c. 2008 Religion News Service

Northwestern pulls honorary degree for Jeremiah Wright

(RNS) Northwestern University has retracted an honorary degree offer to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Sen. Barack Obama’s embattled former pastor.

“In light of the controversy around Dr. Wright and to ensure that the celebratory character of commencement not be affected, the university has withdrawn its invitation to Dr. Wright,” read a statement from Alan K. Cubbage, Northwestern’s vice president for university relations.

The statement said that the offer had been made earlier in the academic year “on the recommendation of faculty committees” to present Wright with an honorary doctorate in sacred theology during Northwestern’s June commencement ceremonies in Evanston, Ill.

Wright has become an increasingly controversial national figure. In sermons at Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ, he declared that U.S. policies were partially responsible for the 9/11 attacks and that the U.S, government was responsible for using the HIV virus as a weapon against African Americans.

Wright defended himself at the National Press Club on Monday in Washington, saying his remarks were taken out of context, but Obama renounced Wright’s comments as “destructive” and against “everything that I’m about and who I am.”

Wright could not be reached for comment, but in a speech in Dallas last weekend said, “The president of the university called and told me he was withdrawing the degree because I was not patriotic,” according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

A spokesman for Northwestern, responding to Wright’s patriotism remark, said, “If Dr. Wright was quoted accurately, that statement is not true.”

_ Jonathan Rubin

Catholic Worker Movement quietly marks 75 years

NEW YORK (RNS) On the eve of the Catholic Worker Movement’s 75th anniversary, volunteer Jane Sammon was doing what she does nearly every day: preparing dinner for a group of elderly residents at Maryhouse, one of two “flagship” Catholic Worker communities here that are dedicated to “hospitality for the homeless, exiled, hungry and foresaken.”

Thursday’s (May 1) commemoration was not likely to be different than any other anniversary celebration of the past, marked by a 5 p.m. Mass and a 6:30 p.m. dinner, said Sammon, 60, who has worked at Maryhouse for nearly 36 years.

“No one is going to jump out of a cake,” she said in an interview.

Celebrations are likely to be similarly low-key in the Worker’s nearly 200 communities in the United States and eight other countries, and that is probably the way co-founders Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin would have preferred it.

Founded on May Day, 1933, during the height of the Great Depression, the Catholic Worker began as a radical newspaper and grew into a wider movement of hospitality and social activism.

It remains committed to a “firm belief in the God-given dignity of every human person,” and to the ideals of “nonviolence, voluntary poverty (and) prayer,” protesting “injustice, war, racism and violence of all forms.”

Given what she calls society’s inattention to economic injustice, Sammon said she is not surprised that the number of Catholic Worker communities has doubled since Day’s death in 1980.

Day was famed as a one-time radical Greenwich Village bohemian who underwent a conversion experience and became renowned as a Catholic writer and social activist. There is still talk of making Day a saint _ a controversial suggestion that Day herself once rejected.

Sammon said Day would remind Catholic Worker communities of Jesus’ dictum that “the poor will always be with you,” and “noting that the constants of “power and greed” continue, “robbing the poor of their livelihood.”

Another constant for those involved in the Catholic Worker Movement is the movement’s cornerstone newspaper, the Catholic Worker, which still remains a penny a copy (excluding mailing costs) and has resisted going on-line.

_ Chris Herlinger

South American archbishop tells Anglicans to drop `hand grenades’

VANCOUVER, British Columbia (RNS) A prominent Anglican archbishop from South America came with a message urging Canadian Anglicans to stop fighting, even as he accused the local bishop of not being an authentic Christian.

“I tell people in Canada not to get filled up with bitterness about the homosexual issue, to just try to allow Christ’s love and generosity to come through,” says Gregory Venables, who was elected primate (senior archbishop) of the Southern Cone in 2001.

“There’s all this silly acrimony. It’s like a ping-pong game. But instead of throwing sweets around, we’re throwing hand grenades,” Venables said in an interview.

Even though the British-born leader of 30,000 Anglicans in Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay is firmly opposed to homosexual relationships, as well as to “post-modern” interpretations of the Bible, he insists liberal and conservative Anglicans in North America shouldn’t be so nasty to one another.

At the same time, Venables felt free to ignore a plea to stay out of Canada made by the leader of Canada’s 700,000 Anglicans, Archbishop Fred Hiltz, because Venables said jurisdictional disputes are secondary to doctrinal issues.

Venables came to Canada to support more than 2,000 clergy and lay people from 15 Canadian Anglican congregations who have recently broken away from the Anglican Church of Canada to operate under his offshore authority.

Some top Anglicans in North and South America have criticized Venables, 58, for breaking global Anglican protocol by intervening in the jurisdictions of other leaders of the loosely structured worldwide Anglican Communion.

“I believe truth is above geography,” he said. “I place doctrine above jurisdiction.”

Venables strongly rejected Vancouver Bishop Michael Ingham’s approval of a diocesan vote in 2002 that permits the blessing of couples in long-term same-sex relationships.

Venables acknowledged that his sprawling Anglican province of the Southern Cone doesn’t allow women to be ordained as priests. But he said the policy is a “local option” that can be overruled by Anglicans in Canada, including female priests who ask to serve under his authority.

He called the ordination of women a secondary issue, but argued that the blessing of homosexual relationships is a “doctrinal” issue that is absolutely prohibited in the Bible.

_ Douglas Todd

Quote of the Day: Journalism lecturer Sheryl McCarthy

(RNS) “I can think of no worse scam, no greater betrayal of one’s religious beliefs, than to have the spiritual leaders to whom you have looked for guidance use the so-called teachings of the church to sexually exploit you.”

_ Sheryl McCarthy, journalism lecturer at Queens College of the City University of New York and member of USA Today’s board of contributors, writing in a commentary in USA Today.

KRE/RB END RNS