c. 2003 Religion News Service
President Bush Announces Council to Promote Voluntary Service
WASHINGTON (RNS) President Bush has announced a new council to honor voluntary service, just days after suggesting new initiatives to promote volunteerism in his State of the Union address.
He said the President’s Council on Service and Civic Participation will be chaired by Darrell Green, a former Washington Redskins football player. Retired Sens. Robert Dole and John Glenn are honorary co-chairs.
“It’s a commission not only to convince our fellow citizens to love one another just like we’d like to be loved; it’s a commission also to devise practical ways to encourage others to serve,” said Bush at a Thursday (Jan. 30) ceremony at a Boys and Girls Club in Washington that marked the first anniversary of the USA Freedom Corps he created to encourage volunteerism.
The council, which will include leaders from the business, media and nonprofit sectors, will help develop the President’s Volunteer Service Awards, a nationwide recognition program. An announcement released by the corps stated that the award would be given to “millions of individuals” who have been seriously committed to voluntary work over a one-year period.
Bush used the announcement as an opportunity to reiterate his proposals regarding community service during his State of the Union speech on Tuesday. Those proposals include $450 million in federal funds to enhance mentoring of needy youth by nonprofit, community and faith-based groups in a three-year period. He would like to see Congress approve $300 million for programs to help disadvantaged middle schoolers and an additional $150 million to aid children of prisoners.
“I strongly believe in mentoring,” he said. “I know we can change America one heart and one soul at a time. There’s just no doubt in my mind we can.”
_ Adelle M. Banks
Despite Religious Chill, Vatican Envoy Greeted Warmly by Putin
MOSCOW (RNS) Russian President Vladimir Putin had warm words Thursday (Jan. 30) for Roman Catholics at a time when the faith is experiencing its worst persecution since the end of the Soviet Union.
“Russia is in favor of developing a political dialogue with the Vatican,” Putin told Archbishop Antonio Mennini, the pope’s new envoy to Russia, according to the Moscow-based ITAR-TASS news agency.
“On many matters, including very important issues like terrorism, our position and that of the Vatican are practically the same,” the president said during a Kremlin reception for new diplomatic envoys presenting their credentials.
Putin’s comments are especially noteworthy because the Russian government last year expelled four Catholic priests and a bishop _ all foreigners. Despite a personal appeal from Pope John Paul II, the Kremlin refused to explain the expulsions or allow the clergy to return.
In December, a leaked Russian government report identified the Roman Catholic Church as the No. 1 religious threat to Russia’s national security. In the report, Catholics outranked Protestants, Muslims and Satanists.
The Catholics’ woes began after the Vatican’s creation last February of four new dioceses in Russia. That move infuriated the dominant and politically powerful Russian Orthodox Church.
At least one observer of Russia’s religious scene said Thursday that Putin’s words had little significance for Russia’s estimated 600,000 people with Catholic roots.
“I don’t see anything new in this,” said Anatoly Krasikov, head of the Russian branch of the U.S.-based International Association for Freedom of Religion. “When Putin met with the pope, his words were very warm then, too.”
Krasikov also discounted the importance of the Russian government’s decision earlier this month to grant permanent resident status to Bishop Clemens Pickel, who is a German citizen.
“In the government, there are different people with different positions,” Krasikov said. “They often have different opinions and are at odds with each other.”
A spokesman for the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Moscow, Father Igor Kovalevsky, was more upbeat about Putin’s comments.
“We hope that relations are changing,” he said. “Our biggest problem today is not with the government but with the Russian Orthodox Church. We hope it gets better.”
_ Frank Brown
Pope Warns Marriage and the Family Are in Crisis
VATICAN CITY _ Pope John Paul II warned Thursday (Jan. 30) that the institutions of matrimony and the family are in “deep crisis” because couples no longer understand that marriage is a gift from God.
“Today’s highly secularized mentality tends to affirm the human values of the institution of the family, detaching it from religious values and proclaiming it totally autonomous from God,” the pope said.
Even Christians no longer understand the “sacramentality” and the “divine origin” of marriage, and this leads to the “dehumanization of all family relations,” he said.
Addressing judges, officials and lawyers of the Roman Rota, the Vatican tribunal that rules on requests for the annulment of marriages, John Paul underlined “the deep crisis that presently assails matrimony and the family.”
The pope said couples were susceptible to doubts because original sin left them vulnerable to ideas that do not conform to “the plan and the will of God.”
“Influenced as they are by models of life too often proposed by the mass media, they ask: `Why must one be faithful always to the other spouse?’ And this question is transformed into existential doubt in critical situations,” he said.
John Paul said that problems in marriages may be the result of the character of the couple, “but in the end everything flows into a problem of love.”
Another way of formulating the question of why be faithful, he said, is: “Why must we always love one another, even when so many apparently justified motivations induce us to leave?”
“There can be many answers” the pope said. “Among them the strongest, no doubt, is the good of the children and the good of the entire society, but the most radical answer passes, first of all, through the recognition of the objectivity of being spouses, seen as a reciprocal gift, rendered possible and guaranteed by God himself.”
_ Peggy Polk
Diocese, Priest to Pay $180,000 to End Lawsuit
SYRACUSE, N.Y. (RNS) The Ogdensburg diocese and the Rev. Liam O’Doherty will pay a total of $180,000 to four Central New York women to settle lawsuits claiming O’Doherty sexually abused them as children or fraudulently practiced medicine on them.
But a lawyer for O’Doherty said Tuesday (Jan. 28) the former parish priest in Sacketts Harbor and Antwerp categorically denies any wrongdoing.
O’Doherty is contributing $15,000 to Monday’s settlement because he thought it impossible to get a fair trial in the environment of clergy sexual abuse scandals, said attorney Peter Carmen.
Two Onondaga County women sued O’Doherty in 2000 and 2001, claiming he sexually abused them when they were children between 1985 and 1991 at a Sacketts Harbor church rectory.
Two Oswego County women who sued him claimed O’Doherty fraudulently posed as a licensed physician in the 1990s while serving as parish priest in Antwerp, and that he performed a vaginal examination on one of them.
Attorney Joseph Amisano of Rochester, who represented the women, said numerous other women have told him O’Doherty sexually abused them.
“I could have had a parade of them (testify at trial),” Amisano said.
O’Doherty, 63, served as a priest at seven parishes in northern New York beginning in 1966. In 1998 the diocese relieved him of his privileges to perform as a priest, but he technically remains a priest. He now resides at Vianney Renewal Center, a retreat for priests in Dittmer, Mo.
Diocese attorney Paul Hanrahan said no one except the four plaintiffs has complained to diocese officials about O’Doherty’s conduct.
The four women alleged the diocese was negligent for not warning them of O’Doherty’s propensity to abuse women and children.
One of the Onondaga County women alleged O’Doherty sexually abused her in 1991 when she was 10 years old at St. Andrew’s Rectory in Sacketts Harbor. The other alleged O’Doherty often fondled her breasts between 1985 and 1991, when she was 8 to 13 years old, and once forced her to sleep nude with him in the rectory.
One Oswego County woman alleged that in 1998, when she was 22 and O’Doherty was pastor at St. Michael’s Church in Antwerp, he told her he was a licensed physician and persuaded her to let him perform a vaginal exam. A second Oswego County woman alleged O’Doherty fraudulently posed as a psychiatrist and counseled her.
“He didn’t have sexual contact with any of them,” said Carmen, O’Doherty’s lawyer. “He has no idea what the genesis of these claims was other than to suspect that the environment was ripe for these sorts of allegations.”
_ Mike McAndrew
Quote of the Day: AIDS Activist and Musician Bono
(RNS) “If you think back just six months or a year, conservatives, especially religious conservatives, were very skeptical about this, and we had to explain that if you can’t get the drugs, why would you test, and if you don’t get people testing, we can’t control the virus. All these points have sunk in.”
_ Bono, the lead singer of U2 and an AIDS activist, commenting that President Bush’s State of the Union announcement proposing $15 billion of funding to address AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean shows how the world has changed. He was quoted by The Washington Post.
DEA END RNS
