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

John Cooper of the Christian rock band Skillet

at last month’s Acquire the Fire event in Massachusetts

for evangelical teenagers.

Photograph: Erik Jacobs for The New York Times

Evangelicals Fear the Loss of Their Teenagers

NYT

6.10.2006

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/06/us/06evangelical.html

Some Protestant churches feeling 'mainline' again

Updated 10/31/2006 9:51 PM ET
USA Today
By Cathy Lynn Grossman

YORKTOWN, Va. — St. Mark Evangelical Lutheran Church in this historic southern Virginia town welcomed 24 new members last month — a tiny breath of life in a denomination faced with a daunting decline in national membership.

Next week, when Virginians vote in 2006's divisive midterm elections, the people of St. Mark may split "red" conservative or "blue" liberal. But when they gather to pray, this is a "purple" place, red and blue mixing in the pews.

"God is calling us to something bigger than just our political views," says the Rev. Gary Erdos, pastor of St. Mark.

It is classic mainline Protestant in nearly every respect: It embraces an interpretive approach to Scripture rather than taking the Bible literally. It makes a strong commitment to social justice and social action drawn from Gospel teachings.

Classic in every respect but one: St. Mark is growing. Membership has jumped from 500 to 1,200 people since 1997, and Sunday attendance climbed from 200 to 500.

By comparison, total membership in the seven largest mainline Protestant denominations — United Methodist, Evangelical Lutheran, Episcopal, Presbyterian Church (USA), Disciples of Christ, United Church of Christ and American Baptist Churches — fell a total of 7.4% from 1995 to 2004, based on tallies reported to the Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches.

Meanwhile, the total membership count for Roman Catholics, the ultra-conservative Southern Baptist Convention, Pentecostal Assemblies of God and proselytizing Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) reported to the Yearbook is up nearly 11.4% for the same period.

Yet church historian Diana Butler Bass argues that St. Mark is not an anomaly but a signpost of revival. It's living proof that headline-dominating conservative and fundamentalist churches aren't the only face of American Christianity.

In her new book, Christianity for the Rest of Us, Bass visits churches coast to coast to bolster her claim that the mainline is not dead — yet.

"Mainline" is shorthand among historians, statisticians and theologians for the Protestant faiths of the Founding Fathers, housed in landmark churches on downtown corners, still preaching the social justice teachings that have shaped many political, academic and philanthropic leaders to this day.

Bass set out on a Lilly Foundation grant to find 50 mainline churches rooted in the Gospel, rich in worship, strong in social justice, creative in spirituality and radiating hospitality. Instead, she found 1,000 thriving congregations from California to Virginia. St. Mark, nestled in the town where the British surrendered to Colonial forces 225 years ago, is one of the 10 churches highlighted in her book.

Erdos says "orthodox preaching, hospitality and attention to details" enable St. Mark to prosper. "We hew to the gospel of Jesus. It's the reason we exist, or we'd just be Habitat for Humanity doing good things."

Under the high wooden beams of its simple sanctuary, St. Mark offers a traditional service, with a pipe organ sounding.

"We chant and stand in a line of Christians who, for 1,700 years, have been saying 'Lord have mercy' in a way that a praise band and a PowerPoint presentation just don't do," Erdos says.

The church's welcome is exemplified in Cafe St. Mark, set up twice a week in the atrium. Staff and volunteers cook and serve a bountiful buffet, including waffles and omelets cooked to order, every Sunday morning.

It's free to visitors and a nominal charge to members, as are the Wednesday restaurant-style dinners offered so families can socialize and still be on time to Bible study or hand-bell choir rehearsal.

"We pay attention to the small things that show respect. Our worship doesn't sound or look like a third-rate high school play. There are no typos in the newsletter or half-hearted sermons," says Erdos, who preaches without notes, roaming the front of the pews.

"I don't want a rock 'n' roll service," says Tammy Held, head of the church council, who loves the formal style, age-old hymns and prayer-laden liturgy and programs. "I really welcomed the 10-day prayer vigil we're doing right now on stewardship in the church. It works for coming close to God, closer to the Bible and closer to each other."

Erdos designed another reason for growth right into the glass-walled atrium that connects the sanctuary with a new education and office wing. The view is all trees and traffic, nature and passing humanity. "I want us to see each other and to see out all the time.

"What makes us different than the evangelical church down the road?" he asks during a recent sermon. "My goal is to equip you to go back into the world, to equip you for life, health and wholeness. You come here for support and prayer in this journey."

Threats from left and right

Yorktown is within an hour of the Rev. Pat Robertson's ultra-conservative, Republican-leaning media and ministry empire. But it's a world away in philosophy.

Had Dan Cummins and his wife, Karen, found politics in the pulpit and pews of St. Mark — people telling them and their two teenage sons how to vote or what to think about Iraq, homosexuality, the environment or other hot issues — "We'd have never joined," he says.

The Cummins family and 20 other people joined the church in late October after the adults completed one of the four-week classes, held several times a year, in Lutheran theology and the practices, ministries and missions at St. Mark.

It will take this kind of proactive energy to stem a 15-year-drop in membership in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, said presiding bishop Rev. Mark Hanson in a state-of-the-church address to a McLean, Va., church last month.

He cited twin threats: the growing strength of the theological conservatives on the right and the lure of unchurched spirituality and secularism on the left.

About one in three U.S. Christians identify themselves in national surveys as conservative evangelical Protestants, whose loudest voices Hanson calls "fundamentalist." Yet, Hanson said, "I hear voices everywhere saying that the fundamentalist image of Christianity is 'not who I am.' "

And 10% to 14% of Americans, depending on the survey, say they have no religious identity.

"We got lazy. We waited for the culture to produce Christians for us. It's not going to happen," Hanson said. Of his own six children, ages 18 to 30, "I bet my bottom dollar only two are in worship today."

Says Eileen Lindner, editor of the 2006 Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches, "There's a wholesale decline in denominational clout, no matter what brand. Denominations have lost the power to enforce theological conformity or regulate the actions of local congregations, and they've ceded their service programs to relatively new organizations such as Habitat for Humanity, Heifer International or Bread for the World."

Sociologist Barry Kosmin, a lead researcher for the American Religious Identification Survey, done in 1990 and 2001, says, "The mainline is never going to be the dominant cultural group again.

"But neither is anyone else in this highly fragmented, segmented market."

In 2001, 17.2 million people named a mainline denomination, down from 18.7 million in 1990. "It's the same thing you have with television," says Kosmin, co-author of Religion in a Free Market, which analyzed the 2001 research.

"You once had three or four networks. Now you have 500 channels."

Still, the experts say hold off on playing taps for the mainline. "Numbers aren't the only story," Lindner says. "We still have to talk about what really counts — cultural hegemony."

Faith and the Founding Fathers

The mainline churches are still landmarks on the landscape of the city squares. Their ideas were formative in the historic documents dating to the Declaration of Independence. And members are still bellwethers, opinion makers in politics, philanthropy, education and activism for social justice.

"Just because a denomination looks like it's dying out doesn't mean there actually is less mainlinereligion out there," says Baylor University sociologist Paul Froese.

Baylor's national survey, released in September, found 26.1% of Americans described themselves as mainline in general. When asked to name a denomination, 22.1% named a mainline brand.

"You are always going to have a third to a quarter of American churches who call themselves theologically liberal, that offer solid religious ethics and meet the needs of a population less absolute in their moral outlook and less likely to believe literally in the Bible," Froese says.

Bass sees an analogy to the Dr. Seuss classic children's book Horton Hears a Who!

Horton the elephant hears the voices of the "Who," creatures so tiny no one can see them. Just as the Who face extinction, he persuades all the Who to shout at once, to be strong enough to be heard and thereby survive.

Mainline congregations, says Bass, "have a beautiful world where they are enacting service, doing justice, learning to pray and caring for one another. And no one seems to realize they are there."

    Some Protestant churches feeling 'mainline' again, UT, 31.10.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/2006-10-31-protestant-cover_x.htm

In Ohio, Democrats Show a Religious Side to Voters

October 31, 2006
The New York Times
By DAVID KIRKPATRICK

COLUMBUS, Ohio, Oct. 30 — Representative Ted Strickland, an Ohio Democrat and former Methodist minister, opened his campaign for governor with a commercial on Christian radio vowing that “biblical principles” would guide him in office.

In his first major campaign speech, Mr. Strickland said “the example of Jesus” had led him into public service. He has made words from the prophet Micah a touchstone of his campaign.

Ohio, where a groundswell of conservative Christian support helped push President Bush to re-election two years ago, has become the leading edge of national Democratic efforts to win over religious voters, including evangelicals.

Explaining his hope to win conservative Christian votes, Mr. Strickland said, “I try to make a distinction between the religious right — people who have a conservative theological perspective — and the political religious right, who seem to have as their primary motivation political influence.”

Polls show a notable decline since 2004 in support for Republicans among white evangelical Christians, who make up about a quarter of the electorate. The slip in Ohio has been especially steep. In 2004, 76 percent of white evangelical Christians in Ohio voted for Mr. Bush over the Democratic candidate, Senator John Kerry. But in a recent New York Times/CBS News poll, 53 percent of the same voters approved of the president’s performance, and 42 percent disapproved.

Democrats, meanwhile, have stepped up efforts to lure religious voters in states including Michigan, Pennsylvania and Tennessee. But Mr. Strickland has capitalized more than anyone else on evangelical disaffection from the Republicans, helping to give him a lead of more than 20 percentage points in the race.

Mr. Strickland faces a Republican opponent, J. Kenneth Blackwell, who speaks just as openly about his evangelical faith, staunchly opposes abortion rights and same-sex unions and carries the endorsement of several nationally known Christian conservatives. But in a recent Quinnipiac University poll, Mr. Blackwell led Mr. Strickland among white evangelical voters by only three percentage points, which is within the margin of error.

“I have talked to lots of folks who say this is the first time they are not voting Republican,” Rich Nathan, pastor of the Vineyard Columbus Church, one of the largest in the state, said in an interview Sunday after a service. Mr. Strickland, he said, was “making headway.”

Still, dozens of evangelicals interviewed at Vineyard Columbus and another megachurch, Grace Brethren, said they remained wary of overtures from Democrats, even Mr. Strickland. Many said they felt more repelled by the Republicans than attracted to the Democrats.

“The Republican is lying, and the Democrats are secular,” said Joshua Porter, a video producer attending Vineyard Columbus. “Who do we vote for?”

Robert Oser, an usher at Grace Brethren, said Mr. Strickland’s liberal positions undercut him. “The Democrats are trying to change their spots,” Mr. Oser said, “but their spots are still there.”

No one brought up the New Jersey Supreme Court decision to recognize some form of same-sex unions as a factor on Election Day.

Only Mr. Oser offered the explanation for grass-roots malaise that Christian conservative groups in Washington usually suggest: that the Republicans had not done enough about abortion or other social issues.

Instead, some said they were disturbed by corruption in the Republican-controlled Statehouse here and in the Republican-controlled Congress. And many pointed to the Ohio economy, budget cuts for schools and social services and the war in Iraq.

Lawrence Porath, a parishioner at Grace Brethren, said he called himself a staunch Republican two years ago and helped turn out voters as a county leader of the Christian Coalition. But a week before this year’s midterm elections, he said he was not sure whom to vote for.

“I feel like our president has really not given us the complete truth from the beginning, on the war, or on anything,” Mr. Porath, a commercial real estate investor, said in an interview after services on Sunday.

Mr. Nathan of Vineyard Columbus said such disillusionment was common. “How is it that we evangelicals have become the strongest constituency for war of any group in America?” he asked.

When he asked that question from the pulpit, Mr. Nathan said, people stand up and cheer.

Other Democratic candidates here are also reaching out to evangelicals and other Christians. Until recently, Representative Sherrod Brown, a Lutheran who is running for Senate here, seldom spoke publicly about his religious views.

This year, however, Mr. Brown’s advisers discovered that after visiting Israel a decade ago he had written to his daughters and a Jewish friend about the emotions he felt reading aloud from the Sermon on the Mount at the site where Jesus is believed to have delivered it. Mr. Brown’s campaign quickly incorporated his private words into messages sent to Christian voters.

In an interview, Mr. Brown said he now talked about his faith “a bit, not a lot.” A campaign aide then arranged a second interview with Mr. Brown’s wife, Connie Schultz, who said her husband tithed, listened to Lutheran hymns to relax and prayed before each campaign debate.

Mara Vanderslice, an evangelical Protestant who worked on Senator Kerry’s presidential campaign, has opened a consulting firm, Common Good Strategies, based here, to help Democrats across the country reach religious voters and, she said, to help make the party more welcoming to them.

In addition to working with Mr. Strickland and Mr. Brown, Ms. Vanderslice is consulting with Democrats in Alabama, Michigan, Pennsylvania and elsewhere.

The Michigan Democratic Party consulted with 500 members of the clergy, including many evangelical Christians, and revised its platform. The revision included a dedication: “The Common Good. The best for each person in the state. The orphan. The family. The sick. The healthy. The wealthy. The poor. The citizen. The stranger. The First. The Last.”

At a speech this month at a Lutheran college here, Mr. Strickland put a liberal twist on the common conservative Christian theme about secular forces trying to squeeze religion from the public square.

“There are those in Columbus and elsewhere who argue that the biblical mandates to love your neighbor and to work for justice are meant only for individuals and have no application to the political sphere,” Mr. Strickland said. “They dismiss the Democrats and those religious leaders who claim that our faith requires us to insist that governments and government leaders — not just private citizens — seek justice, love, mercy, and humbly work to help the least, the last and the lost in our society.”

In an interview, Mr. Strickland said that Christian conservatives had a right to their interpretation of the Bible, but that “it is an anemic interpretation, at best.”

Phil Burress, president of Citizens for Community Values and a prominent Christian conservative organizer here, accused Mr. Strickland of using his faith. “He abandoned his theology degree,” Mr. Burress said, “and all of a sudden he has found that it is a good political toy.”

Still, Mr. Burress commended the Democrats for at least competing for conservative Christian voters. And, he added, “if he is successful in breaking into that bloc of voters, it is going to be a very interesting 2008.”

    In Ohio, Democrats Show a Religious Side to Voters, NYT, 31.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/31/us/politics/31church.html

Bishops Draft Rules on Ministering to Gays

October 29, 2006
The New York Times
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

The nation’s Roman Catholic bishops have drafted new guidelines for ministry to gay people that affirm church teaching against same-sex relationships, marriages and adoptions by gay couples, yet encourage parishes to reach out to gay Catholics who feel alienated by their church.

The bishops’ document, the result of a four-year effort, gives specific instructions on some of the conundrums now faced in many parishes.

The guidelines recommend baptizing the adopted children of same-sex couples, as long as the children will be raised as Catholics. It says that gay people may benefit from revealing their “tendencies” to friends, family and their priest, but should not make “general public announcements” about it in the parish.

The guidelines also say that gay men and lesbians have “no moral obligation to attempt” therapy, an apparent reference to therapy programs that claim to change gay people’s sexual orientation. It says that while “some have found therapy helpful,” there is “no scientific consensus” either on therapy or the causes of homosexuality.

The bishops will vote on the document — “Ministry to Persons with a Homosexual Inclination: Guidelines for Pastoral Care” — when the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops meets Nov. 13-16 in Baltimore. It could be amended, and needs a two-thirds majority to pass.

Bishop Arthur J. Serratelli of Paterson, N.J., the chairman of the bishops doctrine committee, which wrote the new guidelines, said that although it was difficult to predict whether it would pass, “It’s a very sound document, a very clear document. My sense is that the bishops will readily embrace it.”

Gay Catholic leaders who had read the draft, however, predicted that it would only further alienate gays and their families from the church.

“There certainly is some lovely language that sounds welcoming in here,” said Sam Sinnett, president of DignityUSA, an organization for gay Catholics, “but essentially they’re repeating all the spiritually violent things they’ve been saying about gay and lesbian Catholics for a couple of decades — that we are ‘objectively disordered’ and our relationships are intrinsically evil.”

A previous document, issued by a committee of bishops in 1997, was directed primarily at parents with gay children. But it proved controversial and was never approved by the bishops conference.

This new document puts more emphasis on the church’s moral teaching about sexuality. It says that although having a “homosexual inclination” is not itself a sin, homosexual sex is a sin — as are premarital sex and adultery. The answer in all these situations is chastity.

The document says that although the church teaches that homosexuality is “objectively disordered” — a teaching in the catechism that says homosexual acts violate the natural law — the church is not saying that homosexual people themselves are disordered or “rendered morally defective by this inclination.”

Such distinctions will provide little comfort to gay Catholics, said Francis DeBernardo, executive director of New Ways Ministry, a gay outreach group for Catholics based in Maryland. Mr. DeBernardo criticized the document for saying that gay people should make their sexuality known only to a small group, and that gay people whose behavior “violates” church teaching should be denied leadership roles in parishes.

“Gay and lesbian people are going to read those remarks and see them as offensive, as telling them to go underground,” he said.

That is not the intention, said the Rev. Thomas G. Weinandy, who worked on the document as executive director for the United States bishops’ secretariat for doctrine and pastoral practices.

“The bishops would like people with homosexual inclinations to really participate in the church, but they don’t want to ‘give scandal,’ ” Father Weinandy said. “If you knew a heterosexual couple were just cohabitating and not married, you wouldn’t let them be eucharistic ministers either.”

The Rev. James Martin, an editor at the Jesuit magazine America, said, “The document expresses the tension in the church between a sincere desire to minister to gays and lesbians, and the reality that many gays and lesbians feel unwelcome in the church by virtue of the church’s teaching.”

The bishops have issued statements in recent years condemning gay marriage, gay adoption and benefits for gay partners. They have historically been more attuned to gay issues, however, than some of their colleagues overseas. Last year, the Vatican issued an “instruction” saying that men with “deep-seated” homosexual attraction should not be ordained. In its wake, some American bishops commented in their diocesan newspapers or privately to their priests that they did not regard this as a ban on ordaining gay men, and would continue to accept gay candidates on a case-by-case basis.

The bishops said they felt the need for clear guidelines because there were many pastoral ministries for gay people in parishes and dioceses around the country, and “confusion” about what was an “authentic” Catholic approach, Father Weinandy said. He noted that the Vatican had disciplined the founders of New Ways Ministry, the Rev. Robert Nugent and Sister Jeannine Gramick, for preaching acceptance of gay relationships.

As such, the guidelines repeatedly say that bishops should not countenance church leaders and pastoral workers who fail to uphold its teachings on homosexuality, or who advocate harm toward gay people.

It says, “The church cannot support organizations or individuals whose work contradicts, is ambiguous about, or neglects her teaching on sexuality.”

    Bishops Draft Rules on Ministering to Gays, NYT, 29.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/29/us/29bishops.html

Los Angeles Abuse Cases Are Settled for $10 Million

October 28, 2006
The New York Times
By NEELA BANERJEE

WASHINGTON, Oct. 27 — The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles and a Catholic religious order have agreed to pay $10 million to settle claims made by seven victims of sexual abuse by clergy members, lawyers for the parties involved said Friday.

While the amount per victim is large relative to payments made to settle sexual abuse cases in other parts of the country, it is typical of the sums paid in California, which has a taken a strong stance toward the Catholic Church in abuse cases. In 2003, for example, the state extended its statute of limitations for child sexual abuse cases, and the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office has been conducting a criminal investigation into the archdiocese since 2002.

More than 95 percent of the $10 million settlement will be paid by the religious order, the Carmelites, Province of the Most Pure Heart of Mary, which is based in Darien, Ill. The archdiocese will pay less than 5 percent, lawyers for the plaintiffs and the order said.

The settlement for the most part is not covered by the Carmelites’ insurance, said Jim Geoly, the order’s lawyer, adding that the order might have to borrow money to pay the sum.

Mr. Geoly said the order wanted to avoid protracted litigation, which he said would have amounted to going to war with the plaintiffs, “because that’s what litigation is.”

“They are deeply sorry that this sexual abuse occurred and that the church didn’t have more understanding of this kind of problem at the time,” he said. “They want to do everything they can to make it right, even though money can’t make the abuse go away.”

The seven plaintiffs accused four Carmelite priests and one Carmelite brother of sexual abuse in a period from the early 1950s to the late 1970s.

Several of the claims focused on the Rev. Dominic Savino, who held several high-ranking faculty positions at Crespi Carmelite High School in the Encino section of the city before he was removed from the ministry in 2002. One plaintiff accused Father Savino and another priest of raping him at the school when he was 15 and continuing the abuse from 1978 to 1979, said John C. Manly, a lawyer for the plaintiff.

Mr. Manly and victims’ rights groups welcomed the decision by the Carmelites, though they said that it had been hard-won.

“I’m glad Carmelites did the right thing,” said Mr. Manly, himself a Catholic, “but I think that’s what’s ultimately wrong with the Catholic Church: you shouldn’t have to sue your church to get them and the bishop to do the right thing.”

    Los Angeles Abuse Cases Are Settled for $10 Million, NYT, 28.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/28/us/28settle.html

Taking On a Coal Mining Practice as a Matter of Faith

October 28, 2006
The New York Times
By NEELA BANERJEE

HALE GAP, Va. — The windswept ridge that Sharman Chapman-Crane hiked to on a recent fall afternoon is the kind of place, she said, that she normally would avoid. From there, she could see what she loved about Appalachia and what it had lost, and she wanted her visitors to see it, too.

The old rounded peaks of the mountains encircled the ridge, dense with trees smudged red and gold. But in the middle of the peaks, several stood stripped bare and chopped up, a result of an increasingly common and controversial coal mining practice called mountaintop removal.

“Doesn’t it say in Scripture, ‘Who can weigh a mountain, measure a basket of earth?’ ” Ms. Chapman-Crane said, recalling descriptions of God’s omnipotence in Isaiah 40:12. “Well, only God can. But now, the coal companies seem to be able to do it, too.”

Ms. Chapman-Crane, her colleagues at the Mennonite Central Committee Appalachia and other Appalachian Christians are trying to halt mountaintop removal, and at the heart of their work, they say, is their faith.

They are part of an awakening among religious people to environmental issues, said Paul Gorman, executive director of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment, an interreligious alliance. Increasingly, religious people across denominations are organizing around local issues, like preventing a landfill, preserving wetlands and changing mining.

“People of faith are thinking afresh about human place and purpose in the greater web of life,” Mr. Gorman said. “They are asking, What does it mean to be present in a crisis of God’s creation made by God’s children?”

Although Christian environmental activists speak out against mountaintop removal at different levels of government, many believe that showing the practice’s toll will persuade others to join them in seeking stricter regulation of it, if not an outright ban.

A new group, Christians for the Mountains, urges religious people to take up mountaintop removal “as a spiritual issue,” and it has made a DVD that it is distributing to churches and individuals, said Allen Johnson, an evangelical Christian and a founder of the group.

The Rev. John Rausch, director of the Catholic Committee of Appalachia, has led tours of mountaintop removal sites since 1994. Mr. Rausch estimates that 400 people have taken his tour. They learn of the tours by word of mouth or from their churches, pay a few hundred dollars to stay in simple accommodations, hike several miles through forests and mined lands and talk to people whose lives have been affected by mountaintop removal.

The Mennonite Central Committee Appalachia, based in Whitesburg, Ky., gave its first tour in October, focusing on a corner of southeastern Kentucky and southwestern Virginia rich in coal and diverse forests.

On the second morning of the four-day tour, the trip’s leaders, Ms. Chapman-Crane and the Rev. Duane Beachey, marched their three-member group up the mile-long trail to Bad Branch Falls. Poplars, beeches, hemlocks and magnolias thatched together a canopy above the trail, and the rain of their leaves made a soft ticking sound. Wild ginseng and wintergreen lined the path. Cottage-size boulders leaned forward over a rushing stream below the trail.

“Not every place on the mountains has waterfalls like Bad Branch,” Ms. Chapman-Crane said. “But this is pretty much what it’s like on the mountains here. The forests of the Appalachian range are like a northern rain forest.”

Mary Yoder, who had volunteered to come on the trip for her congregation, Columbus Mennonite Church in Columbus, Ohio, asked, “So this is the kind of place that gets blown up in mountaintop removal?”

Mr. Chapman-Crane replied, “This is what would be lost, is lost, when they blast a mountaintop.”

The United States is rich with coal, and mountaintop removal has begun to replace underground mining in Appalachia as the preferred method of extraction because of its efficiency and lower cost. Mountaintop removal involves leveling mountains with explosives to reach seams of coal. The debris that had once been the mountain is usually dumped by bulldozers and huge trucks into neighboring valleys, burying streams.

The coal industry asserts that mountaintop removal is a safer way to remove coal than sending miners underground and that without it, companies would have to close mines and lay off workers.

Luke Popovich, a spokesman for the National Mining Association, a coal lobbying group, said that by fighting mountaintop removal religious groups might find their priorities colliding.

“They find themselves in a difficult position,” Mr. Popovich said, “because they’re expressing support for those who purport to protect nature, and, at the same time, that activism carries implications for the human side of the natural equation. Human welfare depends on the rational exploitation of nature.”

Christianity runs wide and deep in Appalachia. At the Courthouse Cafe in Whitesburg, Mr. Beachey explained that as a Christian concern for his neighbors drove his desire to rein in mountaintop removal. But as in much of Appalachia, pastors and churchgoers here are reluctant to stir up trouble: many work for coal companies, or the people next to them in the pew do. Others believe stopping mountaintop removal would eliminate the few jobs that remain.

Many understand their faith differently than Christian environmentalists do. One night, Darrell Caudill and several friends gathered to play their guitars for the environmental tour and sing traditional songs and hymns. Mr. Caudill, 57, works for a coal company and believes in being a good steward of the earth. But to him, he said, being a Christian means being saved and spreading the Gospel. There is no tension between being committed to his faith and supporting mountaintop removal.

“Why did God produce coal then and put it underground?” said Mr. Caudill, who attends a nondenominational evangelical church. “He produced things that we need on this earth. Without coal, you wouldn’t have the warmth and light you have right now.”

Late in the trip, the tour group drove Lucious Thompson, 63, a former coal miner, to the horseshoe of peaks above McRoberts, where he lives. The peaks have been leveled. The woods where he had hunted are gone. The new grass on the new plateaus barely clings to the soil, which means that McRoberts often floods now after hard rains, he said.

“I’ve been flooded three times since they started working on the mountaintop,” Mr. Thompson said.

He talked of neighbors whose house foundations had been cracked because of the daily blasting, of a pond lost to sludge and of respiratory ailments because of the coal dust flying from the coal trucks.

“The coal company says it’s God’s will,” he said. “Well, God ain’t ever run no bulldozer.”

People like Mr. Thompson and the woods and mountains of Appalachia seemed to make the point the tour’s organizers hoped for. After the tour, Ms. Yoder returned to Columbus to tell her congregation of about 200 what she had learned.

“My comment to the church was that I would do the tour with an open mind,” she said, “and my conclusion is there is no room for mountaintop removal in our country.”

    Taking On a Coal Mining Practice as a Matter of Faith, NYT, 28.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/28/us/28mountains.html?hp&ex=1162094400&en=08c7ce06e6fb8d86&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Watchdog Group Accuses Churches of Political Action

October 26, 2006
The New York Times
By STEPHANIE STROM

A nonprofit group has filed a complaint asking the Internal Revenue Service to investigate the role that two churches may have played in the re-election campaign of Kansas’ attorney general.

The complaint by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonpartisan legal watchdog organization, cited a memorandum from the attorney general, Phill Kline, a Republican, directing members of his campaign staff to recruit churches to distribute campaign literature and serve as the sites for events.

“This is the top law enforcement official in the state who is encouraging everyone to break the law,” said Melanie Sloan, executive director of the watchdog group. “He’s either abysmally unfamiliar with the law, or he’s deliberately violating it.”

A spokeswoman for Mr. Kline, Sherriene Jones, did not return calls to her office.

In his memorandum, Mr. Kline identified two Topeka churches, the Light of the World Christian Center and the Wanamaker Woods Church of the Nazarene, which he said had participated in “lit drops” by handing out campaign literature. A woman who answered the telephone at Wanamaker Woods Church said the church had no comment.

The Rev. Greg Varney, pastor of Light of the World Christian Center, issued a statement saying that Mr. Kline had preached at the church on July 9, but insisting that no illegal activity had occurred. “At no time here at our church did Phill bring up politics, re-election or campaign contributions,” the statement said.

Mark W. Everson, the commissioner of the I.R.S., has repeatedly warned that the agency will crack down on religious organizations that violate laws barring charities of any type from involvement in partisan political activities.

This election cycle, additional accusations of such violations have been made against religious organizations in California, Minnesota, Missouri and Ohio.

Whether the I.R.S. has responded to those complaints is unknown; the agency is barred by law from disclosing its investigations.

All Saints Church, an Episcopal congregation in Pasadena, Calif., has said it was under investigation, but no other church named in complaints that have become public has acknowledged an I.R.S. inquiry.

Despite a report last year by the Treasury Department’s inspector general that concluded political considerations had played no role in the I.R.S.’s selection of nonprofit groups for review, the agency’s silence regarding its investigations has led to accusations of political bias.

“From what we know, the I.R.S. has gone after liberal organizations primarily, the N.A.A.C.P. and the liberal church in California,” Ms. Sloan said, referring to the inquiry into All Saints Church. An I.R.S. investigation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was closed with no finding of wrongdoing.

“Clearly, there are violations on the conservative side, and no action appears to be taken.” Ms. Sloan said. “If they’re being even-handed,” she added, “I certainly can’t tell.”

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington also filed a complaint with the I.R.S. last week against the Living Word Christian Center in Brooklyn Park, Minn., accusing its senior pastor of violating the law by openly stating his support for a Congressional candidate.

“We can’t publicly endorse as a church, and would not for any candidate,” the senior pastor, the Rev. Mac Hammond, told his congregation during a service on Oct. 14 as he introduced Michele Bachmann, a Republican state senator who is running for a seat in the United States House of Representatives. “But I can tell you personally that I’m going to vote for Michele Bachmann,” he said.

During her remarks that followed, Ms. Bachmann said that she had been called by God to run for the House seat after three days of fasting and praying with her husband.

The Star Tribune in Minneapolis later reported that Mr. Hammond could not vote for Ms. Bachmann because he does not live in her district.

Mr. Hammond did not respond to messages seeking comment.

The Star Tribune quoted Mr. Hammond as saying he had “learned my lesson.”

    Watchdog Group Accuses Churches of Political Action, NYT, 26.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/26/washington/26church.html

1867 Mormon Tabernacle Pews

Are Casualties of a Face-Lift

October 26, 2006
The New York Times
By MARTIN STOLZ

SALT LAKE CITY, Oct. 25 — When the historic Tabernacle, the egg-shaped building that is home to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, reopens next year after a lengthy face-lift and seismic retrofit, visitors will find something new: the pews.

The loss of the original, and uncomfortable, pine pews, handmade in 1867 and meticulously etched and painted to look like oak, angers many Mormons, whose religion is strongly defined by its history and its forebears’ hardships.

Kim Farah, a spokeswoman for the Mormon Church (officially known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), released a two-sentence statement saying some original pews — Ms. Farah would not say how many — would be returned and that others would be replaced with oak copies “to maintain historicity.” “No determination has been made on what will happen to the unused original benches,” the statement said.

Church officials would not give an explanation for the change, Ms. Farah said in an interview.

“The church is circumspect about the pews, because it is a work in progress,” she said of the Tabernacle renovations, including the pews.

Lack of an explanation angered LaMar Taft Merrill Jr., a retired schoolteacher who grew up here and lives in Lexington, Ky. Mr. Merrill, a descendant of an early church apostle, said not returning the pine pews would be a “shameful act” by the church’s “misguided top echelon.”

“You can’t ever replace what’s original,” he said. “And an oak bench is no more comfortable than a pine bench.”

A professor of architectural history at the University of Utah, Thomas R. Carter, said the Tabernacle design reflected “the innovation and creativity of the early church.” “It’s experiential,” Professor Carter said. “When I’m there, I feel like, wow, this is such a monumental achievement for the time. And the style is so radical. It’s not a different kind of church. It’s an other. It is otherness.”

Professor Carter, a Presbyterian, said he did not have strong feelings about the pews. He suggested that Tabernacle users could consider the bench dispute based on “what they feel through their bottoms, whether they feel uncomfortable or a connection to the past.”

The early Mormons who made their way west and established Salt Lake City in 1847 believed that they were building a holy “kingdom in the tops of the mountains,” a place to live and welcome their savior with suitable edifices, said Jan Shipps, an emeritus professor of Mormon history and religion at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.

“Their fervor, it was amazing,” Ms. Shipps said. “They understood themselves to be going to the Promised Land.”

In April 1867, the Mormon leader, Brigham Young, exhorted thousands of the faithful to donate labor and supplies to help furnish the interior with pews. Hundreds of volunteers heeded the call. Six months later, the Tabernacle had seating for nearly 9,000. Thousands of pines from the Wasatch Mountains to the east were felled, milled and hauled overland.

Because Young wanted the pews to look as if they were fashioned from oak, the volunteers, including Edward William Davis, a skilled carpenter, painter and glazer from England, created faux grains in the wood, using chisels to etch and feathers or combs to paint the 290,000 feet of the plain pine to resemble oak.

Graining, as the 19th-century practice is known, was common, but the scale of the pew project here is impressive, said Carol Edison, manager of the folk art program at the Utah Arts Council. Mr. Davis’s great-great-grandson, David Ericson, an art dealer here, called the pews “the character-defining attribute” of the Tabernacle. If they go, Mr. Ericson said, “you lose your access to that indigenous past.”

Ms. Edison voiced hope that the old pews would be preserved and reused in other historic Utah buildings.

The church has added controversy by announcing this month that it plans to tear down three historical structures it owns, including the 14-story Greek Revival First Security Bank tower of 1919. The demolition would make way for a $1 billion retail, office and residential complex, the largest development project in the city’s history, on 25 acres opposite Mormon headquarters.

The prospect of losing the ornately decorated bank building dismays preservationists. “We think the building is one of the social and historical and architectural icons of downtown,” Kirk Huffaker, interim executive director of the Utah Heritage Foundation, said.

On Oct. 18, an official of the church’s real estate development company, Mark Gibbons, told City Council members that the church had decided, for now, to postpone leveling the bank and would re-evaluate its plan, though “all options are on the table.”

The state historic preservation officer, Wilson G. Martin, said the state hoped that the church would “tweak” its plans and save the bank. But his agency, the Division of State History, has no position on the Tabernacle pews, Mr. Martin said, because interiors of functioning historic buildings change frequently, and he considers the pews interior furniture.

For Robert Charles Mitchell, a retired newspaper editor from Salt Lake City who lives in Logan, the fate of the pews and the bank tower hit the “same vein.” “It’s an issue of values,” he said. “We glorify our pioneers. We talk about their travails and bless their devilishly hard work. We laud them on the one hand and run roughshod over them on the other. We’re dishing up ersatz history and throwing away the real thing.”

    1867 Mormon Tabernacle Pews Are Casualties of a Face-Lift, NYT, 26.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/26/us/26pews.html

Connecticut Episcopal Bishop Will Bless Gay Unions

October 23, 2006
The New York Times
By FERNANDA SANTOS

The leader of the Episcopal Diocese of Connecticut, Bishop Andrew D. Smith, has authorized priests to give blessings to same-sex unions during religious ceremonies. The move threatens to further alienate the conservative wing of his church and deepen a fissure between progressive and orthodox Episcopalians nationwide.

“I believe in my heart and soul that it is time for this church, this diocese, formally to acknowledge and support and bless our sisters and brothers who are gay and lesbian, including those who are living in faithful and faith-filled committed partnerships,” Bishop Smith said on Saturday in a speech at a diocesan conference in Hartford.

The decision, reported yesterday by The Hartford Courant, does not authorize Episcopal clergy to officiate at civil unions or create an official prayer service for the blessings. Rather, it permits parishes to acknowledge gay and lesbian couples who have had a civil union granted by the state. Connecticut approved civil unions last year.

The decision allows each parish to choose whether to acknowledge same-sex couples during religious services, said Karin Hamilton, spokeswoman for the diocese.

Nationwide, nine other Episcopal dioceses — in Arkansas, California, Delaware, Long Island, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Vermont and Washington, D.C. — have enacted policies allowing the blessing of same-sex couples, according to Integrity, a national Episcopal gay organization based in Rochester. Kansas used to have the same policy, but it was rescinded there in 2003, when the diocese ordained a new bishop, Dean E. Wolfe.

“What happened in Connecticut is great news for the church, because what it says is that we’re going to continue to move forward to fully include all of the baptized in the body of Christ, whether they’re gay or straight,” said the Rev. Susan Russell, president of Integrity and an Episcopal priest in Los Angeles. “We should be in the business of building bridges, not walls.”

But the Rev. Canon David C. Anderson, president of the American Anglican Council, an orthodox umbrella group, said that Bishop Smith’s decision “is proof of his disregard for the larger Anglican Communion and further evidences his militancy with the homosexual gay agenda.”

“Bishop Smith and some other bishops as well are literally choosing to pull themselves and their churches out of the broader religious community,” Canon Anderson continued. “In the future of the Anglican community, there might be no place for people like Bishop Smith.”

With about two million members in the United States, the Episcopal Church has taken significant steps toward inclusiveness in the past few years, most notably with the election of V. Gene Robinson in 2003 as bishop of New Hampshire, the first openly gay bishop in the history of the denomination.

The same year, clergy and laymen overwhelmingly approved a resolution that recognized the blessing of same-sex unions as a prerogative of individual parishes.

The moves strained relations between congregations in the United States and those in the global, more traditional, Anglican Communion, of which the Episcopal Church is the American arm.

A 2004 report commissioned by the communion’s leader, the archbishop of Canterbury, recommended that the Episcopal Church apologize for the ordination of Bishop Robinson and stop blessing same-sex couples and electing gay bishops.

The Episcopal Church responded at its triennial conference this year, calling on dioceses to avoid backing the election of openly gay bishops.

But in Connecticut, Bishop Smith has continued to push forward his changes, as he has done since becoming the diocesan bishop seven years ago.

In 1999, he changed a longstanding policy to allow the ordination of gay clergy members. In 2000, he and other religious leaders voted to extend health benefits to the same-sex partners of diocesan employees.

“I believe that it is time for us to rethink, repray and reform our theology and our pastoral practices; to welcome, recognize, support and bless the lives and faith of brothers and sisters who are gay and lesbian in the equal fullness of Christian fellowship,” Bishop Smith said in his speech, which drew effusive cheers.

The Rev. Christopher Leighton one of six priests who rebelled against Bishop Smith over his support of Bishop Robinson, said yesterday that Bishop Smith’s position on the blessing of same-sex unions only complicated matters.

“He had a very fiery speech, interrupted by applause at several points and in the end, he got a standing ovation,” said Father Leighton, of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Darien. “This is where the vast majority of the diocese stands on this matter; the problem is that the worldwide Anglican community will have no part in this.”

Father Leighon added, “It’s not that we’re against gays. It’s rather that we’re affirming the traditional beliefs that only a man and a woman should be intimate for life in holy wedlock.”

    Connecticut Episcopal Bishop Will Bless Gay Unions, NYT, 23.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/23/nyregion/23bishop.html?hp&ex=1161662400&en=a2be2a7204645369&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Accused Priest’s Long Flight From Law in U.S. and Mexico

October 21, 2006
The New York Times
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.

TEHUACÁN, Mexico — For two decades, dozens of children have accused the Rev. Nicolás Aguilar of molesting or brutally raping them. He faces an indictment charging sexual abuse in Los Angeles and at least five formal complaints in Mexico. Yet at 65 he remains at large, still working as a priest in villages here.

Father Aguilar’s long flight from the law, critics say, reflects the ease with which priests can avoid prosecution in the United States by hiding in Mexico, where judges and prosecutors are reluctant to challenge the enduring political strength of the Roman Catholic Church.

The case has focused attention on a problem that is not limited to Father Aguilar, but rather, critics say, points to a pattern of complicity by high officials in the church.

In September one of Father Aguilar’s accusers filed a lawsuit in southern California alleging that the cardinals of Mexico City and Los Angeles had conspired to help him escape prosecution by allowing him to slip across the border.

Both cardinals deny any wrongdoing. But American law enforcement officials and advocates for victims say that since 1995 at least three other priests accused of molesting children in the United States have fled to Mexico before the authorities could arrest them. In other cases, going back to the 1980’s, still more were transferred to Mexico after church officials received complaints about them.

“It is symptomatic of a problem that is large and will only get larger in the future,” said David Clohessy, director of the Survivor’s Network of Those Abused by Priests. “More and more Catholic bishops understand these predators are hot potatoes, and it is far safer to let them go into the third world.”

Cardinal Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles, who leads the country’s largest Roman Catholic archdiocese, has been accused before of sheltering priests who have sex with children. A new documentary film, “Deliver Us From Evil,” contends that Cardinal Mahony knew that another priest under his supervision, the Rev. Oliver O’Grady, was abusing children in the 1980’s but moved him from parish to parish rather than turn him in. The cardinal denies the accusation.

The other fugitives hiding in Mexico, prosecutors in the United States say, are the Rev. Xavier Ochoa, who is wanted in Santa Rosa, Calif., on 10 counts of forcing children to have sex with him; the Rev. Javier García, who faces 11 counts of child sex abuse in Sacramento, Calif.; and the Rev. Jesús Armando Domínguez, who faces 58 similar charges, including forcible sodomy, in Riverside County, Calif.

María de Jesús González, the mother of a boy in Tehuacán whom Father Aguilar is accused of molesting in 1997, said she had given up hope that the Mexican authorities would ever bring the priest to justice.

“Here in this world there is no justice, so I have to believe in divine justice,” she said, angry tears welling in her eyes. “There is a religious mafia. Among the priests, they protect each other, they help each other.”

Over the years, Father Aguilar, who began his priesthood in Mexico in 1970, has shuffled from parish to parish under the oversight of some of Mexico’s most prominent churchmen, even as he has been followed by many allegations of sexual predation, critics say.

His overseers included Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera of Mexico City, who heads the church in Mexico and was considered a candidate for pope last year, advocates for victims of sexual abuse say.

Cardinal Rivera Carrera declined to be interviewed for this article. But he told the newspaper La Prensa on Sept. 27 that he had heard “accusations of homosexuality, but not of pedophilia” about the priest before shipping him off to Los Angeles with a letter of recommendation. The letter said the priest wanted a change of scene “for family and health reasons.”

In September, after protests over the case in front of the Mexico City cathedral that drew national attention, Cardinal Rivera Carrera read a statement urging Father Aguilar to turn himself in, “for the good of his own conscience and to avoid more damage to the church.”

In the United States, Father Aguilar served under Cardinal Mahony in Los Angeles. Through a spokesman, Cardinal Mahony, who is named in the civil case, said his office reported Father Aguilar’s abuse of two altar boys to the authorities in January 1988.

The spokesman, Tod Tamberg, said the principal of the church school left a message on an answering machine at the office of child protective services on the afternoon of Jan. 8 of that year; Father Aguilar left the country the next day.

The Los Angeles police say the vicar for clergy, Msgr. Thomas Curry, tipped off the priest on the morning of Jan. 9 that he would be investigated, two days before their detectives were informed. Father Aguilar slipped across the border that night.

Mr. Tamberg confirmed that Monsignor Curry had confronted Father Aguilar with the accusations against him that morning and stripped him of ministry duty. The priest told Monsignor Curry he was going to stay with relatives in Los Angeles during the investigation, but he fled the country instead, Mr. Tamberg said.

“Our school officials acted appropriately,” he said, “and so did church officials, to remove this guy from the ministry.” In the next nine years the parents of at least five boys in Mexico have formally accused Father Aguilar of sexual abuse or rape as he continued to work in parishes.

“The frustration is unbelievable,” said Detective Federico Sicard, the Los Angeles investigator who has been seeking Father Aguilar for 18 years. He added: “When things like this happen we fail them. The justice system failed these kids.”

Father Aguilar’s troubled private life first came to light in 1987 in Cuacnopalan, a dusty farming town where he headed a parish for more than a decade.

Many older parishioners still defended Father Aguilar as the best priest they ever had. But there were also hushed reports among some parents that the priest had molested and fondled boys in the congregation, and at least one youngster, who died of complications from AIDS in 1996, told friends that he had complained to the diocese, town officials and residents said.

“There were a lot of comments about his relationships with the boys, that he had problems with the youngsters,” Melquíades Alcántara, 61, recalled. Cardinal Rivera Carrera, who was then the bishop of the Tehuacán Diocese, did not mount an inquiry. He told La Prensa that an attack on Father Aguilar — along with persistent rumors about his homosexuality, not pedophilia — had persuaded him to ship the priest off to Los Angeles in early 1988.

After Father Aguilar was in Los Angeles nine months, two altar boys complained that on several occasions he had lured them into his residence and fondled them.

Three months after the case was reported to the authorities, a grand jury indicted Father Aguilar on 19 counts of lewd acts upon a child, involving 10 children. But by then he had fled back to Mexico. The Los Angeles authorities immediately sought to have him indicted in México and extradited to California.

It took seven years for the Mexican attorney general’s office to issue an arrest warrant, Detective Sicard said. Three months after it did, the statute of limitations on the sex abuse charges ran out.

The priest was never arrested, but allegations of new abuses hounded him. In the early 1990’s he served as the associate pastor at two churches in Mexico City. Joaquín Aguilar Méndez, who brought the suit in Los Angeles in September, was an altar boy at both. Mr. Aguilar Méndez says Father Aguilar brutally raped him in October 1994 inside a rectory after he had misbehaved at Mass. He was 13.

Lawyers for Mr. Aguilar Méndez say he and his parents reported the rape to the police three weeks later. The police did three rape tests and told them that they had lost the results all three times, the lawsuit claims.

A prosecutor, the lawyers allege, offered the parents a bribe to drop the charges. The parents refused, but the complaint never resulted in a trial, Mr. Aguilar Méndez said.

In late 1995 or early 1996, Father Aguilar returned to Tehuacán, where he was assigned to the small San Vicente Ferrer church, clergymen there said. Within a year his parishioners were once again leveling charges of child molestation.

Four mothers filed charges of sexual abuse with the local prosecutor, though other mothers said the number of victims was far higher. Cecilia Flores said her son was only 10 when the priest tried to put his hand down the boy’s shorts. “How many injustices has this priest committed?” Mrs. Flores asked.

That investigation dragged on for six years. The state judge handling the charges, Carlos Guillermo Ramírez, has never issued an arrest warrant in three of the cases and ruled out rape charges in all of them.

Even as the investigation was proceeding, Archbishop Rosendo Huesca Pacheco of Puebla, just 71 miles away, gave Father Aguilar permission in 2001 to serve as an assistant priest in another village. “We didn’t know there were charges against him,” said an official in the Puebla archdiocese, the Rev. Amador Tapia.

In 2002 a state tribunal in Puebla finally ordered that the priest be arrested for the “corruption of minors.” Father Aguilar appealed to a federal judge, who canceled the arrest warrant because the statute of limitations had expired.

In 2003 Judge Ramírez found Father Aguilar guilty of a lesser charge of touching the genitals of one boy, but acquitted him of the top charge of corruption of minors. He sentenced the priest to one year in prison and a $765 fine, according to court papers.

Father Aguilar was allowed to pay a slightly larger fine to avoid prison and disappeared once again.

In recent months he has been seen saying Mass in tiny towns in the states of Puebla and Morelos. The Tehuacán diocese has never defrocked him.

    Accused Priest’s Long Flight From Law in U.S. and Mexico, NYT, 21.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/21/world/americas/21mexico.html

Priest Named by Foley Is Barred From All Religious Duties

October 21, 2006
The New York Times
By ABBY GOODNOUGH

MIAMI, Oct. 20 — The Archdiocese of Miami on Friday barred the Rev. Anthony Mercieca from functioning as a priest anywhere in the world after confirming that he was the clergyman who Mark Foley said molested him in the 1960’s.

Father Mercieca, who now lives in Malta, can no longer publicly celebrate Mass, administer the sacraments or wear priestly clothes, said Mary Ross Agosta, a diocesan spokeswoman.

Ms. Agosta apologized to Mr. Foley in a statement and described as repugnant Father Mercieca’s intimate contact with him, which the priest disclosed to a Florida newspaper this week. Father Mercieca, 69, worked in South Florida for almost 40 years and remains under the auspices of the archdiocese.

“Such behavior is morally reprehensible, canonically criminal and inexcusable,” Ms. Agosta said.

Mr. Foley, 52, resigned from the House of Representatives last month after the release of sexually explicit messages he had sent to teenage Congressional pages. Soon after, his lawyer announced that Mr. Foley is gay, had gone into treatment for alcoholism and had been molested by a clergyman when he was 13 to 15.

“An apology is due to Mr. Foley for the hurt he has experienced,” Ms. Agosta said.

So far, she said, no one else had reported sexual misconduct by Father Mercieca. He worked in at least eight parishes in South Florida since 1966, most recently at Blessed Trinity Catholic Church in Miami Springs from 1993 to 2003. Ms. Agosta said he left Florida to retire.

“There were absolutely no other problems,” she said in an interview.

Ms. Agosta said the Archdiocese of Miami had begun an internal investigation that could result in further sanctions against Father Mercieca. A spokesman for the archbishop of Malta said an investigation was under way there, too.

Though retired, Father Mercieca was still saying Mass every morning at a cathedral on Gozo, the Maltese island where he was raised and now lives with his brother, also a priest.

The Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, an advocacy group, said that both diocesan actions were insufficient and that Father Mercieca should be put in a secure treatment facility while the police investigated.

The Herald-Tribune of Sarasota, Fla., reported Thursday that Father Mercieca said he had skinny-dipped and lounged naked in saunas with the young Mr. Foley, massaged him and roomed with him naked on overnight trips. He said that once, on tranquilizers, he might have gone further with Mr. Foley but could not recall details.

Father Mercieca repeated the claims in interviews with other news outlets, but also said his relationship with Mr. Foley was not sexual.

The survivors group has urged Mr. Foley to press charges, but the statute of limitations has probably expired. His civil lawyer, Gerald Richman, said Friday that he had no idea whether Mr. Foley would pursue the matter.

Mr. Richman identified Father Mercieca to Palm Beach County prosecutors this week as Mr. Foley’s molester. Prosecutors shared the information with the archdiocese, but said they would do nothing more unless other victims emerged.

Ms. Agosta said the archdiocese, which includes Broward, Miami-Dade and Monroe Counties, would encourage any other victims to come forward by asking every parish to make an announcement about Father Mercieca.

Terry Aguayo contributed reporting.

    Priest Named by Foley Is Barred From All Religious Duties, NYT, 21.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/21/us/21priest.html

Editorial

Faith-Based Profits

October 16, 2006
The New York Times

Mary Rosati, a novice training to be a nun in Toledo, Ohio, says that after she received a diagnosis of breast cancer, her mother superior dismissed her. If Ms. Rosati had had a nonreligious job, she might have won a lawsuit against her diocese (which denies the charge). But a federal judge dismissed her suit under the Americans With Disabilities Act, declining to second-guess the church’s “ecclesiastical decision.”

Ms. Rosati’s story is one of many that Diana Henriques told in a recent Times series examining the fast-changing legal status of churches and religious-affiliated institutions. The series showed that the wall between church and state is being replaced by a platform that raises religious organizations to a higher legal plane than their secular counterparts.

Day care centers with religious affiliations are exempted in some states from licensing requirements. Churches can expand in ways that would violate zoning ordinances if a nonreligious builder did the same thing, and they are permitted, in some localities, to operate lavish facilities, like state-of-the-art gyms, without paying property taxes.

Some of the most disturbing stories, like Ms. Rosati’s, involve employment discrimination. Ms. Henriques told of a New Mexico rabbi who was dismissed after developing Parkinson’s disease and found himself blocked from suing, and of nurses in a 44,000-employee health care system operated by the Seventh Day Adventists barred from joining unions.

Religious institutions should be protected from excessive intrusion by government. Judges should not tell churches who they have to hire as ministers, or meddle in doctrinal disputes. But under pressure from politically influential religious groups, Congress, the White House, and federal and state courts have expanded this principle beyond all reason. It is increasingly being applied to people, buildings and programs only tangentially related to religion.

In its expanded form, this principle amounts to an enormous subsidy for religion, in some cases violating the establishment clause of the First Amendment. It also undermines core American values, like the right to be free from job discrimination. It puts secular entrepreneurs at an unfair competitive disadvantage. And it deprives states and localities of much-needed tax revenues, putting a heavier burden on ordinary taxpayers.

Like most special-interest handouts, these privileges exist in large part because the majority is not aware, or is not being heard. With property taxes growing ever more burdensome, it is likely that localities will start to give religious exemptions closer scrutiny. People who care about discrimination-free workplaces, the right to unionize and children’s safety should also start to push back.

In a few places, at least, that has started. After Texas exempted religious day care centers and drug-treatment programs from state licensing, a study found that the “alternatively accredited” facilities had 10 times the rate of abuse and neglect of the others, and several were investigated. In 2001, the Texas Legislature, no enemy of organized religion, did the right thing and ended the exemption.

    Faith-Based Profits, NYT, 16.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/16/opinion/16mon1.html

Letter to Priests Is Critical of Archbishop’s Leadership

October 15, 2006
The New York Times
By MANNY FERNANDEZ

An anonymous letter circulating among priests in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York is calling for a vote of no confidence in Cardinal Edward M. Egan, the archbishop of New York.

“During the last six years, the Cardinal’s relations with the Priests of New York have been defined by dishonesty, deception, disinterest and disregard,” read the 950-word letter, written by a group calling itself A Committee of Concerned Clergy for the Archdiocese of New York.

Though it is unclear how many priests are part of the committee, the letter appears to have resonated with some in the archdiocese. It also is an unusually public display of internal friction between priests and their archbishop.

In response, Cardinal Egan planned to meet with the Priest Council, the cardinal’s chief advisory group of about 40 priests, at his residence in Manhattan tomorrow morning. “He will discuss whatever needs to be discussed with them,” said Joseph Zwilling, the spokesman for the archdiocese said..

Mr. Zwilling said that Cardinal Egan was taking the letter seriously. “An anonymous letter of this kind can potentially do great damage to the church,” he said.

Posted Wednesday on a Catholic news blog called Whispers in the Loggia and reported on by The New York Daily News on Friday, the letter criticized Cardinal Egan for ignoring priests’ spiritual concerns, refusing to seek their advice and fomenting low morale with an arrogant, ruthless manner. The letter said that committee members must remain anonymous “because of the severely vindictive nature of Cardinal Egan” and that attempts to “open avenues of communication” with him had failed.

The letter also claimed that Cardinal Egan’s decision to leave New York two days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attack is an example of his failure to act as a spiritual leader in the city. Cardinal Egan, however, did not leave the city in the days after the attack as claimed in the letter. He visited ground zero, presided at memorial Masses and spoke at an interfaith service at Yankee Stadium on Sept. 23. He went to Rome that October to help run a Vatican conference.

Msgr. Howard Calkins, pastor of Sacred Heart Church in Mount Vernon in Westchester County, said he did not approve of the letter’s harsh tone and anonymity, but agreed with its description of the morale and communication problems in the archdiocese. “I think there is truth in it; that the cardinal has really been an absent figure,” he said.

Monsignor Calkins, who is also vicar of the South Shore Vicariate, said Cardinal Egan has attempted to reach out to priests in recent years, but that generally there has been very little consultation with them on the issues affecting the archdiocese. “I think there’s a feeling that we’re not being heard, even though he did hold a convocation of the priests of the archdiocese in October 2004,” he said.

Rocco Palmo, a Philadelphia resident who started the Whispers in the Loggia blog in 2004, said that a priest who had received the letter called him on Wednesday and read him the text. After confirming the wording, he said he posted it on his blog and later received an electronic copy. Mr. Palmo, who is also a correspondent for The Tablet, a Catholic weekly in London, said he had spoken with about 40 priests about the letter.

“While nobody is taking credit for this, there’s been little to no critique of the substance of it,” Mr. Palmo said. “It’s their way of kind of quietly standing by each other.”

Cardinal Egan was chosen by Pope John Paul II to succeed Cardinal John J. O’Connor, who died in May 2000. Some priests found Cardinal Egan’s style distant and clinical. Cardinal O’Connor had extended an open invitation for priests to visit him at his residence on Wednesdays, without an appointment, to talk about their concerns. Cardinal Egan did not continue the tradition.

“That I don’t do,” Cardinal Egan said of the practice in an interview with The New York Times in 2001. “But I assure you this: any priest that calls to see me, I see.”

The letter stated that a vote of no confidence would encourage Pope Benedict XVI to accept Cardinal Egan’s resignation in April 2007, when he turns 75. Canon law requires all bishops to submit a letter to the Pope offering their retirement at 75, Mr. Zwilling said. It is then up to the Pope to accept or postpone retirement.

“The search for a new Archbishop should begin sooner rather than later,” the letter stated.

    Letter to Priests Is Critical of Archbishop’s Leadership, NYT, 15.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/15/nyregion/15letter.html


 

Within hours of the start of demolition, not even debris remained at the site of the Amish school
where a gunman killed five girls and badly wounded five others. The ground will be returned to pastureland.

Matt Rourke/Associated Press        NYT

Amish Schoolhouse Is Razed        NYT        12.10.2006
 http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Amish-School-Shooting.html?hp&ex=
1160712000&en=afaeb0d1f7c23ab3&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Amish Schoolhouse Is Razed

October 12, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:30 a.m. ET
The New York Times

NICKEL MINES, Pa. (AP) -- Workers with heavy machinery rather than hand tools moved in before dawn Thursday and demolished the one-room Amish schoolhouse where a gunman fatally shot five girls and wounded five others.

Construction lights glared in the mist as a large backhoe tore into the overhang of the school's porch around 4:45 a.m., then knocked down the bell tower and toppled the walls. Within 15 minutes, the building was reduced to a pile of rubble. By 7:30 a.m., the debris was gone, leaving just a bare patch of earth.

The schoolhouse had been boarded up since the killings 10 days earlier, with classes moved to a nearby farm. The Amish planned to leave a quiet pasture where the schoolhouse stood.

''I thought there was widespread feeling in the community that it was important to remove the building,'' said Herman Bontrager, a Mennonite businessman who is serving as a spokesman. ''Especially for the children, but not only for the children.''

The Amish are known for constructing buildings by hand, without the aid of modern technology, but for this job they relied on an outside demolition crew to bring closure to a painful chapter for their peaceful community.

A group of 20 to 30 people, many of them in traditional Amish dress, gathered nearby to watch as the schoolhouse was leveled. One Amish man shook his head when asked if he would comment on the demolition.

''It seems this is a type of closure for them,'' Mike Hart, a spokesman for the Bart Fire Company, said as loaders lifted debris into dump trucks to be hauled away.

The destruction of the West Nickel Mines Amish School came a week after the solemn funerals of the five girls killed by gunman Charles Carl Roberts IV. Roberts came heavily armed and apparently prepared for a long standoff. He held the 10 girls hostage for about an hour before shooting them and killing himself as police closed in.

The five girls wounded in the Oct. 2 shooting are still believed to be hospitalized. The hospitals are no longer providing any information about the patients at the request of their families.

Hart, who has been coordinating activities with the Amish community and whose company will help provide security, said private contractors were handling the demolition, and the debris would be hauled to a landfill.

He has said classes were expected to resume for the school this week at a makeshift schoolhouse in a garage on an Amish farm in the Nickel Mines area.

Associated Press writer Michael Rubinkam contributed to this story.

    Amish Schoolhouse Is Razed, NYT, 12.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Amish-School-Shooting.html?hp&ex=1160712000&en=afaeb0d1f7c23ab3&ei=5094&partner=homepage

In God’s Name

Religion-Based Tax Breaks: Housing to Paychecks to Books
 

October 11, 2006
The New York Times
By DIANA B. HENRIQUES

For tens of millions of Americans, the Rev. Rick Warren is best known for his blockbuster spiritual guide, “The Purpose Driven Life,” which has sold more than 25 million copies; his success as the founder of the 22,000-member Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif.; and his efforts on behalf of some of the world’s neediest people.

But for tens of thousands of ministers — and their financial advisers — Pastor Warren will also be remembered as their champion in a fight over the most valuable tax break available to ordained clergy members of all faiths: an exemption from federal taxes for most of the money they spend on housing, which typically represents roughly a third of their compensation. Pastor Warren argued that the tax break is essential to poorly paid clergy members who serve society.

The tax break is not available to the staff at secular nonprofit organizations whose scale and charitable aims compare to those of religious ministries like Pastor Warren’s church, or to poorly paid inner-city teachers and day care workers who also serve their communities.

The housing deduction is one of several tax breaks that leave extra money in the pockets of clergy members and their religious employers. Ministers of every faith are also exempt from income tax withholding and can opt out of Social Security. And every state but one exempts religious employers from paying state unemployment taxes — reducing the employers’ payroll expenses but also leaving their workers without unemployment benefits if they are laid off.

Another religion-based tax break — the only one consistently defeated in the courts in recent years — is an exemption from state sales taxes for religious publications but not for secular ones.

This sales tax break has been struck down as unconstitutional in at least five states, most recently in Georgia in February, when a United States District Court judge, Richard W. Story, ruled that “the unique and preferential treatment the state provides to ‘religious’ literature raises serious constitutional concerns” under the First Amendment clause prohibiting an “establishment” of religion.

Yet a few states still have a sales tax exemption for religious publications. One of them is Florida, where state officials, lawyers for two religious publications and a national religious liberty advocacy group have joined forces to defend the tax break from a constitutional challenge waged almost single-handedly by an Orlando lawyer named Heather Morcroft.

Ms. Morcroft is a Legal Aid staff lawyer who works with foster children. She is a believer in Wicca, which she described as a neo-pagan faith loosely based on the traditions of ancient earth-centered religions, and serves as president of the state’s small Wiccan Religious Cooperative.

The cooperative is the formal plaintiff in the pending lawsuit Ms. Morcroft filed almost five years ago to challenge the constitutionality of the Florida exemption. Her arguments echo those that have prevailed in other states: that by exempting religious publications from the sales tax, the government is favoring religious ideas over secular ones, and that tax officials should not be in the business of deciding what publications are sufficiently religious to be exempt.

In contrast to Ms. Morcroft’s lonely fight in Tallahassee, Pastor Warren, who declined to be interviewed for this article, had a host of allies when he went to battle to defend the special tax deduction for housing expenses of clergy members. Ultimately, the allies included both houses of Congress and the president of the United States.

The Housing Exemption

The one small passage in the vast federal tax code that originally conferred the housing-expense exemption on clergy members did not cap the deduction. But in 1971, the Internal Revenue Service limited it to the “fair market rental value” of the furnished home, utilities included.

During a routine audit in 1996, according to court documents, the I.R.S. decided that Pastor Warren’s housing deduction exceeded the rental value of his new home on Via Del Sol in the rugged Trabuco Canyon, southeast of Los Angeles.

That’s when the fireworks began.

Pastor Warren, who gives 90 percent of his considerable income to charities, later explained in an open letter to other ministers that he decided to sue because the housing allowance was the only way small churches could pay their pastors enough to live — and he knew that those ministers could not fight the I.R.S. as he could.

The deduction, usually called the parsonage exemption, is available to ministers, rabbis and other clergy members of all faiths working at houses of worship. It allows them to live in congregation-owned housing without being taxed on the imputed value of their free housing, as almost all other employees are when they live in company-paid housing.

Since 1954, the provision had also shielded clergy members from taxes on the entire portion of their paycheck designated by their congregations as a housing allowance, whether they spent it on renting an apartment or buying their own home. But the rules the I.R.S. adopted in 1971 limited the deduction to the smallest of three amounts: the “fair market rental value” of the home, the housing allowance paid to the minister or the minister’s actual housing expenses.

That ruling lighted the long fuse that, decades later, propelled Pastor Warren into court.

It took four years — and far more of Pastor Warren’s money than the $55,300 disputed in the audit — but on May 16, 2000, the United States Tax Court struck down the I.R.S.’s cap and ruled that clergy members could deduct “the amount used to provide a home,” however much that might be.

If the story had ended there, Pastor Warren’s battle would have been an unequivocal victory for the clergy. But the I.R.S. appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco. And in March 2002, that court raised an unexpected question: was this tax break constitutional? Or did it treat the clergy so favorably that it violated the First Amendment?

The court appointed Erwin Chemerinsky, a law professor then on the faculty at the University of Southern California, to research the constitutional issue and file a friend-of-the-court brief. The court was immediately pelted with defending arguments from lawyers representing almost every religious organization in the country, from the Central Conference of American Rabbis to the Church of the Nazarene.

Some defenders noted that employees required to live in certain places for the convenience of their employer, as pastors are, had long been eligible for tax relief. (A similar exemption is available to some military and diplomatic personnel. But only clergy members can apply it so broadly — for example, applying it even when they work for a church they themselves founded at a location of their own choosing, as was the case with Pastor Warren.)

Others argued that tax deductions favoring religion had been granted for more than 200 years without any objections from the Supreme Court, and this one was no exception. And a few simply pleaded that clergy members deserved the deduction because they were so poorly paid for their contributions to society.

Professor Chemerinsky studied the relevant First Amendment case law, especially the 1989 case Texas Monthly v. Bullock in which the Supreme Court had drawn the line at government’s granting a “tax break to those who spread the gospel that it does not also give to others.” He urged the appeals court to find the tax break unconstitutional.

Under I.R.S. rules, he noted, this benefit is available to all clergy members who administer sacraments, conduct worship and direct the spiritual life of a religious institution. “The government thus has to determine what constitutes ‘sacraments,’ ‘religious worship’ and the ‘spiritual life’ of a religion and then to evaluate whether the clergy member is sufficiently engaged in these tasks,” Professor Chemerinsky continued.

“It is difficult to imagine a greater entanglement with religion than this evaluation,” he wrote in his brief for the court.

Moreover, “the parsonage exemption is a subsidy for religion” and is therefore unconstitutional, he argued. Current Congressional budget records show that the exemption has cost the government as much as $500 million in tax revenue a year, shifting that much of the national tax burden onto other taxpayers.

He did not address the pastoral poverty argument in his court briefs, but in an interview, he noted that poorly paid inner-city teachers and day care workers do not benefit from the parsonage exemption, despite their service to society.

Nor do people at secular nonprofit organizations engaged in humanitarian work. Action Against Hunger U.S.A., based in New York, finances relief programs in Africa, but its director, Cathy Skoula, pays taxes on her entire salary, including what she spends on housing. So does Lawrence Rosenblatt, executive director of the Bowery Residents’ Committee, which provides food, shelter and counseling to sick, needy people in Lower Manhattan.

Even amid the distractions of the year after Sept. 11, the constitutional challenge to the clergy housing deduction inspired wide coverage in religious publications and some heated words on radio. Pastor Warren quoted comments made to him by a conservative radio commentator, Hugh Hewitt, who said the issue arose because of “the implacable hostility of the political left to the role of God in the world and the country.”

But in fact, the political left and right joined forces with “almost miraculous” speed to defuse this constitutional time bomb, according to Richard R. Hammar, a lawyer and accountant who edits the Church Law and Tax Report newsletter. Within 40 days, the Clergy Housing Clarification Act of 2002 had been approved unanimously in both houses of Congress and signed into law by President Bush.

“It was like the parting of the Red Sea,” Mr. Hammar said.

The new law, in Solomonic fashion, affirmed the unlimited deductions ministers like Pastor Warren had taken in the past, but imposed the I.R.S.’s “fair market rental value” restriction on deductions going forward. Satisfied, the tax service withdrew its appeal, ending the constitutional challenge in San Francisco.

Ministers of every faith are also exempt from income tax withholding. And they can opt out of Social Security — an exemption that Mr. Hammar said was probably widely abused.

Until 1968, clergy members were exempt from Social Security unless they joined voluntarily. Since then, they have been automatically covered — but, unlike other citizens, they are allowed to drop out as conscientious objectors if they assert, by a certain point early in their ministry, that they have a religious opposition to receiving public welfare benefits.

“Few people, outside of the Amish, could plausibly say that,” said Mr. Hammar, an accountant who also has a law degree from Harvard and attended its divinity school.

Yet his research shows that 3 of every 10 ministers in America have opted out of Social Security. “The only conclusion is that the conscience-based objection is usually really a financial decision,” he said.

Because the exemption is irrevocable, why would so many ministers take such a drastic step? Clergy members are considered self-employed and therefore pay a 15.3 percent contribution to Social Security, Mr. Hammar explained. So young ministers on tight budgets sometimes decide, or are persuaded, to drop out and thereby give themselves a 15.3 percent raise.

“The vast majority of clergy who did opt out of Social Security never replaced it with another retirement scheme,” he added.

Several times since 1968, religious denominations have urged Congress to rescue these potentially destitute ministers. On three occasions in the last 20 years, most recently in 1999, Congress has done so, opening a two-year window during which ministers who “irrevocably” dropped Social Security could return.

Mr. Hammar said federal law and the laws of every state except Oregon also exempt religious employers from the unemployment compensation laws that cover other employers. Court rulings widened this exemption to include religious-operated schools, he said, and in 1997 Congress expanded it further to include schools “operated for a religious purpose” but not actually controlled or affiliated with a religious denomination or institution.

As a result, he said, state courts have generally determined that workers who are laid off from these exempt religious employers cannot collect jobless benefits.

Breaks on Sales Taxes

In her 20 years as a lawyer, Heather Morcroft had never argued a case before the Florida Supreme Court.

But there she was, on June 9 — standing alone on her side of the lofty courtroom in Tallahassee to challenge the constitutionality of a Florida law that exempts “religious publications” from the state sales tax.

As Ms. Morcroft sees it, this exemption not only infringes on the liberty of those faiths with writings that may not be deemed sufficiently religious to be exempt, but it also puts government in the role of defining a religious publication and then favoring that publication over secular ones.

None of that, she says, should be allowed under the First Amendment, which provides, in part, that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

Indeed, in that 1989 case in Texas, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the government could “not place its prestige, coercive authority, or resources behind a single religious faith or behind religious faith generally” without violating the Constitution.

Some legal scholars argue that there was no clear majority opinion, and hence no clear judicial guidance, in the Texas case.

But Ms. Morcroft noted in her lawsuit that since the Supreme Court decision in the Texas case, federal and state courts in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and South Carolina, as well as Georgia, had “found that a sales tax exemption for items based on their religious content is unconstitutional.”

Florida is one of several states that still have some sort of sales tax exemption for religious publications.

Lawyers defending the exemption, which costs the state just under $10 million each year, say it is consistent with a long list of laws, adopted and upheld since the nation’s birth, that have benefited religion in some way. Governments “have found it prudent to avoid entanglement of religion with the state taxation process by providing exemptions,” argued Kevin Shaughnessy, a lawyer in the Orlando office of Baker & Hostetler who represents The Florida Baptist Witness and The Florida Catholic, which benefit from the exemption. Similar arguments were made by Liberty Counsel, a religious freedom advocacy group in Orlando.

Most states give religious groups some sort of broad sales tax exemption, but most do so simply by including religious organizations in omnibus exemptions that cover sales to, and sometimes purchases from, nonprofit groups of all sorts.

But a few states go further, exempting specific kinds of religious publications from sales taxes no matter who buys or sells them, said John L. Mikesell, a professor at Indiana University and the co-author of a widely used primer on sales taxation. They include Florida, Massachusetts and Texas, which revised its statute after the Texas Monthly case.

Several other states grant special treatment to sacramental equipment and supplies, and to materials a private contractor buys for use on many religious construction projects.

The difficulty of applying these exemptions in real life was revealed in Tallahassee, when Justice Barbara J. Pariente quizzed James A. McKee, the state attorney defending the Florida statute, about how the state went about “deciding whether my Bible is really a religious text, or if it is historical or something else.”

Mr. McKee quickly assured her that the revenue department left those constitutionally sensitive “content” decisions to the booksellers. “It’s similar to a statute that exempts certain food items,” he explained. “The grocery store is actually the one that makes the determination.”

Sounding a little shocked, Justice Pariente asked, “So they can say anything is religious and there is no challenge to it?”

Mr. McKee did not directly respond to her question — but booksellers have.

While there is no way of knowing how small bookshops decide what is an exempt “religious publication,” big national booksellers have developed definitions to guide their stores in Florida and other states with similar exemptions.

The problem is, their definitions are different.

Barnes & Noble recognizes a narrow category that includes the Bible and a short list of other “sacred texts,” including the Talmud and the Koran, according to Mary Ellen Keating, a company spokeswoman.

At Borders, the exemption is broader, including books on theology and religious history as well as Bibles, hymnals, prayer books and the sacred texts of all religions, according to Anne Roman, a spokeswoman there.

Hearing that, Ms. Morcroft said she was not surprised at the disparities. “I have friends who shop at a local Christian bookstore,” she said. “They say the only thing that’s ever tax-exempt there is the Bible.”

Like the many other tax and regulatory exemptions that have become available to religious organizations in America, the tax breaks for clergy housing expenses and religious publications benefit religion in ways that some critics say go beyond the limits of the Constitution.

Until several years ago, “it was inconceivable for most to think that religion might well be aggressively expanding its power in a way that is harmful to the public good,” said Marci A. Hamilton, a law professor at the Cardozo law school at Yeshiva University in New York and the author of “God vs. the Gavel: Religion and the Rule of Law,” which is critical of many religious exemptions, particularly in the areas of land use and family law.

But now, Professor Hamilton said, the power of religious entities “is at its apex.”

Defenders of these exemptions deny that they raise any questions of excessive power or constitutional violations. “Government deregulation of religion is consistent with a broader pattern of American government going back to the founding,” said Anthony R. Picarello Jr., vice president and general counsel of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a legal advocacy group in Washington.

“Providing special treatment is not always constitutionally required,” he said, “but it is constitutionally permissible.”

Andrew Lehren and Donna Anderson contributed to this article.

    Religion-Based Tax Breaks: Housing to Paychecks to Books, NYT, 11.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/11/business/11religious.html?hp&ex=1160625600&en=3e7ff24164bf9aae&ei=5094&partner=homepage

In the Congressional Hopper: A Long Wish List of Special Benefits and Exemptions

October 11, 2006
The New York Times
By DIANA B. HENRIQUES

For all their gains, some advocates for religious freedom see the last 15 years not as a time of increased accommodation for religious groups but as a long battle in which religious groups have had to fight hard just to hold their own against a tide of unsympathetic policies. Indeed, they say government must do more to protect religious institutions of all kinds from the hostile environment of modern America.

A Congressional wish list supported by some religious leaders and other advocacy groups would accomplish that.

One bill, H.R. 235, would exempt churches and other religious institutions — but not secular nonprofits — from the I.R.S. rule against partisan political endorsements by tax-exempt organizations. Another, H.R. 27, would grant religious employers even more leeway to discriminate on religious grounds in their hiring, specifically in job training programs paid for with federal tax dollars.

There’s also H.R. 2679, which passed in the House on Sept. 26 by a vote of 244 to 173. It would prohibit the courts from awarding damages, lawyers’ fees or costs to any plaintiff who successfully sues over possible violations of the establishment clause of the First Amendment, cases involving things like the erection of crosses or nativity scenes on public land.

The Public Prayer Protection Act, H.R. 4364, would protect the right of government officials “to express their religious beliefs through public prayer” by barring federal courts, including the Supreme Court, from hearing lawsuits raising constitutional objections to those prayers.

The list also includes the Workplace Religious Freedom Act, H.R. 1445 and S. 677, introduced last year with bipartisan support in both houses, which would amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to require employers to be more accommodating to the religious observances of their employees. The bills do not say whether religious employers would be exempt, as they are from the Civil Rights Act’s prohibition on discrimination based on religion.

Another bill, H.R. 1054, would transform into law the executive orders that created President Bush’s “faith-based initiative,” to make federal grants and contracts more available to religious groups.

Among those who think more should be done is Anthony R. Picarello Jr., vice president and general counsel of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty in Washington, one of a growing roster of law firms and legal advocacy groups ready to provide free legal help for religious groups or individual believers involved in First Amendment litigation or disputes.

“I don’t think we can say the climate for religious freedom is so dramatically improved that we don’t need these laws,” Mr. Picarello said.

There are still fierce battles over individual religious practices and the display of religious symbols on public property, he noted. And religious organizations — especially those outside the nation’s mainstream traditions, like small Latin American or Asian sects and non-Christian houses of worship like mosques, Orthodox synagogues and Hindu temples — still face discriminatory zoning decisions in towns across the country.

He is also concerned that the sexual abuse cases pending against the Catholic church will erode the longstanding judicial doctrine that protects religious employers from lawsuits by disgruntled clergy members and other employees.

“I don’t necessarily view the climate as improving,” he said, adding a few moments later: “The idea that special protection in the law for religion is unconstitutional has been rejected over and over and over. Yet all these statutes are under continuous attack.”

“A lot less frequently, perhaps,” he added, “but it hasn’t stopped.”

Given the broad and expanding benefits available to religious organizations, from tax breaks to government contracts, what explains the continuing complaints about a nationwide hostility toward religion and religious organizations?

A number of legal scholars say some justifiable discontent is warranted over the erratic path the Supreme Court has followed on First Amendment cases since 1990. Derek H. Davis, formerly the director of the J. M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies at Baylor University, said that although the courts had clearly become more accommodating to religion, “the whole landscape is in disarray about what the law is.”

But at a more human level, specialists on religious law said, basic changes in the workings of government — more lenient rules on revenue bonds, new tax breaks for faculty housing at church schools, higher barriers to workplace lawsuits, beneficial exemptions from licensing rules — just don’t attract the emotional lightning that flares over same-sex marriage and religious symbols on public land.

For example, a federal court ruled that a giant cross on city-owned land at the Mount Soledad Veterans Memorial in San Diego was unconstitutional and ordered it removed by August of this year. The public reaction was so fierce that Congress took less than six weeks in the summer to approve a law providing for the federal government to buy the site and preserve it intact.

Much of the angry talk about a national war on religion “is a reaction to modernity and the pace of change in our society,” said Edward R. McNicholas, a director of the religious institutions law practice at Sidley Austin. “People want to cling to their religious values as they encounter more cultures that are different and foreign to them. So the language of exclusion has been taken up in the political rhetoric.”

Beyond just the talk, the Becket Fund and other religious freedom advocacy groups can cite what they say are examples of unfair attacks on people of faith: a devout librarian fired for refusing to work on Sunday; a local zoning law that allows no churches; a student rebuked for saying “God bless you” to a classmate who sneezed. With the involvement of these advocacy groups, battles like these are getting far more attention, adding to the public concern about threats to religious freedom.

While many of these cases are quickly resolved with a single warning letter or sometimes just a telephone call, they leave a bitter aftertaste in the political arena, said the Rev. Barry Lynn, president of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Some scholars and leaders of faith worry that the real threat to religious vitality in the United States is not the “hostility” of a secular culture.

“What’s happening with all these tax breaks and exemptions is a soft, subconstitutional establishment of religion returning to the country,” said John Witte Jr., director of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at the Emory University law school. That increasing level of indirect support and patronage, he said, “breeds a level of dependency that I think is dangerous for both religion and government.”

Professor Davis, now the dean of humanities at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor in Belton, Tex., agreed with that view, but said he was also troubled that religious organizations were pursuing more regulatory exemptions even as more government money is heading their way through contracts, vouchers and grants under the faith-based initiative.

“That suggests to me that they don’t want government involved in monitoring religious institutions, but they want the benefits that government is dispensing anyway,” he said. “To me, that’s unfair. If you’re going to take government money, you should abide by the rules, like everyone else.”

    In the Congressional Hopper: A Long Wish List of Special Benefits and Exemptions, NYT, 11.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/11/business/11religside.html

In God’s Name

As Religious Programs Expand, Disputes Rise Over Tax Breaks

October 10, 2006
The New York Times
By DIANA B. HENRIQUES

The similarities between Holy Cross Village at Notre Dame, on the north side of South Bend, Ind., and Hermitage Estates, south of town, are almost disorienting. The two retirement communities have the same simple gabled ranch houses, with the same touches of brick and stone, clustered around a pond with the same fountain funneling spray into the air and ducks waddling down the grassy bank.

But the retired residents of Hermitage Estates pay an average of about $2,300 per unit in property taxes. The management of Holy Cross Village, the Brothers of Holy Cross, says that development should be exempt from property taxes, and it has taken that argument to court.

As the Brothers of Holy Cross, a Roman Catholic religious order, sees it, providing the elderly with the amenities of the village — a sense of security, social opportunities and various services to make independent living easier — is a charitable activity rooted in its pastoral mission to serve others.

Members of the St. Joseph County Property Tax Assessment Board of Appeals, all but one of them lifelong Catholics, see it differently. To them, a charitable ministry does not consist of providing lovely retirement living to affluent people. The current residents of Holy Cross Village have an average net worth of $1 million. Those with deposits on the units under construction are even better off, averaging $1.6 million.

If Holy Cross Village is not taxed, members of the assessment board point out, a heavier burden will fall on the working families in the county that are struggling to pay the taxes on their small homes in careworn communities like the west side of South Bend.

“I was educated by the Brothers of Holy Cross” at St. Joseph’s High School, “and I have a great deal of respect, love and affection for them,” said Dennis J. Dillman, a longtime board member. “But I think what they’re doing is just not right. And that is based on the values they taught me at their schools.”

The conflict in South Bend echoes disputes from Alaska to Florida that raise the following issue: As religious organizations of all faiths stretch their concept of mission far beyond traditional worship, should their traditional tax exemptions expand as well? Increasingly, government at all levels is answering yes.

The property tax exemption is one of the oldest tax breaks granted to religious organizations, but it is not the only one. Lawmakers and judges have also approved what amounts to special tax treatment for religious organizations and some of their employees, including exemptions on personal-income and payroll taxes, and have made it easier for them to get tax-exempt construction loans for purely religious projects.

Like the exemptions from federal and state regulations that have proliferated for religious groups in recent years, these tax breaks are widely defended both as an acknowledgment of religion’s contributions to society and as a barrier to unjustified government limitations on the liberty that religious organizations enjoy under the First Amendment.

But in some communities like South Bend, tolerance of religious tax breaks is fraying as local governments struggle to provide basic services with limited resources.

There are no national figures on how much money these tax breaks save religious organizations and on how much extra cost is shifted to other citizens. But a typical state, Colorado, reported that religious real estate valued at more than $1.1 billion was exempt from local property taxes there last year. Nationally, tax-exempt financing for religious organizations totaled at least $20 billion during the decade that ended last year.

Congressional budget records show that just the income tax breaks uniquely available for ministers, rabbis and other clergy members cost taxpayers just under $500 million a year.

And the price is almost certainly increasing, experts on taxation and congregational growth agreed, because today’s larger congregations need more land, employ more clergy members and pay them more money. Moreover, the definition of a religious mission is expanding beyond schools and hospitals to include operations as obscure as a biblical theme park in Florida and as upscale as a retirement community at Notre Dame.

Every state affords some type of property-tax exemption to churches, synagogues, mosques and other religious landowners, typically through statutes that also cover charities, libraries, museums, private schools and other secular nonprofit groups. Indeed, when the Supreme Court ruled on the constitutionality of this tax break in 1970 it noted approvingly that the benefits did not fall exclusively on churches.

But those venerable tax statutes did not envision the reality of modern congregations that operate athletic programs in their own gymnasiums or fitness centers, as well as bookstores, music and video production units, coffee shops, counseling services, ice cream parlors, child care programs and multimedia ministries that beam their messages from satellite dishes or television transmission towers.

Leonard A. Wychocki, president and chief executive of the Franciscan Sisters of Chicago Service Corporation, a Catholic organization hired to manage Holy Cross Village, says religious groups should not have to defend property tax exemptions. “When there were old people on the streets of New York City and Chicago, our sisters took them in,” he said. The exemption recognizes “the service such groups provide to society.”

No residents of Holy Cross Village will be coming in off the streets, of course. “People pay a lot of money to live in these places,” Mr. Wychocki acknowledged. “But they have a need beyond just a place to live. It’s around that need that we catalyze our services.”

Financial projections show that the project, if managed well, could eventually generate a surplus. That money, the project’s executives said, could help support other mission work of the Brothers of Holy Cross, including a ministry in Africa.

“If the county wants to argue that those dollars should go to west South Bend rather than West Africa, I can see their point,” Mr. Wychocki said. “You may agree or disagree — but then it’s your judgment, as opposed to the brothers’ judgment.”

He added, after an emphatic pause: “This is probably where religious freedom kicks in.”

Breaks on Property Taxes

Neat homes in landscaped clusters make up the first phase of what will be 256 units at Holy Cross Village at Notre Dame. Among the new units will be additional assisted-living and skilled-nursing units to expand the existing “continuum of care,” its management said. Three adjacent colleges, the University of Notre Dame among them, expand the cultural opportunities.

In style and luxury, the project compares favorably with competing retirement communities built by national developers nationwide. But there is a difference: Holy Cross Village describes itself as “a ministry of Brothers of Holy Cross.” As such, it is seeking a property tax exemption from the Property Tax Assessment Board of Appeals for St. Joseph County.

That rankles Ralph J. Wolfe, an assessment board member who is a resident of Hermitage Estates, a 49-unit neighborhood of retirees whose homeowners association provides services including maintenance and lawn care.

Mr. Wolfe, 77, is a retired tax assessor and a longtime veteran of the close-knit appeals board. He said his community, like Holy Cross Village, offers its retirees some amenities. “So maybe we should get ourselves a property tax exemption.”

He seemed to be teasing Terrance F. Wozniak, the deputy county attorney for St. Joseph County, who was listening. One of Mr. Wozniak’s biggest worries about losing the pending battle with Holy Cross is the ripple effects on the retirement communities in the county that do pay taxes.

The Indiana courts recognize a broad definition of charity, and exemptions already have been granted to a few much smaller religious-affiliated projects that care primarily for less healthy people, Mr. Wozniak said. But this case is different, he said: “It’s a case of escalation.” An exemption for the charitable care of needy older citizens is being stretched to cover “more and more luxurious facilities for people who, by and large, can pay their fair share.”

Each case lowers the hurdle for what constitutes a tax-exempt retirement community, he said.

The management of Holy Cross Village thinks the project’s mission fits well within both the Indiana definition of a “charitable purpose” and the federal standards for tax-exempt housing providers. The federal test requires, in part, that the project “be committed by established policy” to maintaining people as residents even if they become unable to pay, as the project’s investment documents explain.

There is nothing in writing that guarantees the project will keep indigent residents in place, said Lori McLaughlin, general counsel for the Franciscan Sisters management group. “It becomes a case of those guarantees bankrupting you,” she said.

But in lieu of a guarantee, the management has “nuns or brothers on the board saying, ‘We insist you provide care,’ ” Mr. Wychocki said. “It would be very rare for anybody to be asked to leave.”

Holy Cross Village initially paid the taxes the county demanded, but subsequently got court permission to hold off on future payments while its appeals go forward, according to Kevin Rose, a spokesman for the project’s management.

When the Brothers of Holy Cross appealed the county’s ruling to the Indiana Board of Tax Review last year, it lost. “A charitable purpose involves something beyond merely successfully marketing one’s services to seniors,” the review board said. “It implies some level of sacrifice on the part of the entity providing those services. It is this sacrifice that separates an ‘obviously charitable act’ from the everyday purposes and activities of man in general.”

The fight has now moved to the courts, where the project’s management hopes to fare better. “We thought we were within the orbit of what was considered to merit that exemption,” Mr. Wychocki said. “Now we just stand and shake our heads.”

While local tax authorities have been inconsistent in their rulings, many untraditional uses of land by disparate religious organizations of many faiths have already qualified for property tax exemptions somewhere in the country.

In June, for example, the Florida Legislature passed, and Gov. Jeb Bush signed, a law that ended a five-year effort by Orange County tax authorities in Orlando to collect about $300,000 a year in property taxes from Holy Land Experience, a biblical museum and theme park that had sought exemption as a religious ministry but had been repeatedly turned down by the county.

The park, where a pass good for a week costs $35 for adults and $23 for school-age children, advertises itself as a place that “brings the world of the Bible alive.” Its features include replicas of Calvary, the tomb of Jesus and the caves where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. It also includes a period re-creation of a Jerusalem street market, with actors in costume as the merchants and buyers; and the KidVenture area, with a wilderness rock-climbing wall, a “misting station” and toy and gift shops. A cafe and two snack bars serve “real Middle Eastern fare” from couscous and falafel to Goliath Burgers.

The county property appraiser’s office had insisted that the park, despite its biblical motif, was taxable, just like Disney World. The park’s founder, the Rev. Marvin J. Rosenthal, argued that it was a religious mission from start to finish, aiming to introduce religion to people in an entertaining and enlightening way.

In July 2005, a local judge ruled against the county, saying the biblical park’s intent was to “spread what it considers to be God’s word,” while the intent of Disney World “is indisputably to make money.” When the county decided to appeal that decision, the ministry that operates the park lobbied successfully for relief in Tallahassee.

A spokeswoman for Governor Bush said he signed the bill “merely to prevent future legal action and provide clarification of the law” on exemptions for religious property.

In 2003, the Minnesota Tax Court granted an exemption to an elaborate fitness center owned by the Country Bible Church in Ashby, explaining that the center — which included a weight room, tanning bed, video arcade and bookstore, as well as a small auditorium and prayer room — was used to attract new church members.

The church, with about 250 members, has a broad range of programs for children and teenagers, including a day school and toddler program. But it decided in 1996 that its rural location simply did not offer enough for young people, and it conceived the Destiny Center as a place where young people could form healthy habits and “strong, godly friendships,” according to its pastor.

“We’ve spent close to $1 million, including the building and staff, and we’ve never broken even,” said the Rev. Steven R. Quernemoen, who founded the church 25 years ago. “But the goal is not to run a for-profit business. The goal was to open a facility that is a safe environment for young kids and families.”

The two-story center, with a center gable soaring high over the entrance, opened in October 2000 a few miles from the church. Besides its fitness facilities, it has a gymnasium that offers room for rock concerts and for family events like wedding receptions, reunions or birthday parties. A day pass costs $4.69, including shower privileges. An annual family membership costs $500, but the elderly pay about half that. It is open most mornings and after school through the week, but is closed all day on Sunday.

Similarly, in 2002, the Washington State courts granted a tax exemption for the site of a religious broadcaster’s transmission tower. And in January the Pennsylvania Supreme Court reversed a 1959 decision that had denied tax exemptions to parking lots that serve houses of worship.

Legislative Success

Some religious organizations have had equal success with state legislators.

The Anchorage Baptist Temple, which has grown to 4,500 members during the 35-year tenure of the Rev. Dr. Jerry Prevo, is a big, muscular church on a 20-acre campus in eastern Anchorage. Its complex includes a 2,100-seat auditorium, several gymnasiums, a television station and the Anchorage Christian Schools, which serve about 750 students from preschool to 12th grade. The church also owns an assortment of individual properties, 10 of them tax-exempt.

In April 2004, city tax assessors revoked the exemption for four church-owned homes they said did not qualify as “parsonages” because they housed church day-school teachers, not the pastors or other “spiritual leaders” specified by law.

“We are a high-profile church,” said Pastor Prevo. “We were being picked on to make a public statement against tax exemptions generally.”

Any group as large as Anchorage Baptist Temple would probably have no trouble getting help from state lawmakers, even if its pastor did not have his own television show and even if one of the 16 men on its pastoral staff were not treasurer of the state Republican Party. Last May, after vigorous lobbying by the congregation, the Republican-controlled Alaska Legislature passed and Gov. Frank H. Murkowski signed a bill that extends the parsonage exemption to church-owned residential property occupied by educators at private religious or parochial schools.

The exemption, which does not cover faculty housing at secular schools, has been challenged in court by the local American Civil Liberties Union.

It is a tough fight, a lawyer for several big churches said, because a legislature that can constitutionally exempt a parsonage from the tax rolls can surely extend that exemption to homes a church provides to its schoolteachers.

And back in St. Joseph County, Ind., the Granger Community Church, a large United Methodist group, took exception to the county’s enforcement in 2001 of a long-overlooked law that limited the amount of tax-exempt acreage around a church to 15 acres — which left the church with 14.54 acres still on the tax rolls.

It lost in the courts but carried its fight to Indianapolis, and helped push through changes that eliminated the 15-acre cap.

Breaks on Borrowing

The Rev. Russell Lievers of the First Southern Baptist Church in Clarksville, Ind., a town of 22,000 across the Ohio River from Louisville, Ky., is understandably excited about the new fellowship hall his church is building.

At a price of roughly $2.5 million, the facility will contain a “middle-school-sized” gymnasium, he said, as well as a kitchen, meeting areas and classroom space. It will ease crowding at the 57-year-old church and open possibilities for new athletic ministries and outreach, he added.

Pastor Lievers is not familiar with the details for financing the new facility — but he knows the church has received a good interest rate on some of the money it is borrowing. That’s important, he said, because “our people are giving sacrificially” to support the new facility.

“There are people who are delaying their retirement for a few years to help us build this,” he continued. “Others are postponing purchases so they can give more.”

The explanation for the church’s low-cost financing is simple. It is relying on $1 million in tax-exempt revenue bonds sold on its behalf by the town of Clarksville, through its economic development commission.

“It is the first time we’ve had a church apply,” said Samuel K. Gwin, the town attorney. “But most of us here on the town council and economic development commission were familiar with the church, and the folks in the church. It’s a small town.”

The church bond issue is structured like any economic development deal: the town sells tax-exempt bonds to an investor — in this case, a local bank — willing to accept a lower yield because the interest is tax-free. The town lends the lower-cost money to the church. The bank gets tax-free interest income, the church gets a lower-cost loan and the town gets — well, at the least, a new gymnasium the community can use when the church’s calendar permits.

“That will be good,” Mr. Gwin said. “Even the Y is pretty crowded.”

In the evolving view of the courts, tax-exempt bonds for churches and other religious organizations do not involve any public money or government subsidy and do not run afoul of the First Amendment ban on government-sponsored religion.

But in fact, the subsidy provided by all tax-exempt bonds, while indirect, is real: buyers of the bonds do not have to pay income taxes on the interest they earn, which shifts some of the overall tax burden to other taxpayers. And the final beneficiary of the bond issue — in this case, the church — can hold on to money it would otherwise have paid in interest.

Of all the tools that an accommodating government can use to make life easier for religious organizations, perhaps none has changed more and been noticed less than tax-exempt bond financing.

State and local governments have long used tax-exempt bonds to finance public works like bridges and schools, pledging future tax income to repay the debt. In the 1970’s, they began to rely heavily on revenue bonds, debt backed not by taxes but by the future revenues of the projects they were sold to finance, which ranged from airports to stadiums. Through economic development agencies, revenue bonds also were sold for the benefit of private businesses to finance factories or office buildings that would foster economic development.

In 1973, near the high-water mark of the doctrine of strict church-state separation that dominated the postwar decades, the United States Supreme Court gave its limited blessing to public revenue bond deals to benefit private religious colleges — so long as they were not “pervasively sectarian” and regarded education, not the promulgation of religion, as their primary purpose.

In a landmark case called Hunt v. McNair, the court reasoned that “aid normally may be thought to have a primary effect of advancing religion” — which would be unconstitutional — if it went to “an institution in which religion is so pervasive that a substantial portion of its functions are subsumed in the religious mission, or when it funds a specifically religious activity in an otherwise substantially secular setting.”

As recently as 1991, the Virginia Supreme Court refused to approve tax-exempt financing for Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., founded and run by the Rev. Jerry Falwell, because of its overarching religious purposes.

Then, over the next eight years, judicial and government policy made a U-turn.

Gradually, state bond statutes became less restrictive toward religious institutions and federal and state appeals courts started to permit tax-free financing at unabashedly religious universities — and later, religious high schools — so long as the money was used for firmly secular projects, like dormitories and dining halls. (California courts have held on to the “pervasively sectarian” standard, but three religious schools are currently challenging that approach before the State Supreme Court.)

Does Financing Count as Aid?

And the courts began to widely question whether tax-exempt financing even counted as government aid to religion at all, because the schools themselves had to repay the bonds and no public money was involved.

In June 2000, Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for himself and three other justices, expressed second thoughts about denying tax-free financing to institutions based on how religious they were. “There was a period when this factor mattered, particularly if the pervasively sectarian school was a primary or secondary school,” he conceded. “But that period is one that the court should regret, and it is thankfully long past.”

A few months later, the Virginia Supreme Court reversed the position it had taken nine years earlier in the Liberty University case and approved tax-exempt bond financing for the construction of a campus for Regent University, a thoroughly sectarian institution founded by Pat Robertson, the religious broadcaster who also founded the Christian Coalition. The Virginia justices did balk at permitting Mr. Robertson to use public bond financing for his department of divinity; that would have to be financed in some other way, they said.

But that reluctance seems quaint these days. Early 2005 brought the sale of $28.5 million worth of tax-exempt bonds issued by Cook County, Ill., to finance the construction of an academic center for the Catholic Theological Union, the largest Catholic graduate school of theology in the United States.

The new building, which a seminary spokeswoman said would open this fall, includes space for the world-class Bechtold library of theology, spacious classrooms for religious study and “a worship area that has a sacred space for the entire community to gather,” according to the news release about its grand opening.

According to Jeffrey O. Lewis, a lawyer with Ice Miller in Chicago and the seminary’s bond counsel for that deal, “The ‘pervasively sectarian’ restriction began to fall apart in the late 1990’s, and quite a few firms are very comfortable doing seminary financing now.”

So it was perhaps inevitable that a local government would provide tax-exempt financing to an institution as indisputably sectarian and devoutly religious as the First Southern Baptist Church in Clarksville. “Nobody raised any questions about it at all,” recalled Mr. Gwin, the town attorney.

A search of the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board’s database shows that more than $20 billion in tax-exempt bonds have been sold since the late 1980’s on behalf of religious institutions or their affiliates, including deals benefiting a Jewish vocational workshop in Michigan, a Baptist retirement home in Arizona, a Presbyterian housing project in Missouri, Lutheran nursing homes and day care centers in Minnesota and Catholic schools in Rhode Island.

In one recent deal, the city of Olathe, Kan., agreed to sell more than $83.5 million in tax-free bonds to help an affiliate of the Archdiocese of Kansas City finance Santa Marta, described as a Catholic “continuing care retirement community” with 162 units for independent living, 32 assisted-living units, a 32-bed nursing home and a swimming pool.

Except for the swimming pool, Santa Marta sounds a lot like Holy Cross Village at Notre Dame, whose property tax status is being disputed by the tax assessment appeals board in St. Joseph County. They certainly have this in common: Most of the money needed to build Holy Cross Village has been borrowed at favorable interest rates through the sale of a $40 million tax-exempt bond — issued by the economic development commission of St. Joseph County.

Andrew Lehren and Donna Anderson contributed to this article.

    As Religious Programs Expand, Disputes Rise Over Tax Breaks, NYT, 10.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/10/business/10religious.html?hp&ex=1160539200&en=498771bc7b8314bc&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Evangelicals Blame Foley, Not the G.O.P.

October 9, 2006
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

VIRGINIA BEACH, Oct. 7 — As word of Representative Mark Foley’s sexually explicit e-mail messages to former pages spread last week, Republican strategists worried — and Democrats hoped — that the sordid nature of the scandal would discourage conservative Christians from going to the polls.

But in dozens of interviews here in southeastern Virginia, a conservative Christian stronghold that is a battleground in races for the House and Senate, many said the episode only reinforced their reasons to vote for their two Republican incumbents in neck-and-neck re-election fights, Representative Thelma Drake and Senator George Allen.

“This is Foley’s lifestyle,” said Ron Gwaltney, a home builder, as he waited with his family outside a Christian rock concert last Thursday in Norfolk. “He tried to keep it quiet from his family and his voters. He is responsible for what he did. He is paying a price for what he did. I am not sure how much farther it needs to go.”

The Democratic Party is “the party that is tolerant of, maybe more so than Republicans, that lifestyle,” Mr. Gwaltney said, referring to homosexuality.

Most of the evangelical Christians interviewed said that so far they saw Mr. Foley’s behavior as a matter of personal morality, not institutional dysfunction.

All said the question of broader responsibility had quickly devolved into a storm of partisan charges and countercharges. And all insisted the episode would have little impact on their intentions to vote.

It is too soon to tell if the scandal will affect the turnout of evangelical Christians, who make up about a quarter of the electorate and more than a third of Republican voters. Some of President Bush’s political advisers have said that pre-election reports in 2000 that Mr. Bush was once arrested for drunken driving depressed turnout among conservative Christians, nearly costing him the White House.

Pollsters and conservative leaders have said for months that grass-roots evangelicals were demoralized by what they felt was the Republicans’ failure to live up to their talk about social issues — to say nothing of the economy, the Iraq war and other issues that weigh more broadly across the electorate. A recent poll by the Pew Research Center showed a steep drop in conservative Christian support for Republicans, albeit without a corresponding gain for the Democrats.

Some in the crowd waiting outside the concert, by the evangelical group MercyMe, said the revelations about Mr. Foley, Republican of Florida, had redoubled their previous concerns about the Republican Party.

“The Republicans need to tighten up their ship,” said Wade Crane, a sign maker from Virginia Beach who said he usually voted Republican but had soured on the party in the last several months. “They need to stop covering themselves, using their power to protect themselves.”

Charles W. Dunn, dean of the school of government at Regent University, founded here by the religious broadcaster Pat Robertson, said that so many conservative Christians were already in a funk about the party that “the Foley issue just opens up the potential floodgate for losses.” The tawdry accusations, Mr. Dunn said, “give life” to the charges of Republican corruption that had been merely “latent” in the minds of many voters.

But as far as culpability in the Foley case, Mr. Dunn said, House Republicans may benefit from the evangelical conception of sin. Where liberals tend to think of collective responsibility, conservative Christians focus on personal morality. “The conservative Christian audience or base has this acute moral lens through which they look at this, and it is very personal,” Mr. Dunn said. “This is Foley’s personal sin.”

To a person, those interviewed said that Speaker J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois should resign if he knew of the most serious claims against Mr. Foley and failed to stop him. They said the degree of Mr. Hastert’s responsibility remained to be seen. Many said the issue had not changed their view of Congress because, in their opinion, it could not sink any lower.

But all also noted that the swift Democratic efforts to broaden the scandal to Mr. Hastert and other Republicans had added more than a whiff of partisanship to the stink of the scandal.

As the details were emerging last Tuesday, for example, Phil Kellam, the Democrat challenging Ms. Drake, called on her to demand Mr. Hastert’s immediate resignation. In a statement, Mr. Kellam said the House Republican leaders’ “lack of attention” was “perhaps more shocking” than what Mr. Foley had done.

Drew Lankford, a spokesman for Mr. Kellam, said the attacks on Ms. Drake had “painted her into a corner” because she was unwilling to denounce Mr. Hastert. Ms. Drake has said she will wait for a thorough investigation into what Mr. Hastert knew. (The matter has come up less in the Senate race between Mr. Allen and Jim Webb, the Democrat.)

Brian Courtney, a Republican-leaning sales manager attending the concert, said the Foley affair had led to “the kind of mudslinging one would expect to see at an election time like this.” He added that he was paying closer attention to the “values and character” of the candidates, and that he would probably vote Republican again.

Republicans have put up a vigorous defense, mainly through conservative allies and on talk radio. An e-mail message to talk-radio hosts from the Republican Party last week asked, “How would Democrats react if one of their own had a sexual relationship with an intern, was found out, then lied to a grand jury in an attempt to cover it up?”

Rush Limbaugh devoted much of his airtime to the Democrats’ defense of President Bill Clinton in the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Sean Hannity focused on former Representative Gerry Studds, a Massachusetts Democrat who in 1983 admitted having sex with a teenage male page, won re-election and served several more terms with the support of his colleagues.

Still, many conservative churchgoers said that what stood out for them was not the politics but the individual sin. “It is not going to affect my vote because I don’t live in Florida,” said Scott O’Connell, a mechanical engineer who described himself as a fundamentalist. “But there is a bigger moral issue which I would say is the prism I view this through: I do not believe in homosexuality.”

David Thomas, a father taking his family to the concert, said that he, too, was leaning toward voting Republican and that the scandal only reinforced his conservative Christian convictions. “That is the problem we have in society,” Mr. Thomas said. “Nobody polices anybody. Everybody has a ‘right’ to do whatever.”

In an interview on Friday, Pastor Anne Gimenez of the 15,000-member Rock Church here said the scandal “doesn’t change the issues we are voting on,” like abortion, public expression of religion and same-sex marriage.

The church has been actively registering parishioners and reminding them to vote.

“Every Sunday already,” Ms. Gimenez said.

    Evangelicals Blame Foley, Not the G.O.P., NYT, 9.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/09/us/politics/09conservatives.html?hp&ex=1160366400&en=0a8c742c5be6fc91&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Where Faith Abides, Employees Have Few Rights

October 9, 2006
The New York Times
By DIANA B. HENRIQUES

J. Jeffrey Heck, a lawyer in Mansfield, Ohio, usually sits on management’s side of the table. “The only employee cases I take are those that poke my buttons,” he said. “And this one really did.”

His client was a middle-aged novice training to become a nun in a Roman Catholic religious order in Toledo. She said she had been dismissed by the order after she became seriously ill — including a diagnosis of breast cancer.

In her complaint, the novice, Mary Rosati, said she had visited her doctor with her immediate supervisor and the mother superior. After the doctor explained her treatment options for breast cancer, the complaint continued, the mother superior announced: “We will have to let her go. I don’t think we can take care of her.”

Some months later Ms. Rosati was told that the mother superior and the order’s governing council had decided to dismiss her after concluding that “she was not called to our way of life,” according to the complaint. Along with her occupation and her home, she lost her health insurance, Mr. Heck said. Ms. Rosati, who still lacks health insurance but whose cancer is in remission, said she preferred not to discuss her experience because of her continuing love for the church.

In court filings, lawyers for the diocese denied her account of these events. If Ms. Rosati had worked for a business or almost any secular employer, she might have prevailed under the protections of the Americans With Disabilities Act. Instead, her complaint was dismissed in December 2002 by Judge James G. Carr of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio, who decided that the order’s decision to dismiss her “was an ecclesiastical decision” that was “beyond the reach of the court” because “the First Amendment requires churches to be free from government interference in matters of church governance and administration.”

Legislators and regulators are not the only people in government who have drafted special rules for religious organizations. Judges, too, have carved out or preserved safe havens that shield religious employers of all faiths from most employee lawsuits, from laws protecting pensions and providing unemployment benefits, and from laws that give employees the right to form unions to negotiate with their employers.

Some of these exemptions are rooted in long traditions, while others have grown from court decisions over the last 15 years. Together, they are expanding the ability of religious organizations — especially religious schools — to manage their affairs with less interference from the government and their own employees.

The most sweeping of these judicial protections, and the one that confronted the novice nun in Toledo, is called the ministerial exception. Judges have been applying this exception, sometimes called the church autonomy doctrine, to religious employment disputes for more than 100 years.

As a rule, state and federal judges will handle any lawsuit that is filed in the right place in an appropriate, timely manner. But judges will almost never agree to hear a controversy that would require them to delve into the doctrines, governance, discipline or hiring preferences of any religious faith. Citing the protections of the First Amendment, they have ruled with great consistency that congregations cannot fully express their faith and exercise their religious freedom unless they are free to select their own spiritual leaders without any interference from government agencies or second-guessing by the courts.

To do otherwise would be an intolerable government intrusion into employment relationships that courts have called “the lifeblood” of religious life and the bedrock of religious liberty, explained Edward R. McNicholas, co-chairman of the national religious institutions practice in the Washington, D.C., office of Sidley Austin, a law firm with some of the country’s largest religious organizations among its clients.

Judges have routinely invoked the ministerial exception to dismiss lawsuits against religious employers by rabbis, ministers, cantors, nuns and priests — those “whose ministry is a core expression of religious belief for that congregation,” as Mr. McNicholas put it.

But judges also have applied the exception to dismiss cases filed by the press secretary at a Roman Catholic church, a writer for The Christian Science Monitor, administrators at religious colleges, the disgruntled beneficiaries of a Lutheran pension fund, the overseer of the kosher kitchen at a Jewish nursing home and a co-founder of Focus on the Family, run by the conservative religious leader James C. Dobson. Court files show that some of these people were surprised to learn that their work had been considered a “core expression of religious belief” by their employer.

Religious employers have long been shielded from all complaints of religious discrimination by an exemption that was built into the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and expanded in 1972. That historic exemption allows them to give preference in hiring to candidates who share their faith. In recent years, some judges have also refused to interfere when religious groups have dismissed lesbians, unwed mothers and adulterous couples, even if they profess the same faith, because they have violated their employers’ religious codes.

A federal court decision has given religious broadcasters an exemption from some of the fair-hiring requirements of the Federal Communications Commission, even when they are hiring secretaries and receptionists. Two other decisions, one in federal court affecting a Mormon church and the other in a state court of appeals case involving a Roman Catholic nursing home, affirmed the right of religious employers to dismiss employees whose faith changed after they were hired.

“These are very difficult cases because they pull at some very fundamental heartstrings,” said Steven C. Sheinberg, a lawyer at Outten & Golden, specializing in employment law. “There’s our belief that employees should be free of discrimination in their work, versus our belief that religious organizations should be free to hire people who best help them fulfill their religious mission, without the intrusion of government.”

Employees at religious institutions face other risks as well, thanks to pension law exemptions granted by Congress and upheld by the courts. Religious employers are exempt from Erisa, the federal pension law that establishes disclosure requirements and conflict-of-interest restrictions for employee pension plans. That exemption has given rise to several cases in which workers at religious hospitals found that their pensions had vanished because of practices that would not have been allowed under Erisa’s rules.

A related exemption frees religious employers from participating in the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, the government-run insurance program that provides a safety net for corporate pension plans. And some significant court decisions in labor disputes in the last several years have made it easier for religious schools and colleges to resist collective bargaining efforts.

But for Mr. Heck, the question of whether these workplace exemptions are fair to religious employees was crystallized by the case of Ms. Rosati, the novice nun in Toledo.

He said the doctor involved in her case had been prepared to testify under oath on Ms. Rosati’s behalf. The doctor “had quite a vivid memory about these events.” In fact, Mr. Heck said, the doctor had cautioned the nuns who accompanied Ms. Rosati that it would be virtually impossible for the ailing novice to get affordable insurance anywhere else if she were dropped from the diocesan health.

Lawyers for the diocese disputed Ms. Rosati’s account of that visit and denied that health reasons were the causes of her rejection by the order, the Sisters of the Visitation of Holy Mary, which is covered by the diocesan health plan. For the court “to even begin to inquire into that decision-making process, we believe, crosses the line set by the First Amendment,” said Gregory T. Lodge, a lawyer for both the Toledo diocese and the order, which operates under papal authority.

“I understand and absolutely appreciate that in matters of religion, the state has no business meddling,” Mr. Heck said. “It would be unthinkable for a judge to be able to say, ‘Hey, I don’t like the way you’re interpreting the Book of Luke.’ ”

But what religious principle is offended when an employee simply grows old or becomes ill, he asked. If the answer is “none,” he continued, judges should be more willing to “look behind the curtain.”

Exemptions From Employee Suits

For 28 days last May, Lynette M. Petruska, a former nun who now lives in St. Louis, thought she had finally found judges willing to listen to her complaint against Gannon University, a coeducational Catholic college in downtown Erie, Pa. As it turned out, she was wrong.

Ms. Petruska was educated in Catholic schools from kindergarten to college commencement, graduated at the top of her law school class and practiced law for several years before deciding to become a nun. In 1999, as she was working toward taking her final vows, she became the first woman to serve as Gannon’s chaplain.

Three years later she was demoted and, according to her complaint, effectively forced out. In her lawsuit, she said this action was in response to her having notified the administration of a case of sexual misconduct by a senior university official, resisted efforts to cover up that case and opposed proposals to weaken campus policies on sexual harassment. In 2004, she sued, accusing the university administration of forcing her out simply because she was a woman and because she had opposed the sexual harassment others experienced on campus.

Gender bias claims against religious employers have generally been dismissed under the ministerial exception. But some judges across the country have been less quick to dismiss cases where sexual harassment or abuse of an employee is involved. And unlike many other plaintiffs, Ms. Petruska claimed that her supervisor had actually acknowledged to her that she was being demoted solely because of her sex, not because of any religious doctrine.

Judge Sean J. McLaughlin of the United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania nevertheless ruled that Gannon was protected by the First Amendment and the ministerial exception from any court interference in its choice of chaplain. Gannon itself argued that it had many women in leadership positions and that Ms. Petruska had resigned simply because she was unhappy with a staff reorganization. But its fundamental argument was that it would be unconstitutional for the court to second-guess these disputed decisions.

“You may ask, ‘Why should these decisions go unquestioned?’ The reason is plain and simple: The First Amendment protects a church’s right to freely exercise its religion,” said Evan C. Rudert, a lawyer for the university. “And that includes organizing itself as it chooses and selecting those who it believes will serve best as its leaders — without interference from the courts.”

Then, last May, in a decision that caused considerable comment in legal circles around the country, a federal appeals court panel reversed the trial judge’s decision.

For four weeks, the prevailing law in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware and the Virgin Islands — the jurisdiction of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit — was that “employment discrimination unconnected to religious belief, religious doctrine, or the internal regulations of a church is simply the exercise of intolerance, not the free exercise of religion.”

Appellate Judge Edward R. Becker wrote that opinion; his colleague on the three-judge panel, Judge D. Brooks Smith, filed a stinging dissent. A few days later, Judge Becker died. On June 20, in a rare move, the Third Circuit granted Gannon’s routine request to have the case reconsidered and named Judge Smith to the new three-judge panel that would do so.

On Sept. 6, the new panel swept the earlier decision away, unequivocally restoring the protections for religious employers that it had put in doubt. As Judge Smith put it, the ministerial exception “applies to any claim, the resolution of which would limit a religious institution’s right to choose who will perform particular spiritual functions.”

Ms. Petruska, who has left her order and returned home to work at her old law firm, describes herself as a feminist who is “committed to peace and freedom.” She has a long history of putting her words into action — she has been arrested at protest marches, most recently at an antiwar rally the day before the Iraq war began, she said. She plans to appeal the ruling against her.

“I think this issue needs to be decided by the Supreme Court,” she said. And she has hopes that the justices will agree with Judge Becker that, absent some grounding in religious doctrine, sex discrimination by religious employers is wrong.

No Recourse On Age Bias

Add age discrimination to that wish list, the Rev. John Paul Hankins says.

At 73, Mr. Hankins can look back on 50 years in a loving marriage, 40 years as a minister in the United Methodist Church — and 3 years as the plaintiff in an uphill court fight over his denomination’s mandatory retirement policy.

Eight months after he turned 70, that policy forced Mr. Hankins to leave his pulpit in the historic Stony Brook Community Church in Stony Brook, N.Y., where he had served for 37 years. He loved his flock and the feeling was mutual: the congregation withheld part of its annual contribution to the regional church that year to express its dismay.

“He had served for many, many years and wanted to continue to serve, and his congregation wanted that, too,” said David S. Warren, a professor of computer science at Stony Brook University who had been a member of the congregation for more than 25 years but who left because of how Mr. Hankins was treated.

Mr. Hankins said he was suing because age discrimination is almost as hateful and senseless to him as the racial segregation and bias against women that used to be “mandatory policies” of his church.

“I feel, and have long felt, that discrimination in any form has no place in the life of a faith community,” he said.

Under the federal age discrimination law, most employees of all but the smallest businesses can sue if they are forced to retire for no other reason than that they reached a certain birthday; increasingly, government and academic employees have the same protection. But Mr. Hankins knows his complaint will probably never come to trial simply because he is a clergy member trying to sue his church. Indeed, court rulings around the country suggest that if he had been forced out at any age and for almost any reason — for a deceptive reason, or even for no reason at all — he would face the same judicial roadblock.

“I never, ever thought that the last years of my ministry would be involved in a fight like this,” Mr. Hankins said.

Lawrence H. McGaughey, the lawyer for the regional Methodist governing body and its bishop, acknowledged that there is a movement in the church to eliminate the retirement rule opposed by Rev. Hankins. But if the rule is ultimately changed, it should be the church’s decision, not a court’s, he said.

“Any private employer would feel the same way — they’d like to be able to make these decisions without having to face the courts,” Mr. McGaughey said. “But the difference is the First Amendment.”

He continued: “We’re talking about worship here. Are you going to go into church and have someone standing there who was ordered to be there by the courts? There are certain things a government just cannot do in this country.”

In September 2003, a federal trial judge on Long Island ruled that Mr. Hankins’s complaint was barred by the ministerial exception. Last February, a federal appeals court panel sent the case back, directing the trial judge to decide the case by applying a 1993 federal law, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, rather than the ministerial exception doctrine. But there was little in the instructions to the trial court to encourage Mr. Hankins.

He nevertheless thinks his complaint will eventually help his church see that its mandatory retirement rule is unfair.

“I don’t need to win the case,” Mr. Hankins said. “I feel the movement of history at work here, I really do. Ideas find their feet, and start to walk.”

State judges have been equally reluctant to interfere in disputes between religious employers and their staff members — to the sad frustration of Rabbi Isaac H. Celnik of Albuquerque.

Rabbi Celnik, one of the youngest men ever ordained in Conservative Judaism, was just 30 when he was hired in 1971 as the spiritual leader of Congregation B’nai Israel. Eight years later, he entered into a 30-year contract with the synagogue, an arrangement his congregation endorsed by a margin of almost nine to one, he said.

Then the medical problems began. In 1996, Rabbi Celnik was told he was in the early stages of Parkinson’s disease; in April 2000, his wife, Peggy, was told she had breast cancer. In October 2000, he said, the president of the congregation’s governing board at the time suggested he retire on disability.

But the rabbi did not consider himself disabled and did not want to retire, he said. He had two young children and a wife whose treatment required continuing health insurance. He “loved the work, and loved the congregation,” he said. Indeed, when the synagogue’s cantor resigned a month after the retirement discussion, Rabbi Celnik proposed, and the board agreed, that he would take on the cantor’s duties as well, he said.

But the relationship deteriorated as he tried to negotiate retirement terms that would provide him and his family with adequate financial security. In January 2002, after those negotiations faltered, he was dismissed; in 2003, he sued. But last February, the state’s court of appeals dismissed his case, based on the ministerial exception, also called the church autonomy doctrine.

“We are sympathetic to Rabbi Celnik’s struggles with Parkinson’s and the manifestation of the disease after so many years of service,” the chief judge wrote. But he ruled that the dispute “is precisely the type of religious debate that the church autonomy doctrine is intended to protect from judicial review.”

The congregation’s current president, Alan M. Chodorow, declined to discuss the details of the dispute. “I do not want to talk about anything that might impair our search for reconciliation and forgiveness” with Rabbi Celnik, he said. “But I will say that we believe strongly in the separation of church and state, and that the state should not have any part in choosing our spiritual leaders.”

But Mr. Chodorow said that he was sympathetic to the situation that this freedom for congregations created for employees and that he believed that religious institutions have to provide other protections by contract. Although clergy members in many faiths work without formal contracts, the model contract in wide use within Conservative Judaism provides that rabbis and cantors can terminate the agreement without cause and seek binding arbitration to resolve disputes, he said.

The church autonomy doctrine “takes away certain rights and this is put in specifically for the purpose of preserving rights,” Mr. Chodorow said.

Rabbi Celnik and his wife continue to struggle with the financial and physical burdens of his deteriorating health and her second episode of cancer. “They don’t teach this in rabbinical school,” the rabbi said in a recent interview. Teach what? Mrs. Celnik answered before he could: “Don’t get old. Don’t get sick.”

Mr. McNicholas, the Sidley Austin lawyer, acknowledged that some “unjust and sinful” treatment has been protected from litigation by the ministerial exception. But he argued that “the openness of the religious process” would remedy those situations, making it possible for a clergy member dismissed by one congregation to find a home in another.

But what if they are sick? “That’s harder — and very troubling,” Mr. McNicholas said. “But if you have a judge deciding it, that’s just too much intervention in the process of deciding the hiring issues” at religious institutions. “There’s no easy answer.”

Protections Against Unionization

The University of Great Falls, in Montana, has a tidy urban campus, a bold crucifix-topped chapel, a master’s program in criminal justice and, according to one student’s Internet posting, a cafeteria that serves pretty good spaghetti.

What the small Roman Catholic college doesn’t have is a faculty union.

It wasn’t for lack of trying. In 1995, the Montana Federation of Teachers, which had unionized most of the public universities in Montana, asked the National Labor Relations Board to recognize it as the collective bargaining agent for the teaching staff at Great Falls.

“Some of the faculty members there traveled in circles that included professors at the other schools,” recalled James McGarvey, who was president of the Montana Federation of Teachers at the time. (It has since merged with the Montana Education Association.) Teachers at those other campuses had better pay and more favorable work rules, and some professors at Great Falls had expressed interest in seeing whether the federation could help them as well, according to Mr. McGarvey. “We felt we had a pretty strong showing,” he said.

J. C. Weingartner, a union lawyer who worked on the campaign, said that while “pay did come into it, it wasn’t what got it started.” That spark was discontent among some professors over the president’s appointing members to an important advisory council who “did not reflect the views of the majority of the faculty” in negotiations with the administration, he said. “So they felt their interests would be better served with collective bargaining.”

The university, which has a new management team today, declined to comment on the long legal battle.

But when the labor board held a hearing on the union’s request, the university’s lawyers argued that the board had no jurisdiction because the university was a religious institution, and to force it to negotiate with the union would violate its religious liberty.

The university based its case largely on a 1979 decision in which the United States Supreme Court ruled that the labor board’s jurisdiction did not extend to religious schools. After that decision, which resulted in what is called the Catholic Bishop doctrine, the board began case-by-case examinations to determine whether the schools that came before it were sufficiently religious — whatever their faith — to be exempt from its jurisdiction.

The University of Great Falls did not qualify, the board concluded in February 1996.

For the next seven years, the little Catholic college fought both the federal labor board and the faculty union, keeping lots of lawyers busy and incurring official charges of unfair labor practices in the process. In 2002, it won.

The federal appeals court panel in Washington ruled that a three-prong test should be the labor board’s only standard for determining which schools were religious enough to be exempt from the nation’s collective bargaining laws under the Catholic Bishop decision.

Any school that is nonprofit, has a religious affiliation and presents itself to the public as a religious institution must be exempted from jurisdiction, the court said. And that included the University of Great Falls.

And the court ruled that the labor board’s old case-by-case approach had to stop immediately. For the board even to conduct such inquiries raised serious issues of religious freedom, the judges said.

Of course, some casually faithful or broadly tolerant schools that might previously have failed to win a labor board exemption would easily pass the court’s new test.

The appellate judges anticipated that complaint, and dismissed it. “If the university is ecumenical and open-minded, that does not make it any less religious, nor N.L.R.B. interference any less a potential infringement of religious liberty,” they said.

David Strom, general counsel of the American Federation of Teachers in Washington, doesn’t mince words about the impact of the Great Falls decision. “It means that the difficulty of organizing a religiously affiliated college has become enormous.”

Although federal statistics show that one of every seven colleges in the country describes itself as a religious institution, it is not clear how far-reaching the Great Falls decision will be. On its face, it would seem likely to reduce any union-driven salary pressures on exempt religious schools, allowing them to maintain more competitive tuition levels. However, some colleges that might be eligible for an exemption under the new rules may already have collective bargaining in place or may not oppose unions as fiercely as the Montana university did.

And the decision limits only the protections of the National Labor Relations Act. But last fall, in a case involving teachers at Catholic schools in Boston, a federal district judge in Massachusetts ruled that part of another federal labor statute called the Taft-Hartley Act could not be applied to church-operated schools without raising First Amendment issues.

Notwithstanding the protracted battle in Great Falls, Catholic institutions are not doctrinally opposed to collective bargaining, said Julie N. Secviar, senior vice president for strategic resources for the Franciscan Sisters of Chicago Service Corporation, which manages Catholic hospitals, nursing homes and retirement communities.

In fact, the ethical health care directives of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops require “recognition of the rights of employees to organize and bargain collectively without prejudice to the common good.”

Next, Exemptions for Hospitals?

At the other end of the spectrum stand the Seventh Day Adventists, a Christian denomination with more than 14 million members worldwide. Like many denominations, it provides global humanitarian relief and maintains a large network of church schools and colleges, including Loma Linda University in California. But it also operates the largest Protestant nonprofit health care system in the country, with 38 hospitals in 10 states, 23 nursing homes and 44,000 employees.

And not one of those employees is in a union, for a very simple reason: The church believes that collective bargaining “defies Christ’s admonitions that behavior must be directed by individual conscience” and “is inherently disruptive” of the church’s healing mission, as lawyers for the denomination first explained to the national labor board in 1998.

The lawyers were responding to a petition by the California Nurses Association to represent the nonsupervisory nurses employed at Ukiah Valley Medical Center.

As in the Great Falls case, the lawyers argued that the labor board had no jurisdiction because the hospital was a religious institution and to force it to recognize or bargain with a union would violate its freedom under the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

As in the Great Falls case, the labor board ruled otherwise. The next step should have been union balloting, explained Jeffrey A. Berman, the Sidley Austin lawyer who represented the hospital in the case. But the nursing association withdrew its petition and the case ended, he said.

According to the American Hospital Association, about one of every four of its members has a religious affiliation. But the Adventists’ problem before the labor board was that hospitals, unlike religious schools, were specifically included in the board’s jurisdiction by Congress. The only labor-law accommodation that Adventists have been able to win from Congress was a provision in 1974 allowing church members to pay the equivalent of their union dues to one of several agreed-upon secular charities, according to Mr. Berman.

Adventist hospitals are still waiting for their own Great Falls moment. As Mr. Berman put it, “We’re not asking for carte blanche, for the ability to be exempt from all laws — just with respect to what is unique about these hospitals.”

Andrew Lehren conducted computer analysis for this series, and Donna Anderson provided online research assistance.

    Where Faith Abides, Employees Have Few Rights, NYT, 9.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/09/business/09religious.html?hp&ex=1160366400&en=7e43e6930b16bf7c&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Amish children knew their killer

Milkman was a popular figure on his rounds

October 08, 2006
The Sunday Times
Tony Allen-Mills, Paradise

THERE were no children to greet Charles Roberts the last time he collected milk from the Fisher family farm near the Pennsylvania town of Paradise. It was in the early hours of last Monday and the excited young Amish girls who often ran out to greet his arrival were inside asleep.

As a tanker driver for a Lancaster County dairy, Roberts was well known to farmers as one of the few “Englishers” — the Amish term for outsiders — who were allowed to pay regular visits to the community’s old-fashioned farms.

On his daytime rounds he was routinely besieged by inquisitive children who clamoured for lollipops and stories about an outside world that was rarely mentioned by their stern and protective parents.

Roberts finished his night shift at 3am on Monday and returned in darkness to his home in nearby Bart Township. The next time he saw the Fisher children that day, he lined them up against the wall of their classroom and shot them in the back of the head.

The disclosure that Roberts may have known some of the children he murdered in a still-unexplained explosion of violence at the West Nickel Mines Amish school last Monday has added a startling twist to a uniquely American tragedy.

The killings at the heart of the Amish community’s Pennsylvania homeland shattered the zealously guarded serenity of a quaintly archaic religious order that has somehow flourished despite turning its back on modern distractions such as electricity, telephones and cars.

Police initially thought Roberts chose his victims at random, but evidence is mounting that the 32-year-old deliberately targeted the Amish schoolgirls. “I’m sure he knew the girls,” said Stephen Sipos, who lives across the road from the Roberts family. “The milk drivers were always joking around with the kids.”

Among the 10 girls Roberts seized in a planned assault a few hours after he finished work was Marian Fisher, 13, and her 11-year-old sister Barbie, both of whom bravely offered to die in exchange for the lives of the others. A third Fisher sister escaped; neighbours confirmed the Fisher farm was a regular stop on Roberts’s milk route.

As the Amish sought seclusion after the agonies of a public ordeal, there were no easy answers to awkward questions about what provoked Monday’s mayhem, and whether something happened on Roberts’s rounds to propel him to murder the girls.

There were also fears among criminal experts that respect for Amish traditions and the reluctance of Pennsylvania police to intrude may hamper a promised investigation into the motives of a mild-mannered milkman who turned out to be seething with maniacal rage.

After a few hours’ sleep last Monday, Roberts was up at 7.30am helping his wife Marie get their children Abigail, seven, and Bryson, five, ready for school. The couple also had an 18-month-old baby, Carson.

At 8.45am the couple walked the children to their yellow school bus. Paula Derby, a neighbour, said it was unusual to see Roberts on a Monday because he often worked an early shift collecting the weekend milk.

She smiled when Roberts hugged and kissed his children and told them: “Remember, Daddy loves you.” It was a touching gesture from a man whose friends would later describe as a devoted father and husband.

Roberts was due to have a random drug test required by his employer, Northwest Foods. Yet after his wife left for a prayer meeting, he drove to a hardware store and bought steel bolts, plastic ties and wooden planks.

By the time he reached the Amish school in White Oak Road about a mile from his home it was 10am and he was carrying a 9mm semi-automatic pistol, a 300,000-volt stun gun, two shotguns, 600 rounds of ammunition and an assortment of chains and restraining devices.

Police later discovered that he had also brought lavatory paper, a change of clothes and two tubes of the sexual lubricant K-Y Jelly. The only possible conclusion, said Commander Jeffrey Miller of the Pennsylvania state police, was that he intended to “dig in for a long siege”. Police also think he may have been planning to abuse the girls sexually.

There were four adults and 26 children aged between six and 13 in the one-room schoolhouse when Roberts arrived. Beneath the blackboard hung a small sign that read “Visitors brighten people’s days”.

Two of the adults ran away when Roberts appeared with a gun. There are no telephones in Amish schools so Emma Mae Zook, a 20-year-old teacher, ran across fields to raise the alarm. Emma Fisher, nine, slipped out of the classroom, leaving her two sisters behind.

Roberts ordered the 15 boys and two remaining adults to leave. As soon as they were gone he began hammering planks against the door, barricading himself and 10 girls inside. He ignored Marian’s request that he shoot her first and let the others go. “Shoot me next,” pleaded Barbie.

He was still tying the girls’ feet with wire when the first police arrived at 10.45am. Roberts immediately telephoned his wife to tell her: “I’m not coming home. The police are here.”

As his dumbfounded wife struggled to understand what he was saying, Roberts told her he was filled with guilt and remorse because he had molested two younger relatives 20 years ago. He also told her where to find suicide notes. In one of the notes he said he had never recovered from the death of his daughter, Elise, who was born prematurely in 1997 and lived for only 20 minutes.

“It changed my life forever,” he wrote. “I am filled with so much hate, hate towards myself, hate towards God and unimaginable emptiness.”

Just after 11am Roberts answered a call from police. He warned that he would open fire on the children if they did not back away. The police never had a chance to respond. Within seconds they heard gunfire.

When state troopers smashed through the barricaded door, they found the most harrowing of scenes. Roberts had walked down the line of girls, shooting them in the back of the head. He fired 13 shots from his pistol and four magnum rounds, each containing 12 buckshot pellets, from a shotgun. Then he reloaded the pistol and fired a single shot into his head.

Two girls died at the scene and three more in hospital, among them Marian Fisher. A sixth has been taken off life support and is expected to die at home. Barbie Fisher was badly wounded but is expected to survive. The others are in a critical condition.

America has become used to the dreadful aftermath of school shootings — there were two in Colorado and Wisconsin the week before Roberts’s rampage, and President George W Bush has ordered a summit this week to discuss school safety.

Yet many Americans agreed there was something unfathomably cruel about the assault on a community as peaceful and devout as the Amish. People are no longer surprised about eruptions of violence in inner city ghettos or seething suburbs. But this was Lancaster County, home of the horse-drawn buggy and long-bearded farmers who do not wear wristwatches, let alone carry guns.

In reality the Amish are not nearly as otherworldy as sometimes portrayed. Over the years they have made numerous compromises to accommodate today’s world without abandoning their beliefs that life should not be “easy”, and that modern appliances breed laziness and distance from God.

Ironically it was their success as dairy farmers that produced one of the biggest — and most controversial — compromises. As production soared, dairies demanded the replacement of old-fashioned churns with bulk stainless steel tanks. The Amish agreed to install automatic churners — albeit battery-powered — despite traditionalists’ warnings that opening the doors to modern techniques would invite ruin.

Instead the Amish prospered and multiplied — their population has doubled to 180,000 in the past 20 years — but the price they paid was the arrival of outsider dairymen like Roberts.

“The milkman was our contact with the outside world,” said Ruth Garrett, who grew up in an Amish family before being expelled when she fell in love with an outsider.

“He and the (animal) feed man were the people who would come to the farm and the kids would chase them around and you could sit down and ask them what the world outside was like. We were shielded from everything as Amish kids . . . what we knew we learned from the milkman.”

Did Roberts have that kind of relationship with some of the children he killed? Did he give them lollipops and rides in his truck? Did he try to molest one of the girls and become angry when he was rebuffed? These questions have arisen because of what both police and criminal psychologists agree is a mass murderer’s profile that does not yet make sense. Police have investigated Roberts’s claims to have abused two of his relatives when they were four or five years old, and the young women do not remember a thing; nor does any relative believe such abuse occurred.

Psychiatrists acknowledge that the death of his baby may have filled him with anger, but most consider it unlikely he would suddenly explode nine years later without exhibiting any sign of stress.

His cousin, Ben Hildebrand, insisted: “There was not a drop of anger in him.” His wife Marie said in a statement: “The man who did this is not the man I married.”

According to Peter Ash, director of psychiatric services at Emory University, Roberts probably had “a very detailed inner life that simply nobody knew about”.

Some specialists speculated that Roberts may have been molested himself, and that he may have developed fantasies about molesting the Amish girls. In a 1995 study of murder-suicides, Alan Felthous of Southern Illinois University identified a class of “pseudo-commando” killer who may develop a paranoid delusion that a group of people is either “out to get him”, or is secretly taunting him.

Roberts may have fixated on young Amish girls, Felthous said: “It’s conceivable he would direct his hostilities towards them.”

When police revealed Roberts’s relatives were “absolutely sure” they had not been molested by him, Miller, the police commander, said his team would “try to determine what other motive there may have been”.

But other experts said there was little likelihood police would mount an aggressive effort to interview Amish parents about whether their daughters knew Roberts and how he may have behaved towards them.

The murderer is dead and there is no criminal case to prepare. Pennsylvania is immensely protective of the Amish — not least because of the tourism revenues they generate — and is unlikely to countenance further intrusion into a grieving community. It rained heavily in Nickel Mines on Friday. Outside the home of one of the murdered girls, a dozen black buggies were drawn up, signalling that the Amish community was looking after its own. “There is rarely a real inquiry into the motivation of the worst mass shooters,” said Kristin Rand of the Violence Policy Center, which lobbies for gun control. “It is not really a law enforcement function and I doubt we are going to see a proper psychological evaluation.” She paused. “That may be why these things keep happening.”

    Amish children knew their killer, STs, 8.10.2006, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2393640,00.html

In God’s Name

As Exemptions Grow, Religion Outweighs Regulation

October 8, 2006
The New York Times
By DIANA B. HENRIQUES

At any moment, state inspectors can step uninvited into one of the three child care centers that Ethel White runs in Auburn, Ala., to make sure they meet state requirements intended to ensure that the children are safe. There must be continuing training for the staff. Her nurseries must have two sinks, one exclusively for food preparation. All cabinets must have safety locks. Medications for the children must be kept under lock and key, and refrigerated.

The Rev. Ray Fuson of the Harvest Temple Church of God in Montgomery, Ala., does not have to worry about unannounced state inspections at the day care center his church runs. Alabama exempts church day care programs from state licensing requirements, which were tightened after almost a dozen children died in licensed and unlicensed day care centers in the state in two years.

The differences do not end there. As an employer, Ms. White must comply with the civil rights laws; if employees feel mistreated, they can take the center to court. Religious organizations, including Pastor Fuson’s, are protected by the courts from almost all lawsuits filed by their ministers or other religious staff members, no matter how unfairly those employees think they have been treated.

And if you are curious about how Ms. White’s nonprofit center uses its public grants and donations, read the financial statements she is required to file each year with the Internal Revenue Service. There are no I.R.S. reports from Harvest Temple. Federal law does not require churches to file them.

Far more than an hourlong stretch of highway separates these two busy, cheerful day care centers. Ms. White’s center operates in the world occupied by most American organizations. As a religious ministry, Pastor Fuson’s center does not.

In recent years, many politicians and commentators have cited what they consider a nationwide “war on religion” that exposes religious organizations to hostility and discrimination. But such organizations — from mainline Presbyterian and Methodist churches to mosques to synagogues to Hindu temples — enjoy an abundance of exemptions from regulations and taxes. And the number is multiplying rapidly.

Some of the exceptions have existed for much of the nation’s history, originally devised for Christian churches but expanded to other faiths as the nation has become more religiously diverse. But many have been granted in just the last 15 years — sometimes added to legislation, anonymously and with little attention, much as are the widely criticized “earmarks” benefiting other special interests.

An analysis by The New York Times of laws passed since 1989 shows that more than 200 special arrangements, protections or exemptions for religious groups or their adherents were tucked into Congressional legislation, covering topics ranging from pensions to immigration to land use. New breaks have also been provided by a host of pivotal court decisions at the state and federal level, and by numerous rule changes in almost every department and agency of the executive branch.

The special breaks amount to “a sort of religious affirmative action program,” said John Witte Jr., director of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at the Emory University law school.

Professor Witte added: “Separation of church and state was certainly part of American law when many of today’s public opinion makers were in school. But separation of church and state is no longer the law of the land.”

The changes reflect, in part, the growing political influence of religious groups and the growing presence of conservatives in the courts and regulatory agencies. But these tax and regulatory breaks have been endorsed by politicians of both major political parties, by judges around the country, and at all levels of government.

“The religious community has a lot of pull, and senators are very deferential to this kind of legislation,” said Richard R. Hammar, the editor of Church Law & Tax Report and an accountant with law and divinity degrees from Harvard.

As a result of these special breaks, religious organizations of all faiths stand in a position that American businesses — and the thousands of nonprofit groups without that “religious” label — can only envy. And the new breaks come at a time when many religious organizations are expanding into activities — from day care centers to funeral homes, from ice cream parlors to fitness clubs, from bookstores to broadcasters — that compete with these same businesses and nonprofit organizations.

Religious organizations are exempt from many federal, state and local laws and regulations covering social services, including addiction treatment centers and child care, like those in Alabama.

Federal law gives religious congregations unique tools to challenge government restrictions on the way they use their land. Consequently, land-use restrictions that are a result of longstanding public demands for open space or historic preservation may be trumped by a religious ministry’s construction plans, as in a current dispute in Boulder County, Colo.

Exemptions in the civil rights laws protect religious employers from all legal complaints about faith-based preferences in hiring. The courts have shielded them from many complaints about other forms of discrimination, whether based on race, nationality, age, gender, medical condition or sexual orientation. And most religious organizations have been exempted from federal laws meant to protect pensions and to provide unemployment benefits.

Governments have been as generous with tax breaks as with regulatory exemptions. Congress has imposed limits on the I.R.S.’s ability to audit churches, synagogues and other religious congregations. And beyond the federal income tax exemption they share with all nonprofit groups, houses of worship have long been granted an exemption from local property taxes in every state.

As religious activities expand far beyond weekly worship, that venerable tax break is expanding, too. In recent years, a church-run fitness center with a tanning bed and video arcade in Minnesota, a biblical theme park in Florida, a ministry’s 1,800-acre training retreat and conference center in Michigan, religious broadcasters’ transmission towers in Washington State, and housing for teachers at church-run schools in Alaska have all been granted tax breaks by local officials — or, when they balked, by the courts or state legislators.

These organizations and their leaders still rely on public services — police and fire protection, street lights and storm drains, highway and bridge maintenance, food and drug inspections, national defense. But their tax exemptions shift the cost of providing those benefits onto other citizens. The total cost nationwide is not known, because no one keeps track.

When Values Collide

Few Americans dispute the value of protecting religious liberty. The framers of the Constitution opened the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights with language preserving religious freedom with two clear goals in mind, constitutional scholars agree.

First, they wanted to assure that everyone, even members of small and possibly unpopular sects, could practice their faith without fearing the kind of persecution that many had experienced in their home countries, where a dominant religion was allied with the state. Just as important, the framers wanted to prevent the government from ever being captive to a particular religion or set of beliefs at the expense of people of other faiths.

Over the last two centuries, many scholars say, this tradition of religious freedom and tolerance, a radical concept in the 18th century, has helped this country avoid the spasms of sectarian violence that have erupted in countries from Ireland to India and attracted immigrants bringing talents from across the world.

Some legal scholars and judges see the special breaks for religious groups as a way to prevent government from infringing on those religious freedoms.

“Never forget that the exercise of religion is a constitutionally protected activity,” said Douglas Laycock, a law professor at the University of Michigan who has written and testified in support of greater legislative protection for religious liberty. “Regulation imposes burdens on the free exercise of religion. Exemptions lift those burdens.” He added, “That is constitutionally a good thing.”

Precious as protecting religious freedom is, however, there are cases where these special breaks collide with other values important in this country — like extending the protections of government to all citizens and sharing the responsibilities of society fairly.

Religious organizations defend the exemptions as a way to recognize the benefits religious groups have provided — operating schools, orphanages, old-age homes and hospitals long before social welfare and education were widely seen as the responsibility of government.

But while ministries that run soup kitchens and homeless shelters benefit from these exemptions, secular nonprofits serving the same needy people often do not. And rather than just rewarding charitable works that benefit society, these breaks are equally available to religious organizations that provide no charitable services to anyone.

Similarly, religious nonprofit groups that run nationwide broadcasting networks, produce best-selling publications or showcase a charismatic leader’s books and speeches can take advantage of exemptions that are not available to secular nonprofit groups — not to mention for-profit companies — engaged in the same activities.

Any government oversight of religious groups must fit within the First Amendment’s command that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

For most of the past half-century, courts interpreted the first part of that clause as a barrier to government action that seemed to treat religious groups more favorably than secular ones, legal scholars said. But today, many lawyers agree, courts are taking a more accommodating view of government actions that benefit religious groups.

The willingness of the federal courts to accept these arrangements increased considerably under the influence of William H. Rehnquist when he was chief justice of the Supreme Court, said Derek H. Davis, until recently the director of the J. M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies at Baylor University in Waco, Tex.

“Clearly, we’re going to be in this accommodative mode for some time,” added Mr. Davis, who sees Chief Justice Rehnquist’s successor, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. as likely to follow in Chief Justice Rehnquist’s footsteps on cases affecting religious groups.

The problem is, efforts to protect the free exercise of religion can clash with efforts to assure that religion is not favored by the government.

Besides regulatory exemptions and special tax breaks, some of which have been in place for decades, religious organizations have recently become eligible for an increasing stream of federal grants and contracts from state and federal governments. This policy shift began in 1996 under President Clinton, and has continued with greater force under President Bush. Known in the Bush administration as the Faith Based Initiative, it has drawn considerable attention in political, religious and academic circles.

But the broader tapestry of regulatory and tax exemptions for religious groups has gone largely unacknowledged. Indeed, some religious leaders and politicians — focusing not on these special accommodations but on issues like the display of religious icons on public land — argue that religious groups in America are targets of antagonism, not favoritism. House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois, in introducing a legislative agenda last July, said, “Radical courts have attempted to gut our religious freedom and redefine the value system on which America was built.”

In March, hundreds of people and a number of influential lawmakers attended a conference called “The War on Christians and the Values Voter in 2006” in Washington and applauded the premise that religion was under attack.

Society “treats Christianity like a second-class superstition,” Tom DeLay, then a Republican representative from Texas, told the crowd. “Seen from that perspective, of course there is a war on religion.”

The argument that religious groups are victims of discrimination drew a sigh from Ms. White, the day care director in Alabama, where licensed day care centers are finding it harder to compete with unlicensed faith-based centers that do not have to comply with expensive licensing requirements.

James E. Long, a deputy attorney general for Alabama’s department of human resources, acknowledged that licensed day care operators have complained time and again that the exemption is unfair. “But I am unaware of any bill ever having been introduced” that would eliminate it, Mr. Long said. “That would be a very contentious issue. I’m sure the churches would want to be heard on that.”

Breaks for Social Services

On an early summer day at the Harvest Temple Church of God in Montgomery, a lively group of older children tossed soccer balls around a dim, cool gymnasium. In a smaller room to the side, staff members rocked sleeping infants and comforted cranky toddlers.

This bustling church-based center, next to the church sanctuary in a well-tended middle-class neighborhood, covers its costs and helps support the work of the church, the church pastor said.

“We have talked about getting licensed before in the past, but it would cost us quite a bit of money,” Pastor Fuson said. The staff would probably be large enough to meet state standards, he said, but the center would need costly renovations to upgrade the facilities.

Ms. White, whose licensed program, Auburn Daycare Centers, has become nationally accredited during her tenure, understands how demanding the state requirements are. Her centers in Auburn have to comply with them, down to the specific toys required for each age group.

As in many states, these regulations were a response to conditions that had put young lives at risk. In Alabama alone, almost a dozen children died in day care facilities in the two years before the state began upgrading its licensing requirements in 2000.

Ms. White said the root problem in Alabama is that there is not enough state aid for working families who need good day care. But given the state’s limited resources, she said, it seems unfair that subsidies are available to unlicensed centers as well as licensed ones — a view shared by the Federation of Child Care Centers of Alabama, which has lobbied for greater financing and universal licensing.

Some churches in Alabama have voluntarily obtained licenses. The Rev. Paul B. Koch Jr., of First Christian Church in Huntsville, whose day care center is licensed, thinks licensing for such programs is appropriate and raises the quality of care. “But the Christian Coalition is still strong in Alabama and this is an issue for them,” he said.

John W. Giles, president of the state’s Christian Coalition, confirmed that his organization supported the exemption, noting that state oversight would be intrusive and was unnecessary “because the pastors and congregations are your quality control.” Although most of the unlicensed centers are run by Protestant churches or ministries, the exemption covers all faiths, from an Islamic preschool program in Huntsville to a Catholic parish center in Tuscaloosa.

Eleven other states — including Utah, Maryland, Illinois and Florida — also have exempted religious child care programs from at least some of the rules that apply to other nonprofit programs, according to the National Child Care Information Center in Fairfax, Va.

One state that has dropped off that list is Texas.

In 1997, George Bush, who was the governor, pushed through legislation that exempted faith-based day care centers and addiction treatment programs from state licensing, allowing them to be monitored instead by private associations controlled by pastors, program directors and other private citizens. Other laws enacted on his watch steered more state financing to these “alternatively accredited” institutions.

Fewer than a dozen child care centers and about 130 addiction treatment programs took advantage of this new alternative, according to subsequent studies. But several of these later became the focus of state investigations into complaints of physical abuse. A study by the Texas Freedom Network Education Fund, a nonprofit research organization that opposed the faith-based initiatives, found that “the rate of confirmed cases of abuse and neglect at alternatively accredited facilities in Texas is more than 10 times that of state-licensed facilities.”

In spring 2001, the Texas Legislature quietly allowed the alternative accreditation program for day care centers to lapse.

Two leading First Amendment scholars, asked about faith-based day care licensing exemptions like these, said they were unfamiliar with the practice but thought it sounded legally dubious. “I think what you describe is unconstitutional,” said Ira C. Lupu, a law professor at George Washington University and the co-director of legal research for the Roundtable on Religion and Social Welfare Policy, an independent project of the Rockefeller Institute of Government.

Professor Witte, the director of Emory University’s Center for the Study of Law and Religion, said in an e-mail response that he “would frankly be surprised to find even this Supreme Court going that far.”

However, when a group of licensed day care centers challenged the Alabama law in a federal court in mid-2001, arguing that it deprived them of their constitutional right to equal protection before the law, the group lost.

Judge Myron H. Thompson of United States District Court, who ruled on the case, said the state could have adopted the arrangement to avoid church-state entanglements or simply to accommodate the free exercise of religion. Indeed, he cited four other federal cases, all decided since 1988, that had upheld similar exemptions for day care centers in other states.

In Judge Thompson’s view, it is “well settled” constitutional law that “the possible economic inequalities that might result from religious exemptions such as day care licensing exemptions” are not a violation of anyone’s equal-protection rights.

Exemptions From Zoning Rules

“When you fly in to Denver at night, you can always pick out Boulder,” said Ben Pearlman, an athletic young lawyer who grew up there. “It’s the only one with big patches of darkness around it.”

As one of Boulder County’s three governing commissioners, the soft-spoken Mr. Pearlman talks about protecting the county’s spectacular beauty as if it were a sacred trust. In 1978, the county limited intensive development to already urbanized areas, buffered by large swaths of prairie and farmland. The landscape therefore now stands in stark contrast to the spreading carpet of subdivisions, office parks and malls in neighboring counties around Denver.

To Alan Ahlgrim, the mellow and mesmerizing preacher who founded Rocky Mountain Christian Church in eastern Boulder County in 1984, those encroaching subdivisions look like spiritual vineyards, full of families ready to be transformed by his church’s call for them to become “blessed to be a blessing” to others.

“The church has never grown fast enough to suit me,” Pastor Ahlgrim said with a grin that showed he was almost, but not quite, serious.

But the church, one of more than 200 in the county, did grow fast enough in the last 22 years — from about three dozen families in 1984 to more than 2,200 people today — to burst from its original building and five subsequent expansions approved by the county.

Today, its enthusiastic young congregation is once again bumping up against the walls of its 106,000-square-foot home, which sits on 55 acres in an agricultural buffer zone around the small town of Niwot. It is holding multiple services to handle the overflow congregation, but its Sunday school space is full, with some classes spilling out into hallways and temporary buildings set up in a parking lot.

Yet church members cringe at the notion of turning away newcomers. “Who do you say no to? Do you hang a ‘no vacancy’ sign out front?” asked Guy Scoma, a young father who visited the church as a lonely widower and stayed on when he met, then married, his wife, Kaarin.

The church wants to almost double the size of its facilities so it can accommodate up to 4,500 people. The church could then provide a new children’s wing, more rooms for adult classes and a gymnasium with room for two basketball courts or potluck suppers for 1,000. The new wings, linked to the existing building by spacious galleries, would be surrounded by more than 1,200 landscaped parking spaces, 60 percent more than today.

But the county’s land-use plan and zoning rules for the agricultural buffer zone where the church stands would limit any construction on the site to a single residential building. So the church cannot build without the approval of the Boulder County commissioners. And in February, after an emotional public hearing attended by more than a thousand people, Mr. Pearlman and his two fellow commissioners said no.

“People are always trying to develop their properties to the limits of the law and sometimes beyond,” Mr. Pearlman said. But the worst suburban sprawl is the consequence of “lots of little decisions that have this cumulative effect,” he continued. “We’re trying to resist this death by a thousand cuts, and preserve the land where we can.”

Like the leaders of large, fast-growing churches across the country confronting zoning restrictions on their expansion plans, Pastor Ahlgrim is unhappy. The decision “is severely restrictive to our mission,” he said. Like worshiping, teaching and gathering for fellowship, the practice of sharing with the community — in this case, allowing certain outside groups to use the church when it’s available — is “vital to our mission,” he continued. “When one of your core values is generosity and you are restricted from sharing what you want to share — what God has provided — we consider that to be a severe limitation.”

The church had no choice but to go to court, he said.

The church has sued the county under a federal land-use law enacted by Congress and signed by Bill Clinton in 2000 to protect religious organizations from capricious or discriminatory zoning restrictions by local governments. The unusual law came after a decade-long bipartisan tug-of-war between Congress and the Supreme Court.

Before 1990, the court had generally held that any government restriction on religion must serve a compelling public interest in the least burdensome way — a standard known as the “strict scrutiny” test. But in one Oregon case dealing with two Native Americans’ sacramental use of peyote, an illegal drug, the majority concluded that there was nothing unconstitutional about states expecting citizens to comply with valid, neutral and generally applicable laws — like those criminalizing peyote — even if compliance conflicted with religious beliefs.

This “Smith decision,” Employment Division v. Smith, provoked a fierce reaction that has energized the drive for more legislative protections for religion ever since. In 1993, under pressure from a broad coalition whose members ranged from the Anti-Defamation League to the Southern Baptist Convention to the American Humanist Association, Congress adopted the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which restored the “strict scrutiny” test to any federal, state or local government action affecting religious practice. A new tool had been added to the First Amendment emergency kit, although no one was quite sure how to use it.

Then the Supreme Court tugged back. In 1997, it ruled that the religious freedom act could not be applied constitutionally to the states. In reaction, 13 states have subsequently adopted similar measures of their own. But Congress thought the decision left room for it to address zoning restrictions and, separately, religious restrictions imposed on prisoners.

In 2000 Congress adopted and Mr. Clinton signed the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, which restored the “strict scrutiny” test to local zoning decisions, making it easier for churches to challenge those decisions in court. The act also made it easier for prisoners to challenge restrictions on their religious practices.

The provisions that apply to prisoners have been upheld, but the Supreme Court has not yet ruled on the land-use provisions that Rocky Mountain Christian Church is invoking in its lawsuit against Boulder County. One of the church’s allies in the fight is the Justice Department’s civil rights division, which is defending the law’s constitutionality in cases around the country.

Defenders of the law say that some cases invoking its protections have addressed actions by local governments that seem to reflect blatant religious bias. For example, Rabbi Joseph Konikov of Orlando, Fla., successfully sued his local government under the law in 2002 after county officials repeatedly cited and fined him for holding small worship services in his suburban home, in violation of a zoning provision later found to be an unconstitutional burden on religious freedom.

“It was like Communist Russia,” said Rabbi Konikov, who said his grandfather had fled the Soviet Union to escape religious oppression. He has continued to hold services in his home. “It was very satisfying to see that, at the end, our Constitution and our American values and freedoms came through for us.”

Other zoning challenges, all invoking the 2000 law, have been filed by a Sikh society that wants to build a temple in a low-density residential area of Yuba City, Calif.; a Hindu congregation seeking permission to expand its temple and cultural center on a busy highway in Bridgewater, N.J.; and a Muslim organization that has been trying for years to build a mosque on land that the local government in Wayne Township, N.J., now wants to buy for open space.

Seeking a Protective Balance

Critics of the 2000 law argue that the First Amendment itself has long prohibited religious discrimination in zoning, and that such zoning decisions could have been challenged just as successfully in the courts if the law had never been passed.

When Congress considered the law, “what was actually being discussed was ‘How do we make sure churches don’t get discriminated against,’ ” said Marci A. Hamilton, a law professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University in Manhattan and the author of “God vs. The Gavel: Religion and the Rule of Law” (Cambridge University Press, 2005), which calls for closer scrutiny of some religious exemptions, especially those affecting land use and family law.

“Unfortunately, the answer was to give such an expansive remedy that not only are they not getting discriminated against, but they are now capable of discriminating against all other landowners,” added Professor Hamilton, who is advising Boulder County in its case.

The financial stakes in the Boulder lawsuit are large.

Under the 2000 law, if the county loses, it will have to pay not only its own legal bills but also those of the church. If the church loses, it will sacrifice the money it has spent on legal, architectural and public relations fees, but it will not be required to pay the county’s legal bills. And unlike the county, it could seek free legal help from various religious advocacy groups, although it has not yet done so.

While a county victory might provide other local governments with a template for defending against similar challenges, some lawyers fear that if Boulder County, with its long history of careful land-use planning and its environmentally demanding voters, cannot successfully argue that preserving open space is a “compelling public interest,” few local governments could.

“Religious institutions have realized that land-use authorities are vulnerable to the threat of litigation,” David Evan Hughes, the deputy county attorney, asserted in the county’s court filings. Without greater clarity from the courts, he continued, the new law’s reach “will expand to the point where religious institutions are effectively dictating their own land-use regulations.”

Like most Boulder County residents, several church members said they cherish the open space preserved by the county’s past land-use decisions. But they think the county was wrong to reject the church’s proposal.

Lanny Pinchuk, a church member who formerly served on the county planning board, praised all that the county has done to preserve the environment. “But you can’t keep people from coming to the religious institution of their choice,” he said. “I feel that is just, well, un-American.”

Church leaders and members said their current proposal was the “forever plan,” the last expansion the church would make on this site.

But they all struggled to explain why it is an unconstitutional burden for them to have to turn away newcomers now when, if they continue to grow, they will inevitably have to turn away people when their “forever” building is full.

“At some point, we’re going to have to say we can’t accommodate any more; I mean, we’re not going to have a 100-story building over there,” said Gerry Witt, a founding church member who has recently put his house on the market so he and his wife, Carole, can move to a less developed area on the western slope of the Rockies.

“So is there any limit?” He thought a moment, then answered his question. “Yes,” he said. “There’s God’s limit. When he says, ‘You’re at your limit,’ that’s when we will stop.”

Andrew Lehren conducted computer analysis for this series, and Donna Anderson provided online research assistance.

    As Exemptions Grow, Religion Outweighs Regulation, NYT, 8.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/business/08religious.html?hp&ex=1160366400&en=354628e21c97b341&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Film on Pedophile Priest Revives Focus on Cardinal

October 7, 2006
The New York Times
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 6 — A documentary film featuring an extraordinarily candid interview with a former priest convicted of molesting children has heightened interest among law enforcement officials here in considering a criminal case against Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, says a prosecutor who has been investigating sexual abuse cases involving priests.

In the documentary, “Deliver Us From Evil,” the former priest, Oliver O’Grady, describes how he abused young boys and girls across central California over 20 years, including a period in the 1980’s when Cardinal Mahony was his superior as the bishop in Stockton.

The former priest, who lives in Ireland, said he was able to continue abusing children in part because of actions by Cardinal Mahony, who now heads the country’s largest Roman Catholic archdiocese, here in Los Angeles, and is among the church’s most influential American leaders. Mr. O’Grady says in the film that as bishop in Stockton, the cardinal moved him from parish to parish in the face of abuse accusations.

“The film does certainly charge the atmosphere here in Los Angeles,” said William Hodgman, the top deputy of the target crimes division of the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office, who coordinated prosecutions of priests in Los Angeles.

The film also “will fuel ongoing consideration as to whether Cardinal Mahony and others engaged in criminal activity,” Mr. Hodgman added.

Joe Scott, a spokesman for the district attorney, Steve Cooley, confirmed that characterization.

The lawyer for the Los Angeles archdiocese, Michael Hennigan, said Friday, “If Mr. Hodgman is suggesting in any way that the cardinal is the subject of a criminal investigation, he is being irresponsible and in our judgment is committing prosecutorial misconduct.”

Mr. O’Grady, who confessed to abusing boys and girls as young as 9 months old and also adult women, said in the documentary that “I should have been removed” from the priesthood by Cardinal Mahony. In 1993, he was convicted on four counts of “lewd and lascivious” acts with two preteen brothers and served seven years in prison.

Cardinal Mahony, who was the bishop in Stockton from 1980 to 1985, when he was appointed archbishop of Los Angeles, has disputed Mr. O’Grady’s account of events. His spokesman, Tod Tamberg, said Mr. O’Grady’s comments in the documentary were not believable.

“The film rests on the credibility of a convicted child molester who lied to his bishop, to his therapists, to the families of the young people he abused and to law enforcement,” Mr. Tamberg said. “He is the classic pedophile. He lies to conceal his activity from public view.”

But Mr. Hodgman said officials in the district attorney’s office believed that Mr. O’Grady’s revelations in the documentary, along with documents obtained from the archdiocese through subpoena, had given new evidentiary muscle in determining whether criminal acts were committed in handling pedophilic priests.

Mr. Hodgman, who appears in the documentary, declined to comment about the content of the documents, which he said his office had spent several years trying to obtain.

In a telephone interview on Thursday from Ireland, Mr. O’Grady maintained that he informed Cardinal Mahony of his “situation” while working as a priest in Stockton. “I told him I would go to counseling and he said fine,” Mr. O’Grady said. “We thought I had resolved it.”

The film was written and directed by Amy Berg, a former television producer. It features a taped deposition from 1997 stemming from a civil trial in Stockton in which the brothers in the criminal case against Mr. O’Grady brought suit against the local diocese, alleging that its bishops — including Cardinal Mahony — failed to prevent Mr. O’Grady from having contact with children in the face of evidence of his history of abuse.

In that deposition, Cardinal Mahony denied having known that Mr. O’Grady was a pedophile. The brothers’ lawyers presented a police report about Mr. O’Grady’s being accused of molestation along with a 1976 letter to one victim, an 11-year-old girl, in which Mr. O’Grady admitted molesting her.

In a 2004 deposition related to civil trials in Los Angeles, Cardinal Mahony stated that expressing sexual urges toward a 9-year-old would not be automatic cause for removing a priest from duty. He also said he barely knew Mr. O’Grady, though lawyers in the cases presented warm letters exchanged between the two.

In the Stockton civil case, a jury awarded $30 million in damages to the brothers in 1998, an award reduced to $7 million in negotiations. According to news media accounts at the time, jurors said they did not find Cardinal Mahony’s testimony, that he was unaware of Mr. O’Grady’s proclivities, credible.

“I was in Stockton for that trial,” said David Clohessy, the national director of Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests. “The jurors were crystal clear that they didn’t buy what he was saying.”

The Los Angeles district attorney’s office is currently prosecuting or investigating several criminal cases of sexual abuse by priests in Los Angeles County, where there are also more than 500 civil suits, some naming Cardinal Mahony.

In September, a man from Mexico City filed suit against the Diocese of Tehuacán, Mexico, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and Cardinal Mahony and his counterpart in Tehuacán, alleging that the two of them transferred a priest to the United States in 1987 despite knowing he had molested minors in Mexico.

The district attorney has had protracted battles with the archdiocese over obtaining church records, and has long examined Cardinal Mahony’s criminal culpability in the unresolved cases, Mr. Hodgman said.

Criminal cases against church leaders are rare and extraordinarily difficult to pursue. Legal experts said prosecutors might hope Mr. O’Grady’s statements would help them establish a pattern of Cardinal Mahony responding inadequately to reports of abuse.

“What the movie does is confirm that this was a longstanding practice of covering up,” said Prof. Marci A. Hamilton of the Benjamin N. Cardozo Law School in New York, who is an expert on church-state cases. “It corroborates evidence. But whether the movie by itself could be aired in the courtroom is another issue”

No senior Roman Catholic Church official in the United States has been prosecuted in a sex-crimes case, Professor Hamilton said. Because most victims do not come forward until years or even decades after they are abused, the statute of limitations has been a preventive bar.

“The statute of limitations has been a huge impregnable wall,” Professor Hamilton said. “To the extent that a movie like this stirs up the passions of rank-and-file Catholics and citizens it makes it harder for Mahony to say he is being singled out. He has such a history and the numbers are so large, it has been frustrating for prosecutors to get nowhere.”

Mr. Tamberg, the Los Angeles Archdiocese spokesman, dismissed the notion that the film would harm the cardinal. “It is such a biased piece of filmmaking,” he said, “that it has no credibility and will almost certainly have no credibility in the eyes of authorities.”

The documentary, which won first place in the documentary category at the Los Angeles film festival in June, will be publicly released in New York, Los Angeles and Boston next week.

From the 1970’s to the 1990’s, Mr. O’Grady concedes in the film, he sexually abused children. He also describes conversations with Cardinal Mahony about his sexual feelings toward children, and his troubles with law enforcement officials and angry families in towns where he committed his abuse.

(The Stockton police are portrayed in the documentary as filing a report on Mr. O’Grady, and having dropped their investigation after church officials assured them that he would be removed from the parish. A spokeswoman for the department, Roseann Clark, said the department had no record of an investigation into him.)

After the incident in Stockton, but long before his conviction, Mr. O’Grady was moved to another parish — his fourth.

The film also features interviews with several of his victims and their parents, whose festering anguish and heartache seem to have healed little over the years.

Ann Jyono, one of Mr. O’Grady’s victims and a central character in the film, said in a telephone interview Thursday that she was a practicing Catholic, and that while she longed to see Cardinal Mahony prosecuted, she would settle for a conversation with him about her years of abuse at Mr. O’Grady’s hands.

“I hope people appreciate that it is not easy to be naked in front of everybody with your shame,” Ms. Jyono said. “In this film, you find out that Mahony had a hand in everything that happened to me.”

    Film on Pedophile Priest Revives Focus on Cardinal, NYT, 7.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/07/us/07priest.html?hp&ex=1160280000&en=9892430dec223716&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Faith and War

For Recruiter, Saying ‘Go Army’ Is a Hard Job

October 7, 2006
The New York Times
By ANDREA ELLIOTT

EL CAJON, Calif. — Sgt. Cameron Murad wanders the strip malls and parking lots of this Iraqi immigrant enclave in the arid foothills beyond San Diego. Wherever he goes, a hush seems to follow.

He stands by the entrance of a Middle Eastern grocery in khakis and a baseball cap, trying to blend in. He smiles gently. He offers the occasional Arabic greeting.

Quietly, he searches the aisles for a version of himself: an Iraqi expatriate with greater ambition than prospects, a Muslim immigrant willing to fight an American war.

There are countless hard jobs for American soldiers supporting the occupation of Iraq. Few seem more impossible than the one assigned to Sergeant Murad. As the conflict grows increasingly violent and unpopular, the sergeant must persuade native Arabic speakers to enlist and serve with front-line troops.

“I feel like a nomad in the middle of the desert, looking for green pastures,” said Sergeant Murad, 34, who is from the Kurdish region of Iraq.

Linguists have emerged as critical figures in the occupation. They interpret for commanders in meetings with mayors and sheiks. They translate during the interrogation of Iraqi prisoners. They shadow troops on risky missions.

In the pressing search for Arabic speakers, the military has turned to Middle Eastern immigrants in the United States. Sergeant Murad is a rising star in this effort. He has recruited 10 men to the program in little more than a year, a record unrivaled in the Army National Guard.

Still, he is an unlikely foot soldier in the campaign. His own evolution — from a teenage immigrant who landed in North Dakota after the first gulf war to a spit-and-polish sergeant — has been marked with private suffering.

In boot camp, he was called a “raghead.” Comrades have questioned his patriotism. Last year a staff sergeant greeted him by calling out, “Here comes the Taliban!”

He remembers a day in 2002 when the comedian Drew Carey visited a base in Saudi Arabia where he was working. During a skit, Sergeant Murad recalled, Mr. Carey dropped to the ground to mimic the Muslim prayer. As the troops roared with laughter, Sergeant Murad walked out.

“I thought about my mom when she prays, how humble she is,” he said.

Yet, day after day, Sergeant Murad sets out to sell other immigrants on the life he has lived. He believes that Muslims need the military more than ever, he said: At a time when many feel alienated, it offers them a path to assimilation, a way to become undeniably American.

It has proved, for him and others, the ultimate rite of passage.

“It’s almost like Superman wearing his cape,” said Gunnery Sgt. Jamal Baadani, 42, an Egyptian immigrant with the United States Marine Corps. “I’ve got my uniform on, and you can’t take that away from me because I’ve earned it.”

Sergeant Murad has earned it, but with a price. He has changed his name. He has drifted from Islam. He often finds himself at odds with the immigrants he is trying to enlist.

To many of them, he is a mystery. He sees himself as a man of unavoidable contradictions: an American patriot and a loyal Kurd; a champion of the military to outsiders, a survivor within its ranks.

Feeling Like an Outcast

The sergeant is six feet tall, but often stands shrunken, his hands politely clasped. He has a long, distinguished nose and wears glasses that darken in the sun but never fully fade, lending him a distant aura.

He plies the streets of El Cajon in a rumbling, black Toyota Tacoma pickup. In the back, he carries stacks of fliers advertising what the Army calls the “09-Lima” program.

Through the program, speakers of Arabic, Farsi, Dari, Pashto and Kurdish are sent to boot camp like other soldiers. They later receive specialized training as linguists, and a majority are deployed to Iraq.

Of the thousands of interpreters working for the military in Iraq, most are civilians under contract, some of whom earn as much as $170,000 a year. But military commanders prefer uniformed linguists because they cannot refuse combat missions and are subjected to more thorough security checks.

They are offered a fraction of what many civilian linguists earn, with salaries starting at roughly $28,000, including allowances. The program’s perks, such as expedited citizenship, a starting bonus and medical coverage, are a major draw, military officials said.

Since the Army created the program in 2003, more than 800 people have signed up. But nearly 40 percent of them have either dropped out or failed language tests or boot camp. Enlistment in the program has improved with the help of civilian Arabic speakers contracted by the Army to recruit.

In California, the Army National Guard is trying the same approach, but with troops. Capt. Hatem Abdine assembled a team of soldiers of mostly Middle Eastern descent to help recruit full time, and brought Sergeant Murad on board last year.

In April, the sergeant arrived in El Cajon. Before his first week was up, he felt like an outcast.

Stacks of fliers and business cards that he had left in grocery stores had vanished. Cashiers who welcomed him on his first visits were suddenly too busy to talk. One manager fled the store. The owner of another shop turned his back and flipped kebobs over a high-licking flame.

“They’re so agitated when I approach them,” Sergeant Murad said. “Is it because I’m ugly? I don’t think I’m that ugly.”

Nestled in a parched valley, El Cajon drew its first Iraqi settlers half a century ago because of the resemblance it bore to their homeland. The population boomed in the 1990’s when thousands of refugees — primarily Kurds and Shiites — joined what had long been the domain of whites and Hispanics.

Sergeant Murad makes his rounds with a truck full of Army promotional items, including a box of T-shirts that state, in Arabic, “If you can read this” — and then in English — “the National Guard needs you.” He cannot bring himself to wear one.

“To put on that shirt and keep a face free of blush — it’s just an impossible thing for me to do,” he said

He favors a more subdued approach. He strolls into restaurants and barber shops, as though he were just passing through. He offers a smooth, “Assalamu alaikum,” or peace be upon you.

A conversation begins. Soon, Sergeant Murad is reminiscing about his hometown, Kirkuk. Then, almost as an afterthought, he mentions his job. “Call if you know anyone,” he says, offering a card.

But the calls rarely come. When they do, recruitment is hard won. In the fall of 2005, Sergeant Murad signed up his first two recruits. Over the next 12 months, he found about 20 other men. Half of them changed their minds.

Most often, recruits do not follow through because of objections from a parent or spouse. Others learn of more lucrative opportunities. Store windows in El Cajon are plastered with fliers advertising the six-figure salaries offered to civilian interpreters.

Some of the sergeant’s candidates are overcome by fear. A 33-year-old Egyptian man from Hemet, Calif., withdrew from the program in June after watching news from the region on Arabic television channels.

“I know what’s happening over there,” said the man, who would not give his name. “My kids need me more than the money.”

From late 2002 to May 2006, 172 civilian contract linguists were killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, representing 2.6 percent of the roughly 6,500 linguists who worked for United States coalition forces, a Department of Defense official said.

None of the 152 interpreters who have served in Iraq for the 09-Lima program have been killed. But that fact carries little weight in El Cajon, where memories of violence linger.

“They came here to live in peace and now you’re asking them to go to war,” said the owner of a bakery on Main Street who had fought against Iran with Saddam Hussein’s army. “We are full up of the war.”

In the pursuit of trust, it does not help that Sergeant Murad is Kurdish. The Kurds, like the Shiites, are often seen to have an interest in promoting the American occupation of Iraq because of the repression they suffered under Mr. Hussein.

The sergeant, who refers to the occupation as “the liberation,” does not hide his impassioned support of the war, or the fact that he is Kurdish.

Sometimes, this backfires. When he told an Iraqi woman at a Laundromat that he was Kurdish, she snapped, “Saddam was a wonderful president.”

One afternoon last April, Sergeant Murad dropped by the Main Street bakery, bought a box of chocolates and left another stack of pamphlets behind. He was sure they would be tossed, but seemed not to care. He was feeling giddy.

For the first time in weeks, he had a candidate.

The Sting of 9/11

Sergeant Murad’s path to the United States military began 15 years ago, on a lush meadow in Kurdistan.

American helicopters hovered overhead, dropping packets of dehydrated food to thousands of refugees, including Sergeant Murad, his three brothers and their parents.

The next day, they reached a refugee camp run by the United States military in Zakho. There, a group of marines was standing guard, hefty, tattooed and smiling. Sergeant Murad, then 18 and rail-thin, thought the men looked like warriors.

Soon after, in September 1991, the family arrived in Minot, N.D., as political refugees. A year later, Sergeant Murad got his green card and enlisted in the Army.

“If a person like me isn’t obligated to serve this country, who is?” he said. “I had to make a decision that this is my country, that this side is my side.”

He entered the military as Kamaran Taha Muhammad. When he got to boot camp at Fort Jackson, S.C., he spoke choppy English.

He was, and remains, a shy man. “If a fly looks at me, I turn red,” Sergeant Murad said.

But the first time a fellow soldier insulted him, he threw a punch. He fought often enough that he was relegated to kitchen patrol.

In time, Sergeant Murad made friends. When he graduated as a light-wheel mechanic, his fellow soldiers cheered.

The first few years of his military life went smoothly. He was stationed at a base in Germany. After his tour of duty ended, he found work as the head civilian linguist at an Air Force base in Riyadh.

But on Sept. 11, 2001, as Sergeant Murad watched the attacks on television in Riyadh, he felt a searing angst. The next day, he walked into the dining hall holding a tray, and stopped at a table of officers he knew.

He told them he was sorry. No one responded.

“He didn’t know where he fit in,” said Fernando Muzquiz, 42, now a retired master sergeant with the Air Force.

Sergeant Murad experienced a shift after Sept. 11, both in his relationship to Islam and to America. It was as if a fault line crept through him.

As a Muslim, he felt ashamed.

“I was crushed theologically,” he said. He pored through the Koran, looking for proof that it condemned terrorism. But from the loud speakers of mosques in Riyadh, he heard sheiks praying for the mujahedeen.

From Americans, he felt the sting of suspicion.

On trips home to Minnesota, where his parents had moved, Sergeant Murad noticed the new attention he got at airports. In Atlanta, a security officer saw his last name, which was still Muhammad, and called out, “We got one.”

Sergeant Murad wanted to prove his loyalty. He got his chance when the United States invaded Iraq.

By then, he was working in Bahrain as a civilian linguist with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. (He had lost his job in Riyadh after taking an unauthorized trip off base, which he attributed to a lapse of judgment.)

In Bahrain, he was elated to learn that he would be sent to southern Iraq on a top-secret mission with the Navy Seals. But several days into the voyage, he heard a sailor on his ship whisper, “Cam is one of them.”

Sergeant Murad stopped working for the Navy in March, with his mission in Iraq successfully completed.

That month, he changed his name.

“In a way, it was my reaction to say, ‘No, I am not the same as this criminal, this coward,’ ” said Sergeant Murad, referring to Osama bin Laden. “I am an American, I am Cam, I am a naturalized citizen.”

Kamaran became Cameron. Muhammad was dropped for another, less conspicuous family name, Murad.

The middle name he chose was perhaps most surprising: Fargo.

“I always wanted a connection to North Dakota,” he said.

Even with a new name, Sergeant Murad felt ill at ease back in the United States. He has stopped going to mosques. He no longer considers himself a practicing Muslim. He has few Middle Eastern friends.

“If somebody’s name is on a list, and that person has my name or contact number, I will get harassed,” he said.

The Army, he decided, was the most comfortable place to be. In 2005, he joined the National Guard full time.

He is careful to tell potential recruits about the military’s zero tolerance policy on discrimination, and urges them to file complaints should harassment occur.

Still, Sergeant Murad has never filed a complaint of his own. During several interviews, he was reluctant to talk about his negative experiences, saying that he did not want to “whine” and that all immigrants endure hardship before they are accepted.

Last year, when an instructor at an Army base referred to Sergeant Murad as “the Taliban,” he laughed along.

“I laughed not to cause trouble,” he said. “I laughed because I am really getting tired of this. I laughed because I know it’s a hopeless situation. What do you do? You just have to laugh.”

“It doesn’t matter what you think of me,” he said. “Like it or not, I’m your brother in arms.”

Closing the Deal

The new candidate’s name was Khaled. Sergeant Murad jotted down his number, passed on by the captain. The Iraqi immigrant had called after spotting a brochure about the program, the captain explained. And there was one more thing: the man was on the fence.

Sergeant Murad’s job is often one of delicate persuasion. He began by talking to Khaled, who lived near El Cajon, on the phone. (To protect his identity, the military requested that his last name not be published.)

By the time they agreed to meet, Sergeant Murad felt uneasy. Not only was Khaled a Sunni; he was from Mr. Hussein’s home province.

A stout man with a mustache answered the door. He seemed overweight for the rigors of boot camp, thought the sergeant, and his age — 39 — was just short of the cutoff.

They stiffly shook hands, and then sat and sipped tea in a tidy, candle-scented apartment. A framed picture showed Khaled, his wife and three children waving from Disney World. Since arriving in the United States in 1999, Khaled had hopped from one low-wage job to another, pumping gas, stocking groceries.

Now, he told Sergeant Murad, he had made up his mind. He needed the educational loans the military offered.

Still, he was nervous.

“I’m expecting a shock,” said Khaled. “I’ve been hearing good things, bad things.”

As he does with all recruits, Sergeant Murad warned Khaled that he might be hazed at boot camp, and distrusted by other soldiers. But over time, the sergeant promised, he would make friends.

The two men sat talking until the afternoon turned to dusk. The sergeant gave Khaled tips on how to lose weight, and promised to help prepare him for the English tests. Before parting, they embraced.

As Sergeant Murad drove off, he smiled and shook his head. “This is an Arab from the Sunni Triangle trusting a Kurd with his life,” he said.

Khaled entered boot camp in July and is now in advanced training.

Often, finding recruits is only the beginning of Sergeant Murad’s job. He spends time with their families after they have joined up, reassuring mothers that their sons will eat properly, and helping wives fill out insurance forms.

Last April, Sergeant Murad drove to a boxy stucco house to visit the pregnant wife of a 22-year-old Shiite recruit. The woman was worried about her husband’s safety in Iraq.

“The fact that he’s an Iraqi — it’s unfathomable to these nationals that he would be with the United States military,” she said in Arabic, perched on a couch next to her mother-in-law.

“He is Muslim and in the military — it doesn’t look right.”

The older woman frowned.

“If it were up to me, I would make you join the military because they freed you from Saddam,” she told her daughter-in-law.

Boot camp had been effective, the mother said. Her son seemed newly disciplined, more mature. There was only one thing she disliked: his limited vacation.

“Just two weeks!” she said. “Even in the army of Saddam Hussein, this wasn’t the case.”

On a sunny afternoon in August, Sergeant Murad was back in his truck, cruising El Cajon with a fresh stack of business cards.

He was learning to avoid certain shops. He waved mockingly at the kebab store as his truck rolled by, no longer concerned about who might be watching.

He had come to the conclusion that first impressions counted little.

Plenty of Iraqis had misjudged him. Eventually, though, they grew to like him.

It was the same with soldiers, Sergeant Murad said. He looked back on his time in boot camp as the ultimate proof that hardship can be overcome, and wary comrades, won over.

“In the end, when somebody gets to know Cam the soldier, Cam the citizen, they always take my side,” he said. “That’s where my triumph is. The hurt goes away.”

    For Recruiter, Saying ‘Go Army’ Is a Hard Job, NYT, 7.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/07/us/07recruit.html?hp&ex=1160280000&en=d70ac8fda571df6d&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Amish mourn gunman in school rampage

Updated 10/7/2006 9:42 PM ET
AP
USA Today

GEORGETOWN, Pa. (AP) — Dozens of Amish neighbors came out Saturday to mourn the quiet milkman who killed five of their young girls and wounded five more in a brief, unfathomable rampage.

Charles Carl Roberts IV, 32, was buried in his wife's family plot behind a small Methodist church, a few miles from the one-room schoolhouse he stormed Monday.

His wife, Marie, and their three small children looked on as Roberts was buried beside the pink, heart-shaped grave of the infant daughter whose death nine years ago apparently haunted him, said Bruce Porter, a fire department chaplain from Colorado who attended the service.

About half of perhaps 75 mourners on hand were Amish.

"It's the love, the forgiveness, the heartfelt forgiveness they have toward the family. I broke down and cried seeing it displayed," said Porter, who had come to Pennsylvania to offer what help he could. He said Marie Roberts was also touched.

"She was absolutely deeply moved, by just the love shown," Porter said.

Leaders of the local Amish community were gathering Saturday afternoon at a firehouse to decide the future of the schoolhouse, and of the school year itself.

The prevailing wisdom suggested a new school would be built.

"There will definitely be a new school built, but not on that property," said Mike Hart, a spokesman for the Bart Fire Company in Georgetown.

Roberts stormed the West Nickel Mines Amish School on Monday, releasing the 15 boys and four adults before tying up and shooting the 10 girls. Roberts, who had come armed with a shotgun, a handgun and a stun gun, then killed himself.

Roberts' suicide notes and last calls with his wife reveal a man tormented by memories — as yet unsubstantiated — of molesting two young relatives 20 years ago. He said he was also angry at God for the Nov. 14, 1997, death of the couple's first child, a girl named Elise Victoria who lived for just 20 minutes.

Hart is one of two non-Amish community members serving on a 10-member board that will decide how to distribute donations that have come in following the global news coverage. One stranger walked into the firehouse Saturday morning and dropped a $100 bill in the collection jar.

The condolences flowing into the Bart Post Office filled three large cartons on Saturday — two for the Amish children and one for the Roberts clan.

"(It's) envelopes, packages, food and a lot of cards," clerk Helena Salerno said.

More than $500,000 has been pledged, some of which is expected to cover medical costs for the five surviving girls. They remain hospitalized, and one is said to be in grave condition.

As the Sabbath Day approached, close friends expected to spend Sunday paying visits to the victims' families.

The funerals for the five slain girls — Marian Fisher, 13; Anna Mae Stoltzfus, 12; Naomi Rose Ebersol, 7, and sisters Mary Liz Miller, 8, and Lena Miller, 7 — were held Thursday and Friday.

One Amish woman, an aunt to the Miller girls, set out Saturday to retrieve some of the flowers dropped near the school and bring them to the families.

She was traveling on an Amish scooter and tried to balance two potted plants before going home and returning for the task with a child's small wagon.

The massacre sent out images to the world not only of the violence, but also of a little-known community that chooses to live an insular, agrarian way of life, shunning cars, electricity and other modern conveniences.

By Saturday, the hordes of satellite trucks and stand-up reporters had mostly left the country roads, and a semblance of routine returned. Early in the morning, Amish farmers hauled farm equipment past the boarded-up school.

"It was just getting to be too much," said Jane Kreider, a 48-year-old teacher's aide in Georgetown. "It was just, 'Get out of dodge, get out of our town and we'll pull together.'"

    Amish mourn gunman in school rampage, UT, 7.10.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-10-06-amish-funeral_x.htm

Evangelicals Fear the Loss of Their Teenagers

October 6, 2006
The New York Times
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

Despite their packed megachurches, their political clout and their increasing visibility on the national stage, evangelical Christian leaders are warning one another that their teenagers are abandoning the faith in droves.

At an unusual series of leadership meetings in 44 cities this fall, more than 6,000 pastors are hearing dire forecasts from some of the biggest names in the conservative evangelical movement.

Their alarm has been stoked by a highly suspect claim that if current trends continue, only 4 percent of teenagers will be “Bible-believing Christians” as adults. That would be a sharp decline compared with 35 percent of the current generation of baby boomers, and before that, 65 percent of the World War II generation.

While some critics say the statistics are greatly exaggerated (one evangelical magazine for youth ministers dubbed it “the 4 percent panic attack”), there is widespread consensus among evangelical leaders that they risk losing their teenagers.

“I’m looking at the data,” said Ron Luce, who organized the meetings and founded Teen Mania, a 20-year-old youth ministry, “and we’ve become post-Christian America, like post-Christian Europe. We’ve been working as hard as we know how to work — everyone in youth ministry is working hard — but we’re losing.”

The board of the National Association of Evangelicals, an umbrella group representing 60 denominations and dozens of ministries, passed a resolution this year deploring “the epidemic of young people leaving the evangelical church.”

Among the leaders speaking at the meetings are Ted Haggard, president of the evangelical association; the Rev. Jerry Falwell; and nationally known preachers like Jack Hayford and Tommy Barnett.

Genuine alarm can be heard from Christian teenagers and youth pastors, who say they cannot compete against a pervasive culture of cynicism about religion, and the casual “hooking up” approach to sex so pervasive on MTV, on Web sites for teenagers and in hip-hop, rap and rock music. Divorced parents and dysfunctional families also lead some teenagers to avoid church entirely or to drift away.

Over and over in interviews, evangelical teenagers said they felt like a tiny, beleaguered minority in their schools and neighborhoods. They said they often felt alone in their struggles to live by their “Biblical values” by avoiding casual sex, risqué music and videos, Internet pornography, alcohol and drugs.

When Eric Soto, 18, transferred from a small charter school to a large public high school in Chicago, he said he was disappointed to find that an extracurricular Bible study attracted only five to eight students. “When we brought food, we thought we could get a better turnout,” he said. They got 12.

Chelsea Dunford, a 17-year old from Canton, Conn., said, “At school I don’t have a lot of friends who are Christians.”

Ms. Dunford spoke late last month as she and her small church youth group were about to join more than 3,400 teenagers in a sports arena at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst for a Christian youth extravaganza and rock concert called Acquire the Fire.

“A lot of my friends are self-proclaimed agnostics or atheists,” said Ms. Dunford, who wears a bracelet with a heart-shaped charm engraved with “tlw,” for “true love waits,” to remind herself of her pledge not to have premarital sex.

She said her friends were more prone to use profanity and party than she was, and added: “It’s scary sometimes. You get made fun of.”

To break the isolation and bolster the teenagers’ commitment to a conservative lifestyle, Mr. Luce has been organizing these stadium extravaganzas for 15 years. The event in Amherst was the first of 40 that Teen Mania is putting on between now and May, on a breakneck schedule that resembles a road trip for a major touring band. The “roadies” are 700 teenagers who have interned for a year at Teen Mania’s “Honor Academy” in Garden Valley, Tex.

More than two million teenagers have attended in the last 15 years, said Mr. Luce, a 45-year-old, mop-headed father of three with a master’s degree from the Graduate School of Business Administration at Harvard and the star power of an aging rock guitarist.

“That’s more than Paul McCartney has pulled in,” Mr. Luce asserted, before bounding onstage for the opening pyrotechnics and a prayer.

For the next two days, the teenagers in the arena pogoed to Christian bands, pledged to lead their friends to Christ and sang an anthem with the chorus, “We won’t be silent.” Hundreds streamed down the aisles for the altar call and knelt in front of the stage, some weeping openly as they prayed to give their lives to God.

The next morning, Mr. Luce led the crowd in an exercise in which they wrote on scraps of paper all the negative cultural influences, brand names, products and television shows that they planned to excise from their lives. Again they streamed down the aisles, this time to throw away the “cultural garbage.”

Trash cans filled with folded pieces of paper on which the teenagers had scribbled things like Ryan Seacrest, Louis Vuitton, “Gilmore Girls,” “Days of Our Lives,” Iron Maiden, Harry Potter, “need for a boyfriend” and “my perfect teeth obsession.” One had written in tiny letters: “fornication.”

Some teenagers threw away cigarette lighters, brand-name sweatshirts, Mardi Gras beads and CD’s — one titled “I’m a Hustla.”

“Lord Jesus,” Mr. Luce prayed into the microphone as the teenagers dropped their notes into the trash, “I strip off the identity of the world, and this morning I clothe myself with Christ, with his lifestyle. That’s what I want to be known for.”

Evangelical adults, like believers of every faith, fret about losing the next generation, said the Rev. David W. Key, director of Baptist Studies at the Candler School of Theology of Emory University, in Atlanta.

“The uniqueness of the evangelical situation is the fact that during the 80’s and 90’s you had the Reagan revolution that was growing the evangelical churches,” Mr. Key said.

Today, he said, the culture trivializes religion and normalizes secularism and liberal sexual mores.

The phenomenon may not be that young evangelicals are abandoning their faith, but that they are abandoning the institutional church, said Lauren Sandler, author of “Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement” (Viking, 2006). Ms. Sandler, who calls herself a secular liberal, said she found the movement frighteningly robust.

“This generation is not about church,” said Ms. Sandler, an editor at Salon.com. “They always say, ‘We take our faith outside the four walls.’ For a lot of young evangelicals, church is a rock festival, or a skate park or hanging out in someone’s basement.”

Contradicting the sense of isolation expressed by some evangelical teenagers, Ms. Sandler said, “I met plenty of kids who told me over and over that if you’re not Christian in your high school, you’re not cool — kids with Mohawks, with indie rock bands who feel peer pressure to be Christian.”

The reality is, when it comes to organizing youth, evangelical Christians are the envy of Roman Catholics, mainline Protestants and Jews, said Christian Smith, a professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame, who specializes in the study of American evangelicals and surveyed teens for his book “Soul Searching: the Religious and Spiritual lives of American Teenagers” (Oxford, 2005).

Mr. Smith said he was skeptical about the 4 percent statistic. He said the figure was from a footnote in a book and was inconsistent with research he had conducted and reviewed, which has found that evangelical teenagers are more likely to remain involved with their faith than are mainline Protestants, Catholics, Jews and teenagers of almost every other religion.

“A lot of the goals I’m very supportive of,” Mr. Smith said of the new evangelical youth campaign, “but it just kills me that it’s framed in such apocalyptic terms that couldn’t possibly hold up under half a second of scrutiny. It’s just self-defeating.”

The 4 percent is cited in the book “The Bridger Generation” by Thom S. Rainer, a Southern Baptist and a former professor of ministry. Mr. Rainer said in an interview that it came from a poll he had commissioned, and that while he thought the methodology was reliable, the poll was 10 years old.

“I would have to, with integrity, say there has been no significant follow-up to see if the numbers are still valid,” Mr. Rainer said.

Mr. Luce seems weary of criticism that his message is overly alarmist. He said that a current poll by the well-known evangelical pollster George Barna found that 5 percent of teenagers were Bible-believing Christians. Some criticize Mr. Barna’s methodology, however, for defining “Bible-believing” so narrowly that it excludes most people who consider themselves Christians.

Mr. Luce responded: “If the 4 percent is true, or even the 5 percent, it’s an indictment of youth ministry. So certainly they’re going to want different data.”

Outside the arena in Amherst, the teenagers at Mr. Luce’s Acquire the Fire extravaganza mobbed the tables hawking T-shirts and CD’s stamped: “Branded by God.” Mr. Luce’s strategy is to replace MTV’s wares with those of an alternative Christian culture, so teenagers will link their identity to Christ and not to the latest flesh-baring pop star.

Apparently, the strategy can show results. In Chicago, Eric Soto said he returned from a stadium event in Detroit in the spring to find that other teenagers in the hallways were also wearing “Acquire the Fire” T-shirts.

“You were there? You’re a Christian?” he said the young people would say to one another. “The fire doesn’t die once you leave the stadium. But it’s a challenge to keep it burning.”

    Evangelicals Fear the Loss of Their Teenagers, NYT, 6.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/06/us/06evangelical.html?hp&ex=1160193600&en=5519ede029c494c4&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Amish community unites to mourn slain schoolgirls

Updated 10/5/2006 12:29 AM ET
USA Today
By Rick Hampson

NICKEL MINES, Pa. — As funerals begin Thursday for five slain Pennsylvania schoolchildren, there will be a spiritual and emotional variation on a traditional Amish barn raising. The same archaic traditions that left a schoolhouse vulnerable to a twisted gunman also make the Amish community uniquely resilient in the face of such an atrocity.

The Old Order Amish would seem as unprepared for the psychological repercussions as they were for Charles Carl Roberts IV, a milkman who fatally shot five girls and wounded five others after walking into the school Monday carrying a small arsenal.

The Amish have no professional funeral directors, grief counselors, social workers or clinical psychologists as they try to come to terms with the disaster and bury their children. But they have other resources on which to rely, according to those who have studied the Amish and members of the Amish community here. "They are able to process this in a way that others could not," says Donald Kraybill, a professor at Elizabethtown College near here who has written several books on the Amish.

Among the qualities:

•Faith. There's a religious canopy over Amish life. They accept the killings as God's will and part of God's plan, however mysterious or painful, and believe that the murdered children are in heaven.

On one level, the Amish were not surprised by what happened Monday; they believe the world is basically evil, and incidents like the shooting simply prove it. "This reminds them they are strangers, pilgrims in this land," Kraybill says.

Lee Zook, an associate professor at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, who specializes in legal issues and the Amish, says that partly because of their faith and agrarian lifestyle, "death at any age, and for any reason, is more accepted as a part of life and nature than it is in the larger culture. There's a matter-of-factness about death and dying."

•Forgiveness. The Amish try to take Christ at his word: Turn the other cheek and love your enemies.

"They believe their calling is to accept and absorb hostility without fighting back or falling apart," Kraybill says. "Their faith tells them to suffer like Christ did on his way to the cross."

At a prayer service Tuesday night, the Rev. Dwight Lefever of Living Faith Church of God said that earlier in the day he was in the kitchen of the Roberts family home when an Amish neighbor came by. "He wrapped his arms around Charlie's dad for an hour," Lefever says. "He said, ' We will forgive you.' " The pastor's conclusion: "God met us in that kitchen."

•Stoicism. The Amish are taught from a young age not to do anything to differentiate themselves individually. What was remarkable this week was not how much sorrow was exhibited by those closest to the victims, but how little.

Suffering isn't new for the Amish. The account of their ancestors' persecution in Europe hundreds of years ago — Martyrs Mirror — is still well read today.

"The Amish people don't usually show much emotion," explains Annie Beiler, a Mennonite who lives in the neighboring town of Paradise. The sadness that showed was all the more striking.

Beiler was at a farm near the school after the shootings when word came that one family had mistakenly been driven to Philadelphia in the belief their daughter was at Children's Hospital there.

Only when they arrived did the family learn the girl had died at the school. Beiler recalled the scene back at the farmhouse — relatives huddled together, sobbing loudly.

•Interdependence. The Amish work closely and help each other in the best of times; in the worst, they shift into the pre-automotive version of high gear.

"They're a face-to-face community," says Zook of Luther College. "Everybody has a role in what to do and how to do it. When one person dies, the whole community is there. Everything else stops."

In a variation on the communal barn raisings for which they are famous, Amish less directly affected by the deaths helped to prepare for the series of wakes, funerals, burials and meals that began Tuesday and will continue through Friday.

On Wednesday, for instance, three Amish women dressed in black helped by mowing and raking the yard of Anna Mae Stoltzfus, 12, one of the murder victims. About 12 Amish carriages were in the driveway.

Other members of the community cooked food and set up homes or barns for funerals by moving in enough benches or bales of hay to seat hundreds.

When an Amish person dies, the body is taken to a professional undertaker, who is non-Amish, for rudimentary embalming. The body is dressed by relatives and placed in a simple pine casket.

The funeral is on family property — the Amish have no churches. The service is long (over two hours) and simple — no singing, eulogies, Communion or flowers. Scripture is read in an old German dialect. One or two sermons are delivered in the local Pennsylvania Dutch dialect.

Afterward, the casket is taken to a small Amish cemetery in a black horse-drawn hearse, followed by a long procession of horse-drawn carriages.

At the grave, dug by hand, prayers are recited, with perhaps a German hymn sung a cappella. The casket is lowered into the ground and covered with soil.

Later, the grave is marked by a simple tombstone the same size and shape as others — a reminder that even in death, all are equal.

Then everyone heads back to the family's farm for a hearty Amish meal of meat, potatoes, vegetables and pies prepared and served by volunteers.

Underscoring the whole process is a vivid belief in a close, living God — the unseen actor who controls every human tragedy and comedy according to a script that often defies understanding.

Katie Weaver, an Amish woman who was born in Pennsylvania and lives in Evart, Mich., was in the area Monday for a wedding. She came to the schoolhouse Wednesday to pray for the families.

"We're really strongly taught to forgive like Jesus did," she says. "We forgive the way Christ forgives us."

Contributing: Mimi Hall and Alan Levin

    Amish community unites to mourn slain schoolgirls, UT, 5.10.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-10-04-amish-shooting_x.htm

A Secret Society, Spilling a Few Secrets

October 4, 2006
The New York Times
By JAMES BARRON

For more than two centuries, the Freemasons and their grandiose rituals have played a secretive, mysterious role in American life. One of the Masons’ symbols looks a lot like the all-seeing eye on the back of every $1 bill. And look whose picture is on the other side.

George Washington was not the first Mason, and not the only famous one. Mozart worked thinly disguised touches of Masonry into operas. Fourteen presidents and everyone from the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale to the comedian Red Skelton belonged. Masons presided when the cornerstone was laid at the Statue of Liberty.

But the Masons’ numbers have been steadily dwindling — whatever their secrets are, they apparently do not have one for avoiding death — and their ranks have been graying. So the New York State Masons have followed other state Masonic societies in doing something that they would have once considered heretical: they are actively reaching out for new members. And, in the process, a famously reticent fraternal organization that now puts a premium on its community service has lifted its veil of secrecy just a bit.

The Masons are not giving out the secret words that members are supposed to say to get into meetings (although these days, simply showing a dues card might do). But the Masons are giving public tours of the New York Grand Lodge Headquarters.

So people can see the gilded ceiling, the marble walls, the benches along the sides for the rank and file and, at either end, the thronelike chairs for high-ranking Masons. And, in a conference room next door, there is more gold, though it is only paint on a copy of a larger-than-life statue of George Washington.

The lodge also hired a public relations firm to spread the word about its 225th anniversary, which was last month. And the Masons have run advertisements in movie theaters and run one-day classes to award the first three Masonic degrees in a single session. Until then, would-be Masons had to spend months learning what they needed to know to rise from Entered Apprentice to Fellowcraft to Master Mason.

“We’re still not thinking of it as recruiting or trying to amass people,” said Thomas M. Savini, the director of the library at the New York Grand Lodge Headquarters, on West 23rd Street and the Avenue of the Americas, “but I think we’ve reached a point where we realized that not saying anything isn’t making it any easier.”

They had also reached a point where they could not ignore what others were saying about them in “The Da Vinci Code” and other bestsellers like “The Book of Fate” by Brad Meltzer.

“What ‘The Da Vinci Code’ gave us was an opportunity to say, ‘Here’s what we are,’” Mr. Savini said.

What there is, inside the grand lodge headquarters, are a dozen ornate rooms where some 60 lodges still hold meetings regularly.

Those dozen rooms have no windows. Leading the way into one of them, the Grand Master, or leader of all Masons in New York State, Neal I. Bidnick, said the layout was no different from any other lodge room in the world, with an altar and candles in the center. At the one end are two pieces of stone, each about the size of a cinder block — one uncut, the other finished.

“We take a good man and polish the rough edges,” Mr. Bidnick said. (The Masons do not admit women.)

In the hallways of the grand lodge headquarters, the walls are crowded with framed photographs of Masons past and present, but mostly past: Hubert H. Humphrey, the former vice president; and William J. Bratton, the former police commissioner who is now the chief of police in Los Angeles.

But there are fewer names on the membership rolls than there once were: 54,000 in New York, down from a high of 346,413 in 1929. Membership rose again after World War II, rising to 307,323 in 1957 before beginning a long slide.

As Mr. Bidnick explains it, New York’s Masons are heavily involved in community service, underwriting medical research and supplying 29,000 American flags,one for every public school classroom in the city. But still there are the secret rooms where Masons gather.

“Why do we bring them into a room like this?” Mr. Bidnick asked. “Basically, all our rituals are designed to be educational. All these things they show you on TV, the assumptions are wrong.”

He described an encounter with a cable television reporter. “The woman from CNN read some passages about a rope and a hood and asked, ‘Is that what you do?’” he recalled. “It’s not.”

He has heard the conspiracy theories. “We’re often asked why we have a G” as a symbol, Mr. Bidnick said. “We had a person in here from CNN before ‘The Da Vinci Code.’ She pointed out that only in English and German does the word for God begin with a G. But masonry is an educational institution, so that G stands for geometry.”

And, on one wall, is a stained-glass panel with a G in a square and compasses.

Geometry is but one of the seven liberal arts. A Mason who could not remember the other six would need only to look up, for they are written on the ceiling: arithmetic, rhetoric, logic, grammar, music and astronomy. The four cardinal virtues — fortitude, prudence, temperance and justice — are written there, too.

And Mr. Bidnick said when Masons refer to God, they refer to the great architect of the universe. To hear him and Mr. Savini tell it, there is nothing theological in the reference. Mr. Savini said that Masonry was dogma-free. “It doesn’t tell a man how to interpret a symbol, which leaves it open to people outside to misinterpret it,” he said.

They would not describe in detail what happens in the room when members are present for a lodge meeting. Mr. Savini did dispel what he said were misconceptions — that there are secret tattoos, for example. “Masonry has nothing to do with tattoos,” he said. “You don’t get a tattoo when you become a Mason.”

Still, he himself has a tattoo, though not a Masonic tattoo.

And Mr. Savini points out that the eye on the dollar bill is not really a Masonic symbol. “We use the eye,” he said, “but opticians use the eye. It makes us look ridiculous if we say it links into some Masonic connection that was not there.”

    A Secret Society, Spilling a Few Secrets, NYT, 4.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/04/nyregion/04masons.html

Strong Faith and Community May Help Amish Cope With Loss

October 4, 2006
The New York Times
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

The Amish whose children were executed by a milk deliveryman in their rural Pennsylvania schoolhouse had, until Monday, lived in a world where they were largely insulated from violence and singularly unprepared to respond to it.

But their strong faith and community ties may prepare them unusually well to cope with it, experts on the Amish say.

In their one-room schoolhouses in Lancaster County, the Amish have no need for security officers or metal detectors. Their classmates are their siblings and neighbors, their teacher usually a young woman not much older than the students, who graduate after eighth grade. There are no phones to call for help. There is no electricity, perhaps just a battery-operated clock. A wood-burning stove keeps the room warm.

“Violence in an Amish school is just unthinkable,” said Donald B. Kraybill, senior fellow at the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pa., who has studied the Amish for 20 years.

“These are really safe schools, in rural settings, out of the way,” Mr. Kraybill said. “These children have never watched television, never seen a movie, never seen a video game. They don’t in their minds have any images of violence, and there wouldn’t be any protocol in the school for what to do in an emergency like this.”

About 28,000 Amish live in Lancaster County, and 200,000 in 27 states nationwide, Mr. Kraybill said. Far from dwindling, the Amish population in the United States has doubled about every 20 years because they tend to have many children. As young adults, they must decide whether to be baptized and stay in the community; 90 percent of them decide to remain, experts say.

The Amish are the descendants of Swiss and German immigrants who came to the United States in the 18th century, many to escape persecution. They are Anabaptists, and believe in adult baptism. They worship in homes rather than churches.

In their rural life, they are used to tragedy, said Tom Shachtman, a journalist who wrote “Rumspringa: To Be or Not to Be Amish” (North Point Press, 2006). Barns burn down. Families riding in horse-drawn buggies are hit by trucks. Farmers are maimed in accidents. Many of the large families who Mr. Shachtman met had lost a child, some to suicide.

They accept these tragedies as the will of God, an approach to life they call yieldedness, Mr. Shachtman said. He said this helped explain why the Amish interviewed after the shooting in Nickel Mines, Pa., sounded more resigned than angry. They are pacifists, and some spoke of the need to forgive the killer.

In one sign of their approach to tragedy, Amish residents started a charity fund yesterday not only to help the victims’ families but also to help the gunman’s widow.

“This is imitation of Christ at its most naked,” Mr. Shachtman said. “If anybody is going to turn the other cheek in our society, it’s going to be the Amish.”

He continued, “I don’t want to denigrate anybody else who says they’re imitating Christ, but the Amish walk the walk as much as they talk the talk.”

The Amish surmount hardship through mutual aid. When a barn burns, they do not call the insurance company. They have a barn raising, said Kimberly D. Schmidt, associate professor of history at Eastern Mennonite University, in Harrisonburg, Va., who has studied Amish women.

“For the families who lost children, there will be a tremendous community outpouring of love and support,” Ms. Schmidt said. “They will not suffer alone in their grief at all. People will bring in meals for weeks. As devastating as this is, there’s so much strength they can draw from their community.”

    Strong Faith and Community May Help Amish Cope With Loss, NYT, 4.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/04/us/04amish.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Amish seclusion shattered by school slayings

Updated 10/3/2006 10:58 AM ET
USA Today
By Thomas Frank and Alan Levin

BART TOWNSHIP, Pa. — They shun electricity, telephones and the court system to try to stay disconnected from a world they consider polluted by modern convention and comfort.

But the rural seclusion the Amish have here in central Pennsylvania's rolling hills was shattered Monday by the execution-style slayings of five Amish girls in a one-room schoolhouse.

"You read about it, you hear about it. But you don't expect it to happen this close to home," said John Fisher, 33, an Amish man who lives a half-mile from the school.

The killings — the girls were bound together and had to be cut apart by rescue workers according to the Pennsylvania State Police — devastated the ordinarily composed Amish. Many were "crying and weeping and hugging, and the Amish people don't usually show too much emotion," said Annie Beiler, 66, whose farm abuts the school property. "They are quiet, private people."

Lancaster County District Attorney Don Totaro said, "It's beyond comprehension that anyone would slaughter children in this manner."

"It's like a dream. It's something you hear of in a city," said Naomi Fisher, whose runs an auction house nearby. "You read it in the paper. But not in a quiet little country school."

David Bernard, 66, of Parkesburg works as a driver for some Amish neighbors and accompanied them to the school Monday night. Bernard said the Amish viewed the violence as a demonstration of the problems posed by the modern world.

"This is a place of blood," he said of the school. "People died here, so they'll probably tear it down."

The violence seemed unlikely to change the tight religious sect that is rooted in non-violence and resistance to change.

"I don't see it as having a large effect on their lifestyle," said David Weaver-Zercher, a professor at Messiah College in Pennsylvania. "In a certain way, it confirms a general orientation about the world not being a very good place."

Radically non-violent

Since the Amish emerged as a small Protestant sect in late-17th-century Switzerland, its adherents have strived to maintain religious purity. Non-violence — or "non-resistance" — was an early tenet that arose from a literal reading of the New Testament.

"They take the words of Jesus seriously: to love your enemies and not to do evil to fellow people," said Donald Kraybill, an Amish expert at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. "There is very little violence in the Amish community."

Crime by the Amish is so rare that only one adherent is thought to have been convicted of murder: an Amish man from western Pennsylvania who killed his wife in 1993 saying he wanted to excise the devil.

The gunman Monday, Charles Carl Roberts IV, was not Amish and was not targeting the Amish but apparently picked the school because it was near his home and had little security, said Col. Jeffrey Miller of the Pennsylvania State Police. Roberts killed himself in the school building.

Amish schools — typically one-room schoolhouses with 25-30 students and a young, female teacher — reflect the community's efforts to protect itself against the dangers of worldliness. The Amish went to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1972 to preserve their right to end classroom education after eighth grade.

They won a decision in 1972 that said the Amish weren't against education itself but oppose "conventional formal education" in high school years "because it comes at the child's crucial adolescent period of religious development."

"The Amish view is that they should provide the basic education for children to live productively in the Amish community," said Herman Bontrager of the National Committee for Amish Religious Freedom, which brought the Supreme Court case. "Additional things really aren't necessary for living productively in their community. They distract and maybe lead you into another world."

The Amish have negotiated a tricky path between accepting and rejecting convention since the rise of technology in the mid-19th century. They number about 200,000. The largest communities in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Indiana.

Many have moved away from farming, particularly in Lancaster County, Pa., the site of Monday's shooting and the setting for the acclaimed 1985 film Witness, in which Harrison Ford plays a Philadelphia police officer who takes refuge in an Amish farm.

About 60% of Lancaster's Amish run businesses such as greenhouses, woodworking shops and farmer's markets, said Kraybill.

Matters of technology

That has challenged the Amish's effort to "separate from the world," said Weaver-Zercher, the Messiah College professor. "They look at various technology and how that would connect them."

The Amish eschew electricity that would literally connect them to society through power lines, but they use self-contained power sources such as batteries and gas to run refrigerators and stoves.

They pay federal income taxes and local property taxes, but they won an act of Congress to exempt them from paying and receiving Social Security benefits. "They feel the church should provide support for its own members," Kraybill said.

Amish avoid phones in their homes, where they would enable intrusions that interrupt family life. Phones are in some Amish businesses and at roadside booths where families share them.

After the gunman took students hostage in the school, a teacher ran to a farmhouse where someone called 911.

Although Amish enjoy police protection, many of them are reluctant to cooperate with criminal investigations, viewing prosecution as a form of force.

Steven Nolt, a historian at Goshen College in Indiana who's written several books about the Amish, recalled cases in which Amish people were murdered but relatives refused to help win convictions "because they weren't going to engage in that kind of retributive violence."

Weaver-Zercher of Messiah College said he expects the Amish to "reach out" to gunman's widow.

"They'll try to express their forgiveness," he said, "and sense that in some ways, this woman is a victim."

Contributing: Mimi Hall in Nickel Mines, Pa. Frank reported from Washington.

    Amish seclusion shattered by school slayings, UT, 3.10.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-10-03-amish-seclusion_x.htm

Amish usually keep grief private

Tuesday, October 3, 2006
TRIBUNE-REVIEW/Pittsburgh Tribune Review
By Justin Vellucci

Few people living outside Nickel Mines might learn how deeply the Lancaster County village was wounded Monday by the schoolhouse shooting that left three Amish girls and a gunman dead.

Public displays of sadness or mourning are rare, if they're seen at all, according to two men versed in Amish culture. TV cameras will be kept at a safe distance. Discussions over how the modern world is intruding into the insular society of the Amish likely would take place behind closed doors.

Even Amish families beyond Lancaster County might not make public statements expressing grief about the incident, they suggested.

"(The Amish) don't hire or need support groups. You're not going to see them on 'Larry King Live,'" said Jim Fisher, 67, of New Wilmington, Lawrence County, a retired criminal law professor and author of a book about an Amish murder.

"They're stoic. They're private. They're not given to public displays of emotion. They'll grieve privately. That doesn't mean they grieve any less."

But Fisher and David Weaver-Zercher, who teaches American religious history at Messiah College near Harrisburg, said that despite intense private mourning, the Amish likely will not panic about the shooting or trigger a regional hysteria about school safety.

Partly that is because the Amish often view tragic events as part of a fallen world, Weaver-Zercher said. They also have faith that God will sustain them through difficult times and struggles.

Their religious culture, which grew out of the Anabaptist tradition of the 16th century, makes them aware of suffering by teaching them about the struggles of martyrs and others deemed to be God's faithful, Weaver-Zercher said.

Few events, however, can compare to the shootings, which evidently were triggered when a 32-year-old milk truck driver decided to enact revenge for a two-decades-old grudge.

Amish communities have grappled with allegations of drug dealing and domestic violence, but Fisher said these issues frequently are addressed within the community. Homicides involving those outside the Amish community are very rare.

The response might not be different from those of families who lost children and loved ones in recent school shootings elsewhere in the country. The Amish lead sometimes-isolated lives separated from modern technology, but they cannot completely escape contemporary society, Fisher said.

"They don't live in a bubble," he said. "They're human beings. They're not exempt from the problems all of us face just because they live a quaint life."

    Amish usually keep grief private, PTR, 3.10.2006,http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/cityregion/s_473197.html

Amish schools are rooted in the past

They have one room, one teacher, no electricity, and are not mandatory beyond the 8th grade.
 

Posted on Tue, Oct. 03, 2006
The Philadelphia Inquirer
By Kellie Patrick
Inquirer Staff Writer

Amish schools, like most aspects of Amish life, remain today as they have been for generations.

Even the school shootings around the country have had little effect.

School doors are commonly unlocked during the school day, said Stephen Scott, research assistant at the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College.

The schools themselves are one-room affairs with outdoor bathrooms, and have many windows to let in the sunlight, since there is no electricity.

There is usually just one teacher - most often a young, single Amish woman - who sometimes has a helper, he said.

There are no guards.

"There's never been a reason for that," Scott said. "The worst problems the Amish have had in their schools are nosy tourists wanting to take pictures of them. That's the worst problem they've ever had."

And even that likely had not been much of a problem at West Nickel Mines Amish School, in an out-of-the way community - 12 miles southeast of Lancaster - most tourists never see.

There are more than 150 of these one-room school houses in Lancaster County, said Scott, with more opening each year. Each school holds grades 1 through 8, and has 20 to 40 students. Schools are most often located within walking distance of their students in this part of the county. In the western part, where the Amish population is more spread out, Amish students take buses or vans - driven by non-Amish - to school.

Schools are governed by a school board of Amish men, Scott said. Teachers have no college degree, and are not licensed by the state.

In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Amish students did not have to attend beyond grade 8, and that their teachers did not have to be licensed by the state, Scott said.

Students study reading, writing, math, music and German; Amish church services, which are held at congregants' homes, are conducted in German.

"To some extent there is geography, but very little science. The basics are emphasized," Scott said.

    Amish schools are rooted in the past, PI, 3.10.2006, http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/15664071.htm

Unwanted attention focused on rural area Bart Township residents dislike being in media spotlight.

Posted on Tue, Oct. 03, 2006
The Philadelphia Inquirer
By Lini S. Kadaba
Inquirer Staff Writer

PARADISE, Pa. - With its rolling dairy farms and slow-moving buggies, Bart Township typifies Amish country.

"We're just a quiet little village area getting national attention we don't want," Val Keene, the secretary-treasurer of Bart Township, said yesterday, weary of calls from across the nation and even one from England seeking information about the shooting of 11 girls, three fatally, at a school in the rural community. Earlier, she had appeared as a guest on a London talk show, she said.

"We're a very conservative community," Keene said. "Everybody is your neighbor, but they're not in your business... . We've never had anything like this happen."

Located about 55 miles west of Philadelphia, near the small Lancaster County town of Paradise, Bart Township - population about 3,000 - is made up of Old Order Amish and English, as the Amish call those outside their community. Four Amish church districts are nearby, taking in about 150 to 200 people, said Stephen Scott, research assistant at the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College.

Most of the Amish either operate dairy farms or home shops where they make sheds and gazebos, he said.

It is a tight-knit community, where everyone knows everyone, that will pull even closer to cope with the horrific events, said those familiar with the area.

"The Amish would have a sense, even in something like this, to accept it as God's will even though it brings a lot of sorrow and grief," Scott said.

"I'm sure Amish from all over the county are gathering with the families of those that were killed or wounded," he said. "They would be bringing food to the people that were affected by this... lots of it."

Among those outside the Amish community, talk of a fund to help the families has circulated, Keene said.

Unlike other parts of Lancaster County, few tourists have found their way to Bart Township.

"It's off the beaten path," Scott said. "The sale is the biggest thing."

The Bart Fire Company Sale is a benefit for the volunteer fire company, which includes many Amish. It is held in the village of Georgetown each March. Amish bring quilts, farm equipment and even livestock to sell, and families come from around the area for a fun day.

Now, no doubt, Bart Township will also be known for this tragedy.

    Unwanted attention focused on rural area Bart Township residents dislike being in media spotlight., PI, 3.10.2006, http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/15664069.htm

A people of humility still living in 19th century

Published: 03 October 2006
By David Usborne
The New York Times
 

With their humble clothes and picturesque farms, the Amish of Lancaster County have become accustomed to being one of the most popular tourist curiosities of the eastern United States. But through all the peering of outsiders from passing cars, they try to remain separate from the outside world.

They attract attention because they seem stuck in time as if they never left the 19th century. Drive the gravel by-ways of Lancaster County through hamlets with names like Bird in Hand and Paradise and you enter into a living museum of a bygone age. But this is not, as it at first may seem, a countryside Disneyland with actors playing the parts of generations-ago Americans.

Most famously, they spurn not only cars, going about all their daily business in their horse-drawn buggies, but also telephones and anything that runs on electricity. Homes are not wired, because wires are newfangled and superfluous to their simple needs.

If the Amish ever give any ground to modernity ­ their horse-drawn buggies have indicator lights nowadays ­ it's only when they are obliged to. Forced a few years ago to find a means to cool their milk to meet hygiene standards, the Amish decided that diesel generators to power fridges were acceptable.

A 1972 ruling by the Supreme Court exempted certain religious groups from laws requiring all children to attend the public school system or certified private schools. The Amish were allowed to send their offspring to traditional one-room schools.

Their insulation from society extends to a shared sense that theirs is a world shielded from the ills of contemporary America, especially its violent crime. Headlines were spawned across America nearly 10 years ago when reports surfaced of drug abuse among young Amish. The extent of it turned out to be minimal, but the surprise was enough to draw wide coverage.

The largest community of so-called Old Order Amish is in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and numbers about 20,000 people. There are, however, significant Amish outposts in 20 other US states and in Ontario, Canada.

Many are still trilingual, speaking a German dialect called Pennsylvania Dutch in their homes, high German in their religious services, and English in their dealings with the outside world. While most of the Amish have ancestry from Germany, some also trace their roots to the British Isles, Switzerland and France.

Among the Lancaster County Amish, about 40 per cent of the families remain engaged solely in agriculture. In recent years, however, they have set aside some of their squeamishness about the outside world and opened successful craft and food shops in urban centres on the East Coast, including Philadelphia and New York.

Their community traces its roots to the Reformation in Europe and the Anabaptist movement, which gave birth first to the Mennonite church, founded by a Dutch Catholic priest called Menno Simons in 1536. In 1693, a Swiss bishop called Jacob Amman created a splinter group that became known as the Amish. Mennonites and Amish share many religious tenets, but the former take austerity further.

Both the Amish and Mennonites began settling in Pennsylvania in the 1720s and 1730s, where they found fertile land and a non-judgmental religious and political environment. Amish teaching stresses humility, family, community and separation from the outside world. The Amish believe insulation helps them bind the ties of family.

Their sober dress code that gives no ground to fashion is an expression of their faith. Women cover flesh with long skirts and long sleeves. Men and boys are expected to wear hats, dark suits with braces. No zippers are allowed and men can only grow beards once they are married.

For the families ripped apart by yesterday's events there will be no consolation. For the Amish community at large, however, at least they have the knowledge that this was not violence born from within their own.

The gunman, police reported, was neither Amish nor did he apparently have many ties with the Amish community, aside from living close by and driving a local milk lorry.

With their humble clothes and picturesque farms, the Amish of Lancaster County have become accustomed to being one of the most popular tourist curiosities of the eastern United States. But through all the peering of outsiders from passing cars, they try to remain separate from the outside world.

They attract attention because they seem stuck in time as if they never left the 19th century. Drive the gravel by-ways of Lancaster County through hamlets with names like Bird in Hand and Paradise and you enter into a living museum of a bygone age. But this is not, as it at first may seem, a countryside Disneyland with actors playing the parts of generations-ago Americans.

Most famously, they spurn not only cars, going about all their daily business in their horse-drawn buggies, but also telephones and anything that runs on electricity. Homes are not wired, because wires are newfangled and superfluous to their simple needs.

If the Amish ever give any ground to modernity ­ their horse-drawn buggies have indicator lights nowadays ­ it's only when they are obliged to. Forced a few years ago to find a means to cool their milk to meet hygiene standards, the Amish decided that diesel generators to power fridges were acceptable.

A 1972 ruling by the Supreme Court exempted certain religious groups from laws requiring all children to attend the public school system or certified private schools. The Amish were allowed to send their offspring to traditional one-room schools.

Their insulation from society extends to a shared sense that theirs is a world shielded from the ills of contemporary America, especially its violent crime. Headlines were spawned across America nearly 10 years ago when reports surfaced of drug abuse among young Amish. The extent of it turned out to be minimal, but the surprise was enough to draw wide coverage.

The largest community of so-called Old Order Amish is in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and numbers about 20,000 people. There are, however, significant Amish outposts in 20 other US states and in Ontario, Canada.
Many are still trilingual, speaking a German dialect called Pennsylvania Dutch in their homes, high German in their religious services, and English in their dealings with the outside world. While most of the Amish have ancestry from Germany, some also trace their roots to the British Isles, Switzerland and France.

Among the Lancaster County Amish, about 40 per cent of the families remain engaged solely in agriculture. In recent years, however, they have set aside some of their squeamishness about the outside world and opened successful craft and food shops in urban centres on the East Coast, including Philadelphia and New York.

Their community traces its roots to the Reformation in Europe and the Anabaptist movement, which gave birth first to the Mennonite church, founded by a Dutch Catholic priest called Menno Simons in 1536. In 1693, a Swiss bishop called Jacob Amman created a splinter group that became known as the Amish. Mennonites and Amish share many religious tenets, but the former take austerity further.

Both the Amish and Mennonites began settling in Pennsylvania in the 1720s and 1730s, where they found fertile land and a non-judgmental religious and political environment. Amish teaching stresses humility, family, community and separation from the outside world. The Amish believe insulation helps them bind the ties of family.

Their sober dress code that gives no ground to fashion is an expression of their faith. Women cover flesh with long skirts and long sleeves. Men and boys are expected to wear hats, dark suits with braces. No zippers are allowed and men can only grow beards once they are married.

For the families ripped apart by yesterday's events there will be no consolation. For the Amish community at large, however, at least they have the knowledge that this was not violence born from within their own.

The gunman, police reported, was neither Amish nor did he apparently have many ties with the Amish community, aside from living close by and driving a local milk lorry.

    A people of humility still living in 19th century, I, 3.10.2006, http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article1783749.ece

Archbishop’s Call for Court Blessing Steers Clear of Issues

October 2, 2006
The New York Times
By NEELA BANERJEE

WASHINGTON, Oct. 1 — Speaking to Supreme Court justices, cabinet members, politicians and hundreds of judges and lawyers gathered here on Sunday to celebrate a special Mass marking the start of the judicial calendar, Archbishop Donald W. Wuerl of Washington rejoiced in what he called the resurgence of faith in the shaping of public policy and urged those before him to remain rooted in their religion.

“What we do and how we act, our morals and ethics, follow on what be believe,” Archbishop Wuerl told a standing-room crowd at the Roman Catholic Cathedral of St. Matthew downtown. “The religious convictions of a people sustain their moral decisions.”

Officially called the Solemn Votive Mass of the Holy Spirit, “votive” indicating that it is being celebrated for a particular intention, Red Masses are held all over the country, typically at the start of a judicial year. The Supreme Court’s new term begins Monday.

Worshipers ask for the blessing of the Holy Spirit on those who administer justice, in a tradition that goes back to 13th-century Europe. The service is called the Red Mass because of the red vestments clergy members wear.

This year, the Mass was celebrated by the new leader of the Washington Archdiocese, Archbishop Wuerl, to bless a Supreme Court that has a Catholic majority for the first time. The five Catholics on the court are Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia and Samuel A. Alito Jr.

All but Justice Alito were in attendance Sunday, as were Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales; several other cabinet members; Mayor Anthony A. Williams; and Lt. Gov. Michael Steele of Maryland, a Republican candidate for the Senate.

Many non-Catholics attend Red Masses, as a sign of respect. Last year, President Bush came; generally, presidents attend at least one during their terms.

A procession of priests and bishops was followed by a police color guard. A Ralph Vaughan Williams hymn was followed by the national anthem.

Having earned a reputation as a skilled diplomat in his previous tenure as bishop of Pittsburgh, Archbishop Wuerl did not overtly talk about issues the church has championed, like prohibiting abortion, although the court this session will review the constitutionality of a ban on a type of late-term abortion.

Instead, he said the values formed by religion could not be separated from the insight and judgment brought to bear on law and policy.

“The two spheres, church and state, while distinct, are always interrelated,” Archbishop Wuerl told the worshipers. “Politics, law, faith are mingled because believers are also citizens. Church and state are home for the same people.”

For those who may have been looking for some clue to the archbishop’s approach to political issues, he strode the range of Catholic social teaching without focusing on a particular topic, as he called for “speaking out against racial discrimination, social injustice or threats to the dignity of life.”

Advocates on the right and the left have said that, historically, personal religious beliefs have not necessarily directed the way justices vote on a case. But when Justice Alito was confirmed in January, the news media and others noted the Catholic majority on the court.

Few may have raised the issue of the justices’ religion if they had all been Methodist, for instance, said John H. Garvey, dean of Boston College Law School, in a telephone interview. But Mr. Garvey said it was valid to discuss the religious composition of the court because some people would assume the justices voted a particular way because of their Catholic faith.

“They are not a voting bloc,” Mr. Garvey said. “The Catholic Church is a very big tent with people from the far left and the far right in it. The fact that the Catholic members of the court are center-to-right rather than center-to-left says more about President Bush than about the Catholic Church.”

Lucia A. Silecchia, professor of law at Catholic University of America in Washington, said it was too soon to tell whether the Catholic justices held common views. “Where it gets complicated is that all five identify themselves as Catholic, but they aren’t necessarily consistent with one another,” Professor Silecchia said.

The Mass ended with “America the Beautiful” and the hymn “O God Beyond All Praising.” The archbishop descended the altar and left smiling and chatting with Chief Justice Roberts.

Later, on the steps of the cathedral, two young men approached Archbishop Wuerl to have him bless their rosaries and to take pictures with him.

As the archbishop stood with one man, the other, holding the camera, said happily, “Here’s to the union of church and state!”

The archbishop laughed, but gently corrected him. “No,” he said, “remember, I said they were two distinct spheres.”

    Archbishop’s Call for Court Blessing Steers Clear of Issues, NYT, 2.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/02/washington/02mass.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Chaplain Prayer Provision Cut From Military Spending Bill

October 1, 2006
The New York Times
By NEELA BANERJEE

WASHINGTON, Sept. 30 — Congress removed a controversial provision in a military bill on Friday that would have permitted chaplains to offer sectarian prayer at mandatory nondenominational events. At the same time, lawmakers moved to rescind guidelines issued last year by the Air Force and Navy meant to curtail the risk of religious coercion and proselytizing within the ranks.

“The provisions in today’s bill represent a full step forward and a half step back,” said Representative Steve Israel, Democrat of New York and a member of the House Armed Services Committee. “We removed dangerous language undermining religious freedom and military effectiveness, but I am distressed that instead of moving forward with unequivocal religious tolerance in the military, we are reopening old loopholes that permitted some acts of coercion and proselytizing.”

For several weeks, wrangling over the chaplain prayer provision had stalled the National Defense Authorization Act, a bill that sets military spending levels.

The provision was championed by some evangelical chaplains and Christian groups, like Focus on the Family.

But it was opposed by the Pentagon, the National Association of Evangelicals and a dozen or so ecumenical groups, which maintained that offering sectarian prayer would create division within the military.

Congress did hand some evangelicals a victory by abrogating the Air Force and Navy guidelines on religious expression first issued in the wake of a 2004 scandal in the Air Force Academy, when some staff members, alumni and cadets accused evangelical Christians in leadership posts of aggressive proselytizing and discrimination.

Spokesmen for the Air Force and the Navy said Friday that they had not had a chance to review Congress’ decision and so had no comment on eliminating the guidelines.

    Chaplain Prayer Provision Cut From Military Spending Bill, NYT, 1.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/01/washington/01chaplain.html