c. 2008 Religion News Service

Traditionalist Spaniard named to Vatican liturgy office

VATICAN CITY (RNS) Traditionalist Catholics will have a sympathizer in the new head of the Vatican’s liturgical office.

Pope Benedict XVI has named Cardinal Antonio Canizares Llovera, currently Archbishop of Toledo, Spain, as prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, the Vatican announced Tuesday (Dec. 9).

Canizares, who will handle all aspects of church life that relate to worship and liturgy, succeeds Nigerian Cardinal Francis Arinze, who at 76 is now one year past the standard retirement age.

Canizares, 63, has supported accommodating Catholics who prefer the Tridentine or “Old Latin” Mass, which fell out of use following the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s as local-language Mass became the norm. Benedict lifted restrictions on the Tridentine Mass in July 2007.

Widely known as the “little Ratzinger,” Canizares was the Spanish bishops’ top doctrinal official from 1985 to 1992, playing a similar role on a national level as that performed for the church at large by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict.

In a 2006 interview, Canizares also attributed his nickname to his intellectual and spiritual “attunement and communion” with the pope.

The cardinal has been a prominent critic of Spain’s Socialist Prime Minister Jose Rodriguez Zapatero for policies that include the legalization of same-sex marriage and a proposal to reduce religious education in public schools.

_ Francis X. Rocca

Former Union Seminary president wins Grawemeyer Award

(RNS) Donald Shriver Jr., an ordained Presbyterian minister, ethicist, and former president of New York’s Union Theological Seminary, has won the prestigious Grawemeyer Award in Religion from the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary and the University of Louisville.

Shriver garnered the $200,000 prize for his 2005 book “Honest Patriots: Loving a Country Enough to Remember its Misdeeds.”

“Shriver shows that loving our country uncritically does not make us patriots,” said Louisville seminary professor Susan Garrett, who directs the award. “He explains exactly what we need to do to mend the fabric of American society, and it’s a creative, powerful concept.”

Shriver believes the U.S. government must address its past errors before the country can move forward, as Germany did after World War II and South Africa did after apartheid, according to a news release announcing the award.

The longtime ethicist was president of Union Theological Seminary from 1975 to 1991. He has also taught at Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, Emory University’s Candler School of Theology in Atlanta, and was pastor of a congregation in North Carolina before teaching.

The author of 13 books about ethics, Shriver is now working on a new tome about his former teacher, H. Richard Niebuhr.

_ Daniel Burke

Supreme Court declines to hear `candy cane’ speech case

SAGINAW, Mich. (RNS) The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to hear an appeal in a case involving a Michigan fifth-grader who tried to sell candy canes with a religious message at his school.

The high court on Monday (Dec. 8) denied the petition that the Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Alliance Defense Fund filed on behalf of Joel Curry.

Curry was 11 in 2003 when he made candy cane-style Christmas ornaments with notes that school officials considered “religious literature.” The notes attached to the ornaments, titled “The Meaning of the Candy Cane,” referred to Jesus six times and God twice.

Curry copied the message from an ornament at a Christian bookstore. He made the ornaments as part of a class project in which students developed and sold products. He faced no discipline, though school officials told him to remove the message, and received an `A’ on the assignment.

Now a 15-year-old high school sophomore, Curry said he was disappointed in the high court’s ruling, but the incident happened “a long time ago” and he doesn’t “think about it much” anymore.

“They should have heard it because it’s an important issue involving the Constitution and people’s First Amendment right to freedom of speech,” he said.

The Alliance Defense Fund had asked the high court to “consider whether a fifth-grade student’s religious expression on a classroom project may be categorically identified as `offensive’ and therefore legitimately censored by state school officials.”

ADF attorneys filed a lawsuit against the Saginaw School District and Curry’s principal in 2004, claiming that the principal violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause because, in the past, she allowed other students to sell religious-themed items.

In September 2006, a federal judge ruled that the principal violated Curry’s First Amendment rights. A three-judge panel for the Cincinnati-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals later reversed that decision.

_ LaNia Coleman

Quote of the Day: President-elect Barack Obama

(RNS) “I think the tradition is that they use all three names, and I will follow the tradition. I’m not trying to make a statement one way or another. I’ll do what everybody else does.”

_ President-elect Barack Obama, telling The Chicago Tribune that he will include his middle name, Hussein, when he takes the oath of office on Jan. 20.

KRE DEA END RNS