c. 1999 Religion News Service

Creech faces another trial over same-sex union

(RNS) The Rev. Jimmy Creech, the United Methodist minister acquitted in 1998 of violating church law by officiating at a same-sex union, is facing another trial for participating in an April ceremony that united two men.

The Committee on Investigation of the Nebraska United Methodist Annual Conference determined at its Sept. 16 meeting that there are”reasonable grounds for the charge and specifications against Jimmy Creech,”the conference announced.

Bishop Joel N. Martinez released the committee’s decision Thursday (Sept. 23).

Creech is on leave of absence from the Nebraska conference and currently lives in Raleigh, N.C., but remains under Martinez’s oversight, said Cheryl Edwards, director of communications for the conference.

The Rev. Jim McChesney, superintendent of the Central District in Nebraska, filed a complaint with the bishop concerning Creech, she said. The date, location and presiding officer for the trial had not been set as of Friday (Sept. 24).

Creech, the former pastor of First United Methodist Church in Omaha, Neb., issued a statement Thursday about the trial decision. He said he had been”charged with disobedience to the Order and Discipline”(church law) for officiating at an April 24 same-sex union ceremony of Larry Ellis and Jim Raymer in Chapel Hill, N.C.

Creech called the decision”unfortunate”and a waste of money that could be used for ministries to needy people.”The celebration of love and commitment between two people is a profound and particular embodiment of the gospel of Jesus Christ,”he said.”If I am found guilty by a trial court, then The Order and Discipline of The United Methodist Church is in conflict with this gospel. It is arrogance on the part of the church to elevate some people’s relationship with God, while denigrating that of others, on the basis of innate sexuality. This arrogance is evil, comparable to racism.” In 1996, delegates to the General Conference, the denomination’s highest legislative body, voted to add a sentence to the church’s Social Principles barring clergy from performing same-sex union ceremonies.

In August 1998 _ following Creech’s narrow acquittal _ the Judicial Council, the denomination’s highest court, ruled that the prohibition in the Social Principles had the force of church law.

Creech was exonerated on the grounds that the denomination’s ban against same-sex union ceremonies was a guideline and not yet law.

Since the council’s ruling, the Rev. Gregory Dell of Chicago was found guilty of violating church law by presiding at such a ceremony. On Sept. 17, an appeals panel of the United Methodist Church rejected his request that the conviction be overturned.

Gay Episcopal priest leaves hard-won parish

(RNS) The Rev. Barry Stopfel, the openly gay Episcopal priest in Maplewood, N.J., whose ordination became the center of a national church controversy, is moving on.

Stopfel, 51, said the strain of the long-running fracas was partially responsible for his leaving parish ministry. He said he will tend his 25-acre farm and orchard in the Amish country of Pennsylvania while he works on a new book.

Stopfel, whose 1997 book with partner Will Leckie, “Courage to Love,” became an anthem of the Christian gay rights movement, said his new book will focus on the spiritual quest of people disenchanted with organized religion.

“My ministry has not been a typical one,” he said. “It has been deeply gratifying but very stressful, and it has taken its toll on me and our marriage.”

Friends at St. George’s Church, where Stopfel preached his last sermon on Sunday (Sept. 19), said they were saddened by the departure.

“There is an element of disappointment and sadness about losing him, but six to eight years is a pretty typical tenure for an Episcopal rector,” said Bill Albinger, a lay leader at St. George’s. “At this stage in his career, it was probably time to move on.”

Membership at St. George’s, in the Episcopal Diocese of Newark, N.J., doubled to 500 during Stopfel’s six-year tenure.

Following the September 1990 ordination, 10 conservative bishops filed heresy charges against retired Bishop Walter Righter, who had ordained Stopfel. Righter, who eventually won his case, said he has great respect for the principled stand taken by the priest.

“Barry and Will both have tremendous courage,” he told The Star-Ledger of Newark. “They named their book `Courage to Love,’ and they stuck with that long before I got in the picture. They decided right off not to hide their relationship.”

Although he agreed to a public ordination, Stopfel resisted becoming a poster boy for gay rights and never made his pulpit a soapbox.

“At first I was a reluctant participant, but I believe history will prove it to be a pivotal point,” he said. “When I look at the pile of goodbye cards from the kids full of paste and glitter, I know those children will be very different in our world. They will teach their children that it’s not OK to hate.”

“For that alone, it was worth it,” he said.

The Rev. Todd H. Wetzel, executive director of the conservative Episcopalians United, said Stopfel’s willingness to put himself in the news media spotlight “forced the church to confront a secret,” but he believes the outcome of the heresy trial was bad for the church.

“When you’re living a nightmare, it’s better not to face it asleep,” he said. “It did not help the witness of the church, though. It never helps the witness of the church when someone who is obdurately practicing sin receives the approval of the church.”

Protestant leader from East Timor seeks U.S. church support

(RNS) The moderator of East Timor’s Protestant ecumenical council has urged the continuing support of U.S. and Canadian churches as the tiny territory seeks to recover from the violence that followed its vote for independence from Indonesia.”One of our missions now is how to create democracy, how to create peace in East Timor,”said the Rev. Arlindo Marcal, moderator of the Christian Church of East Timor.

Marcal, who publicly called for a referendum on self-determination in East Timor in 1995, arrived in Toronto in July for a planned year of study. He spoke to reporters and representatives of Church World Service, the relief arm of the National Council of Churches, in a conference call Friday (Sept. 24).”Your support to us in this particular situation is very important,”he told those working with North American churches.”It will help us to feel not alone in the situation.” Marcal said he had a”mix of feelings”about his native land. He was glad that the Aug. 30 referendum revealed strong support for independence from Indonesia, but sad about the resulting violence that has killed hundreds, if not thousands, of people.”There are many people that we know lost their parents, their children, husbands,”he said.”They lost very much.” The Rev. Francisco de Vasconcelos, general secretary of the Christian Church of East Timor, was killed in the violence.”Although we are a small minority, we also sacrificed … for the independence of East Timor,”he said of the predominantly Roman Catholic territory.

He said the East Timor churches will continue to address human rights issues.”Our concern was how to help East Timorese to feel free,”he said.”They need to have freedom to vote whatever they want.” Marcal also said he hopes for both forgiveness and justice in the days to come. He urged North American churches to support an international tribunal to prosecute the perpetrators of the violence.”We need to find a way at least to try these people,”he said.

The Associated Press reported that the United Nations Human Rights Commission met in special session Friday to discuss sending a fact-finding mission to East Timor. Such a mission would be the first step toward creating an international criminal tribunal.

Canadian Anglican diocese considers bankruptcy after court ruling

(RNS) A Canadian Anglican diocese is considering declaring bankruptcy following a judge’s ruling that it must pay damages for the sexual abuse 30 years ago of a boy at a church-run residential school.

The 5,000-member Cariboo diocese, which includes 45 Anglican congregations in the rugged interior of British Colombia, is preparing contingency plans for how to operate without church buildings, which may have to be sold to pay court-ordered damages, said Archbishop David Crawley, the province’s top Anglican.”It’s a sad possibility. If there is a move to bankruptcy, and the physical assets are lost, then there will have to be a massive restructuring of the diocese,”Crawley said Wednesday (Sept. 22).”In small towns, many people say the community dies when the church dies _ there goes the place where you and your children were married, where you went to Girl Guides and Cubs, where you sent your loved one off to war. Yet, if the buildings go, we’ll still have the priest and the worshipping congregation,”he said.

The Cariboo diocese, Crawley said, may have enough cash and liquid assets to cover the undisclosed amount Justice Janice Dillon awarded Aug. 30 to Floyd Mowatt, who was abused while attending St. George’s Indian residential school near Lytton, British Columbia.

But there is a real possibility, Crawley said, that the diocese will have to declare bankruptcy when at least four other similar abuse lawsuits are ruled on by the courts.”If the costs awarded are similar,”he said,”it might be enough to force us into bankruptcy.” Right now, he said, there is no immediate plan to sell any of the Cariboo diocese’s large or small sanctuaries.

All the lawsuits against the Cariboo diocese relate to abuse inflicted by St. George’s dormitory supervisor Derek Clarke, who was convicted six years ago for his sexual abuse in the early 1970s of many boys at the defunct federally funded, church-run school.

The British Columbia judge decided that the Anglican church was 60 percent and the federal government 40 percent responsible for the abuse.

While the court ordered that the amount of Mowatt’s award not be publicly disclosed, the denomination’s national Anglican Journal newspaper said the amount is”believed to be about $200,000.”That does not include the church’s legal expenses, which Crawley described as”enormous.”

Court rules late-term abortion laws in three states unconstitutional

(RNS) A federal appeals court panel in St. Louis on Friday (Sept. 24) ruled that three states’ laws banning late-term abortions are unconstitutional.

A three-judge panel of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld U.S. District Judge Richard Kopf’s decision last year that said Nebraska’s law is so vague that it potentially bans all abortions, the Associated Press reported.

The court issued similar rulings for cases out of Arkansas and Iowa.

Appeals Court Clerk Michael Gans said the court dealt with all three cases at once because they were so similar.

On the Nebraska case, Chief Judge Richard Arnold wrote: “The difficulty is that the statute covers a great deal more. It would also prohibit, in many circumstances, the most common method of second-trimester abortion. … Such a prohibition places an undue burden on the right of women to choose whether to have an abortion.”

Nebraska’s law is similar to the 1997 federal bill that President Clinton vetoed. The case marks the first appeal in which the merits of the federal language are considered.

Twenty-eight states have adopted similar laws since 1995, although the courts have blocked or limited enforcement in 19 of those states.

The late-term abortion procedure _ often called “partial-birth” abortion by opponents _ involves partially extracting a fetus, legs first, through the birth canal, cutting the skull and draining the contents.

Nebraska Attorney General Don Stenberg said his office will appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Senate, House negotiators restore funds to School of Americas

(RNS) Senate and House negotiators have restored funding for the controversial School of the Americas that the House tried to shut down last summer.

Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Ga., said House conferees on the fiscal 2000 foreign operations spending bill agreed Wednesday (Sept. 22) to accept the Senate’s position that included $2 million in the State Department budget to pay the expenses of Latin American soldiers who attend the school at Fort Benning, Ga. The vote won’t become final until negotiations on the entire bill conclude, but Kingston, a House conferee, said the section dealing with funding for the Army school has been closed and cannot be reopened, the Associated Press reported.”The School of the Americas is in there,”he said.”It’s survived another year.” For a decade, the school has been the target of a campaign by liberal religious activists upset that some of its graduates were linked to the 1989 murders of six Jesuit priests and two women in El Salvador.

Last summer, the House voted 230-197 to remove the $2 million in training funds. It was the first time in five votes by the House since 1993 that the lawmakers had gone on record opposing the school.

The Rev. Roy Bourgeois, the Catholic priest who led the campaign against the school, said the conference committee action will not diminish the campaign.”We are not going away,”he said.”We’re going to keep coming back to Washington and to the main gate of Fort Benning in greater and greater numbers every year until that school is shut down.” Catholic nun reported abused in eastern India

(RNS) A Roman Catholic nun in eastern India was reportedly abducted by two men, stripped and forced to drink their urine.

The nun had hired a taxi in the town of Chapra in India’s Bihar state on Monday (Sept. 20) when two men in the vehicle threatened her with a knife and forced her to a secluded area, The Indian Express newspaper reported Friday (Sept. 24).

The men urinated in a bottle and threatened to rape her when she tried to resist drinking, the newspaper said, quoting a statement from a local bishop.

The newspaper said the men told the nun that they were trying to teach her a”lesson”so she would not seek to convert Hindus, The Statesman newspaper said.

The nun belonged to the congregation of the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart and had traveled recently to Bihar from the southern coastal town of Pondicherry.

Christians form a tiny minority in Hindu-majority India, making up roughly 2 percent of the country’s nearly 1 billion people.

In New Delhi, Archbishop Alan de Lastic, president of the United Christian Forum for Human Rights, demanded immediate action against the offenders in a letter to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

He also referred to statements by the leaders of two extremist Hindu organizations, which are affiliates of Vajpayee’s Bharatiya Janata Party, that they would carry out street demonstrations during Pope John Paul II’s planned November visit to New Delhi.

“The prime minister must take steps to ensure that John Paul is not insulted during his India visit,” the letter said.

Hindu radical groups have been linked to some of the growing number of attacks on Christians in India.

One of the worst attacks occurred Jan. 23, when an Australian missionary and his two young sons were burned to death in the eastern Orissa state as they slept outside a village after a Bible study. More recently, a Catholic priest was killed by Hindus who said he was trying to convert Hindus.

Quote of the Day: Roman Catholic Bishop Thomas V. Daily of Brooklyn, N.Y.

(RNS)”What are the redeeming features? Even if there is an appeal to the people in Africa, it’s certainly offensive to Catholics, including Africans, who have a great devotion to Our Lady.” _ Bishop Thomas V. Daily of the Diocese of Brooklyn, N.Y., commenting in the Friday (Sept. 24) Washington Times on the controversial work of artist Chris Ofili scheduled for a show at the Brooklyn Museum of Art that includes a portrait of the Virgin Mary stained by elephant dung. New York Mayor Rudolph Guiliani threatened to end the museum’s lease with the city if the show opens. Ofili is black and says he is Roman Catholic.

IR END RNS