c. 2007 Religion News Service
Officials Demolish Chapel So It Won’t Offend Non-Christians
LONDON (RNS) A woodlands chapel in Britain used by Boy Scouts and Girl Guides for nearly 70 years as an open-air place of peaceful worship has been demolished because scout officials feared it might offend non-Christians.
The Scout Association ordered removal of the rudimentary cross and basic altar, plus the wooden pews that had been fashioned from old telephone poles when the chapel was built by volunteers between World War I and World War II.
A campfire circle replaced the chapel near the Belchamps Scout Center at Hockley, in east England, as part of an “updating” that manager Nigel Ruse said would “turn it into a place of worship of all faiths and not to exclude anyone from scouting.”
“This is a case of taking scouting forward,” Ruse added.
But Keith Rooks-Cowell, who led Sunday services at the outdoor chapel for more than 30 years, disagreed. He insisted that a campfire “is a place for sitting around singing, telling jokes and stories,” whereas the chapel “was used as a quiet place” for meditation.
“The two don’t sit comfortably together,” Rooks-Cowell said.
The chapel was used for everything from weddings to the scattering of cremains, and “anyone from any faith or any religion could go and use the chapel,” Rooks-Cowell said. “It’s never been a problem. The chapel was already inclusive.”
Now, Rooks-Cowell said, “It has been wrecked. All the posts and everything had been demolished and laid flat. I was amazed and felt disgusted that this had been done.”
_ Al Webb
La. School Board a Target of Second Religion Suit
NEW ORLEANS (RNS) For the second time in as many months, a parent has launched a federal lawsuit against the Tangipahoa School Board over religion, this time objecting to a teacher-led prayer delivered at a recent high school graduation ceremony.
The suit was filed Wednesday (June 6) in U.S. District Court in New Orleans. It marks the sixth court case in 13 years by the American Civil Liberties Union against the same school district involving matters of religion, according to Joe Cook, executive director of Louisiana’s branch of the ACLU.
“It’s certainly a state record,” Cook said. “I’m not aware of any school district that’s been sued this many times for religious freedom.”
Plaintiffs for the case include John “P,” who is proceeding on behalf of his minor children Jane “P” and Joan “P,” both of whom are students in the school system, according to the suit.
The plaintiffs took action after attending a graduation ceremony for the Tangipahoa PM High School in Hammond, La., on May 17.
At the ceremony, Anthony Massi, a faculty member at PM High School, gave a prayer that began with “Lord we thank you for … ” and ended with “We pray for these things in Jesus’ name, Amen,” the suit states.
John “P,” who is Catholic, found the invocation “offensive and objectionable” because it served to advance only one faith or belief: Christianity, the suit claims.
Cindy Benitez, a spokeswoman for the school system, said officials had not yet received a copy of the allegations outlined in the suit. District policy prohibits further comment regarding pending litigation, she said.
_ Jenny Hurwitz
Court Acquits Five in Murder of `God’s Banker’
VATICAN CITY (RNS) A Italian court on Wednesday (June 6) acquitted five accused murderers in the 1982 death of a prominent banker, leaving officially unsolved the death of a man whose Vatican connections earned him the nickname “God’s Banker.”
Roberto Calvi, former head of Italy’s largest private bank, Banco Ambrosiano, was found dead on June 18, 1982, hanging from temporary scaffolding under London’s Blackfriars Bridge. The collapse of his bank two months later was the largest bankruptcy in European history up to that time.
The failure proved enormously embarrassing to the Roman Catholic Church after it was revealed the bank made $1.3 billion in bad loans to 10 shell companies controlled by the Institute for Religious Works, commonly known as the Vatican Bank.
Although the Vatican denied responsibility, it eventually paid out over $240 million to Banco Ambrosiano’s creditors to settle the matter.
Archbishop Paul C. Marcinkus, the American president of the Vatican bank and a friend of Calvi’s, was indicted by Italian prosecutors as an accessory to fraud, but was never arrested or tried on account of the Vatican’s status as a sovereign state.
Prosecutors in the murder trial had accused the five defendants _ four men and one woman _ of luring Calvi to London, where others killed him and faked his death as a suicide.
Prosecutors claimed the killing was the work of the Sicilian and Neapolitan Mafias, to punish Calvi for his failure to repay money he had laundered for the criminal organizations, and to prevent him from following through with threats to reveal their activities to authorities.
A new book argues that other organizations also had an interest in Calvi’s death.
According to Philip Willan’s “The Last Supper,” published in Britain in April, Calvi had threatened to reveal that Vatican officials and influential Italian Masons had conspired with the Mafia to provide secret financing to anti-communist movements in Latin America and Eastern Europe.
Calvi’s desperate attempts at blackmail, Willan says, were also likely motives for his murder.
_ Francis X. Rocca
Quote of the Day: Republican Presidential Candidate Mike Huckabee
(RNS) “I sometimes marvel when people running for office are asked about faith and their answer is, `Oh, I don’t get into that, I keep that completely separate. My faith is completely immaterial to how I think and how I govern.’ And to me that’s really tantamount to saying that my faith is so marginal, so insignificant, so inconsequential that it really doesn’t impact the way I live. I would consider that an extraordinarily shallow faith.”
_ Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas and former Southern Baptist pastor, discussing faith and politics at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.
KRE/CM END RNS