c. 2000 Religion News Service
AFL-CIO, Catholic Bishops Launch Labor Alliance
(RNS) The nation’s leading labor organization and the country’s Roman Catholic bishops on Wednesday (March 15) announced a united effort to push for more humane immigration laws to protect the country’s estimated 5 million undocumented immigrant workers.
The AFL-CIO, which represents 68 labor unions and 13 million workers, and the U.S. Catholic Conference said they will form a broad-based coalition to urge Congress to adopt laws that protect immigrant workers, many of whom are here illegally and are subjected to harsh working conditions and low wages.
Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony, head of the conference’s domestic policy committee and leader of the nation’s largest archdiocese, joined AFL-CIO president John Sweeney and Camden, N.J., Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio in announcing the agreement in Washington.
“Without these workers taking a real major role in the economy today, the economy would not be at the place it’s at,” Mahony said. “But we need to make sure they’re not fueling (the economy) at the lowest wage possible.”
Mahony and DiMarzio lamented “harsh and oppressive” immigration laws that abuse the “dignity and rights” of immigrant workers and fail to protect their working conditions. They said the United States needs to adopt a better system to legalize immigrants more efficiently and create standards to protect them against unfair labor practices.
“We’re relying on undocumented labor to harvest our crops in the worst of conditions,” DiMarzio said, adding that half of the estimated 2 million migrant farm workers are suspected to be illegal immigrants.
Neither the bishops nor Sweeney would say which specific proposals they would push for, but said government needs to better address conditions in foreign countries that force immigrants to come to the United States to seek a better life.
“This does not mean we’re for open borders,” DiMarzio said. “We’re looking for an immigration policy that works because obviously the current system isn’t working because so many of the workers are undocumented.”
Religious Leaders Join Housing Secretary in Push to End Gun Violence
(RNS) A broad coalition of religious leaders joined Housing and Urban Development Secretary Andrew Cuomo in calling for “common sense gun laws” to end a deadly streak of gun-related violence in America.
Speaking in Washington on Wednesday (March 15), Jewish, Catholic and Protestant leaders signed “a letter to the American people” urging an end to gun violence and calling on Congress to put gun safety above political maneuvering.
“Today, we issue to you a challenge,” said Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism. “Join us in stopping gun violence, in making our communities places of refuge rather than rampage, our nation a beacon of hope rather than a paragon of helplessness.”
Cuomo castigated the Republican Congress for allowing the National Rifle Association to block gun control measures and for incorrectly painting gun control advocates as wanting to take guns away from law-abiding citizens.
“We are not saying that guns beget the violence,” Cuomo said. “In many ways we are a violent people … but why do we need the unnecessary proliferation of guns as a vehicle for that violence?”
The Rev. Jim Wallis, editor in chief of the evangelical Sojourner’s Magazine, told how his Northwest Washington neighborhood has seen three fatal shootings in the last three months. Wallis said as a clergyman, he has few answers for the families of the victims.
“We know that in poor neighborhoods, wealth does not trickle down, but violence does,” Wallis said. “Guns are not the only issue, but when guns are everywhere, who can be so ignorant as to say that guns aren’t linked to violence?”
Representatives from the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, the National Council of Churches and 150 other religious groups signed the letter, which will be distributed to all 535 members of Congress and the nation’s governors.
The letter urges the expansion of gun buy-back programs, laws that would end the sale of guns at gun shows without proper background checks and the mandatory installation of trigger safety locks. “We do not speak in terms of fault or moral blame,” the letter said. “However, the gun industry has the opportunity to reduce the tragedies and bloodshed.”
World Council Calls for Debt Relief for Mozambique
(RNS) The World Council of Churches has appealed to member churches in the world’s leading industrial nations _ including the United States _ to ask their governments to cancel the debts owed by Mozambique, a country crippled in the aftermath of devastating rains and flooding.
The council also called for Group of Eight nations _ Japan, Russia, the United States, France, Italy, Germany, Canada and the United Kingdom _ to encourage creditors such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to agree to “immediate, total and unconditional cancellation of the money owed by Mozambique.”
“Only complete cancellation and not simply postponement _ as for Honduras after Hurricane Mitch _ will do,” insisted the council, which is comprised of more than 300 churches in more than 100 countries.
Weeks of flooding in the southeast African country have displaced thousands and killed at least 500 people, a death toll expected to increase as more bodies surface and more people succumb to disease.
Mozambique, one of the world’s poorest countries, was in debt nearly $6 billion before floods swept through the country last month. The country pays about $1.4 million each week in debt repayment, mostly to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, according to Africa News Service.
A number of countries _ including France, Italy, Germany and Finland _ have announced plans to cancel Mozambique’s debt to their governments.
The WCC’s call follows a similar appeal from the leader of Mozambique’s primary ecumenical group.
“The economic situation of Mozambique was precarious before the flooding,” said Methodist Bishop Bernadino Mandlate, president of the Christian Council of Mozambique. “Now the economic situation has gone from precarious to catastrophic.”
Catholic School Suspends Three Over Abortion Rights Flier
(RNS) A Catholic university in Rhode Island has suspended three students for placing the Virgin Mary’s image on a flier supporting abortion rights.
Providence College suspended junior Patrick Moran, sophomore Christopher White and senior Daniel Pastrana for the remainder of the semester for posting on a classroom door a flier that read “How’s this for an immaculate concept: Keep Abortion Safe and Legal.”
The school’s president, the Rev. Philip Smith, called the February incident “deplorable and offensive” and a “deliberate misuse of a venerated person.”
But the suspended students, who each must also pay a $1,000 fine, contend the flier was intended to provoke discussion, not offend.
“We hoped that the explicit nature of the imagery would add a more personal dimension to the issue,” they wrote in a letter published in the school newspaper.
Some students planned to stage a protest Thursday (March 16) in support of free speech at the university, where a number of Dominican friars and nuns serve on the faculty and Roman Catholics make up more than 80 percent of the 3,700-member student body.
“The flier didn’t say `Abortions are the way to go’ or `Damn the church,”’ said Devan Chase, a 20-year-old sophomore who helped organize the protest. “I don’t really feel like it was an anti-Catholic thing,” the Associated Press reported.
The university’s actions will likely withstand any legal challenge, said an official with the American Civil Liberties Union in Rhode Island.
“The First Amendment does not apply to private colleges, only to public colleges, so students sometimes get a jarring wake-up call to the limitation of their rights at a private institution,” said Steven Brown, the organization’s executive director. “It’s ironic, to say the least, that at an institution founded on the notion of academic freedom, the people who take academic freedom seriously are punished for it.”
Ohio High Court Upholds Sentence Decision of Bible-Quoting Judge
(RNS) In a unanimous decision, the Ohio Supreme Court has upheld a 51-year prison sentence imposed by a judge who quoted a Bible verse when punishing a man for the rape of a young girl.
Last year an appeals court overturned the sentence, saying the judge acted outside Ohio’s sentencing guidelines. The state Supreme Court disagreed, the Associated Press reported.
The state’s high court decided in a 7-0 ruling that Hamilton County Judge Melba Marsh did not violate the due process rights of James Arnett, who pleaded guilty in 1997 to raping an 8-year-old girl repeatedly.
Marsh quoted a Bible verse during her 1988 sentencing of Arnett that says anyone who offends a child would be better off if “a millstone were hanged around his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.”
Justice Deborah Cook wrote that the Bible was one of many factors that supported a “legally unremarkable decision” by Marsh to assign significant weight to one statutory factor _ the age of the victim.
Arnett’s lawyer, Charles Bartlett, was not immediately available for comment at his Cincinnati office.
Quote of the Day: Catholic League Spokesman Patrick Scully
(RNS) “Unfortunately they still treat Catholic bashing as an intramural sport.”
Patrick Scully, spokesman for the New York-based Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, reacting to Bob Jones University’s decision to repost statements on the fundamentalist school’s Web site calling Catholicism and Mormonism cults. He was quoted by the Associated Press.
DEA END RNS
