c. 2000 Religion News Service

Two Prominent Catholics Voice Confidence in Hastert’s Chaplain Choice

(RNS) Two prominent Roman Catholic leaders have written to House Speaker Dennis Hastert to express their confidence that he will make the right final choice in the ongoing controversy concerning the next House chaplain.

“We recognize that it is an important prerogative of the office of the speaker to take responsibility for the final choice of chaplain, and we support you in making that judgment as you see fit, undeterred by crassly political considerations,” wrote William J. Bennett, co-director of Empower America, a conservative grass-roots public policy organization based in Washington, and Michael Novak, a member of the group’s board of directors.

Novak also holds the chair in religion and public policy at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.

The two-page letter commended the speaker for changing the selection process to include a bipartisan committee.

“Never before in history has any speaker opened up the process in the way that you did,” they wrote.

They said what they had learned of the process convinced them of “consummate fairness” by the selection committee.

“We find it admirable that in the winnowing process from 38 candidates to 17 at the second stage, all three Catholic priests made the cut,” they wrote. “In the next round of cuts, to six candidates, and in the third round, to the final three, a Catholic priest gained the confidence of the selection committee and was proudly put forward as one of the three finalists.”

The two men said they wrote “to put on record our esteem for our evangelical and Protestant colleagues in the House and in public life generally, and to commend them for their willingness to work with Catholics.”

The letter comes at a time when the decision about the individual to replace retiring House Chaplain James D. Ford continues to be mired in controversy.

Hastert has said he supports the Rev. Charles Wright, a Presbyterian Church (USA) minister. But some prominent Catholics have questioned whether anti-Catholic bias figured in Wright being favored over Catholic priest Timothy O’Brien.

The report of a “final tally” of six semi-finalists showed O’Brien received the most votes _ 14 and Wright got the third-highest number _ 9.5.

Barna Poll: Women Church Activists Face Burn Out

(RNS) Women have long been active in church affairs but their dedication may come at a price: A new study by the Barna Research Group warns women may suffer from “burn out,” and become less involved in church activities.

“While women represent the lion’s share of Christians and the majority of participants in religious activities, many women appear to be burning out from their intense levels of involvement,” said George Barna, president of the California-based research group, which interviewed 4,755 people for its report titled “Women are the Backbone of the Christian Congregations in America.” “Women’s monumental effort to support the work of the Christian church may be running on fumes.”

The number of women attending church has dropped 22 percent since 1991, the report says, and during the same time period nearly an equal percentage _ 21 percent _ stopped volunteering for church activities.

“We may continue to see tens of thousands of women leaving the church unless there is a widespread, aggressive, thoughtful approach to recognizing and appreciating women,” said Barna.

Still, Christian women outnumber Christian men by as many as 13 million, the report concluded, and women were more involved than men in 12 out of 13 activities analyzed in the study, including leadership, church attendance and evangelism.

According to the study, Christian women were more likely than men to hold a leadership position (56 percent), more likely to attend an adult Sunday school class (57 percent), and more likely to give money (23 percent). Twenty-nine percent of women were more likely than their male counterparts to share their faith with others.

However, men and women were equally likely _ 19 percent of both sexes _ to work with a spiritual mentor.

Despite its finding that women occupy more lay leadership positions within churches, the report noted women serve as senior pastors at only 5 percent of churches.

Evangelical Methodists Stake Out Positions Before General Conference

(RNS) _ Evangelical factions within the United Methodist Church are echoing a call by the church’s more liberal wing for 40 days of prayer and fasting leading up to the church’s General Conference, which will be held May 2-12 in Cleveland.

The meeting is expected to be contentious, with issues of gay marriage, gay ordination and a possible major church restructuring coming up for votes. Last week a coalition of church bishops urged church members to pray and fast so that a spirit of cooperation and compromise would prevail at the meeting.

The United Methodist Church, the nation’s second largest Protestant body with 8.4 million members, is struggling with internal dissension over the issue of homosexuality. Liberal reformists want the church to remove a statement from its 1996 meeting that says homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching and bans clergy from officiating at gay marriage ceremonies.

On Wednesday (March 8), the United Methodist News Service reported that a group of evangelical Methodists issued a similar plea, but urged church members to return to a Scriptural discipline that avoids political solutions and instead focuses on evangelizing non-Christians.

“We have become too accommodating to the principles of the world, and we’ve just strayed way far away from the principles that are outlined in the Scriptures, both old and new,” said the Rev. Robert E. Parker, pastor of East Ringgold United Methodist Church in Circleville, Ohio, who signed the letter.

More than 30 people signed the letter, which went on to call for an end to dialogue with people who “reject the authority of Scripture and the Lordship of Jesus Christ” and to “move beyond efforts to preserve a denomination built on the failed experiment of pluralism and focus, instead, on restoring our unity with the one holy catholic and apostolic church, a unity which transcends denominations.”

Study: Evangelical Voters Solidly Back Bush

(RNS) A recent survey of members of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) found that those voters who form the base of the Republican Party’s support will vote for Texas Gov. George W. Bush over Vice President Al Gore by 6-1.

Wrapping up the annual NAE convention in Washington on Thursday (March 9), University of Akron political science professor John Green revealed the results of a survey of more than 425 NAE delegates. Green, a respected pollster in the study of religion and politics, said that if NAE delegates are an accurate reflection of U.S. evangelicals, George W. Bush can count on their support in November.

Green asked survey respondents who they would vote for in a Gore-Bush match-up. According to the study, 69 percent would vote for Bush, while only 11 percent would vote for Gore. While Republican candidates have wooed the strong evangelical vote, Gore continues to find little support in the evangelical community, Green said.

Seventy-three percent of NAE members had a “negative” evaluation of Gore, while Bush received an 83 percent “positive” rating. Support for Arizona Sen. John McCain, who on Thursday conceded the Republican nomination to George W. Bush, was significantly smaller, although roughly half gave McCain a “positive” rating.

Green said McCain’s statement calling the Rev. Pat Robertson and the Rev. Jerry Falwell “agents of intolerance” and “forces of evil” in the Republican party sealed his lack of strong support with evangelicals.

“It was a calculated political gamble that failed in many ways,” Green said.

When it comes to issues facing evangelical voters, Green found some surprising numbers. According to his survey, evangelicals are roughly split on support for a Constitutional amendment reinstating state-sponsored prayer in schools, and as many evangelicals support affirmative action as oppose it.

In addition, Green said he was surprised to see that while 48 percent of evangelicals think Christians should stay focused on political gains, 43 percent said Christians should pursue a less active role in politics. That trend follows the lead of religious right leaders such as Cal Thomas and Paul Wyrich’s assessment that the political process has largely failed evangelicals.

“I think there has been a modest reassessment” of the value of political mobilization, Green said.

Religious Leaders Press for Death Penalty Moratorium

(RNS) Protestant, Jewish and Catholic leaders urged Congress and the White House on Thursday (March 9) to suspend federal executions while capital punishment is examined for disproportionately targeting minorities and poor people.

Following the lead of Illinois Gov. George Ryan, who imposed a moratorium on executions while investigators try to find out why more death sentences have been overturned than carried out, religious leaders said Congress must halt executions so that no innocent inmates are put to death.

“Mr. President, our plea today is not to send the executioner home, but we pray that you will stay the executioner’s hand until greater justice can be achieved,” said Rabbi Eric Yoffie, the president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the leading movement of Reform Judaism.

A dozen religious leaders gathered at the U.S. Capitol with Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., who has introduced a bill to abolish the federal death penalty. Feingold’s bill is currently working its way through a Senate committee, but so far Feingold has managed to find only one other senator to support the bill.

More than 30 religious leaders from a broad spectrum of faiths signed a letter to Clinton urging a federal moratorium. Clinton has previously refused to issue such a ban.

The Rev. Phil Wogaman, pastor of Washington D.C.’s Foundry United Methodist Church _ the church regularly attended by President and Mrs. Clinton _ said the death penalty should only be used if it can be assured it is being administered justly.

“There is no room here for mistakes,” Wogaman said. “No innocent person should ever be executed.”

Speaking for the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Rev. Ricardo Ramirez, the bishop of Las Cruces, N.M., echoed statements by Pope John Paul II that society can never make up for a victim’s life by taking the life of the killer.

“We oppose capital punishment primarily because of what it does to us as a society,” Ramirez said. “It perpetuates a terrible cycle of violence and the notion that we can settle our most intractable problems by resorting to violence.”

Kentucky Governor Vetoes Religious Civil Rights Bill

(RNS) The governor of Kentucky has vetoed a bill that would have excluded religious groups from state civil rights law preventing places of public accommodation from discriminating on the basis of disability, race, color, religion or national origin.

Saying it would have allowed discrimination on the basis of race, Gov. Paul Patton vetoed the bill, which would have excluded church groups from the definition of a “place of public accommodation, resort or amusement” and allowed churches to refuse to rent their facilities to those who did not adhere to the church’s basic beliefs.

The bill’s sponsor, Democratic state Rep. Tom Kerr, said his proposal was designed to protect church groups who have rented facilities to groups opposing their teachings because they believed not doing so would violate state civil rights laws, according to the Associated Press. Such a case arose in 1996 when the Bulletsburg Baptist Assembly _ fearing that not doing so would violate state civil rights laws _ rented its church camp to a group that did not believe in God.

Kerr contended his bill would have “put churches back in control of their facilities while protecting our civil rights.”

Other legislators disagreed with the proposal, which passed last month in both the Kentucky House (82-17) and Senate (17-12).

“I think it’s very dangerous to tinker with civil-rights legislation. It’s very dangerous when you start talking about excluding people,” said state Rep. Eleanor Jordan, a Democrat. “If we don’t protect the rights of everyone, we have no right to protect the rights of anyone.”

State Rep. Ernesto Scorsone also argued against the bill, noting it would send the message to churches that “it’s OK for you all to discriminate.”

“You don’t promote religion by perpetuating prejudice, and that’s what this bill does,” he said.

Update: Bob Jones University Clarifies Interracial Dating Policy

(NRS) Bob Jones University has issued a clarification of its policy on interracial dating _ students won’t need a note of approval from their parents to date interracially, but the university will encourage students to notify their parents if they wish to get involved in any “serious dating relationship.”

School spokesman Jonathan Pait told the Associated Press of the policy clarification Wednesday (March 8), two days after university president Bob Jones III informed students at an assembly they would need to give their dean a note of approval from their parents OK’ing interracial dating. Pait said that if parents did not approve of a student’s decision to date interracially, the school would suggest students undergo counseling, but would not initiate any disciplinary proceedings.

Last week the controversial South Carolina school ended its 50-year-old ban on interracial dating, which was instituted in the 1950s to prevent Asian and white students from dating (black students were not allowed to enroll at the university until 1970).

The school’s policy on interracial dating made headlines when Texas Gov. George W. Bush spoke there during his presidential campaign, prompting a number of Democrats to denounce the governor’s refusal to speak out against the school’s policy.

“Deliberate Childlessness” Criticized by British Bishop

(RNS)The growing trend to what he called “deliberate childlessness” on the part of married couples has come under fire from Anglican Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali of Rochester, England.

“In an age of excessive self-regard and encouragement on every side to the new religion of the `me,’ it is very important for the church to continue saying that having children and their nurture is a basic good of marriage and not just an optional extra,” the bishop wrote in the current issue of his diocesan newspaper.

Church teaching, he said, argues that marriage is not a matter of self-indulgence or even a prolongation of “romantic” love but rather “costly self-giving to one another and to any children which are born.” Such teaching is “crucial” if the social fabric and future generations are not to be further undermined.

Nazir-Ali allowed for exceptions to the general rule: those past the age of child-bearing; those unable to have children; and those who should not have children because of the risk of passing on inherited disorders.

But those exceptions should not obscure the normative teaching of the church, he said. “It is always a mistake to confuse `exceptions’ with the rule.”

Emphasizing that sex without commitment was “irresponsible and exploitative,” Nazir-Ali, who is married with two as yet unmarried sons in their 20s, said: “Sex with commitment is properly expressed in the context of a married relationship which is permanent. Children are part of God’s will for marriage unless there are very good reasons to the contrary. The planning of a family is however part of our stewardship of creation.”

Quote of the Day: Television Producer Matthew Carlson

(RNS) “I’d like to think we’re laughing with God, not at him.”

Matthew Carlson, producer of NBC’s “God, the Devil and Bob,” a controversial animated show. He was quoted in the Wednesday (March 8) edition of USA Today.

DEA END RNS