c. 2005 Religion News Service
Cardinal: Issue of Divorced and Remarried Catholics Still Open
VATICAN CITY (RNS) An influential Vatican cardinal says a rethinking of church policy on divorced and remarried Catholics is still possible, despite the findings of a worldwide synod of bishops.
Cardinal Walter Kasper, who heads Vatican relations with other Christian churches, told a news conference Monday (Oct. 24) that the status of divorced and remarried Catholics represented “an emerging pastoral problem” that should be studied beyond the synod.
The assembly of more than 250 bishops on Saturday submitted a list of 50 proposals to Pope Benedict XVI. One proposal backed traditional church teaching prohibiting remarried couples from taking Communion, the central sacrament of the Catholic Mass, on the grounds that their sexual relations are sinful.
Asked to comment on the synod’s findings, Kasper said the proposition was “not the final result.”
“The synod is not over after the propositions, because there will be a final exhortation,” he added, referring to the synod review popes traditionally issue weeks after the meeting ends.
“Any bishop, in any country of the West knows that this is a serious problem,” he said, describing the growing numbers of Catholics who find themselves alienated from Mass as a result of their marital status.
“The pope himself,” he added, “invited us to reflect on these cases and this is also my position.”
Many have attributed the dramatic drop in European church attendance to the Vatican’s policy on divorce.
Vacationing in the Italian Alps this summer, Benedict told an audience of 140 priests that church policy on remarried Catholics has resulted in “a particularly painful situation” that “must be studied.”
As the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger famously clashed with Kasper over the issue of divorce.
In 1993, as a diocesan bishop in Rottenburg-Stuttgart, Kasper backed a pastoral letter encouraging divorced and civilly remarried German Catholics to take sacraments. Ratzinger intervened and rejected the letter.
_ Stacy Meichtry
Dallas Church Officials Say Supreme Court Nominee Was Never a Catholic
(RNS) Catholic officials in Dallas say they have no record of Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers ever being Catholic, despite reports that she was raised in that church before attending an evangelical Christian church.
Catholic News Service reported that church officials examined “all known sacramental records,” including baptism certificates, and found no evidence that Miers was ever a Catholic.
“The Diocese of Dallas has no record of Harriet Miers or her immediate family ever having been a member of the Catholic Church,” church spokesman Bronson Havard told CNS.
Much has been made of Miers’ evangelical faith, including her apparent born-again experience in the late 1970s and membership at Valley View Christian Church, as well as her recent move to a new evangelical church with other Valley View members.
Critics accuse the Bush administration of focusing too heavily on Miers’ religion. Speaking to reporters on Oct. 12, President Bush said “part of Harriet Miers’ life is her religion.”
Havard said Miers may have occasionally attended Catholic churches but was never considered a Catholic. CNS also reported that White House spokeswoman Maria Tamburri said “Harriet Miers did not grow up Catholic.”
Havard told the Associated Press that “we don’t normally check for things like this, but this was a prominent situation and we wanted the record to be straight.”
Secretary of State Commemorates Church Bombing in her Hometown
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (RNS) Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says the deaths of her childhood friend and three other girls in the 1963 Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing was not in vain.
Their deaths, she said, forced her hometown of Birmingham as well as the nation to face the injustices that afflicted the lives of black Americans, said Rice in a “From Tragedy to Triumph” ceremony Saturday (Oct. 22) in front of a statue of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
“Even though they were denied a chance to grow up and do the great things I’m sure they would have done, in their deaths, they represent for us the very tragedy to triumph that we’re celebrating,” said Rice at the ceremony inducting bombing victims Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley into Birmingham’s Gallery of Distinguished Citizens.
McNair was Rice’s childhood schoolmate and friend.
“Because we were not denied, Birmingham was not denied, and because Birmingham was not denied, America finally came to terms with its birth defect, finally came to terms with the contradiction … that when the Founding Fathers said, `We, the people,’ they didn’t mean any of us,” Rice said.
The speech was a highlight of Rice’s second day in her native state, which she was visiting along with British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw. Saturday also included a trip to Tuscaloosa for the Alabama-Tennessee football game and concluded with a seafood dinner with family and friends back in Birmingham.
Civil rights was a recurring theme of the Rice-Straw trip. On Friday, in a speech at the University of Alabama, Rice compared the U.S. effort to start a stable democracy in Iraq to the civil rights struggle in Alabama and elsewhere in the South.
Saturday’s Kelly Ingram Park ceremony, which came after she and Straw visited the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, recalled a time in Rice’s Birmingham childhood. At that time, the city was the scene of massive civil rights demonstrations, and police dogs and firehoses were turned on demonstrators.
The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church sits across a corner facing the statue of King, who led many of the demonstrations. On Sunday morning, Sept. 15, 1963, a bomb, planted by Ku Klux Klansmen, exploded at the church.
_ Tom Gordon and Mary Orndorff
Evangelical Christians Promote `Counter-Divestment’ of Israel
JERUSALEM (RNS) A large evangelical Christian organization has launched a campaign to encourage Christians around the world to invest in Israel.
The International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem, an Israel-based evangelical group that brings thousands of pilgrims to Israel every year and supports both Jews and Arabs in the Holy Land, is organizing the effort.
In an Oct. 20 announcement, the group said it is starting a “counter-divestment” campaign intended to counterbalance a divestment campaign launched by the Presbyterian Church (USA) in 2004.
Leaders of the U.S.-based Presbyterian Church have urged their members to divest from companies that, in their view, facilitate what they perceive to be Israel’s “occupation” of the Palestinian people.
Malcolm Hedding, the ICEJ’s executive director, said during a press briefing that “in light of the troubling divestment campaign as well as the ongoing rebound in the Israeli economy, our ministry has committed to redoubling its efforts to promote Christian investment in Israel.”
Hedding said that his organization will work with the International Christian Chamber of Commerce, which is based in Belgium, to pair potential Christian investors with Israeli companies, including the hi-tech start-ups at which Israelis excel.
Because new ventures can be risky, he said, “we are setting up a vetting process” to help investors identify the best, most solid companies.
David Parsons, the ICEJ’s communications director, insisted that the counter-divestment campaign “is not against the Palestinian people. We have 25 years’ worth of commitment to them. At the same time, we need to know that the money (invested) there does not feed the terror chain.”
Hedding stressed that the anti-divestment campaign is not a boycott of companies that refuse to do business in Israel.
“What we are doing is positive and proactive. We want to bless Israel and the people of Israel,” he said.
_ Michele Chabin
Canadian Churches Satisfied with Ruling on Indian Sex-Abuse Claims
(RNS) Canada’s two largest Protestant denominations say they are satisfied with a decision by the Supreme Court of Canada that stipulates how religious groups and the federal government should divide the cost of compensating tens of thousands of native Indian sex-abuse victims.
The Supreme Court of Canada ruled on Friday (Oct. 21) that the federal portion of responsibility for abuse that took place at schools for Indians should be 75 percent, while the church should pay 25 percent. The schools were jointly run by churches and the government.
The high court disagreed with the British Columbia Court of Appeal, which ruled more than a year ago that the federal government alone was liable for compensating abused students embroiled in a nationally watched test case centered on a Vancouver Island native residential school, which was run by the United Church of Canada.
“People think we should be upset. But we’re satisfied,” said the Rev. Brian Thorpe, the United Church of Canada’s spokesman on residential schools. He said the ruling “clarifies the issue of liability” for the church.
Canada’s United and Anglican denominations, which together have about 1.3 million members, have already worked out arrangements with the federal government to resolve more than 600 out-of-court settlements of lawsuits brought by natives.
The denominations expect to complete more settlements in the next few months.
Both denominations have been following a formula in which the church pays 30 percent of damages and the federal government 70 percent for damages inflicted at the now-defunct residential schools, which were attended by more than 125,000 native Indians.
“This decision confirms the government had the greatest responsibility for the schools, and the churches also face some responsibilities. This ruling will help move settlements along even more swiftly, and that’s good for the complainants,” Eleanor Johnson, acting general secretary of the Anglican Church of Canada, said in an interview from Ontario.
More than 15,000 native Indians have launched lawsuits over their treatment at about 85 of Canada’s federally regulated residential schools. Most lawsuits focus on sex-abuse complaints.
_ Douglas Todd
Pope Benedict XVI Canonizes His First Saints
VATICAN CITY (RNS) In the first canonization Mass of his young papacy, Pope Benedict XVI has added five men to the Roman Catholic canon of saints.
Thousands of faithful bearing banners and flags packed the oval contours of St. Peter’s Square Sunday (Oct. 24) as Benedict conferred sainthood on a Jesuit social worker, a Capuchin friar, an archbishop and two charismatics.
“I have the joy of presiding for the first time over a canonization,” Benedict said.
The five new saints included two Ukrainians: Josef Bliczewski, archbishop of Lviv, and the Rev. Zygmunt Gorazdowski, founder of the Sisters of St. Joseph, an order devoted to care for the sick and poor.
The Rev. Alberto Hurtado Cruchaga, a Jesuit from Chile, was also elevated to sainthood for his charity work with the poor.
The other men canonized were natives of Italy. Felice da Nicosia was an 18th century Capuchin friar greatly admired for his asceticism. The Rev. Gaetano Cantanoso founded the Veronican Sisters of the Holy Face in 1934.
Causes for sainthood tend to span several papacies, sometimes taking centuries to reach their conclusion. The late John Paul II, however, was canonized 482 people.
Benedict so far has initiated only one cause for sainthood: that of John Paul. He also has discontinued John Paul’s practice of presiding over beatifications _ the last step before canonization.
_ Stacy Meichtry
Quote of the Day: Marketing Firm President A. Larry Ross
(RNS) “With 330,000 churches in America, it’s potentially the largest distribution network in the country and probably in the world.”
_ A. Larry Ross, president of a Dallas public relations and marketing firm, on the marketing power of the Christian community for recent religious films such as “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” and “Left Behind: World at War.” He was quoted in the Washington Post.
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