Pope Benedict’s decision to resign is remarkable historically, as the last pope to resign was Pope Gregory XII in 1415, and that was due to a schism in the church. Benedict said he lacked the strength to continue the demanding job. “In order to govern the bark of St. Peter and proclaim the Gospel, both strength of mind and body are necessary – strengths which in the last few months, have deteriorated in me to the extent that I have had to recognize my incapacity to adequately fulfill the ministry entrusted to me,” he said.
Columnist Cal Thomas argues that President Obama’s latest compromise on the contraception mandate still doesn’t go far enough. He objects that private businesses (such as Hobby Lobby) are not exempt, and thinks that Catholic institutions might still get stuck with paying for the free coverage that will be provided by the insurance companies. But columnist Margaret Carlson faults the Catholic bishops for not accepting the compromise and moving on. “Even though the new regulation shows that the president has taken the bishops’ objections into account, they refuse once again to declare victory and move on to aiding the poor and comforting the sick,” she wrote. “They will not be satisfied, apparently, if even one employee of a Catholic-aligned institution is getting birth control through insurance.”
Gov. Sam Brownback spoke for about 10 minutes at the ReignDown USA prayer and worship event held Saturday in Topeka. In addition to talking about the phrase “In God We Trust” as it pertains to the country, Brownback shared how being diagnosed with cancer in 1995 led him to a stronger commitment to his faith, the Topeka Capital-Journal reported. “I finally reached up and said, ‘God, this life’s yours.’ It started a great adventure,” he said. Brownback prayed “for forgiveness of his sins, while also asking forgiveness of man’s sins, like broken treaties with Native Americans and slavery, or generalizations, such as greed and lust,” the Capital-Journal reported.
Oops. A new Ten Commandments monument on the Oklahoma Capitol grounds has two misspelled words and a punctuation error: “Sabbath” came out “Sabbeth,” “maidservant” ended up “maidseruant,” and “neighbor’s” is missing the apostrophe. Columnist John Kelso suggested an additional commandment: “Thou shalt not drop out of school until thou has completed eighth grade.”
Asked by the Huffington Post about comments at a recent forum suggesting that Democrats should not be Catholics, state Senate candidate Steve Fitzgerald (in photo) of Leavenworth even went further: “Christ said marriage is between one man and one woman, and the Democratic platform said that it’s not true. So therefore, my point was that one cannot support the Democratic platform and be a follower of Christ,” Fitzgerald said. He is the GOP challenger to state Sen. Kelly Kultala, D-Kansas City. Referring to his intended advice to Democrats, Fitzgerald told Huffington Post: “My actual message was ‘fix the party or leave.’” Kultala, who is Catholic, recalled that at the meeting of the Polish American Democratic Club, “I was so angry I was seeing spots.” She also told Huffington Post: “He does not have the right to dismiss my faith because it is not the same as his. He’s trying to make it sound that you are only truly faithful if you are a right-wing Republican. That’s not right.”
How tragic that the U.S. ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens (in photo), and three staff members were killed Tuesday as the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi was overwhelmed by a mob upset about an obscure film that ridicules the Prophet Muhammad. The violence made Stevens the first U.S. ambassador to die in the line of duty in 33 years. The U.S. Embassy in Cairo also has been targeted by protesters. Boston Globe columnist Farah Stockman watched the trailer on YouTube believed to have inspired the violence, for a movie credited to California real-estate developer Sam Bacile. She found it hard to believe something that “felt like a ‘Saturday Night Live’ spoof” with “terrible acting” and “weird cardboard-looking desert backdrops” could lead to the death of Stevens, a friend of a friend. “The blame for Chris’ death rests squarely with the mob who attacked our embassy. Their actions are despicable, and perhaps were incited by long-standing enemies of the United States. Muslims who are angry at how their religion has been portrayed must stop responding in violent ways that perpetrate the idea of Islam as a dangerous faith,” Stockman wrote. “But shouldn’t people who knowingly incite violence against the United States – as a crude, thinly-veiled publicity stunt – also be held accountable?”
Fifty years after the U.S. Supreme Court nixed school-initiated prayers as a violation of the First Amendment, 74 percent of Kansans think that public schools should open their day with either a spoken prayer (36 percent) or a silent one (38 percent), according to a SurveyUSA poll conducted for KWCH, Channel 12. Similarly large majorities also favor some kind of prayer to open local and legislative meetings, with 71 percent saying it’s OK for such prayers to mention Jesus. Though 58 percent of those surveyed said they’d be willing to listen to a public prayer in a religion other than their own, 54 percent said it would be unacceptable for a prayer to mention Allah in a public meeting where the majority of citizens are Muslim.
Some Catholics are upset that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is scheduled to give a commencement address May 18 at Georgetown University’s Public Policy Institute. Patrick J. Reilly, president of the Cardinal Newman Society, wrote a letter urging Georgetown to rescind the invitation to the former Kansas governor, calling it “scandalous and outrageous that America’s oldest Catholic and Jesuit university has elected to provide this prestigious platform to a publicly ‘pro-choice’ Catholic.” The letter mentioned Sebelius’ role in mandating that most employers cover birth control under the health reform law – a mandate since altered to try to accommodate religiously affiliated employers. The University of Notre Dame drew similar flak when President Obama addressed the graduating class of 2009.
The prayers offered at the start of each day’s legislative session are supposed to be ecumenical and not political. But every once in a while some invited pastor doesn’t follow the guidelines. In 1996, former Wichita pastor Joe Wright prayed a political prayer that has been widely circulated on the Internet. Last Thursday, Father James Gordon of St. John Vianney in Maple Hill near Topeka used the prayer time to lobby against abortion and same-sex marriage and for religious freedom. Some pastors may think it compromises their integrity to not speak out on certain issues. But if that’s the case, there is a simple solution: Don’t accept the invitation to pray. As Wichitan Thomas Witt, the executive director of the Kansas Equality Coalition, responded to Gordon’s prayer: “Using prayer to launch political attacks against one’s opponents is unacceptable.”
How did there come to be such a disconnect between the Catholic Church’s official policy against contraception and the lives of average parishioners? Elaine Tyler May, a professor at the University of Minnesota and author of the book “America and the Pill,” recounted how the pope convened a special commission in the 1960s to evaluate whether the church should change its stance on contraception. “A significant majority of its members favored lifting the ban, including 60 of 64 theologians and nine of the 15 cardinals,” May wrote in the Washington Post. When the pope sided with the minority and reaffirmed the ban in 1968, many church leaders and leading Catholic theologians, as well as many parish priests, publicly criticized the decision, arguing that Catholic women and men should follow their own consciences. Two years after the decree, two-thirds of Catholic women were using contraception,” May wrote. “Quickly, the gap between Catholic and non-Catholic women disappeared.” Today, according to research by the Guttmacher Institute, about “98 percent of sexually active Catholic women have used contraceptive methods banned by the church.”
Gov. Sam Brownback was challenged on a call-in show on C-SPAN Monday by a Kansas woman who complained about the trampling of women’s rights. “We can pay for vasectomies, we can pay for Viagra, but we cannot pay for birth control for women?” the woman said. “I think it’s a shame.” Brownback said the contraception issue was about respecting the beliefs of religious institutions and not about denying women their rights. His solution for women who work at those institutions and want birth control: “Go work somewhere else.” That’s a flippant attitude about an important health concern of women. Switching jobs is also much easier said than done during this down economy – especially when religiously affiliated institutions, such as hospitals or universities, can be among the largest employers in a community.
GOP presidential candidates have been criticizing President Obama for apologizing to Afghanistan for the accidental burning of some copies of the Quran. Newt Gingrich said that Obama “is consistently apologizing to people who do not deserve the apology of the president of the United States. Period.” But Secretary of State Hillary Clinton defended the apology as “the right thing to do.” She also criticized the GOP candidates for trying to politicize it. “I find it somewhat troubling that our politics would inflame such a dangerous situation in Afghanistan,” she said.
GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum said in October that he “almost threw up” when he read John F. Kennedy’s 1960 address on the role of religion in public life. When asked Sunday if he still felt that way, Santorum didn’t back away. “Well, yes, absolutely,” he told ABC News. Kennedy’s well-received address was aimed at reassuring Protestants that he would make decisions as president independent of his Catholic faith and without the influence of the pope. But Santorum, also a Catholic, reads Kennedy’s statement that he believed “in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute” as saying, as Santorum put it, that “people of faith have no role in the public square.” He said: “You bet that makes you throw up.”
It’s disappointing that the Brownback administration is backing the Kansas Preservation of Religious Freedom Act. When the bill was debated last year, supporters talked mostly about protecting the rights of people who opposed same-sex marriage, the Lawrence Journal-World reported. This time supporters are trying a new approach, claiming that the bill is needed to protect people from the Obama administration’s “war on religion.” “As you consider House Bill 2260, the federal government’s recent attempts to trample the religious liberties of millions of Americans must be at the forefront of your debate,” Lt. Gov. Jeff Colyer told lawmakers. But the real target of the bill still seems to be ordinances such as one discussed at Tuesday’s Wichita City Council meeting that would bar discrimination against people based on sexual orientation.
There is a good debate about whether the Obama administration was correct in requiring faith-based groups to abide by anti-discrimination rules in order to receive certain government contracts. Does that infringe on a group’s religious freedoms? Or should faith-based groups follow the same rules as everyone else, as there is no constitutional right to a government contract? But the Obama administration’s actions, including requirements related to the federal health care law, do not constitute a war on religion, as some have charged, including former GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry. Douglas Laycock, a constitutional attorney who argues cases on behalf of religious groups, said that the Obama administration officials “aggressively protected religious liberty in some issues and failed to protect it in other issues. But they’re not hostile.”
The fact that God didn’t help Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow (in photo) defeat the New England Patriots in Saturday’s NFL playoff game was no surprise to former NFL quarterback Fran Tarkenton. “I never understood why God would care who won a game between my team and another,” he wrote in the Wall Street Journal, adding that there are far more important things going on in the world. That said, Tarkenton found it refreshing that the chatter around the NFL has been about a great athlete with great character and “not about more arrests and bad behavior from our presumptive ‘heroes.’”
Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, recently declared that “Jesus was a free marketer, not an occupier.” He wrote that “Jesus rejected collectivism and the mentality that has occupied America for the last few decades: that everyone gets a trophy — equal outcomes for inequitable performance,” and he chastised Occupy protesters for being “unproductive.” Barb Shelly of the Kansas City Star noted that God “endowed humans with an endless ability to conscript Jesus and his words for their own ends.” Still, she thinks “it’s pretty clear that Jesus would push back against a system in which the rich use their clout to get richer, while politicians reel in campaign cash and tell the poor and the sick and the unemployed that everything would be OK if they would just get off their duffs and show some initiative.”
A Kansas City Star profile of Megan Phelps-Roper, the heir apparent of the Phelps protests, noted how similar she is to other 25-year-olds. “She loves her iPhone and the band Mumford & Sons and the Showtime series ‘Dexter,’” it said, adding that Phelps-Roper is “peppy, goofy and, by all accounts, happy.” But then it paused and mentioned one other thing: “She wants to make it perfectly clear that you and the rest of this filthy, perverted nation will be spending a long, fiery eternity burning in hell.”
Correlation does not necessarily mean causation, but regular attendees of religious services tend to be more optimistic and less inclined to be depressed. Those who attend religious services more than once a week are 56 percent more likely to be above the median score in a measure of optimism than those who do not attend services at all, according to a new study published in the Journal of Religion and Health. Weekly attendees also are 22 percent less likely to be depressed than non-attendees. However, psychological health may also depend on what a person believes about God. A new Baylor University survey found that believers in a judgmental God have significantly more anxiety than believers in an engaged, loving God.
Robert Jeffress, the Dallas minister who made the controversial comments about Mormonism being a cult, isn’t backing down from his contention that a candidate’s faith should matter to voters. “The question is not whether personal spiritual beliefs shape a politician’s values and policies, but what spiritual beliefs mold those values and policies,” he wrote. Still, he said, “while I prefer a competent Christian over a competent non-Christian, religion is not the only consideration in choosing a candidate. Frankly, Christians have not always made good presidents. We also must consider whether a candidate is competent to lead and govern according to biblical principles.” But, he argued, “at this point, we have the opportunity to select both a competent leader and a committed Christian.”
“I am not running for theologian in chief,” GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain said. That’s an apt response to the controversy created when a prominent supporter of Texas Gov. Rick Perry criticized Mitt Romney’s Morman faith. Speaking to reporters last week at the Values Voters Summit, Robert Jeffress (in photo), the senior pastor at First Baptist Church in Dallas, called the Mormon faith “a cult.” Perry distanced himself from the comment, saying that’s not what he believes. Jeffress defended his views as mainstream but also distanced himself from Perry, saying they weren’t personally close. “I am not the Jeremiah Wright of the right,” Jeffress said.
As he sentenced a troublemaking local pastor to serve probation time, pay $300 in fines and stay at least 1,000 feet away from the Islamic Society of Wichita, Sedgwick County District Judge Phil Journey delivered a worthy message last week not only to the pastor but to the community: The Constitution provides protection for people of all faiths. “What if the shoe had been on the other foot and someone from the Islamic center had come to your place and tried to convert your members and had blocked your driveway?” Journey asked Mark Holick, pastor of Spirit One Christian Ministry. Holick had been convicted of loitering and disturbing business at the Islamic center as local Muslims observed the holy month of Ramadan. Especially as the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11 nears, Wichitans and all Americans need to remember that the country was attacked not by Islam but by terrorists who’d twisted Islam to serve evil. As President Bush put it in visiting a D.C. mosque just seven days after the 2001 attacks: “The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. Islam is peace.”
The Washington Examiner’s Byron York asked Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., if she was submissive to her husband. York’s question wasn’t about religion per se, but was an attempt to probe whether, if Bachmann became president, America would be getting her husband’s decisions and not hers. It’s common for Christian politicians questioned about their adherence to submission theology to dodge a scriptural explanation, as Bachmann did. After all, while dominionist-minded evangelicals like Bachmann intentionally set out to bring their “biblical worldview” into politics, they recognize that it’s bad 21st-century politics — especially for a female candidate — to admit to a theology that could cause voters to recoil at the image of an obedient wife as president of the United States. At the debate, Bachmann smiled and talked about how in love she is with her husband and maintained that their relationship is based on respect. But if Bachmann had explained her interpretation of the theology, we would have received greater insight into what her “biblical worldview” means for her understanding of law and policy. — Sarah Posner, Religion Dispatches
Since Rep. Michele Bachmann was asked in a debate whether she would be submissive to her husband as president, the punditry has morphed into a morass of armchair theologians pushing flawed interpretations of what submission means in a biblical context. It was fair to ask the question at the debate. After all, if Bachmann had responded, “I believe that submission means my husband will tell me how to do my job as president,” that is important information. But that isn’t what she said. Ironically, the complaint that is usually lobbed at conservative Christians is that they keep their women barefoot and pregnant. Now the anti-evangelical-Christian mob is up in arms because Marcus Bachmann told his wife she should be a tax attorney and run for Congress. Oh, the horror. Ideally, spouses influence each other, and if Bachmann’s husband saw a talent in his wife and encouraged her to pursue higher office, what is wrong with that? He didn’t say, “Run for Congress or I’ll beat you.” Yes, there are people who distort the doctrine of submission to control and abuse women, but they are not representative of mainstream evangelicalism. — Kirsten Powers, Daily Beast
“As our governor goes to Texas to pray with Rick Perry, faith leaders in Lawrence gather to give voice to what we have in common: concern for the most vulnerable,” said Peter Luckey, senior pastor at Plymouth Congregational Church in Lawrence. Luckey and representatives from the Islamic Center of Lawrence and the Lawrence Jewish Community Center are hosting a prayer vigil Saturday about the planned closing by Gov. Sam Brownback’s administration of the Lawrence office of the Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services, the Lawrence Journal-World reported. Brownback is scheduled that day to attend the “Call to Prayer for a Nation in Crisis” rally in Houston.
More than 75 professors at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., and other prominent Catholic colleges wrote a letter to House Speaker John Boehner (in photo), R-Ohio, saying that the GOP House budget will hurt the poor, elderly and vulnerable and, therefore, fails to uphold basic Catholic moral teaching, the New York Times reported. “Mr. Speaker, your voting record is at variance from one of the Church’s most ancient moral teachings,” the letter said, describing policies that cut funding for Medicare and social services while granting tax cuts to the wealthy as “anti-life.” The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a similar letter last week urging lawmakers to protect “the needs of the poor, working families and vulnerable people.” Boehner, who is Catholic, is scheduled to give the commencement speech Saturday at Catholic University. Many Catholics criticized the University of Notre Dame when President Obama spoke at its commencement in 2009.
Pope Benedict’s decision to resign is remarkable historically, as the last pope to resign was Pope Gregory XII in 1415, and that was due to a schism in the church. Benedict said he lacked the strength to continue the demanding job. “In order to govern the bark of St. Peter and proclaim the Gospel, both strength of mind and body are necessary – strengths which in the last few months, have deteriorated in me to the extent that I have had to recognize my incapacity to adequately fulfill the ministry entrusted to me,” he said.
