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kmaherali
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Post by kmaherali »

Will Graham lives a legacy
Evangelist's grandson has 'pastor's heart'

Graeme Morton
Calgary Herald


Sunday, September 30, 2007


He possesses the distinctive family profile, the names of his famous grandfather and father and that soft, southern accent that you just naturally assume an evangelist should come with.

But William Franklin Graham IV, better known as Will, is quietly making his own mark as a Christian leader after growing up in the substantial spiritual shadows of his grandpa Billy and dad Franklin.

Will Graham, 32, was in Red Deer this weekend leading the three-day Central Alberta Celebration crusade. It's part of his outreach preaching role as the assistant director of the Billy Graham Training Centre in Asheville, N.C.

Despite his distinguished religious lineage, Will said there was no pressure on him to follow in the footsteps of Franklin or Billy.

"If anything, my dad cautioned me from going into ministry just because of who I was," said Will, the eldest of Franklin and Jane Graham's four children.

"He left the decision up to me, only to do it if and when I felt called by God. We don't look at our ministry as a family business, where the oldest son is logically expected to take over from the father," Graham said.

Graham says he never went through a rebellious phase like his dad, who now oversees operations of the international Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.

"I was a good kid and a good student. God really protected me from the negative aspects of youth," says Will, who took theological training before becoming a pastor at a Baptist church near Raleigh, N.C. for almost eight years.

Will says his ministerial strengths tend to complement those of his father.

"My dad's a very good speaker, but he's also one of the best administrators I've ever seen, either in the secular or spiritual world," says Will.

"But I think God blessed me with a pastor's heart. Serving in an individual church like I did for years, you need a heart and compassion to work with people and help them out on a one-on-one basis."

Much of Will Graham's work these days is with youth ministry, preaching to a generation he says is rediscovering its relationship with God.

He sees the societal pendulum swinging back to a more conservative lifestyle for today's 20- and 30-somethings -- away from the sometimes extreme liberalism of young adults in his father's baby-boomer generation.

"I'm no expert, but I sense that Canada is more secular than the U.S., particularly the (U.S.) South. Evangelical Christianity is just woven into society's fabric back home. Canada is more like California in its attitudes. But when you see people up here commit their lives to Christ at the rallies, they embrace it with such enthusiasm," says Graham.

The death of his grandmother Ruth at age 87 on June 14th has left a hole in the family's collective heart.

"She had been suffering for a number of years. Her mind was still sharp to the end, but her body was slowly giving out," Graham recalls.

Ruth Graham died with her husband of 64 years and children by her side in the rustic log cabin she helped build.

"We tried to sing a hymn, but we just couldn't do it because we were all crying too hard," Graham says.

"Grandma loved watching a fire in her fireplace, but for the last couple of years she couldn't have one because she was on oxygen. After she died, we removed the oxygen equipment and lit a fire in her honour that night."

Will says his iconic, 88-year-old grandfather, simply called 'Daddy Bill' by his large clan, is bouncing back despite his own health issues.

"He misses her dearly, but he's doing really well these days," says Will.

"He's getting his chuckle back, which is really good to hear. He felt he had to be strong for Grandma, so it's something of a relief. And if you're a Christian like him, he knows he's going to see her again in Heaven."

Graham says his grandfather, spiritual counsellor to a generation of American presidents and one of the most recognizable people on the planet, is an intensely modest family man away from the public limelight.

"He never dominates a conversation. He always does much more listening than he does talking, which is a sign of wisdom in my books," says Will, who's always been close to Billy.

"I hope I have one-tenth of his humility."

Husband, father of three young children and third-generation preacher, Will Graham is a man who seems eminently comfortable in his own skin.

"I know I can't personally convert anyone to Christ; that's up to God," he says.

"All I can do is tell people about the message and the hope that Jesus brings to us all . . . that we're just pilgrims passing through this world -- that we're made for eternity."

gmorton@theherald.canwest.com

© The Calgary Herald 2007
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Post by kmaherali »

Priest bridges gap between East and West

Graeme Morton
Calgary Herald


Saturday, October 06, 2007


When Father Joe Pereira hears about the flap the western media made of the new book Come Be My Light, chronicling the private letters and thoughts of Mother Teresa, he simply shakes his head.

Newspaper pundits made front-page news out of the revelations that the beloved nun of Calcutta experienced deep moments of doubt about her faith during her long life of selfless service to the world's poor.

"Faith has always been a gift from God," says the Indian Roman Catholic priest and senior yoga practitioner during a recent visit to Calgary.

"People get pure faith mixed up with the rituals of the church. Faith is a lifelong journey and it's perfectly normal to go through moments of personal darkness. Anyone who says they have never questioned their faith . . . well, I have some serious doubts about that," says Pereira.

A longtime associate and friend of Mother Teresa, whom he simply, reverently calls "Mother," Pereira conducted yoga sessions during retreats held for her Missionaries of Charity sisters.

Pereira says he, too, experienced his own "dark night of the soul," when he seriously questioned whether he should remain a Catholic priest.

"But Mother had this unique energy which wiped out your doubt and negativity," Pereira recalled.

"She sat and prayed with me when I was in this turmoil and said to me, 'Don't quit. Jesus needs you. It may take some time to determine what you are called to do . . . but don't quit.' "

Since then, Pereira has become the managing trustee of the Kripa Foundation, where those with alcohol and chemical addictions and HIV/AIDS are being treated with a combination of techniques, including yoga, at more than 30 centres in 11 Indian cities.

While such a calling, like that of Mother Teresa, would seem to drain the batteries of caregivers' souls, Pereira says just the opposite plays out in daily life.

"The joy and the healing that one sees coming around helps to energize both the receiver and the giver," he notes.

Pereira says the western world and its collective Christian church needs to once again acknowledge that the physical human body is "a channel of grace and a pathway to our wholeness and holiness.

"We have an infinite potential to love our bodies back to health and life," he adds.

As someone who comfortably bridges the western and eastern worlds, Pereira believes spiritual life in the prosperous West is in dire need of revitalization.

"The Christian faith seems perfectly at home in an Indian ethos," Pereira says. "There are so many beautiful pathways to God. We need to keep looking at elements of faith in other religions, not just blindly think that ours in the only path."

Pereira says the Christian church in the West made a serious blunder when it pushed spiritual meditation and contemplation behind the walls of monasteries and away from the easy reach of the common man.

"I think there was a suspicion that experiential spirituality for the masses would be a threat to church dogma and its inner structures," says Pereira.

"But if the church is to become relevant again to people, to avoid dying, there is no hope until we revitalize the spirit of all religions."

gmorton@...

© The Calgary Herald 2007
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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/opini ... nted=print
October 7, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
A Nation of Christians Is Not a Christian Nation
By JON MEACHAM

JOHN McCAIN was not on the campus of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University last year for very long — the senator, who once referred to Mr. Falwell and Pat Robertson as “agents of intolerance,” was there to receive an honorary degree — but he seems to have picked up some theology along with his academic hood. In an interview with Beliefnet.com last weekend, Mr. McCain repeated what is an article of faith among many American evangelicals: “the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation.”

According to Scripture, however, believers are to be wary of all mortal powers. Their home is the kingdom of God, which transcends all earthly things, not any particular nation-state. The Psalmist advises believers to “put not your trust in princes.” The author of Job says that the Lord “shows no partiality to princes nor regards the rich above the poor, for they are all the work of his hands.” Before Pilate, Jesus says, “My kingdom is not of this world.” And if, as Paul writes in Galatians, “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female: for you are all one in Christ Jesus,” then it is difficult to see how there could be a distinction in God’s eyes between, say, an American and an Australian. In fact, there is no distinction if you believe Peter’s words in the Acts of the Apostles: “I most certainly believe now that God is not one to show partiality, but in every nation the man who fears him and does what is right is welcome to him.”

The kingdom Jesus preached was radical. Not only are nations irrelevant, but families are, too: he instructs those who would be his disciples to give up all they have and all those they know to follow him.

The only acknowledgment of religion in the original Constitution is a utilitarian one: the document is dated “in the year of our Lord 1787.” Even the religion clause of the First Amendment is framed dryly and without reference to any particular faith. The Connecticut ratifying convention debated rewriting the preamble to take note of God’s authority, but the effort failed.

A pseudonymous opponent of the Connecticut proposal had some fun with the notion of a deity who would, in a sense, be checking the index for his name: “A low mind may imagine that God, like a foolish old man, will think himself slighted and dishonored if he is not complimented with a seat or a prologue of recognition in the Constitution.” Instead, the framers, the opponent wrote in The American Mercury, “come to us in the plain language of common sense and propose to our understanding a system of government as the invention of mere human wisdom; no deity comes down to dictate it, not a God appears in a dream to propose any part of it.”

While many states maintained established churches and religious tests for office — Massachusetts was the last to disestablish, in 1833 — the federal framers, in their refusal to link civil rights to religious observance or adherence, helped create a culture of religious liberty that ultimately carried the day.

Thomas Jefferson said that his bill for religious liberty in Virginia was “meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindu, and infidel of every denomination.” When George Washington was inaugurated in New York in April 1789, Gershom Seixas, the hazan of Shearith Israel, was listed among the city’s clergymen (there were 14 in New York at the time) — a sign of acceptance and respect. The next year, Washington wrote the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, R.I., saying, “happily the government of the United States ... gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance. ... Everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

Andrew Jackson resisted bids in the 1820s to form a “Christian party in politics.” Abraham Lincoln buried a proposed “Christian amendment” to the Constitution to declare the nation’s fealty to Jesus. Theodore Roosevelt defended William Howard Taft, a Unitarian, from religious attacks by supporters of William Jennings Bryan.

The founders were not anti-religion. Many of them were faithful in their personal lives, and in their public language they evoked God. They grounded the founding principle of the nation — that all men are created equal — in the divine. But they wanted faith to be one thread in the country’s tapestry, not the whole tapestry.

In the 1790s, in the waters off Tripoli, pirates were making sport of American shipping near the Barbary Coast. Toward the end of his second term, Washington sent Joel Barlow, the diplomat-poet, to Tripoli to settle matters, and the resulting treaty, finished after Washington left office, bought a few years of peace. Article 11 of this long-ago document says that “as the government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion,” there should be no cause for conflict over differences of “religious opinion” between countries.

The treaty passed the Senate unanimously. Mr. McCain is not the only American who would find it useful reading.

Jon Meacham, the editor of Newsweek, is the author of “American Gospel” and “Franklin and Winston.”
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Post by kmaherali »

November 23, 2007
In God's Name
Megachurches Add Local Economy to Their Mission
By DIANA B. HENRIQUES and ANDREW W. LEHREN

In Anchorage early in October, the doors opened onto a soaring white canvas dome with room for a soccer field and a 400-meter track. Its prime-time hours are already rented well into 2011.

Nearby is a cold-storage facility leased to Sysco, a giant food-distribution corporation, and beside it is a warehouse serving a local contractor and another food service company.

The entrepreneur behind these businesses is the ChangePoint ministry, a 4,000-member nondenominational Christian congregation that helped develop and finance the sports dome. It has a partnership with Sysco’s landlord and owns the warehouse.

The church’s leaders say they hope to draw people to faith by publicly demonstrating their commitment to meeting their community’s economic needs.

“We want to turn people on to Jesus Christ through this process,” said Karl Clauson, who has led the church for more than eight years.

Among the nation’s so-called megachurches — those usually Protestant congregations with average weekly attendance of 2,000 or more — ChangePoint’s appetite for expansion into many kinds of businesses is hardly unique. An analysis by The New York Times of the online public records of just over 1,300 of these giant churches shows that their business interests are as varied as basketball schools, aviation subsidiaries, investment partnerships and a limousine service.

At least 10 own and operate shopping centers, and some financially formidable congregations are adding residential developments to their holdings. In one such elaborate project, LifeBridge Christian Church, near Longmont, Colo., plans a 313-acre development of upscale homes, retail and office space, a sports arena, housing for the elderly and church buildings.

Indeed, some huge churches, already politically influential, are becoming catalysts for local economic development, challenging a conventional view that churches drain a town financially by generating lower-paid jobs, taking land off the property-tax rolls and increasing traffic.

But the entrepreneurial activities of churches pose questions for their communities that do not arise with secular development.

These enterprises, whose sponsoring churches benefit from a variety of tax breaks and regulatory exemptions given to religious organizations in this country, sometimes provoke complaints from for-profit businesses with which they compete — as ChangePoint’s new sports center has in Anchorage.

Mixed-use projects, like shopping centers that also include church buildings, can make it difficult to determine what constitutes tax-exempt ministry work, which is granted exemptions from property and unemployment taxes, and what is taxable commerce.

And when these ventures succeed — when local amenities like shops, sports centers, theaters and clinics are all provided in church-run settings and employ mostly church members — people of other faiths may feel shut out of a significant part of a town’s life, some religion scholars said.

Precedents in History

Churches have long played an economic role. Medieval monasteries in Europe and Japan were typically hubs of commerce. In the United States, many wealthy denominations have long had passive investments in real estate. And churches, like labor unions and other nonprofit groups, have been involved in serving immigrants, the elderly and the poor.

But the expanding economic life of today’s giant churches is distinctive. First, they are active in less expected places: in largely flourishing suburbs and barely developed acreage far beyond cities’ beltways and in communities far from the Southern Bible Belt with which they are traditionally associated. And in most cases — as at ChangePoint in Anchorage — these churches say their economic activities are not just an expression of community service but, more important, an opportunity to evangelize. The sports dome, for example, is a way to draw the attention of young families to the church’s religious programs.

“We don’t look at this as economics; we look at it as our mission,” Pastor Clauson said.

Scott L. Thumma, a pioneer in the study of megachurches at the Hartford Institute for Religion Research at the Hartford Seminary in Connecticut, whose roster of churches was the basis for the Times analysis, said he has noticed churches that sponsor credit unions, issue credit cards and lend to small businesses.

Although community outreach is almost always cited as the primary motive, these economic initiatives may also indicate that giant churches are seeking sources of revenue beyond the collection plate to support their increasingly elaborate programs, suggested Mark A. Chaves, a religious sociologist at Duke University.

Investing Capital Assets

Also feeding this wave of economic activity is the growing supply of capital available to religious congregations.

The Evangelical Christian Credit Union in Brea, Calif., a pioneer in lending to churches and a proxy for this market shift, has seen its loan portfolio grow to $2.7 billion, from just $60 million in the early 1990s, said Mark A. Johnson, its executive vice president. Where bankers were once reluctant to lend to churches, the credit union now shares a market with some of the nation’s largest banks.

ChangePoint paid $1 million upfront and borrowed $23.5 million from a state economic development agency to buy a defunct seafood-packaging plant and warehouse out of foreclosure in July 2005. To do so, it formed a partnership with the for-profit owner of the cold-storage unit surrounded by the seafood plant’s land. An affiliated nonprofit is developing the sports dome with a gift of $4 million worth of church land. The church controls these entities directly or through board appointments, said Scott Merriner, executive pastor and a former McKinsey consultant.

Pastor Clauson acknowledged that a few local businessmen who own sports facilities have complained about the subsidized competition they face from The Dome, a nonprofit organization. It is an issue the church takes seriously, he said.

“We don’t want to be taking bread off of people’s tables,” the pastor said.

But the sports dome “is scratching such an enormous proverbial itch, there is no way we’re harming anyone,” he said, adding, “There is more than enough need to go around.”

Martin McGee, the Anchorage municipal assessor, acknowledged that the property poses an assessment challenge. Land and floor space used only by the church are exempt, he said, but the rest of the seafood plant site is taxable, and the tax treatment of the sports dome site is still under review.

The tax issues will be even more complex for a megachurch project in Charlotte, N.C. There, the University Park Baptist Church paid $11.5 million late last year to buy the Merchandise Mart, a half-million-square-foot office and exhibition space.

Some 57 percent of the space will ultimately be remodeled for church use, but the rest will bring new business activity to the neighborhood, said Claude R. Alexander Jr., the church’s lead pastor who also serves on the board of the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce.

His church has left its economic mark on the neighborhood it will leave behind when it moves to the mart. With its traffic added to that of another megachurch a few miles away, a once-quiet intersection between the two churches has recently seen the construction of fast-food outlets and other businesses.

The traffic is unlikely to ease when University Park moves. The other nearby megachurch, the Friendship Missionary Baptist Church, already has zoning approval for Friendship Village, a complex of shops, apartments, homes, offices and housing for the elderly on 108 acres off Charlotte’s beltway.

According to Tom Flynn, the economic development officer for Charlotte, University Park’s purchase of the Merchandise Mart already has prompted interest in older properties nearby.

A Complex Tax Challenge

The church, which formed a for-profit property management unit that also includes a small limousine service, envisions a mixture of commercial and religious uses at its new site — with its own share of the space beginning around 38 percent and rising over time.

What’s a poor tax assessor to do?

The entire site is currently taxable, said Alonzo Woods, the church’s director of operations. But when the church moves in, it will seek exemptions for areas used “strictly for church purposes.”

Churches are moving into residential development, as well. Windsor Village United Methodist Church, one of two churches that own shopping centers in Houston, is teaming up with a national home builder to develop more than 460 homes in the southwestern section of the city.

And in Dallas, The Potter’s House, a 30,000-member church established by Bishop T.D. Jakes, is the linchpin in an economic empire that includes Capella Park, a community of 266 homes.

Just how far-reaching the megachurch economy can become is clear at the First Assembly of God Church in Concord, a small community northeast of Charlotte. Under the umbrella of First Assembly Ministries are the church, with 2,500 in weekly attendance; a 180-bed assisted-living center; a private school for more than 800 students; a day-care center for 115 children; a 22-acre retreat center; and a food service — all nonprofit. In addition, there is WC Properties, a for-profit unit that manages the church’s shopping center, called Community at the Village, where a Subway outlet, an eye-care shop and other businesses share space with church programs that draw traffic to the mall.

Doug Rieder, the church business administrator, said WC Properties files a federal tax return and pays property taxes on the commercial space at the mall.

But Mr. Rieder acknowledged the difficulty of allocating space, staff time and expenses to the appropriate tax category. “We’re very intertwined — it gets tough day to day,” he said adding, “I have to constantly ask myself whether I am accurately allocating our costs.”

Concord was delighted to have First Assembly as the new landlord at the mall once anchored by Wal-Mart.

“That’s a very crucial crossroads for the city,” said W. Brian Hiatt, the city manager. “And the church has been a great partner.”

Another contribution the church makes to the city is a free daylong celebration it holds on Independence Day, complete with fireworks.

Mr. Hiatt said no one seemed to find it awkward for a church to conduct the community’s celebration marking the birth of a country committed to separation of church and state.

“It was a very positive event,” he said.

Mr. Rieder, the church business manager, paused when asked whether people of other faiths would have felt comfortable at the event.

“We try not to discriminate in doing community service,” he said. “There are Muslims and other non-Christians here, of course. And we do want to convert them, no doubt about it — that’s our mission. We don’t discriminate, but we do evangelize.”

The same quandary confronts Pastor Clauson in Anchorage. “There is nothing inherently alienating about what we’re doing economically,” he said. “An Orthodox Jewish youngster or a conservative Muslim child encountering our programs would find zero intimidation.”

Nor does he want his community to become divided along religious lines, he said. But at the same time, “we definitely want to use these efforts as an open door to the entity that we feel is the author and creator of abundant life — Jesus.”

He added, “It’s a tough balancing act.”

There is a related multimedia linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/23/busin ... ?th&emc=th
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Post by kmaherali »

A movie won't destroy church beliefs

Naomi Lakritz
Calgary Herald

Thursday, November 29, 2007

Three cheers for Calgary's Bishop Fred Henry for refusing to get fussed enough to join the protests against The Golden Compass. The movie, which opens Dec. 7, allegedly carries an anti-Christian, atheistic, New Age theme.

Henry says he has bigger fish to fry, like helping the homeless. He's right. Catholicism survived the Reformation -- it will certainly be able to survive an over-hyped post-millennium movie.

I have no plans to see this movie, not because I'm afraid it will drive me into that atheistic camp whose gates are guarded by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, but because it doesn't interest me.

It's the story of a 12-year-old who has to rescue a friend from the clutches of a kidnapper. Someone, possibly a publicist who got paid big bucks to create a gimmicky slogan, has called the film's pubescent heroine a New Age Eve.

Sounds too tiresome for me to waste my time on. That recycled plot of young kids foiling kidnappers to save their friends was old back in the '60s when it formed the core of practically every other Jonny Quest cartoon episode.

If the Christian groups who are upset about the film and are calling for a boycott don't want their children to see it, then they don't have to go to the movie theatre. Who's forcing them?

And if other people want to take their kids to see this film, why is it any of the protesters' business?

These folks are getting their knickers in a proverbial knot for nothing. The reality is that any subtle anti-biblical nuances in the movie will go right over a kid's head; he or she will see the movie literally as an adventure story.

Children do not have the sophistication to read all this other stuff into a movie; they haven't lived long enough to develop those kinds of thought processes. That's the realm of adults.

It's the bigger picture -- no pun intended -- that's disturbing. It's this notion that children must be shielded from dissenting ideas rather than exposed to them so that they can learn to use their critical faculties and think for themselves.

The mania about children's physical safety that sees toddlers on tricycles decked out in full combat gear of helmet, knee and elbow pads -- in case they topple from a height of scarcely more than six inches onto the sidewalk -- extends to the mind. It isn't enough to zealously pad the corners of the physical world; the world in which the developing mind dwells must be equally padded.

Do these protesters think children will go through life and never hear of atheism? Will they forbid their kids to study Greek and Roman mythology with its pantheon of gods? Plato was from the pre-Christian era; should kids never hear about him?

Christianity is hardly on such shaky ground that a movie will cause the collapse of the tenets of this 2,000 year-old faith. Get a grip, parents. As Henry says: "There are much more important issues than some silly little movie."

Amen, Bishop.

nlakritz@...
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Post by kmaherali »

Give without gospel lesson

Darren Lund
For the Calgary Herald


Sunday, December 02, 2007


Giving gifts during the Christmas season is an important act of generosity and kindness that cuts across every faith community. As a parent of two school-aged children, I'm always looking for meaningful ways to foster empathy and kindness in our kids, so it's no surprise that so many people find the Operation Christmas Child shoebox campaign so appealing.

Those shoeboxes that so many Canadians -- including thousands of Calgarians -- stuff with small gifts (and the suggested $7 donation) for underprivileged children overseas offer us an easy way to feel good for the holidays.

A question, however, is how the Samaritan's Purse ministry -- whose primary goal is religious conversion -- uses their gifts. Just as importantly, what do these programs reveal about our view of international development?

Our local Calgary Catholic School District has rejected the shoebox program outright, and a number of our local EMS workers have raised objections about their organization's use of public ambulances and helicopters to support this massive annual fundraiser. What concerns could they have with this program? How suitable is this program for our public schools and other agencies?

A quick visit to the Samaritan's Purse website -- www.samaritanspurse.org -- offers some answers: Recipients of the shoeboxes in more than 100 developing nations -- most of them non-Christian -- must register to receive them, Christian literature is distributed with each box, and followup ministry and "discipleship" programs take place wherever allowable. Their website reports, "Local believers follow up with evangelistic programs, and many precious boys and girls later receive Jesus as their Saviour."

It may strike some of the program's strongest supporters that genuine generosity is not the purpose for the shoebox. A Samaritan's Purse video explains: "It's not just a big gift. It's not just humanitarian aid. It is a tool for evangelism."

A volunteer in Liberia, where most people follow traditional African faiths, reports, "The children took their gift boxes home to their parents . . . this was the first time their children had received such items. Upon hearing the Christmas message, the children received Christ immediately, hence turning their backs on idol worship."

"Our outreach to these children and their families may begin with a shoebox gift," says Samaritan's Purse CEO Franklin Graham, "but our ultimate goal is to open doors to world evangelization."

Graham, son of famous minister Billy Graham, has referred to Islam as "a very evil and wicked religion," and describes "India, with its hundreds of millions of people locked in the darkness of Hinduism . . . bound by Satan's power."

More recently, Graham announced a plan to convert all children to his version of Christianity, and it all starts at our local public schools: "I want to see at least one child in every public school in America trained as a witness for Jesus Christ . . . ."

Local media and enthusiastic sponsors typically ignore the proselytizing purpose of Samaritan's Purse and their shoeboxes, focusing instead on how good it feels to pack them.

Many also avoid tougher questions about larger social issues that the campaign ignores: How can sending a box of plastic goods to the children in impoverished communities help the local businesses and tradespeople? How would this combat poverty and hunger? How does it honour local cultures and faiths? As foreign aid, it lacks meaningful, long-term development impact.

As Rev. Giles Fraser writes: "Schools and churches that are getting their children involved in Operation Christmas Child need to be aware of the agenda their participation is helping to promote.

"There is, of course, a huge emotional hit in wrapping up a shoebox for a Christmas child. But if we are to teach our children properly about giving, we must wean them off the feel-good factor . . . We will need to have some rather grown-up conversations with our children if we are to explain some of these things.

But that would be time better spent than wrapping up a shoebox. We must get over our fondness for charity and develop a thirst for justice."

Public schools must remain neutral on religious propagation, while continuing to offer ample opportunity for sharing and learning about the wide range of religious traditions and celebrations.

I encourage parents to explain to their children what's wrong with Graham's use of their shoeboxes. Please consider sending your collected supplies and toys to local relief agencies, and your cash donations to reputable aid projects that do not include religious conversion. Showing respect for the views of others may be our best hope for peace and justice in the world.

Darren Lund is an associate professor in the faculty of education at the University of Calgary.

© The Calgary Herald 2007
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Post by kmaherali »

US Church splits over gay rights

The ordination of gay Bishop Gene Robinson divided Anglicans
A Californian diocese has voted to become the first to break away from the US Episcopal Church in protest at its support for gays in the Church.
Delegates of the San Joaquin diocese in Fresno voted 173-22 to secede.

It follows years of disagreement with Church authorities triggered by the consecration of a gay bishop in 2003.

The Episcopal Church is the US wing of the 77m-member Anglican Communion, which is threatened by a deep split between conservatives and liberals.

The Episcopal Church says that in recent years 32 of its 7,600 congregations had left, with another 23 voting to leave but not taking the final step.

San Joaquin is the first of the Church's 110 dioceses to complete the split.

In a later vote, the diocese accepted an invitation to join a conservative South American Anglican congregation.

'Contrary to teachings'

"This is the first time, I believe, that a diocese has finally said 'enough' in terms of the liberal theology of the Episcopal Church," said Bishop John-David Schofield of the San Joaquin diocese ahead of the vote.

Anglican leaders in many parts of the world were angered by the consecration of openly-gay Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire in 2003.

Conservative churchgoers believe active homosexuality is contrary to the Anglican Communion's teachings, which are rooted in the bible.

However, liberal Anglicans have argued that biblical teachings on justice and inclusion should take precedence.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7134835.stm
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December 19, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
The Vatican’s Relative Truth
By JOHN L. ALLEN Jr.

POPE BENEDICT XVI has offered a couple of recent previews of what’s likely to be his core message to the United Nations next April, the projected highlight of his first visit to the United States. Last Tuesday, the pontiff released the text of his annual statement for the Vatican’s World Day of Peace, raising typical papal concerns like poverty and disarmament, but also a defense of the family based on heterosexual marriage and, in the section reflecting Benedict’s budding environmentalism, a reminder of human supremacy over the animal kingdom.

Ten days earlier in Rome, Pope Benedict offered a more targeted message in a meeting with Catholic nongovernmental groups that work with the United Nations, delivering a stern warning against the “bitter fruits” of “relativistic logic” and a “refusal to admit the truth about man and his dignity.” Given the titanic battles the Vatican has waged against certain United Nations agencies over abortion and birth control, his comments were quickly spun by the Italian press as a major papal “attack” ahead of next year’s General Assembly address.

But if the pope’s words have fed expectations of a “High Noon”-style showdown, they are likely to be dashed. Benedict had no intention of making an anti-United Nations jeremiad. Like every pope since the birth of the United Nations in 1945, Benedict supports robust global governance, in a fashion that has long bewildered neoconservative critics of the United Nations in the United States and elsewhere. If there was anything remarkable in what he said, it’s only that the Vatican’s public-relations crew still hasn’t found a way to keep the pope from making cosmetic missteps that distract attention from his message.

While the Vatican may have its differences with United Nations agencies over sex, it also sees the organization as the lone realistic possibility for putting a human face on international politics and economics — what Pope John Paul II called a “globalization of solidarity.”

Moreover, Benedict undeniably has a point about relativism. From China to Iran to Zimbabwe, it’s common for authoritarian regimes to argue that rights like freedom of the press, religion and dissent represent Western — or even Anglo-American — traditions. If human rights are to be protected in a 21st century increasingly shaped by non-Western actors like China and the so-called Shiite axis from Lebanon to Central Asia, then a belief in objective truth grounded in universal human nature is critical. That’s hardly just a Catholic concern, but no one on the global scene is making the argument with the clarity of Benedict XVI.

Part of the problem is that so far, this cerebral pope has a track record of blurring such compelling arguments during his biggest turns on stage. When he visited Auschwitz in May 2006, for example, he offended some Jews by asserting that the Nazis tried to destroy Christianity too. Four months later, he set off a firestorm among Muslims with a lecture at the University of Regensburg by quoting a 14th-century Byzantine emperor to the effect that Muhammad brought “things only evil and inhuman,” such as “his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” And in Brazil last May, the pope incensed indigenous people in Latin America by suggesting that Christianity was not imposed on them.

In each case, Benedict was actually trying to make a deeper point worth hearing. In Auschwitz, his contention was that objective truth grounded in God is the only bulwark against the blind will to power; his Regensburg address was devoted to reason and faith, arguing that reason shorn of faith becomes nihilism, while faith without reason ends in fanaticism and violence; and in Brazil, he argued that since Christ embraces all humanity, he cannot be foreign to anyone’s spiritual experience.

Those ideas, however, were overshadowed by a few throwaway phrases that betray a worrying insensitivity to how unfamiliar audiences are likely to hear what he says. One would think that by now the lesson would have been learned, but all evidence is to the contrary. While it was intended to strike a tone of sympathy and common human concern, the speech to the nongovernmental groups instead came off as a screed.

Benedict’s trip to the United Nations in April will be his most important voyage to date, and his best opportunity to address the community of nations. He clearly has something valuable to say, a message that focuses on what he has termed a “dictatorship of relativism” menacing not just the Catholic Church or institutional religion, but everyone, especially the most vulnerable. The question is whether he’ll be able to find a language to ensure that what he pitches is also what people catch.

At this stage, the odds that he’ll succeed seem, well, only relatively good.

John L. Allen Jr. is the senior correspondent for The National Catholic Reporter and author of “The Rise of Benedict XVI.”
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Pope prays to rid church of pedophiles

Herald News Services


Monday, January 07, 2008


Pope Benedict has instructed Roman Catholics to pray "in perpetuity" to cleanse the Church of pedophile clergy. All dioceses, parishes, monasteries, convents and seminaries will be expected to organize continuous daily prayers to express penitence and to purify the clergy.

Vatican officials said that every day each parish or institution should designate a person or group to pray that the Church rids itself of the scandal of sexual abuse by clergy. Alternatively, churches within the same diocese could share the duty. Prayer would take place in one parish for 24 hours, then move to another parish.

Vatican watchers said that there was no known precedent for global prayer on a specific issue of this kind. There are about one billion Roman Catholics worldwide.

© The Calgary Herald 2008
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Protestants gain ground in Brazil
Traditional Catholicism eroding

Graeme Morton
Calgary Herald


Sunday, January 13, 2008


The tropical winds of spiritual change continue to blow through Brazil, says a Mount Royal College religious studies instructor just back from spending more than two years in the giant South American nation.

Steven Engler says the continued rise of evangelical, Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal churches is eroding the dominant position the Roman Catholic Church has held for centuries.

While Brazil remains the world's largest Catholic community, census figures show those identifying themselves as Catholics fell from 83 to 74 per cent between 1991 and 2000.

In that same decade, the Pentecostal sector of Brazil's population of 184-million jumped from six to 10.6 per cent.

"A lot of Brazilians, in many cases the poor in the favelas (shanty towns), are finding the Pentecostal message, the infusion of the spirit in worship, to be a very powerful experience," says Engler, who served as visiting professor at the Pontificia Universidade Catolicu de Sao Paulo while conducting his own research.

"The rise of Pentecostalism is a global phenomenon. It'll be interesting to watch in the coming years if it continues to grow at a rapid pace or eventually plateaus in countries like Brazil."

Engler, whose Brazilian-born wife and daughter will join him in Calgary later this year, says a charismatic wing is growing within the Brazilian Catholic church as a response to the surge in other denominations.

"The charismatic services are more upbeat, less structured than the traditional Catholic liturgy, and there's an emphasis on elements such as exorcism," notes Engler.

Engler says another characteristic of Brazilian faith life is syncretism, a philosophy where people take elements from a number of different religions to create what's essentially a personal belief system.

"A Brazilian who's recorded as Catholic on the census may often also adopt elements of, for example, Buddhism, spiritualism or one of the Afro-Brazilian religions like Umbanda or Candomble into their daily spiritual life," says Engler.

"It seems to be a 'whatever works' philosophy, an openness to other religious concepts that you don't find as frequently in other parts of the world."

While many North Americans have a stereotypical image of Brazil as an exotic culture of soccer wizards, sun-drenched girls from Ipanema and sexually charged dances, Engler says the culture is actually more conservative than Canada's.

The percentage of Brazilians reporting "no religion" on their census form has climbed to 7.5 per cent, but that's still less than half of Canada's 2001 census rate of 16 per cent.

"Traditional gender roles are also more entrenched than in North America and there's a fair level of homophobia," Engler says.

And while there are not the same close links between faith and politics in Brazil as there are in recent American elections, Engler says, "You're not going to get elected down there if you're not religious."

Engler split his time between Sao Paulo, the largest city in the Southern Hemisphere at more than 15 million, and Sao Joao da Boa Vista, a modest-sized town by Brazilian standards, with about 90,000 residents.

"In Sao Paulo, I've never seen so many rich people and so many desperately poor people in the same place," Engler says.

An indelible trademark of the Brazilian national character, he adds, is the depth and importance of personal relationships and family ties.

"Social networks and extended families, which can include friends and neighbours, are highly prized.

"From the outside, it can look like corruption and nepotism when it's applied to sectors like business or politics, but it makes sense from a grassroots level," Engler notes.

"Especially in the favelas, everything is fluid, everything is negotiable."

Since returning to Calgary on Jan. 2, Engler says this boom town of one million looks relatively deserted compared to his home for the last two-plus years.

"The streets (here) are so wide, there's so much open space and Calgarians are quite reserved," says Engler, who plans to publish more academic papers and continue his research on spirituality within the Americas in the future.

"You're much more likely to strike up a conversation with a stranger in Brazil."

gmorton@theherald.canwest.com

© The Calgary Herald 2008
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February 3, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Evangelicals a Liberal Can Love
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

At a New York or Los Angeles cocktail party, few would dare make a pejorative comment about Barack Obama’s race or Hillary Clinton’s sex. Yet it would be easy to get away with deriding Mike Huckabee’s religious faith.

Liberals believe deeply in tolerance and over the last century have led the battles against prejudices of all kinds, but we have a blind spot about Christian evangelicals. They constitute one of the few minorities that, on the American coasts or university campuses, it remains fashionable to mock.

Scorning people for their faith is intrinsically repugnant, and in this case it also betrays a profound misunderstanding of how far evangelicals have moved over the last decade. Today, conservative Christian churches do superb work on poverty, AIDS, sex trafficking, climate change, prison abuses, malaria and genocide in Darfur.

Bleeding-heart liberals could accomplish far more if they reached out to build common cause with bleeding-heart conservatives. And the Democratic presidential candidate (particularly if it’s Mr. Obama, to whom evangelicals have been startlingly receptive) has a real chance this year of winning large numbers of evangelical voters.

“Evangelicals are going to vote this year in part on climate change, on Darfur, on poverty,” said Jim Wallis, the author of a new book, “The Great Awakening,” which argues that the age of the religious right has passed and that issues of social justice are rising to the top of the agenda. Mr. Wallis says that about half of white evangelical votes will be in play this year.

A recent CBS News poll found that the single issue that white evangelicals most believed they should be involved in was fighting poverty. The traditional issue of abortion was a distant second, and genocide was third.

Look, I don’t agree with evangelicals on theology or on their typically conservative views on taxes, health care or Iraq. Self-righteous zealots like Pat Robertson have been a plague upon our country, and their initial smugness about AIDS (which Jerry Falwell described as “God’s judgment against promiscuity”) constituted far grosser immorality than anything that ever happened in a bathhouse. Moralizing blowhards showed more compassion for embryonic stem cells than for the poor or the sick, and as recently as the 1990s, evangelicals were mostly a constituency against foreign aid.

Yet that has turned almost 180 degrees. Today, many evangelicals are powerful internationalists and humanitarians — and liberals haven’t awakened to the transformation. The new face of evangelicals is somebody like the Rev. Rick Warren, the California pastor who wrote “The Purpose Driven Life.”

Mr. Warren acknowledges that for most of his life he wasn’t much concerned with issues of poverty or disease. But on a visit to South Africa in 2003, he came across a tiny church operating from a dilapidated tent — yet sheltering 25 children orphaned by AIDS.

“I realized they were doing more for the poor than my entire megachurch,” Mr. Warren said, with cheerful exaggeration. “It was like a knife in the heart.” So Mr. Warren mobilized his vast Saddleback Church to fight AIDS, malaria and poverty in 68 countries. Since then, more than 7,500 members of his church have paid their own way to volunteer in poor countries — and once they see the poverty, they immediately want to do more.

“Almost all of my work is in the third world,” Mr. Warren said. “I couldn’t care less about politics, the culture wars. My only interest is to get people to care about Darfurs and Rwandas.”

Helene Gayle, the head of CARE, said evangelicals “have made some incredible contributions” in the struggle against global poverty. “We don’t give them credit for the changes they’ve made,” she added. Fred Krupp, the president of Environmental Defense, said, “Many evangelical leaders have been key to taking the climate issue across the cultural divide.”

It’s certainly fair to criticize Catholic leaders and other conservative Christians for their hostility toward condoms, a policy that has gravely undermined the fight against AIDS in Africa. But while robust criticism is fair, scorn is not.

In parts of Africa where bandits and warlords shoot or rape anything that moves, you often find that the only groups still operating are Doctors Without Borders and religious aid workers: crazy doctors and crazy Christians. In the town of Rutshuru in war-ravaged Congo, I found starving children, raped widows and shellshocked survivors. And there was a determined Catholic nun from Poland, serenely running a church clinic.

Unlike the religious right windbags, she was passionately “pro-life” even for those already born — and brave souls like her are increasingly representative of religious conservatives. We can disagree sharply with their politics, but to mock them underscores our own ignorance and prejudice.

I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground. On the blog, you can also see readers setting me straight about previous columns and read posts from guest bloggers, including a Chicago teacher, Will Okun, and an aid worker in Bangladesh, Nicki Bennett.
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March 3, 2008
Op-Ed Contributor
Trials of the Saints
By JAMES MARTIN

LAST month, while Americans celebrated the feast days of two secular saints, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, the Vatican issued a surprising new directive calling for greater rigor in its own saint-making process. Published by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints, the 45-page document called for “strict adherence” to existing rules, in response to some concerns that the canonization procedures had been watered down over the last two decades.

Such criticisms are only half correct: the Vatican’s rules are actually far more rigorous than many may suspect. Still, the church could increase its credibility even further in this department with a few additional benchmarks.

During his long pontificate, Pope John Paul II beatified 1,340 people and canonized almost 500 — more than all his predecessors combined since the current procedures were introduced in 1588. John Paul also waived the traditional five-year waiting period required before the process, or “cause,” could begin for Mother Teresa, who died in 1997.

The Vatican’s new document says that some procedures had become “problematic.” As a result, local bishops are now instructed to exercise “greater sobriety and rigor” in determining which saints-to-be they send for approval to Rome. Candidates should not be promoted by small interest groups; rather, their reputation for holiness must be “spontaneous and not artificially procured.” Officials vetting the cases must be impartial, and not omit negative aspects of a person’s life. And the examination of the miracles required for canonization must make use of “all clinical and technical means.”

While Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul may already be saints in the public mind, for example, the Vatican takes a longer view. Canonization has long been an arduous procedure, which includes gathering evidence for a life of heroic sanctity, interviewing contemporaries and examining a person’s writings for any hint of unorthodoxy. One medically certifiable miracle is required for beatification (when the person is declared “blessed”), and one more for canonization. Only then will the pope declare a person a saint and worthy of “public veneration.”

Even the standard for verifying miracles, arguably the aspect of the process that causes the most eye-rolling among agnostics and atheists, is famously strict. The Congregation draws on teams of doctors (not all of them Catholic) who assiduously rule out any other cause for a healing. Typically, the person cured will have prayed for the saint’s intercession. Any miracle must be instantaneous, permanent and medically verifiable. Those “cured” cannot simply have improved, cannot relapse and cannot have sought medical care (or at least must have given it up well before the miracle). Consequently, the verification process can take decades, as doctors monitor the stricken person’s progress.

Vatican standards for miracles are high not simply because the church is seeking irrefutable evidence of divine intervention, but because the church has much to lose if a miracle is later debunked. The Oxford historian Ruth Harris, for example, uncovered evidence of several early “healings” at the French shrine of Lourdes that were widely held to be miracles by the local populace, but which were rejected by exacting church officials worried about a rush to judgment.

The Vatican understands that any canonization procedures that seem rushed, biased or faulty would invite not only public derision, but also the suspicion of the faithful today and in centuries to come. Any whiff of fast-tracking could decrease respect for a new saint. That may be one reason Pope Benedict XVI did not accede to the wishes of the crowds at John Paul’s funeral in April 2005, who loudly called for “Santo subito!” — “Sainthood now!” Benedict’s implicit response was, “Not yet.”

But to combat ingrained and increasing skepticism, the church could go even further. First, officials could resolve that they will continue to adhere to the five-year waiting period, no matter how popular the candidate might be at death. Second, while the desire to recognize sanctity across the globe is laudable and serves as a reminder that holiness knows no boundaries, the church could avoid bumping up someone in line because the person hails from a country with relatively few saints.

Finally, the church could avoid favoring (or disfavoring) candidates out of any political implications. Archbishop Óscar Romero of San Salvador, who was murdered while celebrating mass in 1980 and who spoke out in defense of the embattled poor, seems to fit the classic definition of a martyr. Yet for many years his cause seemed to have stalled, probably because of his affinity for left-leaning “liberation theology,” which is highly unpopular in Rome.

Catholics should welcome the Vatican’s insistence on increased rigor in its saint-making guidelines. The redoubled commitment to an impartial judging of a saint’s life demonstrates that the church does not “create” saints as much as it simply recognizes them. Likewise, its renewed reminders that, for the church, miracles are serious scientific business, may make it more difficult for agnostics and atheists to disbelieve.

And easier for believers to believe.

James Martin is a Jesuit priest and the author of “My Life With the Saints.”
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Evangelicals shift toward mainstream concerns
Douglas Todd, Vancouver Sun
Published: Saturday, March 08, 2008

It may be time for liberals to take an evangelical to lunch.
There are signs the table talk would no longer be dominated by clashes over abortion, homosexuality and the leadership of Stephen Harper and George W. Bush.

Recent trends suggest evangelicals -- who are key to the U.S. presidential race and influential in Canadian politics -- are becoming less single-minded and more drawn to issues once pressed by liberals.
In the U.S., polls show many white evangelicals are growing almost as disillusioned with Bush as other Americans, feeling he has embarrassed them on politlcal ethics and the environment.

A 2008 lunchtime chat with American evangelicals would now find many more interested in the economy, the environment and poverty than the perennial wedge issues of abortion and same-sex marriage.
White evangelicals, who make up one out of four Americans and once steadfastly supported the Republicans, have always been more aggressive than Canadian evangelicals, who comprise less than 10 per cent of the Great White North.

But one of the signs of changing winds came last fall when a CBS News poll found U.S. white evangelicals were starting to rank poverty and health care as the nation's most important issues.

A Beliefnet poll followed, with 85 per cent of white evangelicals naming the economy and "cleaning up government" as very important issues. That compared to just 61 per cent who highlighted ending abortion and 49 per cent who felt it most crucial to "stop gay marriage."

In his new book, The Great Awakening, progressive evangelical Jim Wallis maintains the age of the Religious Right has passed and social justice issues now top the evangelical agenda.

For instance, big-name evangelical leader Rick Warren, author of the multimillion-selling A Purpose Driven Life, is these days devoting his considerable power to helping the poor of Africa.

Warren is also one of many young evangelical leaders who have clashed with hard-liners such as James Dobson, of Focus on the Family, choosing to emphasize protecting the environment over abortion.

At the same time, polls suggest evangelical support for the Republicans has waned. Forty-one per cent of white evangelicals, according to Beliefnet, continue to declare themselves Republican -- but 30 per cent now say they're Democrats.

And the respected Pew Research Center found, even though in 2002 almost nine out of 10 white evangelicals under age 30 supported Bush, their approval rate has plummeted to 42 per cent (though it's still above Bush's poor overall approval rating of 33 per cent).

Why are many evangelicals shifting?

Part of it has to do with the Bush legacy, which has Americans facing a recession, high gas prices, a quagmire in Iraq and sex and ethics scandals involving prominent Republican politicians and top evangelical leaders.

There are also larger global trends at work -- including religious pluralism.
Even though many old-line U.S. evangelicals still foster the delusion that their country can and must become a "Christian" country, more evangelicals are accepting that people of different worldviews have to learn to live side by side.

A February Pew poll showed white evangelicals are not growing in the U.S., while the non-religious are. Meanwhile, liberal white mainline Protestants, liberal black Protestants, Catholics, Jews and Muslims remain significant in size.

The most intriguing Pew poll finding was that 44 per cent of Americans have changed their religion; suggesting Americans may be enthusiastic about faith, but not that loyal to any leader.

Lest, however, any bleeding-hearts become overly optimistic about the changing face of evangelicalism, there are cautions. Even though stalwarts like Dobson have previously denounced Republican presidential candidate John McCain, the Arizona senator this week was endorsed by a more militant evangelical, John Hagee.

Hagee is an anti-Catholic televangelist who refers to the Vatican as "the Great Whore." He welcomes a Christian war with Islam that will usher in the cataclysmic Last Judgment.

Hagee also has a Canadian connection: He works with Charles McVety, head of Canada's Family Action Coalition, who last week claimed to be the one who convinced Harper's Conservative government to stop funding films that had too much sex and violence.

And just in case liberals begin thinking their lunches with evangelicals will be utterly devoid of controversy, they might also remember that before the 2000 U.S. election most American evangelicals did not much like Bush.
But Bush groomed himself as the born-again candidate by appearing on numerous stages with evangelical leaders (as McCain has started to do) -- thus winning enough evangelicals to snag that contentious election from Al Gore.
The rest is history. Bon appetit.

To reach Douglas Todd, go to: www.vancouversun.com/thesearch
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QATAR: A church cross rises in the Persian Gulf

Muslims in the Middle East have been criticized for insisting on religious freedom in the West while refusing to grant it in their own countries. But a reform-minded leader of the kingdom of Qatar is trying to change that perception.

Thanks to a 2005 decision by Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, Catholics recently completed construction of a church in Doha, Qatar’s capital. It's the first church in the Persian Gulf state since the 7th century arrival of Islam.

This is controversial. The majority of Qatar’s citizens belong to the puritanical Wahhabi school of Islam that inspires Osama bin Laden and is prevalent in Saudi Arabia as well.

And, of course, the construction of St. Mary’s Church has stirred up debate among the peninsula’s Muslims.

On the one hand, conservatives cite a saying attributed to the prophet Mohammed that reads: "There shall be no two religions in the Arabian Peninsula."

Indeed, some made harsh comments about the church, which is set to be inaugurated this weekend. "The cross should not be raised in the sky of Qatar, nor should bells toll in Doha,” wrote columnist Lahdan Bin Eisa Al Muhanadi in the Doha-based daily Al Arab.

But the church is not without its supporters, even among Qatar’s religious experts. "Places of worship for various religions are a fundamental human right guaranteed by Islam," Abdul Hamid Ansari, the former dean of the Islamic law college at Qatar University, told Agence France-Presse.
The church has also sparked hot debates on blogs. On the blog of Radio Netherlands, one commentator, who said he was from the U.S., praised the decision:

This makes me feel proud to be a Muslim. Freedom of religion. This is what Islam is about.

The $7-million church will provide a place of worship for those who have been practicing their faith mostly at home. The complex will include conference facilities, living accommodations, a library and a cafe.
As in other oil-rich Gulf States, migrants and guest workers make up most of Qatar’s population. According to the U.S. State Department’s International Religious Freedom Report of 2006, the majority of these workers are Christians coming from different parts of the world.

Its population is an estimated 900,000, of whom approximately 200,000 are believed to be citizens.... The Christian community is composed of Indians, Sri Lankans, Filipinos, Africans, Europeans, Arabs and Americans. It includes Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Coptic, Anglican and other Protestant denominations.

The church will welcome worshipers in time for Easter Sunday services March 23.
— Davigh Karamanoukian in Beirut
Photo: The first church in Doha, Qatar, has sparked a debate in the tiny, oil-rich gulf state. It's set to open in time for Easter. Credit: AFP / STR
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A poignant and striking reflection of the Easter occasion! One can find many parallels in our history.

Easter's spark of hope shines brightest in abject darkness

Nigel Hannaford
Calgary Herald


Saturday, March 22, 2008


Light seems to shine brighter as the darkness gathers. Perhaps it's not so surprising, then, that the horror of Auschwitz is here and there illuminated by a brilliance of human goodness that continues to astonish, 63 years after the concentration camp was evacuated and abandoned to advancing Soviet forces.

But where could such a spark come from, as the tale of camp inmate Father Maximilian Kolbe? It is worth retelling not only to celebrate his courage, but at this time of the year for the sake of the parallels it supplies to what Christ accomplished through His Easter death and resurrection.

It was 1941, less than a year after the Nazi forces occupying Poland had established the Auschwitz camp to hold political prisoners,(and before it achieved lasting infamy as a death camp). Kolbe, then 47, was an overachiever, and passionately committed to the work of the Roman Catholic Church. He had already accomplished more in 20 years than most people could in three lifetimes, having founded a friary near Warsaw, another in Japan and a radio station. He started a periodical in which he inveighed mightily against Communism, Zionism, capitalism and the Freemasons, and promoted the Virgin Mary.

And he was also a keen ham radio operator.

The friary near Warsaw was a large affair, and by the time the war broke out in 1939 was home to more than 700 friars. It was here that Kolbe's defiance of the Nazis led to his arrest, and ultimately his death.

As the Gestapo, the much feared German secret police, widened its dragnet for Poles likely to resist the occupation, Kolbe began hiding those who sought sanctuary there. Ultimately, he gave shelter to more than 3,000 people, including 2,000 Jews. Meanwhile, he used his radio to get word of conditions under the occupation to the outside world.

Not surprisingly, he was arrested and in May 1941 arrived at Auschwitz. Now, he had just weeks to live.

Like other inmates, he was put to work. But he also began a priestly ministry to those around him, hearing confession and doing what he could to console them, urging them to pray for those who ill-used them, and preaching -- even in these grim surroundings -- the gospel of love, forgiveness and reconciliation.

Doubtless, the words sounded as empty to some, as had the same message centuries before to those who would send Christ to the cross.

However, just as Christ's willingness to die to give the humanity He loved a way to reconcile with God, so Kolbe's words would be forever vindicated when he, too, laid down his life.

In July 1941, a prisoner escaped from the barracks where Kolbe slept. To deter other attempts, the camp deputy commandant -- Karl Fritsch --

ordered 10 randomly chosen men to be locked in a room and starved to death.

In the course of this ghastly lottery, a former Polish officer, Franciszek Gajowniczek, was chosen for death. Hearing him cry out in anguish over the prospects for his wife and children, Kolbe stepped forward and volunteered to take his place. Apparently to the surprise of those in the room, Fritsch accepted his offer, and spared Gajowniczek.

All 10 died, Kolbe lasting three weeks before being killed by lethal injection.

It would be pleasing to record an immense flowering of good from all this, but rather as nature abhors a straight line, so it also avoids cliches.

Gajowniczek did survive the war, but his children did not, killed in the Soviet sweep west. (He also endured much calumny from other prisoners at Auschwitz who held him

responsible for Kolbe's death.) The man whose escape attempt precipitated all this

didn't make it, drowning inside the wire in a latrine. Fritsch was posted east and is presumed to have died in action against the Soviets in 1945.

Kolbe was declared a saint, in 1982.

Most of us could imagine a better end to this story, perhaps one where Fritsch was denied an honourable death and Kolbe, by some ingenious Hollywood scripting, lived to baptize the first of Gajowniczek's herd of great-grandchildren. But we live in a real world where sometimes evil triumphs -- for a while -- and in any case, makes trouble our companion for life.

More than anything, we treasure that which gives us hope.

Let us speak, then, of Christ, Kolbe and Easter.

Christ said, "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." Kolbe demonstrated this greater love, dying horribly, and a man's mortal life was saved.

Not long after the God-Man Christ uttered those words however, He, too, showed this greater love by letting His enemies kill Him, horribly. Thus, in a mystery that draws heavily on the old Jewish practice of sacrificing animals to symbolize blood cleansing repentant man of the burden of his wrongdoing, He became the means through which spiritual lives have been saved.

Life is eternal. The only question is where we will spend it.

Billions of people, having renounced their rebellion against God, affirmed Christ

is His son, and believing God literally raised Him from the dead, believe God will also gather them to Himself for an eternity of joyful fellowship. It is their hope. (And mine.)

It was Kolbe's hope also. And that, I believe, is the spark that gave him the confidence to emulate Christ in one of death's darkest vales, by giving his life for that of another and thus illustrating the message of love inherent in Good Friday. That Kolbe received his eternal reward and conquered death -- as Christ did when He was resurrected three days after his crucifixion -- is the message of joy inherent in Easter.

nhannaford@theherald.canwest.com

© The Calgary Herald 2008
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April 7, 2008
Editorial Observer
The Vatican and Globalization: Tinkering With Sin
By EDUARDO PORTER

It’s hard to erect rules to last forever. The recent suggestion by a bishop from the Vatican’s office of sin and penance that globalization and modernity gave rise to sins different from those dating from medieval times seemed to many like an acknowledgment that the world is, indeed, changing.

Norms encoded hundreds of years ago to guide human behavior in a small-scale agrarian society could not account for a globalized postindustrial information economy. Polluting the environment, drug trafficking, performing genetic manipulations or causing social inequities, new sinful behaviors mentioned by Msgr. Gianfranco Girotti, regent of the Vatican Penitentiary, are arguably more relevant to many contemporary Catholics than contraception.

“If yesterday sin had a rather individualistic dimension, today it has a value and resonance that is above all social, because of the great phenomenon of globalization,” Monsignor Girotti told the newspaper L’Osservatore Romano.

Sin, however, doesn’t take well to tinkering. Many Catholic thinkers reacted strongly against the idea that new sins were needed to complement, or supplement, the classical canon. They accused the press of exaggerating Monsignor Girotti’s words. Their reaction underscored how tough it is for the church to manage a moral code grounded in eternal verities at a time of furious change.

The Vatican has long been riven by this tension between dogma and the outside world. Yet it could apply to any religion: it’s hard to rejigger the rules when truth is meant to be fixed forever.

The core benefits of religions, unlike other, worldly institutions, often relate to the afterlife. Some social scientists argue, however, that many benefits of church membership are to be had this side of death. The gains are not unlike the advantages of a club of like-minded people. Religions provide rules to live by, solace in times of trouble and a sense of community. Some economic studies suggest that this can promote higher levels of education and income, more marriage and less divorce.

Such a club needs strong, believable rules. Like marriage, membership will be more valuable the more committed the other participants are to the common cause. Demanding rules — say celibacy, or avoiding meat during Lent — help enhance the level of commitment.

Strict rules, says the Nobel-winning economist Gary Becker, screen out free riders who wish to enjoy the benefits of membership but are unwilling to invest the necessary zeal in the enterprise. Rules provide commitment devices — like 10-point plans to stop drinking. And they tie members closer by substituting taboos — like drinking and dancing — with acceptable activities, like prayer or Sunday school.

Larry Iannaccone, an economist at George Mason University who has studied religions, notes that some of the most successful, like Jehovah’s Witnesses or Pentecostal Christians, which have very fervent congregations, have strict requirements. Religions relax the rules at their own peril.

“Religions are in the unusual situation in which it pays to make gratuitously costly demands,” Mr. Iannaccone said. “When they weaken their demands they make on members, they undermine their credibility.”

The Vatican is particularly attentive to these strictures. Catholicism has lost traction in many parts of the world. Only 24 percent of American adults identify with the church, though more than 31 percent say they were raised Catholic. In Italy, only about one in four respondents to a 2002 poll said religion was very important.

Many traditionalists attribute the church’s decline to the weakening of its strictures. They believe it was damaged by the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, which tried to bring the church closer to the people, proclaimed religious freedom, embraced people of other Christian faiths and acknowledged truth in other religions.

So it is perhaps unsurprising that the church has been pushing the other way. Pope Benedict XVI has brought back rites abandoned after Vatican II and reasserted the church’s hold on truth.

In this context, it could be tricky to update sins in a way that could de-emphasize individual trespasses and shift the focus to social crimes bearing a collective guilt. New sins might be a better fit for the modern world, but they risk alienating the membership.
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April 14, 2008
Uncertain Church Awaits Pope in U.S.
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

Less than two weeks ago, as final preparations were being made for the visit of Pope Benedict XVI to the United States, the bishop of Camden, N.J., announced plans to close or merge nearly half the parishes in his diocese. Meanwhile, Catholics in New Orleans, Boston, New York, Toledo, Ohio, and nearly three dozen other dioceses are mourning the loss of parishes and parochial schools they grew up in.

So when the pope arrives in the United States on Tuesday, he will find an American church in which many Catholics are eager not only for his spiritual guidance, but also for his acknowledgment that their church is going through a time of pain and uncertainty.

Hundreds of parishes are being closed and consolidated, and the reasons are usually intertwined with the other big challenges facing the church: a shortage of priests, fallout from the sexual abuse scandal, insufficient funds to maintain aging churches, demographic changes and sometimes not enough people attending Mass to justify keeping parishes open.

And yet for most observant Catholics, their primary experience of the church is their local parish.

“It’s frustrating because you start to see the bishop as the enemy, and it puts you where you’re conflicted,” said Leah Vassallo, a lawyer whose parish in Malaga, N.J., is among those to be closed. “Obviously you don’t want to give up your faith or go to a different religion, or not go to church at all. But it does disenfranchise you. We’re going to be a lot more hesitant before we give money to the church.”

A resistance movement to church closings that began in Boston has spread to other dioceses. On Sunday, Catholics in six dioceses — New York, Boston, Buffalo, Camden, New Orleans and Toledo — announced that they were forming a national group, the Coalition for Parishes, to try to prevent the closing or merging of viable churches.

In addition to the issues the closings and consolidations present, this will be the first visit by any pope since the sexual abuse scandal erupted in 2002, taking a spiritual, emotional and financial toll on Catholics across the country. The scandal revealed more than 5,000 victims, and left behind five bankrupt dioceses. It has cost the church more than $2 billion, so far, and it is not over. Last week the family of two young boys filed a civil lawsuit against a Massachusetts priest accusing him of molesting the boys as recently as 2005.

One of the scandal’s repercussions is that lay Catholics across the country are demanding more financial accountability from their bishops and more control over decisions, especially when it comes to closing parishes.

Many dioceses are also closing parochial elementary, junior and high schools that have provided a rigorous education for generations of Catholics and non-Catholics.

The cost of legal fees and settlements to abuse victims has put financial pressure on many dioceses. But in many cases, the far larger reason for the closings is demographic.

Urban enclaves of Italian, Irish, Polish and Eastern European Catholics who had their own ethnic parishes are dispersing to the suburbs and seeing their previous parishes shuttered — or having to learn to share their churches with immigrants from Latin America, Asia and Africa. In some parishes the new mix has been joyous, in others uneasy.

The pope is expected to praise the American church’s vibrancy during his visit, and there is much for the church to celebrate. Catholics are the biggest religious group in the United States, about 23 percent of the population, a proportion that has held steady. Many parishes are healthy, and some are growing, with the influx of immigrants, especially Hispanics.

A poll released on Sunday by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University showed a mixed performance review for the American bishops: 22 percent of Catholics are “very satisfied” with the bishops, 50 percent are “somewhat satisfied,” 21 percent are “somewhat dissatisfied,” and 6 percent are “very dissatisfied.” It is an improvement from 2002, the outbreak of the scandal.

But most priests, and even many bishops, will acknowledge the woes.

Of 18,634 parishes in 2007, 3,238 were without resident pastors. More than 800 parishes have been closed since 1995, most since 2000. (Some bishops are preparing their parishioners for more closings ahead.) The number of priests ordained in 2007 fell to 456, less than half the number of new priests in 1965. Nearly 3 in 10 Catholics who attend Mass weekly or more said they had been personally affected by the priest shortage, according to the Georgetown poll.

“There’s a crisis,” said William V. D’Antonio, a fellow of the Life Cycle Institute at the Catholic University of America. “We’re running out of priests. The average age of priests currently active is over 60. We have recruitment of new priests way below replacement level.”

Groups that advocate opening the priesthood to women and to married men are using the pope’s visit to promote their causes. But there is nothing to suggest that the Vatican is close to reversing itself. The solutions promoted by American bishops are to work harder at recruiting candidates for the priesthood, and to ordain permanent deacons — laymen who can preach and perform many ministerial duties.

Peter Borre, a parishioner who helped form the Council of Parishes in Boston, said that if he could address Pope Benedict XVI, he would say: “The shortage of priests, Your Holiness, is both a symptom and a problem itself. The deeper problem is not a responsibility of the flock, it’s a failure of bishops to inspire and draw more people into the priesthood.”

Some bishops, like Joseph Galante in Camden, have tried to involve the laity in the painful restructuring process. But since the sexual abuse scandal, they are finding many of their parishioners have become more confrontational.

The restiveness is not only among laity. In Belleville, Ill., last month, 45 priests took the step of publicly releasing a letter to the Vatican’s representative in Washington calling for their bishop to step down. They accused the bishop, Edward K. Braxton, of poor communication with priests and of misappropriating more than $17,000 and using it to buy liturgical garments and furniture. (The bishop has apologized, but said he would not resign.)

In Boston, Catholics have spent the last four years taking turns camping inside five churches that the archdiocese wants to close. They figure that if the church is occupied, the archdiocese will not be able to padlock it.

In Boston and Toledo, some Catholics are suing the church to prevent the closings.

The quandary for the church is that the agitation is coming from some of the most religiously committed Catholics, said Mr. D’Antonio, co-author of a recent book that surveyed the members of “Voice of the Faithful,” another church reform group.

“These are really the loyal Catholics speaking out for change,” Mr. D’Antonio said. “They are the ones who have been the Eucharistic ministers, they went to Catholic parochial schools and colleges, got a terrific education, and now they want to change the church.”

Ms. Vassallo, the lawyer in Camden who objects to the closing of her parish (the diocese there is reducing the number to 66 from 124), spends every Thursday from 11 p.m. to midnight in her church praying before the Blessed Sacrament. She is one in a chain of parishioners who keep up this Eucharistic Adoration for 48 uninterrupted hours every week.

As Catholics they are devoted to their church, but don’t necessarily agree with all of its decisions. As Americans, accustomed to life in a democracy, they think they have a right to say so.

Dan Thiel, a contractor and excavator in Upper Sandusky, Ohio, was in a ministerial training program for five years in the Toledo diocese, which assigned him to help gather information from parishes on which ones could be closed or clustered. In the end, he said, he was appalled because some very alive parishes were cut. His own was reduced to a chapel, without a resident priest.

“They’ve totally abandoned our community,” said Mr. Thiel, who is now president of United Parishes, a group that is fighting parish closings in Toledo. “They took the buildings, they took the money, and said, ‘You guys can go somewhere else.’ ”

“There are so many people that want to be active in this church, that want to know more about their faith, and now they’re so offended,” Mr. Thiel said. “I tell people all the time, ‘Don’t leave your church. It’s not the pope. It’s not the bishop. It’s your community.’ ”
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April 16, 2008
Op-Ed Contributor
God and Man at Notre Dame
By KENNETH L. WOODWARD

POPE BENEDICT XVI will give several speeches during his visit to the United States, but the most consequential for American Catholics may be his address to the presidents of Catholic colleges and universities tomorrow.

Benedict has shown himself concerned about preserving the specifically Roman Catholic identity of all Catholic institutions, particularly those in higher education. His predecessor, John Paul II, tried to do this by insisting that Catholic theology professors sign a document called a mandatum affirming their fidelity to the papal teaching. Conservative Catholics are counting on Benedict to enforce this approach.

Yet, because Benedict is at heart a professor, I hope that he recognizes that fidelity to church teachings cannot be coerced.

No question, a Catholic university should be identifiably Catholic. But the problem of institutional identity goes far beyond litmus tests for theologians.

Arguments over the “identity crisis” on Catholic campuses have been going on for 50 years — long enough to realize that there is no single thing that makes a Catholic university Catholic. Indeed, the question of Catholic identity has as much to do with the changes in Catholic students and their parents as it does with faculty members and administrations.

In the early 1960s, half of all Catholic children attended Catholic grade and high schools. The 10 percent or so who went on to college had some 300 Catholic colleges and universities to choose from — more, in fact, than in the rest of the world combined. Catholics were expected to attend one of these; those who wanted to attend, say, an Ivy League college often had to get permission from their pastor.

Today few Catholic students or parents are likely to choose a Catholic university if Princeton or Stanford is an option. A Catholic higher education, in other words, is less prized by many Catholic parents — including complaining conservatives — than the name on the college diploma.

Another difference is this: Well into the 1960s, Catholic college freshmen arrived with a knowledge of the basics of their religion — enough, at least, to question the answers they were given as children or, among the brighter students, to be challenged in theology classes toward a more mature grasp of their faith.

Most of today’s Catholic students, however, have no such grounding. Even the graduates of Catholic high schools, theology professors complain, have to be taught the fundamentals. As one Methodist theologian at Notre Dame wryly put it, “Before I teach my course on marriage I have to tell them first what their own church has to say on the subject.”

No question, Catholic colleges were more “Catholic” then than they are today. Most were small campuses with a liberal-arts curriculum, making it easy to weave theology into the classroom mix. Most teachers were Catholic and many were priests and nuns.

The ’60s changed all that. In 1966, the American Council on Education issued a study that failed to uncover a single Catholic university with a “distinguished or even strong” graduate department. This prompted Msgr. John Tracy Ellis, a leading American Catholic historian, to suggest a radical consolidation: American Catholics should support no more than three Catholic universities, one on each coast and one in between.

Ellis knew it would never happen, given the independence of each university. Yet his pronouncement prompted a contest among Catholic universities in the hope of surviving the final cut. The rush was on to upgrade faculty and facilities, which meant competing for the best teachers and students regardless of religion. Then there was the Second Vatican Council’s urging Catholics to embrace the modern world. This prompted many priests and nuns to abandon Catholic institutions to work “in the world,” further accelerating the need for lay faculty members. Faculty strikes over academic freedom at Catholic universities led many to turn control over to lay-dominated boards of trustees.

Led by the Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, the longtime president of Notre Dame, Catholic educators redefined the relationship between church and university. As Father Hesburgh adroitly put it, a Catholic university is the place “where the church does its thinking.” Learning, in other words, is not indoctrination.

Since those transformative years, the number of Catholic colleges and universities has declined by a third. Some secularized, cutting all ties to the church, in order to survive. Others, especially those for women, closed their doors for lack of applicants. Many more grew through compromise: though nominally Catholic, they offered theology as not much more than a series of selections in a menu of course options.

America can still boast of a monopoly of the world’s best Catholic educational institutions. Some are small liberal-arts colleges that have preserved or reinvented classical Catholic humanism. Others are more sectarian, fashioned in reaction to the demand for orthodoxy by John Paul II. A few universities like Notre Dame (my alma mater) have attained elite status while remaining manifestly Catholic.

I hope Pope Benedict will keep this diversity in mind when tomorrow he discusses the issue of institutional identity. I hope, too, that someone in his entourage will point out that there are more Catholic students at many of the big public universities in the Midwest than at any Catholic college. They are there by choice, their own or that of their parents.

What these students and their teachers need is a vision of what it means to be an educated Catholic, not just a lecture on preserving Catholic institutional identity. If Benedict can manage that, his words will be worth remembering.

Kenneth L. Woodward, a contributing editor at Newsweek, is writing a book about religion and American culture since 1950.
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Church must decide which it serves: the state or God

Nigel Hannaford
Calgary Herald

Saturday, May 03, 2008

Politicians who love the Kingdom of God must deal with a tough question: Should they advocate cutting loose the church from its tax advantages? For its own protection, should donations to churches cease to be tax deductible? There is a case for it. A recent decision of the Ontario Human Rights Commission reminds us that he who pays the piper, calls the tune. If the OHRC's tune is to be widely echoed, it is not one churches can dance to, lest their message be compromised.

Christian Horizons is a mission to the developmentally challenged, started 40 years ago by a minister with two children who might have been institutionalized, had he not started it. Its history is a notable testimony to the power of God, working for good through individuals. Now, it runs 180 group homes in Ontario and cares for 1,400 clients with a staff of 2,500.

A condition of employment though, is that staff sign the mission's code of conduct. Consistent with Christian orthodoxy, it features a clear ban on unbiblical sexual behaviour: adultery and sex before marriage are no-nos, likewise homosexual relationships.

At airport security, nobody is obliged to be searched who chooses not to board the plane. Working for Christian Horizons is like that; nobody must work for it who chooses not to sign the paper. Some non-Christians might think it quaint, but it's their organization. In any case, many people (and not just Christians,) positively approve those principles.

However, the OHRC has decided Christian Horizons must not only drop its code of conduct, but send its whole staff for sensitivity training.

What happened was that an employee outed herself, resigned, then complained to the commission that by insisting on its code, Christian Horizons had discriminated against her.

The OHRC agreed, ordering Christian Horizons to pay her money. And to change its culture. "Christian Horizons shall develop and adopt an anti-discrimination and an anti-harassment policy as well as a human rights training program for all employees and managers . . . [and] shall cease and desist from imposing the Lifestyle and Morality Statement as a condition of employment."

Why? Briefly, the OHRC said it was fine for Christian Horizons to provide a Christian home atmosphere, using committed Christian workers, for developmentally challenged children who would otherwise be institutionalized. But as it was contracted to Ontario's Ministry of Community and Social Services, it couldn't discriminate against gays on the public nickel.

There is some logic to this.

It does, however, leave Christian Horizons with a miserable dilemma. It can stick to its doctrine, but for want of cash do no good. Or it can continue its good work, but to the glory of the Ontario Ministry of Community and Social Services, not God. The trouble is, this goes for any Christian organization -- and non-Christian religious organizations, too. A Christian school that's 50 per cent funded by the state, has no right to complain if the state vetoes textbooks it doesn't like. A church running a soup kitchen or providing other relief using public funds leaves itself open to governmental prescription.

And I don't think the church generally has appreciated that the state has no obligation to give it a property-tax break or make tithes tax-deductible, if the church preaches a message the state doesn't like. Which, in times past, it often has.

Long before there were tax breaks, the church did good work out of love for God. The first hospitals, schools and universities were founded hundreds of years ago by the church. As this was to the state's advantage, it gave the church concessions. This, too, was logical: why make it more difficult for somebody caring for the sick by taxing his hospital?

But those were different days. In Christendom, even men who rejected Christ for themselves nonetheless acknowledged His church as the source of morality.

Today's consensus places equality above biblical teachings as the supreme moral virtue. Indeed, for mankind's greater comfort, the very concept of sin has been banished and this OHRC decision is a case in point. For it does not merely find Christian Missions discriminated against a lesbian employee by insisting on its moral code. It says the moral code must go -- AND goes on to tell the mission what it must think: out with Scripture and in with contemporary understandings of human rights. Our moral code is better than your moral code, believe it.

This has disturbing, oppressive overtones. The day is coming when the church, as an institution, will have to decide which it will serve. (For Christian Horizons, that day is here.)

Loss of tax privileges would grievously hurt its ability to serve the community. Yet, the church's first duty is to be faithful to God's word -- service is a consequence of that, not the church's prime function -- and that may come at a price.

Didn't it always, though? The quicker the church weans itself off tax privileges, the quicker it will be strengthened to resist the state when the state intrudes on its doctrine.

Caesar is welcome to his tax, but not to worship.

nhannaford@theherald.canwest.com

© The Calgary Herald 2008
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http://www.latimes.com/news/printeditio ... 8310.story

From the Los Angeles Times
Group of evangelical Christians writes manifesto urging separation of religious beliefs and politics

By politicizing faith, Christians become 'useful idiots' for one party or another, the group warns

By Rebecca Trounson
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

May 10, 2008

A group of prominent U.S. evangelical Christians is urging other evangelicals to step back from partisan politics and avoid becoming "useful idiots" for any political party.

In an often strongly worded statement released this week, more than 70 pastors, scholars and business leaders said faith and politics have become too closely intertwined and that evangelicals err when they use their religious beliefs for political purposes.

About a quarter of U.S. adults call themselves evangelical Christians, polls show, and for the last 30 years, the "religious right" has been a reliable base of support for the Republican Party. But Christians from both ends of the political spectrum have made the mistake of politicizing their faith, the group declares in the document, called “An Evangelical Manifesto.”

When that occurs, "faith loses its independence, the church becomes 'the regime at prayer,' Christians become 'useful idiots' for one political party or another, and the Christian faith becomes an ideology in its purest form," the document says.

Three years in the making, the manifesto was signed by many high-profile, mostly centrist evangelicals, including Leith Anderson, president of the National Assn. of Evangelicals; Jim Wallis, founder of Sojourners magazine; and Frank Wright, president of National Religious Broadcasters.

Many of the most prominent conservative evangelicals did not sign. A spokesman for James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, said Dobson had concerns about the document and decided not to add his name.

One of the statement's drafters said one purpose was to reclaim the word "evangelical" from its political association.

"This is not primarily a political movement," said the Rev. John Huffman Jr., senior pastor of St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach and board chairman of the evangelical magazine Christianity Today. "Evangelicalism is a theological understanding that we are called to be followers of Jesus Christ, and that's not captive to a culture, society or nation."

Huffman and other organizers said the document's release was not timed to the U.S. presidential contest. But he said he hoped one result would be to persuade some of the more outspoken evangelical voices to tone down their political rhetoric.

"The evangelical umbrella is very large and I won't try to detract from anyone who loves Jesus and has a biblical rationale for their views on any issue," Huffman said. "But we hope some who've been more strident in their statements will be a little more cautious in the future."

Analyst Michael Cromartie, vice president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., said he expected the statement to have limited political impact.

"It's mainly a warning to people not to confuse their personal faith with political convictions," he said.

****
Pope improves image

A new survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life shows that Pope Benedict XVI improved his image among Americans with a recent U.S. visit. The poll, conducted shortly after the pope's April 15-20 visit to the East Coast, shows that 61% of Americans say they have a favorable impression of Benedict, up from 52% in late March.

rebecca.trounson@ latimes.com
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Author confronts liberal Christians
Minister's book touches off heated debate

Graeme Morton
Calgary Herald


Sunday, May 25, 2008


Rev. Gretta Vosper has laid down a radical challenge for Christians . . . a call to change the way we think and talk about God, Jesus, the Bible and our spiritual life.

And while such a collective shift will be a major leap of faith, Vosper says the alternative for the liberal wing of modern Christianity will be a relentless slide into obscurity.

The Toronto-based United Church minister has touched off heated debate in the faith community with her book With or Without God -- Why the Way We Live is More Important Than What We Believe, published in March. Reader response has ranged from praise for its bold vision to concern that Vosper is "throwing the baby out with the bathwater" to vitriolic attacks.

"There's been no official response from the (United) church yet," says Vosper, who will be speaking in Calgary on June 12.

Vosper makes no bones she wants to confront liberal Christian denominations, "who have had access to contemporary scholarship for a couple of generations and have not brought it into the worship space." She expresses the wish that her book "irritates us all into the growth we so disturbingly need." Vosper says those who view Bible stories, Jesus and even God metaphorically, instead of literally, have to show the courage to say out loud that these can be valuable as metaphors and symbols, not as facts.

"We currently have a number of things in church that can help people in their daily lives, but they all have to go back to God or Jesus to be validated. But there are so many rituals across faith traditions which could be examined for their spiritual power and shared," says Vosper.

When asked for her personal vision of God, Vosper suggests it is "that which compels me to be in positive relationship with the world" instead of a omnipresent entity who loves, judges, comforts and punishes.

"We have the choice to make that relationship sacred or to desecrate it. If we make it sacred, we are deepening and expanding the experience of God in the world. And that goes for relationships with ourselves, other people and the planet." Vosper says this loss of a clear message is part of the reason many mainline Protestant denominations are struggling to keep members.

"Once contemporary scholarship hollowed out the Bible as the divine word of God and took away the divinity of Jesus in any way particular to him and not shared by all of life, you wonder what is it that we're actually saying," says Vosper.

"We've used the words, keep the rituals and had the organ sound the same tunes. But the substance has been lacking and it's led to an integrity issue in the liberal church. We need to uncurl our fingers and let go of the words and rituals that aren't working anymore." Despite her theological differences with them, Vosper says Christianity's evangelical leaders who have a strong sense of God and deep relationships with Jesus are able to "walk that talk with an integrity that gathers people to them." Is it too late to revitalize the liberal arm of the Christian community that is struggling to find its place in the world? Vosper says if the debate she's trying to spur had taken place in the 1960s, the church would have transformed itself theologically while maintaining the important, relevant work of challenging social, economic and political issues instead of being largely ignored.

"The young generation are very passionate and knowledgeable about justice issues, but they lack ways to become engaged," says Vosper. "The church is still well positioned to create meaningful ways to engage people in changing the world. But if we continue to sideline ourselves with archaic language, ritual and music, we'll lose that chance." Calgary's Rev. Bill Phipps knows something about creating controversy. As United Church moderator a decade ago, he took major flak for discounting Jesus' divinity. Phipps is just beginning to read Vosper's book, but he lauds her courage for speaking up.

"She's someone who is leading a congregation and not writing from a position of academic security. Anyone who is on the line every Sunday preaching or comforting a family who's just had a tragic death, I admire for pushing the boundaries and getting people to think," says Phipps.

Rev. Tom Melvin of Deer Park United, former chairman of the United Church's Calgary presbytery, says Vosper raises some timely questions.

"We need to be intentional about how we do church -- the way we worship, speak and act. We have to pay attention to how we express ourselves as people of faith because the power of language is extremely important," says Melvin.

"But for me, it's my personal belief in Jesus that allows one to be able to have all those characteristics that she calls for -- the openness, honesty, integrity, creativity and intellectual rigour that are necessary for moving forward." gmorton@theherald.canwest.com

© The Calgary Herald 2008
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New priests answer deep spiritual calling
New careers offer chance to help people

Graeme Morton
Calgary Herald


Sunday, June 01, 2008


Cynics would say they are signing up to crew a leaky, some might even suggest sinking, spiritual ship.

But for eight southern Alberta women and men who were ordained as priests and deacons in the Anglican Church last Sunday, it's a matter of following a deep, personal calling that transcends today's turbulent headlines.

The Anglican Church, Canada's second largest Protestant denomination, has experienced a significant drop in membership in recent decades.

The debate over whether the church should bless same-sex unions has created deep divisions in both the Canadian and global Anglican community, which numbers more than 70 million. The Lambeth Conference, a high-level gathering of Anglican bishops which opens July 16 in Canterbury, England, is already bristling with contention between conservative and liberal viewpoints.

Still, for these new priests and deacons taking this pivotal step in their spiritual journey, the glass looks half full, not half empty. Some already have church postings, others will get their assignments in the days and weeks ahead.

Tara Livingston, ordained as a priest, says she was always coming up with logical reasons why she should quit her theological studies every year.

"But I kept going because I really felt I have some unique gifts that I can offer to this vocation," she adds.

The mother of two, Livingston says her sons, 10 and 9, still think it's a little strange when their mom picks them up at school wearing her clerical collar.

"They were a little confused at first about what mom does for a job, but they understand it now when I say, 'I talk to people about God.' "

Livingston says the diversity within the Anglican tent is both a strength and a natural source of strife for the church.

"The Anglican church could look very different in the years ahead, and that's OK," says Livingston. "We're in a painful period right now . . . kind of like the birth pangs of a new entity."

For many like Bonnie Luft and Ed Davies, the Anglican priesthood is a midlife shift into a second career. Luft had a successful stint in business, advertising and marketing, while Davies was a geologist before both felt called to a religious vocation.

"God kept opening some doors for me and closing others," says Luft, who came from an evangelical faith background. "Throughout this process, I trusted that God was in control."

Despite the ongoing secularization of western society and the Anglican world's myriad challenges, Luft says she's convinced the church's message is still important.

"I have a chance to make a difference in people's lives every day, and that's very special."

Davies notes that Christ's apostles also went through mid-life career shifts, dropping their fishing nets and other tools of their trades to take up a new calling.

"I'm a good listener. I think I have some pastoral gifts to help people achieve what they're trying to achieve," says Davies.

Deacons perform similar roles as priests, but do not preside at sacraments such as the eucharist. Many become priests, usually within one year, but some choose to remain vocational deacons.

Alan Getty has been working toward ordination for a decade since he felt a "very specific calling" to religious life during a backpacking trek through Europe at age 19.

"I want to be in the frontline trenches of preaching, teaching and pastoral care," says Getty. "We're in a dynamic time in the Anglican church. What's going to happen in the future is far from a foregone conclusion."

Fellow deacon Myron Penner will lead a ministry team at St. Barnabas Anglican in Three Hills, where he serves as an associate professor at Prairie Bible College.

"I'd say these are more exciting than desperate times in the Anglican church," says Penner, who says it's been a fascinating journey from seeing himself as a purely academic theologian to an emerging role in rural ministry.

As a newly appointed vocational deacon, Monica King will provide an Anglican presence in the central Alberta town of Trochu.

"I think I'll be more bold in stepping in to help people," says King, a lifelong Anglican. "To have a clergy presence, to be able to do one-on-one pastoral work, is a very big thing in a small community like mine."

Archdeacon Barry Foster of the Calgary Anglican diocese says the church is encouraged by both the quality and quantity of this new leadership wave.

"As a denomination, Anglicans don't actively recruit new clergy," says Foster. "It's almost a mysterious process how people who feel this calling approach us and we help them discern their future."

Foster says the Anglican church, like many employers, is facing a jump in retirements among its baby boomer clergy during the next decade.

"But right now, we have a pretty good balance between the availability of candidates and positions to work in."

gmorton@theherald.canwest.com

© The Calgary Herald 2008
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Minister challenges faithful to rethink concept of God

Graeme Morton
Calgary Herald

Saturday, June 14, 2008

Rev. Gretta Vosper says the dramatic rethinking of Christianity she advocates in her bestseller With or Without God will come with a high cost.

Vosper told more than 200 Calgarians at a public talk at Hillhurst United Church Thursday night that the church has been on a long journey in pursuit of the truth since its earliest days.

"We've tweaked and changed our faith over time, but we've always remembered what we had to do to keep our God happy and ourselves safe," says Vosper, a Toronto United Church minister and leader of the Canadian Centre for Progressive Christianity.

"The ideas we have to open ourselves to will cost us much, including that sense of security, and we've retreated from that cost in the past."

In her book, Vosper contends the liberal wing of the Christian church is headed for obscurity if it doesn't shed well-entrenched rituals, words and concepts she claims are obsolete in the light of modern science and reason.

"We have to accept the cost of saying publicly that the Bible is a human construction and the concepts of Jesus and God can be thought of as metaphors, rather than in literal terms," said Vosper.

Vosper said while she doesn't agree with the theology of fundamentalist Christians, she says they are "drenched in integrity" for actively living their particular faith. Progressive Christians, she adds, all too often have large gaps between what they say during Sunday worship and what they believe in their hearts. Such waffling has led to a mass exodus to either evangelical churches or out of church doors altogether.

She asked the Calgary crowd to name concepts that are vital in their own faith journeys. Dozens of responses ranged from wholeness, awe and compassion to peace, respect and joy.

"To me, you're naming Christianity, those values that we need to live by, not some ancient words, doctrines and rules that no longer apply," Vosper told the audience. "We have to leave this legacy of important values to our kids and grandkids. And if that costs me the words God and Jesus, I'm willing to do that."

Vosper said many references to God in the Bible are tied to destructive attitudes and have too often spawned an atmosphere of judgment, despair and even horror.

"Solid values should be more important that being conversant with ancient theological ideas," she said.

During a lively question-and-

answer session, one woman asked whether Vosper should still minister within the United Church while leading a "Godless, Christless sect."

Vosper said her local presbytery (governing body) has examined her movement's document of beliefs and found them "well within the bounds of the United Church."

And despite her call for sweeping reform within the Christian community, Vosper says the church can still play an important role in the world.

"I don't see a lot of other institutions fighting for the important values that we all talked about as a counterbalance to the self-serving and materialistic society that seems so dominant today," says Vosper.

"We need to dream again as Christians, but to realize our visions come from within us, not from a supernatural being."

gmorton@theherald.canwest.com

© The Calgary Herald 2008

****
Bishops condemn stem cell research

Barbara Liston
Reuters


Saturday, June 14, 2008


American Catholic bishops Friday condemned the destruction of human embryos for stem cell research as a "gravely immoral act" in the organization's first formal statement on the issue.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops voted 191-1 to adopt the statement, without debate or discussion.

"Harvesting these 'embryonic stem cells' involves the deliberate killing of innocent human beings, a gravely immoral act," the organization said.

The identity of the one dissenter or the reason for his dissent was not made public at the gathering in Orlando.

Archbishop Joseph Naumann of Kansas City, Kansas, said ballots are signed but are destroyed after they are counted. Naumann said the reason for the 'no' vote could be as simple as a disagreement with the phrasing in the document.

"I'm assuming the person isn't going against the Pope's teaching," Naumann said.

The bishops' vote to adopt the statement, which will be distributed to Catholics in a brochure, came without debate. Hot-button issues like abortion and stem cell research mobilized the Republican Party's conservative Christian base to help keep President George W. Bush in the White House in 2004.

They may not have the same impact in the November election, as Republican candidate John McCain is viewed by many religious conservatives as soft on core issues like gay marriage and stem cell research.

Individual bishops and conference officials have spoken out regularly over the years on embryonic stem cell research. But Bishop Arthur Seratelli of Paterson, New Jersey, said Catholics and the public generally remained confused about the moral and ethical implications of the research, and on the church's position.

"U.S. Catholics and the general public deserve a clear, concise and unambiguous statement," Seratelli said.

The formal statement on embryonic stem cell research is planned as the first of two related documents to be brought forward from the bishops' Committee on Pro-Life Activities, according to Archbishop John Myers of Newark.

Myers said a forthcoming longer, more pastoral statement directed especially toward married Catholics and those dealing with infertility will tackle the issues of in-vitro fertilization and the adoption of embryos by couples.

The spare embryos eyed by scientists for research are a byproduct of in-vitro fertilization. Myers said the Holy See is studying the issue of embryo adoption.

The bishops cautioned that stem cell harvesting from spare embryos will spur the creation of additional embryos for scientific purposes and cloning, which the bishops said "reduces human procreation to a mere manufacturing process."

© The Calgary Herald 2008
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Europe far from a secular wasteland
Unique religious communities spark renaissance

Wayne Holst
Calgary Herald


Sunday, July 20, 2008


Editor's note: Calgarians Wayne and Marlene Holst recently spent a month visiting a number of spiritual landmarks in Europe.

"My greatest life satisfaction is the changed lives I have seen as a result of our L'Arche communities," said Jean Vanier during the half-hour we shared with him at his home in Trosly-Breuil.

"My greatest concern is for more assistants making long-term commitments to live with our core community members. We now have 134 communities in 35 countries around the world," Vanier said in a quiet spirit of characteristic thoughtfulness.

I remember, during a 1967 visit, when there was just one community, the one we were now visiting.

We could not let our jet-lag prevent us from this special opportunity to be with Jean as he is about to celebrate his 80th birthday in the French village where he founded L'Arche in 1964.

Trosly-Breuil continues to exude its old French village charm. Val Fleuri, the asylum that Vanier helped to empty of its sad occupants so they could become part of happy homes, is getting a significant, government-funded facelift.

We spent nine nights with L'Arche communities in France, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands. As we found in Britain and Ireland two years ago, these communities all share a common spirit even though they function in a variety of cultural contexts.

We spent a day at Taize, another thriving spiritual centre -- this time in Burgundy, mid-France -- which I first visited as a student 40 years ago.

Many hundreds of youth visit here daily and there is no doubt about the special draw of this place with its unique worship style, basic living conditions and group studies.

The largest number of guests now come from Russia, the Ukraine and Eastern Europe as well as Germany. I agree with Philip Jenkins, a writer who has reflected positively on religion in modern Europe, that Taize is a sign of spiritual renaissance on a continent that many would be too quick to write off as a secular wasteland.

We spent time with our hostess, Aska, from Poland, who is working in the reception at Taize while discerning her vocational future.

If you want to hear classic medieval chant at its best -- and before the reforms of Palestrina -- visit the Church of St. Gervais, near Notre Dame de Paris. Young sisters and brothers of the Monastic Communities of Jerusalem sing daily noon-hour prayers in ancient harmonies; accompanied by traditional stringed instruments.

St. Gervais is a magnificent alternative to thronged churches like Notre Dame, Ste-Chappelle and Sacre-Coeur. Here, a spirit of simple reverence and basic but soaring hymnic majesty, is real.

Our hosts in Aix-en-Provence, Cours Mirabeau -- the intellectual and cultural heart of southern France -- were the Oblates of Mary Immaculate. Fathers Ned (Ireland) and Kennedy (Haiti) were our special hosts in the centre begun by the order's founder Eugene de Mazenod. Located in a thriving university town, this international community of missionary life continues its historic focus on evangelization, especially among youth.

"There are more churches per block in Aix than anywhere else," said Father Ned, a man with an encyclopedic mind and a pastoral heart.

Of course, Ned was at his best when discussing the regenerating 19th-century vision of the now-sainted Oblate founder de Mazenod.

The Augustinian Church in Erfurt, a German Evangelical Lutheran spiritual seminar, retreat and renewal centre, the Wartburg in Eisenach where "heretic Luther" translated the New Testament from Hebrew and Greek into the vernacular within less than a year; the Castle Church of Wittenberg -- and the representative door upon which the Great Reformer nailed his 95 theses in 1517 -- all were wonderful to see for the first time since these sites are located in what was previously Communist East Germany.

Our favourite Lutheran site, however, was the Kaiser-Wilhelm Kirche on the Kurfurstendamm in Berlin.

A magnificent museum, located in the tower of the old structure, displayed a cross of nails melted down from the famous ruins of Coventry Cathedral in England, destroyed by the Luftwaffe in November, 1940.

After the Second World War, both churches engaged in mutual reconstruction as a magnificent symbol of reconciliation. The new sanctuary here is a lovely study in blue light that has to be experienced to be fully appreciated. Many thousands do just that each day, escaping the bustling streets into the affecting calm of a resurrected church in the midst of a new, wonderfully-united Berlin. Just off the town square in old Delft, the Netherlands, an historic centre of the Dutch Reformation, stands the Oude Kirk (Old Church).

Artifacts from the past are well-complemented here by a modern community of faith. Youth and young-married people congregate at the Old Church. From Delft, many of them plan international service missions to Africa and Asia -- co-sponsored by the churches and the government of the Netherlands.

In unique ways, the Dutch seem to be setting a standard, evident also in Germany, for helping the young develop an integrated spirituality by serving others around the globe.

Canadians can learn a lot about the spiritual life from brothers and sisters in Europe whom we saw creatively engaging youth and cultural arts; linking the traditional with the contemporary and witnessing to one's faith through service.

© The Calgary Herald 2008
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July 27, 2008
Op-Ed Contributor
The Pope vs. the Pill
By JOHN L. ALLEN Jr.

FORTY years ago last week, Pope Paul VI provoked the greatest uproar against a papal edict in the long history of the Roman Catholic Church when he reiterated the church’s ban on artificial birth control by issuing the encyclical “Humanae Vitae.” At the time, commentators predicted that not only would the teaching collapse under its own weight, but it might well bring the “monarchical papacy” down with it.

Those forecasts badly underestimated the capacity of the Catholic Church to resist change and to stand its ground.

Down the centuries, Catholics have frequently groused about papal rulings. Usually they channeled that dissent into blithe disobedience, though occasionally a Roman mob would run the Successor of Peter out of town on a rail just to make a point. In 1848, Pope Pius IX was driven into exile by Romans incensed at his refusal to embrace Italy’s unification.

Never before July 25, 1968, however, had opposition been so immediate, so public and so widespread. World-famous theologians called press conferences to rebut the pope’s reasoning. Conferences of Catholic bishops issued statements that all but licensed churchgoers to ignore the encyclical. Pastors openly criticized “Humanae Vitae” from the pulpit.

In a nutshell, “Humanae Vitae” held that the twin functions of marriage — to foster love between the partners and to be open to children — are so closely related as to be inseparable. In practice, that meant a resounding no to the pill.

The encyclical quickly became seen, both in the secular world and in liberal Catholic circles, as the papacy’s Waterloo. It was so out of sync with the hopes and desires of the Catholic rank and file that it simply could not stand.

And in some ways, it didn’t. Today polls show that Catholics, at least in the West, dissent from the teaching on birth control, often by majorities exceeding 80 percent.

But at the official level, Catholicism’s commitment to “Humanae Vitae” is more solid than ever.

During his almost 27-year papacy, John Paul II provided a deeper theoretical basis for traditional Catholic sexual morality through his “theology of the body.” In brief, the late pope’s argument was that human sexuality is an image of the creative love among the three persons of the Trinity, as well as God’s love for humanity. Birth control “changes the language” of sexuality, because it prevents life-giving love.

That’s a claim many Catholics might dispute, but the reading groups and seminars devoted to contemplating John Paul’s “theology of the body” mean that Catholics disposed to defend the church’s teaching now have a more formidable set of resources than they did when Paul VI wrote “Humanae Vitae.”

In addition, three decades of bishops’ appointments by John Paul II and Benedict XVI, both unambiguously committed to “Humanae Vitae,” mean that senior leaders in Catholicism these days are far less inclined than they were in 1968 to distance themselves from the ban on birth control, or to soft-pedal it. A striking number of Catholic bishops have recently brought out documents of their own defending “Humanae Vitae.”

Advocates of the encyclical draw assurance from the declining fertility rates across the developed world, especially in Europe. No country in Europe has a fertility rate above 2.1, the number of children each woman needs to have by the end of her child-bearing years to keep a population stable.

Even with increasing immigration, Europe is projected to suffer a population loss in the 21st century that will rival the impact of the Black Death, leading some to talk about the continent’s “demographic suicide.”

Not coincidentally, Europe is also the most secular region of the world, where the use of artificial contraception is utterly unproblematic. Among those committed to Catholic teaching, the obvious question becomes: What more clear proof of the folly of separating sex and child-bearing could one want?

So the future of “Humanae Vitae” as the teaching of the Catholic Church seems secure, even if it will also continue to be the most widely flouted injunction of the church at the level of practice.

The encyclical’s surprising resilience is a reminder that forecasting the Catholic future in moments of crisis is always a dangerous enterprise — a point with relevance to a more recent Catholic predicament. Many critics believe that the church has not yet responded adequately to the recent sex-abuse scandals, leading to predictions that the church will “have to” become more accountable, more participatory and more democratic.

While those steps may appear inevitable today, it seemed unthinkable to many observers 40 years ago that “Humanae Vitae” would still be in vigor well into the 21st century.

Catholicism can and does change, but trying to guess how and when is almost always a fool’s errand.

John L. Allen Jr. is the senior correspondent for The National Catholic Reporter and the author of “The Rise of Benedict XVI.”
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Keeping the Faith

Calgary Herald


Saturday, August 09, 2008


Knights urged to reject pro-choice politicians

Members of the Knights of Columbus, the world's largest fraternal Catholic organization, have been urged to enter the political fray on abortion.

During the group's annual international convention in Quebec City last week, more than 1,000 K of C members were told by their Supreme Knight, Carl Anderson, to "shine a bright line of separation" between themselves and all pro-abortion politicians.

"There are more than 150 million Catholics in North America and if we stand together and demand better from our politicians, we can transform politics," added Anderson.

Americans go to the polls in November in what is shaping up to be a tight presidential election while Canadians may also face a federal election this winter.

Andrew Walther, director of media relations for the 1.7-million member organization, said the abortion issue is the most compelling of our times.

"This is a call to all Catholics to vote with a well-formed conscience; to really consider the impact of abortion. There shouldn't be this idea that you have a public persona that is completely secular and that you keep your religion in your church on Sundays," said Walther.

"Catholics really have the ability to transform the culture, of creating a society where everyone is respected as a person," he added.

Catholics make up about 43 per cent of the Canadian population and an estimated 25 per cent of the U.S. population.

- - -

'Take a flyer' on God's message: church leader

The founder of one of the largest churches in the U.S. encouraged his peers this week to "take a flyer" when it comes to living out God's message.

Bill Hybels, senior pastor at the Willow Creek Community Church in suburban Chicago, told the opening session of the annual Leadership Summit that, "once in a while, you need an action plan that takes your breath away."

Hybels spoke via simulcast to thousands of participants across North America, including hundreds of Calgarians who gathered at First Alliance Church on Thursday and Friday.

Hybels said Willow Creek members recently opted to address world hunger in a personal way by eating nothing but rice and beans for five days while limiting their consumption of goods and services. They shipped millions of pre-packaged meals to Zimbabwe and collected $750,000 for projects to help the poor.

"When you challenge your people, you'll be surprised at how they'll react," Hybels told delegates.

Hybels said leaders with a Christian world view seek guidance from the Bible, trusted advisers and their own hard-won experience before making important moves.

He noted tough decisions had to be made recently to get the Willow Creek program back on track after a period of stagnant attendance.

"But problems within your church or business don't go away if you just leave them alone," Hybels said. "Leaders can't be passive or averse from decision-making; that's why God gave us these gifts."

gmorton@theherald.canwest.com

© The Calgary Herald 2008
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A love that scares us
Christianity has always dealt in hard truths

Michael Gerson
Calgary Herald


Sunday, August 10, 2008


In a recent investigative profile, The Associated Press tells the depressingly familiar story of televangelist Kenneth Copeland.

His ministry's private jet and lakeside mansion. The complex web of ranching, oil and media interests that benefits his extended family. In this case, there is no taint of hypocrisy. Copeland practises what he preaches -- a doctrine that God wants his followers to prosper in very material ways.

This prosperity gospel combines two of the most powerful forces on Earth: the profit motive and the power of positive thinking. At its best, it inspires hard work, generosity and the avoidance of life-destroying vices. At its worst, it is religiously infantile.

"I believe God wants to give us nice things," says evangelist Joyce Meyer.

"I think God wants us to be prosperous," pastor Joel Osteen assures us. "I think He wants us to be happy."

Whatever ethical problems such leaders may or may not have, they face a large theological challenge.

A religious system that promises happiness and "nice things" is difficult to reconcile with the faith whose founder had "no place to lay his head," urged his followers not to store up "treasures on Earth," and called on them to deny themselves and take up a cross of suffering.

This has never made the best marketing message. What company would adopt the electric chair or the hangman's noose as its logo?

Christianity has always dealt in hard truths -- God is not a means to our own ends, suffering is unavoidable in lives bounded by mortality and often wrecked by failure.

Suffering for the sake of suffering is useless; it is merely masochism.

But when suffering cannot be escaped as the health-and-wealth preachers promise -- or even nobly endured as the stoics promise -- it may perhaps be transformed.

"If you and I can share our pain," said the late theologian Henri Nouwen, "suddenly we find grace and joy coming in. In your tears and anguish and struggle, you suddenly discover community, you suddenly discover friendship, you suddenly discover affection, you suddenly discover forgiveness, you suddenly discover healing.

"All these things come through vulnerability."

In this odd faith where the poor in spirit are blessed, the highest ideal is suffering for others -- though most of us do precious little of it. This model of spiritual leadership has nothing to do with conventional measures of success and influence. It is found in the medical missionary who buries his or her life in the forgotten relief of forgotten suffering. In the dying pope who speaks for the vulnerable by exposing his own shocking vulnerability.

One of the most vivid literary pictures of this leadership comes from a strange source -- a self-loathing, self-described "Catholic agnostic," prone to prostitutes, opium and suicide attempts.

In Graham Greene's "The Power and the Glory," set in the 1930s, Mexico's authorities destroy churches and hunt down priests for execution. An unnamed whiskey priest -- disguised and constantly moving -- doggedly performs his sacramental duties while knowing he is a spiritual failure. He has a mistress, a child and a problem with alcohol. But stripped of dignity, respect and possessions, he discovers an identification with the poor around him.

"When you visualized a man or woman carefully," he observes, "you could always begin to feel pity -- that was a quality God's image carried with it. When you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination."

Having reached safety in a neighboring state, the whiskey priest returns, knowing he will be captured and killed, to deliver the last rights to a murderer. The priest is driven by suffering and sin down to the level of his fellow men, until he is worthy to die for them.

During this hard descent into sainthood, he finds God's love is often different than we expect.

"It would be enough to scare us -- God's love. It set fire to a bush in the desert, didn't it, and smashed open graves and set the dead walking in the dark. Oh, a man like me would run a mile to get away if he felt that love around."

But ultimately, this love offers a hope greater than health and prosperity: that even our flawed and half-hearted lives may, perhaps, be redeemed -- and even used as an instrument to redeem others.

michaelgerson@cfr.org

© The Calgary Herald 2008
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Pastor says Christianity's arena poised for growth
Joel Osteen believes Canadians are ready for a spiritual revival

Graeme Morton
Calgary Herald


Saturday, August 16, 2008


From Joel Osteen's home in the heart of the American Bible Belt, the future of Christianity looks bright indeed.

"Maybe I'm a little biased, but I see faith as being at an all-time high," says Osteen via phone from Houston.

"I never dreamed we'd be ministering out of a basketball arena, seeing 30,000 or 40,000 people coming out on a weekend," says Osteen, the lead pastor at Lakewood Church, one of the largest in the U.S.

"People are not ashamed of their faith; they're talking more about it. Today, I have pastor friends all over the U.S. who have churches of 5,000 and 10,000 members."

Osteen was scheduled to host a Night of Hope rally at the Saddledome next Sunday, but the Calgary event has now been rescheduled for Sunday, Nov. 9.

Those who have already purchased tickets for next Sunday's rally can use them for the November event. Full refunds will also be available through Ticketmaster.

At 45, Osteen has become one of the dominant figures in the American evangelical Christian world.

Lakewood, where Osteen became senior pastor after his father John's death in 1999, now operates out of the former Compaq Center, a 16,000-seat arena where the NBA's Houston Rockets played for almost 20 years.

Osteen's televised sermons are seen around the world and draw millions of faithful U.S. viewers every week. His debut book, Your Best Life Now, sold more than five million copies and was a permanent fixture on the New York Times best-seller list for months. Osteen is regularly called on to comment on spiritual issues on programs like CNN's Larry King Live.

While Canadian church attendance lags behind the U.S., Osteen senses there's still a hunger for spiritual revival north of the 49th parallel.

A major challenge for many Canadian churches is the aging of their congregations amid increasing troubles attracting young adults, teens and children on Sunday mornings.

"When the church is relevant and practical, the young people are keen to be a part of it," says Osteen. "When we're not judging that their hair is longer or they like their music loud, then we connect with kids."

Osteen say while his father was raised in the Southern Baptist tradition and Lakewood continues to respect that faith heritage, it's crucial for Christianity to move with the times.

"We don't sing as many old hymns as maybe we used to. Our services are more contemporary and upbeat and our youth pastors can really relate to kids and talk to them on their terms," says Osteen.

He admits there's a fine line between borrowing too much from pop culture and staying true to the Biblical message to win the hearts of young people.

"I know some pastors hold their churches in bars; that's not for me but I'm not going to judge them if they reach people," Osteen says.

"I think more of in terms of talking to youth about how to deal with peer pressure, what their purpose is in life and why they should remain pure."

Osteen has been criticized by others in the faith community for being long on showmanship and short on scripture. He studied radio and TV communications at Oklahoma's Oral Roberts University and guided Lakewood's TV ministry for 17 years. His first sermon was given on Jan. 17, 1999.

"I had no desire to do it, I didn't think I had it in me to get up and preach," says Osteen.

"My dad had asked me to try preaching for years and he died the Friday after my first sermon, so I think I realized that it wasn't a coincidence."

Osteen casts himself more in the role of a laid-back storyteller than a fire-and-brimstone preacher.

"Often I'll just try to relate one passage of scripture to what's going on in peoples' lives and in the world," says Osteen.

"If I can just take 'love your enemies' or 'be grateful today' and expand on it in relevant terms, that's what I can do best."

Osteen says many churches have followed Lakewood's organizational model for success and that small congregations still have a vital role to play in spreading the gospel.

"People criticize us for being so large, but I always tell them we never started out to be big. Lakewood started with 90 people," Osteen adds.

Osteen, whose wife Victoria and two children often join him on the road, still travels to about 20 live rallies each year across North America, somewhat of a rarity in this electronic age.

"It's very expensive to rent arenas, so you just don't see as much of the touring evangelists anymore. But God's just blessed us with his favour; to see these arenas filled up everywhere we go still amazes me."

gmorton@theherald.canwest.com

© The Calgary Herald 2008

****
Nine centuries of caring for the ill
Order's local branch donates $100,000 to area hospices

Graeme Morton
Calgary Herald


Saturday, August 16, 2008


An ancient Christian charitable order which traces its roots back to the Crusades is still alive and well in Calgary.

The Military and Hospitaller Order of St. Lazarus of Jerusalem, which was originally formed more than 900 years ago, has 28 active members in its Calgary branch, called a commandery.

In its infancy, the order was created to assist European knights who were stricken with leprosy during their campaigns in the Holy Land. That emphasis on caring for leprosy victims has continued through the centuries, but is now a smaller component of the order's work.

The Calgary group, one of 12 St. Lazarus orders across Canada with a total membership of about 400, now focuses on fundraising for local hospices and palliative care centres.

They recently donated a total of $100,000 to Hospice Calgary and facilities performing similar roles in Okotoks, Black Diamond and Lethbridge, having raised the money through volunteer work at casinos.

Peter Mortimer-Rae is a longtime member of the Calgary commandery.

"I was drawn to the order for a couple of reasons, including the history. If any organization can last this long, it's got to have something going for it," says Mortimer-Rae.

"And there's certainly a spiritual aspect to it, helping people who are in the final stage of their lives."

Sarah Walker, executive director of Hospice Calgary, lauds the work of St. Lazarus members.

"The Living with Cancer day program this money supports benefits people from all faiths and all walks of life," says Walker. "We're the kind of an organization that nobody wants to talk about, because death is a difficult subject for many people to deal with, but they are awfully glad to have us there when the time comes."

Barbara Hongisto joined the order five years ago and now serves as Calgary commander.

"It makes you feel good to know that you're helping serve a real need in society and to meet and work together with people from other traditions in the Christian community," says Hongisto.

The order helps fund the printing and distribution of thousands of copies of A Caregiver's Guide, a book which is given free of charge to families of palliative care patients.

The order also has a strong ecumenical flavour to it, creating bursaries to support religious studies students at a number of Canadian theological colleges and universities.

The Calgary commandery will host the order's next national convention in May, 2009. More information on the order is available at www.stlazarus.ca or at bhongisto@shaw.ca.

gmorton@theherald.canwest.com

© The Calgary Herald 2008
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Rebel heads to Rome to work for world's poor

Ed Struzik
Edmonton Journal


Sunday, September 28, 2008


Camille Piche was on his way to the impoverished city of Cochabamba in Bolivia in February to meet Catholic missionaries working with the poor when he was blindsided by a letter from his boss.

Would he consider coming to Rome to assume the role of worldwide director of Peace and Justice in an office situated up the hill from the Vatican? The St. Albert-based priest's initial response was, "No." Having spent most of his life working with the poor and indigenous people in the Mackenzie Valley of the Northwest Territories, on reserves in northern Alberta, in the slums of Haiti and with Mayan peasants in Guatemala, living in the relative lap of luxury in one of the most beautiful cities in the world just didn't seem to be the thing to do.

More important, he was 70 years old and had not been in the best of health.

So Piche politely suggested someone younger and more energetic be given the opportunity to work with front-line groups such as Amnesty International, Bread for the World, the Rainbow of Hope for Children and other non-government organizations that share the same cause as this arm of the Catholic Church.

But Rev. Oswald Firth, the General Councillor of the worldwide Oblate Missionaries, wouldn't be denied. There is in Piche, he says, "the kind of fire and passion that is needed in a man who is going to work with the wounded and the oppressed and who can show solidarity with them." "It always happens like that," says Piche, at home packing his modest belongings.

"Just when I line up a nice cushy job in Colombia, I get summoned to Rome." Piche's Road to Rome began long before South America and well before he became a priest in 1963. In seeking ordination, the son of devout farmers from Gravelbourg, Sask., was following in the footsteps of an uncle, brother, cousin and two sisters who went on to become a bishop, priests, a nun and lay missionary, respectively.

But Piche's conventional Catholic view of life changed dramatically a year later when he took his Obedience with the Oblate missionaries. He was living in the Dogrib community of Rae in the Northwest Territories. Poor as his family was, he never imagined the kind of grinding poverty the Dene people there endured.

"Seeing a family of nine children, the poorest of the poor, living in a tent in -60 C weather in January, it was obvious to me that children freezing in totally inadequate housing was definitely not God's will." So Piche did what other Oblate missionaries in the Canadian North had begun to do. He started a co-op to answer the pressing needs of the people in the community. Together, they built new homes, a handicraft centre and a means of distributing firewood to everyone who needed it.

The experience, he says, redefined what it meant to be a Catholic priest. Liturgical celebrations, he realized, meant nothing if the people he served didn't have the means of self-determination.

Since then, Piche has been on fire, promoting aboriginal interests in Canada and abroad. He was the one who got the idea of inviting the Pope to Fort Simpson in the Northwest Territories. He was the one who convinced the Oblates to turn the Lac Ste. Anne pilgrimage grounds over to Metis and aboriginal control. The apology the Oblates made to residential school victims was spearheaded, in part, by him.

"I've known Camille for a long, long time," says Charles Wood, former chief of Saddle Lake, a former residential school student and one of the board members who took control of the Lac Ste. Anne land trust.

"This I can say about him. Of all the priests I have known over the years, and I have known many, he's the one who truly exemplifies what a priest should be. He's kind, understanding and compassionate. He also believes what my people believe -- that there is one God and one Creator for all of mankind." At his most serious, Piche has the no-nonsense, resolute look of a strict Catholic priest.

That may be why his quick wit and mischievous sense of humour can be so disarming.

Pat Scott, a former journalist who is now a land-claims negotiator for the Dehcho in the Northwest Territories, recalls visiting Piche at his home in the Northwest Territories more than 25 years ago.

"I had long hair and a beard back then," he says. "Camille and I were outside talking when these kids rode up, pointing at me and asking: 'Father, is that Jesus?' Camille didn't miss a beat.

"Yup," he said. "And off the kids went to tell everyone they had just seen Jesus." Piche, Rene Fumoleau, Lou Menez and other like-minded Oblates in the North were rebels, sympathetic to the tenets of liberation theology and to the aspirations of an increasingly disgruntled Dene leadership that resented the fact most government decisions affecting the territory were being made from Ottawa.

What Piche desires most now is that the Oblates forge a new relationship with First Nations people.

"Aboriginal people throughout the world have had to bear the brunt of injustice, in many cases with their lives," he says. "It is true that we imposed our Latin language and rituals, our religious customs and ways and too readily interpreted their spirituality as superstition.

"Perhaps now, if these events can be understood as a certain purification of our mission we can continue our ministry with a renewed dialogue. We can work along with First Nations and not for them." Piche says in his new role, he will do whatever he can to work with others to hold governments and corporations accountable for what they do in the Third World.

"Our work will really take place at the grassroots, as it has in my case, with countless numbers of people working sometimes at the personal level or with others to give hope and combat poverty," Piche says.

"It's important that we network with others, either Oblates, NGOs, or other socially conscious groups, to bring about structural change and improve the lives of many so that the poor will realize their dignity as beloved sons and daughters of God."

© The Calgary Herald 2008
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Beijing denies bishops' request to visit Vatican

Philip Pullella
Reuters


Saturday, October 04, 2008


China has denied permission for Catholic bishops to travel to Rome for a Church meeting, a Vatican spokesman said Friday, in a sign of new strains between Beijing's Communist government and the Vatican.

Chief Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi said Beijing, which has had difficult relations with the Vatican over the years, had made it clear in preliminary contacts that travel requests would be denied.

Bishops from Macao and Hong Kong, regions with a degree of autonomy from Beijing, will attend the month-long synod, which starts Sunday.

"(There were) talks with the Chinese authorities to see if other bishops from mainland China could come. It was clear that there would be no agreement and they won't come," Lombardi said.

China's Communist government does not allow its Catholics to recognize the Pope's authority and forces them to be members of a state-backed Catholic organization. China's eight to 12 million Catholics are split between the officially approved church and an "underground" one loyal to the Pope.

The lack of participation by the mainland bishops came as a surprise because there had been signs of an improvement in relations this year.

A bishop from Hong Kong represented Pope Benedict at the opening ceremony of the Olympics in August and, in May, China's national orchestra played for the Pope at an unprecedented concert in the Vatican.

Benedict has made improving relations with China a main goal and hopes diplomatic ties can be restored.

China says before restoring ties the Vatican must sever relations with Taiwan, which Beijing considers a renegade province.

© The Calgary Herald 2008
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