart the cooperative agreements NAMB has with state conventions without suggesting an alternative means for NAMB to cooperate with state conventions in the future. Ezell will have to figure out how those cooperative relationships will be redefined.

Good luck with that, and may the GCR cadre [force?] be with you, it seems.

Catholicism at the “tipping point”

Sheila O’Brien, a cradle Irish Catholic from Chicago cries out, “Excommunicate me please.”

Bryan Cones, managing editor of U.S. Catholic and a man not given to hasty pronouncements, responds:

Why should anyone care about Sheila O’Brien? She isn’t Anne Rice, after all. And her complaints about “an institution off the rails” will surprise no regular follower of the Catholic scene: an unresolved sex abuse crisis, Roman authorities who seem deaf to the aspirations of women and even punitive toward some, a lack of financial transparency. “How can we stay in a church whose leaders protect pedophiles?” O’Brien asks. “Yet how can we leave and relinquish our church to those very leaders?”

But I think who she is and the demographic profile she reflects matters as much as what she wrote: a cradle Irish Catholic, the granddaughter of immigrants, a professional woman, a wife and mother. In other words O’Brien represents the “thick middle” of the American Catholic Church. She’s active in her parish and still contributes to it (but writes “one-time bequest” on every check, she says, so nothing goes to the diocese). She’s a graduate of the University of Notre Dame Law School, and she even has a degree in pastoral theology. In other words, she’s Catholic with a capital C.

. . .

Catholicism has reached a “tipping point”–initiated by the crisis but perpetuated by other unresolved issues–after which thoughtful Catholics, despite their faith and commitment, finally start to give up.

Worst headline nominee

Virtue Online tells is, “Russian Metropolitan Blasts Anglican Communion’s Sexual Innovations.”

No, the Kama Sutra does not have an Anglican Communion version now. It isn’t at all what it sounds like.

It’s just a shrill headline on an overwritten but otherwise interesting story about debate over the ordination of women, same-sex marriage and the like.

What are you doing on the Internet?

The Pew Internet & American Life Project found that you’re probably sending or reading email (62%), using a search engine (49%) or getting the news (43%).

Social networking (38%) like twitter or Facebook is tied with just having fun(38%). Then there’s the ever popular checking the weather (34%), and everything else Pew measured in May is below 30%.

Except for total American adults who used the Internet on an average day (78%).