RNSdigest_06_16

RNS Digest
c. 2010 Religion News Service

African religious leaders warn about HIV during World Cup

By Fredrick Nzwili

NAIROBI (RNS/ENInews) African Christian and Muslim leaders are warning of increased vulnerability to HIV infections during the soccer World Cup in South Africa, which began June 11.
The world soccer extravaganza is coming to Africa for the first time, and religious leaders want governments to help commercial sex workers and their clients protect themselves against HIV during the event.
“When you add a whole group of men, plus lots of free time and lots of liquor together it makes an explosive combination,” said the Rev. Jape Heath, an HIV-positive South African Anglican priest. He is a co-founder of a network of African religious leaders living with or personally affected by HIV and AIDS.
“We know from past experiences under these circumstances that people get engaged in sex work and look for sex workers,” Namibian-born Heath told ENInews in Nairobi. The faith leaders have called for intensified services to stop the possible spread of infection.
“We need to make sure that there are counselling centres, support environment and condoms are made available,” said Heath.
The religious leaders also want governments to intervene against child trafficking, which they warned would increase with the World Cup.

Campaigners for women’s ordination protest at Vatican

By Luigi Sandri

ROME (RNS/ENInews) A group of women demonstrated in Rome’s St Peter’s Square on June 8, saying they want “full and equal participation” in the Roman Catholic Church.
The small group held a banner stating, “Ordain Catholic Women,” to the apparent curiosity of passers-by in the Via della Conciliazione, the boulevard that leads to the square, before they were asked to move on by police.
The June 8 protest followed a media conference organized by groups campaigning for women’s ordination in the Catholic Church, to protest against a Vatican celebration to mark the end of a “Year for Priests” proclaimed by Pope Benedict XVI in 2009.
“Our church urgently needs large numbers of male and female pastors to serve our parishes. Charisma should be important, not gender,” said Angelika Fromm, a German representative from the International Movement We are Church.
Fromm said the past 12 months had been “a disastrous year,” referring to the sexual abuse crisis that has rocked the Catholic Church.
“The current global crisis within the church demonstrates that the clerical hierarchy alone can’t serve any longer as the foundation of the Catholic Church’s institutional structure and authority,” said Fromm.
In a statement, the groups said they want “full and equal participation in the Roman Catholic Church, including ordination as deacons, priests and bishops.”
Vatican Radio has reported that 9,000 priests from 91 nations are to join Benedict on Thursday and Friday in the final ceremonies in Rome for the priests’ year.
“The absolute hypocrisy of the Year for priests celebration cuts to the core of what is wrong with the hierarchy today,” said Erin Saiz Hanna, executive director of the US-based Women’s Ordination Conference.

Pope begs forgiveness for clergy sex abuse

By Richard Allen

(RNS) — Pope Benedict XI begged forgiveness for sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests on Friday, June 11, but victims’ groups say they want action, not apologies.
Addressing 15,000 priests gathered from around the world on the final day of the Vatican’s “Year for Priests,” the pope pledged to do “everything possible” to stop “sin within the Church.”
“And so it happened that, in this very year of joy for the sacrament of the priesthood, the sins of priests came to light, particularly the abuse of the little ones,” he said at a Mass before one of the largest gatherings of clergy ever in St Peter’s Square.
“We too beg forgiveness from God and from the persons involved, while promising to do everything possible to ensure that such abuse will never occur again.”
Five bishops in Europe have already resigned from the scandal that has seen prominent cases in Ireland, Germany, Belgium, Austria and the United States in recent months and threatened to engulf the pope himself.
Benedict had already issued a pastoral letter to Irish Catholics in March expressing shame and remorse, and on a recent trip to Portugal he said the greatest threat came from “the sin inside the church.”
A group for victims said the pope’s words were not enough.
“Forgiveness comes after, not during, a crisis,” said Barbara Blaine, president of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. She called for an independent inquiry into priests’ abuse and a reduction in the power of bishops.
“The root cause of this horrific and on-going clergy sex abuse and cover-up crisis remains the nearly limitless power of bishops,” she said.
Benedict also promised on Friday that the Church would tighten controls on choosing men for priesthood: “We will do everything we can to weigh the authenticity of their vocation and make every effort to accompany priests along their journey.”
But, speaking at a vigil on Thursday, he dismissed any change to the celibacy rule. After reformers — including women’s groups — had marched on Rome on Tuesday calling for evolution in the Church’s male-dominated structure, the pontiff said celibacy was “an act of faith and fidelity” towards God.

Retired archbishop dishes on Kennedy in new memoir

By Bruce Nolan / The Times-Picayune

(RNS) — Retired New Orleans Archbishop Philip Hannan has produced a new memoir that casts light on parts of his 71-year career — including a rare look into Jackie Kennedy’s private grief in the first weeks after her husband’s assassination.
In The Archbishop Wore Combat Boots, Hannan, 97, publishes a handwritten personal note addressed to him from an anguished young widow less than a month after her husband’s death.
Hannan, a young auxiliary bishop in Washington, D.C., by then had already delivered Kennedy’s eulogy, at Jackie Kennedy’s request. Ten days later he had presided over a second Kennedy interment at Arlington National Cemetery, in which she quietly re-buried two of their children next to her husband, a daughter stillborn in 1956 and their son, Patrick, who had lived only three days after his birth four months before the assassination.
“If only I could believe that he could look down and see how he is missed and how nobody will ever be the same without him,” Kennedy wrote of her husband on Dec. 20, 1963, a few days after the re-interment of the children.
“But I haven’t believed in the child’s vision of heaven for a long time. There is no way now to commune with him. It will be so long before I am dead and even then I don’t know if I will be reunited with him . . . .
“Please forgive all this — and please don’t try to convince me just yet — I shouldn’t be writing this way,” she concludes.
Hannan said he included the Kennedy note “after much soul-searching” to contest the post-Camelot view that the president’s infidelities had made their union a loveless marriage of convenience.
Hannan believes “theirs was a relationship grounded in deep, emotional conviction until the very end.”
Moreover, Hannan says, it is “one of the greatest regrets of my priesthood” that he did not reach out to Kennedy on a sustained basis in the weeks and months after the assassination.
Two years later, Hannan was transferred from his native Washington D.C., to New Orleans, then reeling from damage by Hurricane Betsy. He remained archbishop from 1965 until 1989, when he was succeeded by Archbishop Francis Schulte.
An excerpt of the memoir, including the Jackie Kennedy letter, appeared earlier this month (June) in the online publication The Daily Beast. The book was released June 2.