History > 2015 > USA > Religion / Faith (I)

Muslims in America

Condemn Extremists

and Fear Anew for Their Lives

DEC. 4, 2015

The New York Times

By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

Only hours after news broke that a suspect in a mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., had a Muslim name, the well-practiced organizations that represent American Muslims to the broader public kicked into action, as they routinely do after each terrorist attack attributed to Muslim extremists.

They issued news releases condemning the attacks as inhuman and un-Islamic, posted expressions of grief on Facebook and held news conferences in which Muslim leaders stood flanked by American flags alongside clergy of other faiths and law enforcement officials.

“Groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda,” Salam al-Marayati, president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, said at a news conference in Los Angeles on Thursday, “are trying to divide our society and to terrorize us. Our message to them is we will not be terrorized and we will not be intimidated,” either by the terrorists or, he said, “by hatemongers who exploit the fear and hysteria that results from incidents like this.”

But the message is apparently not getting through. Muslims and leaders of mosques across the United States say they are experiencing a wave of death threats, assaults and vandalism unlike anything they have experienced since the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001.

They say that they observed an escalation in hateful episodes this fall after anti-Muslim remarks by the Republican presidential candidates Donald J. Trump and Ben Carson. The threats, vandalism and violence grew more frequent and frightening after the attacks by Islamic State militants last month in Paris.

Now, with the F.B.I. saying that one of those responsible for the San Bernardino massacre had expressed Islamic State sympathies on Facebook, American Muslims are bracing for more hate directed their way. Overnight on Friday, vandals broke all the windows at the Islamic Center of Palm Beach in Florida, turned over furniture in the prayer room and left bloody stains throughout the facility. The F.B.I. is investigating death threats left by voice mail at a mosque in Manassas, Va.

The attacks have left American Muslims feeling defensive and vulnerable just as the San Bernardino attack is forcing them to come to grips with the prospect that the threat from terrorists within their midst is very, very real.

The attack in San Bernardino, which left 14 victims dead and 21 injured, was in many ways the nightmare scenario for Muslims trying to gain full acceptance in American society: Syed Rizwan Farook, the husband who committed mass homicide with his wife, was raised in the United States and was an American citizen. He had a college education, a stable job, a comfortable home and a baby, and displayed no outward signs of anger, mental illness or radicalization. He worshiped and was known at several local mosques.

At one of those mosques — Dar al-Uloom al-Islamiyah in San Bernardino, down a long road and surrounded by palm trees — Imam Mahmood Nadvi said he had never detected any warning signs in the few conversations he had had with Mr. Farook, an inspector for the county health department.

“Everyone had an image of him being a successful person,” Imam Nadvi said. “He had a degree. He had a good post.”

The imam called the shooting a shock and a mystery. Mr. Farook, he said, “does not even represent humanity.”

Mahoor Nadvi, a teacher and assistant imam, said the mosque had received threats.

“This all has to do with ignorance,” he said.

In a news conference Friday, lawyers for Mr. Farook’s family cautioned the public against jumping to conclusions about the attackers’ motivations. One lawyer, David Chesley, said the F.B.I.’s claim that Mr. Farook’s wife, Tashfeen Malik, had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State on Facebook was “nebulous” evidence.

“Until there is absolute, clear evidence, every headline doesn’t have to say ‘Muslim massacre’ or ‘Muslim shooters,’ because it’s going to cause intolerance,” Mr. Chesley said.

However, Muslim Americans are now confronting the fact that to many Americans, Mr. Farook and other terrorists do represent Islam — especially since polls show that most Americans know no Muslims and little about Islam.

“My identity and everything that I am becomes erased every time one of these incidents occurs,” said Nabihah Maqbool, 27, a law student at the University of Chicago. “It all becomes collapsed into these senseless acts of violence being committed by people who are part of my group.”

Like many other Muslim American women, Ms. Maqbool said that she had considered taking off her hijab, or head scarf, out of fear of being victimized. She said that driving back to Chicago after celebrating Thanksgiving with her family, she had decided not to stop and pray on the grassy lawn outside an interstate rest stop, as she usually does.

“I just got so nervous that something could happen to me by any unhinged individual who saw me as someone who deserved violence,” Ms. Maqbool said.

The F.B.I. said it did not yet have data for hate crimes in 2015, and would not comment on whether there had recently been a rise in attacks on Muslims and their houses of worship. A chart provided by Stephen G. Fischer Jr., chief of multimedia productions for the F.B.I.’s criminal justice information service, showed that bias-related hate crimes against Muslims were at a peak in 2001, with 481 reported. In 2014, 154 such crimes were reported.

But in recent weeks, American Muslims have reported a spate of violence and intimidation against them: women wearing head scarves accosted; Muslim children bullied; bullets shot at a mosque in Meriden, Conn.; feces thrown at a mosque in Pflugerville, Tex.

Omair Siddiqi said he had been about to get into his car in the parking lot of a shopping mall in the Dallas suburbs last month when a man came up to him, flashed a gun and said, “If I wanted to, I could kill you right now.”

Mr. Siddiqi said he stayed quiet and the man walked away. Mr. Siddiqi called 911 and is now in the process of getting a concealed-handgun permit. “It’s very scary in times like this,” he said.

In a Dallas suburb, about a dozen protesters congregated outside the Islamic Center of Irving last month, some covering their faces with bandannas and carrying hunting rifles, tactical shotguns and AR-15s. The group that organized the protest posted on Facebook a list of the names and addresses of dozens of Muslims and what they called “Muslim sympathizers.”

Khalid Y. Hamideh, a spokesman for the Islamic Association of North Texas and a Dallas lawyer, called the mosque protest “un-American.”

“It would be unfathomable for that to occur outside a church or synagogue,” he said. “At the same time, we’re realists. We understand what’s going on around the country. We thank God for our friends in law enforcement and our interfaith partners.”

Reporting was contributed by Julie Turkewitz, Ian Lovett, Manny Fernandez and Ryan Schuessler.

A version of this article appears in print on December 5, 2015, on page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: Muslims in America Condemn Extremists and Fear Anew for Their Lives.

Muslims in America Condemn Extremists and Fear Anew for Their Lives,
NYT,
DEC. 4, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/05/us/
muslims-in-america-condemn-extremists-and-fear-anew-for-their-lives.html

Pope Francis Ends Visit With Mass

After Meeting Bishops and Inmates

SEPT. 27, 2015

The New York Times

By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

and DANIEL J. WAKIN

PHILADELPHIA — Pope Francis turned penitent and pastor Sunday on the final day of his visit to the United States, declaring himself “overwhelmed by shame” at the sexual violation of children by his clergy, embracing inmates at a local jail, urging young people to leave the loneliness of social media and bidding farewell with a huge downtown Mass.

Since arriving in the United States from Cuba on Tuesday during his 10-day tour, Francis, 78, had been met by large crowds — tens of thousands during a drive through Central Park in New York, in Madison Square Garden, at a canonization in Washington; perhaps several hundred thousand on Saturday night for a potpourri of prayer, musical performances and testimonials at a festival for the Vatican-sponsored World Meeting of Families.

Sunday’s Mass, marking the end of the meeting, on Eakins Oval in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, presented the pope on the grandest of scales, with nearly a million passing through the city’s lockdown-emptied streets into Benjamin Franklin Parkway, which was studded with Jumbotron screens.

The pope departed the United States at just after 7:30 p.m. local time, aboard an American Airlines charter jet.

After a week of big public statements — about fighting climate change, abolishing the death penalty, preserving religious liberty, welcoming immigrants — Francis turned his gaze on the Catholic Church with a forceful appeal for tolerance of different views. Some conservative prelates and commentators have not warmed to Francis, considering him inattentive to the church’s traditions and rules.

“The temptation to be scandalized by the freedom of God threatens the authenticity of faith,” the pope said, adding that it should be “vigorously rejected.”

Excluding people not considered “like us” is wrong, he said. “Not only does it block conversion to the faith; it is a perversion of the faith!”

Francis seemed to be suggesting that intolerance is a greater threat to the church than doctrinal impurity. “Our common house can no longer tolerate sterile divisions,” he said.

The security stranglehold on central Philadelphia cast doubt on whether the crowd would pass the million mark. Yet before the Mass, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims packed the long boulevard leading to the makeshift sanctuary. Waving Mexican, Argentine, Vatican and other flags from around the world, people cheered as the pope, standing in his open-sided popemobile, took a spin around the boulevard, blessed babies and, as the choir struck up with a “Hallelujah” chorus, climbed out to meet the throng pressed against the gates.

Before the Mass, Francis, a member of the Jesuit religious order, made an unscheduled stop at St. Joseph’s Univerity, a Jesuit school. Francis has made it a practice to visit with his Jesuit brothers on trips abroad. He blessed a newly-installed statue dedicated to ties between Catholics and Jews.

Sunday began somberly, with Francis meeting privately with a small group of victims of clergy sexual abuse.

“I am profoundly sorry that your innocence was violated by those who you trusted,” he told them, according to a transcript of his remarks released by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

He blamed some bishops for failing to protect the abuse victims, or even worse, violating them. He echoed such comments publicly before a group of bishops at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary, pledging that all responsible would be “held accountable.”

“God weeps,” he said.

Advocates for the victims had deplored his previous comments on the trip, which seemed mainly to provide moral support for the clergy who suffered through the scandal. The advocates said on Sunday that the pope’s comments were merely a public relations move.

In his prepared remarks, Francis went on to note the modern world’s challenges to the church’s traditional idea of family — without mentioning gay unions, contraception or other difficult issues for the church.

The bishops there were taking part in the World Meeting of Families. As he has for much of the weekend here in Philadelphia, the pope delved into related matters — marriage, young people, friendship, relationships. Here, he wrestled with how “unprecedented changes” in society have affected family ties, telling the bishops that the church must live in “this concrete world.”

Francis adapted his critique of a consumer society, one of the themes he most forcefully pushes and that draws some of the sharpest criticism from free-marketers, to modern concepts of family. “We have turned our society into a huge multicultural showcase tied only to the taste of certain ‘consumers,’” he said.

Francis also lamented how young people are delaying marriage. Departing from the text, the Argentine pope drew chuckles when he recounted exchanges he has had back home.

In Buenos Aires, he said, many women tell him, “ ‘My son is 30 or 34 years old and my son isn’t getting married, What do I do?’ And I say, ‘Don’t iron his shirts anymore.’ ”

And then he seemed to take on Facebook. Or at least social media.

He said society also resembled a “huge multicultural showcase” based on consumer tastes. “Running after the latest fad, accumulating ‘friends’ on one of the social networks, we get caught up in what contemporary society has to offer,” said Francis, who posts on Twitter as @pontifex.

Francis urged the bishops not to lament the good old days and dismiss young people as “hopelessly timid, weak, inconsistent.”

In a brief interview, Anthony Fisher, the archbishop of Sydney, Australia, responded to the pope’s speech to bishops on Sunday morning.

“I think it’s interesting that he was insisting that we had to rebuild or renew our covenant with families, suggesting that we maybe weren’t as close to families as we should be as bishops.”

Francis later went to the Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility, mainly an intake jail, which has roughly 2,800 inmates and is one of six jails in Philadelphia’s system. Some of the inmates had made Francis a hand-carved chair, which he thanked them for. Prison ministry has long been a special mission of Francis’. As archbishop of Buenos Aires, he frequently visited jails. As pope, he also made visits to prisons in Italy and abroad, washing the feet of inmates at the Rebibbia prison in Rome in a Holy Thursday ritual in April.

“I am here as a pastor, but above all as a brother, to share your situation and to make it my own,” he told the roughly 100 men and women detainees, drawn at random, at Curran-Fromhold. “Jesus doesn’t ask us where we’ve been and he doesn’t ask us what we’ve done,” Francis said.

He said the Gospel story of Jesus washing the feet of his disciples reflected the need in ancient times to soothe dusty, cut up feet, and used it to signal the possibility of redemption. “All of us need to be cleansed,” he said, adding, “It is painful when we see prison systems, which are not concerned to care for wounds, to soothe pain, to offer new possibilities,” he said.

As he spoke, burly inmates, some with shaved heads and dreadlocks and one with a tattoo crawling up his neck, watched intently. After the speech, Francis walked along the rows of inmates sitting in chairs, shaking hands, chatting, laying his hand on their foreheads and hugging a few. Ron Cianci, 55, who said he would be inside for about six months, said afterward that he had asked and had received a blessing. “Right now I feel elated, kind of a little bit high on life,” he said.

 

Laurie Goodstein and Todd Heisler reported from Philadelphia, and Daniel J. Wakin from New York.

Pope Francis Ends Visit With Mass After Meeting Bishops and Inmates;
NYT, SEPT. 27, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/28/us/pope-francis-philadelphia-visit.html

After Criticism,

Pope Francis Confronts

Priestly Sex Abuse

 

SEPT. 27, 2015

The New York Times

By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

PHILADELPHIA — At the start of an otherwise joyous and well-received trip to the United States, Pope Francis hit one seriously sour note: He praised American bishops for their handling of the sexual abuse scandal and told priests he felt their pain — leaving abuse victims stunned and infuriated, asking why he neglected to even acknowledge their anguish.

On the last day of his journey, Francis stepped to a lectern here before hundreds of seminarians and bishops from around the world and tried to salve the open wound. He said that he had met in private with a group of victims and pledged that “all responsible will be held accountable.”

“God weeps” at the sexual abuse of children, he said in an early translation from Spanish of his remarks added to the start of a scripted address in the chapel at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary here on Sunday. “I commit to the careful oversight to ensure that youth are protected.”

His remarks and the meeting, anticipated for weeks and carefully choreographed, were greeted with varying degrees of skepticism by abuse victims who have now seen two popes on American trips meet with victims and make sweeping promises to protect children. They would like to believe that Francis’ words are sincere and pledges are real, but they continue to have serious doubts.

A pope whose most salient quality is his pastoral approach to real people and their real-life problems appears to have a blind spot when it comes to victims, many of them said. In his first remarks on the issue to an American church that has indeed suffered from the revelations of abuse, the pope chose to comfort and praise his fellow clerics, and said nothing at all about the victims.

Instead, he told bishops and priests that he felt their pain and suffering. And he praised the bishops — some who engaged in ongoing legal battles with abuse victims — for their “courage” and their “generous commitment to bring healing to the victims.”

“It was shocking and insulting, and it is hurtful,” said John Salveson, an abuse survivor and a businessman who runs the Foundation to Abolish Child Sex Abuse, based in Philadelphia. “I don’t know how you could make a case that would support these comments.”

Even a member of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, a special panel that Francis appointed, was taken aback. Marie Collins, who is a survivor of abuse, said in an email, “Like so many other survivors I found the comments disappointing.” But she said did not want to say more because she is trying to “stay positive” and continue her work on the commission.

For a churchman known for his empathy for the marginalized and his insistence on dialogue and what he calls “encounter,” Francis has seemed reluctant to encounter abuse victims. As the archbishop of Buenos Aires, before he became pope, Francis declined to meet with abuse victims and their families who say they begged to talk with him, according to news reports and several victims interviewed in Argentina last year.

Since becoming pope, Francis has taken steps to address the abuse problem, but has not made it a top priority. His only known encounter with abuse victims came 15 months into his papacy, when he celebrated Mass with six victims, then met with them individually over three hours.

“I beg your forgiveness,” he told them, “for the sins of omission on the part of church leaders who did not respond adequately to reports of abuse made by family members, as well as by abuse victims themselves.”

Francis is not known to have met with abuse survivors since, though church officials had said that he would meet privately with victims at some point during this visit to the United States. His predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, met with abuse victims at least five times on foreign trips: in the United States, Australia, Malta, Britain and Germany, according to BishopAccountability.org, which tracks cases and advocates for survivors. Francis has traveled to 15 countries as pope, but had not met with any survivors of clergy sexual abuse until Sunday.

However, he has appointed a commission on sexual abuse that includes victims, lay experts, clergy and bishops, and which has made recommendations for Vatican policy. The commission encouraged the pope to set up a process for holding accountable those bishops who covered up abuse, and in June the Vatican announced the creation of a Vatican tribunal for judging bishops accused of negligence.

Francis appears to have accepted the resignations of three American bishops who were in the midst of escalating scandals over their mishandling abuse allegations: two bishops in Minnesota in June of this year and one in April in Kansas City-St. Joseph in Missouri, where the bishop was the first to ever be criminally convicted of shielding a pedophile priest. But the bishops were allowed to leave office without the Vatican’s ever making clear why, and both remain as bishops.

The abuse scandal has quieted, but hardly died down in the United States. On Tuesday last week, the same day that Pope Francis arrived in the United States, a priest in Pennsylvania was convicted of abusing boys in an orphanage he supported for years in Honduras. The Archdiocese of Milwaukee just proposed a plan to settle claims with an estimated 570 victims in bankruptcy court.

Philadelphia, the pope’s last stop on his visit, has also been a site of continued pain and scandal. Two grand juries have found many accused priests still serving in ministries. A high-ranking church official was convicted in 2012 and is now in prison for covering up abuse. In fact, until recently he was in the same prison that Francis visited on Sunday, according to local news reports.

Francis’ addresses in the United States reopened the wounds for many victims. At a prayer service with bishops at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle in Washington last Wednesday, the pope said that he was “conscious of courage with which you have faced difficult moments in the recent history of the church in this country without fear of self-criticism and at the cost of mortification and great sacrifice.

“Nor have you been afraid to divest whatever is unessential in order to regain the authority and trust which is demanded of ministers of Christ,” he said. “I realize how much the pain of recent years has weighed upon you and I have supported your generous commitment to bring healing to victims — in the knowledge that in healing we too are healed — and to work to ensure that such crimes will never be repeated.”

The next day, at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, Francis told clergy that they had “suffered greatly in the not distant past by having to bear the shame of some of your brothers who harmed and scandalized the Church in the most vulnerable of her members.”

The pope made public appearances and shared private moments among the people and the powerful in Washington.

At a two-person protest on Saturday outside a Catholic church in Philadelphia, Barbara Dorris, an abuse survivor and an organizer with the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said, “It’s all about the bishops. The victims got ignored.”

Karen Polesir, whose cousin was abused by a priest, said of Francis, “I honestly thought that he got it. But after those statements, I knew he clearly didn’t get it at all.”

Church officials were hoping, however, that Francis’ remarks on Sunday after he met victims would speak louder than anything else he said earlier in the trip on the abuse issue. The Rev. Thomas Rosica, a Vatican spokesman, said that the pope’s remarks at his meeting with abuse victims were “the strongest he’s spoken about the abuse.”

But for many victims, Francis’ comments were not enough to overcome their sense of disappointment. Kenneth M. O’Renick, 72, who was 6 when he was abused by a priest at his parish school in Kansas City, was brimming with optimism about Francis before he arrived.

Then he heard what the pope had said to American bishops in Washington about their courage and generosity in the face of the sexual abuse crisis.

The pope’s praise for the bishops, Mr. O’Renick said, made his promises to protect youths and hold abusers accountable on Sunday “ring hollow, very hollow, to me.”

“He has not even come close to what needs to be done, in my opinion,” he said. “I hope that it gets better, but I’m certainly not as hopeful as I was.”

Jason Horowitz contributed reporting from Philadelphia; Vivian Yee contributed reporting from New York.

After Criticism, Pope Francis Confronts Priestly Sex Abuse,
NYT, SEPT. 27, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/28/us/pope-francis-philadelphia-sexual-abuse.html

Pope Francis, in New York,

Takes On Extremism and Inequality

SEPT. 25, 2015

The New York Times

By MICHAEL WILSON

By motorcade and popemobile and simple shoe leather, in a daylong tour up and down Manhattan that found pockets of joy and pain, wealth and want, Pope Francis on Friday called for social justice and peace in addresses to world leaders and workaday New Yorkers alike. He ended with a stirring homily that was both an ode to the city and a reminder to watch for glimpses of the presence of God among the poorest of the poor.

“In big cities, beneath the roar of traffic, beneath the rapid pace of change, so many faces pass by unnoticed because they have no ‘right’ to be there, no right to be part of the city,” Francis said in a Mass before 20,000 at Madison Square Garden. “They are the foreigners, the children who go without schooling, those deprived of medical insurance, the homeless, the forgotten elderly. These people stand at the edges of our great avenues, in our streets, in deafening anonymity.”

That theme, that “God is living in our cities,” provided an apt conclusion to a day spent navigating New York’s complicated fabric of rich and struggling. It was the pope’s first visit to the city, where the longtime hum of the machines of commerce and prosperity has brought the very excesses he has spent his papacy pushing against. It was impossible to ignore, behind the rows and rows of well-wishers who packed Central Park’s broad meadow, the soaring columns of skyscrapers with penthouses that are home to many of the world’s wealthiest people.

He spoke of that divide often during the day, from his first remarks before the United Nations General Assembly, where he called for respect for “those considered disposable because they are only considered as part of a statistic,” to his closing homily’s observation that “big cities also conceal the faces of all those people who don’t appear to belong, or are second-class citizens.”

Francis sought out some of those faces on a day of grand pageantry and small gestures that brought him before the relatives of the fallen at the footprints of the twin towers and, hours later, the upturned smiles of East Harlem schoolchildren not yet born the day those buildings were destroyed.

Perhaps the day’s greatest spectacle was his winding sweep through a swath of Central Park, a logistical feat that included screening tens of thousands of ticketholders, one bag at a time. The throngs roared their greetings to the “people’s pope,” using the name by which he is commonly known: “Viva Papa!”

In spite of the tight ring of dark-suited security that surrounded the pope at all times, many were allowed a closer look. Among them: a New York police officer, Terrance McGhee, in a wheelchair at the World Trade Center site, whom Francis stooped to greet; dozens of children outside Our Lady Queen of Angels in East Harlem, who waved cellphones as Francis gave head-pats and high-fives; the day laborer at the Garden Mass, a medal under his shirt of St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes; the babies held out for a blessing in the Garden.

Just after 8 on the crisp early autumn morning, Francis left his papal apartment on the Upper East Side for his address to the General Assembly, the fifth by a pope and the first for him. He called for environmental responsibility and lamented the impact of decades of abuse on the world’s poor.

“They are cast off by society, forced to live off what is discarded and suffer unjustly from the consequences of abuse of the environment,” Francis said. “These phenomena are part of today’s widespread and quietly growing ‘culture of waste.’ ”

From there, the layers of political commentary that followed his remarks in Washington earlier in the week seemed to fall away, leaving the day one of pure emotion for Francis and those wishing to be near him.

It was also a respite from nagging thoughts that society’s ills will remain after he has left New York, the middle leg of a United States visit that began in the capital and ends on Sunday.

From the United Nations, the pope’s motorcade sped downtown to the World Trade Center site. Upon arriving, he walked into the September 11 Memorial and Museum, flanked by Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan and others, slowly making his way past the bottom of the memorial’s North Pool to the top of the South Pool.

There, he paused for a long moment of silent reflection, gazing down into the pool of cascading water, which, from the visitor’s vantage point, has no visible bottom. He looked at the names of the victims on the panel at his fingertips, one of many panels at the site that, together, bear thousands of names: Boyle, Woods, Nguyen, Lynch. The falling water brought the only sound. He and Cardinal Dolan each left a white rose on the panel.

Francis turned at that point, meeting a long line of relatives who shared memories of those who had died on Sept. 11. He listened, often clutching an outstretched hand, and once patting a little girl’s head. He entered the museum and its Foundation Hall, where a multifaith ceremony of striking breadth — representatives of Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism and Christianity — heard him eulogize those who died trying to rescue others.

“New York City firefighters walked into the crumbling towers, with no concern for their own well-being,” he said. “Many succumbed. Their sacrifice enabled great numbers to be saved.” He called the site “a place of saved lives, a hymn to the triumph of life over the prophets of destruction and death.”

And he called for peace. “Peace in our homes, our families, our schools and communities. Peace in all those places where war never seems to end. Peace for those faces which have known nothing but pain.”

The pope walked through the museum, past the relics and totems that have become indelible images from that day 14 years ago, like the hulking section of the trade center’s foundation wall, the “slurry wall,” and the “last column,” an icon covered with pictures and truck and unit numbers from the city’s firehouses and police precincts.

“I’m Jewish, and this is still the coolest moment of my life,” Julie Rodgers, 70, said.

The crowds swelled around Central Park during a break in the papal schedule. There was some jostling and name-calling among the hordes of ticketholders, but the police reported no major disturbances. Scores of people lined up along the sidewalks outside the park, filling block upon block. Some were eventually turned away, crying. Others fainted in the heat.

The afternoon’s first stop for Francis was Our Lady Queen of the Angels School on East 112th Street. The neighborhood was perhaps the day’s least polished backdrop, with its hair salons and “We Buy Gold” signs. (“I hope he brings some blessings to the block,” a local superintendent had said on Thursday.)

Inside a brightly colored classroom, he warmly greeted about two dozen children — “This is nice!” he said — and examined class projects — “This is a solar panel,” one boy explained — before evoking the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

“His dream was that many children, many people could have equal opportunities,” Francis said. He joked to the students that he was giving them homework: “Please don’t forget to pray for me.”

Then he met a group of immigrants, who gave him gifts — a soccer ball, a hard hat, a tool belt.

From there, he went to Central Park, where the crowds were still waiting, stepping into his popemobile to cruise about 12 blocks at a walker’s pace, beneath English elms and pin oaks, toward Columbus Circle. The journey lasted only about 15 minutes, but it exposed the pope to his largest crowd of the day by far.

The Mass at the Garden was celebrated with the choreography of a concert befitting the hall before a rapt audience.

“A hope which liberates us from the forces pushing us to isolation and lack of concern for the lives of others, for the life of our city,” Francis said. “A hope which frees us from empty connections, from abstract analyses or sensationalistic routines. A hope which is unafraid of involvement, which acts as a leaven wherever we happen to live and work. A hope which makes us see, even in the midst of smog, the presence of God as he continues to walk the streets of our city.”

Reporting was contributed by Al Baker, Nicholas Casey, David W. Dunlap, Lisa W. Foderaro, Sandra E. Garcia, David Gonzalez, C. J. Hughes, Benjamin Mueller, Sharon Otterman, Kate Pastor, Noah Remnick, Liz Robbins, Rick Rojas, Marc Santora, Nate Schweber, Kirk Semple, Jeffrey E. Singer, John Surico and Rebecca White.

A version of this article appears in print on September 26, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Mixing in New York, Pope Recalls the Forgotten.

Pope Francis, in New York, Takes On Extremism and Inequality,
NYT, SEPT. 25, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/26/nyregion/pope-francis-visits-new-york-city.html

Immigration Advocates in Philadelphia

See Affirmation in Pope’s Visit

SEPT. 25, 2015

The New York Times

 By JASON HOROWITZ

PHILADELPHIA — Immigration weighs heavily on the parishioners of Old St. Joseph’s Church, a centuries-old Jesuit parish that spread Catholicism through colonial America and now flies a “Welcome Pope Francis” banner over its gate.

In a city, and a faith, sustained through tough times by waves of immigration, the correct approach to undocumented workers has flared up as an issue here in recent weeks as Donald J. Trump in his presidential campaign has excoriated so-called sanctuary cities such as Philadelphia for being overly welcoming to immigrants.

While a Republican mayoral candidate in Old St. Joseph’s congregation agreed that the city needed to crack down, many others were appalled by the injection of explicitly nativist language into American politics and sought in Pope Francis a powerful ally.

Their prayers have been answered.

Francis, who will address thousands of Spanish-speaking families at Independence Mall here on Saturday, has in his visit to the United States become a virtual patron saint of suffering migrants. He hugged immigrant children in New York, and in Washington accepted a letter from a young girl seeking legalization for her parents.

Already, in his historic address to Congress, where efforts for a comprehensive immigration overhaul have atrophied, Francis spoke about the masses of South and Central American immigrants who “travel north in search of a better life for themselves and for their loved ones, in search of greater opportunities,” and urged more humane treatment of them by asking legislators, “Is this not what we want for our own children?”

At the White House on Wednesday, he pointedly referred to himself as “the son of an immigrant family,” and one of the two recommendations “close to my heart” that he made to fellow bishops later that day concerned immigration.

“Now you are facing this stream of Latin immigration which affects many of your dioceses,” he said. Speaking “as a pastor from the South,” he encouraged bishops to “not be afraid to welcome them.”

Mr. Trump still thinks people should be afraid — and he said in an interview that the pope does not know what he is talking about.

“If he is in favor of illegal immigration, he doesn’t understand it,” Mr. Trump said. “Nobody has properly explained it to him. And I’m Christian.”

Just before the pope’s visit, Sarah Palin, who struck similar chords on the issue during the 2008 campaign, spoke “with all due respect as a baptized Catholic,” and said, “Come on, pope! Follow the law.”

The pope, who has emphasized a universal message of mercy and forgiveness, has spoken up for migrants against the global backdrop of a refugee crisis that is flooding Europe’s borders; a coarsening national political discourse on immigration; and a demographic shift to the Southern Hemisphere in the global church, with Hispanics now accounting for nearly 40 percent of all Catholics in the United States.

Philadelphia is a front line.

Since 2014, Philadelphia has refused to comply with requests from the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to detain undocumented offenders, unless the government presents a judicial warrant and the person in question has been convicted of a first- or second-degree offense involving violence.

The city argues that such a policy fosters better cooperation between immigrant communities and the police, and improves public safety. But it has come under attack and become a topic of local debate since Mr. Trump seized on the murder of a woman in which an illegal immigrant has been charged in San Francisco, which has a similar policy.

That has made Mr. Trump, who after the pope’s remarks on Thursday again referred to the murder in San Francisco, the boogeyman of the Catholic left.

Bishop Eusebio L. Elizondo of Seattle has said he hoped the pope would “shame those who spew hatred and vitriol toward immigrants for political gain.” Ralph McCloud, the director of the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, an anti-poverty program of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, shook the pope’s hand after his address to bishops on Wednesday and said in an interview that the sanctuary cities policy “saves lives and saves families.”

And in a sign of how compassion toward migrants has become a rallying point in a church hierarchy that has shown signs of division over Francis’ de-emphasis of social issues, Salvatore J. Cordileone, the ultraconservative archbishop of San Francisco, warned after the murder there against the “implementation of policies that punish all immigrants for the transgressions of a small minority.”

Charles J. Chaput, the influential archbishop of Philadelphia, who has said his fellow conservatives have “not been really happy” with parts of Francis’ reign, has also been a strong pro-immigration voice. But at a panel this month he drew a line at the sanctuary cities policy, calling it “not a very good idea.”

The Vatican is careful to recognize a legitimate diversity of opinion on the issue of illegal immigration, advocating the rights of migrants to seek a better life and of sovereign states to regulate their borders. But in his speeches so far this week, Francis has clearly focused his attention on the migrants who see him as their champion.

“When you have these two rights in conflict, which one has to bend?” said Greg Burke, the senior adviser for communications at the Vatican. “The Gospel answers that it has to bend in favor of human dignity.”

That is an answer with which a majority of Americans appear to agree. A New York Times/CBS News Poll this month shows that 65 percent of Catholics nationwide said they thought illegal immigrants should be allowed to stay in the United States and eventually apply for citizenship.

But it is also the answer undocumented immigrants and their advocates on the ground in Philadelphia want to hear.

“I don’t think there is anything about the pope that is representative of 18th Street,” said Jim Kenney, the Democratic candidate seen as likely to be the city’s next mayor, referring to the headquarters of Archbishop Chaput, a longtime adversary.

Peter Pedemonti, who runs the New Sanctuary Movement of Philadelphia out of a small office opposite a Catholic church in the poor Kensington area of Philadelphia, said he personally had found inspiration in the pope’s urging people to “encounter” the marginalized where they are.

“That’s what Pope Francis is calling for,” Mr. Pedemonti, himself a Catholic, said. “You can’t encounter people if you are deporting them.”

At Old St. Joseph’s Church, the Rev. Philip Florio said he expected the pope to preach “welcome the stranger at your door” and reject the round-them-up and ship-them-out approach of Mr. Trump, at the mention of whose name the priest theatrically slid away on the pew.

One congregant, Bethany J. Welch, directs the Aquinas Center in South Philadelphia, near bakeries selling cookies printed with edible papal faces. She is organizing a pilgrimage of Mexican immigrants to the pope’s speech at Independence Mall.

Another Old St. Joseph’s parishioner, Melissa Murray Bailey, is running a long-shot campaign for mayor against Mr. Kenney. Sitting in the church’s courtyard, she explained why she, like the archbishop, opposed sanctuary city status for Philadelphia.

“We are not solving the root cause of the problem, we’re saying we’re going to ignore the laws,” she said. “It’s the law-and-order issue.”

But she wanted to make clear that she was pro-immigration and that she found Mr. Trump, who “makes it difficult for all Republicans,” odious. She preferred to affiliate herself with Francis.

“The things that drive him,” she said, “are very similar to the things that drive me.”

A version of this article appears in print on September 26, 2015, on page A15 of the New York edition with the headline: Seeking Affirmation at Center of Immigration Debate.

Immigration Advocates in Philadelphia
See Affirmation in Pope’s Visit,
NYT, SEPT. 25, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/26/us/
immigration-advocates-in-philadelphia-see-affirmation-in-popes-visit.html

Pope Francis Addresses U.N.,

Calling for Peace

and Environmental Justice

 

SEPT. 25, 2015

The New York Times

By SOMINI SENGUPTA

and JIM YARDLEY

UNITED NATIONS — With a passionate call from Pope Francis to choose environmental justice over a “boundless thirst for power and material prosperity,” world leaders on Friday adopted an ambitious agenda to reset their own priorities, from ending hunger to protecting forests to ensuring quality education for all.

“We want to change our world, and we can,” Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany told a packed General Assembly hall.

The global goals, which emerged after three years of negotiations, are 17 in all. Known as the Sustainable Development Goals, they are not legally binding, and therefore not enforceable. But they carry a moral force of coercion, because they are adopted by consensus by the 193 member states of the United Nations. They apply to all countries, not just poor ones, as was the objective of the last round of ambitions, called the Millennium Development Goals, which expired this year.

“The new agenda is a promise by leaders to all people everywhere,” the secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, told the General Assembly.

Central to the new set of global goals, which extend to 2030, is the idea of caring for the planet and for the world’s poorest citizens, which was also at the heart of the pope’s address — his first at the United Nations.

“Any harm done to the environment, therefore, is harm done to humanity,” Francis said, later reprising his argument that the poor are the biggest victims of environmental destruction.

“A selfish and boundless thirst for power and material prosperity leads both to the misuse of available natural resources and to the exclusion of the weak and the disadvantaged,” he said.

The poor, Francis said, are “cast off by society, forced to live off what is discarded and suffer unjustly from the consequences of abuse of the environment. These phenomena are part of today’s widespread and quietly growing ‘culture of waste.’ ”

The summit meeting at the General Assembly for the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals is something of a prelude to the Paris conference later this year, where countries are trying to come up with a global compact to cut their carbon emissions and to help the most vulnerable countries deal with the ravages of climate change.

China promised a cap-and-trade policy in 2017. South Africa announced its climate plan on Friday, Indonesia announced its commitments on Thursday, and Brazil was due to reveal its plan on Sunday. The United States, European Union and other big polluters have already said how they plan to cut emissions, leaving India as the major holdout.

On Friday, Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, said his country was already on its way to what he called “a sustainable path to prosperity,” enumerating in his speech a list of things that his administration had already announced: ramping up renewable energy, cleaning rivers and imposing a carbon tax. He made no announcements about India’s climate commitments, saving that for when he returns home. India has maintained that its main priority is to overcome poverty. “We have concrete initiatives and time frames,” Mr. Modi said, signaling to his domestic audience that India was not going to bend to outside influence.

Mr. Ban, who met with Mr. Modi, gently nudged him on committing to emissions cuts, a statement by Mr. Ban’s office suggested. “He underlined the tremendous importance of India’s role in renewable energy, and encouraged the prime minister to continue to show strong global leadership on this issue,” Mr. Ban’s statement read.

The pope, who was the inaugural speaker of the day, was frequently interrupted by applause for his remarks, which included a full-throated endorsement of education for girls. In the balcony of the General Assembly hall, Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani girl and Nobel Peace Prize laureate who was shot in the head by the Taliban, was among those who clapped.

Francis praised world powers for reaching an agreement with Iran on its nuclear energy program. He also called for the elimination of nuclear weapons, at which Mohammad Javad Zarif, the foreign minister of Iran, sat up in his seat and applauded.

The pope did not dwell on the church’s notable difference with the global agenda: ensuring access to reproductive health and services. He spoke of “absolute respect for life in all its stages and dimensions.”

How governments will be held to account for their commitments to the goals remains unclear.

“The true test of commitment to Agenda 2030 will be implementation,” Mr. Ban told leaders. “We need action from everyone, everywhere.”

Salil Shetty, the secretary general for Amnesty International, speaking after Mr. Ban, said, “People should know exactly what governments have promised and what they have delivered — the right to information.”

He, too, scolded many of the powerful in the room, accusing them of hypocrisy.

“You cannot lecture about peace while being the world’s largest manufacturers of arms,” he said. “You cannot allow your corporations to use financial and tax loopholes while railing against corruption.”

Once the development summit meeting concludes on Sunday, many of the same presidents and prime ministers are to begin their annual debate in the General Assembly — and in the corridors, talk about war and peace.

The pope rebuked them, particularly “those charged with the conduct of international affairs,” for having failed to put an end to the many conflicts in the world, particularly in the Middle East.

“Real human beings take precedence over partisan interests, however legitimate the latter may be,” he said.

In what appeared to be a specific reference to the conflicts in Syria and Iraq, the pope said people “have faced the alternative either of fleeing or of paying for their adhesions to good and to peace by their own lives, or by enslavement.”

Ms. Merkel also referred to the refugees fleeing violence for Europe, and said peace was a “prerequisite” for development.

Francis also scolded global financial institutions, calling on them to ensure that countries “are not subjected to oppressive lending systems which, far from promoting progress, subject people to mechanisms which generate greater poverty, exclusion and dependence.”

The audience responded with loud applause.

The pope’s native Argentina — and, more recently, Greece — fought vigorously for a General Assembly resolution on a set of principles to resolve disputes between financially distressed countries and their lenders. The United States, Japan and Germany were among a handful of countries that voted against it. It passed, although it is not binding and has no real effect.

Correction: September 25, 2015

An earlier version of this article misstated the number of popes who have visited the United Nations headquarters. Pope Francis is the fourth pope to visit, not the fifth (though it is the fifth time the body has heard a pope speak; John Paul II addressed the United Nations twice).

Rick Gladstone contributed reporting from New York, and Coral Davenport from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on September 26, 2015, on page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Pope Francis Addresses U.N., Calling for Environmental Justice.

Pope Francis Addresses U.N.,
Calling for Peace and Environmental Justice,
NYT, SEPT. 25, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/26/world/europe/
pope-francis-united-nations.html

Pope Francis’ Challenge to America

SEPT. 24, 2015

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Editorial

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Pope Francis could not have had a more divided and needy audience than Congress to hear his creative, blunt demand to confront the problems of the nation and the world that Congress has made a political art of evading.

In an address of memorable passion and nuance, Francis focused widely on the divisive immigration issues at home and abroad, the economic divide driving poverty, the threat to the environment, the “brutal atrocities” and “simplistic reductionism” of the world’s continuing conflicts, and the need, above all, for “courageous actions and strategies” rather than “facile proposals” from leaders responsible for solutions.

Any listener expecting a safe exercise in euphemism amid the American presidential debate had to be delighted as the pope took a highly prescriptive path in reminding American leaders they must never forget the nation’s own roots of tolerance and equal justice. Cutting through the latest political talk about building ever bigger walls to keep immigrants out, Francis spoke to this nation of immigrants as a son of Latin American immigrants.

Of all his themes, Francis’ call for rational and just treatment of refugees here and abroad rang with the greatest passion and truth. “We must not be taken aback by their numbers, but rather view them as persons, seeing their faces and listening to their stories, trying to respond as best we can to their situation,” he said, a rebuke to the ugly diatribes of some in the presidential campaign.

Bursts of applause and cheers underlined the separate points lawmakers favored, but Congress remained rapt as he singled out a quartet of Americans as the embodiment of the nation’s history in advancing dreams of liberty, tolerance, social justice and reaching out to the world: Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton. The latter two were a decidedly pleasant surprise, reminders of Day’s poverty-focused labors as co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, and of the contemplative writings of Merton, the intellectual Trappist monk, whom he called “a promoter of peace between peoples and religions” and “a thinker who challenged the certitudes of his time.”

Throughout the speech, the pope offered his listeners a needed reminder of their potential and duty to make politics a creative calling in multiple spheres, including on poverty. In discussing Day, the pope praised her ceaseless struggle against the cycle of poverty. “Part of this great effort is the creation and distribution of wealth,” he declared to a roomful of politicians busy courting big-dollar campaign donors. And he repeated his call for leaders to protect “our common home” from “the environmental deterioration caused by human activity” — an issue that is anathema to some of the richest corporate donors.

On the question of human life, Francis stressed the need to “protect and defend human life at every stage of its development” — a point that seemed to allude to abortion. But in the very next sentence, he used this theme to speak at greater length about need for the global abolition of the death penalty.

As attuned to political subtext as well as any in the audience, he did not speak explicitly about the same-sex marriage movement. But he did warn that “fundamental relationships are being called into question, as is the very basis of marriage and the family.” He added, “I can only reiterate the importance and, above all, the richness and the beauty of family life,” a point that same-sex couples would certainly embrace.

Far from preaching, Pope Francis was gentle but firm in enunciating the nation’s ideals. For Americans frustrated by congressional gridlock and a looming government shutdown, there seemed an undertone of wistfulness and wisdom to Francis’ simple reminder to his highly partisan audience: “A good political leader is one who, with the interest of all in mind, seizes the moment in a spirit of openness and pragmatism.”

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A version of this editorial appears in print on September 25, 2015, on page A34 of the New York edition with the headline: Pope Francis’ Challenge to America.

Pope Francis’ Challenge to America,
NYT, SEPT. 24, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/25/opinion/pope-francis-challenge-to-america.html

Pope Francis, in Washington,

Addresses Poverty and Climate

SEPT. 23, 2015

The New York Times

By PETER BAKER

and MICHAEL D. SHEAR

WASHINGTON — Welcomed with a fanfare of trumpets and a chorus of amens, Pope Francis introduced himself to the United States on Wednesday with a bracing message on climate change, immigration and poverty that ranged from the pastoral to the political.

On a day that blended the splendor of an ancient church with the frenzy of a modern rock star tour, Francis waded quietly but forcefully into some of the most polarizing issues of American civic life. Along the way, he underscored just how much he has upended the agenda of the Roman Catholic Church and reordered its priorities.

Perhaps no one was more pleased than President Obama, who greeted him with an elaborate arrival ceremony at the White House, where the pope explicitly embraced the administration’s efforts to combat climate change. At a later speech to American bishops, Francis, the first pope from Latin America, pressed for openness to immigrants, marking a signal day for Hispanics in the United States.

While the last two popes focused on traditional moral issues like abortion and homosexuality, Francis left those to the side in Mr. Obama’s presence. With the bishops, he spoke about the “innocent victim of abortion” but mentioned the issue as only one of a long list of concerns, including children who die of hunger or in bombings, immigrants who “drown in the search for a better tomorrow” and an environment “devastated by man’s predatory relationship with nature.”

“Humanity has the ability to work together in building our common home,” the pope told a crowd of thousands on the South Lawn of the White House in his first major speech in English. “As Christians inspired by this certainty, we wish to commit ourselves to the conscious and responsible care of our common home.”

Still, in a low-key but evident break with Mr. Obama, Francis at the end of the day made a previously unannounced stop to see the nuns at the Little Sisters of the Poor to underscore his support for religious freedom, a Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said. The Little Sisters religious order sued the federal government over the birth control mandate in Mr. Obama’s Affordable Care Act.

Wearing his white cassock and skullcap, Francis was greeted everywhere he went by joyful crowds. Catholics and non-Catholics alike juggled their cellphones and small flags of the Holy See as they craned for a glimpse of the 266th pope — only the fourth to visit the United States and third to visit Washington.

The spiritual leader of 1.2 billion Catholics led a short parade around the Ellipse in his open-air popemobile, waving and making the sign of the cross as Vatican officials brought him babies to kiss. He later celebrated Mass for more than 20,000 people and presided over the first canonization in the United States.

In his first visit to the United States, Francis, 78, seemed eager to pass over his previous criticisms of a materialistic, capitalist culture and instead reach out to the world’s most powerful nation. He praised the country’s devotion to freedom of liberty and religion even as he cautioned that its vast resources demanded a deep sense of moral responsibility. “God bless America,” he said at the White House.

The pope arrived at the White House in a modest Fiat to find a crowd of 11,000 people, including Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Secretary of State John Kerry and Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic minority leader, all Catholics, as well as about half of the members of Congress. The White House rolled out its best color guards, including a fife-and-drum corps, but opted against the 21-gun salute that is traditional for such ceremonies.

Mr. Obama thanked the pope for his help in restoring American diplomatic relations with Cuba and hailed him for speaking out for the world’s most impoverished. “You shake our conscience from slumber,” he said. “You call on us to rejoice in good news and give us confidence that we can come together, in humility and service, and pursue a world that is more loving, more just and more free.”

In his own remarks, the pope noted the country’s origins at a time when critics of illegal immigration were pushing to build a wall at the southern border. “As the son of an immigrant family, I am happy to be a guest in this country, which was largely built by such families,” Francis said.

He devoted more of his address to climate change than any other topic. “Mr. President,” Francis said, “I find it encouraging that you are proposing an initiative for reducing air pollution.” He added that there was still time to heal the planet for its children. “To use a telling phrase of the Rev. Martin Luther King, we can say that we have defaulted on a promissory note, and now is the time to honor it,” he said.

The ceremony brought together two men with starkly disparate backgrounds and yet commonalities that have united them now, a community organizer from Chicago and a priest from Argentina, both presenting themselves as champions of those without any. While they first met last year at the Vatican, their appearance on Wednesday carried a visual and possibly a political power that solidified the impression of a secular-theological alliance.

Republicans, who have said they disagree with the pope on climate change and capitalism, nonetheless largely kept such thoughts to themselves and instead focused instead on the majesty of the day. Former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, a Republican presidential candidate who converted to Catholicism, attended the afternoon Mass with the pope and posted a picture on Twitter.

After meeting alone with the president and an interpreter in the Oval Office, the pope went to the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle, where the crowd swelled so deep that for many the only sign of the pope’s arrival was a cheer echoing through nearby streets. A crowd of more than 50 people inside a restaurant pressed against windows facing the cathedral and stood eagerly on chairs to get a better view.

As the pope entered the cathedral, the rector, Msgr. W. Ronald Jameson, threw his arms open wide. As he walked down the church’s center aisle between rows of bishops in pink zucchettos, some of them held up phones and cameras to take pictures.

Archbishop Alexander Sample of Portland, Ore., posted on Twitter from his seat in the pews: “Pope Francis has arrived!”

Addressing nearly 300 bishops, whom he referred to as his brothers, the pope was warm and encouraging, but he also spoke clearly and with simple language that was unmistakable in its emphasis. He praised the bishops for their work on behalf of immigrants, and for the first time praised their “courage” in handling the church’s sexual abuse scandals.

“I am also conscious of the courage with which you have faced difficult moments in the recent history of the church in this country without fear of self-criticism and at the cost of mortification and great sacrifice,” the pope told the bishops.

Those remarks brought applause from the bishops but later drew indignation from survivors of sexual abuse and their advocates. Dennis Coday, the editor of The National Catholic Reporter, an independent outlet that helped reveal sexual abuse by priests, said the pope’s comments would prompt victims to conclude, “He just doesn’t get it.”

Speaking to bishops who have not always agreed with his spiritual emphasis, the pope said that he had “not come to judge you or to lecture you.” But he said the “style of our mission” should make parishioners feel that the message was meant for them. “Be pastors close to people, pastors who are neighbors and servants,” he instructed.

Francis also pressed his case for particular attention to immigrants and refugees as a primary responsibility of the church. Speaking of the recent surge of migration from Latin America, he acknowledged that parishes may be “challenged by their diversity.”

“But know that they also possess resources meant to be shared — so do not be afraid to welcome them,” he said. “I am certain that, as so often in the past, these people will enrich America and its church.”

Latinos who flocked to see the pontiff said they were not surprised that he would highlight an issue of critical importance to a community with increasing influence in American politics — and an expanding target for political backlash.
Continue reading the main story
Francis in America: Popemobiles Through Time

“He understands Americans — he is one,” Oscar Lefranc, 55, said. “He’s lived it. He’s experienced it.”

Later in the afternoon, the pope went to the campus of Catholic University of America to celebrate his first Mass in the United States and to canonize Junípero Serra, a Franciscan who founded missions across California in the 1700s.

The pope greeted the enthusiastic crowd before entering the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, the nation’s largest Roman Catholic church.

Before the homily, the pope declared Father Serra to be a saint. “Having given mature deliberation and having begged the help of divine grace, and the opinion of many of our brothers, blessed Junípero Serra we discern and define to be a saint,” the pope said, speaking in Spanish.

Olga Herrera, 30, and eight other members of a young-adults group at St. Camillus Catholic Church of Silver Spring, Md., all of them from Guatemala, cheered when Francis accepted the proclamation made on behalf of Father Serra’s sainthood.

Correction: September 23, 2015

An earlier version of this article misstated the church group that Olga Herrera was with when Pope Francis accepted the proclamation made on behalf of Junípero Serra’s sainthood. It was the group with St. Camillus Catholic Church of Silver Spring, Md., not the group with St. Catherine Laboure Church in Wheaton, Md.

Peter Baker reported from Washington, and Michael D. Shear from New York. Reporting from Washington was contributed by Nicholas Fandos, Laurie Goodstein, Fernanda Santos, Jada Smith and Jim Yardley.

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A version of this article appears in print on September 24, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Pope’s First U.S. Message Is Pastoral and Political.

Pope Francis, in Washington, Addresses Poverty and Climate,
NYT, Sept. 23, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/24/us/politics/
pope-francis-obama-white-house.html

Bigotry, the Bible

and the Lessons of Indiana

APRIL 3, 2015

The New York Times

SundayReview | Op-Ed Columnist

Frank Bruni

THE drama in Indiana last week and the larger debate over so-called religious freedom laws in other states portray homosexuality and devout Christianity as forces in fierce collision.

They’re not — at least not in several prominent denominations, which have come to a new understanding of what the Bible does and doesn’t decree, of what people can and cannot divine in regard to God’s will.

And homosexuality and Christianity don’t have to be in conflict in any church anywhere.

That many Christians regard them as incompatible is understandable, an example not so much of hatred’s pull as of tradition’s sway. Beliefs ossified over centuries aren’t easily shaken.

But in the end, the continued view of gays, lesbians and bisexuals as sinners is a decision. It’s a choice. It prioritizes scattered passages of ancient texts over all that has been learned since — as if time had stood still, as if the advances of science and knowledge meant nothing.

It disregards the degree to which all writings reflect the biases and blind spots of their authors, cultures and eras.

It ignores the extent to which interpretation is subjective, debatable.

And it elevates unthinking obeisance above intelligent observance, above the evidence in front of you, because to look honestly at gay, lesbian and bisexual people is to see that we’re the same magnificent riddles as everyone else: no more or less flawed, no more or less dignified.

Most parents of gay children realize this. So do most children of gay parents. It’s a truth less ambiguous than any Scripture, less complicated than any creed.

So our debate about religious freedom should include a conversation about freeing religions and religious people from prejudices that they needn’t cling to and can indeed jettison, much as they’ve jettisoned other aspects of their faith’s history, rightly bowing to the enlightenments of modernity.

“Human understanding of what is sinful has changed over time,” said David Gushee, an evangelical Christian who teaches Christian ethics at Mercer University. He openly challenges his faith’s censure of same-sex relationships, to which he no longer subscribes.

For a very long time, he noted, “Many Christians thought slavery wasn’t sinful, until we finally concluded that it was. People thought contraception was sinful when it began to be developed, and now very few Protestants and not that many Catholics would say that.” They hold an evolved sense of right and wrong, even though, he added, “You could find scriptural support for the idea that all sex should be procreative.”

Christians have also moved far beyond Scripture when it comes to gender roles.

“In the United States, we have abandoned the idea that women are second-class, inferior and subordinate to men, but the Bible clearly teaches that,” said Jimmy Creech, a former United Methodist pastor who was removed from ministry in the church after he performed a same-sex marriage ceremony in 1999. “We have said: That’s a part of the culture and history of the Bible. That is not appropriate for us today.”

And we could say the same about the idea that men and women in loving same-sex relationships are doing something wrong. In fact the United Church of Christ, the Episcopal Church and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) have said that. So have most American Catholics, in defiance of their church’s teaching.

And it’s a vital message because of something that Indiana demonstrated anew: Religion is going to be the final holdout and most stubborn refuge for homophobia. It will give license to discrimination. It will cause gay and lesbian teenagers in fundamentalist households to agonize needlessly: Am I broken? Am I damned?

“Conservative Christian religion is the last bulwark against full acceptance of L.G.B.T. people,” Gushee said.

Polls back him up. A majority of Americans support marriage equality, including a majority of Catholics and most Jews. But a 2014 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute showed that while 62 percent of white mainline Protestants favor same-sex marriages, only 38 percent of black Protestants, 35 percent of Hispanic Protestants and 28 percent of white evangelical Protestants do.

And as I’ve written before, these evangelical Protestants wield considerable power in the Republican primaries, thus speaking in a loud voice on the political stage. It’s no accident that none of the most prominent Republicans believed to be contending for the presidency favor same-sex marriage and that none of them joined the broad chorus of outrage over Indiana’s discriminatory religious freedom law. They had the Iowa caucuses and the South Carolina primary to worry about.

Could this change? There’s a rapidly growing body of impressive, persuasive literature that looks at the very traditions and texts that inform many Christians’ denunciation of same-sex relationships and demonstrates how easily those points of reference can be understood in a different way.

Gushee’s take on the topic, “Changing Our Mind,” was published late last year. It joined Jeff Chu’s “Does Jesus Really Love Me?” published in 2013, and “Bible, Gender, Sexuality: Reframing the Church’s Debate on Same-Sex Relationships,” by James Brownson, which was published in 2013.

Then there’s the 2014 book “God and the Gay Christian,” by Matthew Vines, who has garnered significant attention and drawn large audiences for his eloquent take on what the New Testament — which is what evangelicals draw on and point to — really communicates.

Evaluating its sparse invocations of homosexuality, he notes that there wasn’t any awareness back then that same-sex attraction could be a fundamental part of a person’s identity, or that same-sex intimacy could be an expression of love within the context of a nurturing relationship.

“It was understood as a kind of excess, like drunkenness, that a person might engage in if they lost all control, not as a unique identity,” Vines told me, adding that Paul’s rejection of same-sex relations in Romans I was “akin to his rejection of drunkenness or his rejection of gluttony.”

And Vines said that the New Testament, like the Old Testament, outlines bad and good behaviors that almost everyone deems archaic and irrelevant today. Why deem the descriptions of homosexual behavior any differently?

Creech and Mitchell Gold, a prominent furniture maker and gay philanthropist, founded an advocacy group, Faith in America, which aims to mitigate the damage done to L.G.B.T. people by what it calls “religion-based bigotry.”

Gold told me that church leaders must be made “to take homosexuality off the sin list.”

His commandment is worthy — and warranted. All of us, no matter our religious traditions, should know better than to tell gay people that they’re an offense. And that’s precisely what the florists and bakers who want to turn them away are saying to them.

I invite you to visit my blog, follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/frankbruni and join me on Facebook.

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A version of this op-ed appears in print on April 5, 2015, on page SR3 of the New York edition with the headline: Same-Sex Sinners?.

Bigotry, the Bible and the Lessons of Indiana,
NYT, APRIL 3, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/opinion/sunday/frank-bruni-same-sex-sinners.html

A Twist of Faith in Brutal Captivity

 

FEB. 21, 2015

The New York Times

By JIM YARDLEY

VATICAN CITY — The Islamic State’s beheading in August of the journalist James Foley stirred global outrage, fury and despair. But for many of his fellow Roman Catholics, Mr. Foley’s death in Syria transformed him into a symbol of faith under the most brutal of conditions.

One Catholic essayist compared him to St. Bartholomew, who died for his Christian faith. Others were drawn to Mr. Foley’s account of praying the rosary during an earlier captivity in Libya. Even Pope Francis, in a condolence call to Mr. Foley’s parents, described him as a martyr, according to the family.

Then came an unexpected twist: It turned out that Mr. Foley was among several hostages in Syria who had converted to Islam in captivity, according to some freed captives. What had been among some Catholics a theological discussion of faith and heroic resistance quickly shifted to a different set of questions:

Is any conversion under such duress a legitimate one? Why would a man who had spoken so openly about his Catholic faith turn to Islam? Given his circumstances, is it even surprising if he did?

“How do we assess that?” asked the Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest and editor at large of the Catholic magazine America, who described Mr. Foley as “a good and holy man” and expressed doubts about the genuineness of his conversion. “The answer is we can’t assess it. We cannot look at what is in someone’s soul.”

Religious faith is often described as a deeply sustaining force for people in captivity, providing comfort, strength and hope. The family of Kayla Mueller, who died this month while being held hostage by the Islamic State in Syria, recently released a letter Ms. Mueller had written in captivity in which she described surrendering herself to God and feeling “tenderly cradled in free-fall.”

Faith can also be a practical force, experts say, in that prayer or reading religious texts can provide order and discipline to days otherwise defined by fear or brutality, or even just boredom. And practical, also, as a means of survival: Some freed hostages describe converting to Islam as a tactic to win favor and sympathy from their captors.

For many Catholics, issues such as religious persecution, forced conversion and martyrdom are distressingly current. Pope Francis has frequently inveighed against the persecution of Christians in the Middle East, where militants with the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, have ordered some Christians to convert or face death.

This month, Francis invoked the death of John the Baptist as the model of Christian sacrifice, citing the “men, women, children who are being persecuted, hated, driven out of their homes, tortured, massacred.”

Martyrdom, he added, “is not a thing of the past: This is happening right now.”

To many Catholics, Mr. Foley’s death seemed infused with religious overtones. A former altar boy who grew up in a Catholic family, Mr. Foley had volunteered in low-income schools while attending Marquette University in Milwaukee, and then joined Teach for America. Shifting to photojournalism, he immersed himself in conflict reporting, working as a freelancer in Iraq and Afghanistan and then covering the Libyan civil war in 2011.

Pushing to the chaotic front lines, Mr. Foley and three other journalists were ambushed by forces loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, then Libya’s ruler. A photographer, Anton Hammerl, was killed. Mr. Foley and the other two surviving journalists were taken hostage and spent 44 days in captivity as family members and former classmates at Marquette campaigned for his freedom and organized prayer vigils on his behalf.

Upon his release, Mr. Foley wrote a letter of thanks to Marquette in which he also described the importance of his Catholic faith during his captivity. He and a cellmate prayed aloud “to speak our weaknesses and hopes together, as if in a conversation with God,” he said, and he also prayed the rosary to connect with his mother.

“I prayed I could communicate through some cosmic reach of the universe to her,” he wrote. “I began to pray the rosary. It was what my mother and grandmother would have prayed.”

His open discussion of his spirituality would resurface after Mr. Foley was taken captive again in 2012, in Syria, and then after his grisly death last August. On social media, many Catholics found inspiration in his earlier words and in accounts by freed captives describing Mr. Foley as someone who often gave away his food or blanket to others but never buckled to his captors.

Some Catholic commentators suggested Mr. Foley might be a candidate for Catholic martyrdom, a complicated process that involves determining if a person was killed because of his or her faith. Others praised him but questioned whether such talk was appropriate and whether his killers’ motivation had been more political than religious.

Then, in October, an article in The New York Times detailed the brutality endured by Mr. Foley and others in captivity, while also quoting freed hostages as saying Mr. Foley and others had converted to Islam. Mr. Foley was described as particularly devout and as a fervent reader of the Quran. In an interview earlier this month, one freed captive, Nicolas Hénin, said Mr. Foley seemed the most interested of the group in learning about Islam and that his conversion appeared genuine, even if Mr. Hénin could not be certain.

“I was not inside his mind,” he said.

Some Catholics were startled. But for Mr. Foley’s mother, Diane, the disclosure was not new. She said that she had spoken months earlier with Jejoen Bontinck, a Belgian former captive who is Muslim, after his release, and that he had described her son’s conversion as a genuine act. Then, after French and Spanish captives were released, Ms. Foley said she received a somewhat different version of events.

“What the hostages had told me was that by saying that he had converted to Islam, he would be left alone five times a day, without being beaten, so that he could pray,” she said in an interview.

Like others, Ms. Foley, who is a Eucharistic minister at her parish in New Hampshire, described her son as deeply interested in spirituality and the faiths of other people. But she still strongly believes that her son died as a Christian and that his conversion was an act of practicality.

“Only God and Jim know what was going on in his heart,” she said. “I think the Lord used Jim in a magnificent way in the last two years of his life. He gave hope to his fellow captives.”

The issue also arose after Mr. Foley’s captivity in Libya. In a series of articles in Global Post, as well as during an appearance at Marquette, Mr. Foley described how he had agreed to pray with his Muslim cellmates, jailed as enemies of the Qaddafi government. He was surprised when, after he had washed himself, they declared him converted.

“So, from then on out, I prayed with them five times a day,” he said at Marquette. “It was so powerful, and it was something I needed to do to commune with these guys who were relying on their faith in Allah. But it was difficult. I was thinking, ‘Jesus, am I praying to Allah? Am I violating my belief in you?’ ”

“I don’t have an answer to that,” he continued. “I just know that I was authentically with them, and I was authentically praying to Jesus. I don’t know theologically. But I thought I was being authentic.”

His family said his Syrian captivity was much the same.

“I believe, much like in Libya, Jim ‘converted’ for the purpose of surviving and being close to some of the others there, and to have some discipline,” said Michael Foley, one of his brothers, adding, “I’ll bet you and I would strongly explore ‘converting’ in that situation.”

At the Vatican, Cardinal Angelo Amato, prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, said he was unaware of any discussion of martyrdom for Mr. Foley, noting that such a process can take decades or centuries. But he did say that any religious conversion “not done freely does not indicate a conversion.”

“You can’t condemn people who are afraid of dying and so don’t show themselves as Catholic,” Cardinal Amato said. “A Christian is not obliged to be a martyr.”

Nicole Tung, a photographer who worked closely with Mr. Foley in Syria, described his faith as “deep within him” and said he knew the Bible so well that he often had broad discussions with Syrians comparing Christianity with Islam.

But Ms. Tung said she thought Mr. Foley would be uncomfortable with being considered a martyr. She described his journalism as commingled with a powerful compassion: He helped raise $14,000 to buy an ambulance for children in Aleppo, Syria, just as he helped organize an earlier fund-raiser for the family of Mr. Hammerl, the photographer who was killed in Libya.

“As a humanitarian and as a journalist,” Ms. Tung said, “was really how he conducted himself.”
 

A version of this article appears in print on February 22, 2015, on page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: A Test of Faith in Brutal Captivity.

A Twist of Faith in Brutal Captivity, NYT,
FEB. 21, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/world/europe/keeping-the-faith-in-brutal-captivity.html

In Chapel Hill Shooting of 3 Muslims,

a Question of Motive

 

FEB. 11, 2015

The New York Times

By JONATHAN M. KATZ

and RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — It was a little after 5 p.m., a quiet time in a quiet neighborhood, before many people had returned home from work on Tuesday, when two women called 911 to report multiple gunshots and screams echoing through a condominium complex here near the University of North Carolina.

By the time the police arrived, three people were dead — a newlywed couple and the woman’s sister. They were young university students, Muslims of Arab descent, and high achievers who regularly volunteered in the area. A neighbor, a middle-aged white man, was missing — then under arrest and charged with three counts of murder.

The victims’ families described it as a hate crime. The police said that the shooting appeared to have been motivated by “an ongoing neighbor dispute over parking,” but that they were investigating whether religious hatred had contributed to the killings.

“To have him come in here and shoot three different innocent people in their head — I don’t know what kind of person that is,” said Namee Barakat, the father of the male victim, Deah Shaddy Barakat.

The first of two 911 calls, made at 5:11 p.m. on Tuesday, reporting a shooting in Chapel Hill, N.C. The caller describes hearing “multiple, between five and 10” gunshots and “kids screaming.”

The killings immediately set off a debate throughout the world over whether the students had been targeted because of their religion, with Muslims picking up some of the language of those who protested police shootings in the United States, using the phrase #muslimlivesmatter.

Even as Chapel Hill awoke on Wednesday, frustration had already spread on Twitter throughout Europe and Asia, as Muslims as far away as Indonesia shared photographs and details of the victims’ lives.

The Chapel Hill police quickly tried to tamp down the fears, releasing a morning statement that identified parking as the cause of the dispute, without confirming whether the victims had been shot in the head. The police chief, Chris Blue, added, “We understand the concerns about the possibility that this was hate-motivated, and we will exhaust every lead to determine if that is the case.”

In the afternoon, Ripley Rand, the United States attorney for the region, said the shooting appeared to have been “an isolated incident” and “not part of a targeted campaign against Muslims.”

Friends and neighbors struggled to make sense of what had happened. Those who knew the victims — identified as Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, 21; her husband, Mr. Barakat, 23; and her sister, Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, 19 — said they were all model students from well-educated, successful local families.

They had nonetheless run into previous problems over parking with the man who was arrested, Craig Stephen Hicks, 46, a former car parts salesman who was studying to be a paralegal at Durham Technical Community College.

He was one of their neighbors. They lived on opposite sides of the two-story Finley Forest complex on Summerwalk Circle, where the shooting occurred — a condominium complex tucked into the woods about a mile and a half east of the main University of North Carolina campus. Residents said Mr. Hicks’s apartment was adjacent to the main parking lot; the students lived on the other side, where little parking could be found.

Mohammad Yousif Abu-Salha, the father of the two women who were killed, said Yusor had told him that she and her husband had been harassed for their appearance by a neighbor who was wearing a gun on his belt. On his Facebook page, Mr. Hicks recently posted a photograph of what he said was his .38-caliber, five-shot revolver.

A friend of Yusor said she knew that Mr. Hicks had complained to the couple before about making noise and the use of parking spaces by their visitors, and that he once came to their door carrying a rifle.

It is not clear whether they ever called the police about the altercations.

Their Facebook pages and other material online show a cheerful threesome who were devoted to family and charitable work. Mr. Barakat was a second-year student at the university’s graduate school of dentistry, and his wife was set to enroll in the same school later this year. Her sister was an undergraduate at North Carolina State University who had recently won an award for her artistic talents.

“They were gems of their communities and left a lasting impression on the people around them,” Suzanne Barakat, a sister of Deah Barakat, said Wednesday, reading a brief statement while flanked by several tearful family members. “We are still in a state of shock and will never be able to make sense of this horrendous tragedy.”

Mr. Hicks appeared to have a deep dislike of all religion. On his Facebook page, nearly all of his posts expressed support for atheism, criticism of Christian conservatives or both.

Last month, he posted a photograph that said, “Praying is pointless, useless, narcissistic, arrogant, and lazy; just like the imaginary god you pray to.”

Mr. Hicks’s wife, Karen, insisted at a news conference that her husband was not a bigot. “I can say with absolute belief that this incident had nothing to do with religion or the victims’ faith, but it was related to a longstanding parking dispute that my husband had with the neighbors,” she said.

His wife also pointed out his support for gay rights and the right to abortion.

Karen Hicks, the wife of Craig Stephen Hicks, who is accused of murdering three Muslim students, said he championed individuals’ rights on his Facebook page and believed everyone was equal.

But her comments and the Police Department’s caution about what was behind the fatal confrontation did not convince relatives of the dead who were familiar with details of the episode. One 911 caller, at 5:11 p.m. Tuesday, said she had heard five to 10 shots and “kids screaming.” Another, calling a minute later, said she had heard about eight shots and multiple people screaming, then a pause, and then three more shots.

The victims were shot inside an apartment, according to one of the calls, and family members said the police told them they had been shot in the head.

Mr. Barakat questioned the premise that a parking dispute alone could lead to such killings. “We all know it’s about more than that, unfortunately,” he said.

Many Muslims in the area of North Carolina known as the Research Triangle, where universities and technology companies are major employers, said they had been on edge in recent weeks. Although the area is dotted with mosques and interfaith events are a staple at universities and houses of worship, tensions have been rising since the Charlie Hebdo shootings in Paris, according to several Muslim leaders. Last month, Duke University abruptly canceled plans to broadcast the Muslim call to prayer on Fridays, citing security concerns, after Franklin Graham, the son of the evangelist Billy Graham, raised vehement objections on Facebook.

Broadcasting the call to prayer from a church bell tower, intended as a symbol of religious inclusion, instead became a source of religious division.

“There is a tendency to say, ‘This is a nice place, these eruptions of violence don’t belong here,’ ” said Omid Safi, the director of the Duke Islamic Studies Center and a professor of Islamic studies. “And yet here we are. This is, in all of the heartbreak and violence and sadness, where we are.”

Linda Sarsour, a longtime Arab-American activist in Brooklyn, who said she was working with the family, added that for those who fear mistreatment, the episode “sends a message to other young people in the Muslim community that the fear is valid.”

Much of their rage online addressed a perceived double standard in the news media, with posts saying that the killing of three Muslims was not receiving much attention.

In fact, the police did not release the names of the victims or the accused until after 2 a.m. Wednesday; Mr. Hicks turned himself in to sheriff’s deputies in Pittsboro, a few miles away, but it was not clear when. During a court appearance Wednesday, a judge ordered him held without bond. By that point, most major American news organizations had reported the story, but that did not slow the allegations of news media neglect.

The #muslimlivesmatter hashtag echoed the #blacklivesmatter hashtag that gained popularity after the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner at the hands of police officers. Both tap into a sense of grievance in minority communities that feel marginalized and disrespected.

To share the achievements of the slain students, friends and family members created a Facebook page, Our Three Winners, early Wednesday. Several of the posts showed images of Mr. Barakat and Yusor Abu-Salha at their wedding.

Friends also praised Mr. Barakat’s work with a charity that provided dental supplies to the poor, and noted that he planned to travel to Turkey to provide dental care to refugees from the civil war in Syria, narrating a video to raise money.

On the U.N.C. campus on Wednesday evening, thousands packed the central plaza known as the Pit in a silent, dramatic show of solidarity. Dozens of friends and relatives offered remembrances. One, who did not give her name, concluded her speech: “Muslim lives matter. All lives matter.”
 

Jonathan M. Katz reported from Chapel Hill, N.C., and Richard Pérez-Peña from New York. Laurie Goodstein and Richard A. Oppel Jr. contributed reporting from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on February 12, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: In Killing of 3 Muslims, a Question of Motive.

In Chapel Hill Shooting of 3 Muslims, a Question of Motive,
FEB 11, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/12/us/muslim-student-shootings-north-carolina.html

Obama,

Trying to Add Context to Speech,

Faces Backlash Over ‘Crusades’

 

FEB. 6, 2015

The New York Times

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR

WASHINGTON — President Obama personally added a reference to the Crusades in his speech this week at the National Prayer Breakfast, aides said, hoping to add context and nuance to his condemnation of Islamic terrorists by noting that people also “committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.”

But by purposely drawing the fraught historical comparison on Thursday, Mr. Obama ignited a firestorm on television and social media about the validity of his observations and the roots of religious conflicts that raged more than 800 years ago.

On Twitter, amateur historians angrily accused Mr. Obama of refusing to acknowledge Muslim aggression that preceded the Crusades. Others criticized him for drawing simplistic analogies across centuries. Many suggested that the president was reaching for ways to excuse or minimize the recent atrocities committed by Islamic extremists.

“I’m not surprised, I guess,” said Thomas Asbridge, a medieval historian and director of the Center for the Study of Islam and the West at the University of London. “Any use of the word ‘Crusade’ has to be made with great caution. It is the most highly charged word you can use in the context of the Middle East.”

It was, Mr. Obama’s aides said, not entirely an accident. The president wanted to be provocative in his remarks, they said, urging people to see how the current brutality of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, fits in the broader sweep of a global history that has often given rise to what he called “a sinful tendency that can pervert and distort our faith.”

They described the president as eager to use the prayer breakfast to make people think about the need to stand up against those who try to use faith to justify violence, no matter what religion they practice.

Still, White House officials said the president did not expect to start a full-throated, daylong debate about the Crusades. And they expressed surprise that a single sentence in the speech had generated such an outcry.

“What he wanted to do is take on perversions of religions that are out there,” a senior White House adviser said, requesting anonymity to discuss the president’s speechwriting process. “He wanted to make the point that this isn’t the first time we’ve seen faith perverted and it won’t be the last.”

The first and loudest response to Mr. Obama’s remarks came from partisans, who accused the president of offending millions of Christians with an ill-considered comparison of the Islamic terrorist threat to the territorial attacks in Europe in the 11th century.

Michelle Malkin, a conservative columnist, said on Twitter that “ISIS chops off heads, incinerates hostages, kills gays, enslaves girls. Obama: Blame the Crusades.”

But the conversation quickly moved beyond the usual suspects. Many of the commentators on Friday came to the defense of the Crusades, arguing that the brutal sweeps through Europe were a reaction to previous Muslim advances.

Mr. Asbridge, who has written a series of histories of the period, said that view of the Crusades is held by relatively few historians. Most believe, he said, that the Christian Crusades were attempts to reclaim sacred territories, rather than reaction to Muslim actions more than 450 years earlier.

“I don’t necessarily have a problem with President Obama attempting to remind people that there is a history of violence by Christians,” he said. “But we have to be very careful about judging behavior in medieval times by current standards.”

Deborah E. Lipstadt, a professor of modern Jewish history at Emory University, said the president’s remarks seemed to be an attempt to avoid alienating Muslims by blaming their religion for groups like ISIS.

She said the remarks at the prayer breakfast will rightly bolster critics who insist that Mr. Obama should simply say that the United States is at war with Islam.

“He has bent over backwards to try to separate this from Islam,” Ms. Lipstadt said. “Sometimes people try to keep an open mind. And when you have too open a mind, your brains can fall out.”

In Mr. Obama’s remarks at the breakfast, he also managed to anger people in India, just days after being hosted by the country’s leaders during a three-day trip to New Delhi. In the speech, Mr. Obama called India “an incredible, beautiful country,” but he added that it is “a place where, in past years, religious faiths of all types have, on occasion, been targeted by other peoples of faith, simply due to their heritage and their beliefs — acts of intolerance that would have shocked Gandhiji.”

Indian news channels ran Mr. Obama’s remarks as top news for most of the day Friday, prompting senior ministers to issue public remarks in response. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley responded by saying that India “has a huge cultural history of tolerance. Any aberration doesn’t alter the history.”

Eric Schultz, the deputy White House press secretary, said Friday that he had no response to critics of Mr. Obama’s speech, but he described the president’s remarks as in keeping with his “belief in American exceptionalism,” which stems in part from “holding ourselves up to our own values.”

“So the president believes that when we fall short of that, we need to be honest with ourselves and look inward and hold ourselves accountable,” Mr. Schultz said. “What I think the president was trying to say is, over the course of human history, there are times where extremists pervert their own religion to justify violence.”

Julie Hirschfeld Davis contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on February 7, 2015, on page A11 of the New York edition with the headline: Obama, Trying to Add Context to Speech, Faces Backlash Over ‘Crusades’.

Obama, Trying to Add Context to Speech, Faces Backlash Over ‘Crusades’,
FEB 6, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/07/us/obama-trying-to-add-context-to-speech-faces-backlash-over-crusades.html

Maher Hathout,

a Powerful Voice

for American Muslims,

Dies at 79

JAN. 10, 2015

The New York Times

By SAM ROBERTS

Maher Hathout, an Egyptian-born cardiologist who became an influential American Muslim leader, preaching interfaith comity and helping to sustain the Islamic faithful in the United States against the backlash after the 9/11 attacks, died on Jan. 3 in Duarte, Calif. He was 79.

His death, at a hospital near Los Angeles, was confirmed by Salam al-Marayati, president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, which Dr. Hathout helped found in 1988. He had been treated for liver cancer.

For decades Dr. Hathout encouraged American Muslims to join the multicultural mosaic of the United States.

“He represented free and critical thinking in helping Muslims face contemporary challenges and bring congruence between living as a Muslim and as an American,” Mr. Marayati said. “He influenced many young Muslims to participate in civic life, people who now lead in major government, media and philanthropic institutions.”

Both committed to his religion and patriotic to his adopted country, Dr. Hathout, the author of three books on Islam, called on American Muslims to embrace their dual identity, admonishing them that home was defined not by their roots in the Middle East or South Asia but by their present and future.

“Home is not where my grandparents are buried,” he said, “but where my grandchildren will be raised.”

That vision shaped his response to radical Islam. He repeatedly challenged reflexive juxtapositions of Muslims with terrorists, explaining to non-Muslims that terrorism was un-Islamic, and that the true meaning of “jihad” is an internal spiritual struggle of purification and promotion of social justice and human rights.

After Muslim suicide bombers killed 52 people in central London in 2005, Dr. Hathout carried that message directly to Muslims.

In a sermon to the Islamic Center of Southern California, which he also helped found, he declared: “It is our responsibility — young and old, parents, sons and daughters, teachers and students, leaders and activists — to rally together to plug the holes through which the distorting predators pass through and push the substances that kill brain cells and fill hearts with despair and hate.”

Dr. Hathout himself was no stranger to conflict.

Born in Egypt on Jan. 1, 1936, he enlisted as a student in the protest movement against Britain’s half-century occupation of his country. He was imprisoned for almost five years. After earning bachelor’s and medical degrees at Cairo University, he left Egypt in 1968 for Kuwait, then moved in 1971 to Buffalo, where he worked as a cardiologist and became active in the Muslim community.

Six years later, he settled in Los Angeles. He was joined there by his older brother, Dr. Hassan Hathout, at the Islamic Center of Southern California, which was notable for having placed a woman on its board of directors as early as 1952. There he helped start a coeducational youth group and a weekly nationally televised program about Islam.

In 1991, Dr. Hathout helped found the Religious Coalition Against War in the Middle East, became the first Muslim chairman of the Los Angeles Interfaith Council, and in 2000 was the first American Muslim to deliver the invocation at a Democratic national convention, in Los Angeles. Dr. Hathout was also a charter member of the Pacific Council on International Policy.

“He had the innate ability to embrace a lot of people who many people wouldn’t have embraced because of that ability to see something good and powerful in someone else,” said the Rev. Dr. Gwynne Guibord, an Episcopal priest who invited Dr. Hathout to join the board of her own interfaith center in Los Angeles.

He is survived by his wife, Dr. Ragaa Hathout; two children, Dr. Gasser Hathout and Samer Hathout-Blackshire; and four grandchildren.

Dr. Hathout had been prominent among American Muslims and leaders of other religions well before 2001, but the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath helped introduce him to a wider community seeking a credible, progressive voice that preached pluralism and integration.

Shortly after the attacks, Dr. Hathout said that Osama bin Laden’s appeal to Muslims to emulate the Sept. 11 terrorists had debased Islamic theology.

The Quran permitted “anyone to call on God for anything,” he explained. That said, he added, “It is for the Almighty to make the judgment of whether to act.”

Maher Hathout, a Powerful Voice for American Muslims, Dies at 79,
NYT,
Jan 10, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/11/us/
maher-hathout-a-powerful-voice-for-american-muslims-dies-at-79-.html