Religion (general)

BOSTON (AP) — Churches and other religious organizations would be required to disclose their finances like other nonprofit groups under a bill overwhelmingly approved by the state Senate on Wednesday.

Supporters of the bill, which has met opposition from the Catholic church and other religious denominations, say there’s no reason to exempt religious groups.

They say secrecy helped the Roman Catholic church in Massachusetts hide the burgeoning clergy sexual abuse scandal from public view, even as church officials shuffled abusive priests from parish to parish.

One way to prevent a repeat of the scandal is to bring the finances out into the light, backers of the bill said.
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Ed. Interesting article from Rabbi Daniel Lapin that touches on our ongoing discussion of poverty but from a Jewish perspective.

Toward Tradition Rabbi Daniel Lapin

Heading an organization whose entire purpose is to promote friendship and mutual respect between Jews and Christians, egregious assaults on this friendship really bother me. As I reported last week, it gives me little pleasure to admit that most of these assaults come from my side of the fence. Well, here we go again.

In Bellevue, Washington, just a few miles from my home, a Jewish Reform temple has been upsetting its neighbors by insisting on hosting an encampment of homeless people on its property. Fearful neighbors in this upper middle class enclave of young families point to countless offenses, ranging from assault and relieving in public to drug possession, perpetrated by this group of homeless during their earlier sojourn on the grounds of a church in a neighboring city.
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World Net Daily September 19, 2005

Applicants with ‘gay’ tendencies won’t be admitted to seminaries

Pope Benedict XVI has given his approval to a new Vatican policy document that bans men with homosexual tendencies from being ordained as priests, reports Catholic World News.

The policy statement is a direct result of the pope’s concern about the pedophilia scandal in the church – especially in the U.S.

The new document, prepared by the Congregation for Catholic Education in response to a request made by the late Pope John Paul II in 1994, will be published soon. It will take the form of an “Instruction,” signed by the prefect and secretary of the congregation: Cardinal Zenon Grocholewski and Archbishop Michael Miller, according to the report.
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LewRockwell.com Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI)

[This is a homily that was delivered on 26 November 1981 in the course of a service for Catholic members of the Bundestag in the church of St. Wynfrith (Boniface) in Bonn. The readings provided for the day by the lectionary were 1 Peter 1:3-7 and John 14:1-6. At first sight they seemed to be out of keeping with the subject, but on closer inspection they showed themselves to be unexpectedly fruitful.]

The epistle and gospel that we have just listened to have their origin in a situation in which Christians were not citizens of a state who were able to shape their own lives but the persecuted victims of a cruel dictatorship. They could not share in responsibility for their state but simply had to endure it. It was not granted to them to shape it as a Christian state; instead their task was to live as Christians despite it. The names of two emperors in whose reigns tradition dates these two passages are enough to cast light on the situation: they were Nero and Domitian. Thus the first letter of Peter describes Christians as strangers within this state (1:1) and the state itself as Babylon (5:13). By doing so it indicates very impressively the political position that Christians were in; it corresponded more or less to that of the Jews living in exile in Babylon who were not responsible citizens of that state but subjects without any rights, and who thus had to learn how they might survive in it, not how they could build it up. Thus the political background of today’s readings is fundamentally different from ours. Nevertheless they contain three important statements which are significant for political activity among Christians.

World Net Daily
© 2004 WorldNetDaily.com

Christianity in Great Britain is imploding, fragmenting and will soon be driven underground, says a senior adviser to Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams.

Jayne Ozanne told Williams and Archbishop of York David Hope that a time of great persecution for the church is coming, reports the Times of London.

In a private report to the pair, Ozanne warned the outlook for the church was not good – that it would continue to implode and self-destruct over homosexual clergy and other issues. She says that its future will be one of an underground movement comparable to resistance movements during World War II.
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