No decision from South Carolina on secession from the Episcopal Church: Anglican Ink, September 22, 2012 September 22, 2012
Posted by geoconger in 77th General Convention, Anglican Ink, South Carolina, The Episcopal Church.Tags: Mark Lawrence
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Bishop Mark J. Lawrence
The Bishop of South Carolina, the Rt. Rev. Mark J. Lawrence has written to the clergy of the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina urging them to hold fast, as no decision has so far been made by the diocese in response to the actions of the 77th General Convention in Indianapolis.
Read it all in Anglican Ink.
SSPX bishop threatened with expulsion: The Church of England Newspaper, September 20, 2012 September 22, 2012
Posted by geoconger in Canon Law, Church of England Newspaper, Roman Catholic Church.Tags: Richard Williamson, Society of St Pius X
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Bishop Richard Williamson of the SSPX
The controversial British bishop of the breakaway Catholic Society of St. Pius X, Richard Williamson, faces expulsion from his order following his unauthorized episcopal visit to a breakaway group in Brazil.
In a 6 Sept 2012 letter published on the SSPX website, the society’s superior for South America, Fr. Christian Bouchacourt said Bishop Williamson had committed a “serious act against the virtue of obedience” and “an attack upon the most elementary demands of courtesy” by confirming 100 people at the invitation of the prior of the breakaway Benedictine Monastery of the Holy Cross in Nova Friburgo in the Brazilian state of Rio de Janeiro.
Fr. Bouchacourt said the illicit confirmations had “deceived” those being confirmed as they had been led to believe the bishop was acting on behalf of the SSPX. The society, which has distanced itself from the bishop’s Holocaust-denial statements, is investigating the charges, which if proven true could result in his dismissal from the society.
First printed in The Church of England Newspaper.
Fighter Command honoured at Westminster Abbey: The Church of England Newspaper, September 20, 2012 September 22, 2012
Posted by geoconger in Church of England, Church of England Newspaper.Tags: Battle of Britain, Fighter Command, Prince of Wales, RAF, Westminster Abbey
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The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall honoured the men and women of Fighter Command last week at a service at Westminster Abbey commemorating the Battle of Britain.
The service began with the laying of wreaths at the RAF memorial by the Thames on London’s Embankment, moving to Westminster Abbey where some of the dwindling band of Hurricane and Spitfire pilots who defended the skies over Britain in the summer and fall of 1940 were welcomed by serving RAF members. A Spitfire of the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight provided a flypast as the service concluded.
“The few did not let us down; they displayed courage over fear and hope rather than despair” the Ven. Raymond Pentland, Chaplain-in-Chief of the RAF, told the congregation at the 16 Sept 2012 service.
First printed in The Church of England Newspaper.
Anglo-Catholic seminaries to ink mission agreement: The Church of England Newspaper, September 20, 2012. September 22, 2012
Posted by geoconger in Church of England, Church of England Newspaper, The Episcopal Church.Tags: Nashotah House, St Stephen's House, theological education
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Two Anglo-Catholic seminaries will sign a covenant next month in Oxford to strengthen the Catholic witness in the Anglican Communion. The Episcopal Church’s sole Anglo-Catholic seminary, Nashotah House in Wisconsin, and St. Stephen’s House in Oxford on 4 Oct 2012 will endorse “Strengthening the Bonds of Affection: A Mutual Covenant for Ministry” that pledges the schools to a programme of mutual ministry.
The schools will adopt a joint mission statement, create a seminarian exchange programme and coordinate their academic priorities. “Both St. Stephen’s House and Nashotah House share a common and rich ancestry, emerging from the Catholic Revival of the nineteenth century,” said the Bishop Edward L. Salmon, Jr., Nashotah House dean, “and by working together we can be a monumental blessing to our church and to our world.”
The Rev. Canon Robin Ward, principal of St. Stephen’s House noted “St. Stephen’s House and Nashotah House are the preeminent Anglo-Catholic seminaries serving the Anglican Communion today, and affirming our common heritage while seeking new ways to expand our vision together will plant seeds that, by God’s grace, will produce fruit – fifty, sixty and even a hundred fold.”
First printed in The Church of England Newspaper.
Windfall for Vancouver Island parish: The Church of England Newspaper, September 20, 2012 September 22, 2012
Posted by geoconger in Anglican Church of Canada, Church of England Newspaper.Tags: huanghuali yokeback armchairs, St Matthias Anglican Church Victoria British Columbia
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A cash strapped Canadian parish has received a windfall after auctioning two antique Chinese armchairs found in the parish hall. On 11 Sept 2012 St. Matthias Anglican Church in Victoria, British Columbia sold a pair of 300-year-old Qing dynasty “huanghuali yokeback armchairs” at auction at Sotheby’s in New York for £400,000.
The chairs had been given to St. Matthias at some time in the church’s history, but their provenance is unknown. An antiques buff attending a Bible study in the parish hall noticed the chairs and recommended they be appraised.
The sale comes at a fortuitous time for St. Matthias as in 2009 approximately 95 per cent of the church’s members quit the diocese to join the Anglican Church in North America. The 30 parishioners left at St. Matthias had been unable to maintain the property or support the church’s ministry. Their discovery was a “godsend” said the rector, the Rev. Robert Arril, and would allow the church to carry on.
First printed in The Church of England Newspaper.
Pakistan church torched by Muslim mob: Anglican Ink, September 21, 2012 September 22, 2012
Posted by geoconger in Anglican Ink, Church of Pakistan, Islam, Persecution.Tags: Diocese of Peshawar, Humphrey Peters, Innocence of Muslims, Mardan, Samuel Azariah
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St Paul’s Mardan
A Muslim mob has set fire to a church and looted its school in response to Western acts of “blasphemy” against Muhammad. Reports from Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province near the border with Afghanistan remain unclear on the size and motivation of the mob, however, the Church of Pakistan and the security services police have confirmed the assault and looting of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church and St Paul’s High School in Mardan.
On 21 Sept 2012 the mob, a several thousand strong mob stormed the compound after Friday prayers. The Diocese of Peshawar reports the church was set alight and the homes of its two priests and the school’s headmaster were destroyed. The school, which serves the Christian and Muslim community, was ransacked and newly installed computers taken away by the mob.
“The damage has been very severe, and we will need to rebuild. We are asking for people around the world to keep us in your prayers,” said Bishop Humphrey Peters of Peshawar.
Read it all in Anglican Ink.
Supreme Court date set for Harare property cases: Anglican Ink, September 20, 2012 September 22, 2012
Posted by geoconger in Church of England Newspaper, Church of the Province of Central Africa, Property Litigation, Zimbabwe.Tags: Chad Gandiya, Diocese of Harare, Nolbert Kunonga
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Nolbert Kunonga
The Supreme Court of Zimbabwe has agreed to hear the appeal of Bishop Chad Gandiya and the Diocese of Harare in its suit to recover the properties expropriated by former bishop Dr. Nolbert Kunonga.
In an email to supporters in the West, Bishop Gandiya reported “the Supreme Court hearing will take place from the 22 October 2012 and will last that week.”
Elected bishop of Harare in 2000, Dr. Kunonga withdrew from the Church of the Province of Central Africa (CPCA) in 2007 after a series of disputes that included a church trial for theft, heresy, attempted murder and conspiracy. A vocal supporter of Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe, Dr. Kunonga was rewarded by the regime in 2002 with the gift of land confiscated from a white farmer.
Read it all in Anglican Ink.
Australian Christian leaders appeal to MPs to reject gay marriage: The Church of England Newspaper, September 16, 2012, p 5. September 20, 2012
Posted by geoconger in Anglican Church of Australia, Church of England Newspaper, Marriage.Tags: Australia, gay marriage, George Pell, Peter Jensen
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The Anglican and Roman Catholic archbishops of Sydney have endorsed a public letter urging the Australian parliament to reject calls to widen the legal definition of marriage to include same-sex couples.
The statement endorsed by Dr. Peter Jensen and Cardinal George Pell and by over 250 other Orthodox, Anglican, Catholic and Protestant clergy comes as parliament in Canberra on 10 Sept 2012 takes up four bills that seek to amend the Marriage Act to permit same-sex weddings under law.
Marriage is the “lifelong commitment and faithful union of one man and one woman. As such, marriage is the natural basis of the family because it secures the relationship between biological parents and their children,” the preamble to the statement declared.
“As Christian leaders” those signing the statement affirmed their “commitment to promote and protect marriage. We honour the unique love between husbands and wives; the vital place of fathers and mothers in the life of children; and the corresponding ideal for all children to know the love and role modelling of a father and mother.’
“Marriage thus defined is a great good in itself, and it also serves the good of others and society, as it has done for thousands of years. The preservation of the unique meaning of marriage is therefore not a special or limited interest, but serves the common good, particularly the good of children.’
They called upon Parliament to “protect this definition of marriage in Australian law, and not change the meaning of marriage by adding to it different kinds of relationships.”
On 16 June 2012 Dr. Jensen released a statement urging Anglicans to lobby their MPs to vote against the proposed amendments to the Marriage Act. He stated the “parliamentary success of this revolutionary re-definition is not inevitable. It will help however if in the near future Christians who wish to stand for marriage, as instituted by God, would thoughtfully and courteously let their views be known to their Federal parliamentary representatives.”
“We should speak up for the sake of love,” he said, “however hard it may be and whatever pressure we may face, we do not love our fellow Australians if, knowing God’s grace and his written will, we do not speak up and point them to God’s plan for the flourishing of human relationships.”
The first votes on the amendments are likely to take place by month’s end.
First printed in The Church of England Newspaper.
Newcastle dean defrocked: The Church of England Newspaper, September 16, 2012 p 7. September 20, 2012
Posted by geoconger in Abuse, Anglican Church of Australia, Church of England Newspaper.Tags: Andrew Duncan, Brian Farran, Bruce Hoare, Diocese of Newcastle, Graeme Lawrence, Graeme Sturt, Gregory Goyette
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Graeme Lawrence
The Bishop of Newcastle (Australia) has defrocked three priests for misconduct, including the former Dean of Newcastle, the Very Rev. Graeme Lawrence.
On 10 September 2012 Bishop Brian Farran announced he had accepted the recommendation of the diocesan Professional Standards Board and removed Dean Lawrence, the Rev. Bruce Hoare and the Rev. Andrew Duncan from the ministry. The Rev. Graeme Sturt was suspended from the ministry for five years, while cathedral organist (and Dean Lawrence’s partner) Gregory Goyette was banned from working in Anglican churches.
“There will be people in Newcastle who will be extraordinarily angry with me, but unfortunately the processes must be followed,” Bishop Farran told the ABC. “The Professional Standards Board considered some very disturbing material and determined that some of the respondents engaged in sexual misconduct, including misconduct when the complainant was a child,” he said.
The five men had been brought up on charges before the Professional Standards Board for sexual abuse and misconduct and on 15 Dec 2010 the board found that Dean Lawrence and Mr. Goyette had engaged in sexual relations with a 17 year old man at a church camp in 1984, and that Mr. Sturt had observed the act and recommended their dismissal.
Dean Lawrence and Mr. Sturt asked the New South Wales Supreme Court to review the proceedings, charging the standards board failed to observe procedural fairness.
On 27 April 2012 NSW Justice John Sackar held the civil courts did not have the authority to intervene in the church’s internal deliberations by issuing an order granting a permanent stay on the proceedings of the standards board, as the standards board was not a statutory tribunal subject to government oversight. His ruling dismissing the cleric’s appeal did not address the merits of the charges of abuse brought before the standards board, but held the board’s proceedings had not been arbitrary or capricious.
Dean Lawrence, who served as Dean of Newcastle for 25 years until his retirement in 2008, was a member of the Anglican Church of Australia General Synod Standing Committee task force that in 2003 created the recommendations for the current professional standards proceedings.
The 2003 Sexual Abuse Working Group recommended that the church change clergy disciplinary proceedings from an adversarial procedure involving a prosecution for an offence before a tribunal, to panel review process that looked at the fitness of the church worker to hold office. The Standing Committee subsequently accepted these recommendations, which were subsequently adopted by the 2004 General Synod.
First printed in The Church of England Newspaper.
Rimsha bailed on blasphemy charges: The Church of England Newspaper, September 16, 2012 p 5. September 20, 2012
Posted by geoconger in Church of England Newspaper, Church of Pakistan.Tags: Blasphemy Laws, Rehman Malik, Rimsha Masih
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Rimsha Masih, the mentally disabled Christian girl jailed for blasphemy in Islamabad has been released from prison on bail.
She was freed on 7 September 2012 followed a statement made by Pakistan Interior Minister Rehman Malik to the senate that his investigation revealed the girl had not left her home on the day she was alleged to have burned pages from a Koran. He further stated that a medical examination found the girl to have a mental age of 7, though she was approximately 14 years of age.
The judge hearing the case released Rimsha on bail after her attorneys argued that the arrest of her accuser, a Muslim cleric, on charges of fabricating the evidence against her raised reasonable doubts about her guilt.
On 16 August Rimsha was taken into custody after she was accused of burning pages of the Koran. The leader of mosque in Mehrabadi, a mixed Muslim-Christian neighborhood outside Islamabad, filed a complaint with the police alleging the young girl had committed blasphemy – a crime punishable by death under the Pakistani penal code.
An anti-Christian pogrom ensued in Mehrabadi and the Pakistani press reported that approximately 1000 Christian families fled the neighborhood in fear for their lives. Rimsha and her mother were had been kept in custody since 16 Aug for their own protection, the interior minister told the senate.
The arrest of Rimsha Masih has focused international attention upon Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, which critics charge is used to intimidate Christians for personal and business reasons. It has also sparked a backlash within the majority Muslim community. A prominent conservative cleric, Tahir Ashrafi, defended Rimsha against the charge of blasphemy, describing her to reporters as the “daughter of the nation.”
After a minority rights group gave a £6500 bond to the court, Rimsha was released from custody. She is being kept in seclusion, a spokesman for the minorities group said, pending the outcome of her case.
First printed in The Church of England Newspaper.
Christians under threat from Burmese govt, NGO reports: The Church of England Newspaper, September 16, 2012 p 5 September 20, 2012
Posted by geoconger in Anglican Church of Myanmar, Buddhism, Church of England Newspaper, Persecution.Tags: Burma, Chin Human Rights Organization
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Christians in Chin State worshiping in a makeshift church beside the ruins of their old church, destroyed by the military. Photo: CHRO
The Chin people of western Burma are denied religious freedom and are being coerced into abandoning their Christian faith and forced to convert to Buddhism by the state, according to a new report by the Chin Human Rights Organization (CHRO).
The 160-page report, entitled “‘Threats to Our Existence’: Persecution of Ethnic Chin Christians in Burma” released on 5 September 2012 documents the military junta’s abuse of religious freedoms including forced labour, torture, church demolitions, banning of Christian worship services and forced conversions to Buddhism.
The 2012 US State Department’s International Commission on Religious Freedom categorized Myanmar as a country of “particular concern”, but a reform government led by President Thein Sein which came to power in March 2011 has ended press censorship, ended the ban on opposition parties, and released many political prisoners.
However, “Threats to Our Existence” reports the abuses of religious rights for the Chin have not ended. The government’s “claims that religious freedom is protected by law but in reality Buddhism is treated as the de-facto state religion,” said CHRO Program Director Salai Ling.
“The discriminatory state institutions and ministries of previous military regimes continue to operate in the same way today. Few reforms have reached Chin State.”
Chin students are also frequently targeted for enrollment in schools run by Myanmar’s military which convert them to Buddhism, she said, adding that Christian students are beaten for failing to recite Buddhist scriptures. CHRO Advocacy Director Rachel Fleming stated, “These schools are designed to facilitate a forced assimilation policy under the guise of development. The schools appear to offer a way out of poverty but there is a high price to pay for Chin students.”
“They are given a stark choice between abandoning their identity and converting to Buddhism, or joining the military to comply with the authorities’ vision of a ‘patriotic citizen’,” she said.
Chin state, which borders India, is home to around 500,000 people – the majority of whom are Baptist or Anglican Christians. Amnesty International reports that tens of thousands of Chin have fled to India and still face persecution from the state in Burma.
“The government needs to recognize that a multi-ethnic Burma needs to be a multi-religious Burma,” said Phil Robertson, Asia deputy director for Human Rights Watch. “This is a challenge the government has to face.”
First printed in The Church of England Newspaper.
Charlie Hebdo’s Muhammad Cartoon Crassness: Get Religion, September 19, 2012 September 19, 2012
Posted by geoconger in Get Religion.Tags: blasphemy, Charlie Hebdo, Innocence of Muslims
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Get ready GetReligion readers for the next twist in the Muslim outrage story. Today’s issue of Charlie Hebdo – a lowbrow political humor magazine akin to Private Eye — tops the “Innocence of Muslims” film in crassness and bad taste.
That direct to YouTube video produced by an expatriate Egyptian Copt denigrates Islam and Muhammad, denouncing him as a charlatan, womanizer, and sexual degenerate. The rest is history.
While some members of the mob that assaulted the U.S. embassy may have been paid to express their outrage, and it is unlikely the well planned assault on the consulate in Benghazi that led to the rape and murder of the U.S. ambassador was an act of spontaneous outrage — there is little doubt the film has sparked indignation across the Muslim world.
And at this point in the story, Charlie Hebdo steps in. The cover of the offending issue portrays an Orthodox Jew pushing a Muslim in a wheelchair. Atop the cartoon is the mock-movie title “Untouchables 2″, which Reuters says is:
a reference to a hugely popular French movie about a paralyzed rich white man and his black assistant.
The text balloon states “You must not mock”, but there is also the undertone of “Make my day” here also. Last November the offices of Charlie Hebdo were firebombed after they put Muhammad on the cover of their magazine and ran some distasteful cartoons inside the magazine.
It may be worse this time round. France 24 reported that after today’s issue of the magazine was released, the Quai d’Orsay announced it was closing 20 French embassies on Friday in anticipation of trouble. Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, who happens to be in Cairo today, expressed his anger at the timing of the release of these new cartoons. Publishing inflammatory cartoons while the Muslim world was still seething over the YouTube video was not helpful to the cause of peace, he told i-Télé. However, Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault has affirmed that freedom of speech is a fundamental principle for France.
The anger at Charlie Hebdo will focus on the cartoons on the inside of the magazine, not the cover. Here is a link to one page where you can see for yourself what is causing the fuss. Taking its film theme from the Youtube video, Charlie Hebdo portrays Muhammad as a gay porn star.
I suspect we will see calls for censorship of Charlie Hebdo just as the “Innocence of Muslims” has prompted pro-censorship commentaries in the U.S. press. Some self-censorship around the Charlie Hebdo story has already begun. While some European and American newspapers and broadcasters have not held back on showing the cover, Fox News, ABC News, CBS News, the Guardian, the Jerusalem Post, Al-Ahram and others chose to describe the cover and contents, but not show them to their readers. I’ve not seen any reprint the inside cartoons.
I too am guilty of self-censorship. I chose not to publish the risque cartoons on this blog, but placed them on a private page where a reader can examine them if he so chooses. Am I guilty of moral cowardice?
The editor of Charlie Hebdo spoke to RTL defended his decision to publish, saying:
If we start to ask questions now about whether or not we have the right to draw Muhammad, if it’s dangerous or not, the next questions is going to be: ‘Can we show images of Muslims in the paper?’ Then the question after that will be: ‘Can we show images of people in the paper?’ And then at the end, we won’t be representing anything and this form of extremism that is happening around the world will have won.
Reuters quoted him as saying:
“To me, these religious hardliners who protest and kill over a crappy film are no different to the people who made the crappy film. They’re all the same pack, a bunch of assholes,” editor Stephane Charbonnier, under police protection since printing similar caricatures last November, told Reuters.
The last time Charlie Hebdo ran a Muhammad cartoon, I argued that this was done in bad taste and lacked journalistic merit — but it was their right to do so. I also stated that Islamic law does not forbid depictions of Muhammad. As my colleagues at GetReligion have pointed out in Everybody Draw Mohammad Day, South Park, and the Jyllands-Posten cartoons there is no one Muslim law, nor common view on this topic. Here is a gallery of Muhammad images in Western and Turkish art collections.
I also argued that the failure to print the Muhammad cartoon that prompted the firebombing of Charlie Hebdo, while printing covers from other issues of the magazine to illustrate the story, was moral cowardice. I rejected the contention that by publishing something that someone might find offensive you were crying fire in a crowded theater. I cited Christopher Hitchens in support of my argument. He wrote:
If you instigate something, it means that you wish and intend it to happen. If it’s a riot, then by instigating it, you have yourself fomented it. If it’s a murder, then by instigating it, you have yourself colluded in it. There is no other usage given for the word in any dictionary, with the possible exception of the word provoke, which does have a passive connotation. After all, there are people who argue that women who won’t wear the veil have “provoked” those who rape or disfigure them … It was bad enough during the original controversy, when most of the news media—and in the age of “the image” at that—refused to show the cartoons out of simple fear. But now the rot has gone a serious degree further into the fabric. Now we have to say that the mayhem we fear is also our fault, if not indeed our direct responsibility. This is the worst sort of masochism, and it involves inverting the honest meaning of our language as well as what might hitherto have been thought of as our concept of moral responsibility.
Tell me GetReligion readers, does this argument still work? Should we limit free speech in the name of a moral responsibility not to offend, or does the moral responsibility to act within the bounds of civilized society take precedence? Where I the editor of Charlie Hebdo I would not have commissioned the cartoons nor printed them in this climate. But having been printed, I believe the press should show them to their readers. I respect Charlie Hebdo‘s right to be offensive and crass, but would not do it myself. Is this moral cowardice? Preening or prudence? What say you?
First printed in GetReligion.
Charlie Hebdo cartoons 18 Sept 2012 September 19, 2012
Posted by geoconger in Get Religion, Islam, Press criticism.Tags: Charlie Hebdo
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Exorcism for fun and profit: GetReligion, September 18, 2012 September 19, 2012
Posted by geoconger in Get Religion, Roman Catholic Church.Tags: Agence France Presse, demonic possessions, Egzorcysta, exorcism, spiritual warfare
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The title of this story from the Agence France Presse (AFP), “Exorcism boom in Poland sees magazine launch” caught my eye, as a good headline should, and set my click finger twitching.
“What was this?”, I wondered. An explosion during an exorcism? Did the acolyte get too close with his burning taper to a gas line? Satan levitating magazines, tossing back issues of Our Sunday Visitor at a cowled cleric?
Alas, my imagination — alight with images of Max von Sydow battling the forces of evil in the form of the National Catholic Reporter — was a bit off. The AFP was reporting on the launch of Egzorcysta, the Polish word for “exorcist”, a monthly Polish-language magazine devoted to exorcisms, demonology, and related topics.
With its 62-page first issue including articles titled “New Age — the spiritual vacuum cleaner” and “Satan is real”, the Egzorcysta monthly with a print-run of 15,000 by the Polwen publishers is selling for 10 zloty (2.34 euros, 3.10 dollars) per copy.
Though not as colorful as I had hoped, the article nonetheless turned out to be well crafted with strong quotes from the magazine’s principals outlining its editorial mission. It also looks into the phenomena of exorcisms.
The story beings with Fr. Aleksander Posacki, one of the magazine’s founders, whom AFP describes as a “professor of philosophy, theology and leading demonologist and exorcist” explaining the niche his magazine will fill is related to the “rise in the number or exorcists from four to more than 120 over the course of 15 years in Poland …”
Having identified his audience, Fr. Posacki explains why the market for exorcists has grown.
Ironically, he attributed the rise in demonic possessions in what remains one of Europe’s most devoutly Catholic nations partly to the switch from atheist communism to free market capitalism in 1989.
“It’s indirectly due to changes in the system: capitalism creates more opportunities to do business in the area of occultism. Fortune telling has even been categorised as employment for taxation,” Posacki told AFP.
“If people can make money out of it, naturally it grows and its spiritual harm grows too,” he said, hastening to add authentic exorcism is absolutely free of charge.
The article offers Fr. Posacki’s views on the intersection of psychiatry and the demonic possession, and he and fellow exorcist Fr. Andrzej Grefkowicz offer accounts of exorcisms.
According to both exorcists, depictions of demonic possession in horror films are largely accurate. “It manifests itself in the form of screams, shouting, anger, rage – threats are common,” Posacki said. “Manifestation in the form or levitation is less common, but does occur and we must speak about it — I’ve seen it with my own eyes,” he added.
A fun little story — yet I was troubled by the story’s lack of curiosity and its underlying assumptions. Unlike the Huffington Post‘s treatment of this issue, the AFP does not play it for laughs. But is it too respectful, to earnest? An assumption behind this story is that exorcisms are a bona fide spiritual phenomena — should AFP have been more circumspect? Even-handed? Would it have reported accounts of Sufis doing spiritual battles with Jinns from Pakistan, or occult practices from Zimbabwe in the same way?
The respectful tone of the story might well have led to the avoidance of hard questions. Fr. Posacki argues that the free market for spiritualists has led to the growth in demand for the services of Catholic exorcists. Might not the same question be put to Fr. Posaki? Is he making a quick buck out of exorcisms though the launch of this magazine?
And, if the rise in the number of exorcists is only “partly” due to a free market in fortune tellers, what are the other reasons for the jump from 4 to 120?
Let me say I am not denigrating Fr. Posacki with my questions. Rather I am asking why the reporter on this story did not press Fr. Posacki to address the issues of the business of exorcisms when Fr. Posacki raises this issue in his rationale for the magazine. Many of my posts at GetReligion deal with the ignorance or hostility a journalist brings to a religion story. But there are also times when a too respectful attitude, too deferential to an institution, individual or doctrine results in poor reporting. Tell me GetReligion readers, is this the case here?
First printed in GetReligion.
New TEC provisional bishop of Fort Worth named: Anglican Ink, September 18, 2012 September 18, 2012
Posted by geoconger in Anglican Ink, Fort Worth, The Episcopal Church.Tags: episcopal diocese of fort worth, Rayford High
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The Rt. Rev. Rayford High
The former suffragan bishop of the Diocese of Texas, the Rt. Rev. Rayford High has been named provisional bishop of Fort Worth. Pending confirmation by the 3 Nov 2012 diocesan convention in Stephenville at Tarleton State University, Bishop High will succeed the Rt. Rev. C. Wallis Ohl, Jr., as bishop of the faction loyal to the national Episcopal Church in North Texas.
“I am deeply honored and humbled by the fact that the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth would ask me to be their provisional bishop,” Bishop High said, according to an announcement posted on the diocese’s website.
Read it all in Anglican Ink.
Anglican bishops call for U.N. ban on blasphemy: Anglican Ink, September 17, 2012 September 18, 2012
Posted by geoconger in Anglican Ink, Episcopal Church in Jerusalem & the Middle East.Tags: Bill Musk, Blasphemy Laws, Diocese of Cyprus & the Gulf, Diocese of Egypt, Grant LeMarquand, Michael Lewis, Mouneer Anis
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Bishop Mouneer Anis
Four North African and Middle Eastern Anglican bishops have written to U.N. Secretary Ban Ki-moon urging the adoption of an international declaration against religious defamation.
Bishops Mouneer Anis of Egypt, Michael Lewis of Cyprus and the Gulf and assistant Bishops Bill Musk of North Africa and Grant LeMarquand of the Horn of Africa wrote to the U.N. leader on 15 Sept 2012 following the attacks on the U.S. embassy in Cairo and consulate in Benghazi on 11 Sept. In the days that followed mobs demonstrated outside American diplomatic posts across the Middle East and attacked U.S., German and British embassies in Tunis and Khartoum, ostensibly in response to a Youtube video that attacked Mohammad.
The bishops wrote that in “view of the current inflamed situation in several countries in response to the production of a film in the USA which evidently intends to offend our Muslim brothers and sisters by insulting the Prophet Mohammed, and in view of the fact that in recent years similar offensive incidents have occurred in some European countries which evoked massive and violent responses worldwide, we hereby suggest that an international declaration be negotiated that outlaws the intentional and deliberate insulting or defamation of persons (such as prophets), symbols, texts and constructs of belief deemed holy by people of faith.”
Read it all in Anglican Ink.
No changes in the works for Canterbury, ACC claims: The Church of England Newspaper, September 16, 2012 p 6. September 17, 2012
Posted by geoconger in Anglican Consultative Council, Archbishop of Canterbury, Church of England Newspaper.Tags: Kenneth Kearon, Rowan Williams
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Canon Kenneth Kearon
The secretary general of the Anglican Consultative Council states he is unaware of any talks underway to restructure the office of the Archbishop of Canterbury, altering its relationship to the wider Anglican Communion.
The Rev. Canon Kenneth Kearon said claims put forward by the Daily Telegraph in an interview with Dr. Rowan Williams published on 8 September 2012 were “mischievous” and the assertion that plans to great a “presidential” figurehead for the Communion were untrue.
In what was described as the final “major” interview of his archiepiscopate, the Telegraph quoted Dr. Williams as having conceded the job of archbishop could have been handled better by two men.
He also noted the Episcopal Church of the U.S.A.’s arrogance and refusal to take counsel from the wider Communion had been an on-going headache for the past ten years.
“Thinking back over things I don’t think I’ve got right over the last 10 years, I think it might have helped a lot if I’d gone sooner to the United States when things began to get difficult about the ordination of gay bishops, and engaged more directly with the American House of Bishops,” he told the Telegraph, adding, “I think the problem though, is that the demands of the communion, the administrative demands of the communion have grown, and are growing.”
“I suspect it will be necessary, in the next 10 to 15 years, to think about how that load is spread; to think whether in addition to the Archbishop of Canterbury there needs to be some more presidential figure who can travel more readily.”
Dr. Williams believed his successors should still retain a “primacy of honour” and remain as “head” of the Anglican Communion but said there should be “less a sense that the Archbishop is expected to sort everything”.
Discussions were currently underway about reforming the structures of the worldwide Anglican Communion, he said, telling the Telegraph to “watch this space”.
Canon Kearon responded that he was unaware of the plans for change mentioned by Dr. Williams.
“There are no such plans,” Canon Kearon said. “The Archbishop of Canterbury simply said in the interview that he could see that in the future there might be some reflection on how the administrative load associated with the Anglican Communion might be better shared.”
“The Anglican Communion has several decision-making bodies, one of which is meeting in a few months’ time. Nothing like what this newspaper has suggested is on the agenda,” for ACC-15 in New Zealand next month.
First printed in The Church of England Newspaper.
Priest arrested for attempted child rape: The Church of England Newspaper, September 16, 2012 p 6. September 17, 2012
Posted by geoconger in Abuse, Church of England Newspaper, Massachusetts.Tags: Paul LaCharite
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A priest of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts has been arrested by police on suspicion of indecent assault and attempted rape of a young boy.
On 7 September 2012, the Middlesex District Attorney’s office reported the Rev. Paul A. LaCharite (65) had been taken into custody by the Somerville (Mass.) Police Department.
“We allege that this defendant, holding a trusted position within the Episcopal Church, indecently assaulted and touched the victim over several years, only ending his 10-year long predatory abuse of the victim when the defendant left the church,” District Attorney Leone said.
“Our office will continue to prosecute those who harm or exploit children, as they are our most vulnerable victims and most deserving of our protection,” she said.
Fr. LaCharite, who presently serves as priest associate of Old North Church in Boston, is accused of molesting a boy over a period of ten years when he was rector of St James Episcopal Church in Somerville from 1989 to 2005. According the district attorney’s office, the alleged abuse began when the victim was an elementary school student and continued until Fr. LaCharite’s retirement earlier this year.
Fr. LaCharite is alleged to have begun inappropriately touching the child and progressed over time to acts of indecent assault and attempted rape. The victim reported the assaults to the police earlier this week, and after investigation a warrant was arrested for Fr. LaCharite’s arrest.
A spokesman for the Diocese of Massachusetts told The Church of England Newspaper it was “cooperating fully with the investigation, and is making arrangements for pastoral care for the congregations where Paul LaCharite had affiliations and for Paul LaCharite himself.”
The diocesan spokesman said the church’s “canonical disciplinary process was initiated upon receipt of news from the DA’s Office. The diocese remains committed to making our congregations safe through transparency, diligence, care for victims and due process. We face this situation with real sorrow and concern for everyone affected.”
First printed in The Church of England Newspaper.
Orombi rejects rumors he is running for president: The Church of England Newspaper, September 16, 2012 p 7. September 16, 2012
Posted by geoconger in Church of England Newspaper, Church of the Province of Uganda.Tags: Henry Orombi
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Henry Orombi (left) with his successor as Archbishop of Uganda, Stanley Ntagali (right)
The Primate of the Church of Uganda, Archbishop Henry Orombi has denied rumours that he will enter politics following his retirement from the church in December.
“If politicians do their duty, people are blessed just as they are blessed when we perform our duties,” the archbishop said on 9 September 2012 in his sermon at Christ’s Cathedral in Bugemebe in the Dicoese of Busoga.
In an address to a meeting of the Ugandan House of Bishops on 7 January 2012, Archbishop Orombi issued a call for the election of a new archbishop and said he would retire following the installation of his successor in December. In a statement given to The Church of England Newspaper in January by the Church of Uganda, Archbishop Orombi said he was leaving office a year before his mandatory retirement at age 65 in order to focus on mission and evangelism.
“I want to use my retirement to preach the Gospel single-heartedly. This has been my single passion and I want to fulfill the call while I can still do it,” the Archbishop said.
The archbishop affirmed his plans to take up a ministry of preaching and evangelism this week, stating “people should not be misled that I’m retiring to join politics. Someone in Kampala approached me inquiring about my plans to contest for the country’s presidency and even offered to support the bid. But even in retirement I will continue with God’s ministry not politics.”
The archbishop was quoted by the Kampala newspaper, New Vision as saying “I cannot get tired of this ministry, though I can give way for someone else to be Archbishop. Our role as a Church is to guide the county. We are not competing against political leaders, rather we work as partners.”
First printed in The Church of England Newspaper.
Catholic bishop guilty of cover up in U.S. child abuse case: The Church of England Newspaper, September 16, 2012 p 6 September 16, 2012
Posted by geoconger in Abuse, Church of England Newspaper, Roman Catholic Church.Tags: Diocese of Kansas City-St Joseph, Robert Finn, Shawn Ratigan
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A Missouri state court has found Bishop Robert Finn of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Kansas City-St Joseph guilty of failing to report suspected child abuse. The 7 September 2012 conviction of Bishop Finn makes him the most senior U.S. Catholic cleric convicted in that church’s clergy sex abuse scandal.
After pleading no contest to the charges and declining to exercise his right to a trial by jury, Jackson County Circuit Court Judge John Torrence placed Bishop Finn on probation, ordered him to ensure the diocesan staff implements an effective child abuse prevention programme, and create a fund to pay for the counselling of abuse victims.
Last week’s ruling follows the August conviction by a Philadelphia court of the secretary of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, Msgr. William Lynn, who was sentenced to six years imprisonment for covering up child sex abuse by Philadelphia priests.
In May 2010 teachers at a Kansas City parochial school shared their concerns with the bishop over the behavior of Fr. Shawn Ratigan. The bishop brought Fr. Ratigan into his office and counseled him over “boundary issues” but made no further inquiries into the school’s concerns.
In December 2010 a computer technician discovered a photograph of a child’s genitals on a computer brought in for repair by Fr. Ratigan. Further investigations subsequently discovered hundreds of pornographic photographs of the pudenda of pre-pubescent girls.
Contrary to state law, the bishop did not report the discovery to the police, but after consultation with diocesan lawyers sent Fr. Ratigan to a psychiatrist for an evaluation, who said he did not believe Ratigan was a threat to children. A parish priest subsequently informed the police of the discovery six months after the diocese learned of the photos. Fr. Ratigan has been indicted by Federal prosecutors on child pornography charges.
Prosecutors hailed the ruling as a “clear and ringing victory for the victims.”
This decision by the court “helps protect children and continued anonymity for these young victims,” Jackson County prosecutor Jean Peters Baker said.
“We can be assured now that if an allegation of child abuse comes to the attention of the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph, there will no hesitation to report it immediately to the proper authorities.”
However, a spokesman for a victims’ rights’ groups disagreed. “Only jail time would have made a real difference here and deterred future horrific cover-ups, anything less will not produce any meaningful reform,” said Barbara Dorris, outreach director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests.
First printed in The Church of England Newspaper.
Bishop runs off with school chaplain: The Church of England Newspaper, September 16, 2012 p 4. September 15, 2012
Posted by geoconger in Anglican Church of Aotearoa New Zealand & Polynesia, Church of England Newspaper.Tags: adultery, Diocese of Wellington, Kate Carey-Smith, Tom Brown
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Dr. Tom Brown
The New Zealand bishop who surrendered his licence to officiate as a priest last month has moved in with the wife of a clergyman. The Rt. Rev. Thomas Brown, the former Bishop of Wellington told the Dominion Post he was leaving the ministry in order “to be loyal to the church and maintain the church’s integrity”.
“I’ve stepped back from an involvement in the church for personal reasons. I volunteered to give back my licence, it was not taken from me,” he said, adding that “I think that under the circumstances it was appropriate that I stand down and have a period of sabbatical or time out, and the present bishop accepted that.”
The bishop’s 7 Aug 2012 decision to withdraw from the ministry came amidst reports he had separated from his wife, Dwyllis. “I have a private life and I’m endeavouring to get on with that to deal with the difficulty of separating from my wife,” the former bishop told the Post.
It has since been revealed that Bishop Brown has begun a relationship with the chaplain of Samuel Marsden Collegiate School, the Rev Canon Kate Carey-Smith. Canon Carey-Smith, whose husband, the Rev. Chris Carey-Smith is chaplain at St Mark’s Church School, resigned from her position on 3 Aug.
The new Bishop of Wellington, Justin Duckworth last month told reporters: “The breakdown of any marriage is always deeply sad for all involved.” He has declined to comment further.
First printed in The Church of England Newspaper.
Iran frees imprisoned Christian pastor jailed for apostasy: The Church of England Newspaper, September 16, 2013 p 7 September 15, 2012
Posted by geoconger in Church of England Newspaper, Persecution.Tags: apostasy, Christian Solidarity Worldwide, Iran, Yousef Nadarkhani
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Yousef Nadarkhani
An Iranian court acquitted Yousef Nadarkhani of apostasy from Islam this week, permitting the Christian pastor to return home after three years imprisonment.
Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) reports that at an 8 September 2012 hearing, a court in Rasht in Iran’s Gilan province on the southern shore of the Caspian Sea court overturned Yousef Nadarkhani’s 2010 conviction for apostasy, finding him guilty instead of proselytizing Muslims. The court sentenced him to three years imprisonment for seeking to evangelize Muslims, but ordered he be released for time served.
Born in a non-practicing Muslim family, Mr. Nadarkhani (35) converted to Christianity as a young man and for the past ten years has been the pastor of a network of house churches in Rasht. In 2009, Mr. Nadarkhani was arrested and brought before a political tribunal on 12 October 2009 after he complained that new government regulations requiring that his two sons, Daniel (10) and Yoel (8) be instructed in Islam in school violated the Iranian constitution’s guarantee of the free practice of religion.
Mr. Nadarkhani was brought to trial on 21-22 September 2010 before the 1st Court of the Revolutionary Tribunal. On 13 November 2010 the court handed down a guilty verdict and ordered he be hanged. The third chamber of the Iranian Supreme Court in Qom on 28 June 2011 upheld the conviction for apostasy and the death penalty, but stayed execution pending an investigation by the trial court to determine when Mr. Nadarkhani had left Islam.
In October 2011 the trial court wrote to the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khameini, requesting his opinion as to how to proceed in light of the Supreme Court’s decision. Last month it was announced the local court would review the proceedings in light of Sharia law precedents and investigate at what age Mr. Nadarkhani had left the Muslim faith.
Each of Islam’s five major schools of jurisprudence call for the death penalty for those who leave Islam for another faith. However Islamic law distinguishes between apostasy of an adult and a child. Iran’s proposed Islamic Penal Law also divides apostates into two categories: parental and innate. Innate apostates were those whose parents were Muslim, made a profession of Islam — the Shahada — as an adult and then left the faith, while parental apostates were those born in non-Muslim families, converted to Islam as an adult, and then left the faith.
Iranian law is unclear as the punishment for apostasy, but the proposed Article 225-7 of the Islamic Penal Law states the “Punishment for an innate apostate is death,” while Article 225-8 allows a parental apostate three days to recant their apostasy. If they continued in their unbelief, “the death penalty would be carried out.”
The push to impose penal sanctions on apostates from Islam comes amidst a rise in conversions to Christianity in Iran. Approximately 200,000 or one percent of Iran’s population, belong to officially sanctioned groups that have historic ties to the region such as the Armenian, Assyrian and Catholic Churches.
However, the number of Protestant Christians is unclear. In 1979, there were less than 500 known Christians from a Muslim background in Iran. “Today the most conservative estimate is that there are at least 100,000 believers in the nation,” reports Elam Ministry – a British based Christian ministry to Persians.
News of the release of Mr. Nadarkhani was greeted with joy by Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW), one of the principle organizations in the West that had championed his cause. CSW chief executive, Mervyn Thomas said they were “delighted to learn of Pastor Nadarkhani’s release after a long incarceration. We commend the Iranian judiciary for this step, which is a triumph for justice and the rule of law.”
“While we rejoice at this wonderful news, we do not forget hundreds of others who are harassed or unjustly detained on account of their faith, and CSW is committed to continue campaigning until all of Iran’s religious minorities are able to enjoy religious freedom as guaranteed under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Iran is party.”
First printed in The Church of England Newspaper.
Hunt on for the grave of Richard III: The Church of England Newspaper, September 16, 2012 p 4 September 15, 2012
Posted by geoconger in Church of England, Church of England Newspaper.Tags: Richard Buckley, Richard III, University of Leicester
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The earliest surviving portrait of Richard III (c. 1520, after a lost original), in the collection of the Society of Antiquaries, London
Archaeologists believe they may have found the lost grave of Richard III under a council car park in Leicester.
On 7 September 2012 the University of Leicester’s public affairs office reported that members of the Greyfriars project had uncovered the lost garden of Robert Herrick, the supposed site of the grave of Richard III.
This was “an astonishing discovery and a huge step forward in the search for King Richard’s grave.” said Philippa Langley from the Richard III Society.
The last of the Plantagenet kings, Richard III (1452-1485) ruled for two years until his death at the Battle of Bosworth Field on 22 August 1485. After the battle he was interred in Greyfriars Church in in Leicester, but the location of the church and the grave were lost over time.
In the early 1600s, Alderman Robert Herrick, a mayor of Leicester, bought the Greyfriars church from the Crown and built a large mansion house with a garden on the site. In 1612, Christopher Wren, father of the famous architect, during a visit to Leicester recorded in his diary seeing a three foot stone pillar in Herrick’s garden with the inscription: “Here lies the body of Richard III sometime King of England.”
In 1711 Herrick’s descendants sold the house, which was pulled down in 1870 and in the 1930s the city council built a car park on the site.
The modern hunt for Richard III’s final resting place began Aug. 25, when a team of archaeologists led by Richard Buckley began excavating the parking lot, uncovering floor and roof tiles, and window tracery fragments.
Dr. Buckley said they believe the tracery fragments came from the east window of the church, near the high altar, which itself is near the choir where Richard III was said to have been buried.
“Having overcome the major hurdle of finding the church, I am now confident that we are within touching distance of finding the choir — a real turning point in the project and a stage which, at the outside, I never really thought we might reach,” Dr. Buckley said.
First printed in The Church of England Newspaper.
Anglican Unscripted Episode 49, September 13, 2012 September 14, 2012
Posted by geoconger in Anglican Church of North America, Anglican.TV, Archbishop of Canterbury, Church of England, South Carolina.Tags: Richard Chartres, Robert Duncan, Rowan Williams
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Kevin and George are back from news blackout break with Anglican News from around the globe. They discuss Rowan’s exit interview, South Carolina, Archbishop Duncan’s interview and Much, Much More. #AU49 Comments to AnglicanUnscripted@gmail.com There might even be some bloopers.
Foggy Bottom’s ‘pantywaist protocol pussy-footers’: Get Religion, September 13, 2012 September 14, 2012
Posted by geoconger in Get Religion, Islam, Press criticism.Tags: Benghazi, Cairo, CNN, MEMRI
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Wanted to thank me brokenly, I suppose, for so courteously allowing her favorite brother a place to have his game legs in, Eh? [said Bertie Wooster]
Possibly sir. On the other hand she alluded to you in terms suggestive of disapprobation. [said Jeeves]
She — what?
“Feckless idiot” was one of the expressions she employed, sir.
Feckless idiot?
Yes, sir.
I couldn’t make it out. I couldn’t see what the woman had based her judgement on. My Aunt Agatha has frequently said that sort of thing about me, but then she has known me from a boy.
P.G. Wodehouse, Very Good, Jeeves! (1930) p 124.
The 9/11 assaults on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi and embassy in Cairo have jumped to center stage since the first reports came out on Tuesday. The press has continued to do a fine job of highlighting the religious and political issues behind the protests — this report from the AP on the Benghazi attack is quite good. The latest round of stories also addresses the question whether the assaults were spontaneous acts of religious outrage in response to an anti-Mohammad film, or where they planned attacks?
Yahoo! News’ The Lookout reports:
The deadly attack on the U.S. Consulate in Libya may have been a planned operation and not a spontaneous protest that turned violent, U.S. officials told the New York Times and CNN on Wednesday. Initial reports suggested that protesters in Benghazi, Libya, were angry about an online video that mocked the Muslim Prophet Muhammad, and then attacked the consulate, killing U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other foreign service workers. But now, according to the New York Times, officials suspect that “an organized group had either been waiting for an opportunity to exploit like the protests over the video or perhaps even generated the protests as a cover for their attack.”
There are reports out of Egypt that the Cairo assault was also a planned spontaneous political action that was awaiting a religious provocation — this was the opinion of my Christian Egyptian contacts on Tuesday. MEMRI states:
On September 7, 2012, Nasser Al-Qaeda, a prominent writer on the Jihadi forum Shumoukh Al-Islam suggested burning down the U.S. embassy in Egypt with all workers inside in order to pressure the U.S. to release Sheikh ‘Omar ‘Abd Al-Rahman aka the Blind Sheikh. In the post, titled “How can the U.S. embassy remain in Egypt while [the U.S.] imprisons Sheikh ‘Omar ‘Abd Al-Rahman,” Nasser Al-Qaeda wrote: “Oh people of Egypt, it is time [to launch] a powerful movement to liberate the mujahid Sheikh ‘Omar ‘Abd Al-Rahman.
In contrast to the foreign reporting, I’ve not been that impressed with the even handedness of the domestic stories. For example, Geoffrey Dickens at NewsBusters reports:
The Big Three (ABC, CBS, NBC) Wednesday evening newscasts devoted more than 9 minutes (9 minutes, 28 seconds) to the flap over Mitt Romney’s statement criticizing the administration’s handling of the Libyan crisis but spent just 25 seconds on questions regarding Barack Obama’s Middle-East policy, a greater than 20-to-1 disparity.
Has anyone seen any MSM reports about why conciliatory messages from U.S. officials aren’t going over well with some Americans?
I would however like to single out for particular praise CNN’s story “Ambassador’s killing shines light on Muslim sensitivities around Prophet Mohammed” by Dan Gilgoff and Eric Marrapodi.
This well written, well researched, finely balanced piece from CNN provides the views of Sunni Muslim scholars who explain why a film portraying Mohammad in an unflattering light would provoke religious outrage.
Violence over depictions of the Prophet Mohammed may mystify many non-Muslims, but it speaks to a central tenet of Islam: that the Prophet was a man, not God, and that portraying him threatens to lead to worshiping a human instead of Allah.
“It’s all rooted in the notion of idol worship,” says Akbar Ahmed, who chairs the Islamic Studies department at American University. “In Islam, the notion of God versus any depiction of God or any sacred figure is very strong.”
“The Prophet himself was aware that if people saw his face portrayed by people, they would soon start worshiping him,” Ahmed says. “So he himself spoke against such images, saying ‘I’m just a man.’”
Do read the whole story. It will give you a good grounding in one of the religious angles in this affair.
My first post on this story also generated several thoughtful comments focusing on the statements issued via twitter from the U.S. embassy in Cairo. “The Old Bill” asked who had tweeted these comments, while “Ben” questioned the timeline. When did the Embassy release the tweet and press statement — before, during or after the compound was attacked?
By day’s end, these questions had entered the U.S. political arena as Mitt Romney criticized the administration over the tweets and statement. Foreign Policy Magazine’s “The Cable” has a solid story that looks at these issues, identifying the embassy staffer who wrote the tweet — and revealing the anger within the State Department over the content, timing and tone of the embassy tweets and statement.
People at the highest levels both at the State Department and at the White House were not happy with the way the statement went down. There was a lot of anger both about the process and the content,” the official said. “Frankly, people here did not understand it. The statement was just tone deaf. It didn’t provide adequate balance. We thought the references to the 9/11 attacks were inappropriate, and we strongly advised against the kind of language that talked about ‘continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims.'”
Despite being aware of Washington’s objections, the embassy continued to defend the statement for several hours, fueling the controversy over it, a decision the official again attributed to Schwartz.
“Not only did they push out the statement but they continued to engage on Twitter and retweet it,” the official said. “[Schwartz] would have been the one directing folks to engage on Twitter on this.”
The State Department has long had a reputation of being disconnected from reality. Spiro Agnew is not the author of the title of this post — that honor belongs to a Democratic congressman from Ohio who in a 1948 speech condemned the reluctance of the State Department to engage with China over the fate to two downed airmen. The actions of its public affairs officer in Cairo has done the administration no good — adding yet another stanza to the song of the feckless idiots of Foggy Bottom.
First published in Get Religion.
Attack on Bible Study leaves 1 dead in India: The Church of England Newspaper, September 9, 2012 p 7. September 13, 2012
Posted by geoconger in Church of England Newspaper, Church of South India, Hinduism, Persecution.Tags: Bharatiya Janata Party, Diocese of Kanyakumari, Tamil Nadu
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Hindu nationalists attacked a Church of South India (CSI) prayer meeting last week in Tamil Nadu, leaving one man dead and a dozen injured.
On 26 August 2012 supporters of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)attempted to break up a prayer service led by a CSI minister at the home of one of his parishioners in Sasthancode village in the Diocese of Kanyakumari. One church member is alleged to have invited a friend, a Hindu woman, to attend the Bible study, prompting protests from Hindu militants the pastor was seeking to convert Hindus to Christianity. Two Christians were hospitalized following the attack and the melee spread to the neighboring village of Nadaikavu where a Christian man, Edwin Raj (29), was allegedly beaten to death by Hindu extremists.
The Indian press reports the police have charged seven BJP party members in connection with the attack and are also seeking to question the Kanyakumari district BJP party chief over his role in the pogrom. A curfew and ban on public assembly was also imposed by police on 29 August to prevent further violence.
The BJP is alleged to have tested police resolve by staging a protest march the next day. Approximately 800 BJP cadres including the Tamil Nadu BJP party leader, Mr. Pon Radhakrishnan, were arrested on 30 August in Marthandam.
BJP national secretary Muralidhar Rao denounced the arrests saying the incident was a Christian provocation. “This entire act of falsely implicating the BJP leader and innocent people was part of the attempt by police to please local churches and Christians at the behest of certain political leaders,” he said in a statement to the press.
Mr. Rao said the invitation to a Hindu woman to attend a Bible study angered local Hindus. The local BJP party chief had been present in an attempt to defuse the tension, however the violence began when members of the Bible study attacked Hindu protestors.
Sajan George, president of the Global Council of Indian Christians (GCIC) told the Catholic news service, AsiaNews the situation in Kanyakumari was “rapidly deteriorating.”
“The central government and that of Tamil Nadu must do something. Religious freedom is a fundamental human right and the basis of any healthy society. Such hostility and intolerance are a bad omen for India. If the whole population is not guaranteed freedom of worship, Christians could become second class citizens,” he said.
First printed in The Church of England Newspaper.
Death Penalty upheld for Bombay terrorist: The Church of England Newspaper, September 9, 2012 p 6. September 13, 2012
Posted by geoconger in Church of England Newspaper, Church of North India, Terrorism.Tags: capital punishment, Mohammed Ajmal Kasab
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Mohammed Ajmal Kasab entering the Bombay CST station on 26 Nov 2008
A two-judge panel of India’s Supreme Court has upheld the death sentence of Mohammed Ajmal Kasab, dismissing the 25-year old Pakistani’s appeal of his conviction on 80 counts of murder and terrorism charges arising from the 2008 terror attack on Bombay.
In the opinion handed down last week, Justices Aftab Alam and C.K. Prasad held that in “view of the nature of the gravity of his crime and the fact that he participated in waging war against the country, we have no option but to uphold his death penalty.”
Church leaders in India had been divided over the propriety of imposing the death penalty following Kasab’s 10 May 2010 conviction. Catholic leaders had urged clemency citing their church’s social teachings on capital punishment. However, the Church of North India’s general secretary told reporters the sentence was just and that Anglicans did not oppose in principle capital punishment.
Kasab was one of ten heavily armed terrorists who attacked a rail station, hotels, a Jewish center and other Bombay landmarks on 26-29 November 2008 in a rampage that that left 173 dead and 300 injured. A closed circuit television camera captured Kasab carrying a sub-machine gun in the Chatrapathi Sivaji Terminal where 52 people died. Kasab was captured by police on the first day of the assault while the other nine were killed in gun battles with police.
Following the 2010 conviction, the Rev. Enos Das Pradhan, General Secretary of the Church of North India said: “We welcome the judgment. It is a message to everybody that the rule of law prevails.”
While Christians differed on the morality of capital punishment, he believed it was ethically just. It also served as a deterrent to crime, he argued.
However, the head of the Roman Catholic bishops’ Commission for Justice, Peace and Development, Fr. Nithiya Sagayam, said the Catholic Church was opposed to capital punishment.
“Capital punishment does not solve any problem. It will only make things worse,” he argued.
Kasab may ask for reconsideration of the court’s ruling or petition President Pranab Kumar Mukherjee for clemency.
First printed in The Church of England Newspaper.
NZ bishop surrenders his licence: The Church of England Newspaper, September 9, 2012 p 6 September 13, 2012
Posted by geoconger in Anglican Church of Aotearoa New Zealand & Polynesia, Church of England Newspaper.Tags: Diocese of Wellington, Tom Brown
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The newly retired Bishop of Wellington (New Zealand) has surrendered his licence to function as priest in the Anglican Church of Aoteroa, New Zealand and Polynesia. The church has declined to comment on Bishop Tom Brown’s 7 August 2012 decision to leave the ministry, which comes in the midst of his separation from his wife, Dwyllis.
Bishop Brown, who was elected bishop in 1998 and retired in March, told The Dominion Post last week he voluntarily gave up his right to officiate “to be loyal to the church and maintain the church’s integrity”.
“I’ve stepped back from an involvement in the church for personal reasons. I volunteered to give back my licence, it was not taken from me.”
“I think that under the circumstances it was appropriate that I stand down and have a period of sabbatical or time out, and the present bishop accepted that.”
The former Bishop of Wellington, Dr. Tom Brown
“I have a private life and I’m endeavouring to get on with that to deal with the difficulty of separating from my wife,” the former bishop said.
The new Bishop of Wellington, Justin Duckworth told reporters: “The breakdown of any marriage is always deeply sad for all involved,” but declined to comment further.
First printed in The Church of England Newspaper.
Mullah accused of fabricating evidence in Pakistan child blasphemy case: The Church of England Newspaper, September 9, 2012 p 7 September 12, 2012
Posted by geoconger in Church of England Newspaper, Church of Pakistan, Islam, Persecution.Tags: Blasphemy Laws, Khalid Jadoon Chisthi, Rimsha Masih
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One of the accusers of the 11-year old Christian girl imprisoned in Pakistan and awaiting trial on for blasphemy has been arrested by Islamabad police for fabricating evidence and filing false charges.
On 31 August 2012, a witness came forward to inform the police that a local mullah, Khalid Jadoon Chisthi, had concocted the accusations against Rimsha Masih, and had conspired to foment anti-Christian hatred.
The Express Tribune reported that Hafiz Zubair informed police that he had witnessed Mr. Chishti fabricate the evidence and had heard him describe his plan to frame the Christian girl. “We tried to stop him but he said this would strengthen the blasphemy case against Rimsha,” said Zubair in his statement to the police.
A police spokesman told the Express Tribune Chishti “put pages into the ashes, showed them to the people of the area, gathered them to attack the girl’s house and detained her before taking her to the police station. He made the boy Hammad become a complainant in the case and urged the police to press blasphemy charges against the 11-year-old girl,” said the police officer.
Rimsha, whose baptismal certificate indicates she is 11 years of age, although a police medical examination places her age at 13, has Downs Syndrome and is illiterate. She was arrested on 16 August after she was accused by Chishti and others of burning a Koran. The girl and her mother remain in protective police custody and a hearing is scheduled on her case this week.
The outcry over the arrest of Rimsha led to an anti-Christian pogrom, allegedly fomented by Chishti, that forced 900 families from their homes – emptying the Islamabad neighborhood of Christians who feared for their lives.
If convicted of falsifying evidence in a capital case, Chishti could face life imprisonment. If charged with blasphemy for burning the pages containing Koranic verses, he could be executed.
First printed in The Church of England Newspaper.
Australian church apology for forced adoptions: The Church of England Newspaper, September 9, 2012 p 3. September 12, 2012
Posted by geoconger in Anglican Church of Australia, Church of England Newspaper.Tags: adoption, Diocese of Brisbane, unwed mothers
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The Diocese of Brisbane has offered its apology to those harmed by forced adoptions.
The diocese “sincerely apologises to the mothers, fathers and babies, now adults, who have experienced hurt, distress and harm as a result of past forced adoption practices in homes which operated in the name of the Church. We are aware that these practices occurred at St Mary’s Home at Toowong and the Church of England Women’s Refuge in Spring Hill,” the statement printed on the diocesan website said.
An Australian Senate inquiry found forced adoptions were widespread across Australia from the 1950s to the 1970s for unwed or unfit mothers. In February the senate recommended church agencies, the government and other entities involved in coercing unwed mothers to give up their children for adoption offer an apology for their actions.
Up though the 1970’s, Australian adoption practice favoured a “clean break” practice that kept the names and locations of birth parents and children secret, so that the adoptive parents were free to raise the children as if they had been born to them. The practice was gradually ended however, with the enactment of adoption reform laws in the 1980s.
The Brisbane statement said the senate “inquiry heard that mothers’ consent to have their babies taken for adoption was often coerced and, in some cases, was not obtained at all. Often fathers were excluded completely from this process. It heard that mothers were denied access to information about their babies, including birth records and information about their child’s survival or well-being. Those adopted babies have often not had access to accurate records of their birth and parentage.”
It was “with deep sadness and regret, this Diocese acknowledges that mothers suffered emotional trauma and abuse in these adoption processes. We apologise that they were subjected to shame, isolation and humiliation while in the care of homes operated by the Anglican Church. The Church acknowledges that the resulting grief and loss for both parents and children is ongoing and significant.”
The diocese apologized for its “failings” and would “assist those who suffered harm while in our care in the past.”
First printed in The Church of England Newspaper.
Teen cannabis use linked to permanent brain damage: The Church of England Newspaper, September 9, 2012, p 5, September 12, 2012
Posted by geoconger in Church of England, Church of England Newspaper, Youth/Children.Tags: cannabis, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
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Cannabis use by teenagers leads to permanent brain damage, a study published in Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences reports.
Teenagers who smoked pot on a daily basis were found to have a significant neuropsychological decline that persisted even after they stopped using the drug. Researchers from Duke University, King’s College London’s Institute of Psychiatry, and the University of Otago found that early-onset regular pot users had IQs 8 points lower than their counterparts who never smoked or started after they were 18 years of age.
The study examined data on 1,037 New Zealanders who were tracked by researchers from birth to age 38. Cannabis usage was measured at ages of 18, 21, 26, 32 and 38, while tests for intelligence, memory and attention were given at the age of 13 and at the age of 38.
The study found that heavy and regular cannabis use was linked to neuropsychological decline across virtually all domains of functioning with the greatest damage found among those who began smoking marijuana before the age of 18.
The “findings are suggestive of a neurotoxic effect of cannabis on the adolescent brain and highlight the importance of prevention and policy efforts targeting adolescents,” the report said.
In a 2001 submission to Parliament, the Church of England’s Board for Social Responsibility urged the decriminalization of cannabis arguing the current laws:
It leads to disrespect for the law among young people; it is enforced in a random manner; there is no link between cannabis and the use of hard drugs except for a tiny minority … Indeed the criminalisation of cannabis makes the association with hard drugs perversely more likely. Legislation is being used here to govern morality, and the indication is that it sets up greater problems in the future. We do take seriously the point that young people may be encouraged to use cannabis more heavily if this legislative change takes place, and we believe that even greater drug education is necessary in schools and with young people.”
However, drug education programmes warning of the harmful effects of cannabis appear not to be working. Study leader Madeline Meier of Duke University observed that persistent cannabis use among American high school students is higher than it has ever been, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
The Church of England’s 2001 submission noted that “Alcohol inebriation has long been associated with violence in some cases, and it is possible that cannabis abuse could sometimes have harmful effects. However that is a matter for personal responsibility, guided by moral imperatives. Abuse, which is a sin, is not necessarily a crime: adultery is wrong, but it is not a crime. Murder is both a sin and a crime, by definition. We believe that it is time to decriminalize the possession of cannabis.”
First printed in The Church of England Newspaper.
Righteous Religious Indignation in Cairo: Get Religion, September 11, 2012 September 12, 2012
Posted by geoconger in Get Religion, Islam, Politics.Tags: Benghazi, Cairo, Muslim Brotherhood, Salafi Muslims
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There are conflicting reports coming out of Egypt and Libya tonight on the attacks on the U.S. embassy in Cairo and the consulate in Benghazi.
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation, drawing upon reports from Reuters and AFP, stated one U.S. official was killed and a second injured in the attack on the Benghazi consulate,while the Washington Post, citing the Associated Press, reported that no one was inside the Benghazi consulate when the attack occurred.
The protests, coming on the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 bombings, are being described in most press accounts as being driven by religious fervor. The New York Times reported:
The protest was a result of outrage over a movie being promoted by an anti-Muslim Egyptian Christian campaigner in the United States, clips of which are available on YouTube and dubbed in Egyptian Arabic. The video depicts Muhammad as a fraud, and shows him having sex and calling for massacres. Muslims find it offensive to depict Muhammad at all, much less in an insulting way.
And the ABC noted:
Reports suggest both incidents were sparked by anger over a film which was produced by expatriate members of Egypt’s Christian minority resident in the United States.
Reports said the Cairo protesters, numbering nearly 3,000 were mostly hardline Islamist supporters of the Salafist movement.
A dozen men scaled the embassy walls and one of them tore down the US flag, replacing it with a black one inscribed with the Muslim profession of faith: “There is no God but God and Mohammed is the prophet of God.”
The New York Times added a bit of context about this black flag, stating: “The flag, similar to Al Qaeda’s banner, is popular with ultraconservatives around the region.”
Religion, then would seem to be one of the forces driving the attack — though some Egyptian Christians with whom I was in contact via email today suggested the attacks were driven by Egyptian domestic political considerations. Their argument was that the Salafist parties — the hardline Islamist groups that are junior coalition partners with the Muslim Brotherhood government — are seeking to incite the “Arab Street” to pressure the government to adopt a stricter Sharia law-based government. Religion, this line of thinking believes, is a tool for political ends.
I have no knowledge as to the truth of these assertions, but the first day reports out of the Middle East have noted the religious and political nature of the protests.
The Washington Post reported:
Many of the protesters at the U.S. Embassy Tuesday said that they were associated with the Salafist political parties Al Nour and Al Asala. Salafism is an extremely conservative branch of Islam.
Protesters condemned a video clip that depicted the prophet Mohammed in a series of humiliating scenes. A controversial Cairo television host, Sheikh Khaled Abdallah, aired clips from the video on an Islamic-focused television station on Saturday, and the same video clips were posted to YouTube on Monday. Depicting Mohammed at all is considered deeply offensive by Muslims. Some protesters said that the movie had been created by Egyptian-American Coptic Christians, though its provenance online was unclear.
“We are speaking out and will never be tolerant toward any curses for our prophet,” said Moaz Abdel Kareem, 37, who had a long beard typical of followers of the Salafist movement and was carrying a black flag.
Congratulations to the Post — and the wire services — for being on the scene and doing a great job in explaining what is taking place.
I would note that the prohibition against the portrayal of Mohammad is a Sunni Muslim tradition and not practiced by the Shia. My colleagues and I at GetReligion have written extensively about reporting on images of Mohammad. Articles on Everybody Draw Mohammad Day, South Park, and the Jyllands-Posten cartoons have raised questions about the quality of reporting and unwarranted suppositions about Islam. I hope we will not see these same mistakes in this news cycle.
While the press has done a great job so far, I would not say the same about the U.S. embassy press people in Cairo. There response to the violation of American sovereignty, the raising of the al-Qaeda flag at the U.S. embassy and destruction of the American flag by the Salafist protestors on the 11th anniversary of 9/11 was to send out this tweet:
We condemn the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims
US Embassy CairoAn extraordinarily feckless statement — even by the standards of the State Department.
I do hope that in the days to come the press continues pushing this story, seeking to unravel the political and religious dimensions of this story.
First printed in GetReligion.
57 Communists – McCarthyism from The Australian: Get Religion, September 10, 2012 September 11, 2012
Posted by geoconger in Abuse, Anglican Church of Australia, Get Religion.Tags: Brian Farran, Diocese of Newcastle, Graeme Lawrence, The Australian
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I have in my hand 57 cases of individuals who would appear to be either card-carrying members or certainly loyal to the Communist Party, but who nevertheless are still helping to shape our foreign policy.
One thing to remember in discussing the communists in our government is that we are not dealing with spies who get 30 pieces of silver to steal the blueprints of new weapons. We are dealing with a far more sinister type of activity because it permits the enemy to guide and shape our policy. …
This brings us down to the case of one Alger Hiss, who is important not as an individual anymore but rather because he is so representative of a group in the State Department. …
Joseph R. McCarthy (R-Wisc.) Congressional Record, 81st Congress, Second Session, Vol. 96, Part 2, 1954-1957.
One month after Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury, Senator Joseph McCarthy began his now famous series of speeches on Communist infiltration of the U.S. government. He told a Wheeling, West Virginia Republican Women’s Club there were 57 Communist spies in the State Department, repeating this charge in a speech to the Senate on 20 Feb 1950.
Exaggeration, hyperbole and guilt by association were among the tools used by Sen. McCarthy in achieving his political ends — and he was also helped by the fact that there had been Communist spies in the U.S. government — Alger Hiss being one.
My mind turned to Joseph McCarthy and McCarthyism as I read a story this morning in The Australian, the largest daily newspaper in Australia and a part of the Rupert Murdoch media empire. The article entitled “Fears Anglican abuse linked to Catholics” is filled with exaggeration, hyperbole, guilt by association and the omission of key facts. But yes, there are abusers in this case — though not 57 of them.
The news behind this article is the September 2012 announcement from the Anglican bishop of the Diocese of Newcastle, Brian Farran. Acting upon the recommendation of the diocesan professionals standards board he had defrocked three clergy, suspended one priest for five years, and banned a lay employee from further employment in the church for having engaged in sexual misconduct with a teenaged boy.
Here is how The Australian reports this story:
NSW police are investigating allegations four Anglican priests, including the former dean of Newcastle, had sex or were involved in group sex sessions with a teenage boy aged as young as 14.
The establishment of the inquiry, which was referred to police by the church itself, means detectives are now involved in two separate investigations into alleged child abuse by church officials in Newcastle during the 1970s and 80s. The second, Strike Force Georgiana, is investigating the Catholic Church and has charged six priests with pedophile abuse.
While neither police investigation is looking specifically at any connection between members of the two churches allegedly involved in pedophile abuse, detectives believe such relationships may exist. One source within the Anglican Diocese of Newcastle said: “It’s possible there are links. There’s no strong evidence of it, but it’s possible …
“There’s certainly been a strong network up here and they infiltrated the church.”
It is not suggested any of the four priests currently under investigation were involved.
The article then goes into details of the abuse, quoting graphic extracts from the professional standards report. This is followed by:
Each of the four priests has previously denied the allegations against them while a previous police inquiry was suspended after the state Director of Public Prosecutions found there was insufficient evidence to lay charges. Mr Goyette could not be contacted yesterday.
And closes with a statement from the unnamed victim:
In a written statement, M said: “Making my complaint and having it heard has been a long and difficult journey. “I urge anybody else who has had similar experiences to speak out.”
What is wrong with this story? Where is the exaggeration, hyperbole, guilt by association, and omission of facts? Let me start off by saying I have been following this closely for two years and have written a half dozen articles on this story. So I come to this story encumbered with a degree of knowledge.
Let us begin with the lede. It reports that police are investigating the four Anglican clergy for child abuse — and they may be part of a clergy pedophile ring that includes six Catholic priests who are suspected abusers. And then we have an unnamed source within the Diocese of Newcastle saying that it might very well be possible that there is a clergy pedophile ring involving priests from the Anglican Diocese of Newcastle and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Newcastle-Maitland
But then again, the third and fifth paragraphs tells us that there is no evidence of a clergy pedophile ring and the police had investigated the four Anglican clergy once already and had taken no action.
And — the Catholic Church has nothing to do with the actions of the Anglican clergy. Does The Australian work on the principle that any abuse story by any cleric must somehow be tied into the Catholic abuse scandal? As the story states there is no link between the Anglicans and Catholics, what else is this but Catholic-bashing?
What is omitted from this story are several key facts that provide context for this story. Two of the clergy and the lay employee — a cathedral organist — had filed a civil suit that was heard by the New South Wales Supreme Court. They argued the professional standards board process violated natural justice and their due process rights. Supporters of the accused have brought Bishop Farran up on charges for the way he has handled this case. The diocese also halted disciplinary proceedings for over a year while this issue was taken through the civil courts and has defrocked the accused clergy now that the Supreme Court has held that it will not intervene in the church’s internal disciplinary proceedings.
There is omission of the fact that the lay employee, Gregory Goyette — the former organist of the Anglican Cathedral in Newcastle — and the most prominent of the accused, Graeme Lawrence, the former dean of the cathedral are same-sex partners. What we have are five gay men (and Angl0-Catholics) being accused of being part of a pedophile ring by persons unknown. Is it because they are gay men and hence potential pedophiles? That is what I hear in the unnamed quotation in the lede.
By raising the spectre of a pedophile ring and omitting the legal battles and questions about probity of the professional standards board’s actions, The Australian crosses a line. Whether this is a subtle form of gay bashing (“Well, we know that all Anglo-Catholics are like that don’t we”, wink wink) or a case of improving a story — sexing it up — is hard to tell. But to me this smells bad.
One of the odd things about this is that Lawrence, who served as Dean of Newcastle for 25 years until his retirement in 2008, was a member of the Anglican Church of Australia General Synod Standing Committee task force that in 2003 created the recommendations for the current professional standards proceedings.
He was a member of the 2003 Sexual Abuse Working Group that recommended that the church change the clergy disciplinary proceedings from an adversarial procedure involving a prosecution for an offense before a tribunal, to panel review process that looked at the fitness of the church worker to hold office. His complaint to the Supreme Court was that he never had an opportunity to face his accusers or dispute the charges — and now he has been deposed by the process he helped create.
Also — here is what I am not saying. I am not excusing or condoning the behavior described in this article.
There are evil people in this world. Some of the clergy sexual abuse stories I have covered have sickened me, while stories on the cover up of abuse have left me ashamed. Yet in the evil and sickness that I have seen, I am always mindful that the perpetrators of crimes are still human beings — and deserve to be treated with fairness and dignity — even if they never showed this compassion to their victims.
In writing clergy abuse articles there is a temptation to paint the abuser in the blackest of terms. Monster A is as bad as Monster B who is just short of being another Charles Manson. Yet there needs to be nuance and clarity in reporting on these cases so that the truth can be told.
The bottom line in this article is that the whole truth has not been told by The Australian. It throws in a gratuitous and unproven assertion of a pedophile ring, omits important facts that provide context to the case, takes an uncalled for swipe at the Catholic Church, and relies upon an unnamed sources to make its most important point. This is not the way to write a newspaper story. It stinks.
First printed in GetReligion.
Priest’s wife accused of murdering her husband: The Church of England Newspaper, September 9, 2012 p 7. September 10, 2012
Posted by geoconger in Anglican Church of Southern Africa, Church of England Newspaper, Crime.Tags: Diocese of Mbhashe, Elliot Williams, Lungiswa Xuba, Ongama Xuba, Southern Baptist Convention
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The wife of an Anglican priest in South Africa has been arrested in connection with the murder of her husband, the Rev. Canon Ongama Xuba, who last month was found stabbed to death in his rectory in Butterworth in the Eastern Cape.
Last week police detectives announced that Mrs. Lungiswa Xuba (40) had been arrested as an accessory in the death of her husband. The police reported they had also taken into custody Mr. Vuyo Mehlo (40) and have charged him with killing Canon Xuba.
On 3 August, Mrs. Xuba and her two small children returned to their home from a shopping excursion. The children ran into the house and then rushed back, telling their mother that their father was badly injured. Canon Xuba the rector of St Peter’s Church in Butterworth in the Diocese of Mbhashe, died at the scene.
Mrs. Xuba’s relationship to the accused killer has not been revealed by the police. Butterworth police spokesman, Captain Jackson Manatha stated: ”After their arrest on Friday last week they were detained by police until they appeared in court yesterday. They made a brief court appearance and are expected back in court next week for a formal bail application.
“Both are charged with the murder of Xuba,” Captain Manatha said.
Bishop Elliot Williams of the Diocese of Mbhashe told reporters he was profoundly saddened by the murder and the news of Mrs. Xuba’s arrest was “terrible”.
The accused are scheduled to appear before the Butterworth magistrate court this week to answer the charges of murder and conspiracy.
First printed in The Church of England Newspaper.
Action demanded in the wake of SA police shootings: The Church of England Newspaper, September 9, 2012 p 6 September 10, 2012
Posted by geoconger in Anglican Church of Southern Africa, Church of England Newspaper.Tags: Johannes Seoka, labour unrest, Lonmin Platinium, South Africa, Thabo Makgoba
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The President of the South African Council of Churches, the Anglican Bishop of Pretoria Jo Seoka has published an open letter calling upon President Jacob Zuma to investigate the 16 August 2012 police killing of 34 striking miners.
“The coming investigation into the shootings must commence promptly and consist of an impartial commission that will be able to establish responsibilities for the incident at all levels within the police force and government, and the top management of Lonmin,” Bishop Seoka said.
Last month police fired into a crowd of 3000 miners gathered on a hillside close to the Lonmin Platinum mine near Rustenburg after miners attacked police lines.
The mines have been the scene of labour tensions between two rival unions: the National Union of Mineworkers and the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union for the right to represent the mine’s 28,000 employees. In early August ten people, including two policemen, were killed in skirmishes between the unions who are also calling for a £600 a month wage increase from the British owned company.
Lonmin had a poor reputation the bishop said. “Communities in the area say that mines’ corporate social responsibility programmes are ‘lies’ as they make a lot of promises when they enter a community but often do not deliver,’ Bishop Seoka said, adding “the majority of the projects are done to satisfy their public image and rarely do they consult with workers to find out what they actually need.”
However, he announced that in his talks with management, “we are pleased to announce that Lonmin have finally agreed to meet with representatives of the strikers,” Bishop Seoka reported, adding that Lonmin had backed away from its threat to sack the striking workers.
At the first of four funerals held for the dead on 23 Aug, Bishop Seoka told the congregation the shootings brought back memories of the apartheid struggle. “We are shocked as a nation about what happened. None of us ever thought it would happen again.”
The Archbishop of Cape Town Thabo Makgoba warned political leaders not to exploit the tragedy for their own purposes telling the congregation “These are God’s people, we need to respect the dignity and sanctity of their lives.”
First printed in The Church of England Newspaper.
Bishops plea for justice from Robert Mugabe: The Church of England Newspaper, September 9, 2012 p 3 September 10, 2012
Posted by geoconger in Church of England Newspaper, Church of the Province of Central Africa, Zimbabwe.Tags: Cleophas Lunga, Godfrey Tawonezvi, Ishmael Mukuwanda, Julius Makoni, Nolbert Kunonga, Robert Mugabe
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Zimbabwe’s Anglican bishops have appealed to President Robert Mugabe to enforce the rule of law in the Central African nation and end police support for former Harare Nolbert Kunonga.
Last week the Bishops Cleophas Lunga of Matabeleland, Julius Makoni of Manicaland, Godfrey Tawonezvi of Masvingo and Ishmael Mukuwanda of Central Zimbabwe wrote to President Mugabe asking him to intervene in the case of Daramombe Mission in Chivhu in the Diocese of Masvingo.
They asked the president “members of the Government of National Unity, Home Affairs co-ministers and the Police Commissioner-General to intervene in this matter where innocent and peace-loving worshippers are being driven out of their church buildings for no legitimate reason.”
“As Anglican Bishops in Zimbabwe in the Church of the Province of Central Africa, we wish to express our dismay at the continued harassment of the faithful in the Diocese of Masvingo. What happened to freedom of worship in Zimbabwe,” they asked.
The bishops said that a court had held ruled the Daramombe Mission in the Diocese of Chivu was not part of the properties claimed by Dr. Kunonga as it was not part of the Diocese of Harare when he served as its bishop. However, Dr. Kunonga’s supporters had seized the church with the support of local police officials and driven out Anglicans loyal to the Church of the Province of Central Africa.
“What Kunonga is using to hoodwink the police are title deeds which he illegally refused to surrender to the Diocese of Masvingo at its formation. We are also disturbed that the police have taken sides. They are the ones who are in the forefront when our members are evicted from their church buildings,” the bishop said.
During his meeting with President Mugabe in 2011, the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams pressed him to intervene in the Dr. Kunonga affair and uphold the power of the courts. The protestations, however, appear not to have swayed the octogenarian Zimbabwe strongman as sources inside the country continue to report harassment by the security services of Anglicans.
First printed in The Church of England Newspaper.
Iran frees Pastor Yousef Nadarkhani: Anglican Ink, September 8, 2012 September 8, 2012
Posted by geoconger in Anglican Ink, Islam, Persecution.Tags: Christian Solidarity Worldwide, Iran, Yousef Nadarkhani
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The Iranian Christian pastor awaiting execution has been acquitted of the charge of apostasy and released from imprisonment.
Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) reports that at an 8 September 2012 hearing, the court overturned Yousef Nadarkhani’s 2010 conviction for apostasy, finding him guilty instead of proselytizing Muslims. He was sentenced to three years imprisonment, but released for time served.
In 2009, Mr. Nadarkhani was arrested and charged with apostasy after he complained that new government regulations requiring that his two sons, Daniel (10) and Yoel (8) be instructed in Islam in school violated the Iranian constitution’s guarantee of the free practice of religion.
Read it all in Anglican Ink.
No plans to neuter Canterbury: Anglican Ink, September 8, 2012 September 8, 2012
Posted by geoconger in Anglican Consultative Council, Anglican Ink, Archbishop of Canterbury, Church of England.Tags: Kenneth Kearon, Rowan Williams
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There are no plans to divest the Archbishop of Canterbury of his pan-Anglican responsibilities and transfer them to a “presidential” leader of the Anglican Communion, the secretary general of the Anglican Consultative Council, has claimed.
In a statement released on 8 September 2012, the Rev. Canon Kenneth Kearon said the claim put forward in an interview with Dr. Rowan Williams published earlier that day in the Daily Telegraph was untrue and “mischievous”.
In what was described as the final “major” interview of his archiepiscopate, the Telegraph quoted Dr. Williams as having conceded the job of archbishop could have been handled better by two men.
Read it all in Anglican Ink.
Massachusetts priest arrested for attempted child rape: Anglican Ink, Sept 7, 2012 September 8, 2012
Posted by geoconger in Abuse, Anglican Ink, Massachusetts.Tags: Paul LaCharite
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A retired Diocese of Massachusetts priest has been arrested by police and charged on one count of assault to rape a child and three counts of indecent assault and battery.
On 7 September 2012, the Middlesex District Attorney’s office reported the Rev. Paul A. LaCharite (65) had been taken into custody by the Somerville Police Department.
“We allege that this defendant, holding a trusted position within the Episcopal Church, indecently assaulted and touched the victim over several years, only ending his 10-year long predatory abuse of the victim when the defendant left the church,” District Attorney Leone said.
Read it all in Anglican Ink.
Sex and the Single Indian: Get Religion, September 7, 2012 September 7, 2012
Posted by geoconger in Get Religion, Hinduism, Popular Culture.Tags: advertising, BBC, Kama Sutra, pre-marital sex, Virginity
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The BBC’s inability to comprehend religion is not a new story at GetReligion. Often as not the corporation appears oblivious to the faith dimension of a story. I should say the BBC’s religion reporters are a professional lot and there are a number of fine specialty programs that treat faith issues well and when it focuses on religion it does a good job. It is outside the religion ghetto that the BBC fails to “get religion.”
This item, “Virginity cream sparks Indian sex debate”, is an example of the BBC’s failure to comprehend the faith element of a story.
It begins:
An Indian company has launched what it claims is the country’s first vagina tightening cream, saying it will make women feel “like a virgin” again. The company says it is about empowering women, but critics say it is doing the opposite. The BBC’s Rajini Vaidyanathan in Mumbai reports.
It is certainly a bold claim. As the music starts playing on the advertisement for the 18 Again cream, a sari-clad woman is singing and dancing. It is an unusual take on Bollywood. “I feel like a virgin,” she croons, although the advert makes it clear she is not. Her shocked in-laws look on, before her husband joins her for some salsa-style dancing. “Feels like the very first time,” she continues, as she is twirled around. Cut away to her mother-in-law who begins by responding with a disgusted look on her face, but by the end of the advert even she has been won over, and is seen buying the product online.
This video is designed to market a vaginal “rejuvenation and tightening” product, which was launched this month in India. The makers of 18 Again, the Mumbai-based pharmaceutical company Ultratech, say it is the first of its kind in India (similar creams are already available in other parts of the world such as the USA), and fills a gap in the market.
The article starts off with a few facts about the product but then turns into a discussion of the importance of virginity for women. It states:
… the company’s advertising strategy has attracted criticism from some doctors, women’s groups and social media users, who say the product reinforces the widely held view in India that pre-marital sex is something to be frowned upon, a taboo which is even seen as sinful by some.
The clause that ends this paragraph frames the rest of the story: “which is even seen as sinful by some.”
The BBC then lines up critics of 18 Again: doctors, activists and bloggers whose objections are that the add campaign reinforces a taboo on pre-marital sex.
Objection one comes from Annie Raja of the National Federation of Indian Women who says “this kind of cream is utter nonsense, and could give some women an inferiority complex,” as it reaffirms
a patriarchal view that is held by many here – the notion that men want all women to be virgins until their wedding night. “Why should women remain a virgin until marriage? It is a woman’s right to have sexual relations with a man, but society here still says they should not until they are brides.”
Second comes the doctor with the sex-advice column in the newspapers.
“Being a virgin is still prized, and I don’t think attitudes will change in this century,” says Dr Mahinda Watsa, a gynaecologist who writes a popular sexual advice column in the Mumbai Mirror and Bangalore Mirror newspaper. … Men still hope they’re marrying a virgin, but more girls in India, at least in the towns and cities, are having sex before.”
And then we move to the internet. Man (woman) in the street comments followed by Dr Nisreen Nakhoda, “a GP who advises on sexual health for the medical website MDhil” who questions the science behind the product, and observes:
The young generation wants to be hip and cool and try out sex before marriage, but they’re still brought up in the traditional set up where it’s taboo to have sex before marriage. This leads to a lot of confusion in many teenagers. On one hand you’re supposed to be the traditional demure Indian bride, but on the other hand, you don’t want to have to wait for sex because people are marrying later. Temptations are coming their way and people are no longer resisting,” says Dr Nakhoda.
Any comment representing a voice in support of the traditional view? No, but the BBC does provides a sidebar which begins with this questionable statement:
Ancient India has always been celebrated for its openness and lack of hypocrisy, for its modernity and inclusive attitude; but in one aspect, it has remained rigid: the need for women to be virgins.
But closes with the admission that virginity is a religious issue and is:
Considered to be a spiritual obligation, Hindu wedding ceremonies even today centre round the Kanyadaan, which literally translates as the gift of a virgin.
From the start the BBC has framed this story in a faith-free atmosphere. We see this in the line about some “even” seeing pre-marital sex as being sinful. Who might these people be? Answer: India’s Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Jains and Parsis to name but a few.
Were India a fiercely secular society, such an omission might be justified. But it is not — nor are the rates of pre-marital sex comparable to the West. A study by the International Institute for Population Studies estimated that 3 per cent of women had engaged in pre-marital sex.
Why? Perhaps it is because sexuality for a woman in the Vedic tradition of Hindu culture is controlled by her age and marital status. It frames virginity, chastity and celibacy as being appropriate for distinct periods of life. Virginity is expected of a woman before marriage and chastity is expected within marriage. Celibacy, as signaled by an ascetic withdrawal from the obligations of marriage and family life, takes place at the end of life with abstinence being a liberation of the self from worldly attachments. While Tantric cults exalted women in worship, their sexual mores did not extend to a modern notion of female sexual autonomy. While the ideal seldom governs the real, it must be stated that pre-marital sex simply does not work within the Hindu worldview.
From what I have read, discussions of sexuality in India often turn to a mythologized past where it is claimed “openness and a lack of hypocrisy” ruled. This is the Kama Sutra narrative, but it is not history. It is more a product of the nationalist aspirations of the rising middle classes of the Twentieth century, mixed with anti-colonialism, coupled with a dash of “Orientalism” — a belief in repressed Westerners and liberated Orientals. However the Kama Sutra narrative of Indian sexuality is largely irrelevant to an understanding of its modern manifestations and as sociologist Sanjay Srivastava of the Institute of Economic Growth in Delhi writes:
is best confined to expensive coffee table books of our ‘glorious’ past that was supposedly destroyed by foreign invaders.
Does the BBC truly believe that it is not necessary to note the objections that might come from religious scruples? I do not believe I am being too harsh. Though an off color topic, the story was not treated in a light tone. It was given the full BBC treatment — 1400 words including an analysis side bar. Yet the final result was one-sided and woefully incomplete.
Bottom line — a poor outing once again for the BBC.
First printed at GetReligion.
Church leaders urge Egypt’s new president to support religious tolerance: The Church of England Newspaper, September 2, 2012 p 6. September 6, 2012
Posted by geoconger in Church of England Newspaper, Episcopal Church in Jerusalem & the Middle East, Islam, Persecution.Tags: Arab Spring, Egypt, Mohammad Morsi, Mouneer Anis, Muslim Brotherhood
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The sacking of the country’s top generals puts an end to 52 years of military rule and restores the rule of law to Egypt, President Mohammed Morsi told a gathering of Christian leaders this week, the Bishop of Egypt Dr. Mouneer Anis writes.
On 22 August, Dr. Anis along with 12 other bishops and ministers representing Egypt’s Coptic Orthodox Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Anglican and Protestant Churches met for two hours at the presidential palace with the new president.
“I, and all my colleagues, appreciated the fact that the President called us twice in less than two months to talk and listen to us. This never happened in the last 30 years,” Dr. Anis said.
“The President shared with us the reasons behind his recent decisions to dismiss the military chiefs and the cancelling of the constitutional declarations they made. By these decisions the President put an end to the military ruling of the country which started since 1952. He also shared his hopes that the new Constitution would represent the hopes and views of all Egyptian regardless of their religion, ethnic background and political views. This will guarantee the support of the vast majority of people to the new constitution,” the bishop reported.
Asked to share with him the concerns of Egypt’s Christian minority, the church leaders urged the president to clamp down on sectarian violence. “Ignorance and wrong teaching are behind such congestion,” they told the president and urged him to support the “sound and moderate religious teaching of Islam as taught by Al Azhar.”
A member of the Muslim Brotherhood before his run for office, President Morsi has supported the introduction of Shari’a law in Egypt. At a 13 May rally broadcast by Misr-25 TV, he told supporters the Koran would be the true constitution of Egypt.
“Above all – Allah is our goal… The shari’a, then the shari’a, and finally, the shari’a. This nation will enjoy blessing and revival only through the Islamic shari’a. I take an oath before Allah and before you all that regardless of the actual text [of the constitution]… Allah willing, the text will truly reflect [the shari’a], as will be agreed upon by the Egyptian people, by the Islamic scholars, and by legal and constitutional experts,” he proclaimed.
The Christian leaders urged the president to improve the quality of Egypt’s schools to “care for the education of the new generations so that they become more tolerant and good citizens. We suggested that common values should be taught in schools,” Dr Anis said.
They also asked the president to ensure non-partisan policy and that the security services apply the “rule of law on everyone, especially when sectarian clashes” as well as take steps to improve public order across the country.
“We told the President that we are aware that he received a heavy responsibility at a very difficult time in Egypt’s history and we all need to be patient and hard-working in order to see the desired fruits,” the bishop reported, adding the president “assured us that he is working to achieve the dream of Egypt: to be a democratic and modern country where the rights of citizenship and the constitution are held up high.”
“In the end, we came out of the meeting very encouraged and determined to do our best in order to see the Egypt that we dream of,” said Dr. Anis.
First printed in The Church of England Newspaper.
Communal violence errupts in Assam: The Church of England Newspaper, September 2, 2012 p 1. September 6, 2012
Posted by geoconger in Church of England Newspaper, Church of North India, NGOs.Tags: Assam, Bodo, Oxfam India, sectarianism
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Communal violence in the North East Indian state of Assam has claimed the lives of approximately 75 people and displaced over 400,000 people after fighting erupted between Muslim immigrants from Bangladesh and the predominantly Hindu and Christian Bodo people.
The Church of North India in conjunction with the Lutheran World Service India trust, Churches Auxiliary for Social Action and other Christian NGOs has asked for assistance to support the refugees housed in 270 relief camps across Assam.
Press reports from India state the violence erupted on 20 July after four Bodo youths were killed in a fight with Bengali immigrants. Bodo tribesmen retaliated by attacking Bengali settlements and the violence then spiraled out of control. Hundreds of villages are reported to have been looted and over 5000 homes destroyed.
Friction between Bengali immigrants and Bodo tribesman has grown in recent years and is not the first time the two groups have come to blows. In 1993 2000 people were killed in sectarian clashes, and in 2003 the government signed a peace deal with Bodo militants giving them autonomy over the four districts.
On 24 July the Indian Federal government responded to the sectarian violence by dispatching troops to the troubled districts, which are part of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s parliamentary constituency. A dusk to dawn curfew was imposed on 26 July and the army ordered to shoot looters on sight.
Prime Minister Singh visited the riot torn area last week and said the central government will closely work with the Assam state government to ensure the people’s safety. He also announced the government would send approximately £12 million to rebuild homes destroyed in the fighting and to compensate the families of those killed in the fighting.
On 15 August the Indian government announced it had lifted the state of emergency and said it would close the refugee camps. However, church aid agencies report that many of those living in the refugee camps have become ill with dysentery and twenty-two people have died so far in the camps, while around 8,000 children are sick, according to government figures.
Many also now have no place to go. “Most of the displaced fled with nothing,” says Zubin Zaman from Oxfam India. “Sanitation has to be stepped up with better hygiene practices, access to clean water and more toilets. There is also a need for bedding, clothing, mosquito nets and tarpaulin sheets.”
Survivors say they cannot live in such conditions, but add that it is better than dying at the hands of armed mobs.
“We do not want to live like this, but we will not go back. The security forces cannot protect us. They cannot be there 24 hours a day, guarding us,” says Barendra Brahma, 70, a retired school teacher in a camp in the town of Kokrajhar.
“I was born in that village. If I go back now, it will only be to die,” she told Relief.Net.
First printed in The Church of England Newspaper.
Is it Race or Religion at Issue in Burma: Get Religion, September 5, 2012 September 6, 2012
Posted by geoconger in Buddhism, Get Religion, Islam, Persecution, Press criticism.Tags: AFP, Burma, France 24, Rohingya
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What is driving the violence in Burma? Race or religion? And can the two be distinguished from one another. Reports from the South East Asian nation have framed the conflict in terms of sectarian violence — but is religion really the issue here?
The English-language service of France 24 reported that Buddhist monks had staged a mass political rally in the streets of Burma’s second largest city Mandalay. But unlike the 2007 anti-government protests that sparked the unsuccessful “Saffron Revolution”, France 24 reported this week’s rally was in support of the government and against Muslims.
Drawn from an AFP wire service report, France 24‘s headline read: “Buddhist monks stage anti-Rohingya rally”. The subtitle firmly anchored the story to the theme of sectarian Buddhist-Muslim clashes.
Hundreds of Buddhist monks marched in the Burmese city of Mandalay on Sunday to back President Thein Sein’s proposal to deport members of the Rohingya Muslim minority group. Fighting between the two sides has left almost 90 people dead since June.
The article stated:
“Protect Mother Myanmar by supporting the President,” read one banner, while others criticised United Nations human rights envoy Tomas Ojea Quintana, who has faced accusations that he is biased in favour of the Rohingya, following deadly unrest between Buddhists and Muslims in western Rakhine state.
This article is the best I have seen so far on the disturbances. Written from Burma, it offered comments from a leader of the monks as well as concerns from international rights groups. But the title and subtitles given by France 24 do not quite match the story written by AFP.
The leader of the protest march did not use religion as a reason for his march, but race.
Wirathu, the 45-year-old monk who led the march, claimed that as many as 5,000 monks had joined the procession, with another several thousand people taking to the streets to watch.
He told AFP the protest was to “let the world know that Rohingya are not among Myanmar’s ethnic groups at all”.
The monk, who goes by one name, said the aim was also to condemn “terrorism of Rohingya Bengalis who cruelly killed ethnic Rakhines”.
Speaking a dialect similar to one in neighbouring Bangladesh, the estimated 800,000 Rohingya in Myanmar are seen by the government and many Burmese as illegal immigrants and the violence has stoked a wave of anger across the Buddhist-majority country.
The video accompanying the France 24 story along with the text of the article quoted the leader of the monks as stressing a clash of peoples who happen to be of different faiths, than a clash of faiths. In the video Wirathu tells the camera that all Burmese “religions, sects and political parties” are united against the Rohingya.
A second AFP story from Burma suggested that race and religion may not be divisible. In an article entitled “Myanmar Christians forced to convert: rights group” a spokesman for the Chin, a predominantly Christian minority group in Burma, stated:
Rachel Fleming, another member of the [Chin] group, said Christianity does not fit with the national view that “to be Burmese, you should be Buddhist”.
Where then should the emphasis be in the phrase “Rohingya Muslim minority group”? On the ethnic — Rohingya — or religious — Muslim — descriptors for this minority group? It may well be argued that this is a meaningless distinction, that the reasons for the Rohinga’s suffering are of secondary consequence to the fact of their suffering. I have some sympathy for this argument, but it is a journalist’s duty to split these hairs and dig into a story. The bottom line is that what AFP reported is not so straight forward as the France 24 title suggested.
To paraphrase Neville Chamberlain, Burma is a far away country that we know little about — and hence care little about. Why would balancing race versus religion matter? One consequence of the Rohingya conflict is that it has become a political football in the Islamic world, with some extremist groups calling for jihad against Buddhists.
The anti-Buddhist rhetoric became so bad the Central Tibetan Administration — the Dhali Lama’s government in exile — issued a press statement denouncing the use of misleading photos to whip up anti-Buddhist sentiment in the Muslim world.
The Central Tibetan Administration based in Dharamsala is deeply disturbed and concerned over the circulation of a misleading photograph in some section of the media showing Tibetan monks in their reports on the recent violence in Myanmar involving Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims.
A photograph of Tibetan monks standing in front of a pile of dead bodies appeared in many websites in the Muslim countries, especially Pakistan. This photo of Tibetan monks was actually taken during their relief work in Kyegudo (Yushul), eastern Tibet, after a devastating earthquake hit the region on 14 April 2010. The Tibetan monks extended remarkable service in the rescue and relief operations at the time.
The relevant department of the Central Tibetan Administration wrote a letter to a website in Pakistan (ColumPk.com, Urdu Current Affairs Portal) on 30 July to remove the photo from its website, which it did so the next day. But the photo is still in circulation, as some Muslims carrying the photo during their recent protest in Mumbai on 11 August 2012, appeared in Zee News, a leading news channel in India.
We strongly appeal to the media across the world not to use this photo, which is being circulated by miscreants to provoke conflict between the Buddhist and Muslim communities.
Pakistani pro-democracy bloggers have chronicled the use of the fake atrocity photo by Islamist extremist groups to inflame public sentiment, while retaliatory attacks on Buddhist temples in Indonesia by Muslim extremist groups in the wake of the Burmese conflict have been reported. Would these attacks have taken place if the Muslim angle were downplayed and the ethnic angle stressed? Does it make any difference? Should the press dig deeper into this story and find out what is really going on in Burma?
What say you GetReligion readers? How should this story be played out? Should reporters worry about the consequences of their stories if fanatics seize upon them for their own ends?
First printed in GetReligion.
Adelaide Supreme Court to review Australia’s church disciplinary canons: The Church of England Newspaper, September 2, 2012 September 6, 2012
Posted by geoconger in Anglican Church of Australia, Church of England Newspaper.Tags: clergy disciplinary canons, Diocese of The Murray, Peter Coote, Phillip Aspinall, Ross Davies
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An Australian diocese has asked the Supreme Court of South Australia to uphold the legality of the Anglican Church of Australia’s clergy disciplinary code following the successful appeal of a suspended archdeacon.
The Primate of the Anglican Church of Australia, Archbishop Phillip Aspinall, has also joined the Diocese of the Murray in seeking an order from the court overturning the findings of Neville Morcombe QC, who last April held the diocese’s Professional Standards Board did not have jurisdiction to examine Archdeacon Peter Coote’s alleged misconduct.
Dr. Aspinall argued that unless the Supreme Court reaffirms the legality of the diocesan and national church disciplinary canons, the church’s ability to discipline its clergy could collapse. The latest court proceedings in the Coote affair cap an 8-year saga for the Diocese of the Murray, which led in part to the dismissal of its former bishop, the Rt. Rev. Ross Davies.
In 2004Archdeacon Coote was accused of sexual misconduct by three female members of the diocese. After investigation the diocese’s Professionals Standards Committee found the allegations to be credible and in July 2007 Fr. Coote was dismissed as archdeacon and his licence to officiate as a priest suspended in 2008.
The diocesan decision was sent to the national church’s Professional Standards Board for review, and in 2009 the board upheld the decision. Fr. Coote appealed that decision and review by an independent attorney followed, which included a new hearing before a newly constituted Professional Standards Board.
The new board issued its decision in March 2011, which Fr. Coote subsequently appealed, and the case was sent to Mr. Morcombe for review. In April 2012 he concluded the board had no jurisdiction to investigate Fr. Coote and ruled the board had no jurisdiction to undertake its inquiry. The diocesan standards committee responded in June with its appeal to the civil courts asking for a declaration that the Professional Standards Board had jurisdiction to hear the case, and a ruling that the Morcombe finding be dismissed.
Attorneys for Fr. Coote urged the Supreme Court to uphold the Morcombe decision, and argued the 2007 disciplinary canon was inconsistent with Article IX of the church’s constitution.
Represented by the Adelaide law firm Iles Selley, Archbishop Aspinall asked permission to intervene in the case to defend the “constitutional validity” of the diocesan and national church disciplinary canons.
“The Professional Standards Ordinance 2007 of the Diocese of the Murray is largely mirrored in some 21 of the 23 dioceses which constitute the Anglican Church of Australia,” Archbishop Aspinall’s pleading said.
“Were any challenge to the validity of any professional standards ordinance to succeed, or should such a view be expressed by this honourable court, it may have widespread and adverse consequences for all of the dioceses that make up the Anglican Church of Australia,” the archbishop argued, adding that as primate, he had “an interest in the proper interpretation of the National Constitution and, in particular, insofar as it affects the rights, powers and responsibilities of individual dioceses.”
On 24 Sept 2010, Archdeacon Coote’s former superior, Bishop Davies, resigned as Bishop of The Murray one day before a tribunal met to hear nine counts of misconduct laid against him by the Archbishop of Adelaide and Bishop of Willochra.
After two days of hearings, the tribunal found the former bishop guilty of misconduct in absentia and recommended he be removed from the episcopate. Among the charges that led to his being deposed, Bishop Davies was adjudged to have subverted the Professional Standards processes by failing to respond to allegations of sexual misconduct made against Archdeacon Coote.
First printed in The Church of England Newspaper.
Australia’s asylum policy ‘un-Christian’: The Church of England Newspaper, September 2, 2012 p 6. September 6, 2012
Posted by geoconger in Anglican Church of Australia, Church of England Newspaper, Immigration.Tags: Houston Report, Jeffrey Driver, Philip Freier
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Retired Australian Defence Chief Air Chief Marshall Angus Houston
Church leaders in Australia have voiced objections to new legislation to regulate entry of asylum seekers and control illegal immigration.
The Archbishop of Adelaide, Dr. Jeffrey Driver – the chairman of the Anglican Church of Australia’s Refugee and Migrant Network – said he welcomed some of the reforms, but was perturbed by the underlying philosophy of the government’s “Houston Report” on asylum seekers.
On 13 August 2012 a report commissioned by the government from an expert panel convened by Air Chief Marshall Angus Houston made 22 recommendations for reforming the government’s asylum policies including processing asylum seekers in Nauru and Papua New Guinea. The report, which the panel described as “hard-headed but not hard-hearted” and “realistic, but not idealistic”, also recommended increasing the current number of asylum places from 13,000 to 20,000 immediately, and expanding it to 27,000 within five years.
Air Chief Marshall Houston said there were no quick and easy solutions to Australia’s boat people problem, but argued the panel’s recommendations were guided by fairness and a sense of humanity. “Like all Australians we are deeply concerned about this tragic loss of life at sea … to do nothing is unacceptable,” he said.
The “Houston Report’s recommendation that boat people processed on Naura and PNG’s Manus Island should be forced to wait as long as those who claim asylum through more traditional channels before they are resettled is inhumane and will be prohibitively expensive,” Dr. Driver said.
“Using the fate of asylum seekers in this way to discourage people smugglers is like using the victims of crime to fight crime; it is punishing the victims in order to discourage the perpetrators,” he said.
The Archbishop of Melbourne, Dr. Philip Freier welcomed the quota increase, but worried there were no guarantees that asylum seekers will not be detained indefinitely on Nauru and Manus Island.
“It has been clearly established that long and indefinite detention severely affects the mental health of detainees. This is of particular concern in the case of children and unaccompanied minors,” he said on 16 August, adding that he urged “the Federal Government to place a limit on the time detainees, especially children, are held in detention.”
Prof. Andrew Dutney, President of the National Assembly of the Uniting Church in Australia, said his church was “deeply disappointed at the recommendations of the Houston Panel on Asylum Seekers. And we are dismayed by the enthusiasm with which the Parliament has passed legislation which will see Australia close its doors to asylum seekers arriving by boat.”
The new policies a sign of a “grave moral failure” and of a “political process that has completely lost its moorings in the Christian heritage” and were “based on a theory of deterrence. The aim is, effectively, to punish new arrivals so that when others hear about it they will be deterred from attempting the same thing. The horrifying message we are sending is that, not only are strangers not welcome here, they are risking further harm at our hands,” he argued.
“A nation that is so determined to turn strangers away – to oppose the God whose mission begins with the stranger, the disadvantaged and the unwanted – cannot prosper in any way that matters,” Prof. Dutney said.
First printed in The Church of England Newspaper.
Uganda drops Anglican Mission in America: The Church of England Newspaper, September 2, 2012 p 6. September 2, 2012
Posted by geoconger in Church of England Newspaper, Church of the Province of Uganda, Church of the Province of West Africa.Tags: Anthony Eiwuley, Chuck Murphy, Nathan Kyamanywa
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The Church of the Province of Uganda has withdrawn its ecclesial sponsorship for the Anglican Mission in America (AMiA).
Formed in 2000 as an American arm of the Church of the Province of Rwanda (PEAR) the AMiA under its leader Bishop Chuck Murphy split from PEAR last year. While many of the AMiA’s congregations and two of its bishops have transferred to the jurisdiction of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA), some have remained loyal to Bishop Murphy – joining him in temporary oversight from the Anglican Church of the Congo.
Earlier this month the remaining AMiA clergy received a letter from its headquarters in Pawleys Island, South Carolina asking that they choose one of two new canonical jurisdictions. In July Bishop Murphy, accompanied by his assistant the Rev. Canon Kevin Donlon, travelled to Africa to arrange alternative provincial oversight following the end of the Congo haven.
Last week the AMiA leader wrote that clergy may choose to affiliate with the Diocese of Bunyoro-Kitara of the Church of the Province of Uganda under Bishop Nathan Kyamanywa, or the Diocese of Dunkwa-on-Offin of the Church of the Province of West Africa in Ghana under Bishop Edmund Dawson Ahmoah. Clergy were allowed to choose which jurisdiction they wanted to enter, or the office in Pawleys Island would assign a jurisdiction. Clergy were asked to respond by 31 August.
However, on 21 August, the Provincial Office of the Church of the Province of Uganda in Kampala released a statement saying:
“The Rt. Rev. Nathan Kyamanywa, Bishop of Bunyoro-Kitara Diocese, in consultation with the Archbishop of the Church of Uganda, the Most Rev. Henry Luke Orombi, has withdrawn his offer, effective immediately, to provide canonical residency to clergy in the AMiA, the Society of Mission and Apostolic Works.”
The withdrawal of the offer to provide canonical residency for AMiA clergy living in the U.S. was not unexpected, as Uganda was the first of the African provinces to offer ecclesial sanctuary to disaffected Episcopal clergy to relinquish its oversight to the Anglican Church in North America.
The General Secretary of the Church of the Province of West Africa, the Rev. Canon Anthony Eiwuley stated: “It is news to all of us that the Diocese of Dunkwa-on-Offin has some kind of association with AMiA.”
Canon Eiwuley said he would make further inquiries, but “nowhere in any of our meeting have we given approval to any relationship with AMiA.”
First printed in The Church of England Newspaper.
Chichester priest arrested for assault: The Church of England Newspaper, September 2, 2012, p 5. September 2, 2012
Posted by geoconger in Abuse, Church of England, Church of England Newspaper.Tags: Diocese of Chichester, Robert Coles
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A retired Chichester clergyman has been arrested at his home in Eastbourne on suspicion of sexual assault. On 16 August 2012 the Rev. Robert Coles (71) was charged with 29 counts of sexual abuse committed against three boys between 1978 and 1984 in West Sussex, Cornwall, Devon, Somerset and the Isle of Wight.
On 6 March 2012, detectives from the Sussex police child protection team arrested Mr. Coles following a six-month investigation. He was released on conditional bail, but charged last week following further inquiries.
The investigation followed the release of a report prepared last year by Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss into the Diocese of Chichester’s child protection practices. A criminal complaint was lodged against Mr. Coles and investigated by police in 1997, but there was insufficient evidence to support criminal proceedings.
A police spokesman said: “The charges, authorized by the South East Complex Case Unit of the Crown Prosecution Service, follow a nine month enquiry by Sussex Police detectives into these allegations.
“None of the charges relate to any allegations of recent or current offending and police emphasise that there is nothing to suggest that any children are currently at risk.”
The Diocese of Chichester released a statement in March saying it was aware of the arrest and was “co-operating fully with the police and other statutory agencies in all their activities, including this investigation.”
The Bishop of Horsham, the Rt. Rev. Mark Sowerby stated: “We are absolutely committed to making sure that our churches are safe communities for children and vulnerable adults and to giving the highest priority to statutory safeguarding practice and Church of England policies on safeguarding. We owe this to those who have suffered abuse and most especially to those who have suffered abuse at the hands of people exercising a ministry in the name of the Church.”
“We are resolved to do whatever is necessary to prevent the abuse of children and vulnerable adults and to ensure that no one fails victims of abuse by failing to report information or knowledge of wrongdoing to the police.”
Mr. Coles is set to appear at Chichester Magistrates’ Court on 5 September.
First printed in The Church of England Newspaper.
Bishops are Republicans, Nuns are Catholic: Get Religion, September 1, 2012 September 2, 2012
Posted by geoconger in Get Religion, Politics.Tags: Democratic National Convention, James Carville, New York Times, Simone Campbell, Timothy Dolan
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Archbishop Timothy Dolan has been invited to give the closing prayer at this week’s Democratic Convention in Charlotte. The New York Times reports the New York cardinal will be one of matched pair of high profile Catholics to appear on the podium before the Democratic faithful, with Sister Simone Campbellof “Nuns on the Bus” fame completing the set.
Religion reporter Laurie Goodstein’s story “At Democratic Convention, a Cardinal and an Outspoken Nun” sets the scene and offers a bit of the “why” — but I’ve seen little so far on the “how” — and outside of the religious press, not much on whether this is a good idea at all.
The Times reports the news the:
Democrats are giving a convention speaking slot to Sister Simone Campbell, an outspoken advocate for the poor and elderly, according to an aide with President Obama’s campaign who would speak only on background.
In doing so, the Democratic Party has balanced its own Catholic ticket by showcasing both Sister Campbell, who pushed for the passage of the Obama administration’s health care overhaul, and Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan of New York, who is suing the White House over a provision in the health care overhaul that requires employers to cover birth control in their employee insurance plans.
The article is framed in good cop/bad cop terms, but seeks to balance the piece by positing a degree of moral equivalence between the Dolan and Campbell’s political activities.
Cardinal Dolan, who says he is a personal friend of Representative Paul D. Ryan, Mitt Romney’s running mate. has been perceived by many Catholic commentators as being too cozy with Republicans, while Sister Campbell has been seen as being too supportive of Democratic causes. In June, she led the “Nuns on the Bus” tour to call attention to cuts affecting the poor and elderly in the budget proposed by Mr. Ryan.
The two will have different roles at the convention:
Cardinal Dolan will give the closing prayer at the convention, and Sister Campbell will speak but not offer a prayer.
And the story then r0unds off with a few paragraphs about Sister Campbell. All in all a solid story with an editorial voice that favors the nun over the cardinal. The theme of the article is that the liberal Campbell is balanced by the conservative Dolan.
What would have made the story stronger would have been a development of the why and how themes. We have surface story of the Democrats playing “me too”, inviting Dolan because the Republicans did. The import being the Democrats are seeking to curry favor with Catholic voters in the same way the Republicans have. But Campbell?
The Times article notes her support for the President’s healthcare initiative and suggests she is an alternative Catholic voice. Yet is there more? In an Aug 24 story in the New Yorker — before the invitation from the Democrats was given to Dolan, Hendrick Hertzberg wrote:
Dolan, as you may also have heard, heads up the male hierarchy’s drive to portray Obamacare as an attack on freedom of religion and is a leading enforcer in the Vatican-ordered crackdown on women religious who regard ministering to the poor and the sick as more urgent and more admirable than railing against contraception and homosexuality.
He then cites with approval the Aug 24 edition of the Carville – Greenberg Memorandum, where James Carville argues the Democrats should invite Campbell to spite Dolan and exploit the social justice agenda of the church for their political advantage.
And now, a week later, we have Campbell speaking and Dolan praying in Charlotte. How did we get to this point? Do Dolan and and Campbell represent different wings of the same church, different views of what it means to live a Catholic life? Is it wise for the Catholic Church to allow individuals to become symbols of the conflicting views of its teachings?
Should the Catholic Church allow itself to be used by the national political parties in this way? I am not speaking of separation of church/state issues, but whether the integrity of the church, any church, is damaged when it comes in contact with secular politics. The assumption here is that it is social good for religious organizations — as opposed to religious individuals — to take a stand in the public square. Is that a valid assumption?
And should these issues be raised in the reporting on these questions? Not every story need be an essay on the merits of the marriage of politics and church leaders — but should there not be a voice offered from time to time that sees the arrangement differently? What say you GetReligion readers? Have I strayed into editorializing here by suggesting that clergy might be seen, but not heard at political conventions? Am I pushing my interpretation ahead of the simple facts of who is doing what in Charlotte — or is there a deeper truth that has yet to be revealed in the reporting of these issues?
And the title to this post? It comes from the Carville video –his mangling (deliberate?) of the old saw, “Bishops are Republicans, Nuns are Democrats.”
First printed in GetReligion.
Indian Ocean Synod reelects Ian Ernest as Archbishop: The Church of England Newspaper, September 2, 2012 p 6. August 31, 2012
Posted by geoconger in Church of England Newspaper, Church of the Province of the Indian Ocean.Tags: Diocese of Mauritius, Ian Ernest, Madagascar
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The General Synod of the Province of the Indian Ocean has re-elected the Bishop of Mauritius Ian Ernest to a second five-year term and archbishop and primate of the eight diocese province covering Madagascar, the Seychelles and Mauritius.
Meeting last week in Fianarantsoa, Madagascar the bishops and synod discussed the political and economic situation in Madagascar, which since independence from France in 1960 has suffered repeated changes of government. A Fourth Republic was established in 2010 after the adoption by referendum of a new constitution. In 2009 President Marc Ravalomanana was removed by a coup led opposition leader and then-mayor of Antananarivo, Andry Rajoelina. In March 2009, Rajoelina was declared by the Supreme Court as the President of the High Transitional Authority, an interim governing body responsible for moving the country toward presidential elections. Elections have been set for next year.
In an interview with Week-End magazine, Archbishop Ernest said the synod hoped the Anglican Church could act as a mediating agent between the rival political groups in Madagascar and help bring an end to political instability that had dried up the tourist trade and hampered economic growth. The Synod welcomed the government’s pledge to hold elections next year, and asked that they be free and fair and respectful of the dignity of the people (“respectueux du peuple malgache”). They also called upon the government to support the right to information and freedom of expression (droit à l’information et à la liberté d’expression).
In other business synod heard reports on diocesan projects, including the foundation of an Anglicare Mauritius to oversee church social service work on the island. The church agency’s first project is a home for un-wed mothers built in conjunction with the Roman Catholic Diocese of Port-Louis.
Archbishop Ernest told Week-End the Anglican Church sought to be a full partner in the social, spiritual and economic development of Mauritius. “We are all called to work together to honor the sacrifice made by the ancestors of all Mauritians to make this country a land of milk and honey,” said the archbishop.
First printed in The Church of England Newspaper.
Conger 