Conscience articles from September 2002

Conscience archives from September 2002

Editor's note.
September 22, 2002... ... Ever since Eve and Adam were banished from the Garden of Eden for eating an apple, women have been regarded as seductresses, while men seem to bear little, if any, responsibility for their sexual values or behavior. This issue of...

Women ordained: stepping on the Vatican's toes.
September 22, 2002... Generally speaking, powerful institutions and people are not very good at sharing power. Equality and democracy as ideals are fairly recent, and even those institutions committed to these goals fall far short of reaching them. One needs to look...

An unholy conspiracy: the Vatican and clergy sexual abuse.
September 22, 2002... The ongoing sexual abuse scandal has hurt the Catholic church deeply. Yet many still seem to think that it is an "American problem" as so many cases occurred in the United States. However, that is far from the truth. The evidence below reveals...

Homosexual priests are not the issue.
September 22, 2002... The language was strong. During a gay pride parade July in Rome, a group of gay men carried the banner, "In memory of all those homosexuals persecuted and killed by the Catholic church." These angry words erupted after Pope John Paul II...

The politics of abortion in the modern age.
September 22, 2002... The abortion debate is multi-layered. Beyond the woman faced with an unplanned pregnancy at the center of every single abortion-related decision, there is an ideological debate raging about the relative significance of the woman's rights over...

Letter from Mexico: sexuality, censorship and the church in Mexico.
September 22, 2002... The often quiet Mexican summer was interrupted by the release of El Crimen Del Padre Amaro (The Crime of Father Amaro), not only because it broke box office records in its first weekend, but also because the movie outraged Catholic bishops and...

Polarization among Christians: is dialogue possible?
September 22, 2002... Christians have been divided into hostile factions since the first generation of the church. Contrary to the myth that there was once a perfect consensus on Christian teachings, from which "heretics" later deviated and created schisms, there...

Front-line faith or unfair coercion?
September 22, 2002... It happened a while ago, but I'm still upset. The memory lingers like a bad dream. I was on the way home from visiting my parents--they are "snow-birds" who park their camper van in Pal Springs for the winter--when I heard the news blurb on the...

A moralistic crusade: sex, condoms and the Catholic hierarchy.
September 22, 2002... In the face of millions of deaths each year from AIDS, the institutional Catholic church's position on condoms has starkly exposed the church's failure to live in solidarity with the poor and oppressed and its failure to be an authentic voice...

Catholics in Zimbabwe: sex, celibacy and the AIDS crisis.
September 22, 2002... Zimbabwe has one of the highest HIV/ AIDS infection rates in the world. So, while up to a quarter of the population is infected by the HIV virus, the rest of the population is also affected, directly or indirectly. Consequently, many Catholics...

Religion and reproductive health care: who's the problem?
September 22, 2002... Being called anti-Catholic doesn't do much for one's health, but hurling this insult at those who criticize the policies of the US bishops or the Catholic Health Association has been the consistent strategy of the Catholic right and even the...

Up against it: the clergy's struggle with the Catholic hierarchy over legal contraception.
September 22, 2002... The struggle to make contraception socially acceptable--and subsequently legal--in the US lasted from before 1930 through the late 1950s. During this time there were literally hundreds of skirmishes between the opponents of birth control and...

Pilot accuses Gov. Keating of "surreal" statement. (The Sexual Abuse Crisis).
September 22, 2002... The Pilot, the official newspaper of the Archdiocese of Boston, has condemned a recent statement by Governor Frank Keating about actions that lay Catholics can take to show their dissatisfaction with the church hierarchy. Governor Frank Keating...

Bishops ban Voice of the Faithful from Diocesan property. (The Sexual Abuse Crisis).
September 22, 2002... Bishops William Lori of Bridgeport, Connecticut, and William F. Murphy of Rockville, New York, have barred the Catholic reform group Voice of the Faithful from meeting on church property. In addition, pastors in Carver, Kingston and Plymouth...

Bush removes funding for UNFPA. (The Church and Family Planning).
September 22, 2002... The European Union has announced that it will give an extra 32 million euros (about $32 million) over the next three years to the United Nations Population Fund. The announcement came after the Bush administration said that it would withhold...

Pope sends ominous message to World Youth Day. (World Youth Day).
September 22, 2002... In a special message for World Youth Day, Pope John Paul II has called on Catholic women to emulate St. Maria Goretti. Maria Goretti was an 11-year-old Italian girl, murdered while defending herself against a sexual assault by a neighbor in...

European Parliament passes resolution on abortion. (The Church and Abortion).
September 22, 2002... The European Parliament has passed a parliamentary resolution recommending that abortion should be made legal in all 15 states in the European Union (EU). The resolution, which is not binding on member states or on states seeking to join the...

Pope wants Christianity in Euro constitution. (The Church and State).
September 22, 2002... Pope John Paul II has re-entered the debate over whether a nascent European constitution should recognize the role Christianity played in shaping Europe. Speaking as he welcomed France's new ambassador to the Vatican, he asked, "How is it...

Bill to allow lobbying by religious groups. (The Church and State).(Brief Article)
September 22, 2002... US Representative Walter Jones has introduced legislation that will allow religious leaders to endorse political candidates without risking their tax-exempt status. The Internal Revenue Service currently prohibits tax-exempt organizations from...

Priest refuses to marry Planned Parenthood worker. (The Church and State).(Brief Article)
September 22, 2002... A priest in Calgary, Canada, has refused to perform a church wedding for a couple because the woman, Celina Ling, works for Planned Parenthood. Bishop Fred Henry of Calgary supported the ban, arguing that Ling had broken canon law and should be...

Reproductive health services at Catholic universities. (The Church and State).
September 22, 2002... A new CFFC report on the availability and scope of reproductive health care services at Catholic universities published the findings of a survey asking 191 four-year Catholic universities in the United States about what reproductive health...

Vatican posts first financial deficit in nine years. (The Church and State).
September 22, 2002... The Vatican has announced its first operating deficit in nine years. Cardinal Sergio Sebastiani, the president of the Prefecture for the Economic Affairs of the Holy See, said that the deficit for 2001 was $3.1 million on revenue of $173.5...

Speaking the truth to power.
September 22, 2002... TAKE BACK THE TRUTH: CONFRONTING PAPAL POWER AND THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT Joanna Manning (Crossroad, 2002 (pbk.), 174 pp.) "Truth for its own sake," said Charles Kingsley in his famous attack on John Henry Newman, "had never been a virtue...

Bookshelf: too many books cross our desk to review them all. What follows is a list of new books that bear noting.
September 22, 2002... American Catholic Lay Groups and Transatlantic Social Reform in the Progressive Era by Deirdre M. Moloney. (University of North Carolina Press, 2002, 267 pp.) Drawing on the activities of lay Catholic social reformers between 1880 to 1925,...

Authentic Catholicism. (Letters to the Editor).
September 22, 2002... I was moved by the last issue of Conscience. The "Letters to Young Catholics" feature touched me like no other piece has done in a variety of publications for a long time. It was so heartening to hear from such a diversity of Catholic women...

The task ahead. (Letters to the Editor).
September 22, 2002... We welcomed the "Letters to Young Catholics" (Conscience, Summer 2002) sharing insights and giving encouragement and advice to young people. Perhaps the greatest insight--and one of the best kept secrets in Catholicism--is that we don't...

Secular understanding. (Letters to the Editor).
September 22, 2002... Even though I am an older woman I was very moved by the rich selection of advice from prominent Catholic women around the world to young Catholics on the occasion of World Youth Day as presented in the article "An Enlightened Church." You gave...

A forgiving God. (Letters to the Editor).
September 22, 2002... Thank you very much for the summer issue of Conscience. It was most encouraging to find people expressing in print ideas and views that I have long held. I am very pleased at the ecumenical spirit of the magazine and was interested to learn,...

Bishops need to do more. (Letters to the Editor).
September 22, 2002... Frances Kissling's analysis of the Dallas bishops' conference was right on the mark. "The mindset of the clerical club" is indeed, as she wrote, "too strong." In the weeks since that event, we have seen bishops continue to make excuses for...

Postscript.
September 22, 2002... "It is the uterus crying... longing for maternity." An unnamed priest from Szczecin, Poland, lecturing on menstruation during a premarital course. --[Heard in Passing, Warsaw Voice (Poland), July 28, 2002.] "If a couple had tried...