History > 2011 > USA > Faith (III)

Muslim Leaders

Criticize Police Response to Scuffle

August 31, 2011
The New York Times
By DAN BILEFSKY

Muslim civil rights leaders on Wednesday accused the authorities of using excessive force after a Westchester County amusement park’s restrictions on head coverings provoked a scuffle a day earlier that led to the arrest of 15 people.

About 3,000 visitors from a Muslim tour group were at Playland park in Rye on Tuesday afternoon celebrating the end of Ramadan when a dispute erupted after women wearing traditional hijabs, or head scarves, were told they could not wear them on certain rides, for safety reasons.

Among the rides that headwear is prohibited on is the Dragon Coaster, on which riders plunge 128 feet before being hurled into the mouth of a smoke-emitting dragon. However, headwear, including the hijab, is allowed on the Double Shot, in which passengers, harnessed in cars, are rocketed up an 85-foot tower in less than two seconds before being shot back down at a nausea-inducing force of what the park says is “negative-one G.”

Park officials said Wednesday that the women were offered admission refunds, but that an altercation ensued when clutches of displeased visitors became agitated and began to argue among themselves and then with park officials, including two rangers who were hospitalized with injuries.

Peter Tartaglia, deputy commissioner of the County Parks Department, said that two people were charged with assault and that 13 were charged with disorderly conduct. All had been released by Tuesday night.

Mr. Tartaglia said the Muslim American Society of New York, which organized the outing, had been warned of the headwear rule, which he said was a safety precaution to ensure that items like caps and head scarves did not get entangled in mechanical parts. On Playland’s Web site, he noted, rides that allow what the park calls headgear are clearly indicated with the letter H.

“This is all about safety, not about religion,” he said.

Mr. Tartaglia recalled an April 2010 episode in Sydney, Australia, in which a 26-year-old mother wearing a hijab was strangled after her head scarf became tangled in the wheel axle of a go-kart. In another incident, in Buena Park, Calif., in 2000, two dozen people were stranded on a roller coaster for about three hours after a rider’s jacket flew onto the track and became wedged under the train.

Cyrus McGoldrick, civil rights manager at the New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said Wednesday that the authorities had overreacted. He said 60 patrol cars and 100 police officers from nine departments had responded to the disturbance, which he said had involved 40 people at most. He said video taken during the episode showed the police pushing at least one Muslim woman to the ground.

“There seems to have been a disproportionate response in which police used excessive strength and force to subdue female protesters,” Mr. McGoldrick said. “That had a snowball effect on the antagonism and aggression that ensued.”

Sharif Aly, vice president of the Muslim American Society of New York, said it was investigating the episode to determine whether the group had been singled out for being Muslim.

Mr. Tartaglia said that nearly 6,000 people were at the amusement park at the time, and that police intervention had been necessary to ensure public safety. “The incident was very quickly escalating,” he said, “and the police had no choice to interfere, or it could have turned into a riot.”

David Mandt, spokesman for the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions, whose members include Disney World and the company that operates the attractions at Coney Island, said it was not unusual for amusement parks to require guests to remove or secure loose articles, including head scarves or hats of any kind.

Kristin Siebeneicher, a spokeswoman for Six Flags Great Adventure in Jackson, N.J., said that for safety reasons, no loose articles were allowed on rides. But hijabs, which are typically securely wrapped around the head, are allowed, she said.

Ms. Siebeneicher said that those wearing the hijab were advised to exercise caution on Six Flags’ most “extreme” ride, the Kingda Ka, a 45-story roller coaster that she said was the tallest in the world and the fastest in North America, going from zero to 128 miles per hour in 3.5 seconds.

“Because that roller coaster is so extreme, we require that head scarves are tightly fastened,” she said. “But we are more than happy to have them along on the ride.”

    Muslim Leaders Criticize Police Response to Scuffle, NYT, 31.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/01/nyregion/muslims-criticize-police-over-playland-fight-about-hajibs.html

Fight Erupts Over Head Scarves at Playland Park in Rye

August 30, 2011
The New York Times
By ELIZABETH A. HARRIS and JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN

A scuffle broke out at an amusement park in Westchester County on Tuesday when a group of Muslims there to celebrate the end of Ramadan were told that women could not wear their head coverings on certain rides, park officials and witnesses said. Fifteen people were arrested.

The Muslim American Society of New York had arranged the trip to Playland Park in Rye, which was expected to bring some 3,000 people to the site from New York City, as well as surrounding suburbs like Yonkers and parts of Long Island.

About 2:30 p.m., the day took a sour turn when some of the female Muslim visitors, most of whom arrived in head scarves, were told they could not get on certain rides — including the Catch-a-Wave ride, the Crazy Mouse roller coaster and the Dragon Coaster — because their heads were covered by the Muslim hijab.

Ola Salem, 17, of Coney Island, Brooklyn, was visiting with the group to celebrate the Muslim holiday of Id al-Fitr, or the end of the holy month of Ramadan, and wearing a pink and gray head scarf. She said she asked a park employee if she could join her 8-year-old sister on a ride.

“They said no because my of my ‘headgear,’ “ Ms. Salem said. “I said, ‘It’s not my headgear, it’s my religion.’ “

Ms. Salem said she asked to speak with a supervisor and was presented with a list of rides that would require her to remove her scarf. More than a dozen of the park’s rides, she said, were on the list.

“It got heated,” said Kathleen M. O’Connor, commissioner of the Westchester County Parks Department. “They were frustrated they couldn’t get on the rides.”

According to park officials, disappointed customers were then offered a refund, and several people proceeded to the park’s main entrance to get back the $20 each member of the group had paid.

Then, the Parks Department said, about 20 members of the Muslim American group started fighting among themselves. Peter Tartaglia, the deputy commissioner of the department, said there was pushing and shoving, so some park rangers intervened. One ranger sustained an injured shoulder; another injured a knee.

Fifteen people, men and women, were placed under arrest, county officials said, though they did not specify whether all of them were members of the tour group. They were charged, the officials said, but the charges were not specified, and all of the arrested were released.

Some people who came to the park with the group said the fight began when a park employee touched a Muslim woman, at which point tempers flared.

“We don’t have any knowledge of that at all from the police end or from the parks end,” Mr. Tartaglia said.

County officials blamed the trip’s organizers for not informing the guests that they would have to remove their headscarves.

Playland Park, owned and operated by the county, has come under scrutiny in recent years after three people died there from 2004 to 2007, including a 7-year-old girl who was killed on a ride called the Mind Scrambler.

County officials say that the ban on headgear for some rides is a longstanding safety policy and that the organizers had been warned about it. “We told them several times we have what we call a headgear policy, meaning there are certain rides where you can’t wear headgear of any sorts,” Mr. Tartaglia said. He said he was not aware of specific instances where headscarves had caused injuries.

“Something flying off your head could land on the track” and require a ride to be stopped, he said. He added, “If you have a scarf on, you could be choked.”

Sharif Aly, vice president of the Muslim American Society of New York, said that the organization planned to investigate what happened before drawing any conclusions.

 

Robert Davey contributed reporting.

    Fight Erupts Over Head Scarves at Playland Park in Rye, NYT, 30.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/31/nyregion/fight-erupts-over-head-scarves-at-playland-park-in-rye.html

Preaching a Healthy Diet in the Deep-Fried Delta

August 21, 2011
The New York Times
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

HERNANDO, Miss. — Not much seems out of place in the Mississippi Delta, where everything appears to be as it always has been, only more so as the years go by. But here in the fellowship hall of a little Baptist church on a country road is an astonishing sight: a plate of fresh fruit.

“You get used to it,” said Arelia Robertson, who has been attending the church for almost eight decades.

Despite a dirge of grim health statistics, an epidemic of diabetes and heart disease and campaigns by heath agencies and organizations, the Delta diet, a heavenly smorgasbord of things fried, salted and boiled with pork, has persisted.

It has persisted because it tastes good, but also because it has been passed down through generations and sustained through such cultural mainstays as the church fellowship dinner. But if the church helped get everybody into this mess, it may be the church that helps get everybody out.

For over a decade from his pulpit here at Oak Hill Baptist in North Mississippi, the Rev. Michael O. Minor has waged war against obesity and bad health. In the Delta this may seem akin to waging war against humidity, but Mr. Minor has the air of the salesman he once was, and the animated persistence to match.

Years into his war, he is beginning to claim victories.

The National Baptist Convention, which represents some seven million people in nearly 10,000 churches, is ramping up a far-reaching health campaign devised by Mr. Minor, which aims to have a “health ambassador” in every member church by September 2012. The goals of the program, the most ambitious of its kind, will be demanding but concrete, said the Rev. George W. Waddles Sr., the president of the convention’s Congress of Christian Education.

The signs of change in the Delta may be most noticeable because they are the most hard-fought.

A sign in the kitchen of First Baptist Church in Clarksdale declares it a “No Fry Zone.” Bel Mount Missionary Baptist Church in the sleepy hamlet of Marks just had its first Taste Test Sunday, where the women of the church put out a spread of healthier foods, like sugar-free apple pie, to convince members that healthy cuisine does not have to taste like old tires.

Carved out of the fields behind Seek Well Baptist Church in the tiny town of Lula is a new community garden. The pastor, the Rev. Kevin Wiley, is even thinking about becoming a vegetarian, a sort of person he says he has never met in the Delta.

Many pastors tell the same story: They started worrying about their own health, but were motivated to push their congregations by the campaign that began in Mr. Minor’s church.

“I’m not going to say it has to be done by the church,” Mr. Wiley said. “But it has to be done by people within the community. How long is an outsider going to stay in Lula, Mississippi?”

Certainly, others have been trying to help.

Mississippi finds itself on the wrong end of just about every list of health indicators. It is first among states in percentage of children who are obese, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. It is first in rates of heart disease, second in the number of adults with diabetes, second in adult obesity, near last in the percentage of adults who participate in physical activity, near last in fruit and vegetable consumption and dead last in life expectancy.

On almost all these scales, the Delta is the worst part of Mississippi. The state has fought this by putting healthier meals in schools, working with mayors to create parks and farmers’ markets and paying for public awareness campaigns.

But the solution is not just a matter of telling people to live healthier, said Victor D. Sutton, director of preventive health for the Mississippi State Department of Health. The Delta is one of the poorest areas of the country, and its problems are deep and varied. The church is part of that whole equation.

“It’s not going to be the answer,” he said, “but it’s going to be one of the answers.”

Mr. Minor was born in the Delta but left for Harvard and a stint selling cars in Boston. He returned to Memphis and in the middle 1990s became the pastor at Oak Hill outside Hernando, about an hour south of Memphis.

If Mr. Minor had never left, he probably would never have noticed it. But he saw it immediately when he returned.

“There were a lot of people not only in this church, but in churches that we fellowship with, that were ...” he searched for the right phrase, “of good size.”

When he began preaching his health gospel right from the start, he was met not by outright resistance — that would have been rude — but by a polite disregard. This is the way people have always cooked here, church members said, and they ignored him.

He argued that while the food may be the same, people’s lifestyles had changed, and few put forth the physical effort that life in the Delta once required. Preparing pork chops used to involve raising and slaughtering a pig; now it requires little more than a trip to the grocery store. But he eventually realized he would have to adjust his strategy.

Around 2000, he began enlisting his ushers and those from other churches to go after hesitant pastors with a baldly practical line of argument.

“Your sick members can’t tithe,” he said with a laugh.

At Oak Hill now, as in several other churches around the Delta, fried foods are banned. Greens are boiled with turkey necks instead of ham hocks. Sweet tea and soft drinks have given way to bottled water. A track was built around the church for organized walks, which members say are pretty well attended.

Traditional Delta cuisine might not even be where the real fight is. The old fare has already been giving way to the new, just as at Taco Bell and Wendy’s. The restaurant Mr. Minor singled out as “the bane of our existence” was a Chinese buffet.

“I think the most resistance will be with your youth who say McDonald’s is so tempting,” said Johnnie Carter, who is helping lead the health push at Bel Mount, driven to get involved after she had a heart attack at the age of 41. But, she added, “you’ll have your older folks who say, ‘I’ve been eating this way all my life.’ It’s around the board.”

As Taste Test Sunday was wrapping up at Bel Mount, those who had just left Silent Grove Missionary Baptist across town were heading toward a traditional Delta buffet place called the Dining Room. Silent Grove has not joined in Mr. Minor’s fight — after all, the Dining Room is run by the pastor’s son.

“Once you taste it, you’re hooked,” said James Figg, a 69-year-old driving instructor, polishing off a tasty-looking pile of greens, fried chicken, macaroni and cheese and peach cobbler. Still, even he said he was making only one trip through the buffet line in these days of hospitalizations and funerals.

“When you get up to get seconds, you think about burying Brother So-and-So last week,” Mr. Figg said, looking wistfully at his near-empty plate. “And you leave it at that.”

    Preaching a Healthy Diet in the Deep-Fried Delta, NYT, 21.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/22/us/22delta.html

Nuns, a ‘Dying Breed,’

Fade From Leadership Roles at Catholic Hospitals

August 20, 2011
The New York Times
By KEVIN SACK

ST. LOUIS — When Sister Mary Jean Ryan entered the convent as a young nurse in 1960, virtually every department of every Catholic hospital was run by a nun, from pediatrics to dietary to billing. After her retirement on July 31 as the chief executive of one of the country’s largest networks of Catholic hospitals, only 11 nuns remained among her company’s more than 22,000 employees, and none were administrators.

For SSM Health Care, a $4.2 billion enterprise that evolved from the work of five German nuns who arrived here in 1872, Sister Mary Jean’s departure after 25 years as the company’s first chief executive marks a poignant passing. The gradual transition from religious to lay leadership, which has been changing the face of Catholic health care for decades, is now nearly complete.

In 1968, nuns or priests served as chief executives of 770 of the country’s 796 Catholic hospitals, according to the Catholic Health Association. Today, they preside over 8 of 636 hospitals. With Sister Mary Jean’s departure, only 8 of 59 Catholic health care systems are directed by religious executives.

SSM, which is now led by William P. Thompson, a Catholic layman and longtime company executive, had been the largest Catholic health system still managed by a nun. Formed in 1986, the St. Louis firm consolidated the management of 15 Catholic hospitals and two nursing homes in Missouri, Illinois, Oklahoma and Wisconsin.

As with other healing orders that have ceded control, the Franciscan Sisters of Mary prepared for their inevitable detachment from SSM with more planning than sentiment.

“We can’t be maudlin about this,” said Sister Mary Jean, 73, who still presides over the company’s board. “I mean, yes, we are a dying breed. We are disappearing from the face of the earth and all of that. That being said, perhaps this is a moment for people to acknowledge the contribution that has been made by women religious throughout our history in the United States.”

The leadership shift has stirred angst in many Catholic hospitals about whether the values imparted by the nuns, concerning the treatment of both patients and employees, can withstand bottom-line forces without their day-to-day vigilance. Although their influence is often described as intangible, the nuns kept their hospitals focused on serving the needy and brought a spiritual reassurance that healing would prevail over profit, authorities on Catholic health care say.

In the case of SSM, that has meant turning away business arrangements with doctors who decline to accept Medicaid. It has meant discounting treatment for the poor and offering charity care to the uninsured, just as the order’s founders did. The St. Louis nuns’ earliest ledgers denoted patients unable to pay as “Our dear Lord’s.”

The near extinction of nuns from American hospitals stems largely from the drastic decline of religious orders that accompanied the women’s movement, the sexual revolution, ethnic assimilation and the Second Vatican Council’s opening of the church to lay leadership.

Even as the country’s Roman Catholic population surged by nearly 50 percent over the last half-century, the number of nuns dropped precipitously, to 56,000 today from 180,000 in 1965, according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University. In 2009, 91 percent of all nuns were at least 60 years old.

Sister Mary Jean’s order has dwindled to about 100 from a peak of more than 500. Most moved out of their convent last year and into a retirement and nursing home. There has not been an initiate for 25 years, and several years ago the sisters reluctantly stopped looking.

“It was painful,” Sister Mary Jean said in an interview in her modest apartment, “but I think it was also courageous to say we’re just not going to recruit any more. Let’s just live out the rest of our lives to the fullest that we possibly can and thank God for what we’ve been able to do. And when the time comes, as they say, the last person turn the lights out.”

Along with parochial education, health care has long been a central mission of nuns in this country, a natural outgrowth of the Catholic insistence on the sacredness of life. Since 1727, when the Ursuline sisters landed in New Orleans, they have built 12 of the country’s 40 largest health care systems. In 2009, Catholic hospitals accounted for one of every six admissions in the United States, according to the Catholic Health Association.

Other than crucifixes on the walls and marble Madonnas in the lobby, Catholic hospitals do not look particularly different from secular ones. But their administrators say that what makes them distinct is a values-driven approach, reflected at SSM in a mission statement that pledges to use exceptional care to “reveal the healing presence of God.”

Catholic health systems have been criticized, along with other nonprofit hospitals, as not dedicating enough resources to the community’s benefit. But surveys also show that, on average, they provide higher-quality performance than other hospitals and are more likely to offer specialty services that are not profit centers.

Sister Mary Jean, who was dispatched by her order to earn a master’s degree in hospital administration, has managed her realm with iron-willed competence and unblinking compassion, SSM executives said.

She is both stern and good-humored enough that the company’s vice president for communications, Suzy Farren, felt comfortable writing a farewell tribute that depicted her as “at times, gruff and demanding and stubborn.” Michael R. Panicola, the company’s vice president for ethics, remembered thinking during his job interview that he was facing “the female version of Mickey,” the crusty trainer in “Rocky” played by Burgess Meredith.

Those who underestimated the nuns as managers “made a mistake,” Sister Mary Jean said, volunteering that many hospital executives with multimillion-dollar salaries were “arrogant” and “overpaid.” Having taken a vow of poverty, Sister Mary Jean worked for free, although SSM paid the Franciscan Sisters of Mary an annual fee — $1.96 million in 2009, according to tax forms — as compensation for their labor.

Operating revenues at SSM (the initials honor the Sisters of St. Mary, a predecessor order) more than quintupled during Sister Mary Jean’s tenure, to $3 billion in 2010. The company produced net income that year of $247.9 million and provided $115.4 million in uncompensated care.

A decade ago, Sister Mary Jean led SSM through a relentless campaign to improve performance that was recognized with the first Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award given to a health care company.

But her legacy also extends to preaching about the dignity of patients, paying blue-collar workers above scale, making her hospitals smoke-free, banning the use of foam cups and plastic water bottles, and insisting on gender-neutral and nonviolent language. There are no “bullet points” in SSM presentations, and photographs are “enlarged,” never “blown up.”

Even Sister Mary Jean can struggle to define precisely what the nuns brought to their hospitals. “There is this thing called presence,” she said, explaining that she was trained to see Jesus in the face of every patient, “and I think that’s the piece that is lost.”

Mr. Thompson, Sister Mary Jean’s handpicked successor, said he planned to hold fast to her commitment to patients, the environment and nonviolence. But he also acknowledged that he would be “trying to drive more efficiencies in the system.”

“I would hope,” he said, “that those two things never come into conflict, at least no more than they ever have in the past.”

    Nuns, a ‘Dying Breed,’ Fade From Leadership Roles at Catholic Hospitals, NYT, 20.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/us/21nuns.html

Polygamist Leader Gets Life in Prison for Assault

August 9, 2011
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

SAN ANGELO, Texas (AP) — Polygamist leader Warren Jeffs was sentenced to life in prison on Tuesday for sexually assaulting an underage follower he took as a bride in what his church deemed a "spiritual marriage."

The head of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints also received a 20-year sentence for the sexual assault of a 15-year-old girl.

He stood quietly Tuesday as the decision of the Texas jury was read, giving him the maximum sentence on both counts. They are to be served consecutively. Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesman Jason Clark said the 55-year-old will be eligible for parole in 35 years.

Prosecutors had asked the jury for the life sentence after presenting their painstaking and sometimes graphic case, and rejected Jeffs' contention that he was being persecuted for his religious beliefs.

"The evidence in this case shows that this isn't a prosecution of a people," prosecutor Eric Nichols said in his closing argument. "This is a prosecution to protect people."

During the trial, prosecutors used DNA evidence to show Jeffs fathered a child with the 15-year-old and played an audio recording of what they said was him sexually assaulting the 12-year-old.

Jeffs, who had insisted on acting as his own attorney during the earlier part of the trial, was convicted Thursday.

He asked to be excused under protest during the sentencing phase, which ended Tuesday with him refusing to answer when the judge asked if he wanted to make a closing statement. A defense attorney told the judge Jeffs had instructed his attorneys not to speak for him.

Jurors deliberated less than half an hour.

During the trial, prosecutors played other tapes in which Jeffs was heard instructing as many as a dozen of his young wives on how to please him sexually — and thus, he told them, please God.

"If the world knew what I was doing, they would hang me from the highest tree," Jeffs wrote in 2005, according to one of thousands of pages of notes seized along with the audio recordings from his Texas ranch.

Nichols referred to that in his closing.

"No, Mr. Jeffs, unlike what you wrote in your priesthood records ... we don't hang convicts anymore from the highest tree. Not even child molesters," Nichols said.

Jeffs claimed his religious rights were being violated. Representing himself after burning through seven high-powered attorneys, he routinely interrupted the proceedings and chose to stand silently in front of jurors for nearly half an hour during his closing arguments. He called just one defense witness, a church elder who read from Mormon scripture.

The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a radical offshoot of mainstream Mormonism that believes polygamy brings exaltation in heaven, has more than 10,000 followers who consider Jeffs to be God's spokesman on Earth.

He spent years evading arrest — crisscrossing the country as a fugitive who eventually made the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list before his capture in 2006, said Nichols.

Several former members of the church testified that Jeffs ruled the group with a heavy and abusive hand. Jeffs also allegedly excommunicated 60 church members he saw as a threat to his leadership, breaking up 300 families while stripping them of property and "reassigning" wives and children.

In an audiotape played during the sentencing phase, Jeffs was heard softly telling five young girls to "set aside all your inhibitions" as he gave them instructions on how to please him sexually. Jeffs is heard telling the girls that what "the five of you are about to do is important."

Prosecutors suggested that the polygamist leader told the girls they needed to have sex with him — in what Jeffs called "heavenly" or "celestial" sessions — in order to atone for sins in his community. Several times in his journals, Jeffs wrote of God telling him to take more and more young girls as brides "who can be worked with and easily taught."

FBI agent John Broadway testified that fathers who gave their young daughters to Jeffs were rewarded with young brides of their own. Girls who proved reluctant to have sex with Jeffs were sent away, according to excerpts from Jeffs' journals that prosecutors showed to the jury.

Police raided the group's remote West Texas ranch in April 2008, finding women dressed in frontier-style dresses and hairdos from the 19th century as well as seeing underage girls who were clearly pregnant. The call to an abuse hotline that spurred the raid turned out to be a hoax, and more than 400 children who had been placed in protective custody were eventually returned to their families.

Jeffs is the eighth FLDS man convicted since the raid on Yearning For Zion, in the town of Eldorado, 45 miles south of San Angelo. Previous sentences ranged from six to 75 years in prison.

The church's traditional headquarters is along the Utah-Arizona border, but it established the Texas compound in 2004. Jeffs once faced criminal charges in Arizona and was convicted of accessory to rape in Utah in 2007. But that was overturned by the state Supreme Court and he was extradited to Texas in December.

Willie Jessop, a former FLDS spokesman, who railed against the raid but has since disavowed Jeffs, said the first priority of the church would be tearing down the guard tower and the gate at the ranch.

    Polygamist Leader Gets Life in Prison for Assault, NYT, 9.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/08/09/us/AP-US-Polygamist-Leader.html

Perry Leads Prayer Rally for ‘Nation in Crisis’

August 6, 2011
The New York Times
By MANNY FERNANDEZ

HOUSTON — Standing on a stage surrounded by thousands of fellow Christians on Saturday morning, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas called on Jesus to bless and guide the nation’s military and political leaders and “those who cannot see the light in the midst of all the darkness.”

“Lord, you are the source of every good thing,” Mr. Perry said, as he bowed his head, closed his eyes and leaned into a microphone at Reliant Stadium here. “You are our only hope, and we stand before you today in awe of your power and in gratitude for your blessings, and humility for our sins. Father, our heart breaks for America. We see discord at home. We see fear in the marketplace. We see anger in the halls of government, and as a nation we have forgotten who made us, who protects us, who blesses us, and for that we cry out for your forgiveness.”

In a 13-minute address, Mr. Perry read several passages from the Bible during a prayer rally he sponsored. Thousands of people stood or kneeled in the aisles or on the concrete floor in front of the stage, some wiping away tears and some shouting, “Amen!”

The rally was seen as one of the biggest tests of Mr. Perry’s political career, coming as he nears a decision on whether to seek the Republican nomination for president. While the event will be sure to help Mr. Perry if he tries to establish himself as the religious right’s favored candidate, it also opens him up to criticism for mixing religion and politics in such a grand and overtly Christian fashion.

In many ways, the rally was unprecedented, even in Texas, where faith and politics have long intersected without much controversy — the governor, as both a private citizen and an elected leader, delivering a message to the Lord at a Christian prayer rally he created, while using his office’s prestige, letterhead, Web site and other resources to promote it. Mr. Perry said he wanted people of all faiths to attend, but Christianity dominated the service and the religious affiliations of the crowd. The prayers were given in Jesus Christ’s name, and the many musical performers sang of Christian themes of repentance and salvation.

Mr. Perry, a lifelong Methodist who regularly attends an evangelical megachurch near his home in West Austin, has been speaking and preaching in sanctuaries throughout Texas since he was state agricultural commissioner in the 1990s. Organizers for the event, called The Response: A Call to Prayer for a Nation in Crisis, estimated that more than 30,000 people were at Reliant Stadium when Mr. Perry spoke. The seating capacity is 71,500, and tens of thousands of seats in the upper decks were empty.

“I wish you could see what I see here,” announced Luis Cataldo, a leader of the International House of Prayer, a Christian ministry in Kansas City, Mo., as the event began at 10 a.m. “This is the body of Christ.”

While those on the stage avoided making overt political statements or expressions of political support for Mr. Perry, many in the audience made it clear in interviews that they would vote for the governor should he enter the presidential race.

Liz Lara, 62, who lives in La Vernia, Tex., drove about 200 miles to Houston with her daughter and two grandchildren to attend the rally. She said the family came to support Mr. Perry and pray for God’s help in solving the nation’s problems. “I believe that God has prepared Rick Perry for such a time as this,” she said. “I believe he will be our next president.”

At one point, Mr. Perry asked those in the audience to pray for President Obama. “Father, we pray for our president, that you impart your wisdom upon him, that you would guard his family,” he said.

Mr. Perry addressed the crowd nine days after a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit filed against him by a national group of atheists arguing that his participation in the rally in his official capacity as governor violated the First Amendment’s requirement of separation of church and state.

Members and supporters of that group, the Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation, were among dozens of people protesting outside the stadium. Others included gay activists who criticized Mr. Perry for supporting the American Family Association, which organized and financed the rally. The association is a conservative evangelical group based in Mississippi that is listed as an antigay hate group by the nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center.

Mr. Perry had invited his fellow governors to join him, but only Gov. Sam Brownback of Kansas, a Republican, attended. Gov. Rick Scott of Florida made a video statement that was played in the stadium.

 

Daniel Cadis contributed reporting.

    Perry Leads Prayer Rally for ‘Nation in Crisis’, NYT, 6.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/us/politics/07prayer.html

To Fight Radical Islam, U.S. Wants Muslim Allies

August 3, 2011
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — Rolling out a new strategy for combating radicalization, White House officials on Wednesday warned that casting broad suspicion on Muslim Americans is counterproductive and could backfire by alienating a religious minority and fueling extremism.

The administration also promised to identify accurate educational materials about Islam for law enforcement officers, providing an alternative to biased and ill-informed literature in use in recent years, including by the F.B.I. Denis R. McDonough, President Obama’s deputy national security adviser, told reporters that Al Qaeda and those it inspired remained the biggest terrorist threat inside the United States. But he said the bombing and shootings in Norway last month, carried out by a right-wing, anti-Muslim extremist, were a reminder that the government could not focus exclusively on any single brand of radicalism.

Mr. McDonough said that Al Qaeda had a “bankrupt ideology,” but that accusing the entire Muslim community of complicity in terrorism could “feed the sense of disenchantment and disenfranchisement that may spur violent extremist radicalization.” Instead, he said, Muslim Americans should be treated as a crucial ally of the government in combating extremism.

In an introduction to the eight-page strategy document, Mr. Obama wrote that “communities — especially Muslim-American communities whose children, families and neighbors are being targeted for recruitment by Al Qaeda — are often best positioned to take the lead” in countering radicalization.

The strategy calls for federal agencies to support state and local officials by sharing information on potential threats and cooperating closely with the police.

The 2009 shootings at Fort Hood, Tex., by a Muslim Army psychiatrist who had been radicalized in part on the Internet drew new attention to the threat posed by Americans who embrace the ideology of Al Qaeda. Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born Qaeda propagandist now hiding in Yemen, who had exchanged e-mails with the Fort Hood gunman, has repeatedly and explicitly called on Muslim Americans to mount attacks.

Since the Fort Hood attacks, there have been a number of foiled plots by radicalized Muslims in the United States, as well as by extreme right-wing and white supremacist ideologues.

Conservative critics of the Obama administration, including Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York, have accused it of political correctness in avoiding applying the “Islamic” label to plots and attacks by Muslims. Mr. King, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, has held a series of hearings focusing exclusively on the threat from Muslim extremists, drawing fire from Muslim groups. In March, on the eve of Mr. King’s first hearing, Mr. McDonough spoke at a Virginia Islamic center to reassure Muslim Americans that the government would fight extremism without practicing “guilt by association.”

On Wednesday, Mr. King welcomed the administration’s identification of Al Qaeda as the “pre-eminent” terrorist threat but said he was concerned about language in the strategy document, titled “Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States,” that “suggests some equivalency of threats between Al Qaeda and domestic extremists.” Mr. King also said that while he supported meeting with community leaders, he did not want such meetings to be “politically correct, feel-good encounters, which ignore the threats posed by dangerous individuals in the community.”

A National Security Council expert on extremism who helped devise the new strategy, Quintan Wiktorowicz, said the administration was aware of “inaccurate training” on Islam for law enforcement officers. He said the administration would compile “gold standard” materials to be posted on the Web for officials to draw upon.

A January study by a liberal research group found a pattern of misleading and inflammatory training about Islam across the country, and a 2009 F.B.I. training document obtained recently by the American Civil Liberties Union gave a provocative account of Islam. That F.B.I. PowerPoint presentation was used for classes for law enforcement personnel at the bureau’s academy in Virginia, but it is no longer in use, according to the bureau.

The F.B.I. document recommended two books by Robert Spencer, an anti-Muslim blogger and author whose work was repeatedly cited in the online manifesto of Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian accused of killing at least 76 people last month. Mr. Spencer, who operates the Web site Jihad Watch, has said he opposes violence and condemns Mr. Breivik’s actions.

    To Fight Radical Islam, U.S. Wants Muslim Allies, NYT, 3.8.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/04/us/04extreme.html

For Philadelphia Archdiocese, a Powerful Conservative Voice

July 19, 2011
The New York Times
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

Before he was named on Tuesday to lead the prominent but troubled Archdiocese of Philadelphia, Archbishop Charles J. Chaput spent the last 14 years in Denver establishing himself as one of the nation’s most prominent advocates of a politically engaged and conservative Catholicism.

He is among a minority of Roman Catholic bishops who have spoken in favor of denying communion to Catholic politicians who support abortion rights. He helped defeat legislation that would have legalized civil unions for gay couples in Colorado. And he condemned the University of Notre Dame, a Catholic institution, for granting President Obama an honorary degree in 2009 because of his stance on abortion.

For these and other decisions stands, Archbishop Chaput has been hailed as a champion by not only Catholic conservatives, but also by evangelical Protestants.

But it would be wrong to believe that the Vatican has given him the prominent posting in Philadelphia solely in the service of politics. The archbishop has been frequently tapped to investigate internal church problems. It is a profile that could serve him well in Philadelphia, where a grand jury accused the archdiocese of a widespread cover-up of sexual abuse and indicted a top church administrator.

“Clearly the appointment does mean a kind of strong, new conservative voice in one of the church’s most important jobs,” said John L. Allen Jr., senior correspondent of the National Catholic Reporter, who lives in Denver and reports frequently from the Vatican.

“But if the sexual abuse crisis is your filter,” Mr. Allen said, “the narrative is that you’ve got a strong reformer and trusted administrator who is going to clean house.”

In the past 10 years, the Vatican has appointed Archbishop Chaput to serve on three high-profile investigations, known as visitations: of American seminaries in the wake of the sexual abuse scandal; of the Legion of Christ after the group’s founder was discovered to have sexually abused seminarians, fathered children and embezzled money; and, most recently, of Bishop William Morris of Australia, who had said publicly that the church should consider ordaining women and married men (the investigation resulted in his removal).

Advocates for sexual abuse victims, however, bristle at the characterization of Archbishop Chaput as a reformer. They point out that he fought hard against legislation in Colorado that would have extended the statute of limitations for people who say they were sexually abused to sue the church.

In every state that such legislation has been proposed, Catholic bishops have fought it. But Archbishop Chaput went further, taking to the pages of First Things, a religious magazine, to explain his rationale. He argued that the legislation singled out the Catholic Church, when many institutions, especially public schools, were also responsible for extensive sexual abuse of children.

“The people paying for these abuse settlements are innocent Catholic families who had no part in events of the past,” he wrote. “Revenge is not justice, no matter how piously one argues it.”

Archbishop Chaput, who is 66, is known in Denver for a pastoral style that is far more personable than that of the current archbishop of Philadelphia, Cardinal Justin Rigali. Like Cardinal Sean O’Malley in Boston, Archbishop Chaput is a member of the Capuchins, a missionary religious order, though he eschews the long brown habit in favor of the black shirt and white collar.

He has written two books, both advocating that Catholics become more assertive in the public square.

In Denver, Archbishop Chaput has been an innovative evangelist for conservative, orthodox Catholicism, said Tom Reynolds, vice president for mission at Regis University, a Jesuit institution in Denver. He said Archbishop Chaput had started a new seminary program, increased vocations to the priesthood and attracted “neotraditionalist Catholic movements and religious orders” to the Denver area.

“He hasn’t always gotten along well with the folks who are on the liberal end, who want to move forward with Vatican II reforms,” Mr. Reynolds said, referring to the Second Vatican Council.

But Archbishop Chaput has not issued any public sanctions or penalties against theologians, priests or laypeople, Mr. Reynolds said, unlike what has taken place in some other dioceses headed by conservative bishops.

Archbishop Chaput will achieve even greater power and prominence if he is elevated to cardinal, as is traditional for the archbishop in Philadelphia. But he may have to wait a few years until Cardinal Rigali retires as a voting member of the College of Cardinals, at age 80.

    For Philadelphia Archdiocese, a Powerful Conservative Voice, 19.7.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/20/us/20chaput.html

Philadelphia’s Cardinal, Amid Scandal, Is Said to Be Retiring

July 18, 2011
The New York Times
By ERIK ECKHOLM and KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

Cardinal Justin Rigali, the Roman Catholic leader of Philadelphia, is expected to announce his retirement on Tuesday, some five months after the 1.5 million-member archdiocese was convulsed by evidence that officials had ignored sexual-abuse charges against dozens of currently active priests.

Cardinal Rigali, 76, who is planning to step down later this year, will be replaced by Archbishop Charles J. Chaput of Denver, 66, a Native American who is known for his aggressive public opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage, according to people familiar with the plans.

The changes are to be announced by the Vatican on Tuesday. The Archdiocese of Philadelphia has scheduled a news conference for 10 a.m. Tuesday at which Cardinal Rigali is expected to appear with his successor.

In April, Cardinal Rigali turned 76, which is the customary retirement age for bishops, although some have continued to serve for years beyond.

“Because he’s over 75, you can’t make the case that he resigning because of the scandals,” said Rev. Thomas J. Reese, a senior fellow of the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University and a Jesuit priest. “Certainly, the Vatican never wants to give the appearance of having someone resign under pressure.”

But Cardinal Rigali’s tenure in Philadelphia will inevitably be linked to the mishandling of sexual-abuse cases, which had gone on for decades but erupted this year into what Father Reese called “a disaster for the church.”

A grand jury report in February accused the archdiocese of failing to report or remove predatory priests over the decades and said that as many as 37 priests remained active in the ministry despite accusations against them of sexual abuse or other inappropriate behavior with minors. The report was particularly shocking because an earlier grand jury, in 2005, reported accusations of abuse by 63 priests. In 2002, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops adopted a zero-tolerance policy and promised to purge the priesthood of sexual predators.

Cardinal Rigali initially responded to the February grand jury report with what critics called evasive language, saying there were no priests in active ministry “who have an admitted or established allegation of sexual abuse of a minor against them.” But then in March, in a reversal, the archdiocese suspended 21 priests in what experts said was the most sweeping action of its kind for the Roman Catholic Church in the United States.

The grand jury report prompted the indictment of four priests and a parochial school teacher, and included the first criminal charges in the United States against a senior church official for covering up abusive behavior by priests. The total number of priests suspended is now 29.

After the suspensions, Cardinal Rigali apologized for the abuses, saying in a statement: “I am truly sorry for the harm done to the victims of sexual abuse, as well as to the members of our community who suffer as a result of this great evil and crime.”

Cardinal Rigali previously served as archbishop of St. Louis. He was appointed to take over the Philadelphia archdiocese in 2003 and also elevated to the College of Cardinals that year.

Some Catholics in Philadelphia said Cardinal Rigali’s lack of forceful leadership to weed out sex abusers had caused morale problems. Tom Maroon, a member of the St. Francis of Assisi Parish in the Germantown section of Philadelphia, said Monday that Cardinal Rigali had not been open enough with the public about suspect priests. “He didn’t want to shake things up,” Mr. Maroon said.

The man poised to succeed him, Archbishop Chaput, has led the Denver archdiocese since 1997. He has stood out even among Roman Catholic leaders for his aggressive promotion in the public arena of Catholic beliefs. In this respect, at least, he is likely to be a more visible presence in Philadelphia than Cardinal Rigali has been.

Advocates for sex-abuse victims expressed disappointment at the prospect of Archbishop Chaput’s arrival. David Clohessy, director of the Survivors Network of Those Abused By Priests, described his record in fighting abuse as “dismal” and said he had opposed legislative proposals to give child victims more time to file civil claims.

David Trickett, president of the Iliff School of Theology in Denver, described Archbishop Chaput as a strong-willed man of integrity.

The archbishop has hurled himself into public debates but he has also made a point of reaching out to groups he disagreed with, Mr. Trickett said. Still, he said, his outspokenness would leave a mixed legacy. “There are people who think he is absolutely the best thing, and there are people who go absolutely in the opposite direction,” Mr. Trickett said.

 

Dan Frosch contributed reporting from Denver.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 19, 2011

An earlier version of this article misstated the age of Cardinal Justin Rigali.
He is 76, not 75.

    Philadelphia’s Cardinal, Amid Scandal, Is Said to Be Retiring, NYT, 18.7.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/19/us/19bishop.html

Ritual Mourning for Slain Brooklyn 8-Year-Old

July 15, 2011
The New York Times
By JOSEPH BERGER

The Jewish custom of shiva, the seven days of intense mourning, often has its spirited aspects.

Despite the prevailing sorrow, visitors might gather around platters of food in a bereaved family’s home and celebrate a long life, or remember foibles with affectionate laughter.

But not after the death of a child, particularly one who died in such chilling fashion as Leiby Kletzky, the 8-year-old Brooklyn boy who was kidnapped and killed this week.

Throughout the morning and afternoon on Friday, a stream of visitors entered the Kletzky family’s brick apartment building on 15th Avenue in Borough Park. Almost all were somber, as if on a mission they did not relish.

Shoeless and sitting on a low chair, Leiby’s father, Nachman, received the visitors alone in a narrow dining room while his wife, Itta, and their four daughters clustered in a bedroom off the kitchen.

Around the apartment, there were so many gifts of fruit and cakes that the family had been forced to send some back. But these were no consolation, visitors said.

“They’re trying to cope,” said Jonathan Schwartz, 42, a close friend. “They keep on saying that God gave them the privilege to raise this child for nine years.”

Though most visitors had attended shivas before, several observed that no gathering had approached the shock and deep grief of Leiby’s.

“If you had a dad go, 90 years old, it’s understandable,” said one family friend, who asked that his name not be used. “This is harder to comprehend, the worst of the worst.”

Mr. Schwartz told of how his 9-year-old son, Shimmy, had often sat beside Leiby in synagogue and recently asked his father why he kept seeing his friend’s picture in the newspapers. “He can’t stop thinking about it,” Mr. Schwartz said. “He asks me if God just takes away kids at the age of 9.”

With the beginning of Sabbath approaching — a night and day when even shiva is interrupted — Mr. Schwartz and other visitors grasped at the thought that the usually joyous observance would provide a respite. “It’s the day of peace,” Mr. Schwartz said. “It will affect us for the better.”

Still, it was hard to escape reminders of Leiby’s ordeal. Outside the building, neighbors had posted a sign that said: “Please be sensitive to the family. DO NOT share rumors, stories and information you have heard — at all!!” Leiby was suffocated and his body was dismembered, but people close to the Kletzkys say they have tried to spare the family the details.

There was also a note from Leiby’s parents posted in the building entryway, thanking those “who assisted us above and beyond physically, emotionally and spiritually — and to all from around the world, who had us in their thoughts and prayers.”

In a contrasting tableau in the adjoining neighborhood of Kensington, two police vans marked Crime Scene Unit were parked in front of a house whose resident had been Levi Aron, the 35-year-old hardware store clerk charged with murdering Leiby after the boy got lost while walking home alone from his day camp on Monday. Knots of onlookers gathered behind barricades to glimpse investigators removing brown cardboard boxes of evidence.

Mr. Aron was taken from Rikers Island to Bellevue Hospital Center, in Manhattan, about 8 p.m. on Thursday after jail officials conducted an intake examination and decided he required further psychiatric evaluation, said Sharman Stein, the chief spokeswoman for the city’s Department of Correction. She said he was in the Bellevue prison ward and “under very close watch.”

Shiva, prescribed for the death of a parent, child, sibling or spouse, harks back to the Bible’s tale of the seven days that Joseph mourned his father, the patriarch Jacob. The ritual has since been layered over with dozens of customs observed differently by various Jewish communities. It generally begins the day of the funeral, and in Orthodox circles it lasts to the morning of the seventh day.

Close relatives do not work, cook or run errands. They spurn shoes, refrain from showers and shaves, do not wear fresh clothes and sit in low chairs. Mirrors are covered, and a candle burns round the clock.

The object is to concentrate on grieving. Visitors are to stay attuned to the mourners’ feelings and not bombard them with remarks. They generally greet a mourner with the words, “May God comfort you among the other mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.”

But shiva can be a surprisingly busy time. Synagogues dispatch volunteers three times a day to set up minyans, quorums of 10 for prayer, and often send along a Torah, said Menashe Silber, a Hasidic community organizer.

Bereavement organizations like Chesed Shel Emes provide such necessities as the low chairs and prayer books, according to Rabbi Mayer Berger, a director of Chesed.

Samuel C. Heilman, a professor of sociology at the City University of New York who wrote “When a Jew Dies: The Ethnography of a Bereaved Son,” predicted that for much of the shiva period at the Kletzky home there would be “a lot of sitting in silence.”

“How do you explain such evil?” he said. “You can’t say God has done something evil.”

 

Al Baker and Matt Flegenheimer contributed reporting.

    Ritual Mourning for Slain Brooklyn 8-Year-Old, NYT, 15.7.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/16/nyregion/ritual-mourning-for-slain-brooklyn-8-year-old.html

How Clergy Helped a Same-Sex Marriage Law Pass

July 15, 2011
The New York Times
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN

Early in the week that ended with New York enacting same-sex marriage, the Rev. Anna Taylor Sweringen stood in a hallway just outside the State Senate chambers. She wore her clerical collar and held a sign saying, “Equality now.” Around her gathered ministers and rabbis of similar sentiment, all in Albany to lobby and pray for the right of gay couples to wed.

As Ms. Taylor Sweringen looked down the corridor, she saw the mirror image of mobilized clergy members, all irreconcilably opposed. One held a placard declaring, “God says no.” Then the assemblage broke into a gospel song. “I told Satan to get thee behind,” it went. “Victory today is mine.”

Among her allies, Ms. Taylor Sweringen responded with a spiritual from the civil rights movement, “I’m Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table.” Soon the dueling choirs were lining up along facing walls, barely inches apart, and the state police had to clear a path between them like a boxing referee.

It was a piquant and immensely revealing moment. The conventional — and erroneous — perception of the gay-marriage issue is that it pits secular forces against religious ones. From New York to California, wherever and whenever the battle has flared, news coverage has focused almost entirely on the religious groups who uniformly denounce it: Mormons, Roman Catholics, evangelical Christians and many Hispanic Pentecostals and African-American Protestants.

Yet the passage of same-sex marriage in New York last month, just two years after its defeat here, attests to the concerted, sustained efforts by liberal Christian and Jewish clergy to advocate for it in the language of faith, to counter the language of morality voiced by foes. In so doing, they provided a kind of political and theological cover to the moderate and conservative state senators who cast the vital swing votes for a 33-to-29 margin.

“It’s like affirmation that this is a spiritual issue, and that it’s integral to a person’s faith,” said Ms. Taylor Sweringen, 54, during an interview this week at her Brooklyn home. “How can you be a person of faith and not be where the issues of justice are being debated?”

Julian E. Zelizer observed the New York vote from his perspective as a history professor at Princeton, a former faculty member at the State University at Albany and the son of a Conservative Jewish rabbi.

“If religious support is fractured, and supporters of the legislation can point to clergy who are on their side,” he wrote in an e-mail, “then it’s easier to counteract the claim of religious conservatives who say there is only one answer to this question. As in previous examples, politicians draw on clergy to give themselves moral authority when taking on these kinds of social and cultural issues. We know more about how the right has done it, but liberals can do the same.”

Those previous examples, Dr. Zelizer noted, include the civil rights movement. For example, by putting their imprimatur on the cause, Roman Catholic bishops and the National Council of Churches helped persuade several conservative Republican senators to defy a Southern filibuster and ultimately pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the first of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s series of landmark laws.

In the case of Ms. Taylor Sweringen and same-sex marriage, both personal history and political organization brought her to that Albany hallway. Her spiritual journey intersected with the strategy of the Empire State Pride Agenda, a lobbying group for gay issues, to develop a cohort of sympathetic, active clergy members.

After a “born again” experience in her late teens, Ms. Taylor Sweringen joined a house church and adopted its conservative theology about homosexuality. “ ‘Hate the sin and love the sinner,’ that was me,” she recalled. “Nobody was going to come out to me.”

As she began worshiping in a Presbyterian church, as she enrolled in seminary and especially as she studied and prayed alongside a gay colleague while interning with a Manhattan congregation, she struggled to reconcile her instinct for equality with her rigid dogma.

The answer emerged from a text she had committed to memory in her house-church days: Acts 10. In the passage, Peter dreams about being told to eat certain foods. He refuses, because they are forbidden. Then the voice explains that nothing God has made clean can be impure.

Ms. Taylor Sweringen, an African-American minister in both the Presbyterian and United Church of Christ denominations, was at the crossroads of the debate on gay rights. She associated those rights with the civil rights that blacks had fought and died to achieve. Yet black Christians, however liberal most are on economic issues, hold to a deep strain of social conservatism, particularly regarding homosexuality.

“There’s a denial and a hiding behind tradition and teaching,” Ms. Taylor Sweringen said. “I see it as tied to the internalized racism of hating someone else to make yourself more acceptable to the larger society.”

By 2008, as an outspoken advocate for gay rights who was ordained in both denominations, Ms. Taylor Sweringen was recruited by Empire State Pride Agenda. Its Pride in the Pulpit initiative had begun in 2004 with the aim of identifying and enlisting clergy members as allies, most of them from mainline Protestant and Reform Jewish denominations.

A group that began as several dozen ministers and rabbis expanded to more than 700 by the 2011 legislative session. The ranks included the Episcopal bishop of Rochester, the executive director of the Long Island Council of Churches and the presidents of both Union Theological Seminary and Hebrew Union College — an estimable amount of religious influence.

Ms. Taylor Sweringen went to work winning over local clergy members in Queens and Brooklyn, especially in the districts of two state senators with swing votes. At news conferences, she spoke of her own interracial marriage, one that would have been illegal in many American states before a 1967 Supreme Court decision. She arranged a meeting between an Empire State Pride Agenda organizer and a high-ranking Presbyterian official, who then joined the lobbying effort. And in the final hectic weeks, she worked the United Church of Christ e-mail list to get boots on the ground with collars around the neck in Albany.

Back home in Brooklyn on the night of June 24, Ms. Taylor Sweringen missed the historic vote. But she was not without a relevant text for it. “What’s that in Micah 6?” she said the other day. “ ‘Do justice. Love mercy.’ ”

    How Clergy Helped a Same-Sex Marriage Law Pass, NYT, 15.7.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/16/us/16religion.html

For Franciscan Twins, Simple Lives Had Depth

June 14, 2011
The New York Times
By DAN BARRY

ST. BONAVENTURE, N.Y. — They were like paired birds of Franciscan brown. If Brother Julian was gardening in front of the friary, Brother Adrian weeded in the back. If Adrian was driving the van, Julian sat by his side. Preparing the altar for chapel, chopping wood for kindling, exulting in ice cream at the Twist & Shake, the identical Riester twins were together, always.

For many years at my alma mater, St. Bonaventure University, these simple men were workers, not teachers, and so ever-present in the pastoral setting as to be unseen. Taken for granted, like the rushing hush of the Allegheny River at the university’s edge, or the back-and-forth of the birdsong in the surrounding trees.

Two weeks ago, the twins died on the same day in a Florida hospital; they were 92. Brother Julian died in the morning and Brother Adrian died in the evening, after being told of Julian’s death. Few who knew them were surprised, and many were relieved, as it would have been hard to imagine one surviving without the other.

But the cultivated anonymity of the twins died with them. News of their deaths, beginning with an article in The Buffalo News, traveled around the world, stunning the Catholic university’s officials. Think of it: eminent Franciscan scholars die with little notice, but the same-day passing of an identical and unassuming pair of Franciscan grunts attracts international attention.

Sister Margaret Carney, the university president and a Franciscan scholar, gave great thought to the why. Her conclusion: “The twins incarnate something that people have a hunger to know.”

The Riesters were the sons of a prominent Buffalo doctor and his wife, and matching gifts to five older sisters. Though bright and observant, the brothers did not excel in school; a nephew, Kevin McCue, suspects a missed diagnosis of dyslexia.

After being turned down by the armed forces on medical grounds — a bad left eye for one, a bad right for the other — they attended radio technology school in California. Then World War II broke out, just as they were exploring religious life. They received an acceptance letter from the Franciscans one morning, and a letter from the draft board that afternoon. They made their choice: Jerome became Brother Julian, and Irving became Brother Adrian.

Back then, the Franciscans followed a rather un-Franciscan caste system, with priests the well-educated elite, often working with books, and the lay brothers the less-educated support staff, often working with livestock. The Riesters, though earnestly obedient, did not understand why the two groups were discouraged from fraternizing; why, for example, the priests and brothers had separate recreation rooms. Didn’t St. Francis say that we are all brothers?

A “Yes, but” answer came when their superior ordered the dismantling of a modest boat they had built to ply the wondrous Allegheny. He may have thought that the vessel violated their vow of poverty — or, more likely, he may have disliked how they took seminarians, their betters, for boat rides.

Here, then, were two shy men, surrounded by scholars, discouraged from speaking, uncertain what to say if given the chance, and yet confident that this was their calling. “They were definitely second-class citizens, and not always treated well,” said Michael Riester, a cousin and a former Franciscan. “But they channeled it, always, spiritually.”

After working together at St. Bonaventure for several years, the brothers were assigned to different Buffalo parishes in 1956, a psychologically taxing separation that ended 17 years later, after their superiors concluded that they functioned best in concert. They were reunited and sent back to serve the dozens of friars living on the St. Bonaventure campus.

Together, they attended to the menial so that their fellow friars could focus on the cerebral. Brother Julian became the sacristan, maintaining the chapel, and Brother Adrian became the chauffeur, but they also built the bookshelves and maintained the garden and cleared the growth from the shrines in the woods — and rarely spoke unless invited.

By now the Franciscan caste system had mostly gone away, and lay brothers were encouraged to excel. But the shy twins remained deferential, although they sometimes thrilled in the vicarious. “When I came here as a young Franciscan, they used to get a kick out of the fact that I’d make my opinions known,” recalled Brother Edward Coughlin, a Franciscan scholar who lived with them in the friary.

To dismiss the twins as blank slates would be to misjudge them; their simplicity had depth. Rarely speaking of yesterday, they lived in the God-given now. Spending hours examining every flower at the Pleasant Valley Nursery. Licking every Twist & Shake ice cream cone so as to make it last and last. Pondering the art in the studio of Brother David Haack, then going off to build picture frames in their nearby workshop — where, occasionally, he heard them call each other by Jerome and Irving.

If they quarreled, Brother David said, “It would be over the measurement of a piece of wood.” And even then, it would be done silently: a slight cock of Julian’s head, to suggest that he didn’t agree with Adrian’s calculations.

They came to teach better-educated friars about stripping life to its essence. For example, the Rev. Canice Connors, a Franciscan who spent a restful summer at the friary after years of investigating sexual-abuse cases involving the clergy, became enchanted by the guileless twins, who seemed to embrace a deeper, ego-free reality.

One night, Father Connors treated the twins to dinner at the Old Library restaurant, for which they wore fine, identical suits given to them by a nephew. During the long meal, they tried their first White Russians, and rejoiced in an alcoholic drink that was like melted ice cream. They asked for a second, and continued to tell Franciscan tales summoned from 60 years of quiet observation.

“It was a rare event in my life,” Father Connors said. “I couldn’t stop laughing.”

Not long after, the brothers survived an awful accident while driving the friary van; they were saying another rosary, apparently, and didn’t see the truck. This ended Brother Adrian’s time as the friary chauffeur, and signaled the approach of a full retirement for both to Florida, in 2008, following a farewell dinner in their honor.

Last week, Brother Julian and Brother Adrian Riester were returned to St. Bonaventure for a memorial service and a side-by-side burial. Their coffins were carried by, among others, a few of the dozen or so Franciscans still on campus; their brothers.

The solemn and joyful day encouraged more stories about the twins. How they adorned the friary trees with birdhouses. How they toured the campus on identical bicycles, one with a pinwheel on its handlebars. And how they often sat in silent prayer in the chapel, so still that you might not know they were there.

    For Franciscan Twins, Simple Lives Had Depth, NYT, 14.6.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/us/15land.html

The Church’s Actions on Child Abuse

May 25, 2011
The New York Times


To the Editor:

“The Vatican Comes Up Short” (editorial, May 19) does not come up short. Sadly, the Roman Catholic hierarchical episcopacy continues to whistle its own tune: we’re in charge — and even when it comes to explaining and defending the sins of their own.

Sexual abuse is extraordinarily complex and arguably more so when it involves men of the cloth who prey on the young and vulnerable. I know. As a victim, I was crippled by the torture of shame for 40 years. I’ve touched the raw wood of the cross.

Don’t other ordained men or women and lay people have any say on how to protect our children? In their quest to achieve a landmark study, church leaders are overlooking the need for healing. The flock are fleeing the pews in droves worldwide. There is no question that the scandal, global we now know, has played a part.

There are many good and gifted priests. The church needs them. Others, for many reasons, defy understanding, cross the line and abuse. Remove these men from active ministry, provide rehabilitation, forgiveness, appropriate prosecution and move on. Come clean, be truthful and heal.

Most important, remember the victims, including those to come. If we do, the church will regain its vibrancy.

MARK JOSEPH WILLIAMS
Mendham, N.J., May 19, 2011

To the Editor:

In your editorial you state that “lay boards helped force the American bishops to proclaim a zero-tolerance policy.” This is history backward. It was the bishops who chose in their Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People to adopt the policy of permanent removal from ministry of any cleric about whom an instance of child sexual abuse is admitted or proved.

The same document established a national review board made up of lay people that in its own report expressed reservations about the so-called zero-tolerance policy but supported the bishops’ decision in its favor as being necessary at the time.

(Msgr.) FRANCIS J. MANISCALCO
West Hempstead, N.Y., May 19, 2011

The writer was secretary of communications for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops from 1994 to 2006.

To the Editor:

“1960s Culture Cited as Cause of Priest Abuse” (front page, May 18) highlights a study that is flawed at its core. How convenient that the results, which rely on church data and dollars, misdirect blame to the general atmosphere of the time rather than those actually accountable: the abusers.

Pedophiles and abusers invariably have some kind of justification for their actions, and this study parallels that rationalization on an institutional level. Perhaps one could argue that the culture of the ’60s and ’70s made people more likely to want to express their sexuality, but there is absolutely no rationale for concluding that child molesting would be a logical outgrowth of this expression.

The sexual abuse and exploitation of helpless children is not an expression of anything related to normal sexuality. Rather, it expresses a moral disconnect, the misuse of power and a complete lack of empathy for the child’s experience.

ROBERTA SHAFTER
Program Director, Greenwich
House Children’s Safety Project
New York, May 23, 2011

    The Church’s Actions on Child Abuse, NYT, 25.5.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/26/opinion/l26church.html

The Vatican Comes Up Short

May 18, 2011
The New York Times

The Vatican’s long overdue guidelines for fighting sexual abuse of children are, unfortunately, just that — flimsy guidelines for a global problem that requires an unequivocal mandate for church officials to work with secular authorities in prosecuting rogue priests.

Instead, the Vatican has issued nonbinding guidance that punts the scandal back to the authority of local bishops, who still will not face firm oversight or punishment for cover-ups that recycled hundreds of abusive priests.

The directive came two days before a new study of the abuse problem that cites the sexual and social turmoil of the 1960s as a possible factor in priests’ crimes. This is a rather bizarre stab at sociological rationalization and, in any case, beside the point that church officials went into denial and protected abusers.

The Vatican directive is also seriously defective for playing down the role of civilian boards in investigating abuses. The lay boards helped force the American bishops to proclaim a zero-tolerance policy that was finally more concerned about raped children than the image of the Roman Catholic Church.

The Vatican guidelines note that abusing children is a matter for secular law and call for dioceses to create “clear and coordinated” policies by next year. But the continuing stress on church priority in what essentially are criminal offenses is disheartening.

Vatican officials say Rome should not interfere with the traditional supremacy of local bishops. That was not the case earlier this month, when Pope Benedict XVI removed Bishop William Morris of Australia from office. The bishop, concerned with the shortage of priests, asked five years ago whether the Vatican “may well” have to reconsider the bar to ordaining women or married men.

No dramatic dismissal was ordered for bishops well documented to have overseen hush payments to victims and relocation of abusive priests. Splendid Vatican sanctuary was extended to Cardinal Bernard Law after he had to resign amid reports he covered up the scandal in Boston.

Most recently, ranking churchmen in Philadelphia rejected a grand jury finding that as many as 37 priests suspected of abuse should not still be serving. The diocese later suspended 26 amid public alarm. This should have been a red flag to the Vatican that diocesan prelates need a no-nonsense fiat in repairing the damage to children and the church from decades of shielding abusive priests.

    The Vatican Comes Up Short, NYT, 18.5.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/19/opinion/19thu4.html

Presbyterians Approve Ordination of Gay People

May 10, 2011
Reuters
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

After 33 years of debate, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has voted to change its constitution and allow openly gay people in same-sex relationships to be ordained as ministers, elders and deacons.

The outcome is a reversal from only two years ago, when a majority of the church’s regions, known as presbyteries, voted against ordaining openly gay candidates.

This time, 19 of the church’s 173 presbyteries switched their votes from no to yes in recent months. The Twin Cities presbytery, which covers Minneapolis and St. Paul, cast the deciding vote at its meeting on Tuesday. The vote was 205 to 56, with 3 abstentions.

Cynthia Bolbach, moderator of the church’s General Assembly, its highest legislative body, said in a phone interview from Minneapolis after the vote: “Everyone was civil. There was no applause, no cheering. It was just reflective of the fact that we are moving forward one other step.”

Although by the time the vote was taken in Minneapolis the outcome was expected, Presbyterian church officials said that even a few months ago they would not have predicted that the church was ready to change its policy.

“All of us are surprised,” said the Rev. Gradye Parsons, the church’s stated clerk, its highest elected official. He attributed the turnabout in the votes to both the growing acceptance of homosexuality in the larger culture, and to church members simply wearying of the conflict.

“We’ve been having this conversation for 33 years, and some people are ready to get to the other side of this decision,” he said. “Some people are going to celebrate this day because they’ve worked for it for a long time, and some people will mourn this day because they think it’s a totally different understanding of Scripture than they have.”

“I hope that going forward we can stay together and be faithful witnesses to the gospel of Jesus Christ,” he said.

The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) now joins a growing bloc of historic, mainline Protestant churches that have voted to accept gay clergy members and church leaders — a bloc that includes the United Church of Christ, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the Episcopal Church. (The largest mainline Protestant denomination, the United Methodist Church, is still fighting over the issue).

The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has about two million members. The Presbyterian Church in America, a much smaller and more conservative denomination, prohibits the ordination of women and openly gay candidates.

Longtime advocates of gay equality in the Presbyterian Church savored the day. The Rev. Heidi Vardeman, senior minister of Macalaster Plymouth United Church in St. Paul and a spokeswoman for a pro-gay church group called More Light Presbyterians, said in an interview, “Finally, the denomination has seen the error of its ways and it will repent, which means, literally, to turn around.

“I’ve had young people who have been exemplary, obviously good candidates for the ministry,” she said, “but then you have to have this weird conversation in which you say that, umm, because they might be gay or lesbian, it’s not going to work. But now we’re free! We can endorse and propose and assist and elect those whom God has called.”

In the next few months, the denomination will gauge the reaction from its more theologically conservative members, who believe that ordaining sexually active gay people is inconsistent with the Bible. Some have already departed. The Presbyterian News Service estimates that approximately 100 congregations have left the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) in the last five years. Several were large congregations, which could help explain why the vote in some presbyteries switched from 2009.

Paul Detterman, executive director of Presbyterians for Renewal, an alliance of conservative Presbyterians, said: “We see this as a bit of a crisis of conscience for us. The book that we hold up as holy is saying one thing, and now the church is behaving differently.”

However, he said groups like his were not planning to separate from the denomination, but to push to create some kind of a formal entity within the Presbyterian Church for conservatives. It could be a nongeographical presbytery or a fellowship, he said. “We need to have some kind of an identity,” he said.

He said he did not think the homosexuality issue was resolved because gay advocates are likely to try to pass an amendment at the church’s next General Assembly in 2012 calling for the church to bless same-sex marriages and unions.

The change approved on Tuesday does not mean that presbyteries must ordain gay candidates — only that they may. The wording leaves the decision open to local presbyteries, according to church officials. It says that governing bodies that consider candidates “shall be guided by Scripture and the confessions in applying standards to individual candidates.”

The measure changes the church’s constitution by removing a 1997 amendment that said that those ordained were required to live in “either in fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman” or in “chastity in singleness.”

    Presbyterians Approve Ordination of Gay People, R, 10.5.3011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/11/us/11presbyterian.html