Author: Tom Heneghan

Remember the issue of what to do with the corpses of the nine attackers killed during the November 2008 siege of the Taj Mahal Hotel and other targets in Mumbai that killed 166 people? The dead attackers were all presumed to be Pakistani Muslims, like the sole survivor, but local Indian Muslim leaders refused to let them be buried in their cemeteries. Islamabad ignored calls to take the bodies back. So they were left in morgue refrigerators in Mumbai, presumably until the issue was finally settled.

FaithWorld was deluged with comments after we asked if the bodies should be cremated and the ashes spread at sea. A surprising number of them suggested the bodies should be desecrated, thrown to the dogs or dumped at the Pakistani-Indian border. The discussion tapered off and the issue seemed to have been forgotten.

The only problem remaining was that those bodies had to be kept refrigerated ad infinitum.  Something had to give. Well, the Maharashtra state government finally put an end to this stalemate. As Rina Chandran in our Mumbai bureau wrote:  “The badly decomposed bodies had been lying in the mortuary of a hospital in Mumbai after Muslim clerics in the city refused to let them be buried on their grounds. Maharashtra home minister R.R. Patil told the state assembly on Tuesday the bodies were buried secretly in January.”

The trial of Mohammad Ajmal Kasab, the lone surviving suspect, ended last week in Mumbai with a verdict scheduled to be announced on May 3.

There were lots of hot button issues in this one — Indian-Pakistani relations, how to treat the dead attackers, giving the dead a proper Muslim funeral, just to name a few — but the angle the local media seemed to highlight most was something nobody thought of at the time. Most of them — see the Times of India,  the Indian Express or the Hindustan Times — seemed surprised that the government and police could keep the burial secret for so long!

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Prominent Muslim scholars have recast a famous medieval fatwa on jihad, arguing the religious edict radical Islamists often cite to justify killing cannot be used in a globalized world that respects faith and civil rights.  A conference in Mardin in southeastern Turkey declared the fatwa by 14th century scholar Ibn Taymiyya rules out militant violence and the medieval Muslim division of the world into a “house of Islam” and “house of unbelief” no longer applies.

Osama bin Laden has quoted Ibn Taymiyya’s “Mardin fatwa” repeatedly in his calls for Muslims to overthrow the Saudi monarchy and wage jihad against the United States.

Referring to that historic document, the weekend conference said: “Anyone who seeks support from this fatwa for killing Muslims or non-Muslims has erred in his interpretation.  “It is not for a Muslim individual or a Muslim group to announce and declare war or engage in combative jihad … on their own,” said the declaration.  Click here for my full report on it.

The declaration is the latest bid by mainstream scholars to use age-old Muslim texts to refute current-day religious arguments by Islamist groups. A leading Pakistani scholar issued a 600-page fatwa against terrorism in London early this month. Another declaration in Dubai this month challenged the religious justification for violence used by Islamist rebels in Somalia and calling for peace and reconciliation there (more on that here).

Fatwas may not convince militants, but they can help keep undecided Muslims from supporting them, the scholars say. Because Islam has no central authority to define the faith in all its details, militants who hijack it by twisting texts for their own purposes need to be confronted by moderates who cite chapter and verse to refute them.

Outside the Muslim world, declarations like these risk the fate of trees that fall in the forest when nobody’s listening. This conference was held in Mardin, a medieval town near the Syrian border, and the media present were mostly Turkish and Arabic speakers. It got good coverage in the Turkish press and Al-Jazeera television ran extensive footage in Arabic.  But getting the message out to the rest of the world, including the majority of Muslim who speak neither Arabic nor Turkish, means getting it out in English.

Mustafa Akyol, an Istanbul journalist and blogger known to readers of this blog, was there writing in English for the Hürriyet Daily News. And one of the main speakers was Aref Ali Nayed, another name regular FaithWorld readers will recognise, whose Kalam Research & Media theological think tank provided the quick English translation of the final declaration. They helped complement the basic information provided by the conference organisers.

Akyol explained the significance of Ibn Taymiyya’s famous fatwa like this:

“The way Ibn Taymiyya denounced the Mongol rulers of his time, who claimed to be Muslim but fell short of implementing the Islamic Shariah, has provided justification for some radical groups to denounce Muslims they view as less strict as ‘apostates’.

“The jurist’s division of the world into the ‘Abode of Islam’ and the ‘Abode of War’ – and his view that a place is not really a part of former unless it implements Shariah – have also inspired fundamentalists dedicated to establishing ‘Islamic states’ in predominantly Muslim countries.”

He also quoted Mustafa Ceric, the grand mufti of Bosnia, on the conference theme of the need for a new interpretation of old texts. “Most ulema [Islamic scholars] have a problem,” he said. “They know the classical texts very well, but they don’t know the contemporary world that much.” During Ibn Taymiyya’s time, there was no concept of international law based on human rights. 

“Today the world is so different. The Bosnian Muslims who took refuge in European countries such as Sweden found there the rights and privileges that they would not exactly find in Muslim countries… There is no such thing as an Islamic state. There are only states that provide justice, freedom and security and those that do not.”

Nayed, who like Ceric is a leading voice in the Common Word group for Muslim-Christian dialogue, developed this theme of the new world context for Islam in his address “Duties of Proximity: Towards a Theology of Neighbourliness” (PDF here). It ’s an eloquent refutation to militants who dream of Islamising western countries or recreating a caliphate: “Islam must never be conceived of merely geographically, because it is beyond geography…We must never reduce the abode of peace to a worldly dar al-Islam, conceived of as merely a geographically distinct empire or state.”

Rather than vilifying life in the West, Nayed said, Muslims must realise that “it is a fact that today many liberal environments are actually more conducive to Muslim living and worshiping than many so-called ‘Muslim countries’. As a matter of fact many Muslims today are actually forced to move to non-Muslim countries because of political or economic insecurity. At least up to 9/11, and in many places, even after it, many ‘non-Muslim’ countries fare quite better than many so-called ‘Muslim countries’, and even ‘Muslim states’, in allowing Muslim living.”

“We must not see secular liberalism as hostile to Islam. We must help secularisms mature to become more and more accepting of religious values in life. Much has been lost because of the lumping together of all sorts of secularism under the negative generic rubric of ‘almaniyya’ (Arabic for secularism). A great deal of discernment and wisdom is called for in this regard.”

What do you think of this declaration? Will it make a difference?

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The sex abuse scandals lashing the Vatican have led to calls for an end to priestly celibacy, a cleanout of the Catholic Church hierarchy and the resignation of Pope Benedict, but the pope seems unlikely to alter his approach.

The demands, widely aired in the media, are so far removed from the way Benedict works that abuse victims and other critics who raise them seem bound to be disappointed.

The sex abuse saga, while shameful enough to make Benedict issue several apologies to victims, has many aspects that apparently convince him he can continue to tackle the problem quietly but firmly, without undue fanfare.

“He will plod along undeterred,” said Rev. Vincent Twomey, an Irish theologian who has known the pope for 37 years. “He takes note of things, but he’s not a magician. He works steadily … I think he’ll weather the storm.”

Read the full analysis here and let us know below what you think.

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The New York Times has unearthed a startling paper trail of 25 letters and memos documenting the way a U.S. priest known to have abused up to 200 deaf boys from about 1952 to 1974 was quietly moved to another diocese and the Vatican resisted attempts to defrock him. Their story on the case of Rev. Lawrence Murphy is here, the paper trail here and our story on the Vatican reaction here. Here’s another story from our Rome bureau on victims demanding that Benedict open all Vatican files on sex abuse cases and defrock all predator priests.

The official Vatican reaction (here in English) is interesting for what it doesn’t say. This is a response to a query from the Times about their story and we don’t know what the questions were. The answers, though, are very narrowly focused. Nowhere is there any reference to the most interesting of the many revelations in the paper trail, i.e. that Pope Benedict, when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger heading the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), got at least one letter about this case from the priest’s bishop but apparently didn’t answer it.

His CDF deputy Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone, now the Cardinal Secretary of State (so once again Benedict’s deputy), first advised a secret trial for Murphy but later relented after the priest wrote directly to Ratzinger asking for clemency because he was old, ill and had already repented for his sins.

The Times got these letters from two lawyers representing five abuse victims suing the Milwaukee archdiocese. Laurie Goodstein, the NYT religion correspondent who wrote the story,  told WNYC radio this morning that there must be many more such documents out there given the number of suits filed in the U.S. against predator priests.

These cases are very complicated and nobody has found a “smoking gun” cover-up document signed by Cardinal Ratzinger — at least not yet. But if today’s NYT scoop is anything to go by, we can probably expect more documents like this that jack up the pressure on bishops and ultimately on Benedict himself.

How much longer can this go on? Do you think Benedict has to take radical measures to deal with this? If so, which ones?

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Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris witnessed a scene on Sunday afternoon that seemed to be from a bygone age. A rabbi invited to deliver a lecture about Catholic-Jewish dialogue was interrupted by young arch-traditionalist Catholics who began to pray the rosary to make “amends for the outrage” of letting him speak there. Rabbi Rivon Krygier had to leave the nave and retire to the sacristy, where he read his text into a microphone to broadcast it to about 1,200 people who came to hear him. Read our full story here.

Rabbi Krygier, the head of a small Conservative Jewish congregation in Paris, had the grace to recognise that his hecklers were a tiny minority. “They’ll say they succeeded in banishing the rabbi to the sacristy,” he told the Catholic daily La Croix.  “This is an act that has to be taken seriously, but the Christians active in dialogue seem much more determined to continue on this path.”

The warm round of applause that Krygier received when he returned to the nave after the lecture bore that out. At the same time, arch-traditionalists such as Rev. Régis de Cacqueray, head of the French section of the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX) congratulated protesters for their “courage” and said: “The Paris cathedral is neither a synagogue nor a Masonic temple.”

An ultra-traditionalist blog called “Les Intransigeants” (The Intransigents) spoke its mind more openly: “Notre Dame again defended against the outrage by the merchants of the Temple.” The rest of the post was worse anti-Semitic venom.

This incident came at a time of growing tension between the mainstream French Church and a small minority of arch-traditionalists who reject the reforms of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), especially the opening it brought to fellow Christians, Jews and the faithful of other religions.

These arch-traditionalists, who are stronger in France than most other countries, have gotten several boosts from the Vatican in recent years. Pope Benedict lifted the excommunications of four SSPX bishops last year, a move that caused an embarrassing uproar when one turned out to be a Holocaust denier. The SSPX was then invited to doctrinal discussions at the Vatican, which are now going into their third round. Bishop Bernard Fellay, head of the Swiss-based SSPX, said recently that the Vatican theologians at the talks “wish the Church well but want to save the Council at the same time. This is a squaring of the circle.”

The French bishops, many of whom  wanted the SSPX rebels to accept the Vatican II reforms before being returned to the Church, have responded by organising conferences such as Notre Dame’s Lenten Lectures series to explain the Vatican II reforms and their relevance for today’s Church to parishioners who may not know many details about an event that happened almost five decades ago.

The Catholic television station KTO cut off its live transmission as the protest started, but you can still hear the beginning of it at the end of the introduction by Cardinal Vingt-Trois, at 3:31 in the video below. In the France Culture radio broadcast here, you can hear the protesters for about a minute until the cathedral’s mighty organ drowned them out.

In the next video, Cardinal Vingt-Trois sets up the microphone and Rabbi Krygier reads his lecture from the sacristy:

What do you think of this? Is this an isolated incident, or do you think it also reflects wider tensions in Catholic-Jewish relations recently?

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The wide gap between Pope Benedict’s letter to the Irish and the reaction it received from victims — the subject of my analysis today on the Reuters wire — is the tip of an iceberg of incomprehension. The frank letter went further than any previous papal condemnation of clerical sex abuse of children, an aspect that Benedict’s defenders promptly highlighted, and went so far as to say some bishops had committed “grave errors of judgment” and undermined their own credibility. This is strong stuff indeed, especially from a man like Joseph Ratzinger who has a far loftier image of the Church and its servants (more on that later).

But what was bold for Benedict was still cowardly for his critics, who saw these “grave errors of judgment” as only the starting point and wanted to hear what the pope would do about them. “The smallest steps that are obvious for any reasonable person are made painfully slowly, which ruins the Church’s reputation radically,” the German group Initiative Kirche von Unten (Church from Below Initiative). This and other victims’ groups, backed up in several countries by the media, some politicians and apparently quite a few Catholics in the pews, appreciate the apologies but want to go beyond them.  They want to go up the chain of command and hold those bishops responsible who hushed up abuse cases, moved predator priests around and extracted secrecy deals from frightened victims.

Something not to be forgotten in this context is that the Vatican, when a cardinal actually had to step down under the pressure of sexual abuse scandals, provided him with a gold-plated exile in Rome that many prelates with spotless records could only dream of. Boston Cardinal Bernard Law fled to Rome in 2002 and was made archpriest of the Basilica of Saint Mary Major, one of the most beautiful Catholic churches in the world, and retained his membership in eight Vatican dicasteries that effectively made him one of the most influential cardinals in the Church.

The pope and several European bishops who greeted his letter carefully avoided any escalation up the chain of command.  Sharp and clear in its condemnation of clerical sexual abuse, the pope’s letter flags when it comes to recommendations for the future. It talks about a Vatican-sponsored inquiry into selected Irish dioceses, which will almost surely fall short of the frankness and detail of the damning Ryan Report into abuse in the Dublin archdiocese. And then it offers mostly spiritual advice, telling priests to look inwards — to more frequent confession and eucharistic adoration, and reflection on the model of the 19th century Curé of Ars, the French priest Fr. Jean-Marie Vianney. In the letter, Benedict reminded his clergy of Vianney’s words: “The priest holds the key to the treasures of heaven: it is he who opens the door: he is the steward of the good Lord; the administrator of his goods.”

Is a 19th-century rural French priest, even one as legendary as Vianney, a model for 21st century clerics struggling with the fallout of the sexual abuse crisis? Critical reactions to the letter doubted this. “We’re not going to make any progress with an image of the priest like that,” said Christian Weisner, spokesman of the German lay movement Wir Sind Kirche (We Are Church). In his letter, Benedict himself says that part of the problem in Ireland was “a tendency in society to favour the clergy and other authority figures.” But the image of a priest that he offers his Irish colleagues is as clerical as the traditional one Ireland has been shaking off with so much pain and sorrow.

Speaking of rural — Ireland’s RTÉ television had an interesting interview with Fr. Kevin Hegarty, a priest in County Mayo along the Atlantic coast, who reported on the reaction in parishes he tends to. “They have been absolutely shocked by the level of the cover up,” said Hegarty, who had been of the first priests in Ireland to openly challenge the bishops’ handling of the abuse.  “I’ve met seven congregations since yesterday morning and from talking to them my sense is that they are saying it is a good thing the pope has spoken at last, they see good things in what he has said, but they see it as a very small step,” said Hegarty.  “It will take a long time to build up any level of trust in the Catholic Church in Ireland.”

Another gap opens up behind Benedict’s comment that the Irish abuse scandals can also be partly blamed on the fact that “the programme of renewal proposed by the Second Vatican Council was sometimes misinterpreted … there was a well-intentioned but misguided tendency to avoid penal approaches to canonically irregular situations.” He also cited “the rapid transformation and secularisation of Irish society.”

These factors certainly played a part, but they can’t  explain the abuse cases that date back to what now seems like the Church’s golden era of the 1950s. As Germany’s ARD television correspondent Stafan Troendle commented from Rome: “If everyone had believed and prayed more, this wouldn’t have happened. That may be the sincere view of a pious Christian, but it’s not very realistic … Especially in Ireland, many abuse cases date back to a time when there was not yet any talk of secularisation and the all-powerful Church could pretty much do as it wished.”

The Süddeutsche Zeitung, the main daily in the pope’s old archdiocese of Munich, gave him mixed marks for his address to the Irish. “The pope’s letter is strong in its emotion, clear in its recognition of the intellectual and spiritual crisis that has engulfed the Catholic Church — but weak about the reasons for the crisis that will change this Church more deeply than many a papal letter.”

What do you think? Did the pope’s letter answer the concerns of victims and other Catholics concerned about the treatment of children in the care of the Catholic Church? Or do you think the victims are right to say that nothing will be changed until bishops who presided over cover ups are called on the carpet?

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Cardinal Seán Brady, the Patriarch of Ireland, said at his St Patrick’s Day Mass that he was “ashamed that I have not always upheld the values that I profess and believe in.” This sermon came after days of calls for his resignation after it was revealed that he played a small part in keeping quiet the case of an abusive priest in 1975. Although he said back in December that he would resign if it turned out he had caused any child to suffer, Brady has refused to step down over this case despite loud calls in Ireland for him to do so.

Will he resign?  He got warm support from the congregation after his sermon but victims still want to see him go.  Vatican Radio seems to think he might be going. Its German-language service, which has naturally been following these abuse cases closely because of the scandals in Germany, said that “the Primate of the Irish Church, Cardinal Seán Brady, is apparently thinking about a possible resignation.”

But John Cooney of the Irish Independent writes that “Cardinal Brady’s powerful plea for “a wounded healer” to be allowed “a new beginning”, a bridgehead towards making the church a safe environment for children, was a clear signal of his determination to stay in office.”

Below are excerpts from what Brady said in his sermon at St Patrick’s Cathedral in Armagh. Click here for a video of his short news conference after the Mass.

“Today, Irish people across the world are remembering St Patrick and the land of their birth. Most will do so with joy and pride. They will celebrate the enormous contribution of this nation to the Christian faith and heritage across the world. They will celebrate a people renowned for generosity to others in need.

 “Ireland and its people have much to be proud of. Yet every land and its people have moments of shame…

“This week a painful episode from my own past has come before me. I have listened to reaction from people to my role in events thirty five years ago. I want to say to anyone who has been hurt by any failure on my part that I apologise to you with all my heart. I also apologise to all those who feel I have let them down. Looking back I am ashamed that I have not always upheld the values that I profess and believe in…

“…We must humbly continue to deal with the enormity of the hurt caused by abuse of children by some clergy and religious and the hopelessly inadequate response to that abuse in the past.

“… We as Bishops, successors of the Apostles in the Irish Church today must acknowledge our failings. The integrity of our witness to the Gospel challenges us to own up to and take responsibility for any mismanagement or cover-up of child abuse. For the sake of survivors, for the sake of all the Catholic faithful as well as the religious and priests of this country, we have to stop the drip, drip, drip of revelations of failure.

“The Lord is calling us to a new beginning. None of us knows where that new beginning will lead. Does it allow for wounded healers, those who have made mistakes in their past to have a part in shaping the future? This is a time for deep prayer and much reflection. Be certain that I will be reflecting carefully as we enter into Holy Week, Easter and Pentecost. I will use this time to pray, to reflect on the Word of God and to discern the will of the Holy Spirit. I will reflect on what I have heard from those who have been hurt by abuse.  I will also talk to people, priests, religious and to those I know and love.

“Pray for those who have been hurt. Pray for the Church. Pray for me.”

Do you think he should resign? Or that he will resign?

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Headlines are supposed to highlight the news, but sometimes the news is uncomfortable. Like the sexual abuse cases for the Roman Catholic Church. Avvenire, the daily newspaper of the Italian Catholic bishops’ conference, played down the big news in its front-page headline on Saturday about an  interview with the head of the Vatican office dealing with charges of sexual abuse against priests.

In the middle of the front page (at left), it ran the headline “Il ‘pm’ vaticano: in tutto il mondo trecento i preti accusati di pedofilia.” — Vatican public prosecutor: 300 priests accused of pedophilia in the whole world.”  That actually doesn’t sound like that many, given all the cases we’ve heard about all these years.

It’s only in the interview on page 5 that the real picture emerges. There the reader finds a much larger figure of  3,000 accusations of sexual misdeeds of all kinds made against priests since 2001, concerning cases dating back up to 50 years ago. That sounds more like it, although it still must be lower than the real number of cases because so many don’t get reported.

Msgr. Charles Scicluna, the “promoter of justice” for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, broke down this large figure into three categories — cases of pedophile and same-sex ephebophile acts and cases of heterosexual acts. Some 60% of the cases were ephebophile (with adolescents), 30% were heterosexual (with adolescent and adult females) and 10% were pedophile (with prepubescent children).

So which figure got highlighted on the main page? The smallest, of course. This is all the more interesting because the the news shorthand for these cases tends to use words like pedophile or children. By ignoring the majority of cases that concern adolescents, the Avvenire headline makes it all seem less of a problem than it is.

In an earlier blog post, we asked whether the hierarchy would have hushed up so many abuse cases if there had been more women in decision-making positions. That question of perspective comes up here too. Avvenire may think this is a reassuring headline. I wonder how many of its readers — especially those who are parents — find any consolation in the news that “only” 10% of accused abusers were going after children under 12 while the majority preyed on youths a few years older.

Here are the relevant passages from the interview in English translation, as provided by the Vatican press office:

Avvenire: How many (sexual abuse cases) have you dealt with so far?

Scicluna: Overall in the last nine years (2001-2010) we have considered accusations concerning around three thousand cases of diocesan and religious priests, which refer to crimes committed over the last fifty years.

That is, then, three thousand cases of paedophile priests?

No, it is not correct to say that. We can say that about sixty percent of the cases chiefly involved sexual attraction towards adolescents of the same sex, another thirty percent involved heterosexual relations, and the remaining ten percent were cases of paedophilia in the true sense of the term; that is, based on sexual attraction towards prepubescent children. The cases of priests accused of paedophilia in the true sense have been about three hundred in nine years. Please don’t misunderstand me, these are of course too many, but it must be recognised that the phenomenon is not as widespread as has been believed.

The accused, then, are three thousand. How many have been tried and condemned?

Currently we can say that a full trial, penal or administrative, has taken place in twenty percent of cases, normally celebrated in the diocese of origin – always under our supervision – and only very rarely here in Rome. We do this also in order to speed up the process. In sixty percent of cases there has been no trial, above all because of the advanced age of the accused, but administrative and disciplinary provisions have been issued against them, such as the obligation not to celebrate Mass with the faithful, not to hear confession, and to live a retired life of prayer. It must be made absolutely clear that in these cases, some of which are particularly sensational and have caught the attention of the media, no absolution has taken place. It’s true that there has been no formal condemnation, but if a person is obliged to a life of silence and prayer, then there must be a reason…

We can say that in ten percent of cases, the particularly serious ones in which the proof is overwhelming, the Holy Father has assumed the painful responsibility of authorising a decree of dismissal from the clerical state. This is a very serious but inevitable provision, taken though administrative channels. In the remaining ten percent of cases, it was the accused priests themselves who requested dispensation from the obligations deriving from the priesthood, requests which were promptly accepted. Those involved in these latter cases were priests found in possession of paedophile pornographic material and, for this reason, condemned by the civil authorities.

Where do these three thousand cases come from?

Mostly from the United States which, in the years 2003-2004, represented around eighty percent of total cases. In 2009 the United States “share” had dropped to around twenty-five percent of the 223 cases reported from all over the world. Over recent years (2007-2009), the annual average of cases reported to the Congregation from around the world has been two hundred and fifty. Many countries report only one or two cases. There is, then, a growing diversity and number of countries of origin of cases, but the phenomenon itself is much reduced. It must, in fact, be borne in mind that the overall number of diocesan and religious priests in the world is four hundred thousand, although this statistic does not correspond to the perception that is created when these sad cases occupy the front pages of the newspapers.

And in Italy?

Thus far the phenomenon does not seem to have dramatic proportions, although what worries me is a certain culture of silence which I feel is still too widespread in the country. The Italian Episcopal Conference (CEI) offers an excellent technical-juridical consultancy service for bishops who have to deal with these cases. And I am very pleased to observe the ever greater commitment being shown by Italian bishops to throw light on the cases reported to them.

You said that a full trial has taken place in around twenty percent of the three thousand cases you have examined over the last nine years. Did they all end with the condemnation of the accused?

Many of the past trials did end with the condemnation of the accused. But there have also been cases in which the priest was declared innocent, or where the accusations were not considered to have sufficient proof. In all cases, however, not only is there an examination of the guilt or innocence of the accused priest, but also a discernment as to his fitness for public ministry.

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Vienna’s Cardinal Christoph Schönborn set off a storm in a teacup this week when he said the Roman Catholic Church had to ask tough questions about the reasons for the clergy sex abuse cases coming to light now in Europe. “The issue of celibacy belongs to that (questioning) as well as the issue of personality development (of priests). And a large portion of honesty belongs to this too, in the Church but also in society,” he wrote in a newsletter for Vienna archdiocese employees called thema kirche.

In the blogosphere, this somehow got turned into  headlines like  “Schönborn questions celibacy” and speculation that he was somehow challenging this centuries-old tradition. Those comments must have been based on dodgy Google translations from the German, because it’s clear in the original that he never questioned the celibacy rule itself. He said the Church should “ask about the reasons for sexual abuse” (nach den Ursachen sexuellen Missbrauchs fragen) and “celibacy belongs to that” set of issues to ask about. He did not say “put celibacy into question” (in Frage stellen) or “challenge celibacy” (hinterfragen).

What he did do, though, is what several other prelates and experts in the German-speaking countries are doing these days, i.e. say that celibacy has to be considered as one of the pieces in the sexual abuse puzzle. This bring the public discussion about celibacy a lot further than the traditional arguments Pope Benedict puts forward.  In my analysis today “Celibacy debate re-emerges amid Church abuse scandal,” Hamburg Auxiliary Bishop Hans-Jochen Jaschke is quoted as saying celibacy was not the reason for sexual abuse but  “the celibate lifestyle can attract people who have an abnormal sexuality and cannot integrate sexuality into their lives. That’s when a dangerous situation can arise.”

Bishop Stefan Ackermann, the German Church’s point man for sexual abuse cases, told a ZDF television discussion (full video in German here) on Thursday evening that “the Catholic Church is especially affected because, as the experts tell us, sex crimes are almost always male crimes. Since priests in the Catholic Church are male, that means the group is clearly defined. And certainly, when you think about boarding schools, there is a family atmosphere there that creates a confusion situation where people don’t want to speak out.”

Professor Klaus Beier, head of the Institute of Sexology and Sexual Medicine at Berlin’s Charité hospital, told the same ZDF discussion round that pedophile tendencies developed at puberty and were not influenced by celibacy, but “celibacy attracts pedophiles into the service of the Catholic Church.” In an interesting article in this week’s The Tablet (subscription only), Beier says the problem arises when men with pedophile tendencies…

…”assume that strong faith and obedience to religious instruction will make their undesirable sexual impulses disappear. Celibacy is so attractive to paedophiles because they want to leave their conflict-laden sexuality behind them and liberate themselves from their sexual impulses.

“What we are dealing with is a built-in biological mechanism. The stability of the sexual preference structure in the case of the majority, those people with an adult heterosexual orientation, guarantees the founding of families, the realisation of a joint wish for reproduction and for jointly raising children. This principle is a part of Creation.”

“However, if we are to prevent sexual abuse of children, we need to accept that human sexuality is characterised by a broad spectrum of unalterable types and that people can deviate from the average in their sexual orientation. We must also insist that society does not refuse to accept sexual minorities because they have a particular sexual inclination, because such inclinations cannot be evaluated morally. This is the only way that one can count on those whose sexual orientation is a potential danger to others (as with paedophiles) to act responsibly and accept the help that should guarantee the prevention of sexual assaults.”

These are examples of asking questions about celibacy without questioning the principle itself. The dicussion about celibacy, which will probably continue for as long as these latest waves of sexual abuse revelations continues, will not be black-and-white. Catholic leaders discussing it in public will make statements full of nuances, several of which echo through the statements of Jaschke, Ackermann and Beier quoted above.

Is Schönborn, whose doctrinal orthodoxy is so solid that he was chosen as editor in chief of the Church’s Catechism, secretly trying to abolish celibacy as some blogs seem to say?  There’s more evidence to think he wants to save it in a changing world, which means openly discussing and resolving the problems connected with it before they make the traditional rule  completely untenable. Living outside the Vatican bubble, he hears all sides of the argument and is not shy about trying to prod the Church into a discussion about it.

What do you think about this? Should the Catholic Church scrap celibacy? And if you think it should, when do you think this could happen?

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The Vatican daily L’Osservatore Romano has published an interesting article saying the Catholic Church might have avoided some of the clerical sex abuse scandals it now has if more women were in decision-making positions. The Italian historian Lucetta Scaraffia says that women “would have been able to rip the veil of masculine secrecy that in the past often covered with silence the denunciation of these misdeeds.” The word she used for “secrecy” is omertà, the  Italian term for “code of silence” well known to anyone who’s seen the Godfather movies or read about how the Mafia works.

Scaraffia writes that Pope John Paul said women should be given posts of equal importance as men and that Pope Benedict has written to bishops promoting collaboration between men and women in the Church. She then writes, in a rather academic style:

“The problem is that this important theoretical development has not been followed with equal clarity by a transformation in women’s participation in the life of the Church. Their participation, although significantly enlarged, has remained mostly outside the decision-making spheres and areas of cultural processing. One can understand, then, that the pressure of the excluded –  who are often shut out for no justified reason — can be felt, even if quietly. It is not just a matter of social justice or equal opportunities. The Church risks failing to develop energies and contributions that are often of primary importance.

L'Osservatore Romano, 11 March 2010 — Scaraffia's article is at the top right.

“One example suffices: In the painful and shameful situation where harassment and sexual abuse by clergymen of young people entrusted to them is coming to light, we can hypothesize that an increased female presence, and not only at lower levels, would have been able to rip the veil of male secrecy that in the past often covered the denunciation of  misdeeds. In fact, women — both religious and secular — are naturally more inclined to defend the young in cases of sexual abuse, avoiding the serious damage these guilty attitudes have done to the Church.”

One can argue whether women in some leadership positions would act much differently from men. Some, like Margaret Thatcher or Indira Gandhi, can make one sceptical about that. But if women had been part of the decision-making process when abusive priests were shuffled around from one post to another, there surely would have been some who — like the Boston mothers in the photo above — would have shamed the bishops with that simple question, “What would your mothers think?”

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Bloody clashes between Christian and Muslim gangs in Nigeria have led to media headlines about “religious violence” that leave readers wondering just what role faith plays in this conflict. As our copy from Nigeria points out, the terms Christian, Muslim and animist are often used to identify the groups in this conflict, but they are not fighting over the divine nature of Jesus, prophethood of Mohammad or sacredness of a tree or rock. They are mostly struggling for land in the fertile central region of the country.

Nigeria has more than 250 ethnic groups and several different languages, but its population is divided almost equally between Muslims and Christians.

Here’s an excerpt from our latest assessment of political risks facing Nigeria:

ETHNIC OR RELIGIOUS UNREST

Clashes between Christian and Muslim gangs in central Nigeria, the country’s main ethnic and religious fault line, have killed hundreds of people since the start of the year.

The violence is rooted in decades of resentment between Christian villagers and Muslim settlers from the north, who compete fiercely for control of fertile farmlands as well as economic and political power.

But the region is seen as a microcosm of the wider country, highlighting how sensitive it is to shifts in the balance of power between its main ethnic and religious groups.

The government has come under criticism for failing to address the root causes of the unrest — poverty and discrimination — and for failing to prevent violence from continuing despite the deployment of the military in January.

What to watch:

• Further outbreaks of violence. Many Nigerians believe that such clashes are engineered by politicians. The last thing Acting President Goodluck Jonathan needs as he steers government through a difficult period is major bloodshed at the heart of the nation.
• Increased use of the military. As much as three-quarters of the rank-and-file in the Nigerian army are from the “Middle Belt”, the border region between the Muslim north and the Christian south, and deployments in the region are highly sensitive, with the potential to expose internal divisions in the military.

Among our latest reports from Nigeria are:

Retaliation fears stalk Nigeria city after clashes

Nigeria urged to end impunity after village massacre

Villagers bury their dead after Nigeria clashes

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The more the scandal of Catholic priests sexually abusing boys in Germany spreads, the more the focus turns to Rome to see how Pope Benedict reacts. The story is getting ever closer to the German-born pope, even though he has been quite outspoken denouncing these scandals and had just met all Irish bishops to discuss the scandals shaking their country. Nobody’s saying he had any role in the abuse cases now coming to light in Germany. But the fact that some took place in Regensburg while he was a prominent theologian there, that his brother Georg has admitted to smacking lazy members of his choir there and that Benedict was archbishop in Munich from 1977 to 1982 lead to the classic cover-up question: what did he know and when did he know it?

This is only the start of what can be a long, drawn out and possibly damaging story for Benedict’s PR-deficient papacy. His crises to date have been linked to his statements or decisions, such as the controversial Regensburg speech that offended Muslims or several run-ins with Jews over restoring old prayers they consider anti-Semitic or rehabilitating an ultra-traditionalist priest who is also a Holocaust denier. But now it’s about what he did or didn’t do in the past and how he moves to avoid further scandals in the future.

As my analysis today put it:

In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus says that if anyone leads innocent children to sin, “it would be better for him to have a great millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.”

That passage must now be ringing in the ears of the Roman Catholic clergy in Germany and the Netherlands, where the Church’s latest scandals of priests sexually abusing boys have broken out, and echoing down the marbled halls of the Vatican.

The alarm bells are tolling all the more urgently in Rome, where tenuous links run from Bavarian boarding schools all the way to the German-born Pope Benedict. Critics are asking what he knew and did then and what he will do now.

Benedict will meet Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, president of the German Bishops’ Conference, at the Vatican on Friday to discuss the scandals and address a letter to the Irish people, possibly on St. Patrick’s Day next Wednesday.  Other stories we’ve run in this series include “Vatican says wrong to single out Church over abuse”, “Pope’s brother “didn’t know of school’s brutality”, “Germany wants Catholic clarity on abuse cases” and  FACTBOX – Sex abuse scandals in the Catholic Church.”

Fr. Andreas Batlogg S.J., editor in chief of the German Jesuit monthly Stimmen der Zeit, said these abuse cases would be “radically cleared up, even if it’s uncomfortable” but also stressed how difficult that might be. “It’s very hard to go back 30 or 40 years with today’s knowledge and crisis management and ask if something was right,” he told me by phone from his office in Munich. “The Church is learning now. There has been a change of perspective, now the victims are in the spotlight, not the perpetrators any more.”

In an article for his journal’s April edition (here in German), the theologian and psychotherapist Wunibald Müller warns his German readers that the U.S. Catholic Church “has not yet recovered” from the scandals that hit it early in the last decade. “It would have been spared some shocks if it had taken available insights and proposed procedures more seriously,” he wrote. “In cases of sexual abuse of minors by priests, the only option is a relentless approach that shines unlimited light on the situation. Nothing must stay in the dark, be hushed up or hidden or played down. Nothing.”

But how far will Benedict go in “shining unlimited light” on the situation in Germany? He seemed to be on that path in Ireland after the devastating Ryan and Murphy reports there, but he disappointed Irish abuse victims by not shaking up the Irish hierarchy as many expected he would when or soon after he called all Irish bishops to Rome for talks in mid-February. Will he take a tougher stand with the Church in Germany?

It’s interesting to see the bishops in the neighbouring Netherlands,  faced with a similar wave of abuse charges against Church-run boarding schools there, promptly decided to set up an independent commission led by a Protestant to examine the issue. The German bishops fought against suggestions from Berlin for a probe just into Catholic schools and now look set to agree to “round table talks” that will include Protestant leaders, family associations and school and local officials. This waters down the focus on the Catholic Church, which insists the probe must not overlook the far larger number of pedophile cases that take place outside its walls. It will be interesting to see if the Dutch bishops earn more public support with their inquiry than the Germans win with theirs.

The big question is whether someone in the Munich archdiocese will come forward with embarrassing charges of being abused sexually by a diocesan priest during the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s time as archbishop there. Seen from today’s perspective, where the focus is now on the victim rather than the perpetrator, even not knowing about abuse cases on one’s watch could be taken as a sign of negligent leadership. Once a debate starts off like that, who knows where it will end?

Benedict and his Vatican aides have stumbled badly on issues easier to handle than this one. Especially after the uproar over the Holocaust-denying Bishop Richard Williamson, his fellow Germans hardly seem ready to cut him any slack. There may be some stormy times ahead.

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It’s like falling dominoes. The scandal of Roman Catholic priests sexually abusing children in Ireland, which came to light last year when two government inquiries cracked the wall of clerical silence there, seems to have inspired victims in other European countries to come forward with their repressed stories. It started in Germany last month with revelations about abuse cases in several elite Jesuit boarding schools. That sparked further reports from other parts of Germany, where reports of hundreds of cases are now coming out. In the neighbouring Netherlands, reports of abuse have also begun surfacing in recent days. On top of all that, an unrelated scandal about a gay prostitution ring has now hit the Vatican.

Since Pope Benedict summoned all Irish bishops to Rome and promised the Irish people a pastoral letter about the abuse cases, what will he do with all these cases now coming out in his homeland? Especially since, as explained below, he seems to have been quite close to some of them.

The abuse cases reported today in Regensburg in northern Bavaria are particularly embarrassing for the Church because Pope Benedict’s brother, Fr. Georg Ratzinger, was director of the “Domspatzen” (Cathedral Sparrows) choir from 1964 to 1994. The abuse cases in the choir’s boarding school dated between 1958 and 1973, so nine years on Fr. Ratzinger’s watch. He told Bavarian Radio he knew nothing about any abuse.

The pope himself lived in Regensburg from 1969 to 1997, when he taught theology at the university there as Professor Joseph Ratzinger. He had nothing to do with the choir officially, of course, but he was a very prominent member of the Church community there. Although he has spoken out about the Irish scandals and has promised a pastoral letter to the Irish people, he has been much more reticent about what’s happening in his own country. It’s hard to imagine he can keep a low profile for too much longer.

Our news report from Berlin today tells most of the story with some selected quotes from news conferences today. Following are a few more quotes to give a fuller idea of what was said.

In Ettal, a southern Bavarian village near Garmisch-Partenkirchen whose baroque Benedictine monastery is one of the most beautiful in Germany, lawyer Thomas Pfister told journalists what he found while investigating abuse charges at the boarding school there:

“One can say with certainty that in past years, in what I call the very dark years of Ettal Abbey, it’s certain that hundreds of pupils were mishandled. It wasn’t just little clouts on the head, as some seem to want to play them down to be. There were very extreme cases of mishandling, which normally would have been punished with long prison sentences.

“A cloak of silence was thrown over the charges. I have so many indications (of mishandling) that one cannot seriously believe that the superiors at the time couldn’t guess what was going on or didn’t know it. There was a culture of collective silence, a collective looking away…

“The 1950s, 1960s and 1970s must certainly be called the darkest years of Ettal Abbey. Back then, pupils were systematically mishandled and, though the person of Father Magnus who has since died, there was serial sexual harassment and sexual abuse on small and older children.”

Rev Johannes Bauer, the monastery treasurer, made a personal confession to the journalists: “Along with other colleagues, I was a teacher in the boarding school from 1985 to 1987. To my shame, I have to say openly that I also brutally abused children physically and humiliated them. I am very sorry and ask forgiveness from the bottom of my heart. I ask all those who I personally injured to contact me so I can personally beg them for forgiveness.” After outlining how the monastery was changing, he added: “We have to admit, several of us were outright brutal back then!” Pfister said Bauer had admitted to having used “objects” to beat boys with. There were also reports that one priest had child pornography on his computer and uploaded pictures of Ettal school boys to gay websites.

A third centre of abuse was at a Capucian school in Burghausen, also in southern Bavaria. A former director of the school had abused boys sexually in 1984-1985, the order said in a statement.The most interesting revelation was the way the order shifted that priest around from job to job until it couldn’t any longer. The statement said “the accused priest was transferred to Munich in 1985 to work as a pastor in a hospital run by the order, but had to leave in 1989 after accusations and differences with the sisters. From 1989 to 2009 he was a pastor for pilgrims in Würzburg. Since he refused to be transferred on several occasions, the order suspended him from his priestly work in agreement with the Würzburg diocese. The abuse charges were legally investigated in 1991 but the statute of limitations had already passed.”

After that 1991 investigation, the Capucian order informed Bavarian dioceses about him and also informed the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), which was then run by the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. “From there came the directive that the accused priest should not be employed in work with children and youths or in hearing confessions. He was also told to go into therapy,” it said.

So the Bavarian Capucians first shuffled him around a bit and, when they turned to Cardinal Ratzinger’s CDF for guidance, were told to give him some therapy and keep a low profile. The statement didn’t say why the order tried several times to move the priest out of  Würzburg, but it seems it was repeating the move-’em-around strategy that so discredited the American bishops when their scandals came to light. Given the firm hand with which he presided over the CDF and much of the rest of the Vatican bureaucracy, is it possible that Cardinal Ratzinger didn’t know about this case from his own native state? And again, can Pope Benedict keep silent on another case so close to home?

The German and Dutch stories seem set to continue. The Dutch bishops will be discussion their scandals at a meeting next Tuesday and Germany’s top Catholic bishop, Archbishop Robert Zollitsch of Freiburg, has an audience with fellow German Pope Benedict three days later. There were clear hints at news conferences in  Regensburg and Ettal the continuing investigations would probably bring more cases to light.

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In the ongoing financial crisis debate, many people think that unrestricted subprime loans, credit default swaps, astronomical bonuses, huge bank bailouts and other aspects of today’s economy are somehow unfair or wrong. This issue is not only economic or political, it’s also about ethics and morality, these people think. But that view doesn’t get traction in our political discourse. Asking the big question about what is right/fair or wrong/unfair is not really debated. Sure, there are contrary views on this and any debate would be long and lively. But it doesn’t really happen.

Some moral issues do get traction in politics. Look at abortion or same-sex marriage. The forces on both sides of this argument have considerable clout (at varying levels, depending on the country). They hold heated debates over ethical  principles such as the sanctity of human life, the freedom of individual choice or the principle of equality. But those are questions that are not primarily about the economy. When money gets thrown into the equation, there is much more of a tendency to let the market decide. What’s not illegal can’t be unethical, this view seems to argue.

So it was refreshing to find the Citizens Ethics Network in London standing up and asking why we’re not asking these questions. I’ve just run an article on this which starts as follows:

The debate about fixing the financial crisis seems to be missing a key factor — a broad ethical discussion of what is the right and wrong thing to do in a modern economy.

This omission stands out at a time when a survey by the World Economic Forum, host of the glittering annual Davos summits of the rich and powerful, says two-thirds of those queried think the crunch is also a crisis of ethics and values.

Voters in western countries may have a gut feeling that huge bonuses and bank bailouts are somehow unfair, but politicians seem unable to come up with a solid response that reflects it, according to a group trying to kickstart an ethics debate.

“People have strong emotions about right and wrong – that sense of justice is hard-wired into the way we view the world,” Madeleine Bunting, one of three founders of the Citizen Ethics Network launched in London last week, told Reuters.

“Our politics have lost the capacity to connect with that kind of emotion,” said Bunting, associate editor of Britain’s Guardian newspaper. “Politics has become very technocratic and managerial, all about who’s going to deliver more economic growth.”

In our phone conversation, Bunting said some would surely take this initiative as a disguised bid to bring religion back into a highly secularised society. It was not, she said, but morality and churches have been linked for so long that many immediately thought of religion when they heard the words morality or ethics. And they promptly think they’re being preached at, and turn off the message. But avoiding these issues is what got us into the muddle we now have, Bunting argued. “You can’t dodge these questions,” she said.

“For 20 years or so, the language of market efficiency was supposed to resolve everything. That was the only question that was asked,” she said. When asked about the fairness of certain economic policies, those defending them dismiss the question as “emotionalism” or “the politics of envy.” This leads to what Bunting calls “an abdication of debate” about ethical issues in the economic policy sphere.

This Network doesn’t want to promote specific policies as much as get a serious debate going. “The only way we can work out what the muddle is that we’ve got ourselves into over the last 25-30 years is to go back to the really fundamental questions of political and moral philosophy and start the argument again,” Bunting said.  “That argument is not solved by the market, nor is it solved by socialism. This is about getting back to some arguments that have been central to most human societies. Aristotle would have recognized all these problems.”

This interested me because I recently wrote up that World Economic Forum report mentioned above that said two-thirds of the people polled thought the financial crisis was also a crisis of ethics and values. It also said that 54% of the respondents believed that universal values exist, a view which could be a basis for taking a more ethical approach to business economic policy. I didn’t know then, and the Citizens Ethics Network doesn’t claim to know now, exactly which policies should be proposed to do that. But the Network wants to kickstart the debate and see where it leads.

Here’s the link to the 60-page pamphlet the Network published as a basis for discussion. The group has its own section on the Guardian newspaper’s Comment is Free website. That includes contributions by various  philosophers, politicians, economists, theologians and writers supporting the project. It also has an audio of its launch at the British Museum on February 26 with a debate with Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, Harvard philosopher Michal Sandel and economist Diane Coyle.

What do you think about this? Do we need to go back and ask the tough basic questions? Or should we echo Margaret Thatcher’s motto “You can’t buck the market”?

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It never was and may never be easy to report about fatwas for a world audience. This point was driven home once again today when a prominent Islamic scholar presented to the media his new 600-page fatwa against terrorism and suicide bombing. Muhammad Tahir ul-Qadri is a Pakistani-born Sufi scholar whose youth workshops fostering moderation and understanding in Britain had already caught our attention. His effort to knock down any and every argument in favour of violence is certainly welcome. But the back story to this event is so complicated that it’s hard to report on the fatwa without simply ignoring many important parts of this back story.

Part of the problem was the PR drumroll leading up to ul-Qadri’s news conference.  Minhaj-ul-Quran, his international network to spread his Sufi teachings, touted this fatwa in an email to journalists a week ago as a unique event “because at no time in history has such an extensively researched and evidenced work been presented by such a prominent Islamic authority.” Hype like this usually prompts journalists to throw an invitation straight into the trash can.

Two days later, on February 25, the pitch was changed to present this document as “the first ever fatwa against terrorism which declares terrorists as disbelievers.” Now, that’s more likely to grab a busy journalist’s attention. But once it has accomplished that, any hack with any experience covering Islam finds two big problems with this description.

First, it plays on a widely-held (and sometimes willful) misperception that Muslim leaders have not spoken out against Islamist violence. Large numbers of Muslim leaders have denounced violence, suicide bombs, 9/11, 7/7 and many other bloody attacks by Islamist radicals (check out a long partial list here). But since there is no real hierarchy in Islam, non-Muslims don’t know who has the authority to speak out and Muslims often challenge the authority of those who do. Many of these statements end up unreported, like the trees nobody hears falling in the forest. But if a news story is written with the “first ever” tag in the lead, it gives the false impression that no other Muslim leader has ever done anything similiar before.

Second, the clause “which declares terrorists as disbelievers” is difficult terrain. It’s hard for a journalist to verify that this is the first such fatwa as no central directory of such edicts worldwide exists. Moreover, who has the authority in Islam to declare someone a non-Muslim? Al-Qaeda has been criticised for declaring its enemies non-Muslims (an act known as takfir) and either killing them or urging other Muslims to kill them.

In fact, an important group of mainstream Muslim scholars got together in 2004 to issue the Amman Message that denounces the use of takfir. On the website of the Amman Message is a list of scholars endorsing it. Among those listed under Pakistan is none other than al-Qadri…

Another problem is that ul-Qadri issued an earlier, 150-page Urdu version of his fatwa last December and got a tepid reception — Pakistan’s Interior Minister Rehman Malik welcomed it as “a positive development” and Pakistani media – see The News here — seem to have given it only short routine coverage. Maybe they’re suffering from a fatwa overload there.

Assessing the fatwa’s significance is also difficult when even Muslim views of it are quite divided. Check out these posts in the blogosphere — Qadri’s fatwa breaks no new ground (with lots about what his critics think of him) … Shaikh Dr Tahir ul-Qadri – Anti-Terrorism Fatwa Without Teeth … Fatwas can be a force for good … plus this Guardian comment Fatwa wars are not the solution.

By this morning, the emails promoting the news conference took another angle:  “The launch of the fatwa is being regarded by many circles as a significant and historic step, the first time that such an explicit and unequivocal decree against the perpetrators of terror has been broadcast so widely.” The spin detectors go out when journalists read “being regarded by many circles” (and how many squares or triangles, one might ask). “Historic” is totally overused. But this statement at least makes sense by the end, because it talks about the first time such a fatwa “has been broadcast so widely.”

Michael Holden, a correspondent in our London bureau, dealt with all this by interviewing ul-Qadri a day in advance (click here for the story) to focus on him and his fatwa rather than the hype around it. He added useful background comments from Tim Winter, a lecturer in Islamic studies at Cambridge University, who called the fatwa “a helpful initiative” and added: “To declare the miscreants as unbelievers is unusual, because it is not really clear that the rules allow one simply to say that they are not Muslims… Those who are already hardliners will pay no attention at all. But ’swing voters’ — poorly educated and angry Muslims, who respect mainstream scholars, will probably take note.”

This fatwa shouldn’t become another unheard tree falling in the forest, but screening out all the surrounding noise about it is not easy.  What do you think about ul-Qadri’s fatwa and how the media covered it?

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When a Catholic priest’s refusal to distribute communion to someone at Mass hits the headlines, it’s usually a U.S. Catholic politician supporting abortion rights who’s at the non-receiving end. Things are a bit different in the Netherlands, where the headlines these days are about a small town’s “carnival prince” turned away at the altar. That refusal led to gay protests at at some Sunday Masses, including the nearby cathedral, and decisions to refuse communion to everyone present.  The protesters have vowed to continue for the next seven Sundays.

The reason for the dispute is that “carnival prince” Gijs Vermeulen, the man chosen to lead the Mardi Gras  parade and other carnival festivities in Reusel near the Belgian border, lives with a gay partner. Tradition calls for the prince to lead townspeople to Mass on the Saturday before Mardi Gras, but the local pastor told him he could not receive communion there because of his gay relationship. That Mass went ahead, but news of it got out to gay activists around the country and several converged on Reusel the following Sunday. Faced with this protest, the pastor refused to distribute communion to anyone, not even life-long parishioners. He said this was decided with the support of the his bishop, Antoon Hurkmans.

When the gay activists announced they would then protest at Hurkmans’s St. John’s Cathedral in nearby Den Bosch, the bishop agreed to meet the editor of the Dutch gay magazine Gay Krant and the gay rights group COC Nederland, which claims to be the oldest LGBT organisation in the world. A Church communique said it was “an open and respectful discussion that touched a raw nerve” and announced there would be no communion at the Mass the gay activists wanted to attend.

On Sunday morning, an estimated hundred or so gay activists filled the pews at the cathedral for Mass, many wearing pink triangles saying “Jesus excludes no one.” Three in pink robes, with matching pink wigs, sat in a front pew. When the celebrant, Rev. Geertjan van Rossem, asked sexually active homosexuals not to come to the altar, dozens of the  activists walked out of the cathedral booing and chanting. Some reportedly sang “We Shall Overcome.” Protesters handed out pink wafers outside.

COC Nederland said it would hold similar protests at the cathedral for the next seven Sundays. “Seven is a very important number in the Bible,” its vice-chair Vera Bergkamp said, “so we plan to come to this church for the next seven weeks.”

Here’s a short video headlined “Homos walk out of Saint John’s angrily.”  The report is in Dutch, but you get the picture:

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Some things you just can’t make up. Check out this email from Twitter about a new follower to our RTRFaithWorld account:

Subject: Satan is now following you on Twitter!

Hi, Tom Heneghan. Satan (thetempter) is now following your tweets on Twitter. A little information about Satan: 325 followers 551 tweets following 1059 people You may follow Satan as well by clicking on the “follow” button on their profile.If you believe Satan is engaging in abusive behavior on Twitter, you may report Satan for spam. Satan may not appear in your follower list. Satan may have decided to stop following you, or the account may have been suspended for a Terms of Service violation.

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After the noise over the niqab, now there’s a hubbub over halal in France.

Police in the northern city of Lille launched an investigation on Friday into claims that a fast food restaurant was discriminating against non-Muslim customers by dropping bacon burgers from its menu and using only halal meat. The public prosecutor ordered the probe after the Socialist mayor of the nearby town of Roubaix sued the Quick fast food chain for switching to follow Muslim dietary laws in eight of its 350 branches.

Quick — a rival to far larger global chains like McDonald’s in France and Belgium — now offers smoked turkey and halal beef and no pork in those branches.  “Why should the people of Roubaix be forced to go to Lille or elsewhere to find bacon?” Franck Berton, the lawyer for Mayor René Vandierendonck, asked when we asked him about this case.

The halal hubbub flared up this week after Marine Le Pen, vice president of the far-right National Front, charged last Sunday that clients “are forced because of halal meat to pay a tax to Islamic organizations” that certify the food was produced according to Muslim dietary laws. We examined this on Thursday in the news story “French politicians rap fast food chain for halal menu.”

Not one to shy away from upping the rhetorical ante, Le Pen accused President Nicolas Sarkozy on Wednesday of supporting a “forced Islamisation of France” because an arm of the state-owned savings bank, the Caisse des Depots et Consignations, held 99.63 percent of Quick’s capital.

This being campaign season in France — regional elections are coming up in March — politicians of both main parties jumped into the fray. Vandierendonck was the main Socialist to do so, while from the conservative side, several MPs denounced the halal menu as discriminatory and a sign of “communautarisme” — which is better translated by the Indian term communalism or sectarianism — than by its English-language “false friend” communitarianism.  Agriculture Minister Bruno Le Maire avoided the “no freedom of choice” argument but said: “When they remove all the pork from a restaurant open to the public, I think they fall into communalism, which is against the principles and the spirit of the French republic.”

The uproar, like France’s drive to ban Muslim face veils and its state-led debate on national identity, has come just ahead of regional elections next month. Quick began what it calls a six-month marketing test in late November, but the politicans didn’t seem to notice it then. Like the ban-the-burqa drive and France’s government-led debate on national identity, the timing link to the elections speaks louder than the politicians’ denials of any connection.

It says something about France that these politicians think their cries of  “discrimination” pass the giggle test. The neighbourhoods where Quick went halal have lots of potential customers of Muslim background. The halal market is growing in France and there already are lots of couscous restaurants and kebab stands that naturally use only halal meat — and many non-Muslims happily eat there. Why is there suddenly such an outcry for a “non-denominational” menu?

One of the great ironies, of course, is that these French politicians are standing up in defence of American fast food! There once was a time when the French got worked up about les sandwiches. Nobody seems to notice that angle here.

Trying to find out why all of France is not laughing now, I asked a French friend how anyone could file a discrimination suit when the status quo ante — no halal menu for Muslim customers — was not considered a problem. The best explanation she could come up with was that customers would expect a certain menu from a McDonald’s look-alike and would at least want a choice. But could this stand up in court? “The court of public opinion is all that matters here,” she remarked.

When French politicians tie themselves in knots like this, I wonder if anyone not familiar with this country can follow what’s happening. What do you think of all this?

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If there ever were a time for Pope Benedict to commit a Freudian slip that we could all understand, it would be in his meetings next week with Irish bishops to discuss the clerical sex abuse scandals that have shaken the Emerald Isle.

It’s not hard to imagine him meeting the Hibernian hierarchy behind closed Vatican doors and occasionally referring to the scandals “in Germany” rather than “in Ireland.” If he does, the Irish bishops will certainly forgive him. Enough has been happening in his fatherland recently to distract him from the uproar about the recent reports of clergy excesses in Ireland.

The controversy caused by two official Irish reports — the Ryan report on abuse in Catholic institutions country-wide and the Murphy report on the Dublin archdiocese — prompted the German pope to take the unusual step of calling the Irish bishops to Rome to discuss the ensuing crisis. He is due to issue a letter to Irish Catholics next Wednesday, after his consultations with the bishops. All this is quite exceptional for the Vatican, which usually does not get too involved in such cases in national churches. But it was arranged a few weeks ago when the problem seemed to be confined to the Irish Church

Since then, reports of hushed-up clerical abuse have been mounting in Benedict’s native Germany.  These reports are all the more shocking because (1) few cases of clerical abuse have emerged in Germany and (2) the abuse allegedly occurred at elite Jesuit high schools in Berlin, Hamburg, Bonn and other cities. These boarding schools have excellent reputations in Germany, as do many Jesuit schools around the world, and charges like this disgrace a long and proud tradition of classical education that’s hard to find elsewhere these days.

Ouch… this cuts a bit close to home. One of my own sons boarded at one of these schools for a month when we lived in Germany  — the goal was to improve his German language skills — and he returned with much improved Deutsch and an appreciation of Jesuit education. But he also came home with disturbing rumours of wayward priests.

There was widespread talk in Bonn back then — at least 15 years ago — about priests taking boys to nudist (Freikörperkultur) swimming pools. Neither we nor our friends who sent their boys to the school had any proof of misconduct, and our sons had no real complaints, but then again, we were not prosecutors investigating every single rumour either. Nor were the Jesuits, it seems, even though they were the ones we parents trusted our boys to …

This shamefully hidden past has come back to haunt German Catholicism in the same way that it has shaken the Catholic Church in the United States, Ireland, Poland and other countries. The irony is that in Germany, this has not hit the diocesan priests, often the usual suspects, but the priestly order that is supposed to be the intellectual elite of the Roman Catholic Church. Jesuit schools have such good reputations around the world that even Muslims, Jews and atheists — and I know cases of this personally in several countries — send their children to them to get the best education available in their cities. All parents I know who confided their children to Jesuit schools signed on to their intellectual rigour and most of them approved of the spiritual depth –  but few knew about and none would have approved of such carnal exploitation. For most of us parents, this side of these schools came out only afterwards, in rumours and gossip that could not be verified but put a disturbing cloud of doubt over an otherwise positive experience.

A courageous Jesuit in Germany, Fr. Klaus Mertes S.J., has brought all this out into the open and started the purification process that these schools needed. Mertes is the head of the Jesuit high school in Berlin, the prestigious Canisius-Kolleg. He informed the Jesuit order back in 2006 of the charges against fellow teachers but — in a bureaucratic reaction we’ve seen all too often in many other countries — his superiors took their sweet time in responding. He admitted that part of the delay in answering these charges was probably based on what he called “the myth”  surrounding the elite school under attack. It took too much time for him and them to crack through that myth, but at least Mertes did it. May he continue his good work.

The scandal in Germany finally became public last month when the head of the Jesuits there, Fr. Stefan Dartmann S.J., announced that he knew of 25 former pupils who said they had been abused at Jesuit schools between 1975 and 1984 — 20 at the  Canisius Kolleg in Berlin, 3 at the  Hamburger St. Ansgar Schule in Hamburg and 2 at the Kolleg St. Blasien in St. Blasien in the Black Forest.

Last week, the principal of the Jesuit boarding school in Bonn, the former capital of West Germany, resigned after two former pupils came forward claiming to have been abused at his school. One of them, Miguel Abrantes Ostrowski, now 37, wrote a book in 2007 about the abuse he allegedly suffered, entitled Sacro Pop: A Schoolboy’s Report. Fr. Theo Schneider S.J. is the first Jesuit to step down since the crisis hit the headlines in late January. He said he did it to allow the investigations to go ahead without any hindrances.

If this issue wasn’t already on the agenda for the German bishops’ regular meeting on Feb 22-25, it certainly is now.

Senior German Jesuits and other Catholic leaders have apologised for these cases, and that’s a good first step. But the Berlin state prosecutor’s office has said that, under the relevant statute of limitations, there would be no prosecutions of the sexual abuse charges at Canisius College. That’s all the more reason for the German Jesuits — and the German bishops as a group — to draw the moral lessons from these cases themselves and deal strictly with those who misused the trust of their pupils (and their parents) so crassly. Forgiveness is a virtue, but so is justice. A church that can’t see that risks losing even those members who believe that their faith, despite all scandals they see, ultimately stands for the good in a sinful world.

What do you think? Can German Catholics turn out to be better than their co-religionists in the U.S., Ireland and other countries in admitting guilt and starting to set things right?

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