c. 2004 Religion News Service

Democrats Unveil New Religious Outreach Director, Web Site

WASHINGTON (RNS) With less than a month to go before the Nov. 2 election, the Democratic National Committee unveiled a new Web site for religious voters, as well as a new director of religious outreach.

The DNC’s new Web site, http://www.kerrysharesourvalues.org, compares Sen. John Kerry’s proposals on poverty, jobs, the environment, the economy and the Iraq war with those of President Bush. It also includes links to an area where supporters make financial donations.

“John Kerry has a plan to lead our country in a new direction, a plan built on his deep faith, his life of service and concern for our neighbor,” said Alexia Kelley, the party’s new religious outreach director.

Kelley, a Catholic, started full time last month after the party’s first religious outreach director, the Rev. Brenda Bartella-Peterson, resigned under fire for supporting the removal of the words “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance.

Kelley said Kerry’s policies “come out of his Catholic faith,” especially on social justice issues like poverty and health care. “He has values that emerge from his faith and religious tradition, just like many Americans,” she said.

From 1994 to 2002, Kelley worked for the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, the anti-poverty arm of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Kerry, a Catholic who has been criticized by some bishops for his support of abortion rights, has seen a “surge of support” from rank-and-file Catholics, Kelley said.

Kerry has had trouble gaining traction among some Catholics. A recent Barna poll put Bush ahead of Kerry among likely Catholic voters, 53 percent to 36 percent.

In addition to reaching out to Catholics, Kelley said the party regularly holds strategy sessions with “outreach” advisers from various faith groups.

“The Democratic Party is committed to religious outreach and that will continue as a full effort into the future,” she said.

The Kerry campaign has its own director of religious outreach, Mara Vanderslice, although she has taken on a low-profile role since being criticized by the conservative New York-based Catholic League.

_ Kevin Eckstrom

In Afghanistan, Religion Still Used to Intimidate Women, Report Says

NEW YORK (RNS) Afghan warlords and resurgent Taliban forces are using religion to threaten and intimidate women in the run-up to Afghanistan’s Saturday (Oct. 9) presidential election, according to a new report by New York-based Human Rights Watch.

The report, “Between Hope and Fear: Intimidation and Threats Against Women in Public Life in Afghanistan,” claims that the intimidation by religious groups and others long opposed to participation by women in Afghan public life is widespread and threatens the right of women to vote freely in the elections.

“A pervasive atmosphere of fear persists for women involved in politics and women’s rights in Afghanistan, despite significant improvements in women’s lives since the fall of the Taliban in late 2001,” the human rights monitoring group said in releasing the report Tuesday (Oct. 5).

One woman, an activist working in a northern Afghan province, told Human Rights Watch investigators that she had received threatening phone calls saying she would be killed for her work and to make her “an example to other women.” Aside from activists, those who have experienced threats include female journalists, humanitarian workers, and government and election officials.

The presidential elections in Afghanistan are being touted as a key test for women re-entering public life since the removal three years ago of the Taliban, the coalition that imposed a strict interpretation of Islamic law and effectively banned women from the country’s public sphere.

Progress made since 2001 includes constitutional guarantees for women’s rights and educational access for more than 1 million Afghan girls, Human Rights Watch noted. Another positive sign is found in voter registration numbers, with more than 41 percent of the country’s 10.5 registered million voters reportedly being women.

But the report warned that multiple registrations have reportedly inflated official pre-election figures, and that continued insecurity in some parts of the country is preventing some women from registering.

Human Rights Watch also warned that gains in women’s rights “mask a more depressing reality.”

“Continuing religious and cultural conservatism, and a dangerous security environment, mean that women still struggle to participate in the country’s evolving political institutions,” the report said. Resurgent Taliban forces, as well as regional military factions and religious conservative leaders, “are limiting Afghan women’s participation in society through death threats, harassment, and physical attacks.”

The Human Rights Watch assessment also noted that religious conservatives, the Taliban and U.S.-supported warlords often have similar views about the role of women and that the United States and its allies have not made the warlords’ treatment of women a high priority.

_ Chris Herlinger

Pope Accepts Resignation of Austrian Bishop of Scandal-Plagued Seminary

VATICAN CITY (RNS) Pope John Paul II has accepted the resignation of an Austrian bishop who dismissed a sex scandal in his diocesan seminary as a “schoolboy prank,” the Vatican said Thursday (Oct. 7).

John Paul named Bishop Klaus Kueng, 63, to succeed Bishop Kurt Krenn, 68, as bishop of St. Poelten. Kueng was the “apostolic visitor” who investigated the scandal in the St. Poelten Seminary for the Vatican.

The announcement said that the pope acted under a canon (church) law providing for the resignation of a bishop “who, because of illness or some other grave reason, has become unsuited for the fulfillment of his office.” The normal retirement age for a bishop is 75.

John Paul sent Kueng to St. Poelten, in Carinthia some 45 miles east of Vienna, on July 20, a day after Austrian police charged an unidentified 27-year-old Polish ex-seminarian with distributing and possessing child pornography.

Authorities said they found some 40,000 photographs and videos of child pornography in seminary computers, allegedly downloaded from a Polish Web site. They also found photographs of priests and seminarians kissing and fondling each other.

The rector of the seminary, the Rev. Ulrich Kuechl, and his deputy, Wolfgang Rothe, resigned July 5, and the former seminarian was convicted and given a suspended sentence Aug. 13.

A poll released July 17 showed that 72 percent of Austrians also wanted Krenn to resign, but he called the photographs a “schoolboy prank” that had “nothing to do with homosexuality” and said he had no intention of resigning.

Kueng, a member of the Opus Dei Prelature, has degrees in medicine, philosophy and theology. He has been bishop of Feldkirch in Austria since 1989.

_ Peggy Polk

Vatican Theologians to Study Fate of Babies Who Die Unbaptized

VATICAN CITY (RNS) Pope John Paul II has asked a panel of theologians attached to the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to study the fate of babies who die without baptism.

Addressing members of the International Theological Commission at a Vatican audience Thursday (Oct. 7), John Paul said the issue is of “maximum interest” because it involves fundamental beliefs.

Catholic dogma dating to the Middle Ages holds that unbaptized babies are tainted with original sin and must, like unbaptized adults, await the last judgment in “limbo,” a place without torments but far from God.

“The question of the fate of babies dead without baptism,” the pope said, “is not simply an isolated theological problem. Many other fundamental themes are intimately interwoven with this.”

John Paul cited “God’s will for universal salvation, the unique and universal mediation of Jesus Christ, the role of the church, universal sacraments of salvation, the theology of the sacraments and the sense of the doctrine of original sin.”

Over the next several years it will be the job of the theologians “to scrutinize the nexus between all these mysteries in view of offering a theological synthesis that can serve to help (develop) a more coherent and illuminated pastoral procedure,” he said.

The commission also will consider natural moral law, or how reason alone can tell right from wrong, which John Paul said has important implications for the church’s relations with non-Catholics.

John Paul noted that his encyclical letters Veritatis Splendor (1993), on the church’s moral teaching, and Fides et Ratio (1998), on faith and reason, dealt with natural moral law.

The church’s belief that man’s conscience can lead him to “fundamental truths on his life and his destiny” has “possibilities of great importance for dialogue with all men of goodwill and for co-existence at many different levels on a common ethical basis,” he said.

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, presides over the theological commission, which is opening its seventh five-year term.

_ Peggy Polk

Publisher: More `Left Behind’ Books on the Way

(RNS) The popular “Left Behind” series detailing an evangelical Christian vision of “end times” will continue with more books, Tyndale House Publishers has announced.

The Wheaton, Ill.-based publisher had already forged an agreement with co-authors Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins to create two additional books to the 12-book series, one set prior to the first book and another set after the 12th. The last book in the series was published in March.

Now, the authors have agreed to pen two additional books that lead up to “Left Behind,” the first in the fictional series. “The Rising,” the first of the three “prequel” books is due out on March 1, 2005. The subsequent titles are expected in November 2005 and spring 2006. A release date for the story that follows “Glorious Appearing,” the 12th book, has not been set.

“As Jerry and Tim began developing the story leading … up to the rapture (which occurs in the novel `Left Behind’), it became clear that they could not cover all the key characters and key events in one book without making the story seem rushed and choppy,” said Ron Beers, Tyndale senior vice president and publisher, in a statement.

“This will now do justice to the quality of the `Left Behind’ series.”

Books in the series, which has produced more than 60 million copies, have topped best-seller lists of The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, The Wall Street Journal and CBA, formerly known as the Christian Booksellers Association.

_ Adelle M. Banks

Quote of the Day: Church-State Separationist Barry W. Lynn

(RNS) “My response to a religious audience would be that God does not need the help of the government at any level in order to work his will in the world. If you believe that God exists, then the actions of some government bureaucrat are hardly going to interfere with that agenda. I think the very best single thing that government can ever do to religion is to simply leave it alone. We will be OK. We are thriving.”

_ The Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, in an interview with OldSpeak, an online publication of The Rutherford Institute.

MO/PH END RNS