In early May a group of women in a remote Andean village kidnapped their parish priest on Sunday to prevent his transfer. Fr. Julian Parque was celebrating his final Mass in the village of Mejia, Peru, when the women abducted him. After a forty-eight-hour standoff with police, the women released Fr. Parque because the local bishop agreed to extend the priest’s time in the village for another month.
“The voice of the people is the voice of God,” said Luis Delgado, the local district mayor, who mediated in the village near the southern city of Arequipa. Negotiations are expected to continue over further extending the deadline for Fr. Parque to leave his post.
Andean villagers in this mainly Catholic South American nation often regard their local priest as an authority figure whose intercession can sway often-distant regional authorities.
It’s comforting somehow — perhaps it falls into the “misery loves company” category — to know that the “God as Mother” debate didn’t start in the Catholic Church. In the latest skirmish in the Church of England, the new Bishop of Leicester angered British Episcopalian traditionalists with his proposal to refer to God as “our Mother” at his enthronement service late in June. The Right Reverend Timothy Stevens has also upset senior clerical colleagues at Leicester Cathedral with his controversial prayer that reads: “We pray, eternal God, for your awakening within us. From disillusion to truth and unto your righteous way, lead us, source of all, our Father and our Mother.”
The chancellor of the diocese, Canon Michael Banks, said: “I remain unashamedly of the opinion that, whereas Christianity can rejoice in our God who metaphorically has a ‘feminine face’ . . . it has no authority from Scripture or tradition to address God as ‘Mother.’ God is whom Jesus says God is, namely ‘Our Father.'”
Anglican Bishop Edwin Barnes of Richborough said the prayer was “a very outdated kind of feminism, more about political correctness than anything.” But Christina Rees, a member of the Archbishops’ Council of the Church of England, said Bishop Stevens was “giving out a signal that he wants to be inclusive and understands the struggle women have faced.”
Jim Neugent of Mena, Arkansas, sent the following e-mail in April to the ABC television network concerning its Sunday night legal drama, “The Practice.” He had just viewed an episode in which the mother of one of the attorneys decided she was gay and wanted her son to go to court to help her get a marriage license to marry her “partner.”
“ABC is obsessed with the subject of homosexuality,” Neugent wrote. “I will no longer watch any of your attempts to convince the world that homosexuality is okay. ‘The Practice’ can be a fairly good show, but last night’s program was so typical of your agenda. You picked the ‘dufus’ of the office to be the one who was against the idea of his mother being gay and made him look like a whiner because he had convictions. This type of mentality calls people like me a ‘gay-basher.’ Read the first chapter of Romans (that’s in the Bible) and see what the apostle Paul had to say about it. He and God and Jesus were all ‘gay-bashers.’ What if she’d fallen in love with her cocker spaniel? Is that an alternative lifestyle? (By the way, the Bible speaks against that, too.)”
Not expecting a reply, Neugent got one anyway from ABC’s webmaster: “How about getting your nose out of the Bible (which is only a book of stories compiled by many different writers hundreds of years ago) and read the Declaration of Independence (what our nation is built on) where it says ‘All men are created equal’ — and try treating them that way for a change?! Or better yet, try thinking for yourself and stop using an archaic book of stories as your crutch for your existence.”
“Thanks for your reply,” Neugent responded. “Evidently I hit a nerve. I will share it with all with whom I come in contact . . . I will be praying for you.”
Fundamentalist James White, a theological opponent of Catholic Answers, is listed as an elder on the web site of his church, a “Reformed Baptist” congregation. A link provided (http://www.prbc.org/whatisrb.html) endeavors to explain the denomination:
“The subject is difficult because there exists an ever widening gulf between churches that call themselves Reformed Baptists. The term has not been copyrighted and thus there exists no definitive statement regarding who can lay claim to the title. No two Reformed Baptist churches walk in lock step. There are churches who call themselves ‘Reformed Baptists’ and all that they mean by that is that they hold to the so-called five points of Calvinism and they immerse believers.
“There are ‘Reformed Baptists’ who believe in pastoral oversight as an integral part of the life of the church and there are other ‘Reformed Baptists’ who say that pastoral oversight is an abuse of power. There are ‘Reformed Baptists’ who hold to the Second London Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689 and there are those who hold to but a few of the articles.
“While most Reformed Baptists hold to a biblical and puritan view of the Lord’s Day Sabbath, there are some ‘Reformed Baptists’ who reject the doctrine as legalistic. You will furthermore find Reformed Baptists churches who differ in regard to their understanding of the exact application of the regulative principle of worship (the conviction that the Bible alone dictates the worship of the church). You will find difference[s] in who is invited to the Lord’s table, differences in Bible translations, hymnals, and the structure of prayer meetings. The list could go on and on.”
As This Rock contributor Larry Nolte, who came across this explanation, points out, “And this is within the single movement of the ‘Reformed Baptists.’ That is the Protestant dilemma in a nutshell.”
Liberia’s president in mid-May fired almost his entire cabinet after members failed to attend a mandatory prayer meeting memorializing a border attack last month that killed eight people.
Among the eleven cabinet ministers fired by President Charles Taylor were the foreign minister, defense minister, and minister of national security. Taylor did excuse the absences of the finance minister, health minister, internal affairs minister, and four others. Information minister Joe Mulbah and the presidents of three state corporations were the only officials to attend the service.
“Any government official who does not know God will not serve in my government,” an official statement quoted Taylor as saying. Taylor won elections in 1997 following a civil war and has been an outspoken advocate of Christianity in the public forum.
You can start saving those box tops again. We reported in these pages in April that in Gary, Indiana, Bishop Dale Melczek had banned General Mills’ Box Tops for Education program from parochial schools because of the company’s financial support of Planned Parenthood. Now General Mills has dropped Planned Parenthood, the world’s largest abortion supplier, from its charity roster. A statement from company spokesman Ranee Erickson said, in part:
“In 1996, the General Mills Foundation’s trustees . . .committed to maintain grant-making at $16 million per year . . . At the same time, the trustees directed the Foundation to give greater emphasis to two issues: measurable educational achievement for K-12 students, especially those most at risk, and reduction in the level of violent crime.
“The trustees recognized that in order to free up discretionary funds with which to implement this strategy, the Foundation would have to reduce the total number of grants it makes, especially to organizations that were not working on its strategic priorities.
As a result, the Foundation has made final grants to approximately one hundred forty grantees, . . . among them Planned Parenthood of Minnesota, and notified them that the Foundation will no longer be making grants to them. While last year’s Foundation annual report lists Planned Parenthood of Minnesota as a grantee, the report for this year, which will be published in August, will reflect they are no longer funded.”
According to news reports, General Mills’ annual commitment to Planned Parenthood of Minnesota had been $17,000 to $18,000.
When the Nicaraguan campus of the Baptist University of Mobile, Alabama, located in the city of San Marcos, was due to close in May because of financial problems, former minister of education Humberto Belli requested the help of Fr. Joseph Fessio, SJ, founder of Ignatius Press. Fr. Fessio in turn contacted Tom Monaghan, founder of Domino’s Pizza restaurants. Monaghan agreed to provide the $1 million needed, ensuring that the campus will not only keep functioning in San Marcos but will become a Catholic university. Belli, who will become the new rector, said that the campus “will turn into a model of a Catholic university and will be the best in the region. We will try to turn it into the jewel of Catholic education in Nicaragua and Central America.” Belli said that the university has so far secured $150,000 to provide scholarships for poor students. “We want this university to also play a social role in the country,” he said.
Can prayer prolong life? Most scientists would be skeptical, but Robert Hummer and colleagues from the University of Texas at Austin report that people who attend religious services more than once a week live, on average, to the age of eighty-three. Those who never go near a service survive only until they are seventy-five.
The conclusion is based on lifestyle data gathered in America and cross-referenced with mortality data. Epidemiologists might argue that religious observance is merely a “marker” for a person who is likely to be female, leads an orderly life, and has close friends — all factors tending to lead to longer lives.
But when the team corrected the results for sex, socioeconomic status, drinking, smoking, and family ties, they found that the correlation still held true. The inference is that involvement in a religious community like a parish is an independent factor contributing to a long life. “There is a sense among much of the scientific community that religious effects are minor or even irrelevant,” the team says.
“Our findings may help to dispel this.”
Mr. Rod LeVake, a public school biology teacher in Faribault, Michigan, filed a lawsuit in June against his school district for removing him from teaching biology because of his religious beliefs. LeVake was told in 1998 by the curriculum director at Faribault High School that he could no longer teach biology because his Christian religious beliefs conflict with the teaching of evolution.
The teacher denied such a conflict exists and said he was willing to teach the theory of evolution with the caveat that not every scientist accepts the theory as unquestionable and that there are numerous scientific, non-religious critiques of the idea. He said he had no intention of teaching creationism.
“School officials may not pry into an employee’s religious beliefs and then discriminate against him because of what officials think about those beliefs. That kind of action is unconstitutional and we intend to prove it in court,” said Francis Manion of the American Center for Law and Justice, which is representing LeVake.
The lawsuit contends that officials refused requests to reconsider the district’s position. Le Vake remains employed as a general science teacher.
Battle of the rock superstars: Gary Cherone, lead singer for Van Halen, has written an open letter to Eddie Vedder, lead singer for Pearl Jam. In it Cherone challenges Vedder’s strong pro-abortion stance and his support for organizations like Rock For Choice.
“Can there be only one true line of demarcation? One finite, measurable point in time that differentiates life from non-life?” Cherone writes. “Womanhood from non-womanhood? Rights from no rights? Is it the moment of conception that point when all of the above is set into motion? That moment when a separate human individual with her own genetic code, needing only food, water and oxygen, comes into existence? . . . The answer can never be a matter of opinion or choice. This is not a metaphysical contention. This is Biology 101. The answer is scientifically self-evident.”
Cherone, a member of the band Xtreme before he joined Van Halen, is the first high-profile secular rock musician in memory to come out publicly so strongly in defense of life.
“Many musicians have used their talent, money, and fame to raise money for the abortion industry,” said Bryan Kemper, national director of the pro-life group Rock For Life, which released Cherone’s statement. “Thousands of babies have died, thanks to efforts of bands like Pearl Jam and RE.M. It’s about time someone like Gary stood up for the rights of these babies.”
In late May two California state assembly members proposed a new state law that would force Catholic hospitals either to provide abortions or referral services to abortionists.
The bill, sponsored by Democrats Sheila Kuehl (a lesbian activist) and Helen Thomson, was passed by the assembly appropriations committee and is now due for floor debate and vote. The committee said in its analysis that, as an example of implementation, the law would ban “the recent merger in Los Angeles between Queen of Angels Hospital and Tenet Healthcare, where Tenet, a non-religious provider, agreed to continue the ban [instituted by Queen of Angels] on reproductive health services [government-speak for abortions] for the next twenty years.”
The California Public Policy Foundation said the bill would also punish Catholic health care providers “who dissent from the authors’ pro-abortion, pro-homosexuality ideology by barring them from publicly funded health programs and by making construction loans and loan insurance more difficult to obtain.” The group quotes a source in its Capitol Watch newsletter as saying, “The bill mandates discrimination based on religious belief against Catholics and anyone who disagrees with its authors’ narrow moral code.”
The Zenit news agency reports that almost four centuries after the cloth’s mysterious disappearance, German Jesuit Fr. Heinrich Pfeiffer has rediscovered the legendary veil of Veronica, with which Veronica wiped the face of Jesus on the road to Calvary. Fr. Pfeiffer, a professor of Christian art history at the Pontifical Gregorian University, found the relic in the abbey of Monoppello, Italy, high in the Apennine Mountains.
A small piece of stained pale cloth kept in this tiny village has long been regarded as a sacred icon with wondrous properties by Fr. Germano, head of its Capuchin monastery. “I am firmly convinced that this is the famous relic,” Fr Pfeiffer, official advisor for the Papal Commission for the Cultural Heritage of the Church, told reporters during a press conference May 31.
The story of Veronica and her veil does not occur in the Bible, though the apocryphal “Acts of Pilate” gives the name “Veronica” to the woman with the hemorrhage who was cured by touching the hem of Jesus’ cloak. The legend holds that Jesus rewarded Veronica’s charity in wiping the sweat from his brow by imprinting his image into the cloth. Some have suggested the incident may be based on the Shroud of Turin, noting that “Veronica” is a combination of Latin and Greek words meaning “true image.” Nonetheless, the story has been a part of popular Christian culture for centuries.
The almost transparent veil measures about six and a half by nine and a half inches and bears the dark-red features of a bearded man with long hair and open eyes. The image on the Monoppello cloth becomes invisible, depending on the angle from which the cloth is viewed. Ultraviolet examinations of the cloth, carried out by Professor Donato Vittore of the University of Bari in Italy, confirm that the image is not paint. Particularly noteworthy are several small flecks of reddish brown-presumably drops of blood from the wounds caused by the crown of thorns.
Enlarged digital photographs of the veil reveal that the image is identical on both sides of the cloth, a feat impossible to achieve by ancient techniques. These photographs have also been used to compare the veil with the face on the Shroud of Turin, which millions of Christians believe to be Jesus’ burial cloth. The faces are the same shape, both have shoulder-length hair with a tuft on the forehead, and the beards match.
History records the existence of the veil from the fourth century, but only from the Middle Ages was it strongly linked to the Passion of Christ. From the twelfth century until 1608, it was kept in the Vatican Basilica as a popular destination for pilgrims (it is mentioned in Canto XXXI of Dante’s Paradise). When the part of the Basilica containing the relic was scheduled to be torn down for remodeling, the relic disappeared.
Fr. Pfeiffer invested thirteen years of searching through archives to prove that this is the same cloth that disappeared in 1608. According to records in the monastery, the wife of a soldier sold the veil to a nobleman of Monoppello in 1608 to get her husband out of jail. The nobleman donated it to the Capuchins. In 1618 it was placed in a walnut frame adorned in silver and gold between two sheets of glass. It has remained in the monastery ever since.
Fr. Pfeiffer’s find has yet to win over the skeptics. Keith Ward, professor of divinity at Oxford, said, “The Gregorian University is quite respectable, but I think the claim about the veil is totally absurd. Almost everybody accepts that it is legend. 1’d put it on the same level as seeing the face of Mohammed in a potato.”
To prove the origin of the cloth, more scientific tests will be necessary. But such tests, which could easily destroy the delicate cloth, still might not solve the mystery, much as negative carbon-14 dating tests have failed to disprove the authenticity of Shroud of Turin.
The number of baptized Catholics has grown progressively throughout the world, going from 757 million to more than a billion (exactly 1,005,254,000), over the last twenty years. This is according to the Holy See’s Statistic Yearbook for 1997, released in early June. Of these, almost half (49 percent) are in the Americas; 28 percent in Europe; 11 percent in Mrica; 10.47 percent in Asia; and .8 percent in Oceania.
The number of ordained priests in this period has declined from 420,000 to 404,000, a decrease of 4 percent. These figures are counterbalanced by priest increases in Africa (49 percent) and Asia (46 percent).
Two decades ago, women religious numbered almost one million (991,000). Their number has decreased to 819,000, a 17 percent decline. Men religious (excluding priests), have decreased from 76,000 in 1978 to 58,000 in 1997. The number of priest religious, which twenty years ago was 158,000, has decreased to 140,000. Once again, Asia and Africa have experienced constant growth in consecrations to the religious life.
The most striking statistics are those of vocations to the priesthood. In 1978 there were 63,882 seminarians; according to the 1997 yearbook, there are now 108,517, an increase of 70 percent. Over the last twenty years, Africa and Asia have seen an increase of238 percent and 124 percent, respectively. In all continents there has been a decisive increase in vocations with the exception of Oceania, where the number of seminarians went from 784 to 797. Even Europe has seen an increase of over 16 percent (from 23,915 to 27,853). The Americas have become the seedbed of the Catholic Church’s vocations. At present, they have 35,000 seminarians; twenty years ago it was 22,011.