c. 2003 Religion News Service

Lieberman Says Conservatives Hold No Monopoly on Values

WASHINGTON (RNS) Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., said Monday (March 31) conservative politicians and clergymen do not have a “monopoly” on values and morality.

Lieberman, who became the first Jew on a major party presidential ticket when he was tapped as Al Gore’s running mate in 2000, told a gathering of Reform Jews that “not only do values come from many different faiths, they lead in many different directions.”

“I am here to tell you that conservative politicians and … even conservative clergy members have no monopoly on moral values or the absolutely correct political positions,” Lieberman told a conference organized by the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism.

Lieberman, an Orthodox Jew, is a moderate Democrat who is a favorite of social conservatives for his moral positions on media violence and his public faith.

Speaking to the Capitol Hill briefing, Lieberman urged the Reform audience to work for a host of progressive causes, including affirmative action, abortion rights and gay and lesbian equality.

Lieberman called on the Senate to pass the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which would ban federal-level discrimination because of sexual orientation. “And if it doesn’t get done in the next two years, I intend to introduce it and sign it as president of the United States,” said Lieberman, a declared candidate for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination.

_ Kevin Eckstrom

Pope Warns War in Iraq Could Become `Religious Catastrophe’

VATICAN CITY (RNS) Pope John Paul II has warned the war in Iraq, already “a human tragedy,” could become “a religious catastrophe” if it serves to set Christians and Muslims against each other.

The 82-year-old Roman Catholic pontiff issued the warning Saturday (March 29) in an address to 36 bishops from predominantly Muslim Indonesia, where Catholics make up only 3.4 percent of the population.

“War must never be allowed to divide world religions,” the pope said. He urged the bishops to work “at this unsettling moment” with “your own people, with those of other religious beliefs and with all men and women of goodwill in order to ensure understanding, cooperation and solidarity.”

“Let us not permit a human tragedy also to become a religious catastrophe,” he said.

John Paul, who mounted an intensive peace campaign in the weeks before the war, sending personal envoys to both Baghdad and Washington, spoke again of the war on Sunday to thousands of pilgrims gathered in St. Peter’s Square for the midday Angelus prayer.

Praying to the Virgin Mary for “the victims of conflicts under way,” the pope said, “With grieving and faithful insistence we invoke her intercession for peace in Iraq and in every other region of the world.”

The Indonesian bishops were in Rome for the “ad limina” visit to the Vatican prelates are required to make every five years. The pope praised them for making the trip “during these trying times” and encouraged them not to turn against Muslims even when persecuted by “an extremist minority.”

“I am well aware that certain portions of the Christian community in your nation have suffered from discriminating and prejudice, while others have been victimized by acts of destruction and vandalization,” he said.

“In some areas Christian communities have been denied the permission to build places of worship and prayer,” the pope noted. “Indonesia, together with the international community, was recently stunned at the terrible loss of life due to the terrorist bombing in Bali.

“In all of this, however, one must be careful not to yield to the temptation to define groups of people by the actions of an extremist minority. Authentic religion does not advocate terrorism or violence but seeks to promote in every way the unity and peace of the whole human family.”

_ Peggy Polk

Sikh Temple Opens in London

LONDON (RNS) What is being called the world’s largest Sikh temple outside India opened Sunday (March 30) in London with a reported 40,000 people attending the opening ceremony of the new gurdwara.

The ceremony began with the Sikh scriptures, the Guru Granth Sahib, being carried in procession from the former Southall gurdwara half a mile away to their new home.

The temple, which can accommodate 3,000 worshippers, took three years to build and cost just under $26 million, all of which was raised by London’s Sikh community. Facilities include a library, a seminar room and a dining hall able to provide more than 20,000 meals over a festival weekend.

“The ambition was to create a temple second only to the Golden Temple in Amritsar,” said spokesman Parminder Singh Garcha.

_ Robert Nowell

Peter and Peggy Steinfels to Receive 2003 Laetare Medal

(RNS) A husband and wife team who are among the most respected commentators on the Catholic Church will be awarded the distinguished Laetare Medal from the University of Notre Dame.

Peter and Margaret “Peggy” O’Brien Steinfels, both former editors of Commonweal magazine, will receive the 120-year-old award on May 18.

Peter Steinfels edited the biweekly journal of politics and opinion from 1979 to 1988, when he left to become senior religion reporter for The New York Times. His wife succeeded him as editor until her resignation earlier this year.

“Peter and Peggy Steinfels live out and articulate a compelling response to the Catholic vocation,” said the Rev. Edward Malloy, the university’s president. “As married people, as intellectuals and as children of the church, their witness to the kingdom has been splendid and exemplary.”

Previous Laetare winners include President John F. Kennedy, the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago and death penalty abolitionist Sister Helen Prejean.

_ Kevin Eckstrom

Report See Cohabitation as `New Path’ to Wedlock

LONDON (RNS) A new report commissioned by a diocese in London urges the Church of England to change its teaching on sex before marriage, in favor of viewing cohabitation as a “new path” to eventual wedlock.

The document, prepared by a working party of the Southwark Diocese and titled “Cohabitation: A Christian Reflection,” says the church’s traditional view on premarital sex is a hangover from a different society in a different time and has become a “heavy load” in this modern era.

Peter Grinyer, a member of the group that prepared the report, said “the great majority of people I talked to agreed that there is an urgent need for the church to come to terms with a changed society and to provide a new, and what some may consider a radical, even heretical, understanding of sexual relationships for the 21st century.”

The diocese said the document will be sent to all parishes for study and consideration. It is certain to stir considerable controversy in the Anglican community.

The report does not condone cohabitation with no intention to marry. What it does say is that “it is clear that all the media now present cohabitation uncritically as the practical equivalent of marriage, and in this context it is difficult for the church to present Christian teaching about marriage in a positive and attractive light.”

“Society as a whole, not just the church, is in a state of crisis in its attitude to cohabitation and marriage,” it says.

The document insists that a change is needed if worshippers, particularly younger ones, decide the church’s historic teaching is irrelevant or unrealistic, or both. A shift should not be seen as a demeaning of marriage but as a “new path from the single state to the married one.”

Unless the church is ready to allow “the exploration and discovery of sexual intimacy” as a key part of the development of a relationship ahead of marriage, the report says, what it does have to say is in danger of being seen as irrelevant.

For the church, it said, “this risks demeaning and undermining its whole witness and ministry to society.”

_ Al Webb

Update: Pacifist Paraglider Charged With Breaching Security

VATICAN CITY (RNS) An Austrian peace activist who invaded Vatican air space on a paraglider, setting off a security alarm, has been charged with breaching security and staging an unauthorized demonstration.

Police took Andreas Siebenhofer, 26, and seven fellow activists into custody at dawn Friday (March 28) and impounded Siebenhofer’s motor-propelled paraglider, a video camera his friends were using to tape his exploit and their van.

Siebenhofer, who was carrying a letter with 2,000 signatures praising Pope John Paul II’s opposition to the Iraqi war, crossed St. Peter’s Square under a white banner on which was written “Peace Not War.” He landed on barriers separating the Vatican city-state from Italian territory.

Vatican air space has been closed to aviation since the 1929 Lateran Treaties between Italy and the Holy See. Authorities tightened security following intelligence reports the Vatican was a prime target for terrorists following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

Rome Prefect Emilio del Mese called an emergency meeting of the Provincial Committee on Public Order and Security, which includes commanders of the police, fire brigades, border patrols and paramilitary Carabinieri. The committee agreed to study ways of further tightening security and to step up helicopter patrols.

“I acted on impulse, following my heart, to support the pope’s campaign against the war,” Siebenhofer said. “If I had known it would upset the city, I wouldn’t have done it.”

Police released the group after questioning and all but one returned to Austria. Their Italian lawyer, Luca Maori, another paragliding enthusiast, said they would return to Rome this week to present their letter to the pope with help from the Austrian Embassy to the Holy See.

Siebenhofer and his friends, including a 73-year-old priest, two German women and four other Austrian men, belong to a paragliding club in Judenberg in southwestern Austria.

_ Peggy Polk

Quote of the Day: Yale Divinity School theologian Miroslav Volf

(RNS) “Religions are embraced and practiced in no other way except in their concreteness. To speak in a Christian voice is neither to give a variation on a theme common to all religions nor to make exclusively Christian claims in distinction from all other religions. It is to give voice to the Christian faith in its concreteness, whether what is said overlaps with, differs from or contradicts what people speaking in a Jewish or Muslim voice are saying. Since truth matters, and since a false pluralism of approving pats on the back is cheap and short-lived, we will rejoice over overlaps and engage others over differences and incompatibilities, so as to both learn from and teach others.”

_ Yale Divinity School theologian Miroslav Volf in his column “Faith Matters” in The Christian Century.

DEA END RNS