c. 2008 Religion News Service
Cafardi leaves trustee post after Obama endorsement
(RNS) Catholic legal scholar Nicholas Cafardi, who recently endorsed Sen. Barack Obama for president, has resigned as a trustee of Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio, an outpost of conservative Catholicism.
Cafardi, an expert in civil and canon law, said he quit the school’s board voluntarily.
“When it became apparent to me that some Catholics who disagree with my position on how to end the horror of abortion in America were using my association with Steubenville to try to harm that great university,” Cafardi said, “I thought that the best thing for me was to resign so as to prevent that harm.”
In a Religion News Service column published Sept. 29, Cafardi argues that Catholics “have lost the abortion battle” and that “a vote for Obama is not somehow un-Catholic.”
Cafardi, former dean of of the Duquesne University School of Law in Pittsburgh, is the second high-profile Catholic scholar to endorse Obama, even though the Illinois Democrat supports abortion rights. Earlier this year, Douglas Kmiec, a former Reagan Justice Department official and former dean of Catholic University’s law school, also endorsed Obama.
The Catholic Church teaches that abortion is “intrinsically evil,” wrong in all circumstances, and adamantly opposes legalized abortion.
Steubenville University said in a statement that it “does not believe the abortion battle is lost … but that the tide is decidedly turning in favor of life.”
The school said it “strongly encourages its students, faculty, staff, alumni, and other constituents to view the life issues _ such as abortion, euthanasia, and the protection of marriage and the family _ as foundational, and as issues that do not lend themselves to the prudential judgment of the voter.”
University president the Rev. Terence Henry expressed “his gratitude for the many ways Dr. Cafardi has assisted and advised Franciscan University over the years,” the statement said.
_ Daniel Burke
Toddler is Nepal’s new `living goddess’
CHENNAI, India (RNS) A 3-year-old girl was enthroned Tuesday (Oct. 7) as a “living goddess,” or Kumari, in Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu, in a centuries-old ritual approved by the country’s new atheist government.
Matine Shakya, daughter of a watch repairer, became a “Royal Kumari” after a series of religious rituals carried out by Hindu and Buddhist priests. Scores of people joined in a procession as the young girl was carried by family members from her home to an ancient palace in central Kathmandu where she will be confined for several years.
Three towns in the Kathmandu valley follow the age-old Kumari custom, but the “Royal Kumari” in the capital is considered the most powerful, having had the closest link to Nepal’s deposed monarchy. Nepal became a republic after former rebel Maoists won landmark elections last April and abolished the Hindu monarchy soon after.
“In Nepal’s changed political context, President Ram Baran Yadav has taken the responsibility of approving the (new) Kumari as he is now head of state,” said Hemraj Subedi, an official on the trust board that selected the girl in Kathmandu.
Another official, Achyut Pokharel, said Matine Shakya was chosen “after consultation with Buddhist priests, community leaders and officials who will look after her.”
Matine Shakya replaces the previous Royal Kumari, 12-year-old Preeti Shakya, whose term ended because she is close to puberty, after which she will be considered ritually unclean.
_ Achal Narayanan
Supreme Court declines to act on circumcision fight
(RNS) The U.S. Supreme Court has decided not to intervene in the fight between a father who wants to circumcise his 13-year-old son against the wishes of the boy’s mother.
After the high court declined on Monday (Oct. 6) to consider the case, the fight is headed back to a judge in Medford, Ore.
James Boldt, who converted to Judaism, says his son wants to undergo the procedure for religious reasons. The boy’s mother, Lia Boldt, said her son is afraid to tell his father that he doesn’t want to be circumcised.
A trial judge sided with the father, who has custody. But the Oregon Supreme Court in January said the boy’s wishes needed to be determined.
James Boldt, who says he has a constitutional right to raise his child in his religion, attempted to get the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene.
No court date has been set for lower court to consider the case.
_ Ashbel S. Green
Poll: Monthly churchgoers swing toward Obama
WASHINGTON (RNS) Significantly more monthly churchgoers are supporting the Democratic nominee _ Sen. Barack Obama _ in this year’s presidential election than in the 2004 election cycle, according to a new poll.
Voters who attend religious services one to two times a month are supporting the Democratic nominee by 60 percent, up from 49 percent who supported Sen. John Kerry in 2004, based on a survey released Wednesday (Oct. 8) by the nonpartisan group Faith in Public Life.
“The fact that he’s getting 60 percent of those voters shows that there has been a movement overall in the last four years in terms of Democratic outreach with religious Americans,” said Amy Sullivan, whose book “The Party Faithful” examines Democrats’ outreach to religious voters.
“That might be related more to economic issues than anything else this year, but it does show that religious voters are willing to vote for Democrats.“
Exit polls in 2004 showed Bush won 51 percent of the vote among monthly churchgoers.
Sen. John McCain has 34 percent of the vote of monthly churchgoers in the survey, but maintains a significant advantage among voters who attend church more frequently. Obama has a similar advantage over McCain among those who attend less often.
“We took a look at one of the historically … strongest predictors of votes and that’s religious attendance,” said Robert Jones, president of Public Religion Research and lead researcher and analyst for the poll.
The survey also found evidence of a generational divide between younger and older evangelicals, including support by younger evangelicals for a more active government and less conservative views on same-sex marriage.
“They (evangelicals) are more concerned about peace and prosperity than they are about abortion or same-sex marriage,” said Michael Lindsay, associate professor of sociology at Rice University. “This is why things are different in 2008 than they were in 2004.”
The survey polled 2,000 adults, and an additional 1,250 adults ages 18 to 34, and was conducted between Aug. 28 and Sept. 19. The margin of error for the overall sample was plus or minus 2.5 percentage points; the margin of error among younger adults was plus or minus 3 percentage points.
_ Brittney Bain
Humanists file suit over `Humanist Principles’ in courtroom
WASHINGTON (RNS) The American Humanist Association said it will support a lawsuit filed by the Ohio chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union against a judge who displayed a poster of “Humanist Principles” in his courtroom.
Judge James DeWeese of the Richland County Common Pleas Court put up the “Philosophies of Law in Conflict” poster that lists the Ten Commandments in one column as moral absolutes and in another column the “Humanist Precepts” as moral relatives.
A quote from DeWeese lines the bottom saying, “The cases passing through this courtroom demonstrate we are paying a high cost in increased crime … for moving from moral absolutism to moral relativism.”
“This is not a religious effort at all,” DeWeese said in an interview. “The ACLU’s goal is to censor speech, and what they are objecting to is an essay on the wall by me.”
DeWeese said he has seen a sharp increase in crime since 1980, and he attributes the cause to a “philosophy war,” in which people have stopped considering morals as absolutes. What he called his “essay” depicts this “crisis of morality in America.”
“Judge DeWeese’s poster misrepresents Humanism,” said Ron Speckhardt, the executive director of the Humanist group. The “Humanist Precepts” the judge listed are from an outdated Humanist Manifesto, and Speckhardt claims DeWeese took the tenets out of context.
The ACLU filed the lawsuit because it said the poster violates the First Amendment’s prohibition against an establishment of religion. “Judge DeWeese is attempting to end-run around the Constitution while pushing his own religious agenda,” said Mel Lipman, president of AHA.
The ACLU successfully sued DeWeese over another Ten Commandments poster in 2002.
_ Ashley Gipson
Oregon court sees frozen embryos as property rights issue
PORTLAND, Ore. (RNS) A divorcing couple’s years-old agreement to thaw out frozen embryos trumps the husband’s recent desire to donate them to another woman trying to have children, the Oregon Court of Appeals ruled Wednesday (Oct. 8).
The case touched on a common and controversial social issue: how to dispose of the hundreds of thousands of frozen embryos made to assist infertile couples. The courts had to pose that new medical question against the old framework of family law, which sees things as personal property to be divided.
The three-judge opinion said the contractual “right to possess or dispose of the frozen embryos is personal property,” without directly stating that the embryos themselves are property.
The result of the case is in line with cases in eight other states, all of which sided with the person who did not want the embryos to be implanted.
“The outcome, in 100 percent of the cases, is we’re not going to force anyone to be a parent,” said William Howe III, the attorney for the woman in the case, pediatrician Laura Dahl.
Barring an appeal, the embryos will be discarded or donated for research. Mark Johnson, lawyer for orthodontist Darrell Angle, said his client hasn’t decided whether to appeal.
Dahl and Angle were married in 2000 and had a child. In 2004, they tried to have a second child through in-vitro fertilization. Doctors created several embryos from Dahl’s eggs and Angle’s sperm, and tried unsuccessfully for a pregnancy. When the couple decided to divorce soon after, six embryos remained frozen.
Dahl and Angle signed an agreement saying that if they disagreed about how to dispose of any excess embryos, Dahl should “have the sole and exclusive right” to decide. The agreement also said that if the couple died, the embryos should be used for research instead of being given to another woman.
The embryos became a sticking point during the divorce. According to the opinion, Dahl said the embryos were created for her and Angle and that she no longer wanted to have another child with him. Dahl did not want another woman to bear a child that is genetically hers.
_ Andy Dworkin
Connecticut high court approves gay marriage
(RNS) Connecticut became the third state to allow same-sex marriage after its Supreme Court ruled Friday (Oct. 10) that it is unconstitutional to deny the legal benefits of marriage to gay and lesbian couples.
The 4-3 decision outraged conservative groups, who are pushing hard for constitutional amendments on the November ballot that would outlaw gay marriage in California, Arizona and Florida.
“This decision demonstrates … the dire need for states to enact constitutional amendments to protect marriage from ongoing judicial attack,” said Brian Raum, senior legal counsel for the Arizona-based Alliance Defense Fund.
The case, Kerrigan v. State of Connecticut, was filed in 2004 by eight same-sex couples who applied for marriage licenses and were denied. The state began offering civil unions to same-sex couples in 2005.
But Justice Richard N. Palmer, writing for the majority, said equal protection means “gay persons are entitled to marry the otherwise qualified same sex partner of their choice. To decide otherwise would require us to apply one set of constitutional principles to gay persons and another to all others.”
Gov. M. Jodi Rell, a Republican, said she disagreed with the ruling, but signaled that she will not fight it because “attempts to reverse this decision _ either legislatively or by amending the state Constitution _ will not meet with success.”
The Connecticut Catholic Conference said it would support a constitutional amendment to overturn the court’s decision, saying the court had “taken it upon itself to make a determination that other courts throughout our nation have felt should be made through the political process.”
The decision was praised by the state conference of the United Church of Christ, which in 2005 became the first major U.S. denomination to endorse civil marriage for same-sex couples.
“I greet this day with great joy in my heart, especially for the thousands of gay and lesbian citizens who will know that they are fully included in our common life as a state from this day forward,” said the Rev. Davida Foy Crabtree, who heads the UCC’s Connecticut Conference.
_ Kevin Eckstrom
Report calls U.S. church giving `lukewarm’
(RNS) Americans spent nearly twice as much on first-day sales of the video game “Grand Theft Auto IV” as would be needed by the Southern Baptist Convention to share the gospel with all the world’s “unreached people groups” by 2010, according to a new report on church giving.
The annual report, by the Illinois-based group empty tomb inc., found a general downward trend in church member giving through 2006, which led authors to propose a “global triage to treat what ails the church.”
They said focusing on reaching new “people groups” and preventing child deaths around the world would help U.S. churches “sort out their priorities” to use what funds they do have more efficiently.
“It’s difficult to avoid the label of `lukewarm’ when analyzing the church’s level of response to Jesus’ Great Commandment and Great Commission,” said John Ronsvalle, who co-authored the study with his wife, Sylvia.
Even Southern Baptists, a group highlighted as a “denomination that takes this religious task seriously,” have not launched an aggressive campaign to fund the estimated additional 2,800 missionaries that would be needed to “engage” unreached groups by 2010.
Empty tomb estimated it would cost about $11 per Southern Baptist to fund those extra missionaries; instead, the denomination’s 2008 goal of $170 million to support existing missionaries is the equivalent of asking each Southern Baptist to donate just 31 cents more than last year.
By contrast, Americans spent $310 million in first-day sales for “Grand Theft Auto IV.”
“The total portion of per capita income given to churches in 2006 was lower (in 2006) than in the worst year of the Great Depression,” the authors found.
The report estimates that for only $26 a year per evangelical, U.S. evangelicals as a whole could fund $544 million in efforts through evangelical-affiliated denominations and other missions agencies.
The report estimated that it would cost each U.S. church member just 8 cents a day to help reach the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goal of cutting infant mortality by two-thirds by 2015.
_ Ashley Gipson
La. church forced to rebuild _ again _ after hurricane damage
METAIRIE, La. (RNS) In the past three years, Memorial Baptist Church has absorbed a series of hard punches from Hurricanes Katrina, Gustav and Ike, but the congregation and its pastor refuse to give up.
“The people in the church are phenomenal,” said the Rev. Jackie Gestes, pastor. “When the Lord is with you, who can be against you? And in the midst of all this we know he is with us.”
In 2005, the winds from Hurricane Katrina ripped the roof off the church’s sanctuary and left the worship space in shambles. Gestes and the congregation spent almost three years rebuilding while holding worship services in the fellowship hall.
The congregation held its first worship service in the remodeled sanctuary July 13. The renovation included new pews, carpet, sound system and a baby grand piano.
When Hurricane Gustav blew through on Sept. 1, its winds took the roof off _ again _ and damaged most of the inside of the sanctuary including the pews, piano and carpet.
“We put a temporary plastic roof on the building and thought we could save the interior walls,” Gestes said.
But the winds from Hurricane Ike the following week ripped off the temporary roof and allowed rainwater to damage the interior walls and drywall.
“When the wind from Ike took off the plastic roof, it left the inside totally vulnerable to the rain,” Gestes said. “And that finished off the rest of the building.”
The congregation is now faced with the challenge of having to rebuild the sanctuary a second time in three years, and it is once again holding Sunday worship services in the fellowship hall.
“The Sunday after Gustav, we met in the fellowship hall and there was some shock among some of the people when they saw the damage for the first time,” Gestes said. “Yet at the same time, they were already thinking about rebuilding and talking about how soon we could get it done.”
The church plans to start rebuilding the sanctuary as soon as possible, Gestes said, and their goal is to have it finished in six months.
“Hard times bring people together, and we have a strong unity that only God can provide,” Gestes said. “And we are going to come back better than ever.”
_ Earl Hodges
Billy Graham returns home after brief hospital stay
(RNS) Evangelist Billy Graham is out of the hospital and resting at home after tripping over his dog.
Graham spokesman A. Larry Ross said the 89-year-old evangelist spent Friday night (Oct. 10) at Mission Hospital in Asheville, N.C., in part because of the late hour of his treatment. But, with no broken bones, he was ready to resume his regular physical therapy the next day.
“He’s experienced some muscle soreness and bruising, but I think overall Mr. Graham is stronger than he was six months ago due, in part, to his faithful exercise and physical therapy,” Ross said. “Also, prayer support from many individuals across the country and the world.”
Graham tripped over Sam, a golden retriever that sticks close to the evangelist’s side.
“I am encouraging him to remain as active as possible, but to be mindful of his dog, who likes to keep faithfully at his feet,” said Dr. Lucian Rice, who treated Graham. “I expect Mr. Graham to recover fully.”
Ross said Graham, who turns 90 on Nov. 7, continues to be treated for macular degeneration, which reduces his vision, and hearing loss, for which he uses hearing aids. He has a pending book project and continues to write for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.
_ Adelle M. Banks
Quote of the Week: Iowa pastor Arnold Conrad
(RNS) “There are millions of people around this world praying to their god _ whether it’s Hindu, Buddha, Allah _ that his (John McCain’s) opponent wins, for a variety of reasons. And Lord, I pray that you will guard your own reputation, because they’re going to think that their god is bigger than you, if that happens.”
_ Arnold Conrad, the former pastor of Grace Evangelical Free Church in Davenport, Iowa, delivering an invocation at a rally in his city for GOP presidential nominee John McCain, quoted by CNN.com. The McCain campaign later distanced itself from his comments.
KRE/PH END RNS
