c. 2003 Religion News Service

Knights of Columbus Urge Supreme Court to Overturn `Pledge’ Ruling

WASHINGTON (RNS) The Knights of Columbus, who successfully lobbied for the words “under God” to be added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to decide whether the phrase makes the pledge unconstitutional.

The New Haven, Conn.-based Catholic fraternal organization urged the court to overturn last year’s decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit that said “under God” violated the separation of church and state.

“At least since the Declaration of Independence was written, our national ethos has held that we have inalienable rights that the State cannot take away, because the source of those inalienable rights is an authority higher than the State,” the Knights said in an amicus brief to the court.

“The Pledge, like the Declaration, is a statement of political philosophy, not theology.”

In 1951, the Knights of Columbus ordered members to add the words “under God” when reciting the pledge. A year later, the Knights recommended the change to Washington, and in 1954, Congress approved the addition.

The Supreme Court has not decided whether to hear the case, in which a three-judge panel in San Francisco ruled that the pledge “impermissibly takes a position with respect to the purely religious question of the existence and identity of God.”

The Bush administration, in urging the court to take the case and overturn the lower court, said in April that “whatever else the (Constitution) may prohibit, this Court’s precedents make clear that it does not forbid the government from officially acknowledging the religious heritage, foundation and character of this nation.”

Kevin Hasson, an attorney for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, told the court that at the height of the Cold War, the words “under God” were not added as some “jingoistic exercise in contrasting good believers with bad atheists. It was a serious reflection on the different versions of human nature, and therefore of human freedom, that underlay the two systems.”

In a separate brief, Americans United for Separation of Church and State urged the court not to take up the case. The church-state watchdog group said reciting the pledge in classrooms is an “exercise in religious affirmation.”

“Children are bound to perceive the phrase as affirming a belief in the existence of God and national subordination to God, and as expressing commitment to a nation defined by religious devotion,” the brief said.

_ Kevin Eckstrom

Death Penalty Opponents Rally at Supreme Court

WASHINGTON (RNS) Hundreds of death penalty abolitionists rallied in front of the Supreme Court on Monday (June 30), protesting the 1976 ruling that upheld capital punishment.

Monday’s rally speakers included Washington Wizards basketball player Etam Thomas, musician Steve Earle and Juan Melendez, an ex-convict who spent over 17 years on death row in Florida before being exonerated for a 1983 murder which another man confessed to committing.

“I am a prime example that the death penalty system is broken, that it is not fair and that it is not accurate,” Melendez said at the rally.

This year’s rally marked the 27th anniversary of the Gregg vs. Georgia ruling, which reinstated the death penalty after a 1972 ruling struck it down, calling the state-sponsored executions a “cruel and unusual punishment” in violation of the 14th Amendment.

Gathering in Washington for the 10th consecutive year to take part in a 96-hour fast and vigil, abolitionists protested the 859 executions that have taken place in the United States since the Supreme Court upheld death penalty statutes. In the past year, 78 people have been executed and eight people have been released from death row upon discovery of their innocence, activists said.

“The death penalty in 1972 was arbitrary and capricious and the death penalty in 2003 is arbitrary and capricious,” Abe Bonowitz, spokesman for the Abolitionist Action Committee, said in a statement. “The difference between 1972 and 2003 is that the abolition movement in the United States is now committed to a strategy of legislative repeal _ organizing on a grass-roots level, state by state, legislature by legislature. It is no longer a question of whether we will abolish the death penalty, but when.”

_ Alexandra Alter

Vancouver Anglicans Urged to Continue Third World Support

VANCOUVER, British Columbia (RNS) Bishop Michael Ingham has called on Vancouver-area Anglicans to keep donating money to cash-starved Third World Anglicans, despite their leaders’ denunciations of him for approving same-sex blessings.

But at least one top Third World Anglican doesn’t want any handouts from the affluent Diocese of New Westminster, on the West Coast of Canada.

Nigerian Primate Peter Akinola, leader of roughly 17 million Anglicans, is urging his African followers to reject financial help from Anglican churches in the developed world, which he accused of wielding their money to “intimidate” poor churches in Africa. Akinola has been the most aggressive of 15 Anglican primates who have declared a state of “impaired communion” with the Diocese of New Westminster for formally allowing a same-sex blessing to occur May 28.

The 15 primates, out of a total of 38, predominantly hail from poor regions, such as Africa and Asia, where Anglicanism has been spreading rapidly.

Faced with intense criticism from conservative Anglicans, Ingham tried to turn the other cheek in a statement he asked to be read out in all 80 of the Vancouver-area diocese’s parishes on June 29. Ingham said his diocese continues to welcome all people, including vocal Anglican critics from the Canadian North and the Third World.

“We shall continue as a diocese to support the mission work of the Canadian church in the North and overseas with our financial contributions, even where certain bishops have attempted to exclude their people from fellowship with us,” he said.

_ Douglas Todd

Cooperative Baptist Fellowship Faces Shortfall, Plans Hispanic Outreach

(RNS) The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship will face a shortfall of $650,000 in revenues this year but is continuing new mission efforts, including a partnership to start 400 Hispanic churches.

“This is one of those good news/bad news scenarios,” said Daniel Vestal, the fellowship’s coordinator, in a statement issued during its annual meeting June 26-28. “We have received more money this year than we have ever received, but we are also behind in the budget.”

The moderate Baptist group will not appoint new missionaries except those funded by designated gifts, he said.

The fellowship approved a partnership with the Hispanic Baptist Convention of Texas to start 400 Hispanic churches and share training on Hispanic evangelism.

A total of 4,357 people registered for the fellowship’s General Assembly, which met in Charlotte, N.C.

Vestal expressed optimism about an upcoming decision concerning the fellowship’s membership application with the Baptist World Alliance.

“I will be surprised and disappointed if our membership application is not granted into the Baptist World Alliance,” he said of the group that will meet July 7-12 in Brazil.

The fellowship developed in opposition to the conservative direction of the Southern Baptist Convention and some SBC leaders have voiced displeasure that the alliance is considering making the fellowship a member.

_ Adelle M. Banks

Prelate Suggest Rewording English Monarch’s Oath

LONDON (RNS) Archbishop of York David Hope has suggested rewording the the oath taken by the English monarch at his or her coronation to remove the polemically anti-Catholic character of the oath.

In its present form, the oath was drawn up for the coronation of William and Mary in 1689 and was concerned to make Protestantism an essential feature of English society.

In its current form, the monarch swears, as Queen Elizabeth did at her coronation in 1953, to uphold “the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law.”

Hope said the appropriateness of the pledge in the 21st century is open to question.

In any case, he said, the statement does not accord easily with the declaration read at the consecration of every bishop of the Church of England which affirms the Church of England “is part of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church.”

“In this 21st century, in so multicultural a society and nation, and with other faith traditions now flourishing in this land, as well as the considerable ecumenical advances in respect of relationships between Christian churches and communities, a somewhat less exclusive and excluding statement must surely be called for,” said the archbishop.

Hope also implicitly took issue with the well-known desire of the heir to the throne, Prince Charles, to be “defender of faiths” rather than Defender of the Faith _ a title bestowed on King Henry VIII by Pope Leo X for the king’s treatise defending the seven sacraments against the criticisms of Martin Luther.

The fact that the sovereign was defender of the faith, the Christian faith, and himself or herself a Christian should not in the archbishop’s view be any reason to change this title.

“Precisely because the monarch is defender of the faith and is seen to be both committed and practicing will surely be an encouragement to those of other faiths rather than the contrary,” Hope said. “Defender of the Faith is entirely consonant with the defending of all in their particular faith traditions.”

_ Robert Nowell

Quote of the Day: Baptist Sociologist Tony Campolo

(RNS) “The only difference between the new music and a machine gun is that a machine gun has only 100 rounds.”

_ Baptist sociologist and preacher Tony Campolo, speaking at the annual St. Amant Lecture of the Whitsitt Baptist Heritage Society in Charlotte, N.C. Campolo, who is not a fan of contemporary praise music, was quoted by Associated Baptist Press.

DEA END RNS