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Sr. Donna Quinn is a gutsy woman. A Dominican nun, who entered the convent right out of high school and Chicago’s South Side in 1955, She has that no-BS Chicago style and early on became a feminist. Prone to demonstrate at the drop of a hat, I recently spent an evening in a DC hotel lobby bar sipping Grand Marnier with Donna and being regaled by tales of her exploits. She picketed Notre Dame when they invited Ronald Reagan to speak—but women’s rights are her particular passion.

She is a frequent target of right wing Catholic groups. This past summer, anti-abortion Catholics picketing at a Chicago reproductive health clinic figured out that one of the peacekeepers was Sister Donna and began protesting to Chicago’s Cardinal George and Quinn’s prioress in the Sinsinawa Dominicans. Things came to a head when LifeSiteNews went public with the story panicking some of the Dominican leadership which then issued what some in the community considered a premature “public statement” on the community listserv.

The order claims that Quinn’s peacekeeping activities are “in violation” of her position as a Dominican religious and that they are working with Quinn to resolve the matter. On Sunday, Nov. 1 they issued the following statement:

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Early Thursday, the US Catholics Conference on Bishops circulated a memo (see below) and “supporting” documents to all bishops urging them to use this Sunday’s mass as a lobbying event designed to defeat health care reform if the bishops don’t get what they want on abortion. What do they want? They want to scuttle the well crafted compromise moderate pro-lifers and all prochoice groups have reluctantly supported and insist that health care reform efforts be used to cut off all sources of funding for abortions for all women—whether they are on Medicaid or currently have coverage for abortion in their private insurance plans.

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The clergy sex abuse scandal was in the press once again as the Vatican issued yet another defense of its insufficient efforts to protect children and adolescents from pedophiles. The International Humanist and Ethical Union sent a letter to the UN Human Rights Council citing the Vatican’s failure to live up to its treaty obligations under the Convention on the Rights of the Child and requesting that the Council urge the Commission on the Rights of the Child to ask the Vatican to open all documents related to this matter as well as allow CRC staff to interview church officials with knowledge of these matters.

It cited not only statistics on child sexual abuse but also the physical and emotional abuse children in the custody of the church in work houses and orphanages endured up to the 1970s. And it made clear that the problem was not just child abuse but the massive cover up from country to country and in the Vatican itself.

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I was encouraged this week when I read an op-ed column in the London Observer by former President Jimmy Carter. Some may remember that about ten years ago Carter resigned from the Southern Baptist Convention after it had issued a number of rulings on the role of women in the church and society. Women, it said, needed to be subject to men. We were responsible for the sin of Eve and we could not be deacons, chaplains or ministers in the church. It was a boost for all women working for women’s rights in the churches when Carter stood up for us.

Now, Carter has joined with other world leaders and initiated a project aimed at ending religious discrimination against women and girls.

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OK. I am freaked out that the President may nominate a Catholic to the Supreme Court. I have been wrestling with writing anything about this because it sounds terrible. So, if for one short period of several decades there are six Catholics on the Court, should we care? In the last two rounds of confirmation hearings for Alito and Roberts, conservative Catholics mounted campaigns calling anyone who mentioned religion in the context of nominations anti-Catholic bigots and everyone who had a rational concern about whether or not Catholic nominees would be restricted in their judicial opinions by church demands for orthodoxy on the so called “non negotiable” — gay marriage, abortion, euthanasia, stem cell research and human cloning – went running for cover.

The constitution says there shall be no religious test for public office. It certainly means we would not bar from public office anyone who is of a specific faith or no faith. It also means, and perhaps more pointedly, that we would not appoint someone because they are members of a favored religion. But does it mean we cannot ask the effect that religious beliefs, church positions or church discipline might have on how a nominee would vote on issues before the court?

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I’m Just Wild about Harry.

And apparently so is President Obama. Harry Knox, Director of the Religion and Faith program at the Human Rights Campaign was one of the few human rights-oriented religious leaders appointed to the Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnership Advisory Council. Rev. Knox, a member of RD's Advisory Council, is a seasoned advocate of glbt rights from a faith based perspective. Like others on the Council, he is a man of strong opinions and has not been shy about criticizing religious leaders who have engaged in homophobic rhetoric or in dangerous and misleading statements about condoms. Harry is now under attack as a “virulent anti-Catholic bigot [who] has made numerous vile and dishonest attacks against the Church and the Holy Father.”

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Father Alberto Cutie (pronounced Koo-tee-ay), a popular Miami priest and talk show host on the conservative Eternal World Television Network as well as Pax Catholic Communications is the latest cleric to get caught in a sex scandal. The priest, known as “Padre Oprah” for his relationship counseling on a TV show called “Hablando con padre Alberto,” was the victim of Mexican paparazzi for the celebrity magazine TVnotas. TVnotas published 25 photos of Cutie and a woman relaxing on the beach and kissing at a local bar. One photo shows Cutie with his hands in the woman’s bathing suit bottom. At least, some say, he wasn’t caught abusing a young boy.

Cutie has spoken out. On CBS’s Early Show [watch video below] he said, “I believe I have fallen in love and I believe I’ve struggled with that, between my love for God and my love for the Church and my love for service.” Cutie is obviously a very loving man and now he will need to choose, some say needlessly, between those loves.

The life of a Roman Catholic priest is no picnic. When I was growing up there were a fair share of what we called Father “What-a-wastes”...

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An opinion piece by David Gushee back in mid-March is worth revisiting as it opened the door to real dialogue on the controversial efforts of some in the religious community who’ve sought to end the culture war on abortion by focusing not on abortion itself but on efforts to reduce its incidence or need.

Some who have accepted this approach are pro-choice on abortion such as Faith and Public Life; others, who believe that abortion is almost always immoral—and wish it were possible to make it illegal—accept that that is not likely in the near future and would prefer to see some abortions prevented, rather than continue to bash their heads against the wall and insist that the only answer is to make it illegal. David Gushee has been a prominent voice in the preventing some abortions is better than continuing the status quo camp and he has urged the president to fulfill the Democratic Party platform’s promise to really do something to make abortion less necessary.

In pursuit of that goal, Gushee has gone the distance for the president and he is feeling a little used. He’s seen the President take immediate actions that reinforce the standard pro-choice agenda on abortion and related life issues including:

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I’ve been writing a lot about false common ground these days so it was a pleasure to discover that Michael Novak and I have come to a common way of conceptualizing government benefits for living kidney donors.

Novak, in my book, is a conservative, free market philosopher and cultural thinker. He is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, has traveled world wide making the Catholic case for capitalism. Along with George Weigel and the late Richard John Neuhaus he spent the last decade educating young Eastern European Catholics at a Polish summer school in how to be effective Catholic capitalists. He once supported contraception and thought Humanae Vitae [1968 encyclical reaffirming the Roman Catholic view on birth control, abortion, and other "life" issues] was wrong. Now he is against contraception and of course abortion and embryonic stem cell research. He went to the Vatican in 2003 to try to convince the Pope that the war in Iraq was “just.” Not much we agree on.

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It was only 27 years ago that the United States recognized the Holy See (the governing body of the Catholic church) as a state and agreed to exchange ambassadors. In making the decision, Ronald Reagan went against a long history of US opinion against recognizing a religious institution as a state.

But for Reagan, the shared agenda with the Pope regarding communism was a good reason to break with prior legal opinions and the US tradition of separation of church and state. Part of the deal, according to Pope John Paul II biographer, Carl Bernstein, was active engagement against family planning and abortion by the US in international forums.

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Today was one of those days when the tenuous thread that binds me to a religious identity was further frayed. It is not easy being a feminist and a Catholic. In fact it is not easy being a feminist and a member of any institutional religion. No matter what modest advances have been made within faith groups on overcoming religion’s historic antipathy to women and our sexuality, the fact remains that the religious world is one in which women are still woefully undervalued and represented and where the gender lens and commitments to women’s well being made in the larger world are still ignored. And when that larger world, particularly the political world engages with religion, it is almost always prepared to ignore religion’s failure to meet even the lowest standard of respect for women’s rights.

Today’s disappointment was the White House announcement of the full President’s Advisory Council on Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. Fifteen members had been previously appointed. Ten new names were released today. Among the 25 members are six representatives of non-religious, community based organizations. The only Hindu member of the Council and the second Muslim appointed, both women, are in this category. In fact, were it not for the women representing secular organizations (four of the six secular members of the Council are women) the gender distribution would be grotesquely unbalanced.

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In a brief White House Conference call on Friday, Melody Barnes, head of the White House Domestic Policy Council launched a White House effort to bring together NGOs with differing perspectives on abortion to find areas of common ground. Barnes was joined by Christina Tchen, Director of the White House Office of Public Liaison and Executive Director of the White Council on Women and Girls. The final administration spokesperson was Josh DuBois, Director of the Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnership initiative.

The 15 minute one-way call was essentially a backgrounder, with the three administration representatives describing the initiative. No question or comments were solicited and a list of participants was not made available. Media reports suggested that both abortion rights supporters and religious proponents of common ground based on reducing the number of abortions were invited. Representatives from HHS, OMB, and White House Congressional Affairs will also be involved.

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The following post uses terms that have, for better or worse, become shorthand for describing different groups within the Democratic-leaning religion community. “Progressive” refers to groups like Faith in Public Life, Third Way, Jim Wallis’ Sojourners, et al, while “Liberal” or “Religious Left” refers to a loose grouping of writers, like the author of this post, “Pastor” Dan Schultz of Street Prophets, RD contributor Peter Laarman, Fred Clarkson (editor of Dispatches from the Religious Left), et al. — ed.

I just read a provocative blog post about the differences that have emerged among faith based supporters of a public policy that is focused on economic and social justice and respect for human rights. Susan Thistlethwaite, a respected academic theologian, early on assumed a measured and positive role in the post-2004 effort to catalyze a religious voice that, as she puts it, could counter the religious right and influence public policy that had moved the “center to the right, especially by manipulating so called wedge issues like homophobia and abortion.”

Thistlethwaite is now concerned that “some self-identified liberals are charging that especially some newer, progressive organizations are really ‘centrists’ in disguise.” She notes that such a charge from a liberal is not a compliment. I will use her terms liberal and progressive in this piece although I am sure she and I agree that the labels are imperfect. And, indeed the battle of words has been at times intemperate. The Thistlethwaite liberals have been prone, to put it politely, prophetic lightening bolts flung at the “progressives.” Peter Laarman’s invocation of Jesus’ condemnation of the “lukewarm” in these pages is a prime example. The progressives have had bigger fish to fry and tend to treat the liberals with disdain. It’s sort of the way the Business and Professional Women’s Club saw the National Organization for Women or how the NAACP saw SNCC in the 60s.

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Following the announcement of the first 15 members of Obama’s Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnership Council, a number of progressive groups weighed in with the White House, providing names of progressive religious leaders as well as secular leaders who are favorable to sexual and reproductive rights and actually know something about preventing teen pregnancy and in general unintended pregnancy—two issues the Council will address. News reports issued yesterday indicate that these requests are going unheeded in the White House.

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OK, these days I’m asking myself why are we religious progressives spending so much time picking on Jim Wallis and his cohorts when there’s so much low lying fruit that really needs to be picked.

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April 10, 2005 was a bright Sunday morning. Around 10 o’clock a group of women, some leaders in the broader women’s movement, others feminists of faith gathered in front of NBC’s upper northwest DC headquarters. We were picketing Meet the Press (which we dubbed “Meet the Patriarchy”). A few Sundays earlier, Tim Russert convened a panel of religious leaders to discuss religion and politics in America. Not a single woman was among. The show was the second time in less than six months that an important dialogue on the state of religion in America excluded women. Frank Rich criticized a similar MTP discussion of religion and values In November 2004, which also featured an all male panel.

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In an amazing shift in the Vatican’s strategy of no dissent from its position that direct abortion is never permitted, even to save a woman’s life, the Vatican’s top bioethics official, Archbishop Rino Fisichella opined that the doctors in Brazil who performed an abortion on a nine-year-old who was 15 weeks pregnant with twins did not merit excommunication. Before any of us breathes a small sigh of relief, we need to take a closer look at what the Archbishop said and understand that an article in the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano does not constitute official teaching of the church.

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This week, the National Center for Health Statistics announced that after a 14-year steady decline in teen birth rates, the US has experienced a sharp rise in the birth rate among 15- to 19-year-olds. From 1991 to 2005, the rate plummeted 34%; between 2005 and 2006 it rose 3%. The increase was greatest among black teens. Their birth rate rose 5%.

Of course advocates and experts on both sides of the sexual and reproductive rights divide claimed that the other side was responsible. Abstinence-only sexuality education leaders claimed it proved the prevention message focusing on using contraceptives was the cause, while the comprehensive sex education crowd blamed abstinence-only. While we have ample evidence that abstinence-only education has been ineffective in reducing adolescent sexual activity, experts are uncertain of the reasons for the sharp shift in teen births. They note that birth rates are also rising among other age groups as well. And the Center for Disease control recently reported that the long decline in teenage sexual activity is at a standstill. It is still true that US teen pregnancy, abortion and birth rates are substantially higher than those of other developed countries, and that teen mothers in the US are far more likely not to finish high school and to live in poverty.  

What role, if any, can progressive religion play in addressing this problem? The question takes on particular significance politically as one of the principal goals of the White House Office on Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships will be to “address teen pregnancy.” 

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Just before he left for his current trip to Africa, the Pope told pilgrims in St Peter’s Square that he wanted to reach out to Africans suffering from hunger, disease and injustice.

He chose a strange way to initiate that exchange.

On the Papal plane on the way to the Cameroon, the Pope repeated what many hoped would be a discarded Papal message: condoms, rather than preventing AIDS increases the problem. He suggests the solution lies in a spiritual and human awakening, friendship with those who suffer, and abstinence. Now if the Pope cannot convince Roman Catholic priests to abstain from sex, especially abusive sex with children it is hard to imagine that he can convince ordinary people for whom sexuality is part of life that they should abstain.

Papal pronouncements against condom use and against sexual expression outside of life-long monogamous heterosexual marriage are so frequent that one cannot help but wonder why they still get so much media coverage. They are by no means the man bites dog story media love. But in the face of the enormous and continuing tragic effect of the AIDS pandemic and the demonstrated evidence that condom use is an essential component of efforts to prevent further transmission every opportunity to correct the misinformation inherent in the claim condoms increase the incidence of AIDS.

True, if you never have sexual contact, you will not get sexually transmitted AIDS and you don’t need condoms.

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Julia Duin, religion writer for the Washington Times in a column on March 12 attempts to rekindle the dying embers of the 2004 election campaign debate about denying communion to politicians who disagree with the Vatican’s position on abortion.

Duin speculates about the fate of Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius soon to take up residence in the Diocese of Washington DC as HHS secretary. Sebelius a pro-choice Catholic has had the misfortune of living in one of the half dozen or so dioceses where Bishops have either told legislators to refrain from receiving communion, or issued not-in-my-backyard threats against candidates who do not live in their diocese, telling them they would not be welcome to receive communion should they ever show up in their fiefdom.

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The Roman Catholic church often acts in ways that decent compassionate people find incomprehensible. It hides priests who sexually assault children and agonizes over whether or not it can punish them by stripping them of their priesthood. In fact, it rarely goes so far as to “defrock” them. One could not help but compare this reality to the situation this past week of the Brazilian mother of a nine-year-old girl who was 15 weeks pregnant with twins as a result of a well-founded allegation of rape by her stepfather. Doctors in Brazil decided that the pregnancy met both grounds for abortion in Brazil: rape and risk to the life of the pregnant woman, in this case a child. The nine-year-old weighs about 80 pounds and is not fully developed. Carrying twins to term and delivering them is medically very risky.

The Catholic church first hired lawyers to try to prevent the abortion. When that failed and the abortion was performed, the local bishop Jose Cardoso Sobrinho announced that the mother and the doctors had “incurred excommunication.” The child, he said, should have carried the pregnancy to term and delivered by a Cesarean section yet no mention was made of what penalty, if any, the stepfather would incur. He has been arrested attempting to flee town and is also suspected of abusing the nine-year-old’s physically handicapped sister.

The Vatican entered the fray this weekend. In an interview in La Stampa, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re who heads the Vatican Commission on Latin America claimed that attacks on the church were ”unfair.” The “twins” had a right to and the excommunication was the right thing to do.

Are these prelates crazy?

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President Obama will sign an executive order today (March 9) rescinding the Bush administration limitations on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. Scientists, advocates and members of Congress have been invited to public ceremony at the White house to witness this important and historic decision. At the ceremony, Obama is expecting to announce “a broader effort to restore scientific integrity.” Hopefully, this will signal the end of the Bush era’s reliance on junk science in setting policy when science and religion appear to conflict.

I hope the White House has invited some of the many religious leaders who have spoken out in support of embryonic stem cell research. We have heard incessantly from religious leaders who are opposed to research on embryonic stem cells and it is now time for us to hear from the proponents. This will be especially important as NIH develops the guidelines for federal funding as active denominational opposition has been vigorous and well-funded. It is however limited to a few faith groups: Roman Catholicism, the National Association of Evangelicals, Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, and the Southern Baptist Convention. The Episcopal Church, United Methodists, all major branches of Judaism, United Church of Christ, UU, and the Presbyterian Church have all adopted positions in favor of using early embryos to create stem cells for medical and therapeutic research so long as embryos are not created specifically for this purpose. Most advocate the use of embryos created for assisted reproduction and scheduled to be destroyed anyway.

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In what long term lawyer advocate for clergy sex abuse victims Jeff Anderson calls a “David vs. Goliath” victory, the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on March 3, 2009 that a man who was sexually assaulted in the 1960s by a Catholic Servite order priest can pursue his civil suit for damages against the Holy See. In 2002, lawyers for the survivor (who remains anonymous) brought a civil suit against the Holy See (the governing entity of the Roman Catholic Church) for its role in authorizing multiple transfers of a priest they knew was abusing children.

The priest named in the suit, Fr. Andrew Ronan, deceased, was accused of sexual abuse in Ireland and then transferred to Chicago where he admitted to abusing three boys and was then transferred to Portland Oregon where he allegedly committed further abuse.

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So says Catholic convert, Senator Sam Brownback, who earlier this year signed a fundraising letter for a conservative Catholic advocacy group called “Catholic Advocate.” The letter seeks funds to fight the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA), a bill which would codify the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion. While pro-choice advocates have despaired that the bill is unlikely to be introduced or pass, Catholic anti-choice groups from the US Conference of Catholic Bishops to the Knights of Columbus have made the bill a centerpiece of their anti-choice agenda. For smaller groups like Catholic Advocate, it is a fundraising ploy.

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It was religion day at the White House. Shortly after 9am, the president spoke at the annual National Prayer Breakfast. He detailed his own history with religion highlighting the diversity in his own family, a Muslim father who became an atheist, “grandparents who were non practicing Methodists and Baptists and a mother who was skeptical of religion.” Repeating the themes of his campaign, he talked about the role his work as a community organizer and how his connections with faith communities in Chicago led him to Christianity. He expressed confidence in faith-based groups working at the grass roots level to have their fingers on the pulse of people’s needs. These groups, he said are trusted by the community.

Later, the President signed an Executive Order slightly modifying Bush’s 2001 order which established what was then called the White House Office of Faith Based and Community Initiatives and establishing a “President’s Advisory Council for Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnership.” The Executive Order, and White House comments on the priorities of the new Council and the list of initial members, are likely to raise concerns within the progressive religious community and among women leaders.

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