c. 2003 Religion News Service

Judge Dismisses Abuse Suit Against Brooklyn Diocese

(RNS) A New York judge dismissed a sexual abuse lawsuit against the Diocese of Brooklyn, a decision that could affect similar legal action that aims to overcome expired statutes of limitation on old abuse cases.

Judge Janice A. Taylor of the New York State Supreme Court in Queens on April 11 threw out the suit filed by 42 plaintiffs who had claimed they were abused by Catholic priests, some as many as 50 years ago.

The plaintiffs’ lawyer, Michael Dowd, had argued that church officials who had covered up the alleged abuse had hindered the victims from filing suit. Taylor said the victims had “timely knowledge” of the abuse and could have taken legal action before their window expired.

“I think that this is a disastrous decision for the Catholic Church,” Dowd told The New York Times, “because the winning argument was, they had no duty to their parishioners, to the children in their care, to warn them about sexual predator priests that were among them and abusing kids.”

Dowd said he would appeal the judge’s decision. Frank DeRosa, a spokesman for the diocese, told The Times, “We’re grateful that the judge has ruled in favor of our position on the law as we understand it to be.”

The ruling may be significant because Dowd and other lawyers have used the same fraud and concealment argument in other cases to get around the expired statutes of limitation. Last week (April 14), Dowd filed a similar suit against 14 priests in the neighboring Diocese of Rockville Centre.

Several states, most notably California, have passed legislation to lift the statutes of limitation on old abuse cases in order to let alleged victims seek legal action against their abusers.

Pope’s Easter Message Calls for Peace in Iraq, Elsewhere

(RNS) In an Easter Sunday message centered on the need for peace, Pope John Paul II called for peace in Iraq and asked the international community to support the Iraqi people in becoming “the protagonists of the collective rebuilding in Iraq.”

The pope delivered the traditional “Urbi et Orbi” message _ Latin for “to the city and to the world” _ in Italian after celebrating Mass on the steps of St. Peter’s Basilica.

The first words of the risen Jesus _ “Peace be with you” _ are “a greeting which echoes today throughout the world,” John Paul said. The 82-year-old pontiff has spoken out strongly against war in Iraq and tried to use Vatican diplomacy to avoid it.

While media attention has focused on the conflict in Iraq, there is need for peace in other parts of the world, “where forgotten wars and protracted hostilities are causing deaths and injuries amid silence and neglect,” he said.

“With profound grief I think of the wake of violence and bloodshed, with no sign of ceasing, in the Holy Land,” said the pope, also expressing concern over continuing conflicts in Africa and “the attacks on people’s freedom in the Caucasus, in Asia and in Latin America.”

Referring again to international tensions, he also prayed that there would not be “a tragic clash between cultures and religions.”

“May faith and love of God make the followers of every religion courageous builders of understanding and forgiveness, patient weavers of a fruitful interreligious dialogue,” John Paul said.

_ Christina Denny

Russian Jews Warn of a Campaign of Intimidation

MOSCOW (RNS) Local residents found two plastic bags full of explosives next to a synagogue here Sunday night, causing the evacuation of a 16-story apartment building and prompting Jewish leaders to condemn efforts to “intimidate” the Jewish community.

Because the botched attack came on a day often marked here by racist violence _ April 20, Adolf Hitler’s birthday _ observers were quick to link the primitive bomb to the Polyakov Synagogue, which was subject to a grenade attack in 1994 and an unsuccessful time-bomb in 1999.

“They would like to murder us,” the synagogue’s rabbi, Yitzhak Kogan, told NTV television.

Police said the bomb was intended to destroy the car of a local businessman. However, police investigators offered no evidence and have a history of downplaying the activities of neo-fascist gangs.

“It is too early to say” whether the botched attack was part of a concerted campaign, concluded Boruch Gorin, a spokesman for the ultra-Orthodox Chabad Lubavitch, a Hasidic group that runs the synagogue.

Three days earlier in the provincial Russian city of Kostroma, someone placed a small bundle of explosives next to a synagogue and attached a sign reading: “Hitler didn’t get the job done. We will!” The bomb did not detonate and no one was injured, according to Moscow’s Human Rights Bureau.

In an unrelated incident, the longtime Lubavitch rabbi of Rostov-on-Don was deported Sunday with his family after a local court ruled that he had illegally overstayed his visa. The Israeli rabbi, Eliyashiv Kaplun, flew with his wife and four children to Tel Aviv, where he plans to apply for permission to return to Russia, according to Boris Zeidman, a Jewish lay leader in Rostov-on-Don.

“It is my fault for not turning the documents in on time,” said Zeidman by telephone Monday (April 21), expressing hope that Kaplun would return in a month or so.

In the last year, at least two dozen foreign religious workers _ mostly Protestants and Roman Catholics _ have been expelled from Russia without explanation. Kaplun himself was inexplicably detained for three days in October at the Rostov-on-Don airport when he arrived from Israel. At the time, border guards said they were checking Kaplun’s documents.

_ Frank Brown

Archbishop of Canterbury Warns About Misuse of Christianity

LONDON (RNS) Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, preaching his first Easter sermon as head of the worldwide Anglican communion, has warned against the misuse of Christianity to justify one’s actions.

Taking as his starting point the risen Jesus’ warning to Mary Magdalene not to cling to him, he said: “There is a clinging to Jesus that shows itself in the longing to be utterly sure of our rightness; we want him there, we want him where we can see him and manage him, so that we know exactly where to turn to be told that everything is all right and that he is on our side.

“We do it in religious conflicts, we do it in moral debates, we do it in politics. We want to stand still and be reassured, rather than moving faithfully with Jesus along a path into new life whose turnings we don’t know in advance. To have an absolute reassurance of our rightness somehow stands in the way of following Jesus to the Father; it offers us an image of ourselves that pleases and consoles, instead of the deeper and harder assurance of the gospel _ the assurance that whether or not we have a satisfying image of ourselves, we have the promise of forgiveness and of a future.”

But he said the temptation runs deep. For months a profound and disturbing moral argument had been raging over the rightness of the war against Iraq.

“You’ll have noticed the way in which some opponents of the war insisted that the motives of those in power must be personally corrupt, greedy, dishonest and bloodthirsty _ as if the question could be settled simply by deciding on the wickedness of individuals,” Williams said.

“Equally though, there have been defenders of the war who have accused its critics of being unable to tell good from evil, of colluding with monstrous cruelty and being indifferent to the suffering of nations.”

This was not simply about how controversies are debated, he said, but about “that odd and not very pleasant tendency in our hearts to ignore the mixture of motives and the uncertainties of understanding that lie behind our own decisions, to deny the elements of chance and hidden prejudice, temperament and feeling that make up our minds, even on the most profound matters. … We cling to what makes us feel most safely distant from evil,” the archbishop said.

“The would-be peacemaker is often passionate in treating every kind of force as equally terrible, so that there is a single clear enemy over there to confront _ all those with blood on their hands, American general as much as Iraqi executioner.

“The apologist for war is offended and threatened by the _ not unreasonable _ suggestion that the motives and methods of modern war are unlikely to be completely shaped by moral considerations, and that fighting evil can involve us in imitating some of its methods, even in the best of causes.

“Both are afraid of acknowledging that they have something in common with what they are resisting,” the archbishop added.

Quote of the Day: Anglican Archbishop of York David Hope

(RNS) “Quite frankly, despite all the promises, given how things currently are in Kabul and Afghanistan, postwar does not bode well as to how things might be in Baghdad and Iraq. At least as much determination, commitment and resolution will be needed on the part of the coalition which pursued the war now to pursue the reconstruction.”

_ Anglican Archbishop of York (England) David Hope in an Easter sermon April 20.

DEA END RNS