Eideard

Christians who want to be exempt from equality legislation are like Muslims trying to impose sharia on Britain, Trevor Phillips, the human rights watchdog, has declared.

Religious rules should end “at the door of the temple” and give way to the “public law” laid down by Parliament, the chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission said. He argued that Roman Catholic adoption agencies and other faith groups providing public services must choose between their religion and obeying the law when their beliefs conflict with the will of the state.

Mr Phillips singled out the adoption agencies that fought a long legal battle to avoid being forced to accept homosexual couples under equality laws. Last year, following a High Court case, the Charity Commission ruled against an exemption for Catholic Care, an adoption agency operating in Leeds.

Speaking at a debate in London on diverse societies, Mr Phillips backed the new laws, which led to the closure of all Catholic adoption agencies in England. “You can’t say because we decide we’re different then we need a different set of laws,” he said, in comments reported by The Tablet, the Catholic newspaper.

“To me there’s nothing different in principle with a Catholic adoption agency, or indeed Methodist adoption agency, saying the rules in our community are different and therefore the law shouldn’t apply to us. Why not then say sharia can be applied to different parts of the country? It doesn’t work.”

He added that religious groups should be free to follow their own rules within their own settings but not outside. “Once you start to provide public services that have to be run under public rules, for example child protection, then it has to go with public law,” he said.
“Institutions have to make a decision whether they want to do that or they don’t want to do that…”

Mr Phillips has been outspoken in his defence of human rights law even when they conflict with religious beliefs.

He has accused some Christian groups of being more militant than Muslims. During the debate, he praised both the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches for their work in inner cities, particularly through faith schools, but accused some religious groups of growing intolerance.

“There is something rather odd that is happening amongst what I call the righteous brigade, that is people of good will and so on,” Mr Phillips said. “And that is that if you don’t agree 100 per cent with them and excoriate people who have a different point of view actually somehow you are joining a bad bunch of people.”

Keith Porteous Wood, director of the National Secular Society, said Mr Phillips was “absolutely right…If society has decided that it wants to ensure by law that every citizen of this country has equal rights, then there cannot be endless exemptions for religious bodies or anyone else,” he said.

“There is no such thing as partial equality, and every time an exemption is made, someone else’s rights are compromised.”

Sound familiar? Except that Trevor Phillips has more backbone than Barack Obama when it comes to confronting civil rights, the validity of civil law over religious belief in a constitutional democracy. Confronting sharia-style precepts, Muslim or Catholic or whichever fundamentalist source requires the courage to maintain constitutional protections via civil law. Maybe he’ll be invited sometime to drop in and give lessons at the White House.

But, don’t hold your breath waiting.

More female priests are joining the Church of England than male ones for the first time ever, it can be disclosed as it takes another step towards the introduction of women bishops.

Official figures show that 290 women were ordained in 2010, the most recent year for which figures are available. By contrast, just 273 men entered the priesthood.

The watershed moment comes less than 20 years since the Church first allowed women to be priests, in the face of opposition from Anglo-Catholics and conservative evangelicals who believe that only men can be church leaders…

Sally Barnes, spokesman for the campaign group Women And The Church, said: “The figures are very good news. They show the increasing numbers of women whose vocations are being recognised, accepted and valued by the Church.”

But detailed breakdown of the figures, published in The Church of England Yearbook 2012, shows that most of the new women priests are “self-supporting” rather than having full-time clergy jobs…

The figures on ordination come on the eve of another critical meeting of the Church of England’s governing body, the General Synod.

The week-long gathering in Church House, Westminster, will hear four debates on the draft legislation to introduce women bishops…

Meanwhile new divisions are opening in the Church over whether or not clergy should be able to bless civil partnerships or support full gay marriage.

Anyone send a copy of the memo to the Pope?

Bridgette Dunlap organized off-campus clinic for birth control prescriptions

Bridgette Dunlap, a Fordham University law student, knew that the school’s health plan had to pay for birth control pills, in keeping with New York state law. What she did not find out until she was in an examining room, “in the paper dress,” was that the student health service — in keeping with Roman Catholic tenets — would simply refuse to prescribe them.

As a result, students have had to go to Planned Parenthood or private doctors to get prescriptions. Some, unable to afford the doctor visits, gave up birth control pills entirely. In November, Ms. Dunlap, 31, who was raised a Catholic and was educated at parochial schools, organized a one-day, off-campus clinic staffed by volunteer doctors who wrote prescriptions for dozens of women.

Many Catholic colleges decline to prescribe or cover birth control, citing religious reasons. Now they are under pressure to change. This month the Obama administration, citing the medical case for birth control, made a politically charged decision that the new health care law requires insurance plans at Catholic institutions to cover birth control without co-payments for employees, and that may be extended to students. But Catholic organizations are resisting the rule, saying it would force them to violate their beliefs and finance behavior that betrays Catholic teachings…

The administration’s rule has now run headlong into a dispute over values as Republican presidential contenders compete for the most conservative voters. In an election season that features Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, who have stressed their Catholic faith, scientific thinking on the medical benefits of birth control has clashed with deeply held religious and cultural beliefs.

The Obama administration relied on the recommendations of the Institute of Medicine, an independent group of doctors and researchers that concluded that birth control is not just a convenience but is medically necessary “to ensure women’s health and well-being.”

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Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

A Roman Catholic priest in Missouri has been indicted on federal child pornography charges.

The indictment…charges the Rev. Shawn Francis Ratigan still took sexually suggestive photographs months after church officials removed him from a parish position and ordered him to stay away from children, The Kansas City Star reported. At the time, Easter Sunday this year, officials had not yet reported Ratigan to police.

Ratigan also faces state charges.

“When a person who has been placed in a position of trust exploits and victimizes children, he victimizes the entire community,” U.S. Attorney Beth Phillips said. “The indictment today sends a strong message that this type of behavior will not be tolerated.”

Ratigan was ordained in 2004. The indictment charges that a year later he took lewd photographs of a 6-year-old girl at St. Joseph Church in Easton, Mo.

Late last year, Ratigan was removed from parish work and transferred to the Vincentian Mission House in Independence, Mo. but his alleged activities were not reported to police until May. The official in the Kansas City diocese in charge of dealing with allegations of clerical abuse was removed in June largely because of his [non] handling of the case.

Time and again the Catholic Church figures they know better than the law of the land. In any case they think they need not answer to secular civil law.

Wrong! Again.

The close-knit community on the Mediterranean island of Malta could be on the verge of a fundamental change that may affect the very fabric of its society. In a referendum on Saturday, the citizens of this deeply Roman Catholic country will decide whether to introduce divorce.

Malta is the only country – apart from the Philippines and the Vatican City – where divorce cannot be carried out. Instead, people must either become domiciled abroad or, if one of the parties is not Maltese, they could apply for a divorce in their own country. That divorce can be recorded in Malta.

Couples can apply for a legal separation thought the courts, or seek a Church annulment – a complex process that can take up to nine years…

According to the Labour opposition leader Joseph Muscat – who is in favour of divorce – two legal separations a day pass through the Maltese courts. On top of this, the courts regularly record foreign divorces.

With at least 95% of a population of more than 400,000 being Roman Catholic, divorce has never made it past the strong religious beliefs of the Church, politicians and the public itself. But that might be about to change. Last year Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando, an MP with the Nationalists, presented a private member’s bill along with Evarist Bartolo, an MP with the opposition Labour party…

Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando…thinks the current system is unjust. “Malta is the only country in the world which doesn’t have divorce but does recognise those obtained abroad. Therefore, if you have the means you can get divorced but if you don’t, then you can’t.

“This, to me, is unjust and unacceptable.”

Mr Orlando sees the referendum as more than just a vote on divorce – for him it’s a debate on the Church’s role in society and the amount of political and social influence that it carries in Malta.

“I appreciate the fact that the Church should be allowed to exercise spiritual influence, but I can’t accept a situation where the Church also wields political and administrative power,” he says.

Some parishioners say they have been told by their priests that they will be denied Holy Communion and confession if they vote for divorce, he continues.

“The local Catholic Church is going to suffer, even after the referendum.”

I hope there’s isn’t anyone out there who expected the Catholic Church to be any more willing to enter modern society – in Malta – than it is everywhere else in the real world. Individual freedom to choose, to live, is not allowed the flock by its shepherds.

UPDATE: The referendum passed. Bravo, Malta!

Eight years after the American-clergy sex-abuse controversy erupted, Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams yesterday lobbed a bombshell into the still-simmering scandal.

Williams announced the grand-jury indictment of one of former Archbishop Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua’s top aides for allegedly endangering children by shielding pedophile priests from detection and shuffling them into unsuspecting parishes where they could continue the perversions of which they are accused.

It’s believed to be the first time a high-ranking Catholic official has been accused of being criminally accountable for covering up priest abuse.

Monsignor William Lynn, 60, was charged with two counts of endangering the welfare of a child. As Bevilacqua’s secretary for clergy, he was the Archdiocese’s personnel director and responsible for investigating reports of priest sexual abuse from 1992 until 2004.

Grand jurors had aimed even higher, saying that Bevilacqua may have been involved in the coverup.

“We do know that over the years Cardinal Bevilacqua was kept closely advised of Monsignor Lynn’s activities, and personally authorized many of them . . . [but] we cannot conclude that a successful prosecution can be brought against the Cardinal – at least for the moment,” they wrote in their 124-page report…

Lynn, now parish priest at St. Joseph’s, in Downingtown, faces up to 14 years in prison if convicted…

Advocates for abuse victims celebrated the indictments.

RTFA for the history of abuse, priests sharing victims, passing them around through the ranks – and the inevitable coverup.

The worst any of these thugs suffered was being defrocked. A delightful medieval term that matches the out-of-date mindset of the church leaders who feel they and their acolytes are above secular law.

Andrew Madden is one of a relatively new breed of Irish celebrities who would just as soon be less well known. He was among the first people in Ireland to go public about being sexually abused by Catholic clergy — one of those who set off the intense bout of soul-searching that has racked the country lately. When I met Madden last fall in Dublin, the early rumbles of the collapse of Ireland’s economy were shaking the country, and throughout much of a pub lunch he talked about the failures of the government and the banks. It was only later, once we were driving around his old neighborhood, past the pebbledash house where he grew up and where his parents still live, that he began to talk about his childhood. As we sat in his car in front of Christ the King Church, where he spent much of his youth as an altar boy and a choir member, he outlined the four years of torment he suffered in the late 1970s at the hands of the Rev. Ivan Payne, one of the infamous serial sex offenders among the Irish Catholic clergy whose stories have transfixed the country over the past year and a half…

My afternoon with Andrew Madden might serve as a snapshot of what Ireland has been through lately. The country is preoccupied with the fallout — personal, social and political — from the crash and burn of the Celtic Tiger. But beneath that, and in a way connected to it, is a more primal pain: one deeper, lodged in the bones, maybe. The phenomenal economic boom over the past two decades, and the secularization that came along with it, allowed Ireland to think it was no longer what it once was: a backward land dominated and shaped by the Roman Catholic Church. But as the economy has crashed, the Irish have come face to face with their earlier selves, and with a church-state relationship that was and in many ways still is, as quite a few people in the country see it, perversely antimodern.

Of the various crises the Catholic Church is facing around the world, the central one — wave after wave of accounts of systemic sexual abuse of children by priests and other church figures — has affected Ireland more strikingly than anywhere else. And no place has reacted so aggressively. The Irish responded to the publication in 2009 of two lengthy, damning reports — detailing thousands of cases of rape, sexual molestation and lurid beatings, spanning Ireland’s entire history as an independent country, and the efforts of church officials to protect the abusers rather than the victims — with anger, disgust, vocal assaults on priests in public and demands that the government and society disentangle themselves from the church…

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Click on the Frito-Lay graphic to see the advert

The advertising executives behind Doritos and Pepsi Max have been trying to create buzz with their “Crash the Super Bowl” contest, in which user-submitted ads for each product would compete via public vote to be shown during the big game, with potential prizes up to a million dollars for the winners.

Unfortunately, the Pepsi products’ competition has fallen under the public eye for the wrong reason — one of the candidate ads offended Catholics.

The ad, entitled “Feed the Flock,” features a priest using Doritos and Pepsi as replacements for the wafer and wine that are normally part of the Eucharist.

Probably better for you than the original tasty bits.

A man stands near the crowned head of a statue of Jesus being built in Swiebodzin, 110 km west of Poznan, western Poland, November 4, 2010. The statue, whose body is 33 metres high, is expected to be completed in November.

It’s being erected as a tourist attraction holy monument.

Nothing illegal here, eh?

Women who wear miniskirts or show too much cleavage will face fines of up to 500 euros under new rules to be introduced by an Italian town.

In a move sharply at odds with a country which produced the likes of Monica Bellucci and Sophia Loren, the town of Castellammare di Stabia, near Naples, intends to prohibit women from wearing provocative clothing.

The town’s council also wants to ban men and women from wearing low-slung jeans as part of a list of 41 new rules that “every good citizen must respect”…

Playing football in parks and gardens and swearing in public will also be banned under new regulations which will be put forward for approval at a council meeting on Monday…

Warms the cockles of your heart to see political correctness returned to it’s proper Fascist roots.

A local parish priest, Don Paolo Cecere, said he supported the crackdown…

Italy has become entangled in a web of petty rules and regulations in the last two years, after the government of Silvio Berlusconi gave councils extra powers to tailor laws to tackle crime and anti-social behavior.

Across the nation, towns have banned a range of seemingly innocuous activities such as building sandcastles on the beach, kissing in cars and feeding stray cats.