c. 2005 Religion News Service

Former Church Official Says Vatican Owes Victims an Apology

(RNS) The former director of the Catholic bishops’ sexual abuse prevention office said the Vatican owes victims a high-level apology, and urged the church to consider allowing priests to marry to meet a “deep, normal need” for intimacy.

Kathleen McChesney, who left in February as director of the bishops’ Office of Child and Youth Protection, said victims and their families need an “overdue” apology from the Vatican, including from Pope Benedict XVI.

“The repeated, generic expressions of sorrow made by bishops have been well received, but acts and words of compassion and understanding from the Holy See itself are greatly needed,” McChesney wrote in the May 30 edition of America magazine, a Jesuit weekly.

McChesney said the new pope should be well-acquainted with the abuse scandal since he was the prefect of the Vatican office with jurisdiction over all abuse cases prior to his election as pope. Yet she said “complacency” remains a risk.

She said the scandal is not over, noting that more than 1,000 allegations of abuse were filed in 2004 alone. What’s more, the lingering pain and damage continue for many victims of abuse, she said.

“The ravaging of their souls may have altered or destroyed their relationship with God,” she wrote. “There are victims and their families who long to be reinvited and reunited with the church and their faith.”

McChesney said mandatory celibacy for clergy may be a factor in encouraging deviant behavior, depriving priests of “a deep, normal need for adult intimate relationships.”

“Serious thought should therefore be given to optional life modes, i.e., marriage,” she said. “Psychosexual maturity and self-knowledge are essential.”

McChesney, a former No. 3 official at the FBI, is now vice president for Crisis Management and Threat Assessment at the Walt Disney Co. in Burbank, Calif.

_ Kevin Eckstrom

Quebec Says No to Islamic Tribunals for Muslims

QUEBEC CITY (RNS) The Canadian province of Quebec has denied its growing Muslim population the right to use Islamic legal tribunals to settle private disputes.

In a rare unanimous vote Thursday (May 26), Quebec’s National Assembly passed a motion rejecting the use of Islamic sharia law in the province’s legal system. The move was seen as a pre-emptive strike to stop a growing movement among some Muslims to have religion play a role in family law and private disputes.

“Today the National Assembly speaks with one voice to say `No’ to the implementation of Islamic tribunals in Quebec and in Canada,” said Fatima Houda-Pepin, a Liberal member of the legislature and a Muslim. “Demanding the implementation of the sharia in Canada is tantamount to a takeover attempt aimed at undermining our democracy, our system of justice.”

The debate over sharia surfaced in Canada two years ago when a Muslim group in Ontario proposed binding arbitration of family disputes according to Islamic law.

Last December, neighboring Ontario, which already has a religious-based arbitration system for Jews and Ismaili Muslims, issued recommendations that the province should continue to allow disputes to be arbitrated using religious law, provided certain “safeguards” are observed.

The Ontario report said faith-based tribunals must conform to Canadian law and human rights codes. The tribunals, which include the Jewish Beth Din, are permitted under Ontario’s Arbitration Act, which allows parties who wish to avoid the courts by choosing private arbitration to resolve family law and inheritance issues.

Muslim leaders in Montreal were shocked by the Quebec decision.

“It is total bigotry or total ignorance of what Islam is,” said Salam El Menyawi, president of the Muslim Council of Montreal. “Muslims are being excluded from rights other religions have. And this exclusion is very dangerous because that is exactly what Hitler did to Jews.”

But Toronto-based Homa Arjomand, who is leading the Canadian campaign against sharia tribunals, called the decision “great news, a great achievement.”

“We have received congratulations from around the world,” Arjomand told RNS, adding that she is now hoping to pressure Ontario to remove divorce, child custody and other family matters from the purview of sharia-based panels in the province, should they be approved for all Muslims.

_ Ron Csillag

Pentagon Says Quran Was Not Purposefully Mishandled

(RNS) The commander of a U.S. military prison in Cuba said Thursday (May 26) that the Quran _ the Islamic holy book _ has not been purposefully mishandled by interrogators at the facility.

Speaking at a Pentagon news briefing, Brig. Gen. Jay Hood, commander of the Joint Task Force at Guantanamo Bay, said allegations of persistent defilement and desecration of the Quran were found to be mostly incidents of accidental contact with the Quran by interrogators and guards.

The investigation identified 13 “incidents of alleged mishandling of the Quran by Joint Task Force personnel,” Hood said.

Of those, only five “could be broadly defined as mishandling of a Quran,” Hood said. Six additional episodes were “accidental incidents involving guards, that the guard either accidentally touched a Quran, touched it within the scope of his duties or did not actually touch the Quran at all,” he said.

Those six incidents are considered “resolved,” Hood said. Hood would not disclose the exact circumstances of the incidents in question while the investigation is ongoing.

Hood spoke at the midpoint of an ongoing investigation that covers approximately 31,000 documents regarding activities from 2002 to the present. Under normal Pentagon procedure, a preliminary report is unusual, Hood said, but the incendiary nature of these allegations made comment necessary.

Hood announced that there is “no credible evidence that a member of the Joint Task Force at Guantanamo Bay ever flushed a Quran down the toilet.” Earlier, an FBI document obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union had alleged such an incident in August 2002. On Thursday, the detainee who had made that allegation recanted his statement.

Hood said written procedures for handling the Quran were distributed to Guantanamo Bay personnel in January 2003, and that those procedures have been followed with few exceptions.

Twice, Hood said, guards or interrogators have been punished for violating the protocol, though he declined to discuss the specific violation or the punishment.

In Islam, the world’s second-largest religion, it is not permitted to touch a Quran without first ritually washing one’s hands. Further, a Quran is not permitted to touch the floor, be placed under other books or objects, or otherwise be treated casually.

_ Holly Lebowitz Rossi

Appeals Court Reviews Case of Falwell Web Site

WASHINGTON (RNS) A federal appeals court is reviewing whether a Web site that criticized the Rev. Jerry Falwell’s views on AIDS was improperly shut down last August.

A federal judge had ruled the site _ fallwell.com _ violated federal trademark law because it was a common misspelling for the evangelist and too close to Falwell’s own Web site, falwell.com, according to the Associated Press.

The judge ordered its owner, Christopher Lamparello of New York City, to take it down, but Lamparello appealed his case to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va.

Lamparello’s lawyer argued the site should be allowed to keep its name as it contains constitutionally protected non-commercial speech. A commercial link to amazon.com was removed from the site three years ago.

Falwell’s lawyers said the spoof site amounted to identity theft. “It’s been wrong to steal since Moses came down from the mountain,” attorney John Midlen Jr. said, according to AP.

Vatican Avoids Talk of Condoms in Tackling Third World Health

VATICAN CITY (RNS) A high Vatican official has told the World Health Organization (WHO) that Pope Benedict XVI is committed to tackling health problems in developing countries, but he made no mention of Catholic opposition to the use of condoms to stem the spread of AIDS.

Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan, president of the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral of Health, led a seven-member Vatican delegation to WHO’s 58th World Health Assembly held May 16-25 in Geneva. The Vatican on Thursday (May 26) issued the text of the speech he delivered May 18.

The new pope, he said, “has shown that he is very concerned over problems of health in the world and offers all his support and help to the world effort to obtain health for all, especially the health of the most unprotected.”

Lozano Barragan said Benedict is particularly concerned about mother and child health and wants the Vatican to work with WHO to improve the health of the “poorest and most needy.”

The prelate emphasized health problems in developing countries where, he said, 95 percent of AIDS victims “do not have money to pay for anti-retroviral” drugs to combat the infection.

Although centers operated by the Catholic Church provide 26.7 percent of the care offered to sufferers from HIV/AIDS worldwide, the church remains opposed to the use of condoms to prevent its spread. The Vatican opposes condoms on moral grounds and has argued that they are not effective protection against HIV/AIDS.

Lozano Barragan said that while the world spends an estimated $50 billion to $60 billion on medicines annually, only 0.2 percent of the medicines are aimed at the treatment of respiratory diseases, tuberculosis and diarrhea, which are widespread in developing countries and cause some 18 percent of deaths worldwide.

_ Peggy Polk

Parents Fight Order to Shield Son From Wiccan Faith

(RNS) A divorced Wiccan couple in Marion County, Ind., is fighting a court order to shield their son from their religious beliefs.

Wiccan activist Thomas Jones and his ex-wife, Tammy Bristol, were ordered by an Indianapolis court to protect their 9-year-old son from their “non-mainstream religious beliefs and rituals,” the Associated Press reported.

The stipulation was written into the divorce order by a court commissioner, following a report by the court’s Domestic Relations Counseling Bureau that Jones and Bristol are pagans. A judge upheld the ruling.

The parents have followed the judge’s ruling out of fear of losing their son, Archer, who attends a Catholic elementary school.

However, they are fighting the order. “We both had an instant resolve to challenge it. We could not accept it,” Jones told the Associated Press. The Indiana Civil Liberties Union has appealed the order, saying it is unconstitutionally vague since it does not define mainstream religion. Religious and advocacy groups have objected to the ruling for infringing on the parents’ rights.

“The parents have the right to raise their child in that faith, just as I have the right to raise my child in the Christian faith,” said Micah Clark, executive director of the American Family Association of Indiana.

The Rev. Barry Lynn, executive director of the Washington-based Americans United for Separation of Church and State, called the decision “an absurd result, because in the eyes of the law being a pagan should be no different from being a Presbyterian.”

In 2002, there were about 1 million pagans worldwide, more than the numbers of people practicing Sikhism, Taoism and other established religions in the United States, the parents said in their appeal.

Wiccans, who call themselves witches, pagans or neo-pagans, say their religion is based on respect for nature and the cycle of the seasons.

Quote of the Day: Air Force Policy Statement

(RNS) “Senior leaders, commanders and supervisors at every level must be particularly sensitive to the fact that subordinates can consider your public expressions of belief systems coercive. Using your place at the podium as a platform for your personal beliefs can be perceived as misuse of office.”

_ A new Air Force policy statement, issued after allegations of harassment of Jews and other faiths at the Air Force Academy, on treatment of religion. The statement was obtained and quoted by the Associated Press.

KRE/PH END RNS