History > 2006 > USA > Faith, Sects (III)

Fla. priests accused

of stealing millions from parish

Posted 9/28/2006
3:16 PM ET
AP
USA Today

DELRAY BEACH, Fla. (AP) — Two Roman Catholic priests stole millions in offerings and gifts made to their parish as far back as 40 years ago, prosecutors said Thursday.

Monsignor John Skehan, who was pastor at St. Vincent Ferrer Catholic Church for four decades, was arrested Wednesday night on charges that he stole $8.6 million from the church, using the money to buy property and other assets, investigators said.

The 79-year-old priest was arrested at Palm Beach International Airport as he returned from Ireland and was being held on $400,000 bond on grand theft charges.

The Rev. Francis Guinan, who succeeded Skehan three years ago, has disappeared and was being sought, city police and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement said. He is alleged to have stolen an unspecified amount of money to take gambling trips to Las Vegas and the Bahamas.

An anonymous tip in June 2005 led police and the church to launch the investigation.

A spokeswoman with the Diocese of Palm Beach did not immediately return calls seeking comment. It could not be immediately determined if Skehan has an attorney.

    Fla. priests accused of stealing millions from parish, UT, 28.9.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-09-28-priests_x.htm

Christian Conservatives Look to Re-energize Base

September 25, 2006
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

WASHINGTON, Sept. 24 — Openly anxious about grass-roots disaffection from the Republican Party, conservative Christian organizers are reaching for ways to turn out voters this November, including arguing that recognizing same-sex marriage could also limit religious freedom.

Just two years after many conservative Christians exulted that their voter turnout efforts had pushed President Bush to re-election, organizers say their constituents are disengaged.

“There is disillusionment out there with Republicans,” said James C. Dobson, founder of the conservative Christian broadcaster Focus on the Family and the most influential voice in the movement. “That worries me greatly.”

At an election-season Values Voters Summit held here by the allied Family Research Council, some conservatives debated whether “maybe losing the Republican majority would teach us a lesson and get our movement back on track,” in the words of Representative Mike Pence, Republican of Indiana.

Mr. Pence argued that in the end, Republicans were still preferable to Democrats. Like many arguments, though, his was about picking the lesser of two evils.

“My first inclination was to sit this one out,” Dr. Dobson said in an interview, adding that he had changed his mind when he looked at who would become the leaders of Congressional committees if the Democrats took over.

Some were candidly gloomy.

“At the grass roots, among ordinary people, the enthusiasm is not there, and unless that changes in the next five or six weeks, the Republicans aren’t going to make it” to retain control of Congress, said Paul Weyrich, chairman of the Free Congress Foundation and a founder of the modern conservative movement.

In addition to voicing more general complaints, Christian conservatives say President Bush and Republicans in Congress have not lived up to their expectations about advancing new abortion restrictions or a proposed constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.

Even in this crowd of nearly 2,000 Christian conservative activists, some balked at one tactic recommended to turn out church voters. In a workshop, Connie Marshner, a veteran organizer, distributed a step-by-step guide that recommended obtaining church directories and posing as a nonpartisan pollster to ask people how they planned to vote.

“Hello, I am with ABC polls,” a suggested script began.

Some attendees complained that the script seemed deceptive, Ms. Marshner said in an interview afterward. She said that such disguised calls were a common campaign tactic, that it was just a suggested script and that she never recommended answering a direct question with a lie.

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, who played host to the conference, said he was “upset” to learn of her instructions and condemned any deception.

The Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of the liberal group Americans United for Separation of Church and State, called the tactic “disgraceful” and “a desecration of the church.”

Several organizers at the event lamented that opposition to same-sex marriage, a major catalyst for Christian conservative turnout two years ago, had lost some of its emotional resonance. Massachusetts remains the only state to recognize same-sex marriage. Sixteen states have passed constitutional amendments banning such unions, and eight courts have ruled against the idea.

“Sometimes success brings complacency,” Mr. Perkins said.

To revive some of the emotions around the issue, several organizers said they were taking up the argument that legal recognition of same-sex marriages would cramp the free expression of religious groups who consider such unions a sin — an idea much discussed at the conference.

“That is an issue that wasn’t around two years ago and one that is absolutely moving to the very forefront,” said the Rev. Donald Wildmon, founder of the American Family Association, a conservative Christian broadcaster and advocacy group.

Although that idea may seem far-fetched to many liberal or secular-minded voters, legal scholars across the political spectrum agree that authorizing same-sex marriages could present legal questions for some religious groups. A Roman Catholic group in Massachusetts, for example, recently stopped offering children for adoption rather than provide them to gay couples.

At the Values Voters conference, Mr. Perkins played a preview for an October telecast to Christian broadcasters that dramatized the conflicts in stark terms. He interviewed parents who are suing the town of Lexington, Mass., because its public school assigned their 7-year-old son a book called “King and King,” about two princes who marry.

“Get involved as the Lord leads before religious liberty is lost forever,” Mr. Perkins warned in the trailer.

Others looked abroad. In a pre-election letter to 2.5 million supporters, Dr. Dobson is breaking away from his traditional field of child psychology to argue that foreign terrorists are a threat to families.

The Rev. Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, looked ahead to 2008 and the possibility that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton might be the Democratic presidential candidate. Ms. Clinton’s nomination, Mr. Falwell said to laughs, would arouse even more evangelical opposition than Lucifer’s.

    Christian Conservatives Look to Re-energize Base, NYT, 25.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/25/us/politics/25conserve.html

Joining a Fraternity of Faith, Dwindling but Resolute

September 24, 2006
The New York Times
By MICHAEL LUO

When Emmanuel Ko broke the news to his girlfriend that he had decided to become a priest, he clutched a rosary in his right pocket for resolve as she wept. “It’s not like I didn’t like her anymore,” he said. “I’m doing this because I love him more.”

Mr. Ko, 22, is one of four young men from the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn who decided to take the first step toward priesthood this fall, enrolling at the Cathedral Seminary Residence of the Immaculate Conception in Douglaston, Queens.

Decisions like his are increasingly rare, especially now that the priesthood, hit with a series of sex scandals, has become suspect in many people’s eyes. There were fewer than 1,300 college-level seminarians in the country last year, down from more than 13,000 three decades ago, according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University.

The seminary in Douglaston, which serves both the Brooklyn and Rockville Centre dioceses, was once a bustling place, a fully functioning college with faculty and several hundred students.

Today, just 25 seminarians live there. They occupy a handful of pews in the school’s cavernous chapel. The men take most of their classes now at nearby St. John’s University, returning to the seminary campus for the other aspects of spiritual and character development that make up the continuing process known in the Catholic Church as “discernment.”

“They’re exploring their call,” said Bishop Octavio Cisneros, the seminary’s rector. “That’s what we offer, the opportunity to explore that.”

The shortage of priests in the Brooklyn Diocese, which encompasses 216 parishes in Brooklyn and Queens, mirrors the situation in dioceses across the country. Ordinations have plummeted in the last three decades.

To simply keep up with the number of priests dying or retiring over the next decade or so, 20 new men would have to don the collar each year, said Msgr. John J. Brown, who until recently was the director of clergy personnel for the diocese. But the diocese has been ordaining only a handful of new priests a year, he said.

Meanwhile, the remaining priests are stretched increasingly thinly. About a third, or 70, of the diocese’s parishes have just one priest, according to the most recent statistics available.

“When I first started 10 years ago, there were very few one-man places,” Monsignor Brown said.

As a result, the Brooklyn Diocese is exploring the possibility of closing and consolidating parishes, a painful process that the New York Archdiocese and others across the country have begun as well.

Enter Mr. Ko and the small fraternity of men he joined this month when he moved into a sparsely furnished dormitory room on the third floor of the seminary. They represent the future of an embattled church, just beginning to emerge from the sexual abuse scandals of a few years ago.

Each student has his own story of what brought him to this point, testimony to how faith and sacrifice can still occasionally win out in a time when money, sex and power seem more typical pursuits by young men.

Christian Rada, 17, from Cypress Hills, Brooklyn, is the most gung-ho of the four. He has been contemplating the priesthood since childhood and says he has never really strayed from the idea.

“When I was a kid, the only thing I liked was going to church,” he said. “I was one of those kids who actually sat at Mass.”

In high school, he eschewed dating to help gird himself for the discipline of the priesthood.

“I was already in the state of mind of training myself,” he said.

In contrast, Mark Hacker, 18, from the Rockaways in Queens, had a serious girlfriend for much of his time at Cathedral Preparatory Seminary, the high school counterpart to Douglaston. He was the only member of his class to enroll in the college seminary program, yet he has a hard time articulating exactly what sent him down this path.

“It’s like a gut feeling,” he said. “But it’s more than a gut feeling.”

His faith has been a source of comfort in his life during difficult times, including the deaths of his mother from a heart attack and his brother from muscular dystrophy. But he is worried that becoming a priest will mean having to impose his opinions on others and wonders if his views can fully mesh with the church’s teachings.

On homosexuality, for instance: “I have friends who are gay, and it doesn’t bother me,” he said. “At the same time, it should. But it doesn’t.”

Or proselytizing: “I should feel like I should be able to ‘convert’ people, but at the same time, in some instances, I don’t want to convert them. They seem fine.”

But several of the incoming students, including Mr. Hacker, have already experienced a measure of confirmation in their first weeks. Jason Espinal, 22, who attended community college before enrolling in the seminary, was overcome while genuflecting before the Eucharist in the seminary’s chapel on a recent Sunday. He went down on one knee, but then prostrated himself completely.

“I found myself in tears,” he said.

Like the other students, Mr. Espinal has endured plenty of questions about his decision to pursue the priesthood. Lawyers at a firm where he was working told him it would squelch his personality. A friend told him he thought it was disgusting that he would be living with other priests.

The perception of a gay priesthood is a sensitive subject at the seminary, said Robert Palumbo, a lay psychologist who helps the Brooklyn Diocese screen candidates and counsels them throughout their time at the seminary. The Vatican now bars anyone with “deep-seated homosexual tendencies” from seminary, and Dr. Palumbo said he knew of no gay men at the seminary from the Brooklyn Diocese.

“I am certain I would know,” he said.

The men have to undergo a battery of psychological tests to be admitted. Dr. Palumbo also quizzes them on their family lives, sexual development and other subjects.

Generally, a third to half of incoming seminarians do not make it through to ordination, said the Rev. Kevin Sweeney, vocation director for the Brooklyn Diocese. After their college studies, the men face four more years of classes at the graduate seminary in Huntington, N.Y., plus an internship year.

“They’re in for quite a ride,” Father Sweeney said.

Sexual temptation is clearly a concern for the men. Every trip in the seminary’s van to the St. John’s campus can be a battle. There are female students, of course, wearing what young women wear, and the seminarians’ standard uniform of khakis and neatly tucked-in polo shirts sets them apart from the other students.

“There’s no way of protecting your eyes,” Mr. Espinal said. “You just have to remember why you’re here and what you have to do.”

Bishop Cisneros, the rector, likes to tell visitors that the seminary is not meant to be a monastery, nor is it simply a hotel. The goal is intellectual, social and spiritual development.

Msgr. Thomas Caserta, the seminary’s spiritual director, meets with each of the men regularly. His central role, he said, is to help them answer the question that continues right up to their ordination: Is God calling them to the priesthood?

Of the four newcomers from the Brooklyn Diocese, Mr. Ko has perhaps taken the most circuitous path. At age 6, while he was living in South Korea, a car struck him and a playmate, seriously injuring him and killing the other boy. He remembers a priest walking into his hospital room later, causing him to burst into tears. But the experience also sparked a strange thought: I want to be a priest.

But later, after moving to the United States, he grew disenchanted with the church. With people at his parish in Flushing, Queens, pushing him toward the priesthood, he fled to college upstate at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

“In my mind, I thought, ‘I’ll go to college. I’ll have a girlfriend, and then as soon as I graduate, I’ll marry her and they’ll stop talking about it,’ ” he said.

By the end of his freshman year, he had his girlfriend, “a pretty one too,” he said. But in his junior year, he had to drop out because of financial problems at home. He wound up breaking up with his girlfriend as well.

A difficult period followed. He helped his mother through bankruptcy, working multiple jobs and drinking heavily.

He eventually edged back into the church, but he soon met another girl. An uncle gave him a job at his costume jewelry company, even offering to let him take over one day. Everything seemed to be falling into place.

But try as he might, he said, his thoughts kept returning to the priesthood. His uncle turned out to be the director of the vocation committee at their parish, in charge of encouraging young men to consider the priesthood.

“Every day he talked about vocation,” he said. “Every single day.”

One day, Mr. Ko found himself in Mass, listening to the priest talk about how God gave everything that is good to his children. A realization coursed through him that he needed to respond.

On a recent Thursday evening, he donned a cassock for the first time for Mass. It seemed to fit him well.

    Joining a Fraternity of Faith, Dwindling but Resolute, NYT, 24.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/24/nyregion/24seminary.html

Cardinal Takes Web Surfers Along on His Trip to Rome

September 23, 2006
The New York Times
By KATIE ZEZIMA

BOSTON, Sept. 22 — His day job requires adhering to traditions that are thousands of years old, but Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley’s newest hobby is decidedly modern.

Cardinal O’Malley, the leader of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston, just started a blog, complete with Internet slang and personal stories.

Cardinalseansblog.org was unveiled this week and will chronicle the cardinal’s 10-day trip to Rome, his first since being elevated to cardinal there in March. Archdiocesan officials said they did not know if the blog would continue after he returns, on Oct. 2.

So far, Cardinal O’Malley has posted two entries, one before leaving for Rome and another after a long flight that included a delay on his layover in Germany, where he studied as a seminarian in the 1960’s.

“I have many fond memories of those days,” he wrote. “I will share with you, believe it or not, that I and everyone else were wearing lederhosen in those days. But do not try to find those pictures because I assure you that the negatives have been destroyed. LOL!”

The archdiocese said the cardinal was using the blog as an informal way to reach out to the public, particularly to young people already active in the blogosphere. A recent survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Center said half of the 12 million adults who have blogs are under 30. About 2 percent of the survey’s respondents said their blogs were religion-based, said Amanda Lenhart, a senior research specialist at the center.

A spokesman for Cardinal O’Malley, Kevin Shea, said the cardinal was excited about the blog. “The blog is one of the latest ways to communicate directly with the people,” Mr. Shea said.

One point of the blog is to explain what a cardinal does on a trip to Rome. Its main page heralds “Cardinal Sean’s Fall Trip to Rome” and includes pictures of him saying Mass.

On this trip, Cardinal O’Malley will take possession of his titular church, Santa Maria della Vittoria. In keeping with tradition, each cardinal is assigned to oversee a parish in the Diocese of Rome.

He will also say Mass at the shrine of Padre Pio in San Giovanni Rotondo in southeastern Italy. Padre Pio, who was recently consecrated, belonged to the Capuchin Franciscan order, as Cardinal O’Malley does.

Cardinal O’Malley is not the first prelate with a travel blog. Bishop Gerald F. Kicanas of the Diocese of Tucson has blogged from Rome, India and World Youth Day in Cologne, Germany. And Bishop Kicanas and other bishops post weekly greetings on their diocesan Web sites.

Unlike some other blogs, Cardinal O’Malley’s has no political discourse, gossipy comments or tales of extremely bad behavior. But Cardinal O’Malley is unlike many other bloggers.

He often dresses in the brown robes of his order and eschews the spotlight, living in a small rectory behind the Boston cathedral. He has a reputation for being quiet and private, and his relationship with parishioners has at times been guarded and rocky, particularly regarding the clergy sexual abuse scandal.

Stephen J. Pope, a professor of religion at Boston College, said that an informal blog was not really in the style of a carefully measured archbishop, especially in Boston, but that it could be a way to ease tensions and establish bonds.

“What would be surprising and interesting is if Cardinal O’Malley is willing to take comments from readers and respond,” Professor Pope said, “because he is not in general seen as a person who is highly responsive to questions from people who are not part of his inner circle.’’

He added, “It could be something very creative that allows a new opening in communication or it could just be another forum for monologue.”

Mr. Shea said the archdiocese was considering allowing comments on the blog.

He described Cardinal O’Malley as “computer savvy,” but said he would have help with the blog.

The cardinal posted his first entry Thursday afternoon, shortly before boarding the flight. “I think I’m taking more books than I can possibly read — my carry-on bag will be bursting at the seams,’’ he wrote. “Hopefully security lets me through the gates.”

In Friday’s post, the cardinal said he had read from two of the books, “Basilica: The Splendor and the Scandal: Building St. Peter’s” by R. A. Scotti and “Suite Francaise” by Irene Nemirovsky.

    Cardinal Takes Web Surfers Along on His Trip to Rome, NYT, 23.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/23/us/23blog.html

Political Memo

Volatile Mix: Campaigning and Religions

September 22, 2006
The New York Times
By ANNE E. KORNBLUT

WASHINGTON, Sept. 21 — In one of the more awkward moments surrounding the disclosure of his Jewish heritage this week, Senator George Allen, Republican of Virginia, volunteered that his background had hardly inspired him to start keeping kosher.

“I still had a ham sandwich for lunch,” Mr. Allen told The Richmond Times-Dispatch, referring to rules against eating pork, “and my mother made great pork chops.”

If Mr. Allen did not fully grasp the sensitivities at first, he did find himself in a growing group of political figures who have discovered their Jewish roots late in life.

The responses to his situation, which included bad ethnic humor and serious debates about denial and anti-Semitism, focused attention on the power of religious, ethnic and racial identities in politics, forces that may not have the power they once did. But those forces remain sufficiently alive that Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, a Mormon, will almost certainly face questions about his religion if he runs for the Republican presidential nomination.

Nowadays, political operatives say, what matters is not so much Mr. Allen’s bloodlines but his handling of the news that his mother was born Jewish, a fact that both say she told him last month.

“People are always curious about the backgrounds and the attitudes that people bring into a race, and especially someone who has been touted as a potential presidential nominee,” said Wesley K. Clark, a retired general and former Democratic presidential contender who learned at age 23 that his father was Jewish.

What may ultimately distinguish Mr. Allen from politicians like Madeleine K. Albright and Senator John Kerry, who both learned the full extent of their Jewish histories on the public stage, is the manner in which his narrative has unfolded. It is occupying a place in a campaign that has already left him on the defensive over racial sensitivity and his efforts to incorporate his newly discovered background into a political identity as a Christian conservative.

After initially sidestepping questions about his Jewish roots, Mr. Allen played them down and then had his campaign accuse his Democratic rival of anti-Semitism. Only on Wednesday did his mother confirm that she had hidden the family history from her son for decades.

Mr. Allen went on the offensive, declaring himself a champion for all minorities. “Now, it’s personal,” he said Thursday in an interview on CNN.

The development came on the heels of his “macaca” comment, a phrase he used to describe an Indian-American aide to his opponent that has become shorthand for the race and ethnicity problems that have plagued Mr. Allen’s campaign for weeks.

Even some of his friends say that handled differently the news of his background could have developed into a sympathetic storyline.

Candidates like Mr. Kerry and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton handled similar developments deftly enough to appeal to the Jewish community without, in the view of their supporters, appearing exploitative or abandoning the Christian traditions in which they were raised.

In Mrs. Clinton’s Senate race in 2000, The Jewish Daily Forward reported that Mrs. Clinton’s step-grandfather was Jewish.

For any Democrat in a similar spot, of course, the landscape is much less complicated. The Democratic Party has long been the predominant home for most religious and ethnic minorities, including Jews.

The situation is more complex for Mr. Allen.

William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, a conservative publication, said the incident especially “struck a nerve with Jewish Republicans.”

“It’s simply the way he handled it,” Mr. Kristol said.

But in a southern state that was once a slave state, where white voters are predominant and cultural and political conservatives are a majority, Mr. Allen has seemed to struggle to find the right words to address his newfound identity.

After initially responding defensively to a television news reporter who asked him directly on Monday about his Jewish ancestry and saying it was important not to make “aspersions about people because of their religious beliefs,” Mr. Allen later said his objection was to a preceding question, about whether his mother had taught him the word “macaca.”

By midweek, the campaign accused its Democratic opponent, James Webb, of using “anti-Jewish ploys.” Mr. Allen’s campaign issued statements saying that, among other things, Mr. Webb had approved a flier in his Senate primary that had anti-Semitic overtones, an accusation that Mr. Webb has denied.

On CNN, Mr. Allen spoke forcefully about combating discrimination, saying he had recommitted to fight for tolerance.

He also said his mother, after releasing him from a promise to keep the family secret, had started to find out who her real friends were. \

Democrats have, of course, taken delight in watching Mr. Allen confront another difficult episode.

A spokesman for Mr. Kerry said that the news “would be nothing more than a piece of trivia if it wasn’t clear that George Allen is so uncomfortable with himself” and that the “Watergate principle” applied, with the cover-up worse than the news.

In an interview published on Thursday in The Washington Post, Mr. Allen’s mother, whose unmarried name was Henriette Lumbroso, said she had kept the news from her son until a discussion after a report in The Forward about her family and its experience in Tunisia. She said her father had been imprisoned during the Nazi occupation of Tunis.

On CNN, Mr. Allen recounted his mother’s saying: “I didn’t want to tell you. Do you love me? You won’t love me as much.”

Mr. Allen said he responded, “I love you even more.”

Mark Leibovich contributed reporting.

    Volatile Mix: Campaigning and Religions, NYT, 22.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/22/us/politics/22memo.html?hp&ex=1158984000&en=af83a99286b9a89c&ei=5094&partner=homepage

IRS Investigates Calif. Church

September 20, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:09 p.m. ET
The New York Times

PASADENA, Calif. (AP) -- With the campaign season in full swing, a liberal church is locked an escalating dispute with the IRS over an anti-war sermon -- delivered two days before the 2004 presidential election -- that could cost the congregation its tax-exempt status.

Religious leaders on both the right and left are watching closely, afraid the confrontation at All Saints Church in this Los Angeles suburb will compromise their ability to speak out on issues of moral importance such as abortion and gay marriage during the midterm elections.

Under federal tax law, church officials can legally discuss politics, but to retain tax-exempt status, they cannot endorse candidates or parties. Most who do so receive a warning.

According to the IRS, the only church ever to be stripped of its tax-exempt status for partisan politicking was the Church at Pierce Creek near Binghamton, N.Y., which was penalized in 1995 after running full-page ads against President Clinton in USA Today and The Washington Times in 1992 during election season.

Before this fall's congressional races, the IRS warned that it would be scrutinizing churches and charities -- important platforms, particularly for Republicans -- for unlawful political activity.

All Saints is an Episcopalian church of about 3,500 -- the largest west of the Mississippi -- and has long had a reputation for liberal social activism among its largely affluent, Democratic-leaning membership. During World War II, its rector spoke out against the internment of Japanese Americans. The Rev. George Regas, who headed the church for 28 years before retiring in 1995, was well known for opposing the Vietnam War, championing female clergy and supporting gays in the church.

The dispute centers on a sermon titled ''If Jesus Debated Senator Kerry and President Bush'' that Regas delivered as a guest pastor. Though he did not endorse a candidate, he said Jesus would condemn the Iraq war and Bush's doctrine of pre-emptive war.

''I believe Jesus would say to Bush and Kerry: `War is itself the most extreme form of terrorism. President Bush, you have not made dramatically clear what have been the human consequences of the war in Iraq,''' Regas said, according to a transcript.

The IRS reprimanded the church in June 2005 and asked that it promise to be more careful. Church officials refused.

Last week, the IRS demanded documents and an interview with the rector by the end of the month. Church officials will probably fight the action, said the rector, the Rev. Ed Bacon. That would mean the IRS would have to ask for a hearing before a judge.

''You can't talk about the love of the neighbor without talking about public policy,'' Bacon said.

Pastors elsewhere echoed those sentiments.

In South Dakota, where citizens in November will vote on the nation's most restrictive abortion law, preachers have taken classes to avoid breaking federal law.

''I would think that that speech should not be censored and neither should ours,'' said the Rev. Ron Traub of the Pasadena case.

Traub, senior pastor at the First Assembly of God in Sioux Falls, S.D., said he never mentions candidates by name but tells his congregation to vote for the abortion ban and for politicians who espouse the church's values.

''When the IRS comes into my pulpit and tells me I cannot speak on issues, on spiritual and moral issues, I believe my congregation will be willing to stand with me and say, `If you want to take away our IRS status, go ahead,''' he said. ''The only approval that we need is the approval of God.''

Steve Miller, commissioner of the IRS tax-exempt and government entities division, would not comment on the specifics of the investigation but denied the agency had any partisan agenda.

''It's a delicate area, there's no question,'' Miller said. ''But we are not trying to curtail people's right to speak.''

Miller said the agency completed investigations of 90 tax-exempt churches and charities in 2004 and found wrongdoing in 70 percent of the cases. Four -- none of them churches -- lost their tax-exempt status. In 2005, the agency began audits of 70 churches and charities and has 40 cases pending so far this year.

Earlier this year, IRS Commissioner Mark W. Everson promised more robust enforcement.

In recent years, Republicans in particular have teamed with conservative evangelical leaders to motivate would-be voters, a strategy credited with helping President Bush win re-election. Intensified IRS enforcement could erode the relationship between religious and political leaders, according to some political strategists.

''The IRS action will hinder the ability of some of the churches to make their lists available, to make their pulpits available, to make their sanctuaries available,'' said Democratic strategist Donna Brazile.

Others say the All Saints case will barely affect politicians' use of churches.

All Saints has been known as ''a headquarters for political activity'' since the 1970s, said Steve Frank, a GOP consultant who organizes churches for political campaigns. The IRS is probably using the sermon as an excuse to investigate the church's expenditures, Frank said.

''It's not a question of the IRS going after one ideology. They're going after anybody that violates the law,'' he said. ''The reality is it doesn't stop a minister from teaching ... what they believe is the truth within the Bible.''

------

On the Net:

All Saints Church: http://www.allsaints-pas.org

Speech by IRS Commissioner Mark W. Everson: http://www.irs.gov/irs/article/0,,id154788,00.html

    IRS Investigates Calif. Church, NYT, 20.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Religion-IRS.html

Mexican, L.A. cardinals sued in priest abuse case

Tue Sep 19, 2006 7:36 PM ET
Reuters

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The cardinals of two of the most important Roman Catholic dioceses in North America were accused in a lawsuit filed on Tuesday of allowing a priest wanted for multiple sex abuse to flee California for Mexico.

Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles and Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera of Mexico City were named in a civil lawsuit claiming obstruction of justice, negligence and conspiracy to facilitate the flight of the priest and sexual battery.

Mexico City is the world's largest Catholic diocese and Los Angeles is the largest archdiocese in the United States.

Lawyers for the plaintiff said the lawsuit was unprecedented among the hundreds of sexual abuse charges brought since 2002 in the United States against Catholic priests and bishops accused of covering up their activities.

"I don't know of any another lawsuit that has sued two cardinals in different countries. This is the first time. These are probably two of the most powerful cardinals in North America," said attorney Mike Finnegan.

Mahony's spokesman, Tod Tamberg, said the conspiracy charge was "preposterous and without foundation." Representatives for Cardinal Rivera could not immediately be reached for comment.

The suit was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court by Joaquin Aguilar Mendez, 25, of Mexico City, who says he was raped by Catholic priest Nicolas Aguilar Rivera in Mexico in 1994 when he was a 13-year-old altar boy.

It claims that Mahony facilitated Father Aguilar's flight to Mexico in 1988, when a U.S. warrant was issued for his arrest, without notifying law enforcement in Los Angeles. Prosecutors were investigating allegations that he had abused more than 20 boys during his nine months in the Los Angeles archdiocese.

Attorneys representing the Los Angeles area victims have previously charged that Mahony assigned Father Aguilar to work in Los Angeles in 1987 despite a letter from then Bishop Norberto Rivera that he had "homosexual problems."

Tamberg said Father Aguilar fled without warning in 1988 after he had been removed from working as a priest and reported to child services. Mahony then wrote to Mexico urging his return to justice, Tamberg said.

After his return to Mexico, Father Aguilar worked for several parishes in Mexico and was later convicted in Mexico 2003 on one charge of sex abuse but was not jailed. Finnegan said his current whereabouts are unknown but he is thought to be in Mexico.

Joaquin Aguilar contacted the Los Angeles lawyers after reading of other priestly sex abuse cases they are handling in the United States.

Finnegan said the court papers were delivered to Mahony's office on Tuesday and that lawyers planned to travel to Mexico City to deliver them to Cardinal Rivera on Wednesday. No lawsuits are being filed in the Mexican courts.

Hundreds of lawsuits have been filed across the United States since the priest abuse scandal broke in 2002. Church documents published since then have shown that some bishops shuffled priests with histories of abuse between parishes or sent them for counseling rather than reporting them to police.

    Mexican, L.A. cardinals sued in priest abuse case, R, 19.9.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-09-19T233625Z_01_N19443181_RTRUKOC_0_US-CRIME-CHURCH.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-domesticNews-2

I.R.S. Eyes Religious Groups as More Enter Election Fray

September 18, 2006
The New York Times
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

With midterm elections less than two months away, Christian conservatives are enlisting churches in eight battleground states to register voters, gather crowds for rallies and distribute voters’ guides comparing the candidates’ stands on issues that conservatives consider “family values.”

This election year, however, the religious conservatives are facing resistance from newly invigorated religious liberals and moderates who are creating their own voters’ guides and are organizing events designed to challenge the conservatives’ definition of “values.”

Both religious flanks are looking nervously over their shoulders at the Internal Revenue Service, which this year announced a renewed effort to enforce laws that limit churches and charities from involvement in partisan political campaigns.

“We became concerned in the 2004 election cycle that we were seeing more political activity among charities, including churches,” said Lois G. Lerner, the director for exempt organizations at the I.R.S. “In fact, of the organizations we looked at, we saw a very high percentage of some improper political activity, and that is really why we have ramped up the program in 2006.”

The I.R.S. issued a report in February that said nearly half of the 110 tax-exempt organizations it investigated after the 2004 elections for improper political activity were churches. Of the 40 churches that the I.R.S. had finished investigating, 37 were found to have violated the law. These churches were given warnings or penalized with excise taxes and, although none lost their tax exemptions, the I.R.S. is still investigating seven more cases against churches.

Capitalizing on the crackdown, the advocacy group Americans United for Separation of Church and State plans to begin mailing letters today to 117,000 clergy members in 11 states warning them to avoid “any activity designed to influence the outcome of a partisan election,” by either supporting or opposing a particular candidate.

“The stakes for these churches are higher than ever before because of the I.R.S.’s new enforcement efforts,” said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. “The I.R.S. is taking this very seriously, and I think it’s because the situation was spinning out of control.”

Mr. Lynn said that conservative churches in 2004 had constructed a political machine he likened to “a church-based Tammany Hall.” He said he expected their voters’ guides to be skewed to favor Republican candidates. “It’s absolutely illegal, it’s wrong and it divides churches,” he said.

But a leader of Focus on the Family, a conservative Christian organization whose affiliates are distributing voters’ guides in eight states, said its guides would be nonpartisan and comply with I.R.S. rules.

Tom Minnery, senior vice president for government and public policy at Focus on the Family, said, “What I see are people from the left complaining when people from the right decide they want to be citizens.”

Focus on the Family, a ministry founded by James W. Dobson and based in Colorado Springs, has stepped into the vacuum left by the Christian Coalition, which pioneered the voters’ guide tactic in churches in the 1990’s under the leadership of Ralph Reed, but is now in disarray in many states.

Focus on the Family’s state affiliates plan to register voters and distribute voters’ guides in churches this year in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Michigan, Ohio, New Jersey, Minnesota, Montana and Tennessee: all states where Republican candidates favored by religious conservatives are on the ballot.

“Obviously, they’re battleground states,” Mr. Minnery said. “Our overall desire is for our constituency, generally conservative church people, to be involved citizens.”

He said he regarded the threat of I.R.S. penalties as exaggerated, and he called Mr. Lynn of Americans United “the bully on the playground.” He said the Alliance Defense Fund, a legal advocacy group, had offered to “defend for free any pastors if they’re challenged” by the I.R.S.

Focus on the Family and its affiliates are holding pre-election rallies in Pittsburgh, St. Paul and Nashville, but no candidates will be invited to speak. The group also plans to send letters, Mr. Minnery said, “laying out the issues that separate the candidates in certain major races,” but he refused to say which races.

Many of the most visible groups representing religious moderates and liberals are distributing materials that do not mention the candidates.

The voters’ guides distributed by two such groups — Sojourners, a predominantly evangelical organization founded by Jim Wallis, and Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good — will enumerate principles that they say religious voters should use to evaluate candidates.

Among the principles are a commitment to reducing poverty and preserving the environment and caring for immigrants: in short, the left’s version of “family values.”

“We’re not doing candidates,” Mr. Wallis said. He added: “The principle comes from Martin Luther King Jr., who never endorsed a candidate, not once. He made them endorse his agenda. We want to create an agenda with a social movement behind it that holds politicians accountable.”

Catholics United for the Common Good, which is affiliated with the Catholics in Alliance group, is compiling “candidate evaluations” for many of the senate races, using 25 criteria important to Catholic voters, said Chris Korzen, the group’s director. But they do not plan to distribute paper copies, only to post it on the Web.

“It’s a matter of resources,” he said.

    I.R.S. Eyes Religious Groups as More Enter Election Fray, NYT, 18.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/18/us/politics/18church.html

Minister of Riverside Church to Step Down

September 18, 2006
The New York Times
By JAMES BARRON

Riverside Church, whose Gothic sanctuary was modeled on the Cathedral at Chartres and built with money from John D. Rockefeller Jr., has had only five senior ministers. Under each of them, it has been a center of activism, open debate and dissent.

The first, the Rev. Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, had already established himself as a prominent voice among liberal Protestants in the squabble against fundamentalists when he preached his first sermon at Riverside in 1930. The fourth, the Rev. Dr. William Sloane Coffin Jr., arrived in 1977 after crusading against the war in Vietnam in his previous post, as chaplain of Yale University.

Dr. Coffin’s successor, the Rev. Dr. James A. Forbes Jr., took the pulpit in 1989. Since then, he has welcomed Nelson Mandela and Fidel Castro, and the church has held memorial services for Betty Shabazz, the widow of Malcolm X, and Paul McCartney’s first wife, Linda.

But his years at Riverside, located at 119th Street and Riverside Drive in Manhattan, have also been marked by disagreements so deep that at one point a professional mediator had to be called in, and by allegations of financial mismanagement leveled by some members of the congregation.

Dr. Forbes told that congregation yesterday that he planned to retire in June after 18 years as senior minister. He said in an interview that he wanted to concentrate on a new ministry aimed at “maximizing the witness for spiritual revitalization and the nation’s spiritual revitalization.”

“Having finally reached the age of 70 last year and now I’m 71, it feels like, O.K., that’s long enough for congregational leadership, let’s see if the congregation wants to give me to the nation, somewhat as a minister to the nation, out of the values that together we have been promoting here at this church,” Dr. Forbes said in the interview.

He said he had not determined how he would do that. He said he would begin a six-month sabbatical in January, and would decide during that time whether to set up a nonprofit organization or become affiliated with an institution that “affirms what I’m about.” To some extent, the role he has in mind for himself would expand on what he did in 2004, when he delivered lectures in more than 40 cities. He also spoke out for John Kerry and was critical of the Bush administration. In the pulpit yesterday, he mentioned his program on Air America, the talk-radio network that favors liberal or progressive points of view.

Dr. Forbes received a prolonged ovation after announcing his retirement. But there has also been criticism of the way he has run the church. Earlier in the year, a group of church members went to court, charging that its finances were in disarray. They demanded that a judge appoint a receiver to go through its accounts. Among other things, they alleged that $10 million had “simply disappeared.”

The church denied the allegations, and Justice Richard F. Braun of State Supreme Court in Manhattan dismissed the case in August.

In the interview, Dr. Forbes said Riverside had had “our share of congregational squabbles and conflicts.”

“My approach has been to believe that I am here by divine appointment and that I should expect that I would be challenged sometimes with merit and sometimes perhaps without,” he said

But one of the church members who filed the lawsuit, George Bynoe, asserted yesterday that Dr. Forbes had “purposely misled the flock.”

“How do I feel about him leaving?” Mr. Bynoe asked. “God bless him. His 18 years here have shown no accomplishment. He has preferred to get in with the left wing of the Democratic Party and do their bidding.”

Other members said after the service yesterday that the disputes had taken their toll. “In the last year or so, there’s been a lot of tension,” said Leroy Minors, an usher. “There are some who are 100 percent with him and some who don’t care if he goes.”

Another longtime member, Elizabeth Kennedy, said Dr. Forbes’s retirement would be a loss for the church.

“He’s an ideas guy, and you have to have a really great lieutenant, and I’m not sure he did,” she said, adding that he had “a real strong spiritual vision for the church” but sometimes seemed short on “concrete steps” for translating that vision into action.

The lawsuit was the latest in a string of disputes dating back to Dr. Forbes’s early years at the church. In 1992, amid complaints that membership was down, a mediator was called in after he moved to dismiss the No. 2 minister, the Rev. David Dyson. A former labor organizer who had been the executive minister, Mr. Dyson later left Riverside.

Dr. Forbes said “the Dyson affair,” as he called it, had been important in establishing his relationship with the congregation. A moment after he said that, he added, “People who fight against me can be used by God, and that’s a hard lesson to learn.”

Some in the congregation said they had had to come to terms with Dr. Forbes and his passionate, personal style of preaching. “It’s not my way of describing my relationship to God, but it’s his, it’s his style, it’s credible because of that and the congregation understands that, and I’ve benefited a lot,” said Geoffrey Martin, the co-chairman of the Sharing Fund, which distributes 10 percent of the money contributed by the congregation.

Dr. Forbes said the church now has 2,700 members, up from 2,400 when he was hired, though he added, “I don’t know whether that’s true — a preacher never knows.” Financially, he said, “I think Riverside is in pretty good shape.”

Dr. Forbes was the first black senior minister at the church which has a history of civil rights activism. When asked about that, he said, “Cornel West says, race matters. It sure does. Does that answer your question?”

He also said he wished he could have a conversation in which he would tell President Bush: “You experienced a conversion, but the people who interpreted to you what true Christian conversion looked like, they only gave you half of the perspective. Are you open to hearing another way, perhaps from a more progressive perspective?”

“Maybe that can’t happen until after he’s no longer president,” Dr. Forbes said, “but I do think that top political leaders need to have conversations with people on both the right and the left, and I think that the left has probably been so contemptuous of those who had conservative leanings that we did not pressure or push to have that dialogue. I think that’s necessary. That’s part of the work I want to do.”

    Minister of Riverside Church to Step Down, NYT, 18.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/18/nyregion/18riverside.html?hp&ex=1158638400&en=bc2f6bd50b3cab0e&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Priests hear victims' tales of abuse

Posted 9/16/2006 5:00 AM ET
AP
USA Today

WYNNEWOOD, Pa. (AP) — Monsignor David Benz listened in anguish as a woman described how a parish priest sexually abused her two sons with the same hands he used to consecrate the body and blood of Christ. The woman's tale came in a meeting called by Cardinal Justin Rigali, who summoned hundreds of Roman Catholic priests in the Philadelphia Archdiocese to hear from the victims of clergy sex abuse.

The victims offered sometimes graphic accounts of molestation and rape.

"It was like sticking a knife in my heart," said Benz, 63, of St. Philomena church in Lansdowne.

Victoria Windsor Cubberly spoke of repeated abuse by more than one priest and the suicidal thoughts and nightmares she suffers as a result. The mother of the two abused children, identified only by the first name Grace, talked about the lingering trauma the abuse inflicted on her entire family.

"How did I not know? How did I not see it?" said Grace, who was not fully identified by the archdiocese. "I will carry these questions until I die."

Some viewed the meeting as a small but hopeful step by the archdiocese to face its past.

Rigali, who convened the unusual forum at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary, said that although many priests have read newspaper accounts of clergy sex abuse, they need to listen to the stories as well.

"It is extremely important for us to hear their stories firsthand so that we may see the human face and hear the human voice," he said.

About 330 priests and a handful of lay people gathered at the seminary, where victims spoke in a small auditorium just a few feet from the cardinal and his top aides. The priests were riveted by the speakers, who challenged Rigali to offer victims more help, including financial compensation.

Cubberly graphically described being raped as a girl by one priest in a rectory office. She later spoke of abuse suffered at the hands of two more clergymen.

"There are few people who want to hear my story — it's just too hard to hear," Cubberly said.

Grace described a priest who regularly visited her family's house in what she said was a concerted effort to gain the trust of her and her husband. The priest — whom she later referred to as a "man from the devil" — then used that trust to abuse her children.

Grace also read a letter from her older son, now in prison, describing how he dreaded seeing the priest's car pull up to their house. After taking the son to the priory and abusing him, the priest would bring him back home and have a drink at the kitchen table.

"It was like he was celebrating what he did to me," the son said in the letter.

Abuse victim Edward Morris, 44, told the priests that the church has lost generations of followers because of the crimes committed by clergy.

The speakers said it was hard for them to report the abuse. "I wanted so badly to be the good little Catholic girl who was supposed to please the priests," Cubberly said.

The 90-minute event was closed to the public, but video was streamed live on the archdiocese's website. Afterward, the priests attended a prayer service at nearby St. Martin's Chapel. Rigali did not answer questions.

A year ago, a Philadelphia grand jury accused church leaders of covering up decades of abuse by at least 63 priests. Lawyers for the archdiocese attacked the report, calling it "a vile, mean-spirited diatribe."

The Rev. Steve Katziner of St. Ephrem church in Bensalem said after the forum that he knew one of the priests accused by Cubberly, and that what she described was "horrible and devastating."

    Priests hear victims' tales of abuse, UT, 16.9.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-09-16-priest-abuse_x.htm

Anti-Abortion Group Loses Tax Exemption

September 15, 2006
The New York Times
By STEPHANIE STROM

The Internal Revenue Service this week revoked the tax exemption of an anti-abortion group, Operation Rescue West, after receiving a complaint that it had violated prohibitions on electioneering by nonprofits in 2004.

The group had promised tax deductions for contributions to help defeat the Democratic presidential candidate, Senator John Kerry.

The organization said the agency’s ruling would have little impact on its operations.

“We have reorganized as simply Operation Rescue,” said Cheryl Sullenger, the group’s outreach coordinator. “Losing our tax exemption doesn’t have much of an effect on us, one way or the other. We have learned some lessons through this whole thing, and I think we’re in a better place now than we were before the I.R.S. investigation.”

The role of churches, religious organizations and charities in elections drew attention in the 2004 presidential campaign and has already become an issue as the midterm elections approach. Charities and churches are generally prohibited from campaigning for candidates but may take stands on issues and hand out voter guides, among other things.

Politicians across the political spectrum are courting churches this year as never before. The latest example is Attorney General Phill Kline of Kansas, a Republican who recently sent a memorandum to his campaign staff directing them to get him in front of as many congregations as possible at receptions and church services and to get ministers to introduce him to their wealthy congregants.

In a four-page memorandum dated Aug. 8, which was first reported by The Lawrence Journal-World, in Lawrence, Kan., Mr. Kline lists several churches that have agreed to distribute campaign literature. He also mentions the need to create lay campaign committees in each church and to collect church members’ e-mail addresses.

“Please try to get literature into everyone’s hands,” he wrote. “Check and work with pastor to see what is comfortable. In most instances, we should be able to place materials under the windshields of cars.”

Mr. Kline’s memorandum ends with a directive to give churches “I.R.S. rules guidance regarding what they can and cannot do (this should not take long — no use of church assets — can show in church as long as they do not deny opposition of showing their own video — no need to invite the other, just cannot deny — etc.) sign up sheets, show to give money contributions, etc.”

Marcus S. Owens, a lawyer who formerly headed the I.R.S. division that oversees charities, said some of the suggestions in the memorandum would cause churches to violate the law.

“Assume you’re a pastor who doesn’t know a lot about the law, and here’s the attorney general of the state coming to you and telling you it’s O.K.,” said Mr. Owens, who represents several nonprofits that the I.R.S. is investigating for possible political infractions. “Who’s going to be in a position to refute the attorney general?”

Sherriene Jones, Mr. Kline’s communications director, said the attorney general was well aware of laws proscribing the political activity of churches. Ms. Jones said that although the memorandum listed churches participating in political activities that might be seen as prohibited, Mr. Kline was referring only to the churches’ pastors, and to recruiting volunteers for his receptions, not for his campaign.

“The attorney general would never ask a church to do anything illegal,” she said.

In February, the I.R.S. said it had noticed a sharp increase in prohibited activities by charities and warned that it planned to reverse the trend. At the time, it said it was seeking to revoke the exemption of three organizations but did not name them, pending an appeals process.

Whether Operation Rescue West, which was also known as Youth Ministries Inc., was one of those charities is unclear. The I.R.S. does not comment on its reasons for revoking tax exemption, a step that Commissioner Mark Everson has characterized as “the nuclear option” to be used only as a last resort.

Catholics for a Free Choice, a nonprofit group that advocates on behalf of a woman’s right to choose abortion, filed a complaint against Operation Rescue West in 2004, citing its activities during the Democratic National Convention in Boston.

It noted an advertisement Operation Rescue West placed in the July 15, 2004, edition of The Wanderer, a Roman Catholic weekly, seeking tax deductible contributions to help “defeat’’ Mr. Kerry, thus enabling President Bush to appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion.

At the Democratic convention, members of Operation Rescue West drove around a truck featuring a large photo of a late-stage aborted fetus and the words “Kerry’s Choice.”

“It could not have been a more clear or blatant violation of the I.R.S. rules,” said Frances Kissling, president of Catholics for a Free Choice.

Ms. Kissling said she had no way of knowing whether her group’s complaint had prompted the I.R.S. investigation of Operation Rescue West. Catholics for a Free Choice has also filed complaints alleging prohibited political activity against Priests for Life, a religious order on Staten Island, and Catholic Answers, a lay Catholic evangelical group.

Jerry Horn, media director of Priests for Life, declined to comment “because this a common tactic of Catholics for a Free Choice to try to intimidate people into not exercising their rights under the federal laws.”

Catholic Answers responded to the complaint against it by forming a separate organization, Catholic Answers Action, under a different section of the tax code. Catholic Answers Action is tax exempt but cannot offer its donors tax deductions for their gifts.

Troy Newman, Operation Rescue’s president, said he did not know what structure the new organization, which was created a year ago, had been organized under.

“Whatever structure we have,’’ Mr. Newman said, “we are going to speak out, we’re not going to be intimidated, we’re not going to be muzzled and we’re not going to be gagged.”

    Anti-Abortion Group Loses Tax Exemption, NYT, 15.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/15/us/15tax.html

In Sex Abuse Case, Priest’s Old Letter Could Be Pivotal

September 14, 2006
The New York Times
By MICHAEL LUO

For years, the letter sat in an attaché case in the study of the family’s home. For the parents who received the letter and had once trusted their teenage son with the priest who wrote it, it was too important to throw away, but too upsetting to reread.

Only when Daniel Donohue, the teenage son who grew up to be a conflicted adult, decided several years ago to come forward to accuse the Roman Catholic priest, Msgr. Charles M. Kavanagh, of touching him in a sexual manner on at least two occasions, did his parents dig the letter out again. By then, it was yellowed and creased but contained what they thought was proof that the priest had acted inappropriately with Daniel.

“It lay in there for years and years and years,” Jack Donohue, Daniel’s father, said yesterday.

Earlier this week, Daniel Donohue, now 42, married with four children and living in Portland, Ore., flew to New York City and turned the letter, which was addressed to his parents, over to officials at the Archdiocese of New York. The officials had been asking him for the letter, Mr. Donohue said, in preparation for a church trial that is expected later this year in which Monsignor Kavanagh, now 69, who had risen to become the archdiocese’s chief fund-raiser before he was suspended in 2002, faces the possibility of being removed from the priesthood.

A copy of the letter, which was given to The New York Times by Mr. Donohue, highlights the potential shades of gray in cases like these. Monsignor Kavanagh’s supporters, after having portions read to them, argued that it proved what he has said all along; that he had an emotionally intimate relationship with Mr. Donohue, but that he never sexually abused him.

“He has never denied having a close affectionate relationship with this man,” said Ann Mandt, Monsignor Kavanagh’s sister. “He has consistently adamantly denied that he sexually abused him and, when it goes into a court, he will be found innocent.”

Mr. Donohue and his parents disagreed with the priest’s supporters, saying that although the letter does not get into the details of alleged instances of molestation, it does show a man with a guilty conscience, who knew he had crossed the boundaries of proper behavior.

“This is a sick man, a disturbed man,” Jack Donohue said.

Daniel Donohue said in an interview that the four-page letter, typed and single-spaced, was sent to his parents several months after he broke off contact with Monsignor Kavanagh while attending a college seminary. The letter is full of emotionally laden language expressing how much the priest loved their son, and was written after the young man had broken off contact. It is filled with misspellings.

“Here was the closest human relationship, and the deepest spiritual relationship of my life, and, without a word spoken, any listening or dialogue, I was told that I don’t exist any more,” Monsignor Kavanagh wrote to the parents.

Later in the letter, Monsignor Kavanagh defended himself from allegations of “touching” that Daniel Donohue had accused him of in a letter to the priest earlier that year.

Monsignor Kavanagh tried to explain the physical relationship: “Dan and I used to hold hands and embrace each other often. It wasn’t planned, but just became something we did. We would put our arms around each other and say how much we cared for and loved each other.”

“I never touched Dan or, He me, genitally, and I never saw it in terms of sexual activity. I had tried to tell him when we talked about it back then, that there was a difference between gestures of intimacy between close firends and sexual activity that was sinful.”

But Monsignor Kavanagh appeared to regret the events: “Those moments must have been very confusing and threatening and very unfair to someone I care for so much. I should have known better and never allowed anythig like that to surface.”

He went on: “When I look back on those moments, I see the danger there, but i dont see myself as sick or wierd or cruel. I’ve been a priest for twenty years and lived a caring and open ministry, and been faithful. I feel good about much of the struggle. When Dan rushed into my life I let him closer than anyone else.”

Supporters of Monsignor Kavanagh said yesterday that he could not personally comment on the case because of Vatican rules for secrecy. The case is to be heard by a panel of canon law judges.

When Monsignor Kavanagh and Daniel Donohue developed their close relationship two decades ago, the teenager was a gifted student and athlete at Cathedral Preparatory Seminary, located at that time in Manhattan, where the monsignor served as rector and spiritual director. In time, the charismatic priest would become the teenager’s teacher, rector, spiritual director and confessor.

But the Donohues, who were active in the archdiocese, became alarmed by the amount of time that the priest seemed to be spending with their son and what they perceived as his possessiveness.

Later, when Mr. Donohue moved on to the college seminary in Douglaston, Queens, in 1982, every time the parents went to visit him, they would invariably find Monsignor Kavanagh there as well. “Dan was saying, ‘I can’t get rid of him,’ ” Jack Donohue said. “ ‘He’s hounding me.’ ”

The letter arrived at the Donohue home in Peekskill, N.Y., just before Christmas, 1984. The events alluded to in it, Daniel Donohue said, are the same ones he later contacted the archdiocese about to accuse Monsignor Kavanagh of wrongdoing.

The first involved a time when the student said he was lying on the rector’s couch and the priest came over and lay down beside him, leaned his weight against him and rubbed his face back and forth against his.

The second occurred when the rector took a group of boys with him to an anti-abortion rally in Washington. The priest and student stayed in one hotel room but slept in separate beds. In the morning, Mr. Donohue said, the priest jumped into bed with him, wearing only his underwear, and snuggled up behind him. “Somebody knocked,” he said. “He jumped out of the bed.”

Two sexual abuse experts who reviewed copies of the letter provided them by The Times were divided in their assessment.

A. W. Richard Sipe, a former Benedictine monk who has written several books on priests and sexuality in the Catholic Church, said the letter bore the markers of other sexual abuse cases in which inappropriate behavior is cloaked in spiritual piety. Any person with common sense, he said, would consider the behavior egregious.

“The young man perceived it under all the ‘spiritual talk,’ ” he said. “He was sexually assaulted.”

But Dr. Frederick Berlin, associate professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Medical School and a consultant on the National Conference of Catholic Bishops’ ad hoc committee on sexual abuse, said that although the letter clearly indicated that proper boundaries between a priest and a student were breached, he did not see anything more sinister.

“I didn’t see anything in the letter that I thought was sexual,” he said. “What I did see was a spiritual adviser who was trying also to be a friend and have his own personal needs a part of this, making it hard to function in a professional way.”

    In Sex Abuse Case, Priest’s Old Letter Could Be Pivotal, NYT, 14.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/14/nyregion/14priest.html

Bush says U.S. seeing religious reawakening

Wed Sep 13, 2006 2:13 PM ET
Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush believes the United States has embarked on the latest great religious awakening of its history.

Bush, who counts on religious conservatives as a key base of political support, was quoted as saying on Tuesday that the United States appeared to be undergoing a cultural change on the scale of that seen in the 1950s and '60s.

"There was a pretty stark change in the culture of the '50s and the '60s. I mean, boom. But I think something is happening here," Bush said at a roundtable with conservative columnists. His words were reported by the National Review magazine.

"I'm not giving you a definitive statement -- it seems like to me there's a Third Awakening with a cultural change," Bush said.

Historians have pointed to periods such as the early 1700s and early 1800s, as times in which religious movements were particularly significant in America.

Those eras are referred to as Great Awakenings, although there is disagreement on how many there have been. In one such period, in the 1730s and 1740s, religious revivals in the United States coincided with similar movements in Germany and England.

An awakening in the 1800s is credited with helping to inspire the movement to abolish slavery in the United States.

Bush, a Methodist, often talks about the importance of faith in his life. Some critics seeing this as crossing a line between religion and politics, and his frequent references to religion are viewed with particular unease abroad.

Amid growing U.S. concerns about the Iraq war, The National Review article linked Bush's rejection of a pullout to his religious faith.

"I know it upsets people when I ascribe that to my belief in an Almighty, and that I believe a gift from that Almighty is universal freedom. That's what I believe," Bush said.

    Bush says U.S. seeing religious reawakening, R, 13.9.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-09-13T181300Z_01_N13197671_RTRUKOC_0_US-BUSH-RELIGION.xml&WTmodLoc=NewsArt-L3-U.S.+NewsNews-4

Episcopal church summit fails to agree on gays

Wed Sep 13, 2006 2:06 PM ET
Reuters
By Michael Conlon

CHICAGO (Reuters) - A high-level meeting called by the Archbishop of Canterbury failed to find a way to stop the U.S. Episcopal church from splintering even further over gay issues, church leaders announced on Wednesday.

"We were unable to come to common agreement on the way forward," said 11 bishops representing differing views on the volatile issues after a two-day meeting in New York.

The summit was called after seven U.S. dioceses asked to be removed from the jurisdiction of the U.S. church leadership. They suggested being placed under oversight elsewhere, perhaps a Latin American or an African bishop who shares their opposition to the 2003 consecration of the church's first gay bishop and the blessing of same-sex unions.

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, who called the New York meeting and sent a top emissary to it, suggested in July that the solution for America's 2.4 million Episcopalians and other liberal churches might be a "two-tier" church. Some churches under his plan would have "associate" or something less than full membership in the communion.

The bishops said they had "confronted the depth of the conflicts that we face" but "we could not come to consensus on a common plan to move forward to meet the needs of the dioceses that issued the appeal for (alternative oversight)."

Their statement said the "level of openness and charity in this conference allow us to pledge to hold one another in prayer and to work together until we have reached the solution God holds out for us."

Williams issued a statement from London welcoming the "frank and honest" tone of the New York meeting which he said offered "signs of hope for the future."

CHURCH 'BROKEN'

But Bishop Robert Duncan of Pittsburgh, a meeting participant and moderator of the conservative, 200,000-member Anglican Communion Network, said "this is the first real admission that the church is broken in two parts, both of which claim to be the Episcopal church."

He told Reuters the worldwide Anglican primates would take up the oversight question in a February meeting, and he predicted that a "staggeringly high" number of Episcopalians could eventually align with a different Anglican leadership.

The 77-million-member Anglican Communion, a loose federation of national churches, has struggled since 2003 to hold together its liberal minority and the conservative majority, mostly in Africa, which vigorously opposed the naming Gene Robinson, an open homosexual, as bishop of New Hampshire.

Robinson became the first bishop known to be in an openly gay relationship in more than 450 years of Anglican history.

The Anglican leadership had been pressuring the U.S. church to promise not to consecrate any more gay bishops. At its meeting in June, the Episcopal Church adopted a non-binding resolution that fell well short of a full promise.

It called on those in authority "to exercise restraint" by not consecrating any future bishops "whose manner of life presents a challenge to the wider church and will lead to further strains on communion."

The U.S. church at the same meeting chose Nevada Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, who backed the Robinson elevation, as its next presiding bishop. When installed later this year she will be the first woman to head any branch in the Anglican church.

    Episcopal church summit fails to agree on gays, R, 13.9.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-09-13T180618Z_01_N13432312_RTRUKOC_0_US-RELIGION-EPISCOPALS.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-domesticNews-3

Zoroastrians Keep the Faith, and Keep Dwindling

September 6, 2006
The New York Times
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

BURR RIDGE, Ill. — In his day job, Kersey H. Antia is a psychologist who specializes in panic disorders. In his private life, Mr. Antia dons a long white robe, slips a veil over his face and goes to work as a Zoroastrian priest, performing rituals passed down through a patrilineal chain of priests stretching back to ancient Persia.

After a service for the dead in which priests fed sticks of sandalwood and pinches of frankincense into a blazing urn, Mr. Antia surveyed the Zoroastrian faithful of the Midwest — about 80 people in saris, suits and blue jeans.

“We were once at least 40, 50 million — can you imagine?” said Mr. Antia, senior priest at the fire temple here in suburban Chicago. “At one point we had reached the pinnacle of glory of the Persian Empire and had a beautiful religious philosophy that governed the Persian kings.

“Where are we now? Completely wiped out,” he said. “It pains me to say, in 100 years we won’t have many Zoroastrians.”

There is a palpable panic among Zoroastrians today — not only in the United States, but also around the world — that they are fighting the extinction of their faith, a monotheistic religion that most scholars say is at least 3,000 years old.

Zoroastrianism predates Christianity and Islam, and many historians say it influenced those faiths and cross-fertilized Judaism as well, with its doctrines of one God, a dualistic universe of good and evil and a final day of judgment.

While Zoroastrians once dominated an area stretching from what is now Rome and Greece to India and Russia, their global population has dwindled to 190,000 at most, and perhaps as few as 124,000, according to a survey in 2004 by Fezana Journal, published quarterly by the Federation of Zoroastrian Associations of North America. The number is imprecise because of wildly diverging counts in Iran, once known as Persia — the incubator of the faith.

“Survival has become a community obsession,” said Dina McIntyre, an Indian-American lawyer in Chesapeake, Va., who has written and lectured widely on her religion.

The Zoroastrians’ mobility and adaptability has contributed to their demographic crisis. They assimilate and intermarry, virtually disappearing into their adopted cultures. And since the faith encourages opportunities for women, many Zoroastrian women are working professionals who, like many other professional women, have few children or none.

Despite their shrinking numbers, Zoroastrians — who follow the Prophet Zarathustra (Zoroaster in Greek) — are divided over whether to accept intermarried families and converts and what defines a Zoroastrian. An effort to create a global organizing body fell apart two years ago after some priests accused the organizers of embracing “fake converts” and diluting traditions.

“They feel that the religion is not universal and is ethnic in nature, and that it should be kept within the tribe,” said Jehan Bagli, a retired chemist in Toronto who is a priest, or mobed, and president of the North American Mobed Council, which includes about 100 priests. “This is a tendency that to me sometimes appears suicidal. And they are prepared to make that sacrifice.”

In South Africa, the last Zoroastrian priest recently died, and there is no one left to officiate at ceremonies, said Rohinton Rivetna, a Zoroastrian leader in Chicago who, with his wife, Roshan, was a principal mover behind the failed effort to organize a global body. But they have not given up.

“We have to be working together if we are going to survive,” Mr. Rivetna said.

Although the collective picture is bleak, most individual Zoroastrians appear to be thriving. They are well-educated and well-traveled professionals, earning incomes that place them in the middle and upper classes of the countries where they or their families settled after leaving their homelands in Iran and India. About 11,000 Zoroastrians live in the United States, 6,000 in Canada, 5,000 in England, 2,700 in Australia and 2,200 in the Persian Gulf nations, according to the Fezana Journal survey.

This is the second major exodus in Zoroastrian history. In Iran, after Muslims rose to power in the seventh century A.D., historians say the Zoroastrian population was decimated by massacres, persecution and conversions to Islam. Seven boatloads of Zoroastrian refugees fled Iran and landed on the coast of India in 936. Their descendants, known as Parsis, built Mumbai, formerly Bombay, into the world capital of Zoroastrianism.

The Zoroastrian magazine Parsiana publishes charts each month tracking births, deaths and marriages. Leaders fret over the reports from Mumbai, where deaths outnumber births six to one. The intermarriage rate there has risen to about one in three. The picture in North America is more hopeful: about 1.5 births for one death. But the intermarriage rate in North America is now nearly 50 percent.

Soli Dastur, an exuberant priest who lives in Florida, is among the first generation of immigrants who started the trend. Mr. Dastur grew up in a village outside Mumbai, where his father was a priest, the fire temple was the center of town and his whole world was Zoroastrian.

He arrived in Evanston, Ill., in 1960, where he knew of no other Zoroastrians, to attend college on a scholarship provided by one of the Parsi endowments in Mumbai, which have since provided scholarships to many others. He earned a Ph.D., worked as a chemical engineer and married an American Roman Catholic he met on a blind date 40 years ago.

Mr. Dastur is a priest in much demand to perform ceremonies because of his melodic chanting of the prayers. He and his wife, Jo Ann, have two grown daughters. Neither married a Zoroastrian.

“They’re good human beings,” Mr. Dastur said. “That’s more important to me.”

The very tenets of Zoroastrianism could be feeding its demise, many adherents said in interviews. Zoroastrians believe in free will, so in matters of religion they do not believe in compulsion. They do not proselytize. They can pray at home instead of going to a temple. While there are priests, there is no hierarchy to set policy. And their basic doctrine is a universal ethical precept: “good thoughts, good words, good deeds.”

“That’s what I take away from Zoroastrianism,” said Tenaz Dubash, a filmmaker in New York City who is making a documentary about the future of her faith, “that I’m a cerebral, thinking human being, and I need to think for myself.”

Ferzin Patel, who runs a support group for 20 intermarried couples in New York, said that while the Zoroastrians in the group adored their faith and wanted to teach it to their children, they in no way wanted to compel their spouses to convert.

“In the intermarriage group, I don’t think anyone feels that someone should forfeit their religion just for Zoroastrianism,” Ms. Patel said.

Despite, or because of, the high intermarriage rate, some Zoroastrian priests refuse to accept converts or to perform initiation ceremonies for adopted children or the children of intermarried couples, especially when the father is not Zoroastrian. The ban on these practices is far stronger in India and Iran than in North America.

“As soon as you do it, you start diluting your ethnicity, and one generation has an intermarriage, and the next generation has more dilution and the customs become all fuzzy and they eventually disappear,” said Jal N. Birdy, a priest in Corona, Calif., who will not perform weddings of mixed couples. “That would destroy my community, which is why I won’t do it.”

The North American Mobed Council is so divided on the issue of accepting intermarried spouses and children that it has been unable to take a position, said Mr. Bagli, the council’s president. He supports accepting converts because he said he can find no ban in Zoroastrian texts, but he estimated that as many as 40 percent of the priests in his group were opposed.

The peril and the hope for Zoroastrianism are embodied in a child of the diaspora, Rohena Elavia Ullal, 27, a physical therapist in suburban Chicago.

Ms. Ullal knew from an early age that her parents wanted her to marry another Zoroastrian. Her mother, a former board president of the Chicago temple, helped organize Sunday school classes once a month there, enticing teenagers with weekend sleepovers and roller-skating trips.

The result was a core group of close friends who felt more like cousins, Ms. Ullal said recently over breakfast.

Both of her brothers found mates at Zoroastrian youth congresses, and one is already married. Ms. Ullal stayed on the lookout.

“There were so few,” she said. “I guess you’re lucky if you find somebody. That would be the ideal.”

Ms. Ullal’s college boyfriend is also the child of Indian immigrants to the United States, but he is Hindu. [They married on Saturday and had two ceremonies — one Hindu, one Zoroastrian.] But Ms. Ullal says that before they even became engaged, they talked about her desire to raise their children as Zoroastrians.

“It’s scary; we’re dipping down in numbers,” she said. “I don’t want to hurt his parents, but he doesn’t have the kind of responsibility, whereas I do.”

    Zoroastrians Keep the Faith, and Keep Dwindling, NYT, 6.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/06/us/06faith.html?hp&ex=1157601600&en=368e55f502bfb4ef&ei=5094&partner=homepage

After Polygamist Leader’s Arrest, Community Carries On

September 4, 2006
The New York Times
By JOHN DOUGHERTY

COLORADO CITY, Ariz., Sept. 1 — Last week’s arrest of Warren Jeffs, the fundamentalist Mormon polygamist leader, is welcome news to a former sect member, DeLoy Bateman, who blames Mr. Jeffs for ripping his family apart.

Mr. Bateman, 52, was a faithful member of Mr. Jeffs’s Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and raised his children to obey without question the commands of church leaders. But when the church tried to remove four of his children borne by his second of two wives from his home six years ago, he rebelled.

Mr. Bateman said he had refused to turn over the children to the church for reassignment to another family, a common practice under Mr. Jeffs’s authoritarian leadership that dictates that women and children are the property of the church.

Mr. Bateman’s defiance created a schism in his large family. The three oldest of his 17 children sided with Mr. Jeffs, whom church members consider to be God’s only living prophet, and severed all communication with their father.

“They can never see me again,” Mr. Bateman said Friday outside the sprawling two-story home he built to house his large family. “What’s the difference between that and death?”

Even though his three estranged children still live nearby in this small, dusty community on the Arizona-Utah border, Mr. Bateman said he “doesn’t even have a clue” how many of his grandchildren might have been born in the last few years.

“I lost a good share of my family to that man,” Mr. Bateman said. “I’d like to see them sometime.”

Mr. Jeffs’s arrest last Monday in a routine traffic stop near Las Vegas provides Mr. Bateman a glimmer of hope that a more moderate leader will emerge to oversee the 10,000-member church and that someday he will see his grandchildren.

Meanwhile, Mr. Bateman says he wants revenge for what Mr. Jeffs has done to his family. Asked if he wanted Mr. Jeffs, 50, to spend the rest of his life in prison, Mr. Bateman said, “I hope he does.”

The church centers on unwavering devotion to Mr. Jeffs because members believe that he determines whether they will reach the highest level of the “celestial kingdom” in the afterlife. Mr. Jeffs is the only person in the church with the authority to conduct polygamous marriages.

While the church practices many of the same tenets of the mainstream Mormon Church, there is no direct affiliation between the two. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, based in Salt Lake City, banned polygamy in 1890 and excommunicates anyone who practices it.

Mr. Jeffs is being held in Las Vegas and is expected to be taken to Washington County, Utah, to stand trial on two counts of rape as an accomplice that were filed in April. The charges stem from his conducting a spiritual marriage of an under-age girl to a polygamous man and commanding the couple to produce children. If convicted, Mr. Jeffs could face life in prison.

He also faces eight felony counts filed in June 2005 in Mohave County, Ariz., in connection with his conducting three marriages of under-age girls to polygamous men.

While former church members like Mr. Bateman are willing to talk to reporters about Mr. Jeffs’s arrest, current members are following Mr. Jeffs’s orders to tell the news media nothing. Many members have not seen Mr. Jeffs since August 2003, when he abruptly canceled all church services and disappeared from the community.

Mr. Jeffs left Colorado City shortly after the first church polygamist in more than 50 years was convicted of bigamy and unlawful sex with a minor in a Utah state court in nearby St. George. He was put on the F.B.I.’s most wanted list in August 2005.

In his last sermon, Mr. Jeffs directed the congregation to hold religious services in their homes.

Daily life continued as usual on Friday in Colorado City and in the adjacent town of Hildale, where Mr. Jeffs’s compound houses his wives, whose number is unknown but is believed to be more than 50. Women in frontier-style dresses tended their gardens and went shopping as children played in yards.

“From what I have observed in the city, people are carrying on their lives in a peaceful way,” said Hildale’s mayor, David Zitting.

A lifelong member of the church, Mr. Zitting declined to comment on Mr. Jeffs’s arrest or religious activities. He said he and his fellow townspeople “wish the media would leave them alone and let them live their lives as they wish.”

The church has survived previous attempts by law enforcement to root out polygamy, mainly in the 1930’s and 50’s. Church members remained steadfastly loyal to their leaders and continued to quietly practice plural marriage in the face of arrests and imprisonment.

Former church members say they expect the community to react in much the same way this time.

“They will continue to be loyal to Warren Jeffs,” said Benjamin Bistline, a former resident of Colorado City who has written an exhaustive history of the church. “They will never stop practicing polygamy.”

Ruth Stubbs, a former polygamous wife, fled Hildale six years ago with her two young children when she was pregnant with her third. She was the third wife of Rodney Holm, a former Colorado City police officer, and was 16 when she was married by Mr. Jeffs to Mr. Holm, then 32.

Ms. Stubbs testified against Mr. Holm in the August 2003 trial in St. George. He was convicted and sentenced to one year in the Washington County jail.

Ms. Stubbs said on Friday that Mr. Holm had told her that church members had received instructions on how to conduct their lives if Mr. Jeffs was arrested. “Rodney told me, ‘We all know what to do,’ ” Ms. Stubbs said.

    After Polygamist Leader’s Arrest, Community Carries On, NYT, 4.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/04/us/04polygamy.html

Milwaukee archdiocese agrees to $16 million settlement in clergy sex cases

Posted 9/1/2006 4:01 PM ET
AP
The New York Times

MILWAUKEE (AP) — The Archdiocese of Milwaukee has agreed to pay more than $16 million to settle sexual abuse claims involving 10 victims in California and two priests, one transferred there by the archdiocese, church officials said Friday.

Half the settlement will come from insurance, the archdiocese said. The deal was reached after two days of court-ordered mediation.

"Our hope, always, is to continue our progress in reaching resolution with anyone who was a victim of clergy sexual abuse," Milwaukee Archbishop Timothy Dolan said in a statement. "We believe this agreement brings closure to all cases in California and, hopefully, provides healing for victims/survivors."

Nine claims were against Siegfried Widera. The other was against Franklyn Becker, who worked in California and has since left the priesthood, the archdiocese said.

The Milwaukee Archdiocese had transferred Widera to California in 1981, knowing the priest had a history of abuse. He was facing 42 counts of child molestation in the two states when he died in 2003 after leaping from a hotel balcony in Mexico.

Differences between California and Wisconsin law allowed the victims in California to sue the archdiocese years after the alleged abuse, while the Wisconsin victims could not.

In Wisconsin, an appeals court ruled Tuesday that the six-year statute of limitation had expired, even though the accusers had documents showing the archdiocese quietly transferred Widera from one parish to another after a 1973 conviction on sexual perversion. The accusers argued that the archdiocese defrauded them by concealing priest's history, but the court ruling the clock started with the last assault.

Peter Isely, a Milwaukee leader in the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, called the California action "sort of a mixed blessing."

"You have a small handful of victims in California of Milwaukee priests being able to receive some kind of justice where a vast majority of victims of these priests cannot," he said.

A statement from the California offices of Freberg and Associates, which represented eight of the victims, praised the $16.65 million settlement and said the victims appreciated meeting with Dolan after the settlement had been reached.

The firm said one boy was abused over several years, including during a trip with Widera. Another claimed he was abuse starting shortly after his father died. Several instances of abuse happened while the boys were to be praying with Widera.

"No plan of prevention will be successful unless there is full recognition and acknowledgment of the harm that comes to every child that suffers at the hands of sexual predator," the law firm said. "This first step of reconciliation is perhaps the true value of any settlement."

    Milwaukee archdiocese agrees to $16 million settlement in clergy sex cases, UT, 1.9.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-09-01-milwaukee-settles_x.htm

Intimate Confessions Pour Out on Church’s Web Site

September 1, 2006
The New York Times
By NEELA BANERJEE

On a Web site called mysecret.tv, there is the writer who was molested years ago by her baby sitter and who still cannot forgive herself for failing to protect her younger siblings from the same abuse.

There is the happy father, businessman and churchgoer who is having a sexual relationship with another man in his church. There is the young woman who shot an abusive boyfriend when she was high on methamphetamine.

Then there is this entry: “Years ago I asked my father, ‘How does a daddy justify selling his little girl?’ He replied, ‘I needed to pay the rent, put food on the table and I liked having a few coins to jangle in my pocket.’ ”

About a month ago, LifeChurch, an evangelical network with nine locations and based in Edmond, Okla., set up mysecret.tv as a forum for people to confess anonymously on the Internet.

The LifeChurch founder, the Rev. Craig Groeschel, said that after 16 years in the ministry he knew that the smiles and eager handshakes that greeted him each week often masked a lot of pain. But the accounts of anguish and guilt that have poured into mysecret.tv have stunned him, Mr. Groeschel said, and affirmed his belief in the need for confession.

“We confess to God for forgiveness but to each other for healing,” Mr. Groeschel said. “Secrets isolate you, and keep you away from God, from those people closest to you.”

LifeChurch, which is 10 years old, tries to draw back those who may have left the faith, Mr. Groeschel said. The church hews to a conservative theology on homosexuality and abortion.

Its nine sites, in Arizona, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas, draw a total of 18,000 people to weekend services. LifeChurch also has a “virtual campus” online, and it relies on technology to bind together its “campuses” through endeavors like broadcast sermons.

Still, mysecret.tv represents the first time the church has had an interactive Web site tied to its sermons, in this case a series that Mr. Groeschel began last month on the need for confession.

“I can’t tell you how many hundreds of times people have told me that ‘I’m going to tell you something, Pastor, I’ve never told anyone before,’ ” Mr. Groeschel said. “I realized that people are carrying around dark secrets, and the Web site is giving them a first place for confession.”

The Internet already offers many places to confess, from the dry menu of sins at www.absolution-online.com to the raunchy exhibitionism at sites like www.confessionjunkie.com and www.grouphug.us. It is impossible to know whether these stories, like much on the Internet, are sincere or pure fiction.

One of the best-known sites is postsecret.blogspot.com, an extension of an art project in which people write their secrets on postcards and mail them to an address in Germantown, Md.

Mysecret.tv may be singular because it gives people at LifeChurch an easy opportunity to act on the sermons, said Scott L. Thumma, professor of the sociology of religion at the Hartford Institute for Religion Research.

“It’s not what you typically expect when a pastor delivers his weekly sermon, and you hit the back door and forget what he said,” Professor Thumma said. “Here it takes on a life of its own, and the folks that are here are not just those who go to LifeChurch.”

Since its inception, mysecret.tv has received more than 150,000 hits and more than 1,500 confessions, Mr. Groeschel said. Absolution is not part of the bargain, just the beginning of release.

“There’s no magic in confessing on a Web site,” Mr. Groeschel said. “My biggest fear is that someone would think that and would go on with life. This is just Step 1.”

The confessions are often just a paragraph or two. Some are eloquent, almost literary. Others are long, rushed and without punctuation, as if the writer needed to get it all out in one breath.

The starkness of the tersest confessions is jolting: “I have verbally and physically abused my wife.”

Another, referring to a spouse, said: “I tell you I love you everyday. Truth is I do love you, but I’m not in love with you, and I never have been. I just don’t want to hurt you and feel worthless.”

Many women speak of their regrets over having had abortions.

Other writers say they cannot shake the recurring nightmare of being sexually abused as children. Most were abused by relatives, neighbors and friends. Some went on to abuse younger children in their families. They state simply how their parents often did nothing to help. A few wonder where God is in all this.

“When I was 7, I was sexually abused by a guy,” a girl wrote. “Then, when I was 13, my mum did the same thing to me. Now I am 16 and scared. My doctor put me in a mental home. Sometimes, I think where is Jesus and why’s he not helping me.”

Because the site is anonymous, the staff at LifeChurch cannot reach out to those who are in danger of harming themselves or others, Mr. Groeschel said.

Professor Thumma pointed out that the resources section of the site could be improved. It now lists mostly religious books rather than mental health services.

Perhaps the most important activity the Web site has is letting people know that they are not alone in their suffering, Professor Thumma said. It harkens to the now rare practice of “testimony time” at evangelical churches, he said, when “you could hear stories about people overcoming problems, stories of hope, so that you felt you weren’t the only one struggling.”

Among those changed by the confessions is Mr. Groeschel himself.

“Knowing that so many people I see every week on the outside look so normal, and yet inside there is so much pain, that has been surprising,” he said. “When you hear about it in their own words, it’s hard to bear.”

    Intimate Confessions Pour Out on Church’s Web Site, NYT, 1.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/01/us/01confession.html