c. 1996 Religion News Service

Poll: Dole leads among `committed’ Protestants, Clinton gains with Catholics

(RNS) Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole holds a comfortable lead over President Clinton among”highly committed”evangelical and mainline Protestants, but Clinton has made significant inroads among that voting bloc since the 1992 election, according to a new poll released Friday (Oct. 25).

The poll, which has a margin of error of plus or minus 1.8 percentage points, reveals that Dole leads Clinton among highly committed evangelical Protestants by a 25 percent margin, 58 percent to 33 percent. Among highly committed mainline Protestants, Dole leads Clinton by 9 percent, 51 percent to 42 percent.

The poll defines religious commitment as praying frequently, attending church frequently, stating that religion is important in day-to-day life, believing in God, and being affiliated with a church.

Overall, the poll showed Clinton with a wide lead within the entire electorate _ 54 percent to 32 percent.

While Dole still leads Clinton among highly committed evangelical voters, Clinton’s”support among high-commitment Protestants is impressive, representing a significant gain over 1992,”said John Green of the Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron.

He said that in 1992, Clinton drew only in the low 20s among the highly committed evangelicals, who make up about 15 percent of the voting age population.

Although Dole leads among the highly committed evangelical and mainline Protestants, he trails among all other major religious orientations, according to the poll.

Among less committed evangelicals, Clinton leads Dole 48 percent to 36 percent, while among less committed mainline Protestants, the race is a virtual dead heat, with Clinton at 43 percent and Dole at 42 percent. Among African-American Protestants, Clinton leads Dole 92 percent to 2 percent.

Highly committed Roman Catholics are more likely to be Dole supporters than less committed Catholics, but Clinton appears to be moving from winning a plurality of the Catholic vote in 1992 to capturing a solid majority on Nov. 5, Green said.

Dole got 38 percent of the highly committed Catholic voters and just 26 percent of the less committed Catholic voters while Clinton got 47 percent of the highly committed Catholics and 60 percent of the less committed.

The poll did not measure the Jewish vote.

Green said Clinton’s inroads among evangelical voters _ the recruiting ground for the religious right _ could be explained by two factors: Clinton’s moderation on social issues and Dole’s”relative silence on the hot-button social issues that motivate conservative Protestants.”Taken together, these patterns help to explain why the South is competitive this year,”Green said.

The telephone poll of 3,023 adults was taken Sept. 19-Oct. 10 by the Angus Reid Group for the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals and Queen’s University George Rawlyk Research Unit on Religion and Society.

Denver prelate bans reform group from meeting at church halls

(RNS) Roman Catholic Archbishop J. Francis Stafford has banned a Catholic reform group from meeting on any church property in his diocese.

The group, We Are Church, is an umbrella organization of Catholic reform groups seeking 1 million signatures on petitions calling for changes in church practice, including the ordination of women and married men to the priesthood.

In a column published Wednesday (Oct. 23) in the Denver Catholic Register, Stafford accused the reform group of creating”confusion among the faithful”by involving Catholic high school students in the petition drive.”It is my judgment that the petition sponsored by the We Are Church coalition is anti-ecclesial in its origin and spirit,”Stafford wrote.”It is a creature of contemporary political culture. It works against church unity and fundamentally misunderstands the nature of the (Catholic) church.” The petition being circulated by We Are Church is similar to one signed by Austrian and German Roman Catholics last year. More than 500,000 Austrians and 1.8 million Germans signed the call for church reform.

In addition to opening the priesthood to women and married men, the petition calls for lay involvement in the naming of pastors and bishops and welcoming gays into the church.

Stafford’s column did not mention any punishment for those who disobey his direction that”all parishes, Catholic schools and other Catholic-affiliated institutions and property be closed to We Are Church gatherings and activities.”An archdiocesan spokesman said any breaches would be handled on a case-by-case basis.

Stafford will leave Denver next month for a new post at the Vatican, where he will serve as president of the Pontifical Council for the Laity.

Sister Maureen Fiedler, the national coordinator of the petition campaign, said Stafford’s action”treats Catholics as children. It demonstrates a fear of dialogue.” She added:”It ignores both the Gospel and church teaching, which call Catholics to read the signs of the times and give them the right to express their concerns for the future of the church.”

Sudan’s capital to enforce strict sex segregation laws in public

(RNS) The Khartoum Council, the Islamic government body that rules the Sudanese capital and surrounding area, has issued new rules decreeing strict sexual segregation in public and forbidding men from watching women play sports.

The new rules, issued Tuesday (Oct. 22), require curtains or other barriers between men and women at public gathering places such as theaters and movies, the Associated Press reported.

In addition, the new rules _ which apply only to Khartoum and its environs _ say that men and women may not sit next to each other in public and that women may not sit next to male drivers.

It also requires buses to display a verse from the Koran, Islam’s holy book, advising Muslims to not look at members of the opposite sex. The law specifies that streets be well-lighted so couples cannot vanish into the darkness for unauthorized activities, Reuters said.

Other rules require women’s sporting events to be held in private and female athletes cannot wear tight-fitting clothes; women working in restaurants may not wear jewelry or perfume.

Reuters said that the new law does not attempt to enforce the Islamic rule that women should be veiled, noting than an earlier effort was rejected by Sudanese women who did not want to give up their colorful”tobes,”or flowing gowns similar to Indian saris.

Sudanese President Omar el-Bashir, whose Muslim fundamentalist government came to power in a coup in 1989, has been attempting to bring Sudanese law into closer conformity with its view of Sharia, or Islamic law.

United Nations: 800 million people go hungry worldwide

(RNS) A report by the United Nations in preparation for next month’s World Food Summit says that 800 million people around the world regularly go to bed hungry. And hunger is becoming a problem in some industrialized nations.”In the course of the 1980s and 1990s, as the distribution of income in the industrialized countries of North America and Europe has become more uneven and as social welfare spending has been cut back in the face of rising unemployment, the need for food assistance among low-income groups has grown,”the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said Wednesday (Oct. 23).

The FAO is the sponsor of the Nov. 13-17 World Food Summit in Rome. The session, which will be opened by Pope John Paul II, is expected to draw some 100 heads of state.

At the heart of the summit is a draft”plan of action”aimed at outlining steps for eradicating global hunger. The draft will be debated, amended and adopted at the summit.

But preparatory meetings have already suggested that the Rome meeting could once again put the United States and the Vatican at odds.

In the past, the two have differed over abortion and contraception, but in Rome the clash will come over the idea of whether food is a fundamental human right, a concept the Vatican supports and the United States opposes.

On Thursday, the Vatican signaled its commitment to the concept by releasing an 80-page document,”World Hunger: A Challenge for All, Development in Solidarity.”The statement was written by the Vatican’s humanitarian arm, Cor Unum.

The United States and other developed nations want the document to be less specific. They fear making food a”right”could lead to domestic and international lawsuits demanding aid or special trade provisions.

The Vatican statement also criticized the United States for its economic embargoes directed at Iraq and Cuba.

After scandal, Scot Catholics queried on next bishop

(RNS) In an unusual move, church authorities in Scotland are asking Roman Catholics in the Scottish diocese of Argyll and the Isles to make their views known about who should be the diocese’s next bishop.

The Vatican must appoint a new bishop to succeed Roderick Wright, who resigned as bishop a month ago after disappearing with a divorcee and then acknowledging that he had also fathered a son some 15 years ago.

Although Vatican and local church officials often take informal soundings on possible candidates for bishop, it is highly unusual that all priests and parishioners are publicly asked to make their views and opinions known.

The call for input on the selection of the new bishop came in a pastoral letter to be read in diocesan churches this weekend (Oct. 26-27) from Archbishop Keith O’Brien of the diocese of St. Andrews and Edinburgh, who is acting as the vacant diocese’s administrator.

A spokesman for O’Brien said that church officials are clearly concerned to appoint someone who has not been, and is not likely to become, involved with a woman.”It is important when you consider what we discovered after Wright went,”he said.”Somebody might have known that he was misbehaving. If we had taken their views before, then somebody might have tipped them off as to what had happened.”

Quote of the day: ABC News religion correspondent Peggy Wehmeyer

(RNS) Religion and the media was one of the topics discussed at the Oct. 9-12 annual gathering of the Radio-Television News Directors Association meeting in Los Angeles. During the session, according to Associated Baptist Press, an independent news agency, Peggy Wehmeyer, the ABC News religion correspondent told an anecdote about a network news show and its interview with American pilot Scott O’Grady, who was shot down in Bosnia last year.

Reading from a transcript of the interview, Wehmeyer showed that every time O’Grady mentioned either praying or that God save him, the reporter would jump to another topic:”The man is trying to say something miraculous happened to him. And nobody (in the news media) wants to hear. The public wants to hear. Why are we getting in the way then? What’s so scary about this?”

MJP END RNS