c. 2000 Religion News Service
L.A. Cardinal Issues Sweeping Apology on Eve of Lent
(RNS) Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony issued a sweeping mea culpa on the eve of Lent, apologizing to those in his archdiocese and around the country whom he or the Roman Catholic Church may have offended, including gays, lesbians, Jews, Muslims and victims of clergy sexual abuse.
In a seven-page apology issued Monday (Feb. 6), Mahony apologized for the wrong things he has done, as well as the times he remained silent when he should have spoken out. The 64-year-old cardinal has led the nation’s largest Catholic diocese _ with 4 million Catholics _ since 1985.
“I would begin by expressing my personal apologies to everyone in the archdiocese whom I have offended in my pastoral ministry by a lack of patience and understanding, through my pride and lack of charity, and by my rush to judge others without adequately hearing other points of views,” Mahony said.
Mahony lamented that neither he nor the church had forcefully spoken out against the stereotyping of Jews and Muslims, especially in Hollywood.
“The Jewish people and their faith have been stereotyped and made the object of insult, jokes and generalizations,” Mahony wrote, and continued, saying, “Islam is often identified directly with terrorism, and easily becomes the universal villain. But as we know, the Islamic faith teaches love, respect, family values, and a deep responsibility for improving the common good for all peoples.”
Mahony also reached out to the lesbian and gay community, a group of Catholics who often feel rejected and despised by their own church.
“I ask pardon of our Catholic homosexual and lesbian members when the church has appeared to be non-supportive of their struggles or of falling into homophobia,” he wrote.
And, trying to address concerns the church has not fully dealt with the problem of clergy molestation, Mahony said he has instituted new policies to prevent future abuse.
“I apologize to those individuals, families and parish communities who have suffered because of clergy sexual abuse, one of the more tragic scourges afflicting the church in the latter part of the past century,” Mahony said.
Debt Relief Urged for Stricken Mozambique
(RNS) As Mozambique struggles to cope in the aftermath of weeks of heavy rains and flooding that displaced thousands, speakers at a news conference Tuesday (March 7) urged Congress to ease the country’s plight by reducing its debt obligation to the United States .
“For Mozambique, debt relief is flood relief,” said the Rev. M. Thomas Shaw, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, one of several who spoke at the news conference, including Secretary of the Treasury Lawrence H. Summers, House Banking Committee Chairman James Leach, R-Iowa, and Raymond C. Offenheiser, president of Oxfam America.
“Poor countries are caught in a cycle of debt they cannot escape, borrowing more money to make payments on old debts. Fewer children are educated because their governments have had to charge families unaffordable school fees,” Shaw said. “More people die of preventable diseases because there is no money for medicines or hospitals. Crops wither in their fields because government supports for farmers are gone. We should help people and families create opportunities to work and live in dignity.”
Before the floods that swept the country in late February, Mozambique had about $5.3 billion in debt, of which $49 million was owed to the United States. Mozambique officials estimate the country will need about $65 million to recover from February’s disaster.
Speakers at the news conference said debt relief assistance would aid the flood-ravaged nation more effectively than any short-term disaster relief efforts.
Ken Hackett, executive director of Catholic Relief Services, encouraged Congress to support a proposal that would appropriate about $210 million for debt relief for Mozambique and other poor nations. The House Appropriations Committee will consider the proposal, a supplement to the fiscal year 2000 budget, on Thursday (March 9).
“We call upon Congress in this Jubilee year to make a gesture, a profound gesture on the level of $210 million _ $250 million so we can be recognized throughout the world as having done the right thing,” said Hackett. “The people in nations bound in a web of indebtedness cannot see hope for a better future. We must do something to alleviate their debt, and we must do it now.”
Virginia House Passes Minute of Silence Bill
(RNS) _ Virginia schoolchildren may soon find themselves bowing their heads in a moment of silence before classes begin after the state’s House of Delegates passed a bill Monday (March 6) to institute a mandatory morning pause in the state’s schools.
Virginia Gov. James S. Gilmore III, a Republican, has said he will sign the measure, according to the Washington Post. The House bill was a scaled-down version of a bill that passed the Senate earlier this year.
The House bill requires students and teachers to remain seated and silent for one minute before classes begin. The Senate bill goes a bit further and requires that teachers tell students about their choice to pray silently.
Discrepancies between the two bills will be worked out later this week.
Virginia joins about 25 other states who have instituted voluntary moments of prayer or meditation in the nation’s schools. But in a state that drafted the first religious freedom statute, the measure has already met stiff opposition.
Some Virginia Jewish leaders denounced the bill, saying it would require teachers to decide between what forms of religious expression _ crosses, rosary beads or prayer shawls _ are appropriate in the classroom, said Sophie Hoffman, vice president of the Jewish Community Council of Greater Washington.
“We’re putting the teachers in the position of interpreting the Constitution,” Hoffman told Washington Jewish Week, a weekly newspaper.
Supporters, however, say bringing prayer back into schools as a voluntary option will create a more respectful atmosphere and curb the violence that has plagued the nation’s schools in recent years.
“We’re just not doing enough to remind young kids that there’s something greater than themselves,” Gilmore said after the House vote.
Irish Theologian Urges Greater Acceptance of Gays in Church
(RNS) A call for Christians to welcome homosexuals into the church as a source of enrichment has come from the eminent Irish moral theologian, the Rev. Enda McDonagh in a London speech to the Roman Catholic caucus of the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement.
Calling for the restoration of an understanding the “topsy-turvy kingdom of God” in terms not of kings and rulers but of those excluded from power and the marginalized, McDonagh said: “Without being patronizing, for too many Catholics, too many Christians, too many religious and non-religious people, gay and Lesbian people are strangers who inspire fear rather than love, who are not given a priority in the preaching or promotion of the kingdom or reign of God.”
But there needs to be a change of attitude and vision that would give thanks for and value the strangeness of the gay and Lesbian as an enrichment of the whole human community.
“What we need as church and society is to let that richness emerge for all of us,” he said.
Challenging lesbian and gay Catholics to draw on their own experience of exclusion and suffering to help bring justice and peace to Church and society, McDonagh said, “I honestly believe that the challenge for lesbian and gay Catholics now is how you can set the rest of us free, enrich the community to which we belong, to let your vision and realization of the values of the kingdom be free to free us in an important way.
“You are one of the groups that can help us to find the space that we can call Catholic and free in the Pauline sense of being free as the children of God. In the very strangeness of God we find the union, the communion of disciples of Jesus, of people of kingdom instincts and kingdom values, of human beings, all created by that loving God and called to flourish in communion.”
Women Anglican Priests Not Yet in Mainstream
(RNS) The first study of women ordained as priests in the Church of England has found that most women clerics are excluded from mainstream parish life of the church and called for scrapping of the system of so-called “flying bishops” set up to minister to opponents of women’s ordination.
The report also called for opening the the episcopate to women and allowing them to become bishops.
The study looked at the first 1,560 women priests ordained in the Church of England since March 12, 1994.
Questionnaires were sent to all 1,560, and 1,247 were returned _ a response rate of 81 percent. In addition, in-depth interviews were conducted with 29 women priests.
Her study found that most of the women priests were or had been employed in “caring” professions such as nursing, with 38 percent of them being or having been teachers.
Nearly half were not married and only 17 per cent had dependent children, while 18 percent were married to a clergyman.
Nearly a third _ 31 percent _ were working as non-stipendiary ministers _ not paid by the church _ but of this group only 12 percent said they had chosen to be non-stipendiary ministers.
“The picture is clear,” wrote Helen Thorne, the academic who oversaw the survey. “Women are more likely to be in jobs that are removed from the mainstream parochial ministry of the church.
They appear to be developing different career patterns from men in positions that are away from the centers of church hierarchy.”
The study also indicated women married to clergy or with young children were particularly disadvantaged. “In fact,” she went on, “women who are married to clergy and have very young children find it almost impossible to fulfill any priestly role.” Furthermore, the fact that a vicar or rector had to live in the parish made it difficult for women priests whose husbands were also priests to serve at other than a junior level.
The study also found widespread opposition among women priests to the creation of the so-called “flying bishops” to minister to parishes which wanted to have nothing to do with women priests.
“The Act of Synod, and the provision of extended alternative episcopal oversight, are offensive to women because they legitimize womens exclusion and create a form of sexual apartheid by creating areas in the church where womens ministry is unacceptable,” the report said.
Quote of Day: Graca Machel, former first lady of Mozambique
(RNS) “It seem the world has no conscience when it comes to human life. When the West wants to intervene militarily anywhere in the world, they get there in record time.”
_ Graca Machel, former first lady of Mozambique and now wife Nelson Mandela, former South African president, commenting on the slow response of Western governments to aid her country in the wake of catastrophic floods as quoted by the Associated Press.
DEA END RNS
