History > 2008 > USA > Faith (V)

Sister Camille D'Arienzo,

who used to live at the Convent of Mercy,

chokes up while visiting the chapel,

which might be destroyed when the convent closes.

Photograph: James Estrin/The New York Times

After 146 Years, a Brooklyn Convent Is Closing

NYT

17.12.2008

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/17/nyregion/17convent.html

Divine Recruits

In America for Job,

an African Priest Finds a Home

December 29, 2008
The New York Times
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

OAK GROVE, Ky. — The Rev. Chrispin Oneko, hanging up his vestments after leading one of his first Sunday Masses at his new American parish, was feeling content until he discovered several small notes left by his parishioners.

The notes, all anonymous, conveyed the same message: Father, please make your homilies shorter. One said that even five minutes was too long for a mother with children.

At home in Kenya, Father Oneko had preached to rural Africans who walked for hours to get to church and would have been disappointed if the sermons were brief.

“Here the whole Mass is one hour,” he said, a broad smile on his round face. “That was a homework for me, to learn to summarize everything and make the homily 10 minutes, maybe 15. Here, people are on the move very fast.”

Father Oneko is part of a wave of Roman Catholic priests from Africa, Asia and Latin America who have been recruited to fill empty pulpits in parishes across America. They arrive knowing how to celebrate Mass, anoint the sick and baptize babies. But few are prepared for the challenges of being a pastor in America.

Father Oneko, 46, had never counseled parishioners like those he found here at St. Michael the Archangel Catholic Church. Many are active-duty or retired military families coping with debt, racial prejudice, multiple deployments to war zones and post-traumatic stress disorder. Nor did he have any idea how to lead the multimillion-dollar fund-raising campaign the parishioners had embarked on, hoping to build an octagonal church with a steeple to replace their red brick parish hall.

Cutting his sermons short was, in some ways, the least of Father Oneko’s worries when he arrived here in 2004. He did not understand the African-American experience. He had never dealt with lay people so involved in running their church. And yet, in the end, the families of his church would come to feel an affinity with their gentle new pastor, reaching out to him in his hour of need, just as he had tended to them in theirs.

To the volunteers at St. Michael’s, it was clear that Father Oneko was out of his element in many ways. Marie Lake, the church’s volunteer administrator, and her husband, Fred, often invited him for dinner.

“My husband was driving him down 41A and there was a big old statue of Uncle Sam,” said Mrs. Lake, who owns an accounting business and keeps the church’s books. “He thought it was Sam from Sam’s Club wholesale.”

To help him along, the Lakes gave Father Oneko a high school textbook on American history and government.

“Many years ago we sent our missionaries to Africa, and now they’re sending missionaries here,” Mrs. Lake said. “It’s strange how that goes.”

In this largely rural, largely white area of Western Kentucky, the Rev. Darrell Venters, who is in charge of recruiting priests for the Diocese of Owensboro, knew that some of his parishes would never accept Father Oneko, who is short, stout and very dark-skinned.

But Father Venters thought that Father Oneko and St. Michael’s, a parish on the outskirts of a big military base, with its racial mix and many families who had lived abroad, was a good bet.

“We knew if any parish would accept him, it would be this one,” Father Venters said.

Inspired to Serve

When Father Oneko was growing up, the priest in his Roman Catholic parish was an American who spoke the native Luo language and was beloved by the villagers. He showed the children home movies of his parents and his seminary back in America.

“He inspired me,” Father Oneko said. “He was able to speak my language better than anybody I have known. It really interested me, the way I saw him praying the rosary every day. I just admired to be like him.”

In Kenya, Father Oneko became the sole pastor for 12 satellite parishes in an 80-mile stretch. He served more than 3,000 people communion on a typical weekend and ran a girls high school.

It was a hardship post. His car, the only one in the vicinity, was used as a school bus, an ambulance and, if the local officers caught a thief, a police car — with Father Oneko the driver.

When his bishop asked for volunteers to serve in a diocese in Jamaica that badly needed priests, Father Oneko put up his hand. He wanted a new challenge, and being a missionary suited his vision of serving the church.

He found conditions in Jamaica even more desperate than in Kenya. Violence was so common that thugs had killed a priest at the altar.

“The rats in the rectory ate my clothes,” he said. “I got a baby kitten to hunt the rats, but the kitten was eaten by hungry dogs.”

Father Oneko lasted nearly five years as pastor of five churches in Jamaica. But after so much time in hardship posts, he wanted to taste life in a developed country. He sent letters of introduction to dioceses in the United States.

He received offers from two American dioceses. He knew nothing about the Diocese of Owensboro, but picked it because he felt some affinity with its name.

“Our names start with O,” he explained. “So I was so much interested in this place that starts with O.”

Priests must have permission to leave their own dioceses, and some bishops are reluctant to let their priests go, especially if their parishes are understaffed.

In fact, the flow of priests from the developing world to Europe and the United States amounts to a brain drain: most of those developing countries have far fewer priests in proportion to Roman Catholics than the United States does. Father Oneko’s situation in Kenya, serving 12 parishes simultaneously, was not unusual.

But Father Oneko’s bishop at the time, Archbishop John Njenga of Mombasa, said he was receptive to the pleas of the bishops in Jamaica and the United States. He had traveled to Germany and seen parishes closed for lack of priests.

“The Lord will reward us for our generosity, for letting men go out there,” said Archbishop Njenga, who is now retired.

Father Oneko arrived at St. Michael’s on the heels of a Nigerian priest who had been helping out temporarily. Father Oneko said he was unnerved to hear that the Nigerian had not been a resounding success. Parishioners complained that they could not understand his accent. An American pastor said the Nigerian had seemed overly interested in material goods. When an ophthalmologist offered to fit him for glasses at no charge, he asked for three pairs.

But parishioners soon noticed that Father Oneko was different. He listened and won people over with his humility. Where the Nigerian priest had taught the choir to sing African hymns, Father Oneko did not try to impose his worship style. And he learned to keep his sermons to no more than 15 minutes and the Masses to one hour.

One Sunday, after he opened his homily with a joke that fell flat, he said, “I know some of you are looking at your watches, so I’ll make it brief.”

He preached slowly, in his Kenyan accent: “Late us prrray.” Sometimes he spelled out words when he saw the congregation looking puzzled. “B-I-R-D, not B-E-D,” he said.

He did not tell the parishioners that in Kenya and Jamaica, he had been a charismatic Catholic, participating in faith healings and leading Masses with spirited singing and clapping that lasted for hours.

In Kentucky, he stuck to the music the congregation was used to. At the Saturday evening Mass, that meant a faint choir of three voices; at the 11:30 a.m. Sunday Mass, an extended family of Filipinos played guitar and piano.

Some afternoons, the church’s deacon, Jack Cheasty, would see Father Oneko sitting alone at the piano in a corner of the church, quietly playing the upbeat charismatic hymns he loved. “He’s cautious to do anything that might be divisive,” Deacon Cheasty said, “and that’s one of his strengths.”
 

Tending the Flock

Father Oneko drove slowly out of the church parking lot one day in his Ford Taurus with a bumper sticker that said, “The Holy Priesthood: Called, Consecrated, Sent.” He was making house calls, giving communion to three parishioners too ill to come to church.

At the first house, he was offered a seat in an armchair, but instead he chose to sit on a rumpled couch next to his ailing parishioner, SunI Robbins, so frail from lung cancer she could barely sit up. She opened trembling hands to receive the eucharist.

“Don’t lose hope,” Father Oneko said gently, “because we all love you. Mr. Robbins loves you. The whole church, we are all praying for you. Just trust in God’s mercy and love.” (Mrs. Robbins has since died.)

Driving well under the speed limit, as is his habit, he said that Africans were far more accustomed to death — and premature death — than Americans. In Kenya, he said, so many parents were used to having children die. In Africa, he said, “We just accept it.”

He drove into the countryside to the home of one of the church’s founding members, Shirley Korman. In the yard, Mrs. Korman’s son was stalking small game with a rifle. Inside, the house was decorated with large framed prints of Civil War battle scenes.

Mrs. Korman, a retired nurse who has congestive heart failure, sat in a glider rocker, a red wig setting off her pale skin. She said that when her husband died, Father Oneko had comforted her and led a moving funeral.

“Father Chrispin,” she said, “if you’re still here in Kentucky, I want you to come and do my funeral.”

His answer was gentle: “I hope to still see more of you, but if it happens, I will fulfill your request.”

On the way out, after passing a portrait of Robert E. Lee, Father Oneko spied a statue of a guardian angel on the kitchen table. The angel was a beautiful woman in flowing robes, and she was black.

“I haven’t seen one like that before!” Father Oneko exclaimed, delighted.

That night, he settled at a table at a Mexican restaurant filled with soldiers in uniform and their families, where he discovered to his satisfaction that sizzling fajitas tasted a lot like the grilled meat he missed from Kenya. He said that although he saw himself as a missionary, he did not think he was actually spreading the faith in Kentucky.

“People already know their faith,” he said. “Mine is only to help them. I’m not planting any new faith here. Mine is only to water it.”

He confessed that he had an easier time relating to white Americans than African-Americans because he did not understand why blacks carried such resentments toward the United States.

“Their ancestors are long gone,” he said. “They are bitter for I don’t know what.”

He has little tolerance for what he sees as unnecessary self-pity. When an unemployed Vietnam veteran told him he blamed his war experience for his poverty, Father Oneko said he told him: “I blame you, because military people have so many opportunities. You are getting some pension from the government, so you should not complain.

“There are some poor people, poorer than you, somewhere, in Africa, in Jamaica,” Father Oneko said. “But you, at least you have freedom. You have somewhere to sleep.”

‘Part of the Family’

One morning in January, Father Oneko received a phone call from his family in Kenya, where a disputed presidential election had just set off a wave of intertribal anger and violence.

A mob had set fire to his parents’ house because they had given shelter to a family of a rival tribe the mob was chasing. Father Oneko’s 32-year-old brother, Vincent Oloo, arrived in time to help their elderly parents escape the burning house. But the mob turned on Father Oneko’s brother, shooting him dead. He left a wife and three children.

“My parents were just crying and crying,” Father Oneko said. “My father is crying and saying, ‘Now I’m losing all the children, who will bury me?’ ”

Father Oneko phoned his friend the Rev. John Thomas and then Mrs. Lake, his faithful volunteer administrator. She was stunned at the news, and for half an hour listened to and consoled her priest — a sudden role reversal. Father Oneko was troubled to hear his mother wailing on the phone and to know that he could not go to Kenya to perform the funeral. His parents insisted it was too dangerous for him to come.

Mrs. Lake called three of the church’s Silver Angels, a club of elders. They phoned more church members, and in two hours 60 people had assembled at a special noon Mass in memory of Father Oneko’s brother.

At the end of the Mass, they lined up in the center aisle as if for communion, and Father Oneko stood at the front receiving their embraces one by one.

He was overwhelmed by the outpouring of sympathy. Children in the parish school in Hopkinsville made him cards; one showed his brother with a halo, in the clouds. The bishop and priests of the diocese e-mailed and phoned their condolences. St. Michael’s and the parish in Hopkinsville took up a special collection for his family that totaled $5,600.

“It seems the whole church is praying with me,” Father Oneko said a few days later, as he read through the children’s cards. “You feel like you’re not a foreigner, just a part of the family. It makes me know how much I am to them.”

Bidding Farewell

In June, after four years at St. Michael’s, Father Oneko was transferred as part of a routine reshuffling of priests in the diocese. When he told the worshipers at the 11:30 Sunday Mass about the transfer, some cried. Several told him they would leave the church.

He said: “Don’t come to the church because of me. Come because of God.”

He insisted he did not want a big goodbye party because he was afraid he would cry. Still, he was showered with gifts: calling cards; a white chasuble from the Silver Angels, hemmed for his short frame; a $1,500 check from the parish for his coming trip to see his family in Kenya; and from Mrs. Korman, a replica of the black angel he had seen on her kitchen table.

He was leaving the parish no more and no less healthy than he had found it. Attendance still fluctuated from 300 to 450 on a weekend — lower in summer and during troop mobilizations.

The campaign to raise money for the new church was still under way. But as a temporary measure, the parishioners had replaced the stacking chairs with wooden pews and built an arched altar, so the old recreation hall looked more like a real church.

At his last set of three weekend Masses, Father Oneko began his homily with a rambling African story about a hyena, a monkey and a tortoise. At the punch lines, no one in the first two Masses laughed. By the third, he had the timing down better and some chuckled. The story was about being grateful, and he spent the next 20 minutes thanking everyone he could think of by name. The homily lasted 35 minutes.

In one of his last acts, he baptized an 11-month-old baby. With the sun streaming in, the baby, Hope Charity Banse, looked like a porcelain doll in her white christening gown.

The baby’s mother, Jennifer Banse, had been waiting for this moment for months. Her husband had just returned from Iraq, in time for Father Oneko to perform the baptism before he transferred. In her husband’s absence, Father Oneko had been a comfort.

Hope rested her head on her mother’s shoulder, then stretched her hand toward the African priest, more familiar to her than her own father. “Hope Charity,” Father Oneko said, “the Christian community welcomes you with great joy.”
 

Tuesday: An exporter of priests.

    In America for Job, an African Priest Finds a Home, NYT, 29.12.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/29/us/29priest.html?hp

Robert Marshall, Church Leader, 90, Dies

December 24, 2008
The New York Times
By BRUCE WEBER

The Rev. Dr. Robert J. Marshall, an ecumenist who in the 1970s led the Lutheran Church in America, then the nation’s largest Lutheran church, and helped pave the way for its merger with two other denominations, died Monday in Allentown, Pa. He was 90.

The cause was heart failure, said his daughter, the Rev. Peggy Niederer.

A pastor and biblical scholar who lectured on the Old Testament in Lutheran theological schools in Chicago and Columbia, S.C., Dr. Marshall was a lifelong advocate of interfaith and interdenominational cooperation, preaching a need for common ground not only from the pulpit but in the conference room and the convention hall as well.

Elected as president of the Lutheran Church in America in 1968 after the sudden death of a revered leader, Dr. Franklin Clark Fry, Dr. Marshall served in the post for 10 years. He reorganized the national and international ministries of the church, which had more than three million members, and guided it through a time of divisive interdenominational argument over biblical interpretations.

In 1988, Dr. Marshall’s wish for greater unity among Lutheran denominations was realized with the creation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. After decades of dialogue, the Lutheran Church in America, one of Lutheranism’s more liberal bodies, and two smaller and more conservative denominations, the American Lutheran Church and the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches, joined together, creating a church that 20 years later has 10,500 congregations and 4.8 million members in the United States and the Caribbean. (In the mid-17th century, European Lutherans settled in the Virgin Islands, one of the faith’s first homes in the New World.)

The Rev. Mark S. Hanson, current presiding bishop of the merged church, said in a statement this week that Dr. Marshall was “one of those giants among Lutheran leaders who served in the 20th century."

Robert James Marshall was born and grew up in Burlington, Iowa. His father was a carpenter.

“The family was poor,” his daughter said in a telephone interview Tuesday, “and it caused him to be sensitive to people who were disadvantaged.”

He graduated from Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio, and the Chicago Lutheran Theological Seminary, and earned his doctorate in divinity from the University of Chicago. After three years as pastor of a church in California, he joined the faculty of Muhlenberg College in Allentown, eventually becoming head of the religion department. Before becoming leader of the Lutheran church, he was president of the Illinois Synod.

Dr. Marshall’s wife of 55 years, Alice, died in 1998. In addition to his daughter, who is pastor of the Holy Spirit Lutheran Church in Leonia, N.J., he is survived by a sister, Dorothy Fisher of Moline, Ill.; a son, Robert Edward Marshall of Voorhees, N.J.; five grandchildren; and a great-grandson.

Dr. Marshall was a popular public speaker, often addressing church groups on the subject of church unity, but his most memorable words may have been just two. In Philadelphia in 1976, at the 41st International Eucharistic Congress, an interfaith gathering of scholars and church leaders that was devoted to ecumenism amid a decade often characterized by division, he stood to address a large crowd.

“Fellow Christians,” he said simply, and received a prolonged standing ovation.

    Robert Marshall, Church Leader, 90, Dies, NYT, 24.12.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/24/us/24marshall.html

Texas Report Says 12 Girls

at Sect Ranch Were Married

December 24, 2008
The New York Times
By DAN FROSCH

Texas child welfare officials have concluded that a dozen under-age girls living at the ranch of a polygamist sect that was raided in April were involved in “spiritual” marriages to older men.

It also said that hundreds of children at the ranch had suffered neglect through their exposure to such improper relationships.

The findings were released Tuesday in a report by the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services that focused on the sect living at the Yearning for Zion Ranch in Eldorado.

“The Yearning for Zion case is about sexual abuse of girls and children who were taught that under-age marriages are a way of life,” the report said. “It is about parents who condoned illegal under-age marriages and adults who failed to protect young girls — it has never been about religion.”

According to the report, sexual abuse of children at the ranch was common, with 12 girls, ages 12 to 15, “spiritually” married to older men. Seven of those girls had given birth to one or more children, the report found.

But a spokesman for the families at the ranch, who belong to the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or F.L.D.S., rejected the report’s conclusions and questioned its authors’ motives.

The spokesman, Willie Jessop, called the report “a desperate attempt by the officials of the Family and Protective Services Department to try and justify their barbaric actions of April 3.”

Pointing out that the courts had ordered the return of the children who had been removed from the ranch, he added, “Now they are trying to put out a report and justify it, and it doesn’t hold up.” The sect broke from the mainstream Mormon Church after it rejected polygamy in 1890 and has since found itself in public legal battles over the practice.

The report, requested by the executive commissioner of the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, detailed the controversial raid on the ranch.

After receiving a call alleging child abuse at the ranch from someone claiming to be a teenage sect member, the authorities raided the West Texas compound and removed 439 children. The raid drew national attention for weeks as the state grappled with placing the children in foster care, and the F.L.D.S. went to court to win their return.

Both the Texas Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals ruled that the raid had been too broad, that it was not backed by evidence of sexual abuse, and that there had been no grounds to seize the children. Ultimately, all but one of the children were returned to their parents, and the authorities have investigated whether the original report of abuse was a hoax.

Since the raid, however, 12 men living at the ranch were indicted by a grand jury in Eldorado, on charges including the sexual assault of a minor and bigamy.

The report also noted that F.L.D.S. parents had since taken court-mandated classes on “the appropriate discipline and the psychosexual development of children,” and that girls had been educated on how to identify and report sexual abuse.

Meanwhile, the child welfare agency has ended cases involving 424 children after determining the children were safe from sexual abuse and neglect. Fifteen cases remain active.

Patrick Crimmins, a spokesman for the state agency, said the report showed why the ranch had been raided in the first place.

“We went in there to do an abuse and neglect investigation,” he said. “We didn’t go in there to remove and put kids in foster care.”

    Texas Report Says 12 Girls at Sect Ranch Were Married, NYT, 24.12.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/24/us/24abuse.html

In Madoff Scandal,

Jews Feel an Acute Betrayal

December 24, 2008
The New York Times
By ROBIN POGREBIN

There is a teaching in the Talmud that says an individual who comes before God after death will be asked a series of questions, the first one of which is, “Were you honest in your business dealings?” But it is the Ten Commandments that have weighed most heavily on the mind of Rabbi David Wolpe of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles in light of the sins for which Bernard L. Madoff stands accused.

“You shouldn’t steal,” Rabbi Wolpe said. “And this is theft on a global scale.”

The full scope of the misdeeds to which Mr. Madoff has confessed in swindling individuals and charitable groups has yet to be calculated, and he is far from being convicted. But Jews all over the country are already sending up something of a communal cry over a cost they say goes beyond the financial to the theological and the personal.

Here is a Jew accused of cheating Jewish organizations trying to help other Jews, they say, and of betraying the trust of Jews and violating the basic tenets of Jewish law. A Jew, they say, who seemed to exemplify the worst anti-Semitic stereotypes of the thieving Jewish banker.

So in synagogues and community centers, on blogs and in countless conversations, many Jews are beating their chests — not out of contrition, as they do on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, but because they say Mr. Madoff has brought shame on their people in addition to financial ruin and shaken the bonds of trust that bind Jewish communities.

“Jews have these familial ties,” Rabbi Wolpe said. “It’s not solely a shared belief; it’s a sense of close communal bonds, and in the same way that your family can embarrass you as no one else can, when a Jew does this, Jews feel ashamed by proxy. I’d like to believe someone raised in our community, imbued with Jewish values, would be better than this.”

Among the apparent victims of Mr. Madoff were many Jewish educational institutions and charitable causes that lost fortunes in his investments; they include Yeshiva University, Hadassah, the Jewish Community Centers Association of North America and the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. The Chais Family Foundation, which worked on educational projects in Israel, was recently forced to shut down because of losses in Madoff investments. Many of Mr. Madoff’s individual investors were Jewish and supported Jewish causes, apparently drawn to him precisely because of his own communal involvement and because he radiated the comfortable sense of being one of them.

“The Jewish world is not going to be the same for a while,” said Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky of Congregation Ansche Chesed in New York.

Jews are also grappling with the implications of Mr. Madoff’s deeds for their public image, what one rabbi referred to as the “shanda factor,” using the Yiddish term for an embarrassing shame or disgrace. As Bradley Burston, a columnist for haaretz.com, the English-language Web site of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, wrote on Dec. 17: “The anti-Semite’s new Santa is Bernard Madoff. The answer to every Jew-hater’s wish list. The Aryan Nation at its most delusional couldn’t have come up with anything to rival this.”

The Anti-Defamation League said in a statement that Mr. Madoff’s arrest had prompted an outpouring of anti-Semitic comments on Web sites around the world, most repeating familiar tropes about Jews and money. Abraham H. Foxman, the group’s national director, said that canard went back hundreds of years, but he noted that anti-Semites did not need facts to be anti-Semitic.

“We’re not immune from having thieves and people who engage in fraud,” Mr. Foxman said in an interview, disputing any notion that Mr. Madoff should be seen as emblematic. “Why, because he happens to be Jewish, he should have a conscience?”

He added that Mr. Madoff’s victims extended well beyond the Jewish community.

In addition to theft, the Torah discusses another kind of stealing, geneivat da’at, the Hebrew term for deception or stealing someone’s mind. “In the rabbinic mind-set, he’s guilty of two sins: one is theft, and the other is deception,” said Burton L. Visotzky, a professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary.

“The fact that he stole from Jewish charities puts him in a special circle of hell,” Rabbi Visotzky added. “He really undermined the fabric of the Jewish community, because it’s built on trust. There is a wonderful rabbinic saying — often misapplied — that all Jews are sureties for one another, which means, for instance, that if a Jew takes a loan out, in some ways the whole Jewish community guarantees it.”

Several rabbis said they were reminded of Esau, a figure of mistrust in the Bible. According to a rabbinic interpretation, Esau, upon embracing his brother Jacob after 20 years apart, was actually frisking him to see what he could steal. “The saying goes that, when Esau kisses you,” Rabbi Visotzky said, “check to make sure your teeth are still there.”

Rabbi Kalmanofsky said he was struck by reports that Mr. Madoff had tried to give bonus payments to his employees just before he was arrested, that he was moved to do something right even as he was about to be charged with doing so much wrong. “The small-scale thought for people who work for him amidst this large-scale fraud — what is the dissonance between that sense of responsibility and the gross sense of irresponsibility?” he said.

In a recent sermon, Rabbi Kalmanofsky described Mr. Madoff as the antithesis of true piety.

“I said, what it means to be a religious person is to be terrified of the possibility that you’re going to harm someone else,” he said.

Rabbi Kalmanofsky said Judaism had highly developed mechanisms for not letting people control money without ample checks and balances. When tzedakah, or charity, is collected, it must be done so in pairs. “These things are supposed to be done in the public eye,” Rabbi Kalmanofsky said, “so there is a high degree of confidence that people are behaving in honorable ways.”

While the Madoff affair has resonated powerfully among Jews, some say it actually stands for a broader dysfunction in the business world. “The Bernie Madoff story has become a Jewish story,” said Rabbi Jennifer Krause, the author of “The Answer: Making Sense of Life, One Question at a Time,” “but I do see it in the much greater context of a human drama that is playing out in sensationally terrible ways in America right now.”

“The Talmud teaches that a person who only looks out for himself and his own interests will eventually be brought to poverty,” Rabbi Krause added. “Unfortunately, this is the metadrama of what’s happening in our country right now. When you have too many people who are only looking out for themselves and they forget the other piece, which is to look out for others, we’re brought to poverty.”

According to Jewish tradition, the last question people are asked when they meet God after dying is, “Did you hope for redemption?”

Rabbi Wolpe said he did not believe Mr. Madoff could ever make amends.

“It is not possible for him to atone for all the damage he did,” the rabbi said, “and I don’t even think that there is a punishment that is commensurate with the crime, for the wreckage of lives that he’s left behind. The only thing he could do, for the rest of his life, is work for redemption that he would never achieve.”

    In Madoff Scandal, Jews Feel an Acute Betrayal, NYT, 24.12.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/24/us/24jews.html

After 146 Years,

a Brooklyn Convent Is Closing

December 17, 2008
The New York Times
By DAVID GONZALEZ

Behind the red-brick walls encircling the Convent of Mercy in Brooklyn, generations of nuns have taught the illiterate, sheltered the homeless and raised orphans. They are known as the Walking Sisters, ministering in the community as well as inside their convent.

Now, after 146 years, it is time for the small band of sisters, most of them retired, to walk away from the convent. The leadership of their order, the Sisters of Mercy, decided to shutter the place and scatter the sisters to other homes and nursing facilities after realizing it would cost more than $20 million to fix serious structural and accessibility problems in the fortresslike building on Willoughby Avenue in Fort Greene.

This has been a season of heartbreak and anger for these women, who thought the motherhouse would be their last home and the sisters their constant companions. Now they, the rescuers of lost children, feel like orphans themselves.

“It kind of hurts in a lot of ways,” said Sister Francene Horan, who came to the motherhouse in 1950 to teach kindergarten. “A building is one thing. This is a home, the place you knew would give you a place to stay. It’s like saying your parents died and you don’t have a home anymore.”

In a ritual that was unthinkable a year ago, they gather regularly as their numbers dwindle to bid goodbye to one another, and to an entire way of life — the busy convent and its shared days of work, prayer and laughter.

The Sisters of Mercy, known as the Walking Sisters because working outside the convent was unusual for nuns in the 19th century, have been in Brooklyn since 1855, when five young nuns from Manhattan answered Bishop John Loughlin’s call to work with the poor and sick. They went from the ferry at Fulton Landing to the nine-room convent of St. James parish on Jay Street, where they lived and worked.

Legend has it that five boys were left in their care one day, not an uncommon occurrence during a time when illness often claimed the lives of work-weary immigrant parents. As the nuns’ work grew along with their reputation, they moved in 1862 to the much larger quarters of their present convent, in what was then a solidly Irish neighborhood.

Thousands of children came to live with the sisters over the decades. Rather than fend for themselves as ragamuffins, they lived in tidy dormitories, supervised by two nuns and a helper. In the chapel, an ornate sanctuary of stained glass and gleaming marble, the youngest had a place of honor at the front, sitting in pews that were smaller than the rest.

Mary Margaret McMurray was almost 6 years old when she and her sister arrived at the orphanage after their parents died of influenza in 1917. She stayed until she graduated from high school and took a job as a secretary at an insurance company.

“The convent was so big,” said Ms. McMurray, now 97 and living in Queens with her daughter, herself a Sister of Mercy. “And there were so many children there. I had a lot of company. But it was very pleasant.”

The nuns taught her a lot, she said, and not all the lessons were found in books. “They taught me to be a positive person,” she said. “And of course, religion, too.”

Changes in social welfare policies in the 1970s led the order to open group homes, encourage adoption or foster care, and expand services to the homeless and developmentally disabled. Fewer women were entering the order, while the remaining sisters grew older. The convent became their retirement home, including one floor devoted to the infirm. The neighborhood around them changed, too, attracting Latino, black and Hasidic families.

The order’s leadership realized in the last few years that the old building presented too many obstacles for older women. An engineering study in February recommended extensive exterior renovations, removal of asbestos and rebuilding the foundation. Sister Christine McCann, the president for the region that includes the convent, said the millions of dollars needed for repairs could be better used to finance social and educational work by the order, which still has about 4,000 nuns in the United States.

Selling the convent could help raise even more money for their mission, Sister McCann said, but no decision has been reached. Though the building is not a landmark — giving wide leeway for any new owners to develop or demolish the property — some nuns said they hoped they could still return to the chapel on special occasions.

Since September, with the help of two sisters with nursing backgrounds, the 38 nuns who lived at the convent have been presented with options for new homes — from apartments in assisted-living centers to nursing homes run by religious orders.

Sister McCann knows the news was hard to break, and understands the anger that greeted it.

“It’s difficult when any community has to make these decisions that affect the lives of so many people,” she said. “But I’m awed by the response of the sisters who live here. They have been honest with their feelings, fine one minute and not so fine the next. But their faith is constant. To live as a Sister of Mercy is to take the steps they take with courage.”

About a dozen remain. The ones with the greatest needs were moved first, leaving the infirmary floor deserted and quiet. The television set is cold and the card tables sit unused, with boxes of games like Clue and Yahtzee stacked high.

On a recent afternoon, the dining room was filled with sisters and their visitors, preparing for another departure. Sister Mary Isabel Sullivan recalled moving into the convent in 1967, when it still housed young nuns in college and others teaching at the grammar school across the street. Soon after, she said, much changed, starting with new career choices for sisters in addition to teaching and child care.

“People could choose their residence, too,” she said. “We became smaller.”

She has stayed, by choice, enjoying the company of relative newcomers like Sister Mary Joseph Lorigan, who banters with her like a seasoned vaudevillian. They recalled the days when the Walking Sisters were a visible presence in the neighborhood, easily identified by their habits — or demeanor.

“We dress like any other woman now,” Sister Mary Joseph said. “But every now and then you see someone who asks you, ‘Are you a sister?’ ”

Sister Mary Isabel told how, years ago, she and another sister were driving to a florist when they spotted a panhandler hobbling up to the car. She was ready to give him money. But the panhandler stopped in his tracks once he saw the veil she wore.

“He said: ‘I’m lying. I’m a Catholic. I can walk!’ ” she recalled. “He just walked away from our car.”

By midafternoon, the remaining nuns and their guests had gathered in a circle to say goodbye to Sister Marguerite Relihan, who was moving the next day to Hartsdale, in Westchester County. The mood was subdued, with a gentle sadness in the air. They prayed for one another, and for those outside their convent who had neither home nor hope. At the end, Sister McCann dabbed holy water on Sister Marguerite’s forehead, whispered into her ear and hugged her.

“Dwell secure in his love in your new home,” the group intoned.

And out of the gathering, a voice arose.

“Marguerite!” someone said with a chuckle. “Hold on to my room until I get there.”

    After 146 Years, a Brooklyn Convent Is Closing, NYT, 17.12.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/17/nyregion/17convent.html

Bad Times

Draw Bigger Crowds to Churches

December 14, 2008
The New York Times
By PAUL VITELLO

The sudden crush of worshipers packing the small evangelical Shelter Rock Church in Manhasset, N.Y. — a Long Island hamlet of yacht clubs and hedge fund managers — forced the pastor to set up an overflow room with closed-circuit TV and 100 folding chairs, which have been filled for six Sundays straight.

In Seattle, the Mars Hill Church, one of the fastest-growing evangelical churches in the country, grew to 7,000 members this fall, up 1,000 in a year. At the Life Christian Church in West Orange, N.J., prayer requests have doubled — almost all of them aimed at getting or keeping jobs.

Like evangelical churches around the country, the three churches have enjoyed steady growth over the last decade. But since September, pastors nationwide say they have seen such a burst of new interest that they find themselves contending with powerful conflicting emotions — deep empathy and quiet excitement — as they re-encounter an old piece of religious lore:

Bad times are good for evangelical churches.

“It’s a wonderful time, a great evangelistic opportunity for us,” said the Rev. A. R. Bernard, founder and senior pastor of the Christian Cultural Center in Brooklyn, New York’s largest evangelical congregation, where regulars are arriving earlier to get a seat. “When people are shaken to the core, it can open doors.”

Nationwide, congregations large and small are presenting programs of practical advice for people in fiscal straits — from a homegrown series on “Financial Peace” at a Midtown Manhattan church called the Journey, to the “Good Sense” program developed at the 20,000-member Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Ill., and now offered at churches all over the country.

Many ministers have for the moment jettisoned standard sermons on marriage and the Beatitudes to preach instead about the theological meaning of the downturn.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses, who moved much of their door-to-door evangelizing to the night shift 10 years ago because so few people were home during the day, returned to daylight witnessing this year. “People are out of work, and they are answering the door,” said a spokesman, J. R. Brown.

Mr. Bernard plans to start 100 prayer groups next year, using a model conceived by the megachurch pastor Rick Warren, to “foster spiritual dialogue in these times” in small gatherings around the city.

A recent spot check of some large Roman Catholic parishes and mainline Protestant churches around the nation indicated attendance increases there, too. But they were nowhere near as striking as those reported by congregations describing themselves as evangelical, a term generally applied to churches that stress the literal authority of Scripture and the importance of personal conversion, or being “born again.”

Part of the evangelicals’ new excitement is rooted in a communal belief that the big Christian revivals of the 19th century, known as the second and third Great Awakenings, were touched off by economic panics. Historians of religion do not buy it, but the notion “has always lived in the lore of evangelism,” said Tony Carnes, a sociologist who studies religion.

A study last year may lend some credence to the legend. In “Praying for Recession: The Business Cycle and Protestant Religiosity in the United States,” David Beckworth, an assistant professor of economics at Texas State University, looked at long-established trend lines showing the growth of evangelical congregations and the decline of mainline churches and found a more telling detail: During each recession cycle between 1968 and 2004, the rate of growth in evangelical churches jumped by 50 percent. By comparison, mainline Protestant churches continued their decline during recessions, though a bit more slowly.

The little-noticed study began receiving attention from some preachers in September, when the stock market began its free fall. With the swelling attendance they were seeing, and a sense that worldwide calamities come along only once in an evangelist’s lifetime, the study has encouraged some to think big.

“I found it very exciting, and I called up that fellow to tell him so,” said the Rev. Don MacKintosh, a Seventh Day Adventist televangelist in California who contacted Dr. Beckworth a few weeks ago after hearing word of his paper from another preacher. “We need to leverage this moment, because every Christian revival in this country’s history has come off a period of rampant greed and fear. That’s what we’re in today — the time of fear and greed.”

Frank O’Neill, 54, a manager who lost his job at Morgan Stanley this year, said the “humbling experience” of unemployment made him cast about for a more personal relationship with God than he was able to find in the Catholicism of his youth. In joining the Shelter Rock Church on Long Island, he said, he found a deeper sense of “God’s authority over everything — I feel him walking with me.”

The sense of historic moment is underscored especially for evangelicals in New York who celebrated the 150th anniversary last year of the Fulton Street Prayer Revival, one of the major religious resurgences in America. Also known as the Businessmen’s Revival, it started during the Panic of 1857 with a noon prayer meeting among traders and financiers in Manhattan’s financial district.

Over the next few years, it led to tens of thousands of conversions in the United States, and inspired the volunteerism movement behind the founding of the Salvation Army, said the Rev. McKenzie Pier, president of the New York City Leadership Center, an evangelical pastors’ group that marked the anniversary with a three-day conference at the Hilton New York. “The conditions of the Businessmen’s Revival bear great similarities to what’s going on today,” he said. “People are losing a lot of money.”

But why the evangelical churches seem to thrive especially in hard times is a Rorschach test of perspective.

For some evangelicals, the answer is obvious. ”We have the greatest product on earth,” said the Rev. Steve Tomlinson, senior pastor of the Shelter Rock Church.

Dr. Beckworth, a macroeconomist, posited another theory: though expanding demographically since becoming the nation’s largest religious group in the 1990s, evangelicals as a whole still tend to be less affluent than members of mainline churches, and therefore depend on their church communities more during tough times, for material as well as spiritual support. In good times, he said, they are more likely to work on Sundays, which may explain a slower rate of growth among evangelical churches in nonrecession years.

Msgr. Thomas McSweeney, who writes columns for Catholic publications and appears on MSNBC as a religion consultant, said the growth is fed by evangelicals’ flexibility: “Their tradition allows them to do things from the pulpit we don’t do — like ‘Hey! I need somebody to take Mrs. McSweeney to the doctor on Tuesday,’ or ‘We need volunteers at the soup kitchen tomorrow.’ ”

In a cascading financial crisis, he said, a pastor can discard a sermon prescribed by the liturgical calendar and directly address the anxiety in the air. “I know a lot of you are feeling pain today,” he said, as if speaking from the pulpit. “And we’re going to do something about that.”

But a recession also means fewer dollars in the collection basket.

Few evangelical churches have endowments to compare with the older mainline Protestant congregations.

“We are at the front end of a $10 million building program,” said the Rev. Terry Smith, pastor of the Life Christian Church in West Orange, N.J. “Am I worried about that? Yes. But right now, I’m more worried about my congregation.” A husband and wife, he said, were both fired the same day from Goldman Sachs; another man inherited the workload of four co-workers who were let go, and expects to be the next to leave. “Having the conversations I’m having,” Mr. Smith said, “it’s hard to think about anything else.”

At the Shelter Rock Church, many newcomers have been invited by members who knew they had recently lost jobs. On a recent Sunday, new faces included a hedge fund manager and an investment banker, both laid off, who were friends of Steve Leondis, a cheerful business executive who has been a church member for four years. The two newcomers, both Catholics, declined to be interviewed, but Mr. Leondis said they agreed to attend Shelter Rock to hear Mr. Tomlinson’s sermon series, “Faith in Unstable Times.”

“They wanted something that pertained to them,” he said, “some comfort that pertained to their situations.”

Mr. Tomlinson and his staff in Manhasset and at a satellite church in nearby Syosset have recently discussed hiring an executive pastor to take over administrative work, so they can spend more time pastoring.

“There are a lot of walking wounded in this town,” he said.

    Bad Times Draw Bigger Crowds to Churches, NYT, 14.12.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/14/nyregion/14churches.html?hp

Cardinal Avery Dulles, Theologian, Is Dead at 90

December 13, 2008
The New York Times
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN

Cardinal Avery Dulles, a scion of diplomats and Presbyterians who converted to Roman Catholicism, rose to pre-eminence in Catholic theology and became the only American theologian ever appointed to the College of Cardinals, died today died Friday morning at Fordham University in the Bronx. He was 90. His death, at the Jesuit infirmary at the university, was confirmed by the New York Province of the Society of Jesus in Manhattan.

Cardinal Dulles, a professor of religion at Fordham University for the last 20 years, was a prolific author and lecturer and an elder statesman of Catholic theology in America. He was also the son of John Foster Dulles, the secretary of state under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and the nephew of Allen Dulles, who guided European espionage during World War II and later directed the Central Intelligence Agency.

A conservative theologian in an era of liturgical reforms and rising secularism, Cardinal Dulles wrote 27 books and 800 articles, mostly on theology; advised the Vatican and America’s bishops, and staunchly defended the pope and his church against demands for change on abortion, artificial birth control, priestly celibacy, the ordination of women and other issues.

His task as a theologian, the Cardinal often said, was to honor diversity and dissent but ultimately to articulate the traditions of the church and to preserve Catholic unity.

When Pope John Paul II designated dozens of new cardinals in early 2001, there were three from the United States. Archbishops Edward M. Egan of New York and Theodore E. McCarrick of Washington were unsurprising choices; it is common for heads of archdioceses to be given red hats. But the selection of Father Dulles was extraordinary. Although his was an influential voice in American Catholicism, he was not even a bishop, let alone an archbishop.

The appointment was widely seen as a reward for his loyalty to the pope, but also an acknowledgment of his work in keeping lines of communication open between the Vatican and Catholic dissenters in America. Cardinal Dulles considered it an honorary appointment. He was 82, two years past the age of voting with other cardinals in electing a new pope.

His investiture with 43 other scarlet-robed cardinals in Rome on Feb. 21, 2001, almost came unstuck. The last to step up to the pope’s golden throne to receive his biretta, the red silk hat of office, Cardinal Dulles approached with his cane, knelt and was accoutered. But as he embraced the pope, his biretta fell to the ground: a humbling at the great moment, he recalled wryly.

He carried the cane because of a recurrence of polio contracted while serving in the Navy in World War II. The polio had left him unable to walk for a time, but the symptoms had disappeared. They reappeared about a decade ago, affecting his leg muscles, and became progressively worse. About a year ago, his arms and throat were affected, leaving him unable to speak. Thus, his farewell address at Fordham last April was delivered by the university’s former president, the Rev. Joseph O’Hare.

Cardinal Dulles was typically self-deprecating, and soft-spoken, a bit awkward: a lanky, 6-foot 2-inch beanpole with a high forehead, a shock of dark hair going gray and a gaunt face with sharp features. Abraham Lincoln without the beard came to mind.

His spiritual passage to Catholicism was like a fable. A young scholar with a searching mind, he stirred from his establishment Presbyterian family to face questions of faith and dogma. By the time he entered Harvard in 1936, he was an agnostic.

In his second book, “A Testimonial to Grace,” a 1946 account of his conversion, Cardinal Dulles said his doubts about God on entering Harvard were not diminished by his studies of medieval art, philosophy and theology. But on a gray February day in 1939, strolling along the Charles River in Cambridge, he saw a tree in bud and experienced a profound moment.

“The thought came to me suddenly, with all the strength and novelty of a revelation, that these little buds in their innocence and meekness followed a rule, a law of which I as yet knew nothing,” he wrote. “That night, for the first time in years, I prayed.”

His conversion in 1940, the year he graduated from Harvard, shocked his family and friends, he said, but he called it the best and most important decision of his life.

He joined the Jesuits and went on to a career as a major Catholic thinker that spanned five decades.

His tenure coincided with broad shifts in theological ideas as well as sweeping changes brought on by the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. These provided new understandings of how the church, after centuries of isolation from modern thought and even hostility to it, should relate to other faiths and to religious liberty in an age when the church was gaining millions of new followers in diverse cultures.

Cardinal Dulles devoted much of his scholarship to interpretations of the Vatican Council’s changes, which he said had been mistaken by some theologians as a license to push in democratic directions. The church, he counseled, should guard its sacred teachings against secularism and modernization.

“Christianity,” he said in a 1994 speech, “would dissolve itself if it allowed its revealed content, handed down in tradition, to be replaced by contemporary theories.”

Theological and academic colleagues, including many who disagreed with him, said Cardinal Dulles had set high standards of intellectual integrity, fairness in judgments and lucidity in lectures, essays and books. They said his was often a voice of mediation between the church and American Catholics who challenged church teachings.

In “The Reshaping of Catholicism” (Harper & Row, 1988), he wrote that the Vatican Council had acknowledged the possibility that the church could fall into serious error and might require reform, that the laity had a right to an active role and that the church needed to respect regional and local differences. But he also emphasized that “a measure of conservatism is inseparable from authentic Christianity.”

Avery Robert Dulles was born in Auburn, N.Y., on Aug. 24, 1918, the son of John Foster and Janet Pomeroy Avery Dulles. His family was steeped in public service. Besides his father, who was secretary of state from 1953 to 1959, and uncle, who directed the C.I.A. from 1953 to 1961, his great-grandfather, John Watson Foster, was secretary of state under President Benjamin Harrison, and a great-uncle, Robert Lansing, held the post under President Woodrow Wilson. Avery’s grandfather, Allen Macy Dulles, was a Presbyterian theologian and co-founder of the American Theological Society.

Avery Dulles attended primary schools in New York City and private secondary schools in Switzerland and New England, but had no strict Presbyterian upbringing.

He attended Harvard Law School for a year and a half before joining the Naval Reserve as a World War II intelligence officer. In 1946, he joined the Society of Jesus, began training for the priesthood and was ordained in 1956 by Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York.

He took a doctorate in theology at the Gregorian University in Rome in 1960, taught at Woodstock College in Maryland from 1960 to 1974 and at the Catholic University of America in Washington from 1974 to 1988, then joined the faculty at Fordham as the Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society.

Cardinal Dulles served as president of the Catholic Theological Society of America in 1975-76 and of the American Theological Society in 1978-79. His books include “Models of the Church,” (Doubleday, 1974), a theological best-seller that appeared in many languages; “A Church to Believe In: Discipleship and the Dynamics of Freedom,” (Crossroad, 1982) on American Catholic theological concerns, and “The Splendor of Faith: The Theological vision of Pope John Paul II,” (Crossroads, 1999).

The cardinal is survived by eight nieces and nephews. His brother, John Watson Foster Dulles, an author and professor, died in San Antonio on June 23, and a sister, Lillias Pomeroy Dulles Hinshaw, died in 1987. Cardinal Dulles remained an active voice in the church into the new century, responding when the church confronted sexual abuse scandals involving hundreds of priests in the United States. After the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops adopted a national policy barring from ministerial duties any priest who had ever sexually abused a minor, Cardinal Dulles said the policy ignored priests’ rights of due process.

“In their effort to protect children, to restore public confidence in the church as an institution and to protect the church from liability suits, the bishops opted for an extreme response,” he said. He noted that the policy imposed a “one-size-fits-all” punishment, even if an offense was decades old and had not been repeated. “Such action seems to reflect an attitude of vindictiveness to which the church should not yield.”

    Cardinal Avery Dulles, Theologian, Is Dead at 90, NYT, 13.12.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/13/us/13dulles.html

Emanuel Rackman, Prominent Rabbi, Dies at 98

December 5, 2008
The New York Times
By WILLIAM GRIMES

Emanuel Rackman, the spiritual leader of the prominent Fifth Avenue Synagogue in Manhattan and an outspoken advocate of a more inclusive, intellectually open Orthodox Judaism, died Monday at his home in Manhattan. He was 98.

The death was confirmed by his granddaughter Jessica Rackman.

A lawyer and a Talmudist by training, Rabbi Rackman argued for a more flexible interpretation of Orthodoxy and the relevance of traditional Jewish law to modern life.

“Perhaps, like Socrates, I corrupt youth, but I do teach that Judaism encourages doubt, even as it enjoins faith and commitment,” he wrote in Commentary in 1966. “A Jew dare not live with absolute certainty not only because certainty is the hallmark of the fanatic and Judaism abhors fanaticism, but also because doubt is good for the human soul, its humility, and consequently its greater potential ultimately to discover its Creator.”

Rabbi Rackman was born in Albany, the son of a businessman and Talmudist who was descended from six generations of rabbis. He studied at the Talmudical Academy in New York, the high school affiliate of Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, where he continued his Talmudic studies while attending Columbia University, which awarded him a law degree in 1933 and a doctorate in public law in 1952. In 1934 he was ordained a rabbi.

He practiced law for nine years and was a weekend rabbi on Long Island. In accordance with family tradition, he planned to earn his living as a lawyer rather than as a rabbi, but on entering the Air Force in 1943, he was made a chaplain. While in Germany, where he was military aide to the European Theater commander’s special adviser on Jewish affairs, his encounters with Holocaust victims caused him to reconsider his career.

In 1951, he was called up for active duty from the Air Force Reserve, but found that his security clearance had been revoked because of his outspoken opposition to the death penalties handed down in the Rosenberg spying case and his support for the radical singer Paul Robeson.

Given the choice between accepting an honorable discharge or facing a military trial, he opted for a trial. He not only won acquittal but earned a promotion from major to lieutenant-colonel.

After the war, Rabbi Rackman became spiritual leader of Congregation Shaaray Tefila in Far Rockaway, Queens. He also taught political science at Yeshiva College and helped edit the journal Tradition. In the 1950s, he was president of the New York Board of Rabbis and of the Rabbinical Council of America.

He quickly emerged as an important voice for modern Orthodoxy. Shocking traditionalists, he made common cause with Reform and Conservative rabbis, notably on the issue of Jewish family law and the plight of women denied a religious divorce by their husbands.

He presented his case for modern Orthodoxy in “One Man’s Judaism” (1970) and “Modern Halakhah for Our Time” (1995). Halakhah is the set of rules and practices governing Jewish life.

In 1967, he became the rabbi of the Fifth Avenue Synagogue and soon after was named provost of Yeshiva University. In 1971 he became the head of Jewish Studies at the City University of New York. In 1977, he became the first American president of Bar-Ilan University in Israel.

Rabbi Rackman is survived by a sister, Bess Falkow of Tucson, Ariz.; three sons, Michael, of Brooklyn, Bennett, of Queens, and Joseph, of Scarsdale, N.Y.; eight grandchildren; and 14 great-grandchildren.

    Emanuel Rackman, Prominent Rabbi, Dies at 98, NYT, 5.12.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/05/nyregion/05rackman.html

Episcopal Split as Conservatives Form New Group

December 4, 2008
The New York Times
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

WHEATON, Ill. — Conservatives alienated from the Episcopal Church announced on Wednesday that they were founding their own rival denomination, the biggest challenge yet to the authority of the Episcopal Church since it ordained an openly gay bishop five years ago.

The move threatens the fragile unity of the Anglican Communion, the world’s third-largest Christian body, made up of 38 provinces around the world that trace their roots to the Church of England and its spiritual leader, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The conservatives intend to seek the approval of leaders in the global Anglican Communion for the province they plan to form. If they should receive broad approval, their effort could lead to new defections from the Episcopal Church, the American branch of Anglicanism.

In the last few years, Episcopalians who wanted to leave the church but remain in the Anglican Communion put themselves under the authority of bishops in Africa and Latin America. A new American province would give them a homegrown alternative.

It would also result in two competing provinces on the same soil, each claiming the mantle of historical Anglican Christianity. The conservatives have named theirs the Anglican Church in North America. And for the first time, a province would be defined not by geography, but by theological orientation.

“We’re going through Reformation times, and in Reformation times things aren’t neat and clean,” Bishop Robert Duncan of Pittsburgh, a conservative who led his diocese out of the Episcopal Church in October, said in an interview. “In Reformation times, new structures are emerging.”

Bishop Duncan will be named the archbishop and primate of the North American church, which says it would have 100,000 members, compared with 2.3 million in the Episcopal Church.

The conservatives contend that the American and Canadian churches have broken with traditional Christianity in many ways, but their resolve to form a unified breakaway church was precipitated by the decision to ordain an openly gay bishop and to bless gay unions.

The Rev. Charles Robertson, canon for the Episcopal Church’s presiding bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, said Wednesday, “There is room within the Episcopal Church for people of different views, and we regret that some have felt the need to depart from the diversity of our common life in Christ.”

He added that the Episcopal Church, the Anglican Church of Canada and La Iglesia Anglicana de Mexico will continue to be “the official, recognized presence of the Anglican Communion in North America.”

In a news conference on Wednesday evening, the conservative group unveiled its new constitution and canons at a large evangelical church here in Wheaton, near Chicago.

The proposed new province would unite nine groups that have left the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada over the years. This includes four Episcopal dioceses and umbrella groups for dozens of individual parishes in the United States and Canada.

Besides Pittsburgh, those dioceses are Fort Worth; Quincy, Ill.; and San Joaquin, in the Central Valley of California — representing 4 of 110 dioceses in the Episcopal Church. But not all the parishes and Episcopalians in those four dioceses agreed to leave the Episcopal Church.

The new province would also absorb a handful of other groups that had left the Episcopal Church decades earlier over issues like the ordination of women or revisions to the Book of Common Prayer. One of the groups, the Reformed Episcopal Church, broke away from the forerunner of the Episcopal Church in 1873.

Conservative leaders in North America say they expect to win approval for their new province from at least seven like-minded primates, who lead provinces primarily in Africa, Australia, Latin America and Asia.

These are the same primates who met in Jerusalem over the summer at the Global Anglican Future Conference and signed a declaration heralding a new era for the Anglican Communion. Most of these primates a few weeks later boycotted the Lambeth Conference, the international gathering of Anglican bishops in England held once every 10 years.

Bishop Duncan and other conservative leaders in North America say they may not seek approval for their new province from the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, or from the Anglican Consultative Council, the leadership group of bishops, clergy and laity that until now was largely responsible for blessing new jurisdictions.

Bishop Martyn Minns, a leading figure in the formation of the new province, said of the Archbishop of Canterbury: “It’s desirable that he get behind this. It’s something that would bring a little more coherence to the life of the Communion. But if he doesn’t, so be it.”

Bishop Minns, a priest who led his large, historic church in Fairfax, Va., out of the Episcopal Church two years ago and was subsequently ordained a bishop by the Anglican Archbishop of Nigeria, said in an interview: “One of the questions a number of the primates are asking is why do we still need to be operating under the rules of an English charity, which is what the Anglican Consultative Council does. Why is England still considered the center of the universe?”

Jim Naughton, canon for communications and advancement in the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, and a liberal who frequently blogs on Anglican affairs, said he doubted that a rival Anglican province could grow much larger.

“I think this organization does not have much of a future because there are already a lot of churches in the United States for people who don’t want to worship with gays and lesbians,” he said. “That’s not a market niche that is underserved.”

Since the Episcopal Church ordained Bishop Gene Robinson, an openly gay man who lives with his partner, in the Diocese of New Hampshire in 2003, the parallel rifts in the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion have widened.

In the first years after Bishop Robinson was ordained, bishops representing about 14 dioceses in the Episcopal Church joined meetings to explore the formation of a new Anglican entity in North America.

Asked why only four dioceses broke away, Bishop Minns said: “It’s one thing to feel distressed. It’s another thing to do something about it.”

He added: “There’s some people standing back to wait and see if we pull this off, which I think we’ll do. Then others will join us — parishes, and maybe dioceses.”

If the conservatives try to take their church properties with them, they are likely to face lawsuits from the Episcopal Church. The church is already suing breakaway parishes and dioceses in several states to retain church property.

Bishop Duncan said members of the proposed province would spend the next six months discussing the constitution, and would meet to ratify the document next summer at a “provincial assembly.” He said it would probably be held at the Episcopal Cathedral in Fort Worth.

The Episcopal Church is also holding its General Convention next summer.

The founding members of this new province have major theological differences among themselves on liturgical practices, and whether to ordain women.

Bishop Duncan, whose theological orientation is more evangelical, has ordained women in the diocese of Pittsburgh. Bishops of other breakaway dioceses, like Jack Iker in Fort Worth and John-David Schofield in San Joaquin, are more “Anglo-Catholic” in orientation, modeling some elements of the Roman Catholic Church, and are opposed to ordaining women as priests or bishops.

Under their new constitution, each of the nine constituent dioceses or groups that would make up the new province could follow its own teachings on women’s ordination. Each congregation would also keep its own property.

Told of this new Anglican entity, David C. Steinmetz, Amos Ragan Kearns professor of the history of Christianity at the Divinity School at Duke University, said in a phone interview, “It’s really an unprecedented and momentous event,” that all of these dissident groups had agreed to bury their differences.

“It’s certainly going to be deplored by one part of the Communion and hailed by another,” Professor Steinmetz said. “Are we going to end up with two families of Anglicans, and if so, are they in communion with each other in any way? There are so many possibilities and geopolitical differences, it’s really hard to predict where this will go.”

    Episcopal Split as Conservatives Form New Group, NYT, 4.12.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/04/us/04episcopal.html

George Docherty, Pastor Who Influenced Pledge, Dies at 97

December 2, 2008
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

ALEXANDRIA, Pa. (AP) — The Rev. George M. Docherty, who was credited with helping to push Congress to insert the phrase “under God” into the Pledge of Allegiance, died on Thursday at his home in central Pennsylvania. He was 97.

His wife, Sue Docherty, announced the death, saying Mr. Docherty had been in failing health for about three years.

In 1952, Mr. Docherty, then pastor of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, just blocks from the White House, gave a sermon saying the pledge should acknowledge God. He was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and was unfamiliar with the pledge until he heard it spoken by his 7-year-old son, Garth.

“I didn’t know that the Pledge of Allegiance was, and he recited it, ‘one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all,” ’ he recalled in an interview with The Associated Press in 2004. “I came from Scotland, where we said ‘God save our gracious queen,’ ‘God save our gracious king.’ Here was the Pledge of Allegiance, and God wasn’t in it at all.”

There was little effect from that initial sermon, but Mr. Docherty delivered it again on Feb. 7, 1954, after learning that President Dwight D. Eisenhower would be at the church.

The next day, Representative Charles G. Oakman, Republican of Michigan, introduced a bill to add the phrase “under God” to the pledge, and a companion bill was introduced in the Senate. Eisenhower signed the law on Flag Day that year.

    George Docherty, Pastor Who Influenced Pledge, Dies at 97, NYT, 2.12.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/02/us/02docherty.html

After Smoke, Soot and Water, a Great Church Is Cleansed

November 30, 2008
The New York Times
By DAVID W. DUNLAP

The Very Rev. James A. Kowalski has been dean of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine for nearly seven years. In all that time, he has never heard its great organ played during a worship service.

On Sunday, he will finally have his chance.

So will countless congregants and visitors as the Episcopal cathedral is formally rededicated. Everyone is invited to the 11 a.m. service, though the cathedral advises the public to arrive at least an hour early to claim passes for unreserved seats. At least 3,000 people are expected to attend.

The rededication signifies the return of the whole cathedral — all 601 feet of it — to useful life.

Since a fire on Dec. 18, 2001, one part of the cathedral after another has been closed for cleaning, refurbishing and restoration. Now, from the bronze doors on the west front to the stained-glass windows in the easternmost chapel, the cathedral seems to have shed not only the mantle of destructive smoke, soot and water stains (for the most part), but also the general dulling brought on by more than a century of hard use.

The rehabilitation was financed by a $41.5 million settlement of the cathedral’s insurance claim with the Church Insurance Companies, an Episcopal organization. Stephen Facey, the executive vice president of the cathedral, said scaffolding and cleaning accounted for about 50 percent of the cost.

The fire broke out in the unfinished north transept, which housed a gift shop. Some of the damage elsewhere in the cathedral occurred in the interest of protecting artistic treasures. For instance, to avoid the need to ventilate the fire by breaking stained-glass windows, firefighters drew smoke through the baptistry, which adjoins the north transept.

“This was black — it acted like a chimney,” Mr. Facey said as he walked through the octagonal baptistry this month. One must take him at his word, because the room is now a near riot of color, with a frieze of shields splashed in vibrant greens, oranges, reds and blues.

It does not seem unreasonable to think that the cathedral has not looked this good since it was first dedicated, on Nov. 30, 1941, after the nave was completed. As 10,000 people watched, immense gray curtains parted at the east end of the nave, permitting a view all the way to the apse.

“The entire length of this building, America’s greatest cathedral, the largest Gothic cathedral in the world, now stands open for the worship of God and for the blessing and inspiration of men,” Bishop William T. Manning declared in his sermon that day. He added that he hoped the towers, the crossing and the north transept might be finished while he was still bishop.

But that aspiration ended with World War II, which Bishop Manning foreshadowed in his sermon as he acknowledged that the cathedral was rising at a time “when we see in this world an outbreak of almost incredible evil, a return to sheer barbarism and to unbelievable cruelties.”

Seven days later came the news from Pearl Harbor.

    After Smoke, Soot and Water, a Great Church Is Cleansed, NYT, 30.11.2008,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/nyregion/30cathedral.html

This Land

A Time of Hope, Marred by an Act of Horror

November 17, 2008
The New York Times
By DAN BARRY

SPRINGFIELD, Mass.

As Election Night made way for a new day, a pastor named Bryant Robinson Jr. clicked off his television to accept a sleep of sweet promise. His mostly black congregation now had two blessings awaiting it in 2009: the inauguration of the first African-American president and the finished construction of a new church.

Give praise.

He could not have been asleep two hours before his telephone rang. It was his brother Andrew, whose home abuts the blessed construction site. “They’re burning our church,” shouted Andrew Robinson, who still doesn’t know why he said “they.”

Soon Bishop Bryant Robinson, pastor of the Macedonia Church of God in Christ, was standing at the grassy edge, as firefighters sprayed arcs of water meant not to save the building but to contain a fire clearly set. Black embers the size of fists shot skyward, only to float down like broken pieces of the cold New England night.

Someone eased him into a chair — he is 71, with bad knees and high blood pressure — and placed a blanket around his weary shoulders. He stayed there past dawn, when this new day’s light revealed a smoldering test of faith: a skeleton of scorched steel and a cracked foundation upon which a church could no longer be built.

Sitting there, stunned, emotional, Bishop Robinson sought context for what had just occurred: a black president is elected, a black church is burned. He thought of dreams realized and dreams denied.

“It was so close I could taste it,” he says. “I could just see it.”

You could say that dream began more than 60 years ago, the moment his father, Bryant Robinson Sr., left Alabama for a place where his children could drink from fountains of their choice. As soon as he arrived in Springfield he wanted to flee, so foreign was the place. But his train ticket, courtesy of a local pastor, was one way, so he settled in this community known as the City of Homes and sent for his family.

Though working as a parking attendant and then as an assembly-line worker, he found his true calling in the Church of God in Christ. Eventually the church’s revered leader, C. H. Mason, resolved tension within the Springfield flock by directing the elder Robinson to start his own congregation, one that would be called the Macedonia Church of God.

For a while the congregation shared a storefront with another church, until it raised enough money to buy a former synagogue that featured rooms used for transitional housing. “Housing for people coming from the South,” Bishop Robinson recalls. “Escaping segregation.”

Finally, in 1961, the elder Robinson, now working as a stain spotter at a dry cleaners, persuaded his congregation to buy an old Episcopalian church that sat on a small corner lot on King Street.

For decades he juggled the dual tasks of cleaning clothes and saving souls. He immersed believers in the baptismal pool, presided over their weddings, talked Bible to them on Sundays, led others in prayer after they had gone. Years of footsteps formed grooves in the red stone steps leading to the church’s wooden door.

The elder Robinson died in 2001 at age 86. Bryant Robinson Jr., his co-pastor and the oldest of his five children, took over the congregation, switching gears after more than 30 years as a civic leader and educator; at one time he had served as the city’s interim superintendent of schools.

Bishop Robinson soon decided the church on King Street, now more than a century old, could no longer meet the congregation’s needs. Parking was minimal, the maroon carpet old, the windows small and high; Oh Lord, could it get hot in those pews on a late summer Sunday.

We deserve a church meant for us, built by us, he told his congregants, and they agreed. The weekly tithing and special offerings took on added urgency, as the bishop reminded people that when you invest in Kingdom’s church, you cannot lose.

The church eventually bought four wooded acres on Tinkham Road, about five miles away, from Andrew Robinson, both a brother of the bishop and the congregation’s music director. (“We got a favorable rate,” the bishop says, smiling.) Where others saw tall pine trees and sandy soil, he envisioned a soaring church with plenty of parking.

As time passed, enthusiasm flagged; the project sometimes seemed to be nothing more than an architectural sketch hanging in the back of the old church. As it changed in scope and required the purchase of more land, Bishop Robinson tried to re-ignite interest and to convey his commitment by announcing that he had long ago stopped drawing a salary.

The response, he says, was “marginal.”

Still, the project inched forward, thanks in part to the guidance of the church’s lawyer, Bradford Martin Jr. He helped to secure a $1.9 million construction loan, and worked to allay the concerns of neighbors opposed to having a church in their backyard.

Finally, in April 2007, dignitaries and elders joined Bishop Robinson in breaking ground with shovels painted gold. “I was so elated that day,” he says. “At one point I said we may be standing in the sanctuary. And you know where we were? In the parking lot.”

After a while, though, parishioners who previously visited the site to mutter “This is too small” and “That’s not right” would gaze upon the 18,000-square-foot structure and say only, “Wow.”

“That became the descriptive word,” the bishop says. “Wow.”

Hardly a day would pass without a visit from the bishop. He would sit in his car, watch the workers — and visualize.

You would enter a foyer large enough for people to chat with one another after services. To the right, a men’s room; to the left, a spacious ladies’ lounge with large mirrors, because he remembered his father’s fear of the sermon he would have to give if women stopped attending: “Finally, brothers, farewell.”

A large meeting hall in the back, suitable for weddings and church gatherings. A row of prayer rooms to the right. A pastor’s office in the left corner. A food prep room. A chandelier one day, but not now. And, of course, the 500-seat sanctuary, designed to be intimate, with video equipment to project the full-immersion baptisms on a screen for all to see.

Oh, and plenty of parking for a congregation sure to grow.

By Election Day, 75 percent of the construction was finished, with the entire exterior nearly done and construction workers planning to lay the water line in the morning. The bishop could taste it. He watched the election returns, felt pride in his country and turned out the light. And during his short sleep, someone set fire to his dream.

Investigators say the cause was arson, but so far they have no suspects or evidence that the crime was rooted in racism. Still, the bishop cannot shake the timing of it — timing that will now forever link two events, one of joy and pride, another of loss and horror.

As Election Night melted away, as memories of the past tempered thoughts of the future, the bishop sat in that chair, thinking, praying. Behind him were stacked five gold-painted shovels from the groundbreaking; in front of him, the fire; above him, the mysterious pitch of the night. And the thought came to him: Build again.

    A Time of Hope, Marred by an Act of Horror, NYT, 17.11.2008,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/17/us/17land.html

Mormons Tipped Scale in Ban on Gay Marriage

November 15, 2008
The New York Times
By JESSE McKINLEY and KIRK JOHNSON

SACRAMENTO — Less than two weeks before Election Day, the chief strategist behind a ballot measure outlawing same-sex marriage in California called an emergency meeting here.

“We’re going to lose this campaign if we don’t get more money,” the strategist, Frank Schubert, recalled telling leaders of Protect Marriage, the main group behind the ban.

The campaign issued an urgent appeal, and in a matter of days, it raised more than $5 million, including a $1 million donation from Alan C. Ashton, the grandson of a former president of the Mormon Church. The money allowed the drive to intensify a sharp-elbowed advertising campaign, and support for the measure was catapulted ahead; it ultimately won with 52 percent of the vote.

As proponents of same-sex marriage across the country planned protests on Saturday against the ban, interviews with the main forces behind the ballot measure showed how close its backers believe it came to defeat — and the extraordinary role Mormons played in helping to pass it with money, institutional support and dedicated volunteers.

“We’ve spoken out on other issues, we’ve spoken out on abortion, we’ve spoken out on those other kinds of things,” said Michael R. Otterson, the managing director of public affairs for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as the Mormons are formally called, in Salt Lake City. “But we don’t get involved to the degree we did on this.”

The California measure, Proposition 8, was to many Mormons a kind of firewall to be held at all costs.

“California is a huge state, often seen as a bellwether — this was seen as a very, very important test,” Mr. Otterson said.

First approached by the Roman Catholic archbishop of San Francisco a few weeks after the California Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in May, the Mormons were the last major religious group to join the campaign, and the final spice in an unusual stew that included Catholics, evangelical Christians, conservative black and Latino pastors, and myriad smaller ethnic groups with strong religious ties.

Shortly after receiving the invitation from the San Francisco Archdiocese, the Mormon leadership in Salt Lake City issued a four-paragraph decree to be read to congregations, saying “the formation of families is central to the Creator’s plan,” and urging members to become involved with the cause.

“And they sure did,” Mr. Schubert said.

Jeff Flint, another strategist with Protect Marriage, estimated that Mormons made up 80 percent to 90 percent of the early volunteers who walked door-to-door in election precincts.

The canvass work could be exacting and highly detailed. Many Mormon wards in California, not unlike Roman Catholic parishes, were assigned two ZIP codes to cover. Volunteers in one ward, according to training documents written by a Protect Marriage volunteer, obtained by people opposed to Proposition 8 and shown to The New York Times, had tasks ranging from “walkers,” assigned to knock on doors; to “sellers,” who would work with undecided voters later on; and to “closers,” who would get people to the polls on Election Day.

Suggested talking points were equally precise. If initial contact indicated a prospective voter believed God created marriage, the church volunteers were instructed to emphasize that Proposition 8 would restore the definition of marriage God intended.

But if a voter indicated human beings created marriage, Script B would roll instead, emphasizing that Proposition 8 was about marriage, not about attacking gay people, and about restoring into law an earlier ban struck down by the State Supreme Court in May.

“It is not our goal in this campaign to attack the homosexual lifestyle or to convince gays and lesbians that their behavior is wrong — the less we refer to homosexuality, the better,” one of the ward training documents said. “We are pro-marriage, not anti-gay.”

Leaders were also acutely conscious of not crossing the line from being a church-based volunteer effort to an actual political organization.

“No work will take place at the church, including no meeting there to hand out precinct walking assignments so as to not even give the appearance of politicking at the church,” one of the documents said.

By mid-October, most independent polls showed support for the proposition was growing, but it was still trailing. Opponents had brought on new media consultants in the face of the slipping poll numbers, but they were still effectively raising money, including $3.9 million at a star-studded fund-raiser held at the Beverly Hills home of Ron Burkle, the supermarket billionaire and longtime Democratic fund-raiser.

It was then that Mr. Schubert called his meeting in Sacramento. “I said, ‘As good as our stuff is, it can’t withstand that kind of funding,’ ” he recalled.

The response was a desperate e-mail message sent to 92,000 people who had registered at the group’s Web site declaring a “code blue” — an urgent plea for money to save traditional marriage from “cardiac arrest.” Mr. Schubert also sent an e-mail message to the three top religious members of his executive committee, representing Catholics, evangelicals and Mormons.

“I ask for your prayers that this e-mail will open the hearts and minds of the faithful to make a further sacrifice of their funds at this urgent moment so that God’s precious gift of marriage is preserved,” he wrote.

On Oct. 28, Mr. Ashton, the grandson of the former Mormon president David O. McKay, donated $1 million. Mr. Ashton, who made his fortune as co-founder of the WordPerfect Corporation, said he was following his personal beliefs and the direction of the church.

“I think it was just our realizing that we heard a number of stories about members of the church who had worked long hours and lobbied long and hard,” he said in a telephone interview from Orem, Utah.

In the end, Protect Marriage estimates, as much as half of the nearly $40 million raised on behalf of the measure was contributed by Mormons.

Even with the Mormons’ contributions and the strong support of other religious groups, Proposition 8 strategists said they had taken pains to distance themselves from what Mr. Flint called “more extreme elements” opposed to rights for gay men and lesbians.

To that end, the group that put the issue on the ballot rebuffed efforts by some groups to include a ban on domestic partnership rights, which are granted in California. Mr. Schubert cautioned his side not to stage protests and risk alienating voters when same-sex marriages began being performed in June.

“We could not have this as a battle between people of faith and the gays,” Mr. Schubert said. “That was a losing formula.”

But the “Yes” side also initially faced apathy from middle-of-the-road California voters who were largely unconcerned about same-sex marriage. The overall sense of the voters in the beginning of the campaign, Mr. Schubert said, was “Who cares? I’m not gay.”

To counter that, advertisements for the “Yes” campaign also used hypothetical consequences of same-sex marriage, painting the specter of churches’ losing tax exempt status or people “sued for personal beliefs” or objections to same-sex marriage, claims that were made with little explanation.

Another of the advertisements used video of an elementary school field trip to a teacher’s same-sex wedding in San Francisco to reinforce the idea that same-sex marriage would be taught to young children.

“We bet the campaign on education,” Mr. Schubert said.

The “Yes” campaign was denounced by opponents as dishonest and divisive, but the passage of Proposition 8 has led to second-guessing about the “No” campaign, too, as well as talk about a possible ballot measure to repeal the ban. Several legal challenges have been filed, and the question of the legality of the same-sex marriages performed from June to Election Day could also be settled in court.

For his part, Mr. Schubert said he is neither anti-gay — his sister is a lesbian — nor happy that some same-sex couples’ marriages are now in question. But, he said, he has no regrets about his campaign.

“They had a lot going for them,” Mr. Schubert said of his opponents. “And they couldn’t get it done.”

Mr. Otterson said it was too early to tell what the long-term implications might be for the church, but in any case, he added, none of that factored into the decision by church leaders to order a march into battle. “They felt there was only one way we could stand on such a fundamental moral issue, and they took that stand,” he said. “It was a matter of standing up for what the church believes is right.”

That said, the extent of the protests has taken many Mormons by surprise. On Friday, the church’s leadership took the unusual step of issuing a statement calling for “respect” and “civility” in the aftermath of the vote.

“Attacks on churches and intimidation of people of faith have no place in civil discourse over controversial issues,” the statement said. “People of faith have a democratic right to express their views in the public square without fear of reprisal.”

Mr. Ashton described the protests by same-sex marriage advocates as off-putting. “I think that shows colors,” Mr. Ashton said. “By their fruit, ye shall know them.”

Jesse McKinley reported from Sacramento, and Kirk Johnson from Salt Lake City.

    Mormons Tipped Scale in Ban on Gay Marriage, NYT, 15.11.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/15/us/politics/15marriage.html?hp

Editorial

A Case of Religious Discrimination

November 12, 2008
The New York Times
 

Displays of the Ten Commandments have long been a lightning rod in constitutional law, and so they are again today. The Supreme Court is hearing arguments in a challenge to a city’s decision to allow the Ten Commandments to be placed in a public park, while refusing to allow a different religion’s display. The court should rule that that city’s decision violates the First Amendment prohibition on the establishment of religion.

Pleasant Grove City, Utah, has a city park, known as Pioneer Park, that includes various unattended displays. These include historical artifacts from the town, a Sept. 11 memorial, and a Ten Commandments monument that was given to the city by the Fraternal Order of Eagles, a national civic group.

A religious organization called Summum, which was founded in 1975 and is based in Salt Lake City, applied to install its own monument in the park. The monument it proposed would include the group’s Seven Principles of Creation (also called the Seven Aphorisms), which it believes were inscribed on tablets handed down from God to Moses on Mount Sinai.

Pleasant Grove City rejected Summum’s application. It told the group that it had a decades-old practice of only accepting displays that directly related to the city’s history, or that were donated by groups with longstanding ties to the community. But this was not a firm policy at the time. It was only later that the city adopted a written policy enshrining these criteria.

Summum sued, arguing that the rejection of its monument violated its right to free speech under the First Amendment. The United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit in Denver agreed. In allowing monuments in its park, the court ruled, Pleasant Grove City had no right to discriminate on the basis of the content of those monuments. The city was free to ban all unattended displays if it wanted to. But once it decided to allow such displays, the court ruled, it had no right to permit the Ten Commandments but bar the Seven Principles of Creation.

The federal appeals court reached the right result, but regrettably, it ducked the issue at the heart of the case, which turns on the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The real problem is that Pleasant Grove City elevated one religion, traditional Christianity, over another, Summum. The founders regarded this sort of religious preference as so odious that they included a specific provision in the First Amendment prohibiting it. The United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit has a bad record on Establishment Clause cases, which made it easier for all of the parties to treat the case as a simple speech case.

But as the American Jewish Committee, Americans United for Separation of Church and State and other groups argue in a friend-of-the-court brief, the Supreme Court should not make this mistake. It should squarely confront the religious discrimination underlying Pleasant Grove City’s rejection of Summum’s monument and make clear that the city violated the Establishment Clause.

There is no shortage of churches, synagogues and private parcels of land where the Ten Commandments could be displayed without the need to include the credos of alternative faiths. Public property like Pioneer Park must be open to all religions on an equal basis — or open to none at all.

    A Case of Religious Discrimination, NYT, 12.11.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/12/opinion/12wed1.html

Billy Graham Would Like to Meet, Pray With Obama

November 8, 2008
Filed at 3:01 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) -- Billy Graham has counseled every American president since Dwight Eisenhower. But the evangelist known for his globe-trotting crusades has no plans to mentor Barack Obama, though his son did say his father would like to meet the president-elect and pray with him.

Graham turned 90 on Friday. His son, the Rev. Franklin Graham, told The Associated Press that Billy Graham's mind remains sharp even as his body continues to fail.

Billy Graham still remains engaged in the planning and direction of the ministry he founded, but his days as a pastor to presidents have faded.

''My father feels like his time and day for that is over,'' Franklin Graham said. ''But he would certainly like to meet (Obama) and pray with him.''

About 160 of Billy Graham's family and friends celebrated his birthday Friday at his home in Montreat with fried chicken, barbecue and sweet tea. His ministry had received some 100,000 greetings, including a video from President Bush.

His health contrasts starkly with his days commanding a ministry that put him behind the pulpit to speak with 215 million people in more than 185 countries and placed him in the confidence of some of the world's most powerful people.

Billy Graham's views are still respected in White House circles. Republican presidential candidate John McCain called on Graham at his mountainside home during the campaign, and Obama tried to meet him but was unable to due to the preacher's poor health.

Though never partisan in his preaching, Billy Graham is a registered Democrat.

His son expressed concern about Obama's views on abortion and gay marriage -- an issue Franklin Graham raised in a meeting with the Illinois senator -- saying that he and is father are conservatives who believe the Bible speaks clearly on those issues.

''President-elect Obama heard our position,'' said Franklin Graham, who now heads the Charlotte-based Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. ''And I told him that this was very difficult for us and hard for us. It's a moral issue that we just can't back down on.''

Obama favors abortion rights, and does not support a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. He supports civil unions and believes states should decide their own laws about marriage.

Meanwhile, Billy Graham's health remains a concern among family and friends, who note he still struggles with the loss of his wife, Ruth, who died last year.

He was hospitalized last year for nearly two weeks after experiencing intestinal bleeding, and he has also had prostate cancer. Earlier this year, he had elective surgery to update a shunt that controls excess fluid on his brain. The shunt was first installed in 2000 and drains fluid from through a small tube, relieving excess pressure that can cause symptoms similar to Parkinson's disease.

''He could catch a cold and his life could come to an end,'' Franklin Graham said. ''At his age, any little thing could be a serious event. We realize that.''

Despite his limitations he still has one thing: a booming voice.

This weekend, that voice will once again cross borders when a message dubbed in Portuguese will be broadcast in Brazil in an effort to bring some 1 million new believers into the fold.

And privately, he has been working on a book about aging, trying to put his late-life lessons into context for those soon to follow him.

''He's always been ready to die,'' Franklin Graham said. ''But nobody's prepared him for getting old.''

    Billy Graham Would Like to Meet, Pray With Obama, NYT, 8.11.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Billy-Graham.html

Christian Fraternities Offer Different Path

November 7, 2008
Filed at 7:03 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. (AP) -- It's 11 a.m. Saturday, and whiskey is flowing at the big houses on fraternity row at the University of Alabama. Guys in ties and baseball caps are laughing and dancing with sorority girls in bright dresses as a band blares away just around the corner.

Smack in the middle of that row is the Lambda Sigma Phi house, but things are a lot quieter inside. Parents are helping put out the lunch spread before a Crimson Tide football game and a few members lounge in the den watching TV.

A Bible passage decorates the door to the main room. ''My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord,'' it begins.

Lambda Sigma Phi is part of a wave of Christian fraternities and sororities that has gained a foothold on U.S. college campuses, sometimes despite the wishes of school administrators. Members get pumped up about prayer, Bible study and service projects, passions they say campus officials should and often do embrace as fresh amid a Greek culture typically seen as centered on hazing, keg parties and little else.

Founded in 2001, Lambda Sigma Phi hopes to show other groups at the university what Jesus is all about.

''We're almost in a bubble because we're surrounded by all this. That's why we're here on Jefferson Avenue, to minister to these guys,'' said chapter president Daniel Weaver. ''We want to be a light on this campus.''

Many social fraternities and sororities have Christian tenets in their teachings, and Christian-lifestyle fraternities have existed for generations. Several began about 80 years ago to promote faith-based fellowship during the Roaring Twenties.

Greek-letter organizations that promote Christian practices have become more common in recent years with young evangelicals seeking new ways to live out their faith and parents looking for a haven from the drunken daze that often happens in college.

At least 210 exist on campuses nationwide from the West Coast to the Deep South, where they are most common. But the groups are also strong in parts of the Midwest and in Southern states along the Atlantic coast.

Rules against drinking are common in these groups, along with Bible studies and service projects that resemble church-based missions work.

Alpha Delta Chi, a Christian sorority with 14 active chapters nationwide, is straightforward about its membership requirements: Churchgoing Christians only. No smoking or illegal drugs. No premarital sex. And please, no drinking to the point that it would reflect badly on Christianity.

A small committee works with members who break the rules, said Kiran Thadhani, president of Alpha Delta Chi at Georgia Tech, where a chapter began five years ago. But the group says it isn't just about rules, it's about young women trying to live like Christ.

''All the girls are in Bible studies. We also do sisterhood retreats and outreach,'' she said. ''Many girls work at soup kitchens, go on summer mission trips and work right here on homelessness and poverty issues in Atlanta.''

Many campuses welcome the combination of old-time religion with Greek-letter social groups, but others haven't.

At the University of Florida, Beta Upsilon Chi filed a federal discrimination suit last year after administrators refused to officially recognize the fraternity because it required members to be Christians. The school considered the requirement discriminatory, and the fraternity claimed it was wrongly deprived of meeting space and the ability to recruit on campus.

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ordered the school to recognize the group as a fraternity while the lawsuit winds its way through the legal system, and Beta Upsilon Chi has asked the court to make that recognition permanent.

An attorney for the Christian Legal Society, Timothy F. Tracey, said Christian Greek-letter groups have been opening on the nation's campuses more frequently since the mid-1990s, and such court fights have been rare.

''I can think of four or five cases that have come up with fraternities like this,'' said Tracey, who represents the group at Florida. ''You'd think that (schools) would look at this and see the benefit of having them on campus, but they don't always.''

At Auburn University, members of Alpha Kappa Lambda decided in 2000 to switch the focus of their fraternity from athletics to Christianity. Drew Bonner, a junior from Birmingham, Ala., visited the group and liked what he saw.

''I didn't really look into fraternities at first because of the reputation,'' said Bonner. ''I met a bunch of these guys through the semester and started looking into it. I really liked it. I'm active in a church here, too, but it's not the same as this.''

AKL, part of a secular fraternity with more than 30 chapters, rents a house and throws parties, but without alcohol and members keep the fun pretty tame. ''Animal House'' it's not.

''We pride ourselves on not hazing,'' said Bonner. ''We consider the pledges to be brothers in Christ, and we treat them that way.''

Traditional, secular fraternities also have banned hazing -- the physical or mental abuse of new members -- as arrests and lawsuits over the practice threatened the Greek system. But it persists in places.

Bonner's group, like many Christian fraternities or sororities, is small by big-campus standards. Alpha Kappa Lambda's membership hovers between 30 and 35 -- less than half the size of many Auburn fraternities -- even though its semester dues of $750 are much cheaper than many.

At Alabama, Lambda Sigma Phi lost about 40 members last year in a split over whether to become more like a traditional fraternity. ''We really stood up against it because we wanted to remain Christian,'' said Weaver, the president.

The group only has about 30 members now, which is fine with Weaver and his fraternity brothers. They often feel like they're under scrutiny for their beliefs, but they say they're not willing to sacrifice their faith for parties.

Clete Hux, a Presbyterian minister who has two sons in Lambda Sigma Phi, said he hopes the group sticks to its principles. He said he's got a peace of mind that eludes many parents who send their children off to college.

''You know there's not going to be any wild parties going on. They have accountability groups and Bible studies,'' he said. ''It's kind of furthering what you as parents instill in your children.''

------

Associated Press writer Peter Prengaman in Atlanta contributed to this report.

    Christian Fraternities Offer Different Path, NYT, 7.11.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Christian-Fraternities.html

Sour Note For American Muslims In Election Campaign

October 21, 2008
Filed at 1:00 p.m. ET
By REUTERS
The New York Times

CHICAGO (Reuters) - These are uneasy times for America's Muslims, caught in a backwash from a presidential election campaign where the false notion that Barack Obama is Muslim has been seized on by some who link Islam with terrorism.

The Democratic White House candidate, who would be the first black U.S. president and whose middle name is Hussein, is a Christian. Son of a Kenyan father and white American mother, he spent part of his childhood in largely Muslim Indonesia.

The idea Obama is Muslim has circulated on the Internet for months, presented by some as a fact to reinforce the position that Obama is not a suitable candidate for the White House.

Not since the election of John Kennedy as the first Catholic U.S. president in 1960 has the faith of a White House hopeful generated so much distortion, said about 100 "concerned scholars" and others who have signed an October 7 proclamation aimed at countering Islamophobia they say is on the rise.

In recent weeks:

-- More than 20 million video disc copies of a film called "Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West" were included as advertising supplements in newspapers across the country, many in battleground states where Obama is in a close fight with Republican candidate John McCain. The film, distributed by a private group unaffiliated with the McCain campaign, features suicide bombers, children being trained with guns, and a Christian church said to have been defiled by Muslims.

-- A city council candidate in Irvine, California, who is Muslim convert, said he got a telephone call saying "I want to cut your head off just like all the other Muslims deserve," the Los Angeles Times reported.

-- A mosque in a suburb of Chicago, Obama's home city, was vandalized four times in less than two months, with anti-Islamic messages left on its outer walls, and windows and doors broken.

-- An account of an Ohio rally for McCain running mate Sarah Palin, filed by Al Jazeera and posted on YouTube, shows a woman saying "he is not Christian, and this is a Christian nation," and a second woman saying she opposes Obama because of "the whole Muslim thing. A lot of people have forgotten about 9/11 (the September 11, 2001, attacks). It's a little unnerving."

"It is frightening to see at this point the label 'Arab' or 'Muslim' being used de facto as an insult," said Ahmed Rehab, executive director of the Chicago office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (C.A.I.R).

There is a feeling, he said, that hate crimes increase as Islamophobia rises in public discourse, including that going on peripherally in this election campaign.

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, a Republican crossing party lines to endorse Obama on Sunday, made a demand for tolerance when he referred to Obama-is-a-Muslim rumors.

"Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country?" he asked on NBC's "Meet the Press."

"The answer's no, that's not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president? Yet I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion 'he's a Muslim and he might be associated with terrorists.' This is not the way we should be doing it in America," Powell said, while making clear such sentiment was not coming from McCain himself.

Muslims make up less than 1 percent of the U.S. population of 305 million, according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, though some believe that number is low. About a third of the world's population is Christian, another 21 percent Muslim.

Daniel Varisco, anthropology chair at Hofstra University, said he wrote the "statement of concerned scholars" after seeing Islamophobia on the rise.

"The attempts to label Senator Obama a terrorist or rhyme his name with Osama (bin Laden) or accent his middle name (Hussein), as well as false claims about his being sworn into (U.S. Senate) office on a Koran, demonstrate how near to the surface anti-Islamic sentiment is in the United States," he said.

Circulating such falsehoods "avoids playing the race card directly but at the expense of Muslims," he said.

The Clarion Fund, which distributed the film "Obsession," through a huge newspaper advertising buy, says it is an independent education group focused "on the most urgent threat of radical Islam" and that placing the film in the hands of readers in battleground election states was an attempt to grab attention.

Spokesman Gregory Ross said, "we have no political or religious affiliations to any group whatsoever."

The Islamic Circle of North America has meanwhile opened an offensive of sorts -- a campaign promoting Islam and seeking converts. It said it placed advertising signs inside 1,000 cars in New York's subway network.

In Chicago the group had a number of city buses adorned top to bottom with pro-Islam advertising, headlined "Islam: The Way of Life of Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad."

Rehab of the Chicago C.A.I.R. office said that kind of approach may work to a limited degree, "but really the crux of the issue is not learning about the details of a religion but rather interacting with and understanding that the average Muslim is no different than yourself."

(Editing by Andrew Stern and Frances Kerry)

    Sour Note For American Muslims In Election Campaign, NYT, 21.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/washington/politics-us-usa-politics-muslims.html

Francis Sayre Jr., National Cathedral Dean, Dies at 93

October 12, 2008
The New York Times
By DENNIS HEVESI

The Very Rev. Francis B. Sayre Jr., who in his 27 years as dean of the National Cathedral in Washington raised his sonorous voice against McCarthyism, segregation, poverty and the Vietnam War while presiding over construction of the cathedral’s majestic Gloria in Excelsis Tower, died Oct. 3 at his home on Martha’s Vineyard, in Massachusetts. He was 93.

The death was confirmed by Elizabeth Mullen, a spokeswoman for the Episcopal cathedral, one of the most influential religious institutions in the nation.

Dean Sayre, a lanky, elegant man whose grandfather was President Woodrow Wilson, first climbed into the pulpit of the monumental cathedral, in northwest Washington, in 1951. Soon after, and well before the United States Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, he was calling for an end to school segregation.

Discrimination was a recurring theme for Dean Sayre. In a 1957 sermon, as the civil rights movement gained momentum, he urged his parishioners to join the struggle. He invoked the Prophet Elijah’s Old Testament challenge, “How long will ye go limping between the two sides?” Then he said, “That question, chilling in its candor, probes rather painfully; and I’m afraid we’ve been doing a good bit of limping ourselves, and the testing may not be far off.”

In March 1965, Dean Sayre joined the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the voting-rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala.

When Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin was railing at purported Communist influence in the country in the 1950s, Dean Sayre was not afraid to denounce him. In a 1954 sermon, he called McCarthy one of a crew of “pretended patriots” and said, “There is a devilish indecision about any society that will permit an impostor like McCarthy to caper out front while the main army stands idly by."

Francis Bowes Sayre Jr. was born in the White House on Jan. 17, 1915. He was the fourth grandchild of President Wilson and the first-born of the president’s daughter Jessie. His father was a Harvard law professor who later became an assistant secretary of state.

Francis Jr. graduated from Williams College and received his divinity degree from the Union Theological Seminary. He was a chaplain in the Navy in World War II and later had a parish in Cleveland.

Dean Sayre married Harriet Hart in 1946; she died in 2003. He is survived by two daughters, Jessie Maeck and Harriet Sayre McCord; two sons, Thomas Hart Sayre and Nevin Sayre; and eight grandchildren.

In his nearly three decades presiding over the cathedral, the cornerstone for which was laid in 1907, Dean Sayre oversaw phased construction that brought the Gothic structure, known officially as the Cathedral Church of St. Peter and St. Paul, to 90 percent completion. The cathedral’s 300-foot tower — with nearly 400 carved angels soaring on its four turrets and 32 balustrade pinnacles, and 73 bells inside — was completed in 1964.

Dean Sayre retired in 1978. Four years earlier, in an interview with The Washington Post, he said, “Whoever is appointed the dean of the cathedral has in his hand a marvelous instrument, and he’s a coward if he doesn’t use it.”

    Francis Sayre Jr., National Cathedral Dean, Dies at 93, NYT, 12.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/us/12sayre.html

A Fight Among Catholics

Over Which Party Best Reflects Church Teachings

October 5, 2008
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

As the Roman Catholic Church observes its annual “respect life” Sunday in this heated presidential election season, the unusually pitched competition for Catholic voters is setting off a round of skirmishes over how to apply the church’s teachings not only on abortion but also on the war in Iraq, immigration and racism.

In a departure from previous elections, Democrats and liberal Catholic groups are waging a fight within the church, arguing that the Democratic Party better reflects the full spectrum of church teachings.

It is a contest for credibility among observant Catholics, with each faction describing itself as a defender of “life.” The two sides disagree over how to address the “intrinsic evil” of abortion.

The escalating efforts by more-liberal Catholics are provoking a vigorous backlash from some bishops and the right.

In Scranton, Pa., every Catholic attending Mass this weekend will hear a special homily about the election next month: Bishop Joseph Martino has ordered every priest in the diocese to read a letter warning that voting for a supporter of abortion rights amounts to endorsing “homicide.”

“Being ‘right’ on taxes, education, health care, immigration and the economy fails to make up for the error of disregarding the value of a human life,” the bishop wrote. “It is a tragic irony that ‘pro-choice’ candidates have come to support homicide — the gravest injustice a society can tolerate — in the name of ‘social justice.’ ”

In response, a coalition of liberal lay Catholics is pushing back, criticizing the bishop’s message for neglecting other aspects of “life” talked about in Catholic social teachings, like concern for the poor.

To underscore the point, a nun is collecting the signatures of prominent Catholic leaders there for a newspaper advertisement reminding those who may be wary of voting for Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, the Democratic nominee for president, that the church also considers racism a sin that threatens the dignity of life.

“Here in Scranton, racist attitudes often prevent us from seeing all of our fellow citizens and candidates for public office as God’s children,” says the petition, circulated by Sister Margaret P. Gannon, a professor at Marywood University.

Scranton, the focus of a disproportionate amount of attention because it was the childhood home of Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate, has become a flashpoint in the battle playing out nationwide in weekly homilies, pastoral letters and diocesan newspapers. Scranton is also one of several heavily Catholic, working-class cities in swing states — like Cincinnati; Cleveland; Detroit; Erie, Pa.; Pittsburgh; and St. Louis — where a new network of liberal groups like Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good and Catholics United are trying to promote the church’s social justice teachings.

Catholics make up about a quarter of the electorate nationwide and about a third in many of the most heavily contested states in the Northeast and Midwest, an increasingly central focus of both presidential campaigns.

The campaign of Senator John McCain of Arizona has dispatched high-profile surrogates like Senator Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas, to remind Catholic audiences of the Republican candidate’s opposition to abortion.

For Mr. Obama, who supports the right to abortion, his campaign has trained its grass-roots organizers in the details of recent policy statements of the Bishops Conference.

Conservatives argue that ending legal protections for abortion outweighs almost all other issues, while liberals contend that social programs can more effectively reduce the abortion rate than trying to overturn Supreme Court precedents. They cite a 2007 statement from the United States bishops explicitly condoning a vote for a candidate who supports abortion rights if the vote was cast for other “grave” reasons.

The subtleties can be slippery. The Cathedral of St. Peter in Wilmington, Del., where Mr. Biden lives, is promoting a video produced by the conservative Catholic group Fidelis that is intended to persuade Catholic voters to put opposition to abortion rights and same-sex marriage above all other issues.

“Many issues are at stake,” a caption reads as the video displays a fetus and choral music swells. “Some are more important than others.”

Brian Burch, president of Fidelis, said the group had created the video as “a voter guide for the 21st century.” Many Catholic churches across the country have put it on their Web sites, and Mr. Burch said some statewide advocacy groups had been distributing it to their members.

At the Cathedral of St. Peter, the Rev. Joseph Cocucci has displayed the video prominently on the church’s Web page, and at each Mass he is urging parishioners to view it. Father Cocucci noted that the video also features smaller visual references to Catholics carrying peace signs and marching for civil rights.

“The video does say life is the most important issue, but if you notice it isn’t only abortion,” he said.

In the final push to Election Day, the intrachurch election debate is increasingly spilling into public view.

Last week, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that the head of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. in Missouri had stormed out of a Mass because his priest had invoked Hitler’s name in condemning Democratic support for abortion rights. The Cincinnati Enquirer published a column commending several archbishops for instructing Catholics not to vote for supporters of abortion rights but lamenting that the archbishop there had not done the same.

In the aftermath of the 2004 election, many liberal Catholics complained that parishes had distributed millions of copies of a voter guide created by a group called Catholic Answers that highlighted five “nonnegotiable” issues: abortion, stem-cell research, human cloning, euthanasia and same-sex marriage.

In response, liberal groups like Catholics United and Catholics in Alliance quickly began preparing alternative guides emphasizing a broader spectrum of the church’s social justice teachings.

Then the Bishops Conference, perhaps to forestall a blizzard of competing pamphlets, all but banned third-party voter guides from parishes, requiring the explicit endorsement of the presiding bishop.

But some, including the bishop of La Crosse in Wisconsin, a swing state, have nevertheless chosen to authorize distribution of the “nonnegotiable” guides this year. The liberal groups are trying to distribute their material through direct mail and at meetings of lay Catholic groups.

Alexia Kelley, executive director of Catholics in Alliance, said her organization was spending more than $250,000 on radio, print and billboard advertisements in Scranton and other heavily Catholic areas. The advertisements emphasize what Ms. Kelley described as the broader spectrum of Catholic concerns about the “common good,” including health care, jobs and home foreclosures.

Douglas W. Kmiec, a Catholic legal scholar who was a legal counsel in the administrations of President Ronald Reagan and the first President George Bush, has been telling Catholic audiences in Pennsylvania and other swing states that Mr. Obama’s platform better fits Catholic social teaching, including reducing the abortion rate.

Mr. Kmiec, who recently published a book on the subject — “Can a Catholic Support Him? Asking the Big Question about Barack Obama” — was speaking in Scranton last week when Bishop Martino issued his letter rebutting those arguments.

Asked how his former Republican colleagues were responding to his Obama evangelism, Mr. Kmiec acknowledged some resistance. “Some remind me that George Washington gave orders for Benedict Arnold to be shot on sight,” he said.

    A Fight Among Catholics Over Which Party Best Reflects Church Teachings, NYT, 5.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/us/politics/05catholic.html