c. 2004 Religion News Service
Massachusetts UCC Endorses State’s Gay Marriage Law
SOUTH HADLEY, Mass. (RNS) With an 80 percent majority vote, delegates of the largest Protestant denomination in Massachusetts voted Saturday (June 12) to “celebrate and affirm” the state’s new law to permit gay marriages.
Delegates approved a resolution affirming the right of same-gender couples to legally marry in the commonwealth by a 4-to-1 margin at the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Conference of the United Church of Christ.
The vote taken among the 657 delegates assembled on the campus of Mount Holyoke College marked the first time since the law took effect May 17 that the membership of a major church body had gathered to make a statement on it. Elated supporters, mindful that Massachusetts voters could overturn the law in a 2006 referendum, said the church’s support might help keep it on the books.
“We now have a law that includes everyone,” said Linda Reilly, pastor of the Crombie Street United Church of Christ in Salem. “We need to fight to keep it.”
Others in attendance, however, expected negative fallout among Massachusetts congregations. The Rev. John Castricum, pastor of South Congregational Church of Barnstable, said his church had voted 2-1 not to support the resolution at the annual meeting. He said some members, disappointed by Saturday’s vote, will look for ways to express their displeasure, such as giving less to state-level ministries.
“I think our giving levels will suffer,” Castricum said. “This is dividing the church.”
Before the vote, delegates lined up six- and eight-deep at microphones to make their cases for and against the proposal. Supporters said the issue was a matter of justice for a minority group, while opponents said conservatives were becoming the church’s new outcasts. A third group pleaded for more time to weigh the issue, warning that the church was moving too quickly in offering its blessing.
Delegates, however, defeated a motion to delay a vote on the resolution for one year. They also rejected an amendment that would have urged local congregations to go one step further and fight any attempt to overturn the current law.
In supporting the final resolution, delegates called on local churches to “celebrate and affirm” the state high court’s decision to legalize gay marriage, but UCC polity leaves that decision in the hands of each local congregation.
_ G. Jeffrey MacDonald
U.S. Clergy Create Anti-Torture Ad to Air in Arab World
(RNS) A group of four U.S. clergy from different faiths has created a television advertisement apologizing for the treatment of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. forces.
The 30-second ad, which was to begin airing Tuesday (June 15) on Arabic-language television networks including Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya, features the clergy reading a statement that directly addresses the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison.
“As Americans of faith, we express our deep sorrow at abuses committed in Iraqi prisons,” the statement said.
“We stand in solidarity with all those in Iraq and everywhere who demand justice and human dignity,” it continued. “We condemn the sinful and systemic abuses committed in our name and pledge to work to right these wrongs.”
The statement, which is airing with written Arabic translations, was read by clergy from four different faith traditions.
They are the Rev. Donald Shriver, a former president of Union Theological Seminary in New York, who began the ad with the Arabic greeting “a salaam aleikum”; Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the founder and president of the American Sufi Muslim Association; Rabbi Arthur Waskow of the Shalom Center in Philadelphia; and Sister Betty Obal of the Sisters of Loretto.
The ad is the inaugural effort of FaithfulAmerica.org, an online advocacy organization that launched earlier this month. The group has raised more than $45,000 to date and attracted 17,000 people to endorse the ad via its Web site.
Tom Perriello, co-director of FaithfulAmerica.org, said the prison abuse scandal is “growing, not shrinking in the Arab world” and must be addressed in moral terms.
“Torture to us is a deeply moral issue,” said Perriello. “It’s time our religious leaders spoke out about a failure of moral leadership on our part.”
_ Holly Lebowitz Rossi
House Committee Rejects Church Politicking Measure
WASHINGTON (RNS) Under a tidal wave of pressure from disparate religious groups, a House committee voted unanimously to strike a provision that would have allowed religious organizations to get more involved in electioneering.
The “Safe Harbors for Churches” provision was tucked into a tax bill at the request of House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., The Washington Post reported. The Ways and Means Committee voted Monday (June 14) to reject the proposal.
Under the proposed legislation, religious leaders would have been permitted to endorse political candidates as long as they did so as “private citizens” and not as the head of their organizations. It would also have allowed clergy members three “unintentional” violations of the IRS’ rules governing political activity within a calendar year.
The penalties for breaking those rules included taxing greater portions of organizations’ revenue and would have “opened the books” to allow the IRS to audit them, which was declared anathema by some religious leaders.
The Rev. Richard D. Land, who heads the Southern Baptists’ Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, wrote a letter to Hastert calling the Safe Harbors provision “dangerous” and “an unacceptable intrusion of the IRS into the business of a church.”
Instead, Land favors something closer to the bill defeated in House in 2002 that would have prevented a religious group’s tax-exempt status from being affected by partisan political statements.
While opposing the legislation for different reasons, Joseph Conn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State said that it was a “nice surprise. We rarely wind up on the same side as the Rev. Land.”
Conn’s group, as well as the Anti-Defamation League, said that religious organizations enjoy a “huge benefit” from their tax exemptions “because people have the incentive to give them money knowing they could get some back” in the form of tax write-offs. In exchange for this benefit, the ADL says, there is a quid pro quo: Those religious groups cannot engage in electioneering.
“If the churches are allowed to make political efforts, what will in effect happen is that people can give money to their church and be funding a political advocacy program and get to write it off on their taxes. That would provide a way to funnel huge sums of money directly into the political process,” said the ADL’s David Alter.
Some people on Capitol Hill suggested that the Safe Harbors provision was added to enlist support for the larger tax bill of which it was a part. The American Jobs Creation Act of 2004, which includes tax cuts for businesses, will now move to the House floor without the provision.
_ Daniel Burke
Poll: Catholics Want Bishops to Stay Out of Politics
WASHINGTON (RNS) As the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops gather in Colorado to discuss how to handle Catholic politicians who support abortion rights, a vast majority of U.S. Catholics say the bishops should stay out of politics.
A new Time magazine poll shows that 75 percent of American Catholics disapprove of threats from some bishops to deny Communion to pro-choice politicians, and 70 percent don’t want the bishops to try to influence their votes.
The poll makes clear that neither presumptive Democratic candidate Sen. John Kerry’s public support of abortion rights nor some bishops’ public criticisms of his position will make much difference for the country’s 62 million Catholics when they vote in November.
The Time poll mirrors a recent survey by Quinnipiac University that showed 87 percent of Catholics said pressure from bishops would not impact their votes.
Seventy-one percent of Catholics in the Time poll disagree with the idea that abortion-rights politicians should refrain from seeking Communion, and 83 percent said Kerry’s support of abortion rights would not impact their vote.
The June 13 Time poll found the Catholic vote almost evenly split, with 45 percent for Kerry and 43 percent for President Bush. Among Protestants, Bush led Kerry 55 percent to 36 percent.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is meeting this week outside Denver in a closed-door retreat. The bishops are expected to hear a report from a task force headed by Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington, D.C., on how to handle politicians like Kerry.
The poll found that Bush’s public evangelical faith and Kerry’s Catholic beliefs may hold some sway among voters. Fifty-six percent of Americans said “how religious a candidate is” will help decide their votes, while 44 percent said it would have no impact.
A strong 85 percent of Bush supporters say Bush’s faith makes him a strong leader, while two-thirds of Kerry supporters say Bush’s faith causes him to be close-minded. Seven in 10 Republicans say a president should be guided by his faith, while 63 percent of Democrats say he should not be.
Nearly two-thirds of voters could not identify Bush as a member of the United Methodist Church, and only one-third knew Kerry is a Catholic. More than 70 percent of voters said neither affiliation is likely to affect their vote.
The poll of 1,280 American voters has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.7 percentage points; among the 500 Catholics sampled, the margin of error is plus or minus 4.4 percentage points.
_ Kevin Eckstrom
Pope Renews Apology for Inquisition; Vatican Publishes Historical Study
VATICAN CITY (RNS) Pope John Paul II strongly reiterated his apology for the Inquisition on Tuesday (June 15) as the Vatican published a collection of historical studies indicating that church tribunals tortured and burned at the stake far fewer accused heretics than generally believed.
“The children of the church cannot fail to return in spirit to repentance for the acquiescence shown, especially in some centuries, toward methods of intolerance and even violence in the service of the truth,” the pope said.
John Paul expressed his regret in a letter to Cardinal Roger Etchegaray to mark the publication of “The Inquisition,” a 786-page collection of papers delivered by 29 Italian, English, French and Spanish historians at a Vatican-sponsored symposium held Oct. 29-31, 1998, in preparation for Holy Year 2000.
The Inquisition was a series of trials for heresy conducted by ecclesiastical courts between the 13th and early 19th centuries. The defendants included Cathars and Waldensians, Jews, Muslims, Protestant sympathizers, alleged witches and scientists, most notably the Pisan astronomer and physicist Galileo Galilei.
Italian historian Agostino Borromeo, who edited “The Inquisition,” told a Vatican news conference that torture and execution “were not as frequent as has been believed for a long time.” He said that in Spain, where 125,000 trials were held, only about 1 percent of the accused were sent to the stake and another 1 percent were burned in effigy.
Borromeo said that of some 50,000 accused witches burned at the stake in Germany, almost all were convicted in civil courts. The Inquisition condemned 59 alleged witches in Spain, 36 in Italy and four in Portugal, he said.
The pope made an unprecedented public apology for the sins committed in the name of the Catholic Church over the past 2,000 years at a Mass of Repentance in St. Peter’s Basilica on March 13, 2000. Referring to the Inquisition, he asked pardon for those who had “consented to methods of intolerance.”
In his letter to Etchegaray, who served as president of the Committee for the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000, John Paul said that for many the Inquisition symbolizes “anti-witness and scandal.” But, he said, “In what measure is this image faithful to reality? Before asking pardon it is necessary to have an exact knowledge of the facts and to place the failings with respect to the evangelical needs there where they really are found.”
For this reason, the pope said, he asked the Historical-Theological Committee for Holy Year 2000 to organize an international symposium on the Inquisition.
John Paul said it is up to theologians, however, to determine the “distinction between the authentic sensus fidei (sense of the faithful) and the dominant mentality in a given epoch that can have weighed on their opinion, and it is from the sensus fidei that we must demand the criterion of a fair judgment on the past of the life of the church.”
_ Peggy Polk
Quote of the Day: Branch Davidian Follower Clive Doyle
(RNS) “The people who were here were not hicks, they were not stupid. Some of them had letters after their names, graduate degrees.”
_ Clive Doyle, a follower of the late Branch Davidian leader David Koresh. Doyle is the caretaker of Mount Carmel in Waco, Texas, the former Branch Davidian compound where 70 Koresh followers died in a fire after a 51-day standoff with the FBI. He was quoted by the Chicago Tribune.
DEA/PH END RNS
