c. 2003 Religion News Service
Bishops’ Lawyer Says Church Must Guard Its Autonomy
WASHINGTON (RNS) The top lawyer for the Roman Catholic Church in the United States said bishops need to guard against lawmakers who want to use the recent sex abuse scandal to push laws that would damage the church.
Mark Chopko, general counsel for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said the yearlong clergy sex scandal has given fuel to opponents who want to force the church to endorse contraception or limit the confidentiality of confession.
“There are forces at work in this society that will, unless checked, radically remake the religious institutions serving the public,” Chopko said Wednesday (Jan. 15) in a speech at Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law.
“Unless we are prepared to defend our constitutional rights as a community of believers, our greatest gifts to the larger society in health, education and welfare are in jeopardy.”
Chopko, who said he was speaking for himself and not the bishops, said public anger and media scrutiny have attributed “bad motives” to how U.S. bishops had tried to handle abuse cases in the past.
While he said the church has a duty to defend itself in all legal cases, he said church lawyers should use litigation only as a last resort. Chopko said exorbitant financial settlements have made church insurers reluctant to settle and instead favor lengthy court battles.
He also predicted 1,000 new court cases involving sex abuse within the next two years.
“Litigation, I fear, will waste resources on attacking and defending the church that should be and can be better spent resolving claims in fairness and justice,” Chopko said. “Bankrupting the church or forcing it to recede from ministries of preaching and teaching, sanctifying and serving, is not the answer.”
Chopko, the bishops’ top lawyer for 16 years, said the church must resist efforts to limit church autonomy and authority. He criticized new laws in California and New York that force the church to pay for contraception for employees, and a proposed law in Kentucky that would remove the confidentiality of the confessional in abuse cases.
“We can’t sacrifice long-term principles for short-term punishment,” he said, adding later that “certainly we cannot allow the state and the government to drive the church according to its agenda. We can’t allow the path of litigation to reduce the church as an institution, and we can’t allow the state to remake the church.”
_ Kevin Eckstrom
Missionaries Ask Baptists to Refrain From Criticizing Islam
(RNS) A group of Southern Baptist missionaries working in predominantly Muslim countries has issued a letter asking that Baptists refrain from denouncing Islam and its Prophet Muhammad.
“Comments by Christians in the West about Islam and Muhammad can and do receive much attention in our cities and communities on local radio, television and print sources,” the group wrote. “These types of comments … can further the already heightened animosity toward Christians, more so toward evangelicals, and even more so toward Baptists.”
The letter was released by the Biblical Recorder, a news journal for North Carolina Baptists, which received it from George Braswell, a professor of mission and world religions at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C. The professor recently returned from a visit to the Middle East.
“Braswell explained to me that he was leading a seminar with these missionaries and they expressed concerns to him,” Biblical Recorder Editor Tony Cartledge told Religion News Service. “He agreed to distribute the letter if they were certain that’s what they wanted to do.”
The letter writers, who called themselves only “A Group of Southern Baptists serving in the Muslim World” for security reasons, included more than two dozen missionaries living in the Middle East, North Africa, East Africa and South Asia.
“We have found it more beneficial with our Muslim friends to concentrate on sharing Christ in love and concentrating on the message of the gospel, instead of speaking in a degrading manner about their religion or prophet,” they wrote.
They were responding to remarks by prominent Southern Baptists, including former Southern Baptist Convention president Jerry Vines and evangelists Jerry Falwell and Franklin Graham, who have made public comments disparaging Islam.
An official of the International Mission Board issued a statement responding to the comments of the missionaries.
“These IMB workers wanted to emphasize a focus on bearing witness for Christ as a blessing to Muslims, rather than arguing Islam versus Christianity,” said Avery Willis, senior vice president of overseas operations. “I believe what they were trying to say is that their concern is communicating the gospel to lost persons without having to defend what someone in America said about Islam.”
_ Adelle M. Banks
Hebrew College Plans Transdenominational Rabbinical Program
BOSTON (RNS) Hebrew College, the major institution of higher Jewish education in Boston, has announced plans to develop a transdenominational rabbinic program that will be launched this coming fall.
The program will be only the second in the country, after New York’s Academy for Jewish Religion, to ordain “transdenominational” rabbis, who come from all levels of Jewish backgrounds and are not ordained directly into any particular movement.
Graduates of the Hebrew College program will, however, have the necessary background training to complete the process for admission into the rabbinic associations of the Reconstructionist, Reform or Conservative movements, if they choose.
Orthodox students will also be able to prepare to enter that movement’s rabbinate.
“We hope that our students will be well-prepared both to serve community-wide nondenominational programs in the Jewish community” in such areas as as education or academics, said Rabbi David Gordis, president of Hebrew College. “But we also want them to be well-prepared to go into denominational positions,” he said.
The rabbinical program may, leaders hope, keep a level of vibrancy in the Jewish life of the city, which currently is not home to any Jewish seminary, and beyond.
“Having it in Boston is really very important,” said Gordis. “We have in Boston, as part of the spread of Jewish studies, Jewish academic resources as well as rabbinic (resources), which make it at least the equal of any concentration of Jewish scholarship anywhere else in the world.”
The school says it is developing a multifaceted curriculum that leaders hope will provide an in-depth rabbinical education while remaining attractive to a diverse student population.
“We don’t view rabbinical training as a series of obstacles to be crossed, but a journey of growth,” said Gordis, who has formed faculty subcommittees to design the curriculum, plan for religious requirements and handle the admissions process.
A pilot version of the rabbinic program will begin in the fall of 2003 with eight to 10 students, with the full program beginning a year later. A new doctoral program will also begin in September 2003 at the college.
_ Holly Lebowitz Rossi
Supreme Court Declines to Take Columbine Religious-Tile Case
(RNS) The U.S. Supreme Court declined Monday (Jan. 13) to hear a case concerning religious-themed ceramic tiles placed at Columbine High School by family members of children slain there in 1999.
Without comment, the high court has let stand a decision by an appellate court permitting the removal of tiles with religious references from among others along the corridors of the school in Littleton, Colo.
After the shootings at the school, in which 15 lives were lost, school officials invited relatives of the victims to add to the tile project. The officials banned tiles with religious content, citing the separation of church and state.
The Virginia-based Rutherford Institute, which filed suit on behalf of families who wanted to include religious content, was disappointed by the Supreme Court’s decision.
“This case would have provided the court with the perfect opportunity to ensure fair and equal treatment of religious expression,” said John W. Whitehead, president of the institute, in a statement.
A district judge ruled in 2001 that the religious tiles were permitted, but that decision was overruled by the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals last year.
_ Adelle M. Banks
Anonymous Gift Preserves Los Angeles Ecumenical Office
(RNS) An anonymous non-Catholic donor has given enough money to spare the ecumenical and interreligious affairs office of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles from a $4.3 million churchwide cutback.
The office was eliminated as part of budget cutbacks announced last September by Cardinal Roger Mahony. Other affected offices in the nation’s largest archdiocese included outreach to gays and lesbians, people with disabilities and campus ministries.
The Rev. Alexei Smith, director of the office, told the archdiocesan newspaper, The Tidings, that a non-Catholic benefactor approached him about funding the office.
“This person was very disappointed, then point blank asked me how much I would need to continue operations,” Smith recalled to the newspaper. When told how much it would cost, “This person again looked me straight in the eye and said, `That’s no problem. I’ll give it to you.”’
Mahony gave his blessing to the gift, which will fund the office until Smith’s current term expires in 2005. Church officials were unable to say how much the office budget is. Smith will now serve as “ecumenical and interreligious officer” and the office will move to his church in El Segundo.
Smith said even without the gift he would have tried to fund the office. “I would not allow the reality of budgetary consideration to give the message that interfaith and ecumenical relations were not important to the Catholic Church,” he told The Tidings.
_ Kevin Eckstrom
Quote of the Day: Washington Times columnist Suzanne Fields
(RNS) “Religion and politics make strange bedfellows but, like male and female, they can’t be kept apart. The trick is keeping both happy and distinct. Not always easy.”
_ Suzanne Fields, a columnist for The Washington Times, writing in the newspaper’s Jan. 16 edition.
DEA END RNS
