History > 2014 > USA > Faith / Religion (I)

Students at a Catholic school near Seattle

protested a vice principal’s ouster after he wed a man.

Photograph: David Ryder/Reuters

Gay Marriages Confront Catholic School Rules

NYT

22.1.2014

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/23/us/gay-marriages-confront-catholic-school-rules.html

S. Truett Cathy, 93,

Chick-fil-A Owner, Dies

 

SEPT. 8, 2014

The New York Times

By KIM SEVERSON

When he introduced himself, S. Truett Cathy often played down his job.

“I cook chicken for a living,” he would say.

And on the surface, that was true. Mr. Cathy, who died on Monday at 93, was by all appearances a humble Christian man from Georgia with little education who sold a simple sandwich: a breaded, boneless chicken breast on a soft, white, buttered bun with nothing more than a couple of pickles for garnish.

But as the founder of the Chick-fil-A fast-food empire, he was also a billionaire several times over and, as a conservative Christian who ran his business according to his religious principles, he was at once a hero and a symbol of intolerance. Many admired him for closing his outlets on Sundays and speaking out against same-sex marriage. Others vilified his the chain as a symbol of hate.

He died at his home in Clayton County, Ga., a Chick-fil-A spokesman said.

Rising to prominence between Robert Woodruff, who took over Coca-Cola in the 1930s, and Sam Walton, who began the Walmart chain with a small store in Bentonville, Ark., in 1950, Mr. Cathy was one of a handful of Southern entrepreneurs who in one lifetime took small, hometown companies to a global level.

“He was really part of that generation that was our version of the Rockefellers or Henry Ford,” said William Ferris, a director of the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. “They moved the South in ways that could have never been anticipated in their lifetime.”

Mr. Cathy’s company and its charitable arms have reached widely throughout the South, helping the region’s economy and promoting the founder’s Baptist values. The company required potential franchise operators, for example, to discuss their marital status and their civic and church involvement.

Mr. Cathy said he closed his restaurants on Sundays so that his employees could spend time with their families. But the policy was also a way to honor his faith.

“It’s a silent witness to the Lord when people go into shopping malls, and everyone is bustling, and you see that Chick-fil-A is closed,” he once told a reporter for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Mr. Cathy’s beliefs underpinned the activities of the WinShape Foundation, a charitable arm of his empire that provided for scholarships, camps and foster care before branching out to support organizations that promoted traditional marriage. The foundation gave millions of dollars toward their efforts to oppose extending marriage rights to couples of the same sex.

Gay and lesbian activist groups and bloggers began investigating the foundation’s donations, and the issue blew up in 2012 after his son, Dan, the company president, gave a series of provocative interviews.

“As it relates to society in general, I think we are inviting God’s judgment on our nation when we shake our fist at him and say, ‘We know better than you as to what constitutes a marriage,’ ” Dan Cathy said.

Advocates of same-sex marriage initiated boycotts and campaigned to stop franchises from opening in some cities and on some college campuses. Those who supported the family’s views also rallied, flooding Chick-fil-A restaurants.

In response, the company said it would step back from the policy debate over same-sex marriage and stop funding most of the groups that were at the center of the storm. Mr. Cathy never wavered in his beliefs, however — a point mentioned by politicians, celebrities and business leaders who commented on his death.

“In every facet of his life, Truett Cathy has exemplified the finest aspects of his Christian faith,” former President Jimmy Carter said in a statement. “By his example, he has been a blessing to countless people.”

Samuel Truett Cathy, one of seven children, was born on March 14, 1921, in Eatonton, Ga., the hometown as well of the author Alice Walker and Joel Chandler Harris, who wrote the Uncle Remus stories.

By 8, Truett, as he was called, was selling bottles of Coca-Cola in his front yard. Six years later, the Depression drove his parents to move the family to a public-housing project, the nation’s first, in downtown Atlanta.

A poor student, Mr. Cathy never went to college, but he developed a sharp business acumen, which was supplemented by a strong work ethic he had learned from his parents. He often said the only time he ever saw his mother with her eyes closed was when she was in her coffin.

After he returned from the Army in World War II, he and his brother Ben opened a diner in Hapeville, Ga., just south of Atlanta, in 1946. Many of his customers worked at a nearby Ford plant. The squat shape of the building inspired the name: the Dwarf Grill, later renamed to Dwarf House.

Chicken became a focus when Mr. Cathy started acquiring chicken breasts that had been rejected by Delta Air Lines, because they were either too large or too small for the airline’s food trays. Mr. Cathy began experimenting, frying breaded chicken in a cast-iron pan with a lid, the way his mother used to.

He gave his sandwich its unusual name so that a nation just falling in love with fast-food hamburgers might better understand his product: Chick-fil-A was meant to suggest a chicken steak.

As malls came to the South, Mr. Cathy opened a Chick-fil-A at the Greenbriar Mall in Atlanta. It was a pioneering effort to put fast food in shopping centers.

By 2013, the privately held Chick-fil-A had more than 1,800 restaurants and sales of more than $5 billion.

Mr. Cathy instructed his heirs, who run the company, that they may sell it but must never take it public, because such a move could curtail the immense amount of charitable giving the company engages in.

Mr. Cathy is survived by his wife of 65 years, Jeannette; three children, Dan Cathy, Don Cathy and Trudy Cathy White; 18 grandchildren; and 19 great-grandchildren.

In the five books he wrote, Mr. Cathy often emphasized the importance of giving over receiving and of treating others as you would like to be treated.

“We live in a changing world, but we need to be reminded that the important things have not changed,” he said, “and the important things will not change if we keep our priorities in proper order.”

Correction: September 8, 2014

An earlier version of this article misattributed a quote. Dan Cathy, Mr. Cathy’s son and the president of the company, said, “As it relates to society in general, I think we are inviting God’s judgment on our nation when we shake our fist at Him and say, ‘We know better than you as to what constitutes a marriage.’ ” It was not said by S. Truett Cathy.

Alan Blinder contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on September 9, 2014, on page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: S. Truett Cathy, 93, Chick-fil-A Owner, Dies.

    S. Truett Cathy, 93, Chick-fil-A Owner, Dies, NYT, 8.9.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/09/business/
    s-truett-cathy-93-chick-fil-a-owner-dies.html

As Iraqi Christians in U.S.

Watch ISIS Advance,

They See ‘Slow-Motion Genocide’

SEPT. 6, 2014

The New York Times

SOUTHFIELD, Mich. — Early on Wednesday morning, the sonorous sound of Aramaic rose from the pews of Mother of God Chaldean Catholic Church here. More than a hundred worshipers had gathered well before the 10 a.m. Mass, and they were already chanting morning prayers in the language of their Lord.

Above the altar and crucifix, light flooded through a stained-glass window that depicted Mary and the baby Jesus standing on fertile fields threaded by two rivers. As everyone present surely knew, these were the Tigris and Euphrates in Iraq, the nation from which these Chaldean Catholics had begun coming to Detroit more than a century ago.

As it happened, one day earlier, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria had released a video of the beheading of Steven Sotloff, an American journalist. Two weeks earlier, the Islamist militants of ISIS had reported a similar murder of another American reporter, James Foley.

So when Bishop Francis Y. Kalabat walked quietly from a side door into Mother of God’s sanctuary, it was with a grim sense that maybe now, finally, he and his flock would no longer be howling into the abyss. As he had written last month in an open letter that was posted in the church’s lobby, “We wish to scream, but there are no ears that wish to hear.”

For the last decade, in fact, the Chaldean Catholics of Iraq — members of an Eastern Rite church that is affiliated with Roman Catholicism while retaining its own customs and rites — have been suffering at the hands of the same kind of terrorists who killed Mr. Sotloff and Mr. Foley. During that period, the total Christian population of Iraq, the largest share of which is composed of Chaldean Catholics, has dropped to about 400,000 while as many as a million, by some estimates, have fled.

Churches have been destroyed, monasteries attacked, entire cities purged. Congregations have been bombed during worship. The bishop of Mosul, Paulos Faraj Rahho, was abducted and executed by Al Qaeda in Iraq six years ago. So the recent atrocities visited upon Iraqi Christians by ISIS are nothing remotely new. All that is new is an awareness of them outside the Chaldean-American enclaves of San Diego and metropolitan Detroit.

“It’s almost like waking up to a burning house,” said Bishop Kalabat, 44. “The first thing I think about is, ‘How do I get my family out?’ You don’t have time to say, ‘I’ve been working on this house for 30 years, this is the house I was going to retire to.’ You have some neighbors taking out a hose to help. But we need the Fire Department.”

Putting it another way, Bishop Kalabat turned from metaphor to recent history. “The bad things we look back at now — the Iran-Iraq War, the first Gulf War, the embargo, even six months ago,” he said. “We’d take all of that over today.”

His intensity is not merely the product of Chaldean self-interest, of special pleading. Paul Marshall, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom, has been tracking the persecution of Iraq’s religious minorities, who include members of Syriac and Armenian Catholic and Orthodox denominations, as well as such non-Christian groups as Yazidis and Mandaeans.

Thus, though Mr. Marshall’s résumé would not state it quite this way, he is an expert in comparative calamity. And in his well-informed view, there is a very real possibility that, except for the relative refuge of Iraqi Kurdistan, Christianity may essentially cease to exist in a country to which the apostles brought the Gospel in the first century. Of the present situation, he wrote in an email, “It is the worst in modern history, and probably in history period.”

The vast tragedy of Chaldean Catholics in Iraq today stands in painful contrast to the success story of their coreligionists in the United States. First drawn by assembly-line jobs in Henry Ford’s auto factories, and after World War II compelled to leave Iraq by a succession of coups, Chaldean immigrants scaled the educational and occupational ladders into the upper middle class. By now, many of the Detroit area’s approximately 175,000 Chaldeans live in the prosperous Oakland County suburbs.

Since the recent round of persecution began in 2004, and especially after this year’s lightning advance of ISIS fighters across the Nineveh Plain, the Chaldeans here have sought to leverage their material comfort and political savvy on behalf of their endangered brethren.

Both clergy and lay leaders have met with officials in the White House, Congress and the United Nations. Congregants have donated several hundred thousand dollars for humanitarian aid. There have been prayer vigils, rallies, the announcement of scholarship funds and an “Adopt a Refugee” program.

The Chaldeans here have been pushing for practical, realistic forms of American involvement: creation of a protected zone and safe-passage corridors for Christians still in Iraq; an increased number of refugee visas and streamlined approval by State Department and Homeland Security screeners for Christians trying to reach America. Yet it seems to have taken the videos of two journalists being decapitated for much of the nation to finally heed the warning cries from places like the Mother of God Church.

“We call this a slow-motion genocide,” said Auday P. Arabo, the lay spokesman for the St. Thomas Chaldean Catholic Diocese. “It’s unfortunate people don’t feel it until it hits home. But I guess it’s human nature that you only see what’s happening in the mirror.”

Bishop Kalabat was appointed by Pope Francis to his position — making him one of two Chaldean Catholic bishops for the United States — in early May. Soon after, he traveled to Iraq to meet with Christian refugees in the Kurdish town of Ankawa. More than 10,000 of them, soon to exceed 40,000, had taken shelter in schools and churches.

“What’s happening to us?” Bishop Kalabat said he recalls being asked. “Where’s our government? Where’s the U.S.? Where’s the world? Where’s the church? Where’s God?”

As he recounted those questions in his office the other day, Bishop Kalabat reached into his shirt pocket and extracted a crucifix.

“We are called the Church of Martyrs,” he said. “That’s our pain and our saving grace. Our faith isn’t a theory. It’s not a set of teachings. It’s a person and we’re called to be like him. When I look at this evil, I want to be Rambo. But that won’t do any good. We carry the cross for a reason.”


A version of this article appears in print on September 6, 2014, on page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: As Iraqi Christians in U.S. Watch ISIS Advance, They See ‘Slow-Motion Genocide’.

    As Iraqi Christians in U.S. Watch ISIS Advance, They See ‘Slow-Motion Genocide’,
    NYT, 6.9.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/06/us/
    as-iraqi-christians-in-us-watch-isis-advance-they-see-a-slow-motion-genocide.html

U.S. Religious Leaders

Embrace Cause of Immigrant Children

 

JULY 23, 2014

The New York Times

By MICHAEL PAULSON

After protesters shouting “Go home” turned back busloads of immigrant mothers and children in Murrieta, Calif., a furious Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, the Roman Catholic archbishop of New York, sat down at his notepad and drafted a blog post detailing his shame at the episode, writing, “It was un-American; it was unbiblical; it was inhumane.”

When the governor of Iowa, Terry E. Branstad, said he did not want the migrants in his state, declaring, “We can’t accept every child in the world who has problems,” clergy members in Des Moines held a prayer vigil at a United Methodist Church to demonstrate their desire to make room for the refugees.

The United States’ response to the arrival of tens of thousands of migrant children, many of them fleeing violence and exploitation in Central America, has been symbolized by an angry pushback from citizens and local officials who have channeled their outrage over illegal immigration into opposition to proposed shelter sites. But around the nation, an array of religious leaders are trying to mobilize support for the children, saying the nation can and should welcome them.

“We’re talking about whether we’re going to stand at the border and tell children who are fleeing a burning building to go back inside,” said Rabbi Asher Knight of Temple Emanu-El in Dallas, who said leaders of more than 100 faith organizations in his city had met last week to discuss how to help. He said that in his own congregation, some were comparing the flow of immigrant children to the Kindertransport, a rescue mission in the late 1930s that sent Jewish children from Nazi Germany to Britain for safekeeping.

“The question for us is: How do we want to be remembered, as yelling and screaming to go back, or as using the teachings of our traditions to have compassion and love and grace for the lives of God’s children?” Rabbi Knight said.

The backlash to the backlash is broad, from Unitarian Universalists and Quakers to evangelical Protestants. Among the most agitated are Catholic bishops, who have long allied with Republican politicians against abortion and same-sex marriage, and leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention, whose adherents tend to lean right.

“This is a crisis, and not simply a political crisis, but a moral one,” said Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. On Tuesday, Mr. Moore led a delegation of Southern Baptist officials to visit refugee children at detention centers in San Antonio and McAllen, Tex. In an interview after the visit, Mr. Moore said that “the anger directed toward vulnerable children is deplorable and disgusting” and added: “The first thing is to make sure we understand these are not issues, these are persons. These children are made in the image of God, and we ought to respond to them with compassion, not with fear.”

Also on Tuesday, a coalition of evangelical organizations sent a letter to members of Congress, opposing proposals for expedited deportation of the migrants. A similar letter is being prepared by a wide range of mainline denominations, including the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), the Episcopal Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the Unitarian Universalist Association and the United Church of Christ. Earlier this month, 20 national Jewish groups issued their own statement.

The number of children crossing the U.S. border alone has doubled since last year. Answers to key questions on the crisis.

“We have to put our money where our mouth is in this country,” said Kevin Appleby, the director of migration policy for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. “We tell other countries to protect human rights and accept refugees, but when we get a crisis on our border, we don’t know how to respond.”

Republicans have rejected calls by Democrats for $2.7 billion in funds to respond to the crisis, demanding changes in immigration law to make it easier to send children back to Central America. And while President Obama says he is open to some changes, many Democrats have opposed them, and Congress is now deadlocked.

Various religious groups are trying to assist the migrants directly by offering food, shelter and legal services. The Episcopal Church is providing hygiene and nutrition packets; the United Methodist Church is offering showers and clothing; the United Church of Christ has started a nationwide fund-raising appeal. Catholic Charities U.S.A. has opened seven “welcome centers” along the border.

While thousands of child migrants from Central America have crossed the Rio Grande to U.S. soil, thousands more don’t make it that far. Many end up detained or broke in towns like Reynosa, Mexico.

“As a Christian organization, we feel like we have no choice — we are clearly called by Scripture to respond to all children in need,” said Jesse Eaves, the senior adviser for child protection at World Vision, a large evangelical charity.

Attitudes among evangelicals are changing, particularly at the leadership level, according to the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference.

“I remember when my fellow evangelicals said, ‘Deport them all, they’re here illegally, end of story,’ but the leadership now supports immigration reform,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “There’s still angst in the pews, but if they listen more to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John than to Rush Limbaugh, they’ll act with compassion towards these children.”

The Rev. Larry Snyder, the president of Catholic Charities U.S.A., said the charitable work had not been welcomed in every community.

“Some city authorities are intimidated by the hate talk that you hear, and I even talk to some pastors who say they have to be careful because their parishioners aren’t behind us,” Father Snyder said. “If Jesus said anything, it was that your neighbor is everyone. I wish people would embrace that a little more than they do.”

Asked about the concerns religious organizations are expressing about unaccompanied minors, the White House press secretary, Josh Earnest, said, “Generous acts from average citizens don’t routinely generate headlines, but they accurately reflect the values of the vast majority of Americans.”

A spokesman for Speaker John A. Boehner did not respond to a request for comment.

Some political leaders have cited religious or moral arguments in offering support for the migrants. On Friday, Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts tearfully cited the Bible and declared, “I don’t know what good there is in faith if we can’t, and won’t, turn to it in moments of human need,” as he suggested that migrant children could be temporarily housed at military bases in his state.

And on Monday, briefing reporters in Rome after meeting with a top Vatican official, Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York praised Pope Francis’ support for the migrant children and said, “I emphasize that New York City agrees with the position of the Holy See, that we have to embrace all immigrants.”

In Des Moines on Monday night, the mayor, Frank Cownie, attended the church vigil held by supporters of the migrant children. About 200 people gathered, from Catholic, Lutheran, United Methodist, Quaker and United Church of Christ congregations, as they heard stories from immigrants and expressed a desire to change the way their state’s posture toward the migrants might be perceived.

“I think for me the most important thing is to show that people in Iowa are compassionate and welcoming,” said the Rev. Alejandro Alfaro-Santiz, the pastor of Trinity United Methodist Church.
 

Ann Klein contributed reporting from Des Moines.

A version of this article appears in print on July 24, 2014,
on page A15 of the New York edition with the headline:
U.S. Religious Leaders Embrace Cause of Children Streaming Across Border.

    U.S. Religious Leaders Embrace Cause of Immigrant Children,
    NYT, 23.7.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/24/us/
    us-religious-leaders-embrace-cause-of-immigrant-children.html

Obama Weighs Steps

to Cover Contraception

JULY 4, 2014

The New York Times

By ROBERT PEAR and ADAM LIPTAK

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration, reeling from back-to-back blows from the Supreme Court this week, is weighing options that would provide contraceptive coverage to thousands of women who are about to lose it or never had it because of their employers’ religious objections.

The administration must move fast. Legal and health care experts expect a rush to court involving scores of employers seeking to take advantage of the two decisions, one involving Hobby Lobby Stores, which affects for-profit businesses, and the other on Wheaton College that concerns religiously affiliated nonprofit groups. About 100 cases are pending.

One proposal the White House is studying would put companies’ insurers or health plan administrators on the spot for contraceptive coverage, with details of reimbursement to be worked out later.

Another would give the administration itself a larger role in offering cost-free coverage to women who cannot get it through their employers, although the option for a new government entitlement appears unrealistic for financial and political reasons.

The White House is under such pressure that no one has been able to work out details of how the alternatives would be financed or administered.

Administration officials said they were determined to ensure the broadest possible coverage of contraceptives for the largest number of women without requiring employers to violate their religious beliefs.

Mark L. Rienzi, a lawyer who represented both Hobby Lobby and Wheaton College, said the administration had the tools to make an alternative solution work. “The government can find other ways to deliver contraceptives to people without forcing nuns and religious colleges to participate,” he said.

That is not the way Justice Sonia Sotomayor looks at it. In her dissent in the Wheaton College case on Thursday, she said the challenge facing the government was “daunting — if not impossible.”

Still, the administration has another motivation to act as quickly as possible: It is eager to court the votes of women dismayed by the rulings. The Democratic National Committee is already urging voters to fight back against the Hobby Lobby decision and to “stand up for Obamacare” in the November elections. The Supreme Court said that family-owned for-profit corporations like Hobby Lobby were not required to provide coverage of contraceptives if they objected on religious grounds.

Whatever the choice, no plan can be turned around in two weeks, or two months. It took more than two years for the administration to figure out how to provide contraceptive coverage for women at nonprofit groups that have religious objections. That arrangement allowed religious organizations to fill out a form that would transfer the delivery of free coverage under the Affordable Care Act to others.

But many of the nonprofit groups say that even notifying an insurer of their objections through the opt-out form would make them complicit in a moral wrong. Some consider all contraception to be wrong; others object only to devices and drugs like the so-called morning-after pill that they believe may cause abortions. One such objector was Wheaton College, a Christian liberal arts school in Illinois, and the Supreme Court granted it a temporary exemption in the ruling on Thursday.

That move divided the court along gender lines, with Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan joining Justice Sotomayor’s unsparing dissent. They said the court majority had endorsed the opt-out form just three days earlier in the Hobby Lobby case, in which Justice Stephen G. Breyer joined the three female justices in dissent in the 5-to-4 ruling.

The court’s conservative majority — all men — was sanguine about the availability of other ways for the administration to deliver coverage for every form of birth control approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

Yet officials are struggling to make sense of a sunny sentence in the court’s order on Thursday exempting Wheaton from the opt-out form. “Nothing in this interim order affects the ability of the applicant’s employees and students to obtain, without cost, the full range of F.D.A.-approved contraceptives,” the majority said in the unsigned opinion.

It said Wheaton could merely notify the government of its religious objections in writing rather than send the opt-out form to its coverage providers.

The difference sounds trivial. But it could create quite a roadblock for the Department of Health and Human Services, Justice Sotomayor wrote in dissent. “Does the court intend for H.H.S. to rely on the filing of lawsuits by every entity claiming an exemption?” she asked. She questioned whether the government was supposed to create “a database that tracks every employer’s insurer or third-party administrator nationwide.”

Wheaton said it would have no difficulty sending a notice to the secretary of Health and Human Services.

The contraceptive coverage requirement is just one of many provisions in rules adopted under the Affordable Care Act, but it has become one of the most significant, both politically and symbolically, overshadowing many other important provisions.

In early 2011, Obama administration officials said they wanted to require insurers to offer contraceptives to women free of charge.

The administration has made progress toward its goal, as millions of women have gained access to birth control without co-payments or other charges. But in the process, the administration has become entangled in scores of court cases, fighting with priests and nuns and other religious believers over details of the health insurance coverage they provide and receive.

The battles are sure to continue for a year or more, with religious objectors emboldened by victories this week. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., in writing the majority opinion in the Hobby Lobby case, said it seemed likely that the cost of providing the four drugs and devices that many religious groups object to “would be minor when compared with the overall cost” of the health care law.

Justice Alito wrote approvingly of the idea of shifting contraceptive costs to insurance companies, calling it “an approach that is less restrictive than requiring employers to fund contraceptive methods that violate their religious beliefs.”

But on Thursday the majority made the cost-shifting much harder to accomplish. The general idea is to require insurance companies and plan administrators to deliver coverage when they are told about an employer’s religious objections. They would bear the costs or receive reimbursement from the government.

The situation is more complicated when employers self-insure. There, the administration says, outside plan administrators may obtain a “compensating reduction” in the fees paid by insurers to participate in the insurance exchanges established by the health care law. Those adjustments, the administration has said, will not cost much.

Some religious organizations are using that arrangement. But employee benefits experts said it was not working well, in part because insurers and third-party administrators have had to foot the bill for contraceptive coverage without any immediate offset or reimbursement.

“They are not being paid, and they have no prospect of being reimbursed,” said Christopher E. Condeluci, a lawyer for the Self-Insurance Institute of America.

The Obama administration says the cost of providing contraceptives will be offset by savings that result from greater use of birth control, “fewer unplanned pregnancies” and improvement in women’s health. But, Mr. Condeluci said, “It may be years before the savings are realized.”
 

A version of this article appears in print on July 5, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Obama Weighs Steps to Cover Contraception.

    Obama Weighs Steps to Cover Contraception, NYT, 4.7.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/05/us/politics/
    obama-weighs-steps-to-cover-contraception.html

Limiting Rights:

Imposing Religion on Workers

JUNE 30, 2014

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

The Opinion Pages | Editorial

The Supreme Court’s deeply dismaying decision on Monday in the Hobby Lobby case swept aside accepted principles of corporate law and religious liberty to grant owners of closely held, for-profit companies an unprecedented right to impose their religious views on employees.

It was the first time the court has allowed commercial business owners to deny employees a federal benefit to which they are entitled by law based on the owners’ religious beliefs, and it was a radical departure from the court’s history of resisting claims for religious exemptions from neutral laws of general applicability when the exemptions would hurt other people.

The full implications of the decision, which ruled in favor of employers who do not want to include contraceptive care in their company health plans, as required by the Affordable Care Act, will not be known for some time. But the immediate effect, as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted in a powerful dissent, was to deny many thousands of women contraceptive coverage vital to their well-being and reproductive freedom. It also invites, she said, other “for-profit entities to seek religion-based exemptions from regulations they deem offensive to their faiths.”

The case involved challenges by two companies, Hobby Lobby, a chain of arts and crafts stores, and Conestoga Wood Specialties, a cabinet maker, to the perfectly reasonable requirement that employer health plans cover (without a co-payment) all birth control methods and services approved by the Food and Drug Administration. The main battleground was the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, which says government may not “substantially burden a person’s free exercise of religion” unless the burden is necessary to further a “compelling government interest” and achieves it by “the least restrictive means.”

As a threshold matter, Justice Samuel Alito Jr., read the act’s religious protections to apply to “the humans who own and control” closely held companies, an interpretation contradicted by the statute’s history, context, and wording. He then found that the contraceptive coverage rules put a “substantial burden” on the religious owners, who objected to some of the items on the F.D.A.’s list based on the incorrect claim they induce abortions.

It’s hard to see that burden. Nothing in the contraceptive coverage rule prevented the companies’ owners from worshiping as they choose or advocating against coverage and use of the contraceptives they don’t like.

Nothing compels women to use their insurance on contraceptives. A woman’s choice to use or not to use them is a personal one that does not implicate her employer. Such decisions “will be the woman’s autonomous choice, informed by the physician she consults,” as Justice Ginsburg noted. There also is no requirement that employers offer employee health plans. They could instead pay a tax likely to be less than the cost of providing insurance to help cover government subsidies available to those using an insurance exchange. That did not convince Justice Alito and his colleagues on the court’s right flank, who bought the plaintiffs’ claim that providing health coverage to employees was part of their religious mission.

The majority’s finding that the government’s contraception coverage rules were not the “least restrictive” way to carry out the broad and complex health reform was also unpersuasive.

Mr. Alito’s ruling and a concurrence by Justice Anthony Kennedy portray the decision as a narrow one without broader application, like denying vaccine coverage or job discrimination. But that is not reassuring coming from justices who missed the point that denying women access to full health benefits is discrimination.


A version of this editorial appears in print on July 1, 2014, on page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: The Justices Endorse Imposing Religion on Employees.

    Limiting Rights: Imposing Religion on Workers, NYT, 30.6.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/01/opinion/the-supreme-court-
    imposing-religion-on-workers.html

Supreme Court Rejects

Contraceptives Mandate

for Some Corporations

 

JUNE 30, 2014

The New York Times

By ADAM LIPTAK

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that requiring family-owned corporations to pay for insurance coverage for contraception under the Affordable Care Act violated a federal law protecting religious freedom.

The 5-to-4 decision, which applied to two companies owned by Christian families, opened the door to challenges from other corporations to many laws that may be said to violate their religious liberty.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., writing for the court’s five more conservative justices, said a federal religious-freedom law applied to for-profit corporations controlled by religious families. He added that the requirement that the companies provide contraception coverage imposed a substantial burden on the companies’ religious liberty. He said the government could provide the coverage in other ways.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the court’s four-member liberal wing, said the contraception coverage requirement was vital to women’s health and reproductive freedom. Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Elena Kagan joined almost all of the dissent, but they said there was no need to take a position on whether corporations may bring claims under the religious liberty law.

On that point, Justice Ginsburg, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, said the court’s decision “is bound to have untoward effects” in other settings.

“The court’s expansive notion of corporate personhood,” Justice Ginsburg wrote, “invites for-profit entities to seek religion-based exemptions from regulations they deem offensive to their faiths.”

The contraception coverage requirement was challenged by two corporations whose owners say they try to run their businesses on religious principles: Hobby Lobby, a chain of crafts stores, and Conestoga Wood Specialties, which makes wood cabinets

The health care law and related regulations require many employers to provide female workers with comprehensive insurance coverage for a variety of methods of contraception. The companies objected to some of the methods, saying they are tantamount to abortion because they can prevent embryos from implanting in the womb. Providing insurance coverage for those forms of contraception would, the companies said, make them complicit in the practice.

The companies said they had no objection to other forms of contraception, including condoms, diaphragms, sponges, several kinds of birth control pills and sterilization surgery.

The Obama administration said it did not question the sincerity of the companies’ beliefs, and it has offered exemptions to other groups on such grounds.

A federal judge has estimated that a third of Americans are not subject to the requirement that their employers provide coverage for contraceptives. Small employers need not offer health coverage at all; religious employers like churches are exempt; religiously affiliated groups may claim an exemption; and some insurance plans that had not previously offered the coverage are grandfathered in.

But the administration said that for-profit corporations like Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood must comply with the law or face fines.

The companies challenged the coverage requirement under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993. The law was a response to a 1990 Supreme Court decision that declined to recognize religious exceptions under the First Amendment’s free exercise clause to generally applicable laws. Congress effectively reversed that decision.

“What this law basically says,” President Bill Clinton said before signing the bill, “is that the government should be held to a very high level of proof before it interferes with someone’s free exercise of religion.”

The threshold question in the new case was whether the companies were permitted to raise a claim under the law.

The companies argued that they were, and they said the coverage requirement imposed a “substantial burden” on religious practices by subjecting Hobby Lobby, for instance, to fines of $1.3 million a day if it chose not to offer comprehensive coverage, and to different fines of $26 million a year if it stopped offering insurance entirely.

Some scholars responded that the company would be better off financially if it dropped coverage, and so does not face a substantial burden.

The administration argued that requiring insurance plans to include comprehensive coverage for contraception promotes public health and ensures that “women have equal access to health care services.” The government’s briefs added that doctors, rather than employers, should decide which form of contraception is best.

A supporting brief from the Guttmacher Institute, a research and policy group, said that many women cannot afford the most effective means of birth control and that the law will reduce unintended pregnancies and abortions.

    Supreme Court Rejects Contraceptives Mandate for Some Corporations,
    NYT, 30.6.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/01/us/
    supreme-court-ruling-in-contraceptive-case-is-awaited.html

Georgia Inmate Is Put to Death

in First U.S. Execution

Since Botched Procedure

JUNE 18, 2014
The New York Times
By ALAN BLINDER

JACKSON, Ga. — Marcus A. Wellons, who was convicted in the 1989 rape and murder of a teenage girl, was executed at a Georgia prison on Tuesday, becoming the first inmate put to death in the United States since a botched execution in Oklahoma seven weeks ago prompted renewed questions about capital punishment.

A spokeswoman for the Georgia Department of Corrections said that the execution began at 10:41 p.m., and that Mr. Wellons was pronounced dead more than an hour later, at 11:56 p.m. Media witnesses described a shorter procedure.

A journalist who witnessed the execution, Rhonda Cook of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, said a prison official fainted shortly before Mr. Wellons was declared dead. But she said there had been no other abnormalities.

Mr. Wellons apologized for his crime, Ms. Cook said. “I ask and hope that you will find peace with my death,” she quoted him as saying. He later said, “I’m going home to be with Jesus.”

The execution took place well after the scheduled start time of 7 p.m. State officials had delayed the execution of Mr. Wellons, 58, while the United States Supreme Court considered his final appeal.

Before the execution in this city southeast of Atlanta, law enforcement officials in fluorescent vests and riot gear stood guard at the prison’s entrance.

Although the state acknowledged that it used a substantial dose of a single drug — pentobarbital, a barbiturate — from a compounding pharmacy to execute Mr. Wellons, many of the procedures surrounding his death were kept secret. A state law that took effect last summer and was upheld in May by the State Supreme Court allowed the authorities in Georgia to withhold information about the people and companies involved in executions.

That secrecy was a subject of one of Mr. Wellons’s many appeals in the federal and state courts, which continued well into Tuesday. Defense lawyers argued that the confidentiality exposed Mr. Wellons to the threat of a cruel and unusual punishment because they could not evaluate the qualifications of members of the execution team or the safety record of the compounding pharmacy.

But in a 10-page ruling that the federal appellate system allowed to stand, Judge Timothy C. Batten Sr. of the Federal District Court in Atlanta ruled that Georgia had a “compelling need” for secrecy. He also said that the authorities in Georgia had “a strong interest” in ensuring the execution was properly handled.

“Botched executions lead to embarrassment, investigations, bad press and, perhaps worst of all for the individuals involved, the knowledge that they caused an individual needless pain and suffering,” Judge Batten wrote in a ruling issued on Monday.

The execution of Mr. Wellons followed the botched one of Clayton D. Lockett in Oklahoma on April 29, an episode that President Obama described as “deeply troubling” and prompted him to seek a Justice Department review of capital punishment.

Oklahoma officials had planned a second execution for the same night, but postponed it after Mr. Lockett appeared to endure agonizing pain before he died of a heart attack. The state authorities said that Mr. Lockett’s vein had collapsed during the procedure, and an autopsy commissioned by his lawyers and released last week said the execution team had not properly placed an intravenous line. The findings of an autopsy ordered by the state have not been made public.

Two other inmates in the United States were scheduled for execution within a day of Mr. Wellons’s death. A federal appellate court lifted a stay of execution for John Winfield, a Missouri inmate, on Tuesday evening, and the Supreme Court later refused to halt the execution. He was executed early Wednesday, according to The Associated Press.

Florida has an execution scheduled for Wednesday evening, and the courts have so far turned back requests for a stay.

Mr. Wellons’s execution came more than 21 years after a jury in metropolitan Atlanta convicted him of raping and then murdering a 15-year-old neighbor, India Roberts. The night before the attack, Mr. Wellons’s girlfriend ended her relationship with him, and Mr. Wellons became “distraught and unbalanced” in the hours that followed, a federal appeals court later wrote.

Mr. Wellons mounted a defense related to mental illness during his trial, but he did not elicit testimony from any psychological experts during the guilt or innocence phase of the proceedings.

A version of this article appears in print on June 18, 2014,

on page A18 of the New York edition with the headline:

Georgia Inmate Is Put to Death in First U.S. Execution

Since Botched Procedure.

    Georgia Inmate Is Put to Death in First U.S. Execution
    Since Botched Procedure, NYT, 18.6.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/18/us/
    georgia-inmate-is-put-to-death-in-first-us-execution-since-botched-procedure.html

Brazen Figure

May Hold Key to Mysteries

Apprehension of Ahmed Abu Khattala

May Begin to Answer Questions on Assault

JUNE 17, 2014
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

CAIRO — Ahmed Abu Khattala was always open about his animosity toward the United States, and even about his conviction that Muslims and Christians were locked in an intractable religious war. “There is always hostility between the religions,” he said in an interview. “That is the nature of religions.”

During the assault on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, on the night of Sept. 11, 2012, Mr. Abu Khattala was a vivid presence. Witnesses saw him directing the swarming attackers who ultimately killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.

Afterward, he offered contradictory denials of his role, sometimes trying to say that he did not do it but strongly approved. He appeared to enjoy his notoriety.

Even after President Obama vowed to hunt down the attackers, Mr. Abu Khattala sat for repeated interviews with Western journalists and even invited a correspondent for tea in the modest home where he lived openly, with his mother, in the el-Leithi neighborhood of Benghazi.

But for all his brazenness, Mr. Abu Khattala also holds many tantalizing secrets for the Americans still investigating and debating the attack.

Captured by military commandos and law enforcement agents early on Monday, Mr. Abu Khattala may now help address some of the persistent questions about the identity and motives of the attackers. The thriving industry of conspiracy theories, political scandals, talk show chatter and congressional hearings may now confront the man federal investigators say played the central role in the attack.

Despite extensive speculation about the possible role of Al Qaeda in directing the attack, Mr. Abu Khattala is a local, small-time Islamist militant. He has no known connections to international terrorist groups, say American officials briefed on the criminal investigation and intelligence reporting, and other Benghazi Islamists and militia leaders who have known him for many years.

In several hours of interviews since the attack, Mr. Abu Khattala was happy to profess his admiration for Osama bin Laden and other leaders of Al Qaeda. He insisted that American foreign policy alone was to blame for the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But he remained a distant admirer of Mr. Bin Laden’s organization, having spent most of his adult life in and out of jail for his extremism under Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.

Even by the standards of Benghazi jihadists — and even among many of his friends — Mr. Abu Khattala stands out as both erratic and extremist. “Even in prison, he was always alone,” said Sheikh Mohamed Abu Sidra, an Islamist member of Parliament from Benghazi who spent several years in prison with Mr. Abu Khattala.

“He is sincere, but he is very ignorant, and I don’t think he is 100 percent mentally fit,” Mr. Abu Sidra said. “I always ask myself, how did he become a leader?”

When the revolt against Colonel Qaddafi broke out in February 2011, however, Mr. Abu Khattala’s years in prison were an attractive credential to the young men looking for tough-talking “sheikhs” to follow into battle.
Continue reading the main story

He formed a militia of perhaps two dozen fighters, naming it Obeida Ibn Al Jarra for an early Islamic general. But by the summer, Mr. Abu Khattala and his band had become notorious across Benghazi.

A group of Islamist militia leaders decided to “arrest” and investigate the main rebel commander, Gen. Abdul Fattah Younes, who had also become NATO’s preferred partner among the rebel leaders. His captors held him overnight in the headquarters of Mr. Abu Khattala’s brigade, and General Younes’s body was found the next day on a roadside, riddled with bullets.

Mr. Abu Khattala “became a boogeyman” across Benghazi, said Mohamed al-Gharabi, the Islamist leader of the Rafallah al-Sehati Brigade. “People started to fear him,” he said.

Mr. Abu Khattala appeared to enjoy his new infamy. When the Islamist-dominated militias reorganized into a centralized coalition, he rejected it as insufficiently Islamist. Complaining that the coalition supported the Western-backed provisional government instead of demanding a theocracy, he pulled back from the front.

“He thinks he owns God and everyone else is an infidel,” said Fawzi Bukatef, the coalition’s former leader.

In the period before the attack, Mr. Abu Khattala was living in el-Leithi, known for its high concentration of militant extremists. He made his living as a building contractor in blue Dickies coveralls. But he was still active with a small, part-time militia, which at certain times over the last two years controlled at least one checkpoint on a highway near Benghazi.

On the day of the attack, Islamists in Cairo had staged a demonstration outside the United States Embassy there to protest an American-made online video mocking Islam, and the protest culminated in a breach of the embassy’s walls — images that flashed through news coverage around the Arab world.

As the attack in Benghazi was unfolding a few hours later, Mr. Abu Khattala told fellow Islamist fighters and others that the assault was retaliation for the same insulting video, according to people who heard him.

In an interview a few days later, he pointedly declined to say whether an offensive online video might indeed warrant the destruction of the diplomatic mission or the killing of the ambassador. “From a religious point of view, it is hard to say whether it is good or bad,” he said.

Several witnesses to the attack later said that Mr. Abu Khattala’s presence and leadership were conspicuous from the start. He initially hung back, standing near the crowd at Venezia Road, several witnesses said. But a procession of fighters hurried to him out of the smoke and gunfire, addressed him as “sheikh,” and then gave him reports or took his orders before plunging back into the compound.

Spotting him as the central figure in the attack, a local official, Anwar el-Dos, approached Mr. Abu Khattala for help in entering the compound. The two men drove into the mission together in Mr. Abu Khattala’s pickup truck, witnesses said. As the men moved forward, the fighters parted to let them pass.

When the truck doors opened inside the walls, witnesses said, Mr. Dos dived to the ground to avoid gunfire ringing all around. But Mr. Abu Khattala strolled coolly through the chaos.

“He was just calm as could be,” a young Islamist who had joined the pillaging said, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. Mr. Abu Khattala showed up on internal security cameras at about 11:30 p.m., according to American officials who have viewed the footage.

A short time later, Mr. Abu Khattala drove to the headquarters of Ansar al-Shariah, a local Benghazi militia whose members, witnesses said, also played a prominent role in the attack.

Although widely seen at the attack, Mr. Abu Khattala made no attempt to flee. The safest place for him may have been Benghazi, where Libya’s weak central government feared exerting its authority because of the superior power of the local Islamist militias.

Mr. Abu Khattala’s neighbors and other residents of Benghazi were apparently unaware of his capture, perhaps because they assumed he was caught up in other fighting in the city. A renegade general has been waging a local campaign against Islamist militants such as those in Ansar al-Shariah and Mr. Abu Khattala.

In interviews after the news emerged, two Benghazi residents said they had last seen Mr. Abu Khattala on Sunday. A neighbor in the el-Leithi district said he had seen Mr. Abu Khattala leaving his house alone in an Afghan-style jallabiya, with a Kalashnikov rifle slung over one shoulder and a Belgian FN rifle over the other.

“Then he walked deep into el-Leithi,” the neighbor said. “We haven’t seen him since.”

Suliman Ali Zway contributed reporting from Tripoli, Libya.

A version of this article appears in print on June 18, 2014,

on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:

Brazen Figure May Hold Key To Mysteries.

    Brazen Figure May Hold Key to Mysteries, NYT, 17.6.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/18/world/middleeast/
    apprehension-of-ahmed-abu-khattala-
    may-begin-to-answer-questions-on-assault.html

Religious Constriction

JUNE 8, 2014
The New York Times
The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Columnist

I am both shocked and fascinated by Americans’ religious literalism.

One Gallup report issued last week found that 42 percent of Americans believe “God created humans in their present form 10,000 years ago.”

Even among people who said that they were “very familiar” with the theory of evolution, a third still believed that God created humans in their present form 10,000 years ago.

It’s not clear what the respondents meant by being “very familiar” — did they fully understand the science upon which evolution’s based, or was their understanding something short of that, as in, very familiar with it as being antithetical to creationist concepts?

Whatever the case, on this issue as well as many others in America, the truth is not the light.

That is in part because, compared with other developed countries, America stands out for the level and intensity of its religiosity. People are generally more likely to say that religion is an important part of their daily lives in relatively poor countries, but as Gallup pointed out in a 2010 report:
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“The United States is one of the rich countries that bucks the trend. About two-thirds of Americans — 65 percent — say religion is important in their daily lives. Among high-income countries, only Italians, Greeks, Singaporeans and residents of the oil-rich Persian Gulf states are more likely to say religion is important. Most high-income countries are further down the religiosity spectrum.”

And, in America, when people say that they are religious, they overwhelmingly mean Christian. In fact, nearly eight in 10 Americans identify as Christians.

It’s not only that Americans are more religious — Christian, in particular — but that for many, their beliefs in their religious text — the Bible, in particular — are literal.

As Gallup pointed out in a report issued last Wednesday, nearly a third of Americans continue to believe that the Bible “is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word.”

Furthermore, nearly half believe that it is “the inspired word of God but not everything in it should be taken literally.”

(I am curious which parts would get a pass from most of these respondents and which wouldn’t. Would the origins of the world fall into the literal camp? What about the rules — all or some — in books like Deuteronomy?)

About a fifth of Americans said they believe the Bible is “an ancient book of fables, legends, history, and moral precepts recorded by man.”

Now, I don’t seek to deny anyone the right to believe as he or she chooses. I have at points in my own life been quite religious, and my own children have complicated views about religion. As my oldest son once told me, “I’d hate to live in a world where a God couldn’t exist.”

That is his choice, as it is every individual’s choice, and I respect it.

What worries me is that some Americans seem to live in a world where facts can’t exist.

Facts such as the idea that the world is ancient, and that all living things evolved and some — like dinosaurs — became extinct. Facts like the proven warming of the world. Facts like the very real possibility that such warming could cause a catastrophic sea-level rise.

How does America remain a world leader in an increasingly technological, science-based world, when so many of our citizens — and even our leaders, including Republicans who might run for president — deny basic science?

Marco Rubio told GQ in 2012: “Whether the Earth was created in 7 days, or 7 actual eras, I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to answer that. It’s one of the great mysteries.”

During a debate in 2007, Mike Huckabee made clear that he believed that “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,” but didn’t know when it was done or how long it took.

Bobby Jindal has voiced his support of creationism being taught in public schools alongside intelligent design and “the best science” and allowing students to “make up their own minds.”

Americans, particularly political leaders, who choose religious piety must also create an intellectual framework in which things of faith that exist without proof can make space for truths for which there is proof.

Religious fundamentalism at the expense of basic scientific facts threatens to obscure America’s beacon of light with a bank of fog.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on June 9, 2014,

on page A19 of the New York edition with the headline:

Religious Constriction.

    Religious Constriction, NYT, 8.6.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/09/opinion/blow-religious-constriction.html

A Big Win for the Prayer Lobby

MAY 7, 2014
By KATHERINE STEWART
The New York Times
The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor

IF you listened to Justice Anthony M. Kennedy of the Supreme Court and his fellow conservatives on the bench this week, you might think the court’s 5-4 decision in the case of Town of Greece v. Galloway was no big deal. So what if a town in upstate New York typically opens its council meetings with prayers that acknowledge “the saving sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross”?

If you listened to the people who shepherded the case as it ascended the judicial hierarchy, however, the decision represents one of their biggest victories to date. It “wasn’t just an answer on prayer — it was an answer to prayer!” read a statement by the Family Research Council. The council is one of a host of organizations guided by the religious liberty advocacy group the Alliance Defending Freedom that backed the defendants with legal resources.

To understand why the case’s backers were so cock-a-hoop, you must first know something about the long game being played by the religious right. The goal is to get back to a “soft” establishment of religion in America — that is, a system in which formal guarantees of religious freedom and the official separation of church and state remain in place, but one religion is informally or implicitly acknowledged as the “approved” religion of the majority and a legitimate basis for public policy.

This was more or less the situation in the United States during the first half of the 19th century. In 1811, the New York Supreme Court upheld a conviction for blasphemy (the archetypal union of church and state) on the grounds that the state had an interest in punishing offenses to the religious sensibilities of the Protestant majority. Back then, nativist Protestants imposed their version of the Bible in public schools, while Catholics rioted in protest and placed their children in parochial schools.

Through the 19th and 20th centuries, however, the judicial thinking on church-state issues evolved, and the “soft” establishment became much harder to justify. The United States Supreme Court introduced the “Lemon test,” for example. Named for a 1971 case the court heard, this required that legislation concerning religion should not result in “excessive government entanglement” with religious affairs. The Supreme Court also increasingly took the view that government should abstain from any activity wherein a reasonable observer might perceive it to be endorsing religion.

Today, groups like the A.D.F. — which also represents Conestoga Wood Specialties Corporation in its challenge to the contraception mandate in the Affordable Care Act — are deeply unhappy with the reigning jurisprudence on church-state separation. It would seem that they wish to undermine the Lemon test, which they consider “burdensome,” as a staging post to restoring a soft establishment of Christianity in the United States. This is where Greece v. Galloway comes in.

The first order of business is to remove objections by swiping aside the idea that soft forms of establishment exist at all. Here, the Greece decision delivers, substantially.

“Offense,” Justice Kennedy wrote in his majority opinion, “does not equate to coercion.” Justice Clarence Thomas, in the part of his concurring opinion joined by Justice Antonin Scalia, drew out the key implication: “To the extent coercion is relevant to the Establishment Clause analysis, it is actual legal coercion that counts — not the ‘subtle coercive pressures’ allegedly felt by respondents in this case.” In other words, religious observance counts as “establishment” only if you are compelled to kneel by law.

A second element of the plan for undermining concerns based on the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause is to reinterpret public acts as personal expressions of speech by private individuals. Thus, when the minister appointed by the municipal government of Greece bids “all rise,” the Supreme Court majority tells us, this is not an establishment of religion because the words are not uttered by public officials. And when the town leaders respond with a sign of the cross, that isn’t establishment either, because, just then, public officials are acting as private individuals.

Another prong in the assault on the Establishment Clause is to use neutrality among religious denominations as a wedge for inserting the (presumed) majority religion into state business. In theory, “neutrality” means giving every sect an equal shot at officiating prayer at Greece’s council meetings. In practice, the town government has unquestionably identified itself with what it takes to be the majority religion in the area.

In his concurring opinion, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. dismissed concerns about the blatantly sectarian tilt of the town’s proceedings, which were led exclusively by Christian ministers for nearly a decade, by pointing out that Jews make up a mere 3 percent of the local population and alleging that other non-Christian groups are no larger.

A final, crucial part of the strategy is to substitute history — or, more accurately, a particular mythologized version of history — for legal analysis. Here the A.D.F. and its allies have hit pay dirt in the Greece decision.

Justice Kennedy invoked an earlier, highly problematic decision in the case of Marsh v. Chambers to suggest that the usual legal tests were “unnecessary” because the “history supported the conclusion” that the prayers were compatible with the Establishment Clause. It is, however, preposterous to say that something is constitutional simply because it’s been done in the past.

The “history” here sustains a myth that early America had a single religion of “Christianity,” when, in fact, it was bitterly divided into antagonistic sects from the start. And many of America’s founders — James Madison, for example — were firmly opposed to such precedents of church-state entanglement as congressional chaplains.

The assault by the religious right on the Establishment Clause has been unfolding for two decades, in a number of landmark cases. Under cover of pursuing “religious freedom,” it has already succeeded in inserting fundamentalist religion into parts of America’s public education system. With Greece v. Galloway, it has now expanded the reach of this novel and destructive interpretation of the Establishment Clause. It is part of a project to “restore” a version of America that never was, and never can be.

Katherine Stewart is the author of “The Good News Club:

The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children.”

A version of this op-ed appears in print on May 8, 2014,

on page A27 of the New York edition with the headline:

A Big Win for the Prayer Lobby.

    A Big Win for the Prayer Lobby, NYT, 7.5.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/08/opinion/a-big-win-for-the-prayer-lobby.html

A Defeat for Religious Neutrality

MAY 5, 2014
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
The Opinion Pages | Editorial

The American values of pluralism and inclusion are central to the First Amendment, which forbids government from favoring or aligning itself with any particular religion or believers over nonbelievers.

In a lamentable ruling on Monday, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority brushed past those core values to allow the town of Greece, in upstate New York, to begin its town hall meetings with a sectarian prayer nearly always from a Christian “chaplain of the month.”

Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority, relied on the Supreme Court’s decision in Marsh v. Chambers, a 1983 case in which the court upheld the Nebraska Legislature’s practice of opening its sessions with a chaplain’s prayer, saying that such invocations were “deeply embedded in the history and tradition of this country.”

Yet, as Justice Elena Kagan emphasized in a persuasive dissent, determining whether a particular prayer program violates the First Amendment is a fact-specific exercise, and there are important distinctions between the practice in the Nebraska case and the practice in the New York town. Justice Kagan said a town-hall meeting “need not become a religion-free zone,” and that “legislative prayer has a distinctive constitutional warrant by virtue of tradition,” dating back to the first session of Congress. But she said the practice in the town of Greece does not fit that tradition, for starters, because, unlike the Nebraska case, which involved an audience of elected legislators, the town hall meetings involved ordinary citizens, some there to petition their local government for permits, zoning variances and other individualized matters.

It is a situation that requires “special care,” as Justice Kagan put it, to make sure the prayers that the citizens hear “seek to include, rather than serve to divide” and reinforce that citizens of all faiths are equal participants in government. The town board ignored that need by never reaching out and arranging for non-Christians to offer the invocation, except in a few instances around the time the lawsuit was filed. Nearly all the prayers at the Greece town meetings contained purely Christian references (as in, “We acknowledge the saving sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross”). By contrast, the chaplain in the Nebraska case, a Presbyterian minister, refrained from making references to Jesus Christ after a legislator complained.

Justice Kennedy cited the town board’s purported policy of being open to having prayers delivered by ministers or laymen of other faiths, but that policy was never publicized. Nor was it made clear at meetings that town residents need not participate in the prayer. It was disappointing that the Justice Department urged the justices to uphold the prayer practice in the town hall meetings, which skirted the constitutional principle of religious neutrality and caused some residents to feel like outsiders.

A version of this editorial appears in print on May 6, 2014,

on page A24 of the New York edition with the headline:

A Defeat for Religious Neutrality.

    A Defeat for Religious Neutrality, NYT, 5.5.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/06/opinion/a-defeat-for-religious-neutrality.html

Town Meetings Can Have Prayer,

Justices Decide

MAY 5, 2014
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK

WASHINGTON — In a major decision on the role of religion in government, the Supreme Court on Monday ruled that the Constitution allows town boards to start their sessions with sectarian prayers. The ruling, by a 5-to-4 vote, divided the court’s more conservative members from its liberal ones, and their combative opinions reflected very different views of the role of faith in public life, in contemporary society and in the founding of the Republic.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority, said that a town in upstate New York had not violated the Constitution by starting its public meetings with a prayer from a “chaplain of the month” who was almost always Christian and who sometimes used distinctly sectarian language. The prayers were ceremonial, Justice Kennedy wrote, and served to signal the solemnity of the occasion.

The ruling cleared the way for sectarian prayers before meetings of local governments around the nation with only the lightest judicial supervision.

The decision built on one from 1983 that allowed prayers at the start of legislative sessions. The two sides on Monday disagreed about whether town board meetings, which include not only lawmakers and spectators but also citizens seeking to do business with the government, are meaningfully different from legislative sessions.

Justice Kennedy said the prayers in both settings were “meant to lend gravity to the occasion and reflect values long part of the nation’s heritage.”

Justice Elena Kagan said in dissent that the town’s practices could not be reconciled “with the First Amendment’s promise that every citizen, irrespective of her religion, owns an equal share in her government.”

She said the important difference between the 1983 case and the new one was that “town meetings involve participation by ordinary citizens.”

She did not propose banning prayer, Justice Kagan said, but only requiring officials to take steps to ensure “that opening prayers are inclusive of different faiths, rather than always identified with a single religion.”

Town officials in Greece, N.Y., near Rochester, said members of all faiths, and atheists, were welcome to give the opening prayer. In practice, however, almost all of the chaplains were Christian. Some prayers were explicitly sectarian, with references, for instance, to “the saving sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross.”

Two town residents sued, saying the prayers ran afoul of the First Amendment’s prohibition of government establishment of religion. They said the prayers offended them and, in Justice Kennedy’s words, “made them feel excluded and disrespected.”

But Justice Kennedy said the relevant constitutional question was not whether they were offended. “Adults often encounter speech they find disagreeable,” he wrote. “Legislative bodies do not engage in impermissible coercion merely by exposing constituents to prayer they would rather not hear and in which they need not participate.”

Justice Kennedy said traditions starting with the first Congress supported the constitutionality of ceremonial prayers at the start of legislative sessions. Both Houses of Congress, he said, have appointed and paid for official chaplains almost without interruption ever since. Legislative prayer, he said, is “a practice that was accepted by the framers and has withstood the critical scrutiny of time and political change.”

In a long footnote, Justice Kagan disputed that assertion, saying some of the most prominent members of the founding generation — George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison — took pains to keep sectarian language away from public life. “The demand for neutrality among religions is not a product of 21st century ‘political correctness,’ ” she wrote, “but of the 18th century view.”

But Justice Kennedy said legislative prayers may have sectarian content and need not “be addressed only to a generic God.” He added that it would be perilous for courts to decide when prayers crossed a constitutional line and became impermissibly sectarian.

“To hold that invocations must be nonsectarian,” he wrote, “would force the legislatures that sponsor prayers and the courts that are asked to decide these cases to act as supervisors and censors of religious speech, a rule that would involve government in religious matters to a far greater degree than is the case under the town’s current practice of neither editing or approving prayers in advance nor criticizing their content after the fact.”

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. joined all of Justice Kennedy’s opinion, and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas most of it.

Justice Kennedy did suggest that some prayers may be unacceptable if offered consistently, including ones that “denigrate nonbelievers or religious minorities, threaten damnation or preach conversion.” But without proof of “a pattern of prayers that over time denigrate, proselytize or betray an impermissible government purpose,” he wrote, “a challenge based solely on the content of a prayer will not likely establish a constitutional violation.”

Town officials had tried, he said, to recruit members of various faiths to offer prayers.

In dissent, Justice Kagan said they had not tried hard enough. “So month in and month out for over a decade,” she wrote, “prayers steeped in only one faith, addressed toward members of the public, commenced meetings to discuss local affairs and distribute government benefits.”

In 1983, in Marsh v. Chambers, the Supreme Court upheld the Nebraska Legislature’s practice of opening its legislative sessions with an invocation from a paid Presbyterian minister, saying that such ceremonies were “deeply embedded in the history and tradition of this country.”

Justice Kagan, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, said the case from Greece, N.Y., was different. The prayers at the town board meetings were often explicitly sectarian, they said, and residents were forced to listen to them in order to participate in government.

“No one can fairly read the prayers from Greece’s town meetings as anything other than explicitly Christian — constantly and exclusively so,” Justice Kagan wrote in her dissent in the case, Town of Greece v. Galloway, No. 12-696.

Moreover, she said, the clergy “put some residents to the unenviable choice of either pretending to pray like the majority or declining to join its communal activity, at the very moment of petitioning their elected leaders.”

In a concurrence with the majority opinion, Justice Alito called the dissent’s qualms “really quite niggling.”

That comment, Justice Kagan responded, “says all there is to say about the difference between our respective views.”

A version of this article appears in print on May 6, 2014,

on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:

Town Meetings Can Have Prayer, Justices Decide.

    Town Meetings Can Have Prayer, Justices Decide, NYT, 5.5.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/06/nyregion/
    supreme-court-allows-prayers-at-town-meetings.html

New York Drops Unit

That Spied on Muslims

APRIL 15, 2014
The New York Times
By MATT APUZZO
and JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN

The New York Police Department has abandoned a secretive program that dispatched plainclothes detectives into Muslim neighborhoods to eavesdrop on conversations and built detailed files on where people ate, prayed and shopped, the department said.

The decision by the nation’s largest police force to shutter the controversial surveillance program represents the first sign that William J. Bratton, the department’s new commissioner, is backing away from some of the post-9/11 intelligence-gathering practices of his predecessor. The Police Department’s tactics, which are the subject of two federal lawsuits, drew criticism from civil rights groups and a senior official with the Federal Bureau of Investigation who said they harmed national security by sowing mistrust for law enforcement in Muslim communities.

To many Muslims, the squad, known as the Demographics Unit, was a sign that the police viewed their every action with suspicion. The police mapped communities inside and outside the city, logging where customers in traditional Islamic clothes ate meals and documenting their lunch-counter conversations.

“The Demographics Unit created psychological warfare in our community,” said Linda Sarsour, of the Arab American Association of New York. “Those documents, they showed where we live. That’s the cafe where I eat. That’s where I pray. That’s where I buy my groceries. They were able to see their entire lives on those maps. And it completely messed with the psyche of the community.”

Ms. Sarsour was one of several advocates who met last Wednesday with Mr. Bratton and some of his senior staff members at Police Headquarters. She and others in attendance said the department’s new intelligence chief, John Miller, told them that the police did not need to work covertly to find out where Muslims gather and indicated the department was shutting the unit down.

The Demographics Unit, which was renamed the Zone Assessment Unit in recent years, has been largely inactive since Mr. Bratton took over in January, the department’s chief spokesman, Stephen Davis, said. The unit’s detectives were recently reassigned, he said.

“Understanding certain local demographics can be a useful factor when assessing the threat information that comes into New York City virtually on a daily basis,” Mr. Davis said. “In the future, we will gather that information, if necessary, through direct contact between the police precincts and the representatives of the communities they serve.”

The department’s change in approach comes as the federal government reconsiders and re-evaluates some of its own post-9/11 policies. Although the police department’s surveillance program was far smaller in scope than, say, the bulk data collection by the National Security Agency, a similar recalibration seems to be unfolding.

The Demographics Unit was the brainchild of the Central Intelligence Agency officer Lawrence Sanchez, who helped establish it in 2003 while working at the Police Department and while he was still on the spy agency’s payroll.

The goal was to identify the mundane locations where a would-be terrorist could blend into society. Plainclothes detectives looked for “hot spots” of radicalization that might give the police an early warning about terrorist plots. The squad, which typically consisted of about a dozen members, focused on 28 “ancestries of interest.”

Detectives were told to chat up the employees at Muslim-owned businesses and “gauge sentiment” about America and foreign policy. Through maps and photographs, the police noted where Albanian men played chess in the afternoon, where Egyptians watched soccer and where South Asians played cricket.

After years of collecting information, however, the police acknowledged that it never generated a lead. Since The Associated Press published documents describing the program in 2011, Muslims and civil rights groups have called for its closing.

Mr. Bratton has said that he intends to try to heal rifts between the Police Department and minority communities that have felt alienated as a result of policies pursued during the Bloomberg administration. The meeting last week put Mr. Bratton in the room with some of his department’s harshest critics.

“This is the first time we’ve felt that comfort sitting with them,” said Ahmad Jaber, who resigned from the Police Department’s Muslim advisory board last year to protest the surveillance tactics. “It’s a new administration, and they are willing to sit with the community and listen to their concerns.”

The Demographics Unit was one aspect of a broad intelligence-gathering effort. In addition, informants infiltrated Muslim student groups on college campuses and collected the names, phone numbers and addresses of those who attended. Analysts trawled college websites and email groups to keep tabs on Muslim scholars and who attended their lectures.

The police also designated entire mosques as suspected “terrorism enterprises,” a label that the police claimed allowed them to collect the license plate numbers of every car in mosque parking lots, videotape worshipers coming and going, and record sermons using informants wearing hidden microphones.

As a candidate, Mayor Bill de Blasio said he was “deeply troubled” by the tactic of surveilling mosques. Despite investigations that stretched for years, the Police Department’s efforts never led to charges that a mosque or an Islamic organization was itself a terrorist enterprise.

The future of those programs remains unclear. The former police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, has said his efforts were lawful and helped protect the city from terrorist attacks. Last month, a federal judge in New Jersey dismissed a lawsuit over the department’s surveillance there, saying Muslims could not prove they were harmed by the tactics.

Two other federal lawsuits continue to challenge the department’s tactics. One legal claim has been brought under a civil rights case that dates back to the Police Department’s surveillance of student groups and protesters in the 1960s and 1970s. Martin Stolar, one of the lawyers who brought that claim, maintains that the post-9/11 surveillance programs violate the court order in that case. A judge has not yet ruled on that question.

Like Muslim community leaders, Mr. Stolar said he wanted to see exactly what the department had planned. Police officials have changed the name of the program before, he said.

“I want them to say that they’re getting rid of not just the unit, but the kind of policing that the unit did,” Mr. Stolar said. “Is it still going to be blanket surveillance of where Muslims hang out? Are they going to stop this massive surveillance?”

Based on Mr. Davis’s remarks, the Police Department appears to be moving its policies closer to those of the F.B.I. Both agencies are allowed to use census data, public information and government data to create detailed maps of ethnic communities.

The F.B.I. is prohibited, however, from eavesdropping on and documenting innocuous conversations that would be protected by the First Amendment. F.B.I. lawyers in New York determined years ago that agents could not receive documents from the Demographics Unit without violating federal rules.

Until Mr. Stolar’s case is decided, the police may not destroy any of the Demographic Unit files, he said. Beyond that decision, the future of the documents is unclear.

Mr. de Blasio said in a statement Tuesday that the closing of the unit was “a critical step forward in easing tensions between the police and the communities they serve, so that our cops and our citizens can help one another go after the real bad guys.”

A version of this article appears in print on April 16, 2014,

on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:

New York Drops Unit That Spied Among Muslims.

    New York Drops Unit That Spied on Muslims, NYT, 15.4.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/16/nyregion/
    police-unit-that-spied-on-muslims-is-disbanded.html

Justices Seem Open

to Religious Claims by Companies

MARCH 25, 2014
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK

WASHINGTON — In a long and lively argument that touched on medical science and moral philosophy, the Supreme Court on Tuesday seemed ready to accept that at least some for-profit corporations may advance claims based on religious freedom.

Such a ruling would echo the court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United, which recognized free speech rights for corporations. But it would be only a first step in the court’s analysis of the lawfulness of a part of the Affordable Care Act that requires many employers to provide insurance coverage for contraception.

The justices seemed closely divided along ideological lines on other parts of the case. But Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who probably holds the crucial vote, seemed frustrated with some of the Obama administration’s positions.

The questioning was sometimes technical but often unusually blunt and direct.

Justice Kennedy asked Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr., for instance, whether for-profit corporations “could be forced in principle to pay for abortions” and be powerless to object on religious grounds.

Mr. Verrilli said that was right, though he added that there was no such law.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. jumped in. “Flesh it out a little more,” he said. “There is no law on the books that does what?”

Squirming, Mr. Verrilli said, “That requires for-profit corporations to provide abortions.”

Chief Justice Roberts looked puzzled. “I thought that’s what we had before us,” he said.

The two companies that challenged the law — Hobby Lobby, a chain of crafts stores, and Conestoga Wood Specialties, which makes furniture — say that some drugs and intrauterine devices are tantamount to abortion. Those claims are not generally accepted by scientists.

Mr. Verrilli said he did not question the sincerity of the companies’ beliefs. “With all due respect,” he added, “we’ve got about two million women who rely on the I.U.D. as a method of birth control in this country. I don’t think they think they are engaged in abortion in doing that.”

By the end of the argument, there seemed to be a tentative consensus that the two companies, both controlled by religious families, could be allowed to claim rights under the relevant law, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, without opening the floodgates to objections from major public corporations.

“You picked great plaintiffs,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor told Paul D. Clement, a lawyer for the companies.

Chief Justice Roberts said the court could limit its decision to privately held corporations. “Whether it applies in the other situations is a question that we’ll have to await another case when a large publicly traded corporation comes in and says, ‘We have religious principles,’ ” he said, adding that this was “the sort of situation I don’t think is going to happen.”

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. asked about news reports that “Denmark recently prohibited kosher and halal slaughter methods because they believe that they are inhumane.”

“Now suppose,” he said, “Congress enacted something like that here. What would a corporation that is a kosher or halal slaughterhouse do? They would have no recourse whatsoever. They couldn’t even get a day in court.”

Justice Elena Kagan suggested that the two companies before the court could press their claims but should not win.

The justices signaled the importance of the case by scheduling 90 minutes for the argument rather than the usual hour. The first round of questions to Mr. Clement also seemed meant to establish how much was at stake.

Justice Kagan said the companies’ interpretation of the 1993 law could transform the legal system.

“Your understanding of this law, your interpretation of it, would essentially subject the entire U.S. Code to the highest test in constitutional law,” she said. It would allow, she continued, employers to object on religious grounds to laws banning sexual discrimination and child labor and to laws requiring a minimum wage and family leave.

Justice Sotomayor asked similar questions about the implications of a ruling in favor of the companies for blood transfusions, vaccines and “products made of pork.”

Mr. Clement responded that there was no reason to fear “a parade of horribles,” and that religious objections could be handled case by case.

Justice Kagan said that would be unwieldy. “Everything would be piecemeal, and nothing would be uniform,” she said.

Much of the argument concerned whether the coverage requirement imposed a serious burden on the companies, a threshold question under the 1993 law. The companies remained free, some justices said, not to offer health insurance at all, pay a tax and emerge financially better off. On that point, the court’s liberal wing seemed to have Justice Kennedy’s support.

“How is the employer hurt?” he asked.

But Chief Justice Roberts said that approach ignored another problem. “I thought that part of the religious commitment of the owners was to provide health care for its employees,” he said.

Justice Kennedy also seemed to side with his more liberal colleagues when they said religious objections that imposed burdens on others should not be allowed. Here, Justice Kennedy expressed solicitude for “the rights of the employees.”

“The employee may not agree with the religious beliefs of the employer,” he said. “Does the religious beliefs just trump? Is that the way it works?”

But Justice Kennedy also had significant and possibly crucial reservations about the Obama administration’s carrying out of the contraceptive coverage requirement. It was hard to see, he suggested, how the requirement could simultaneously be a compelling government interest and yet be subject to a web of exemptions and accommodations for religious groups and others.

A decision in the two consolidated cases — Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, No. 13-354, and Conestoga Wood Specialties v. Sebelius, No. 13-356 — is expected by the end of June, two years after a closely divided court upheld another provision of the Affordable Care Act, one requiring most Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a penalty.

At the time, the decision created tension and bitterness on the court. But the references to it on Tuesday were lighthearted.

When Mr. Clement said his clients would face annual penalties if they failed to provide health insurance, Justice Sotomayor corrected him, relying on a distinction that played a role in Chief Justice Roberts’s 2012 opinion upholding the law.

“It’s not called a penalty,” she said. “It’s called a tax.”

Chief Justice Roberts agreed, to laughter in the courtroom. “She’s right about that,” he said.

Later, Justice Kennedy, who dissented in the 2012 case, playfully asked Mr. Verrilli whether “the constitutionality of the whole act has to be examined before we accept your view.”

Mr. Verrilli’s response was also greeted with laughter. “I think it has been examined, Your Honor, is my recollection,” he said.

A version of this article appears in print on March 26, 2014,

on page A13 of the New York edition with the headline:

Justices Seem Open to Religious Claims by Companies.

    Justices Seem Open to Religious Claims by Companies,
    NYT, 25.3.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/26/us/politics/
    conraceptive-coverage-challenge-supreme-court.html

The Catholic Roots of Obama’s Activism

MARCH 22, 2014
The New York Times
By JASON HOROWITZ

CHICAGO — In a meeting room under Holy Name Cathedral, a rapt group of black Roman Catholics listened as Barack Obama, a 25-year-old community organizer, trained them to lobby their fellow delegates to a national congress in Washington on issues like empowering lay leaders and attracting more believers.

“He so quickly got us,” said Andrew Lyke, a participant in the meeting who is now the director of the Chicago Archdiocese’s Office for Black Catholics. The group succeeded in inserting its priorities into the congress’s plan for churches, Mr. Lyke said, and “Barack Obama was key in helping us do that.”

By the time of that session in the spring of 1987, Mr. Obama — himself not Catholic — was already well known in Chicago’s black Catholic circles. He had arrived two years earlier to fill an organizing position paid for by a church grant, and had spent his first months here surrounded by Catholic pastors and congregations. In this often overlooked period of the president’s life, he had a desk in a South Side parish and became steeped in the social justice wing of the church, which played a powerful role in his political formation.

This Thursday, Mr. Obama will meet with Pope Francis at the Vatican after a three-decade divergence with the church. By the late 1980s, the Catholic hierarchy had taken a conservative turn that de-emphasized social engagement and elevated the culture wars that would eventually cast Mr. Obama as an abortion-supporting enemy. Mr. Obama, who went on to find his own faith with the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.’s Trinity United Church of Christ, drifted from his youthful, church-backed activism to become a pragmatic politician and the president with a terrorist “kill list.” The meeting this week is a potential point of confluence.

A White House accustomed to archbishop antagonists hopes the president will find a strategic ally and kindred spirit in a pope who preaches a gospel of social justice and inclusion. Mr. Obama’s old friends in the priesthood pray that Francis will discover a president freed from concerns about re-election and willing to rededicate himself to the vulnerable.

But the Vatican — aware that Mr. Obama has far more to gain from the encounter than the pope does, and wary of being used for American political consumption — warns that this will hardly be like the 1982 meeting at which President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II agreed to fight Communism in Eastern Europe.

“We’re not in the old days of the great alliance,” said a senior Vatican official who was granted anonymity to speak frankly about the mind-set inside the Holy See. While Mr. Obama’s early work with the church is “not on the radar screen,” the official said, his recent arguments with American bishops over issues of religious freedom are: Catholic leaders have objected to a provision in the administration’s health care law that requires employers to cover contraception costs, and have sharply questioned the morality of the administration’s use of drones to fight terrorism.

As in many reunions, expectations, and the possibility for disappointment, run high.
 

A Fast Learner

In 1967, as the modernizing changes of the Second Vatican Council began to transform the Catholic world, Ann Dunham, Mr. Obama’s mother, took her chubby 6-year-old son occasionally to Mass and enrolled him in a new Catholic elementary school in Jakarta, Indonesia, called Santo Fransiskus Asisi. At school, the future president began and ended his days with prayer. At home, his mother read him the Bible with an anthropologist’s eye.

Pious he was not. “When it came time to pray, I would pretend to close my eyes, then peek around the room,” Mr. Obama wrote in his memoir “Dreams From My Father.” “Nothing happened. No angels descended. Just a parched old nun and 30 brown children, muttering words.”

In 1969, Mr. Obama transferred to a more exclusive, state-run school with a mosque, but a development in the United States would have a greater impact on his future career. American Catholic bishops responded to the call of the Second Vatican Council to focus on the poor by creating what is now known as the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, an antipoverty and social justice program that became one of the country’s most influential supporters of grass-roots groups.

By the early 1980s, when Mr. Obama was an undergraduate at Columbia University, the campaign was financing a project to help neighborhoods after the collapse of the steel mills near Chicago. The program’s leaders, eager to expand beyond Catholic parishes to the black Protestant churches where more of the affected community worshiped, sought an African-American for the task. In 1985, they found one in Mr. Obama, a fledgling community organizer in New York who answered a want ad for a job with the Developing Communities Project. The faith-based program aimed to unify South Side residents against unsafe streets, poor living conditions and political neglect. Mr. Obama’s salary was less than $10,000 a year.

The future president arrived in Chicago with little knowledge of Catholicism other than the Graham Greene novels and “Confessions” of St. Augustine he had read during a period of spiritual exploration at Columbia. But he fit seamlessly into a 1980s Catholic cityscape forged by the spirit of Vatican II, the influence of liberation theology and the progressivism of Cardinal Joseph L. Bernardin, the archbishop of Chicago, who called for a “consistent ethic of life” that wove life and social justice into a “seamless garment.”

On one of his first days on the job, Mr. Obama heard Cardinal Bernardin speak at an economic development meeting. He felt like a Catholic novice there, he wrote in his memoir, and later decided “not to ask what a catechism was.” But he was a quick study.

“He had to do a power analysis of each Catholic church,” said one of his mentors at the time, Gregory Galluzzo, a former Jesuit priest and disciple of the organizer Saul Alinsky. Mr. Obama, Mr. Galluzzo said, soon understood the chain of command and who had influence in individual parishes.

Mr. Obama had a small office with two cloudy glass-block windows on the ground floor of Holy Rosary, a handsome red brick parish on the South Side, where he would pop down the hall to the office of the Rev. William Stenzel, raise a phantom cigarette to his lips and ask, “Want to go out for lunch?” Besides sneaking smoke breaks with the priest on the roof, Mr. Obama listened to him during Mass. “He was on an exposure curve to organized religion,” Father Stenzel said.

The future president’s education included evangelizing. Mr. Obama often plotted strategy with the recent Catholic convert who had hired him, Gerald Kellman, about how to bring people into the program and closer to the church. The effort to fill the pews “was what Bernardin really bought into,” Mr. Kellman said.

To expand congregations as well as the reach of his organizing program, Mr. Obama went to Holy Ghost Catholic Church in South Holland, Ill., to ask Wilton D. Gregory, an African-American bishop and a rising star in the hierarchy, for a grant for operating costs. Archbishop Gregory, who now leads the Archdiocese of Atlanta, recalled Mr. Obama as a persuasive man who “wanted to engage the people of the neighborhood.” He recommended that Cardinal Bernardin release the funds.

As the months went on, Mr. Obama became a familiar face in South Side black parishes. At Holy Angels Church, considered a center of black Catholic life, he talked to the pastor and the pastor’s adopted son about finding families willing to adopt troubled children. At Our Lady of the Gardens, he attended peace and black history Masses and conferred with the Rev. Dominic Carmon on programs to battle unemployment and violence. At the neo-Gothic St. Sabina, he struck up a friendship with the Rev. Michael L. Pfleger, the firebrand white pastor of one of the city’s largest black parishes. The two would huddle in a back room and commiserate about the liquor stores and payday loan businesses in the neighborhood.

But even as Mr. Obama effectively proselytized for the church and its role in improving the community, and even as he opened meetings in the backs of churches with the Lord’s Prayer and showed a comfort with faith that put the people he hoped to organize at ease, Catholic doctrine did not tempt him. He was not baptized Catholic, priests said. But it was amid the trappings of Catholicism, according to his fellow organizers, that the future president began to express a spiritual thirst.

As Mr. Obama helped expand the program from Catholic parishes to megachurches and Protestant congregations, he felt that need slaked by the prevailing black liberation theology, inspired by the civil rights movement and preached by African-American ministers like Mr. Wright of Trinity. The notion that Jesus delivered salvation to communities that expressed faith through good deeds suited Mr. Obama’s instincts — and perhaps his interests.

For an ambitious black politician, Mr. Galluzzo said, “it was not politically advantageous to be in a Catholic church.”

Mr. Obama nevertheless maintained his Catholic connections, so much so that when he turned up in the basement of the Holy Name complex in 1987, “there was a need to clarify” that he was not a member of the flock, said the Rev. David Jones, who was at the meeting. And some members still tried to draw him in, in more ways than one.

“He was a man of integrity, very much to my disappointment,” joked Cynthia Norris, then the director of the Chicago Archdiocese’s black Catholics office, who found the young Mr. Obama appealing. The future president, who was dating another woman, did turn to Ms. Norris for a Harvard Law School recommendation, and kept in touch during a trip to Europe in 1988.

“I wander around Paris, the most beautiful, alluring, maddening city I’ve ever seen; one is tempted to chuck the whole organizing/political business and be a painter” on the banks of the Seine, Mr. Obama scribbled to Ms. Norris, along with “Love, Barack,” on one side of a postcard. On the other was a picture of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame.

 

A Partnership Falters

Mr. Obama entered Harvard in 1988, the same year he was baptized at Trinity, the power church of Chicago’s black professional class. Trinity served Mr. Obama well through his dizzying political ascent, which coincided with a period in which black Catholic churches in Chicago closed and the hierarchy shifted away from the progressive social engagement that had characterized Mr. Obama’s early years here.

In 1997, the year Mr. Obama was sworn in as an Illinois state senator, Cardinal Francis George succeeded Cardinal Bernardin as archbishop of Chicago. One of the church’s leading conservative intellectuals, called “Francis the Corrector” by local liberal priests, Cardinal George was emblematic of the bishops installed by John Paul II and his successor, Benedict XVI. Some of them looked with skepticism at the social justice wing that had financed Mr. Obama’s organizing efforts, and later sought to block his election as president by suggesting that Catholics could not in good conscience vote for a candidate who supported abortion rights.

Mr. Obama still won the Catholic vote in 2008. In his campaign, he had held out the goal of finding common ground between supporters and opponents of abortion rights, chiefly by reducing unintended pregnancies and increasing adoptions. Cardinal George quickly dashed those hopes. “The common good can never be adequately incarnated in any society when those waiting to be born can be legally killed at choice,” he said in November 2008 in his opening address as president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Mr. Obama, seeking to avoid confrontation with the church, invited Cardinal George to the White House in March 2009; said at a news conference that April that abortion rights were “not my highest legislative priority”; and told graduates at the University of Notre Dame in May, after some initial boos from the crowd, that Cardinal Bernardin had touched “my heart and mind.” He recalled his years in Chicago’s Catholic parishes and said that after branching out to work with other Christian denominations, “I found myself drawn not just to the work with the church; I was drawn to be in the church.”

Two months later, speaking to reporters from Catholic publications, he said again that the Campaign for Human Development and Cardinal Bernardin had inspired him. “I think that there have been times over the last decade or two where that more holistic tradition feels like it’s gotten buried under the abortion debate,” he said.

Church leaders were unimpressed. A week after his session with Catholic reporters, Mr. Obama met with Benedict, who pointedly offered him a Vatican document on bioethics that condemned abortion and stem cell research. The relationship deteriorated further during Mr. Obama’s push for health care reform, specifically the provision on contraception, which will be argued before the Supreme Court on Tuesday.

Still, Mr. Obama had not lost all his friends in the church. As the president’s relations with Catholic leaders reached their nadir, Father Stenzel, Mr. Obama’s old smoke-break friend, visited the White House. As they walked into the Oval Office, Mr. Obama joked to his staff that the priest had given him his first office in Chicago. Father Stenzel reminded him that his old surroundings were far humbler: “The office I gave you had two rows of glass-block windows!”

 

Pope Francis’ Impression

Mr. Obama’s parish days seemed far behind him when he won re-election in 2012 with a slimmer margin of Catholic votes. Not only did Catholic conservatives view him as a secularist forcing them to pay for contraceptives, but some of his old allies in the church’s left wing criticized his use of drones and lack of emphasis on the poor.

But the election of Pope Francis last March seemed to breathe new life into the Catholic Church and, potentially, into the relationship between Mr. Obama and the institution that gave him his start. While far from an ideological progressive, Francis does sometimes appear cloaked in Cardinal Bernardin’s “seamless garment.” His de-emphasis of issues like abortion and same-sex marriage and his championing of the poor and vulnerable — articulated in his mission statement, “The Joy of the Gospel” — have impressed a second-term president who argues that income inequality undermines human dignity.

“Whether you call that the ‘seamless garment’ or ‘the joy of the Gospel’ or what, I’ve said to the president I consider that a pretty Catholic way of looking at the world,” said Denis McDonough, the White House chief of staff, who is Roman Catholic. Mr. McDonough added that the community-organizer-turned-president had expressed admiration to him about “how important it is for the Holy Father to be so in the community.”

Last month, Catholic activists made their case for social justice on Capitol Hill. Afterward, relaxing over beers and a buffet in the Russell Senate Office Building, they discussed whether Cardinal George, who is retiring as archbishop of Chicago, would be replaced by Archbishop Gregory, who helped secure Mr. Obama’s church grant application in the 1980s. Among them was Mr. Lyke, the man who had received coaching from Mr. Obama years earlier in the basement of Holy Name Cathedral. He characterized Francis and Mr. Obama as a match made in heaven.

Mr. Lyke’s view is not universal. Vatican officials have made clear Mr. Obama will not get special treatment, and leaders of the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, also gathered in the Russell Building, saw the coming papal audience as a chance for Mr. Obama to return to the church’s social justice values, not the other way around.

Dylan Corbett, one of the Campaign for Human Development leaders, said the president was “welcome to the conversation” that the pope was driving about income inequality and poverty. He added with a grin, “We’re happy to have him back, actually.”

A version of this article appears in print on March 23, 2014,

on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:

The Catholic Roots of Obama’s Activism.

    The Catholic Roots of Obama’s Activism, NYT, 22.3.2014,  
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/23/us/
    the-catholic-roots-of-obamas-activism.html

What It Means to Be Catholic Now

MARCH 9, 2014
The New York Times
The Opinion Pages|Op-Ed Contributor
By PETER MANSEAU

ANNAPOLIS, Md. — ONE year into his astonishingly popular papacy, Pope Francis has become the perfect divining rod for uncovering assumptions about the future of the Catholic Church.

After an interview last week, during which he responded to a question about civil unions with a discussion of how “secular states” used them “to regulate different situations of cohabitation,” some mainstream media outlets reported that he had signaled a new openness to same-sex unions. More cautious analysts countered that he had done nothing of the kind.

Wishful thinking is rampant where Francis is concerned, perhaps especially among those born into the faith who have grown distant from it. While a recent Pew poll suggests that church attendance in America has not risen with the pope’s steady stream of positive press, the image he projects of a kinder, gentler Catholicism has inspired many of the lapsed, the recovering, the former and the fallen to reconsider the possibilities of being Catholic without qualification.

Yet even as the pope appears to be opening a big tent, others in the church hierarchy ensure that it will not expand too far. Last July, in response to a question about gay priests, Francis famously uttered one of the lines that set the tolerant tone of his pastoral style, “Who am I to judge?” That same month, the Archdiocese of Detroit published a warning against “nearly a dozen churches” in its jurisdiction that “use the name Catholic, but aren’t.”

The churches mentioned ran the gamut from those that support women’s ordination to those that offer Mass only in Latin and reject all ecclesiastical reforms. The one thing they had in common was their use of a single volatile word: Catholic.

“The only reason they’re calling themselves Catholic,” a church official said at the time, “is to confuse people.”

The most confusing of these may have been a church that once was Catholic, then was not, but still claimed to be. Closed by the archdiocese several years before, the century-old St. Anthony’s was purchased by a group that calls itself the Ecumenical Catholic Church of Christ. Most Sundays, its pews hold a few dozen men and women, most of whom were raised in the Roman church but disagreed so vehemently with its views that they left to join this independent community, which considers itself an “authentic Catholic congregation.”

Church leaders aren’t the only ones policing such expansive uses of the term. Not long after St. Anthony’s reopening, one online commenter wrote: “You do not represent the Catholic Church established by Jesus Christ through His Apostles over 2000 years ago. You defy Church teaching, you are as Protestant as any other splinter group.” Apparently that wasn’t insult enough. The comment continued: “You may be playing house in what used to be a CATHOLIC Church, but you are by no means Catholic.”

The anecdotal surge in the church’s appeal known as the “Pope Francis effect” may be changing attitudes toward the word “Catholic,” but it could also highlight a truth as old as the church itself: Despite its primary definition — universal — there is no universal agreement on what it means.

Who is a Catholic? Is it a matter of baptism? Belief? Loyalty? Psychology? For some, the answer depends on tests of political purity. For others, who may no longer receive the sacraments but continue to identify with the faith, “once a Catholic, always Catholic” is not just a principle of canon law (semel catholicus, semper catholicus), but the diagnosis of a chronic condition.

A similar question often roils Jewish communities, in which the religious laws of Judaism offer a definition based on matrilineal descent and ritual conversion, while various strains of observance vary dramatically in their interpretations of these laws. And it is not just a question of religion but of ethnic, cultural and national identity.

The Catholic version of this conundrum is no less fraught. To begin with, there are dozens of ethnically and nationally affiliated Catholic churches, all of which make an equal claim on the title, though many have moved in and out of schism with Rome. This landscape is further complicated by proliferating independent churches that make elaborate claims to the lineage of spiritual authority known as apostolic succession, and ultra-devout lay societies that worry over orthodoxy like a freelance Inquisition.

While a liberal-leaning congregation, the Reformed Catholic Church, proclaims defensively “we are Catholic!” as the first three words of its mission statement, a conservative association known as Our Lady’s Warriors issues a “solemn warning!” about organizations “who claim to be Catholic but dissent from the Truth.”

Disputes over ownership of “Catholic” do not break cleanly along expected lines, however. Many of the congregations associated with the Old Catholic Church, which separated from Rome over the issue of papal infallibility in the 19th century, are home to newer, reform-friendly interpretations of Catholicism. Some “traditionalist” Catholics, meanwhile, take the seemingly nontraditional stance that neither the church nor its popes have been truly Catholic since the reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. “Even a pope,” another of Detroit’s allegedly illicit churches explains, “may himself become a heretic.”

Many Roman Catholics do not realize that these other Catholics exist, or that affiliation with Rome is often a matter of negotiation. Ancient grudges that make current schisms look like lovers’ spats are now part of the structure of the church, in which the Western and Eastern Rites maintain distinct traditions as remnants of bygone quarrels. The centuries-long spans over which previous rifts have been healed suggests that the fate of today’s breakaway churches will not be resolved anytime soon.

In the meantime, all these groups will continue to claim the same contested word as their own. With hundreds of independent Catholic churches already operating in the United States and more on the way, it will most likely become increasingly difficult to know exactly what the word is meant to signify.

Who is a Catholic? If the late priest and sociologist Andrew M. Greeley was correct in his assessment that “Catholics remain Catholic” because “they are loyal to the poetry of Catholicism,” the answer may be more a matter of language than belief.

The hold the church’s symbolism continues to have on many, practicing and lapsed, Catholic and not, is also the key to understanding both the opportunity and the risk Rome faces in the age of Francis: The poetry of faith remains open to interpretation. Though he surely did not intend it this way, “Who am I to judge?” would be a fitting motto for a papacy that saw a thousand Catholicisms bloom.

Peter Manseau is the author of the forthcoming book

“One Nation Under Gods: A New American History.”

A version of this op-ed appears in print on March 10, 2014,

on page A21 of the New York edition with the headline:

What It Means to Be Catholic.

    What It Means to Be Catholic Now, NYT, 9.3.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/10/opinion/what-it-means-to-be-catholic-now.html

Gay Marriages

Confront Catholic School Rules

JAN. 22, 2014
The New York Times
By MICHAEL PAULSON

SAMMAMISH, Wash. — Eastside Catholic prides itself on teaching acceptance. At the end of Crusader Way, by the school’s entrance, banners hang celebrating “relationships” and exhorting passers-by to “remember to take care of each other.” Students use a sign-language gesture to remind one another of the school’s emphasis on unconditional love.

But now the school is unexpectedly grappling with how it defines both love and acceptance. Last month, a well-regarded vice principal was forced to leave his job as soon as administrators became aware that he had married a man; in the weeks since, the suburban Seattle school has been roiled, first by protests in support of the vice principal, and then by the resignations of those who sought his departure. The chairman of the school’s board resigned last month, and on Tuesday, Eastside, a middle and high school with about 900 students, announced the resignation of its president.

The ouster of Mr. Z, as the former vice principal, Mark Zmuda, is known, comes amid a wave of firings and forced resignations of gay men and lesbians from Roman Catholic institutions across the country, in most cases prompted not directly by the employees’ sexuality, but by their decisions to marry as same-sex marriage becomes legal in an increasing number of states.

This month, the band and choir director at a Catholic school in Ohio was fired hours after he told the school’s president that he planned to marry his boyfriend; in December, a French and Spanish teacher at a Catholic school in Pennsylvania was fired days after telling his principal he was applying for a marriage license in New Jersey. Similar ousters have taken place at Catholic schools, universities and parishes in Arkansas, California, Illinois, Missouri, New York and North Carolina.

For Catholic school and church leaders across the country, the issue is clear. The Roman Catholic Church opposes same-sex marriage, and school officials, including Mr. Zmuda, generally sign contracts saying they will abide by church teachings so that their lives can be models for their students.

But for some young Catholics, the firings are mystifying, particularly given the new tone set by Pope Francis. At Eastside Catholic, some students have taken to crafting banners with the quotation “Who am I to judge?,” words uttered by the pope when asked about gay priests; others have been trying to reach the pope via Twitter, hoping he will somehow intercede.

“He made it safe for people to raise issues and questions that, in the past, they were shut down for,” said Nancy Walton-House, whose son attended Eastside. “There’s a lot of hope, and maybe some naïveté, about how fast things can happen.”

Eastside’s senior-class president, Bradley Strode, a 17-year-old wrestler and lacrosse player, is seeking a meeting with the archbishop of Seattle, arguing that even if the church’s doctrine does not change, its employment practices should.

“It was just shocking that the Catholic Church would turn its back on a teacher for something that didn’t affect his work performance,” he said. “Gay marriage was something I never really thought about before, but everyone can agree that employment discrimination is wrong.”
A sign backed Mark Zmuda, the former vice principal and swimming coach at Eastside Catholic. David Ryder/Reuters

Last week, Archbishop J. Peter Sartain of Seattle issued a statement defending the school and rejecting the notion that the firing ran contrary to the direction of the new pope.

“Pope Francis has often reminded us of the limitless mercy of God, for Jesus came to bring his father’s mercy,” Archbishop Sartain said. “At the same time, Pope Francis has also reminded us of our responsibility as Catholics to live the timeless truth of church teaching on a wide variety of topics, including the sacredness of traditional marriage.”

Some students have quietly expressed support for the decision to remove Mr. Zmuda, but the prevailing sentiment at the school has been upset, reflecting, in part, the shifting attitudes toward same-sex marriage among young people.

“A lot of it is just generational,” said Christian Smith, a professor of sociology at Notre Dame who studies the religious lives of teenagers. “It’s a distinct minority who thinks there’s something wrong with same-sex relationships, and that’s a big change from older generations.”

Eastside Catholic, faced with intense blowback and sustained publicity over the removal of Mr. Zmuda, has defended its decision but is clearly concerned about the impact on applicants and donors as some students, parents and alumni ask what the ouster means about the school they have chosen and cheered.

This month, in a step many in the school community have found confusing, administrators gave a short-term contract to a choreographer who, in a show of support for Mr. Zmuda, had announced on talk radio that she was engaged to her girlfriend.

“It’s great that they’re keeping me, but it’s a little confusing,” said the choreographer, Stephanie Merrow, 41, who taught the school’s students to dance in a 2012 production of “Footloose,” and is now doing the same for this year’s production of “Guys and Dolls.”

“I feel for them,” she said. “I think maybe a mistake was made, and now what do they do?”

The school’s president, Sister Mary E. Tracy, had also sent mixed signals. She initially suggested to Mr. Zmuda that he might be able to keep his job if he got divorced, and then oversaw his ouster. After weeks of protest, she asked Julia Burns, an 18-year-old senior, to share with the public this comment: “I look forward to the day when no individual loses their job because they are married to a person of the same sex.” Sister Mary did not respond to requests for an interview.

On Tuesday, when the board announced Sister Mary’s resignation, it called the step “a difficult, but necessary decision so that a new leader can be brought in to ensure the entire Eastside Catholic community is moving forward on a positive path.”

Mr. Zmuda had not been at the school long, but he was liked by students, especially on the swim team, which he coached. He married in July, seven months after same-sex marriage became legal in Washington State, and he was ousted in December, shortly after the school’s administration received a complaint from a teacher about his marital status.

As students began to hear about his dismissal, they sprang into action.

“I found out about it and just texted 15 or 16 people,” said Ian Edwards, 17, a senior. Word spread quickly, and students staged an impromptu sit-in, skipping classes and gathering in a commons to talk, and, in some cases, to cry. “We just shouldn’t allow this discrimination to happen.”

Over the next weeks, the students took to social media to rally support, gathering signatures on an online petition and communicating via Twitter and texts. They protested outside Sammamish City Hall, at a Seahawks game and outside the archdiocese of Seattle, where they were joined by Ed Murray, then the city’s mayor-elect, who is Catholic and gay. Also this month, many students wore orange — the more attention-getting of the school’s two colors — to class one day to express their concern; and on Jan. 31, the students are hoping that other Catholic schools across the nation will join them in a similar act.

Alumni and parents are organizing online as they seek to force change at the school.

“If I had read the school handbook and it said, ‘We will hire you, but if we find out you are gay and you are married, we will fire you,’ I would not have put my kids there,” said Florence Colburn, who has two children at the school.

And Corey Sinser, 26, said he was an enthusiastic alumnus (class of 2006), but that now, “I worry that this will have a negative effect on the type of students who want to come, or the type of teachers who want to work there.”

Some are hoping Mr. Zmuda will get his job back; others are seeking a change in the school’s employment practices.

Julia Troy, 17, a senior, said she believed that speaking up was an outcome itself.

“I have gay friends, and I care about them,” she said. “Even if all that happens is they know that I support them, that’s enough for me.”

A version of this article appears in print on January 23, 2014,

on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:

Gay Marriages Confront Catholic School Rules.

    Gay Marriages Confront Catholic School Rules, NYT, 22.1.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/23/us/
    gay-marriages-confront-catholic-school-rules.html

Records of Abuse Complaints

Against Priests in Chicago Archdiocese

Are Released

 

JAN. 21, 2014
The New York Times
By MICHAEL PAULSON

Thousands of documents detailing the Archdiocese of Chicago’s often halting response to sexual abuse allegations against 30 priests were posted online Tuesday after eight years of negotiations between victim advocates and Roman Catholic Church officials.

Most of the abuse was alleged to have taken place years ago, about half of the accused priests are dead and many of the victims have already been given financial settlements from the archdiocese. But the victims have pressed for publication of the files, arguing that the documents will provide an important form of reckoning, chronicling what church officials did, and did not do, when they learned of accusations that priests had molested minors.

“There can’t be safety in the future unless practices that were so dangerous in the past are fully known,” said Jeff Anderson, a lawyer representing many of the victims. “It really is a painful and sorrowful and frankly ugly portrait of what has been, but from that, there is hope that it will not be repeated, and to that end it brings comfort to survivors.”

The documents are certain to place an uncomfortable spotlight on Cardinal Francis E. George, the archbishop of Chicago, who is one of the leading intellectuals in the American church hierarchy and who was president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops from 2007 to 2010, when many dioceses were grappling with the abuse crisis. Although the abuse took place before Cardinal George became archbishop, many of the victims first came forward after his arrival; some of the files concern cases in which Cardinal George’s response has been questioned, including that of the Rev. Joseph R. Bennett, whose disciplinary proceeding the cardinal briefly delayed, and the Rev. Norbert J. Maday, whose prison sentence the cardinal sought to reduce.

“It would be a great fulfillment of the millennium spirit to see your captive heart set free,” Cardinal George wrote to the incarcerated Father Maday in 2000. But the cardinal later changed his mind. In 2007, after several more people had come forward to say they had been abused by Father Maday, the cardinal wrote to a parole commission, saying he was seeking to defrock the priest.

The documents also show Cardinal George repeatedly offering to meet with victims of abuse and apologizing; in 2005 he wrote to a victim, “We have tried to apologize to all those who are suffering because of the failure on the part of some bishops to supervise priests adequately.”

This month, in a letter distributed to parishes, Cardinal George acknowledged that in the 1980s, the archdiocese responded to allegations of sexual abuse “sometimes hesitantly,” and that in the 1990s, “archdiocesan policy still allowed some perpetrators a restricted form of ministry, with monitoring, that kept them from regular contact with minors.” He said the response changed in 2002, when the American bishops agreed to a zero-tolerance policy that bars any priest facing a credible accusation of abuse from serving in ministry.

“Publishing for all to read the actual records of these crimes raises transparency to a new level,” Cardinal George wrote in the letter. “It will be helpful, we pray, for some, but painful for many.”

The archdiocese turned the estimated 6,000 pages of documents over to lawyers for abuse victims last Wednesday; the lawyers delayed the release for further redactions to protect victims’ privacy. An archdiocesan lawyer told reporters last week that 95 percent of the allegations in the files concerned conduct before 1988, and none after 1996; 14 of the 30 accused priests are dead, and none is still serving in ministry. Cardinal George, who has been the archbishop of Chicago since 1997, has said he never met many of the accused priests.

The documents will also shed new light on the handling of abusers by Cardinal George’s predecessor, Cardinal Joseph L. Bernardin, a highly regarded figure in American Catholic history, and one of the first prominent church figures to act strongly against clergy sexual abuse. Cardinal Bernardin occasionally gave abusive priests second chances — for example, he allowed the Rev. Joseph L. Fitzharris a new parish assignment, with the caveat that the priest should not be allowed unsupervised contact with high school-age boys, after Father Fitzharris had been charged in court with sexually abusing a 15-year-old.

The Archdiocese of Chicago, which is the third largest diocese in the country, has paid about $100 million to settle abuse allegations against priests. The archdiocese has also posted to its website a list of 65 priests — none still serving in ministry — who the church said have been credibly accused of abusing minors; the documents to be released Tuesday concern 30 priests whose files were subject to negotiations with victims’ lawyers.

The personnel files of accused priests have previously been made public in other American dioceses, including Boston and Los Angeles, generally as a result of litigation. Most of the documents have been published in an online archive, bishop-accountability.org.

The release of the Chicago files comes as Cardinal George, a 77-year-old cancer survivor, is awaiting permission from the Vatican to retire. Pope Francis’s choice of a new archbishop of Chicago will be closely watched as it will probably be the pope’s first appointment to lead a major American see.

    Records of Abuse Complaints
    Against Priests in Chicago Archdiocese Are Released, NYT, 21.1.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/22/us/
    chicago-archdiocese-records-of-abuse-complaints.html