Story for healing religious differences

Stories to help by-pass religious exclusivity
A homily given at several faith gatherings
New Church for a New World: A Story

Four holy persons came out of the desert: three men and a woman.

The first holy man said: "I have found the Book of Holy Wisdom that has God’s answer to everything. We will follow it in everything we do." He soon had many disciples, and they distinguished themselves by following the Sacred Book to the letter. The Book was their guide to everything, a code-book of rules for life. They distinguished themselves by their love of this book and their ability to quote it for any occasion. The Book was revered and honored by many. They had many followers.

The second holy man said, "I have found wondrous feelings of Great Devotion in our gatherings. All our talk and songs will help promote and produce these Wondrous feelings.""Many became his disciples, and they distinguished themselves and were well known by their feelings of Great Devotion and their magnificent enthusiastic praying, preaching and singing.. No one could sing and praise God the way they did. Their members were most likely to be transported into feelings of joy and even ecstacy. There were many followers..

The third holy man said, "We shall have Certain Authority of our Creeds and Traditions. We shall also distinguish ourselves by our officials having lines of authority descended from the original followers, and by officials required to be voluntary celibates. We shall centralize our authority in one man who is the appointed successor of the first apostle. "All wore special clothes to distinguish their position, ranks and titles. These holy men were greatly admired and had a large following. They were distinguished by the Correct Concepts of their creeds, their many devotions, the long history of their Traditions and their loyalty to their Supreme Leader.
There were many followers..

The fourth holy person, a woman, said, "We will find this mystery we call God by serving others wherever and whenever we can, with all the riff-raff of the world, especially the poor and suffering, even if we break some of the rules of the Ancients and don't always have special feelings. Furthermore we will make no distinctions among ourselves or others. She said anyone can do this at any time, without being in any way special, and that all people everywhere could find this Mystery of Divine Hospitality in welcoming the Stranger and outsiders. Sacred Books, Holy Devotion, or Following Distinguished Persons and Holy Creeds are useful but not essential." Many came to observe her work, but few imitated her. There was nothing noteworthy in belonging to this group except their kindness and service of others. They distinguished themselves only by their compassion for the needy.

STOP HERE FOR DISCUSSION
Why were the first three more successful in gaining followers than the fourth? Which human needs were the first three appealing to? Which of the groups gave their members feelings of specialness? Why did the third holy man have a large following? Which mystified themselves and their Way? Which of the groups was more likely to have pride and self- righteousness? Which of the groups was more likely to look down upon and disparage those who did not belong to their way? Which might be the hardest to follow? Which offered the most protection against sin and fear, uncertainty and guilt? Following which holy person requires more risk and vulnerability? Which of the holy persons, in your opinion, is the closest to the mission Jesus announced in Luke 4:18; or closest to His life? Which of these paths would others say you are now following by your life? Which group was the “most inclusively catholic?” End of group discussion. Now walk with us back through the door of your imagination for the REST of the story.)

An extraordinary event then happened. An Angel of the Lord appeared to all four, and said, “Come with me and board my Heavenly Spaceship. We are going to another planet to establish a New Church for a New World. They boarded the spaceship and it ascended. As they circled the globe, the Angel asked each to examine the globe beneath to see whether or not their faith was truly healing of the one human family.
After a few minutes, the Angel announced. “Your ways, although good and holy in themselves, are not sufficient for the New Church on the New planet. You have the next hour to see if you can agree on what shall be the sole ritual for the New Church. If you can agree we will proceed to the new planet. If you cannot agree, we are going directly to meet the Face of God and your time of earthly service is completed.”

Now, said the Angel further, “We do not expect you to figure all this out by yourselves without consulting the Spirit and Muses of your own traditions, so we suggest you each and all begin with a time of silent meditation. Then we will give you two tips for when you are ready to converse. One, there are 4-5 elements necessary. Second, we do not expect you to get all five, so we will give you the first, which is “Gather the People.”
Humans have existed on planet earth for more than a million years, but organized religiion only for the last 3-4 thousand years. What is necessary for the New Word, and what might the history of religion teach us. If yoiu were to construct your own Wisdom tradition that is non-exclusive, what form might it take. What would you do on a regular basis?

STOP HERE AGAIN FOR SMALL GROUP DISCUSSION.

Scan down for my suggestions.

The answer for the church of the New World is
1. Gather the People
2. Tell the Stories
3. Break the Bread
4. Celebrate the vision.
5. Welcome the Stranger.
(The faith community now discusses whether these activities are the necessary signs, in their own faith, of the New Church emerging)

Then the People of God will decide, and Wisdom for the New World emerges.
End of story, end of lesson and homily
(but each of us is the ongoing story...)

This is the format that has evolved with the Spiritual Growth Network of Kentucky, meeting weekly since 1989, and having missed two snow days in 18 _+ years.

Send a stamped and self-addressed envelope for a free SGN brochure and a bookmark featuring these suggested outcomes of this new Wisdom tradition for the future.

Paschal Baute
4080 Lofgren Court
Lexington, Ky 40509
tel 859-293-5302
email pbbaute@paschalbaute.com

Where is true religion?

Where is true religion?

Some notes (adapted and enhanced) from a novel by Tom Robbins (sorry, do not have the title of
by Paschal Baute, pastoral psychologist and storyteller.

Early religions were like muddy ponds with lots of foliage.
Concealed there, the fish of the soul could splash and feed.

Eventually, however, religions were politicized and taken over by the Powers That Be (PTB) When this happened religions became aquariums. Then, hatcheries. From farm fingerling to frozen fish stick is a short swim.

In religions supported by PTB, spirituality and radical response to grace could not be encouraged nor affirmed because these led to too much individuality and autonomy, splashing too high or too vigorously, and therefore threatened the status quo.

Mystics were always suspect as "out of control," either ignored. silenced, punished or in earlier times: put to death. If they heard voices that did not come from the PTB, they had to be dangerous and eliminated, like Joan of Arc, and many others. Or Galileo, restricted to his home for the last 15 years of his life. Or many other scholars who gave up or destroyed their work when they learned that the official church disapproved of it. Organized religion has always be fearful of enthusiasm. In some cases rightly so, given the vast harm done to multitudes during the religious wars of Europe, the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the fanaticism of today.

Of course, religion's omnipresent defenders are swift to point out the many comforts it provides for the sick, the weary, and the disappointed, the least, lost, last and lame.

True enough. But God/dess is not simply a therapist. The Divine Mystery does not dawdle in the comfort zone or merely provide hospitality! If one yearns to see the face of the Divine, one must break out of the aquarium, escape the fish farm, to go swim up wild cataracts, dive in deep fjords, confront the Tremendum Mysterium. One must explore the labyrinth of the reef, risk the depths of the strange, befriend the shadows of running waters.

How limiting, how insulting to think of God/dess as a benevolent warden, an absentee hatchery manager who imprisons us in the "comfort" of artificial pools, where official intermediaries sprinkle our restrictive waters with sanitized flakes of processed nutriment which we are taught to revere, and regard such feeding as the epitome of spiritual bonding, as the ultimate.


A longing for the Divine is intrinsic in Homo sapiens. (For all we know it is innate in squirrels, dandelions, and diamond rings, as well). Maybe we approach the Divine by risking faith, by enlarging our souls and illumining our minds–by discovering my own, my very own authentic spirituality. Could it be that is the reason we are here, to discover who in this vast mystery I am? . . . standing between the vastness of the cosmos and my own deep and erotic longing for the infinite, and my wandering searching? Who am I?

But such soulful search and activity runs counter to the aspirations of commerce and politics. Politics is the science of domination, while persons in the process of enlargement and illumination are notoriously difficult to control. Therefore, to protect its vested interests, politics usurped religion a very long time ago. Emperors bought off bishops with special paid appointments. Kings bought off priests and monks with land, adornments and endorsements. Together, they drained the shady ponds and replaced them with fish tanks. The walls of the tanks were constructed of ignorance and superstition, held together with fear. It was not important that the farm-bred fish understand anything or even know what they were doing. The vernacular was not necessary.

After the tanks were in place, nobody talked much about soul anymore. Instead, they talked about spirit, or about Spirit. Soul is hot and heavy, messy and sensual. Spirit is cool, abstract, detached, cognitive. Soul is connected to the earth, its waters and gases. Spirit is connected to the sky, concepts of heaven and talk of transcendence. Out of the earthly gases springs fire. Firepower. Empowerment.

It has been observed that the logical extension of all politics is war. Once religion became political, the exercise of it, too, could be said to lead sooner or later to war. "War is hell." History unwaveringly reveals the political uses of religious belief for control, domination, and oppression: war against soul. Thus religious belief propels us, we could say, particularly for devout unquestioning believers, straight to hell. Today also. Fundamentalism is the birth mother of terrorism and religious intolerance.

Each modern religion has boasted that it and it alone is on speaking terms with the Deity, and its adherents have been quite willing to die--or kill-- to support its presumptuous claims.) [a.k.a. kill abortionists for Christ, a.k.a., the blending of "religion" and politics in Ireland, Bosnia, a.k.a. Islamic terrorists, a.k.a. American fundamentalists who won't even talk to other Christians, or Catholic conservatives listening to Limbaugh who have it Right: "Liberalism is a Sin".

Not every silty bayou could be drained, of course. The soulfish that bubbled and snapped in the few remaining ponds were tagged "mystics." They were regarded as mavericks, exotic, scary, inferior, to be avoided. If they splashed too high, they were thought to be threatening and in need of extermination.

The fearful flounders in the tanks, now psychologically dependent upon addictive spirit flakes, had forgotten that once upon a time they, too, had been mystical. They had forgotten that a mystic is not a special kind of person, but every person is a special kind of mystic, a soul-fish that has lost its way.

Religion is nothing but the attempt to institutionalize mysticism, to make it "safe" for others and PTB. The catch is, mysticism does not lend itself to institutionalization. The moment we attempt to organize mysticism, we destroy its essence. Organized religion, then, is mysticism in which the mystical has been diminished, teflon coated, suppressed or killed.

The function of professional theologians is to demystify religion, to make it sane, rational and believable, while at the same time, to affirm a special class of persons to function as intermediaries of understanding and grace between the Divine and common folk. When they graduate from the seminary they cannot talk the language of the people, but they are filled with concepts of their teachers and academicians. They have become fish farm management staff. Most seminarians are less able to talk to and with common folk as the result of their new professional education.

"Concepts create idols; only wonder understands anything." Gregory of Nyssa in the Fourth Century.

Organized religion has become, by its protection of the status quo, a paramount contributor to human misery. Organized Religion no more realizes that it reads Scripture only through the lenses of its own culture, power and privilege than did Caucasian religious people read the bible finding support for slavery for 19 centuries. Organized religion has been called the opium of the masses. The question today is whether it has become a cyanide to the development of authentic disciples, to genuine spirituality, to the soul required to renew society, to the development of radical discipleship needed so urgently in today's world. Where today, in today's churches, do we find this personal search encouraged, aided, supported, enhanced, developed? Where? Where can we find an encouragement to question, to explore, to discover for oneself? Where do we even begin to look for sojourners and the mentors we need?

Bernard Haring, the Catholic theologian, or was it Karl Rahner, said that the church of the future would only be saved by its mystics. From farm fingerling to frozen fish stick is too short a short swim for those called to search for their own spirituality, to love Wisdom where-ever they find it today.

Meditation: what strikes you in this short essay?
How much risk does your faith involve? What does it cost you?

America's True Religion is Violence.

August 28, 2007

True American religion is violence

By David Truskoff

"America is, by far, the most violent country in the world when measured against comparable, industrialized nations. Violence is deeply rooted in our society and has become woven into the fabric of the American lifestyle. A culture of violence has emerged that invades our lives at every level, from our most intimate relationships at home to our schools and work environments. For many of us, violence has become an acceptable strategy for solving conflict, exerting power and control, obtaining possessions, and satisfying emotional desires. Moreover, violence has itself become entertainment, glamorized in the behavior of both real and fantasy heroes."

California Attorney General Daniel E. Lungren

Attorney General Lungren made that statement back in 1995. The situation has not improved. It has, in fact, become much worse. There have been 202 homicides in the city of Baltimore alone this year, (2007) The city is headed for at least 300 murders this year. Those are murders alone. It does not include the hundreds of non-fatal shootings.

On any given day in America one can turn on the television set and watch, Kick Boxing, women boxing, extreme fights (Where anything goes, biting, kicking, punching and knees to the groin) There is also a daily fair of so called wrestling (where grown men break metal chairs over the backs of their opponents and perform other insane violent acts.) Add to that the films such as the one that was on while I was writing this piece. I left it on because I was too busy to shut the set after the news and it was so apropros of what I was talking about. The film was titled "Wyatt Erp". In the movie men are shooting men in scene after scene. If you do not want to watch a movie there are many violent detective stories that include all kinds of murder and mayhem for you to enjoy.

After they watch the movie Americans can turn on the local evening news and see how many fellow Americans were shot, knifed or just plain killed by other means in their community. That of course is followed by the death count from Iraq.

It is true that violence is inbred in Americans. It is part of our tradition and culture. We revel in the stories of the Wild West and the horrendous Civil War. We play World War Two movies over and over. Actors who were never in the service glamorize over emphasized violence in "the Longest Day" a movie about the Normandy invasion. It is played along with many other War movies very often on movie channels.

Do not miss-understand me. I am not saying that violence belongs to Americans alone.

I remember one day when I was speaking to a convention of Church youth groups about the Civil Rights struggle in America. During the question period one young women said," I am afraid to go downtown because they (meaning Blacks) are so violent." I lost my composer, for which I later apologized. "You mean like that (N) (I used the forbidden N word) Hitler who was responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent people Or that (again the N word) Truman who dropped the atom bomb and killed 70 thousand people in one day and then a few days later did the same thing again?"

No we Americans do not have a corner on Violence. No race or ethnic group does, but we have made a religion of it. We have poisoned each generation with it and allowed the mass media to ridicule those who oppose it. We have made it into the most profitable product that we produce. Like sex, violence sells. One can not watch an American football game without seeing the joy a "Great Hit" brings to the announcers. The "Great hits" are played over and over interspersed, of course, with commercials. Violence sells.

Two subjects that American politicians dare not touch without risking burned fingers, are Gun Control and of course the plight of the Palestinians. Both of these subjects are guarded by the most powerful lobbies in Washington and a political career can be dashed on the rocks by supporting the Palestinians who are suffering from the American intercourse with the Israelis’ violence (who came by their brand of violence suckling at the breast of the American military complex) and calling for gun control to protect Americans who are also suffering from their own violence.

US Children are ten times more likely to die from gunfire than in 25 industrialized nations combined. For young black males in the US guns are the leading source of death…In 1995 one in 12 students reported carrying a firearm or some other weapon. In 2004, 81 people were shot dead every day in the US according the US center for decease control. 29,569 were killed by firearms that year.. Data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also reveals that every day; nearly eight children or teens are killed by gun violence in America which adds up to about 235 each month.

Where did they get the guns? That is the question gun control advocates continue to ask, but it is like trying to find an acceptable answer to the so called mid east crises. Everyone knows the answer, but no one can apply it. Let’s just dream for a minute. The answer to the gun lunacy can be simple. Guns, in particular hand guns, are used to kill people so the US government should take over all gun manufacturing businesses that make huge profits from the gun murder rate and see to it that only the law enforcement people and the military have guns. Why do any others need them?

There was a time, not too long ago, in England when even the Bobbies didn’t carry guns, but since the huge influx of illegal weapons they are now forced to carry them in order to protect themselves and the general public.

The gun nuts still parrot "Guns don’t kill people, People kill people." No, people with guns kill people more often. They will also quote from the second amendment to the constitution "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." June 21, 1788.

The small country of 1788 when much of the population had to hunt for food and many still worried about Indian wars was a much different place than the three hundred million divided population of present day America.

The second amendment should have been amended before the Wild West became so wild. For decades cowardly politicians have never been able to rewrite it so that it will really protect the people. After demands by law enforcement agencies who have found some of their men outgunned by outlaws (Protected by the second amendment) the best they could do is try and control military assault weapon being used by criminals. They even failed in that.

Oh my, how the neo-cons will scream. Take over an American business, that is socialism they will say. No, it is common sense to save the children and in turn save the nation. It might even inspire the United Nations members to demand weapons limitations. Of course, the merchants of death will also join the chorus and scream that is Marxism being promoted by the dangerous Peace people.

David Truskoff

www.erols.com/sutton

Face of God, via Pope Benedict.

The Face of God

WHAT BENEDICT’S ‘JESUS’ OFFERS

Peter Steinfels

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You can read Pope Benedict XVI’s Jesus of Nazareth (Doubleday, $24.95, 374 pp.) to learn about Jesus of Nazareth. Or you can read it to learn about Benedict XVI. Of course, it is not impossible to do both. In some respects, it is impossible not to do both.

My own interest, I confess, was more in Jesus than in Benedict. Jesus of Nazareth speaks to a real problem. In recent decades, historical scholarship has been churning out multiple images of Jesus and leaving the impression, the pope believes, that any understanding of Jesus as divine stems not from him but from his followers. “Intimate friendship with Jesus,” Benedict warns, “on which everything depends, is in danger of clutching at thin air.”

I think the pope is mistaken in thinking that all these images are incompatible with one another, opposed to the idea that the church’s faith in Jesus’ divinity was rooted in his own words and deeds, or merely the reflection (as Albert Schweitzer had written a century ago) of their scholarly authors’ temperaments or ideological convictions. In fact, much of this scholarship has been morally, spiritually, and intellectually invigorating.

But like the constant parade of new and better cell phones, it has also been befuddling. The sheer kaleidoscope of images-rabbinical sage, Jewish mystic, apocalyptic prophet, faith healer, revolutionary leader, philosophical provocateur, zen master, and New Age shaman-induces a tentative attitude that is hardly the basis for “intimate friendship” or, as an older language would put it, a “personal relationship” with Jesus.

One might expect that the Jesus of history would be a flesh-and-blood person, and the Christ of faith the more theoretical product of belief and doctrine. Instead, the Jesus of history turns out to be one (or several) of an array of scholarly constructs, whose shelf life may be quite limited-hardly an individual to be personally and intimately known, loved, worshiped, and followed. By contrast, it is the Christ of faith who is concrete and enfleshed, embodied in centuries of saints and experienced in family, sacraments, and a lifetime of gestures, stories, and prayers. For many Catholics like myself, moments of intimate friendship or personal relationship with Jesus are more likely to occur in returning from Communion than in encountering Scripture.

Perhaps this is the way it should be, or must be. One unhappy consequence, however, is an ecclesio-centrism eclipsing any Jesus-centrism. Jesus may symbolize a set of moral principles, even model them the way Socrates models the inquiring intellect or Gandhi models nonviolence. But the church is the locus of attachment and authority and energy. Our emotional bond is not with a person but with a tradition, an institutionally structured set of practices, beliefs, and loyalties, sometimes instanced in a local community, most often existing in our heads and psyches. The impulse to read this book to learn about Benedict more than about Jesus is a symptom of that reality.

The crux of the wider problem, of course, is not as new as Benedict supposes. It is the ancient difficulty of grasping the interior life of a person affirmed to be both human and divine, something that an intimate or personal relationship, certainly in our age, seems to demand. Until only a few decades ago, Catholicism resolved this difficulty by adopting a semi-docetism. Jesus was simply God in his internal life-his knowledge, self-understanding, and sense of mission-with a slice of humanity added on, primarily his being subject to physical pain, the anguish of rejection by those he loved, and death. This view threatened to endow Jesus with a puzzling kind of split personality, to strain the Gospel accounts, especially the synoptics, and to contradict the conviction that he was like us in everything but sin. The humanness of Jesus was doctrinally necessary; its full implications were left in the shadows.

The pendulum has swung, and now it is Jesus’ divinity that is often left in the shadows. Jesus of Nazareth attempts to challenge this disjunction between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith without returning to the earlier semi-docetism or to the biographical and devotional portraits that historical criticism has inoculated us against. The pope’s approach is one of “canonical” or “theological” exegesis (see Jack Miles, “Between Theology and Exegesis,” July 13). Major elements of the Gospel accounts are read not only with the eyes of faith but in relation to the entire story of the Bible and the drama of Israel and the pilgrim People of God.

Benedict portrays Jesus therefore as the promised new and greater Moses. Like Moses, Jesus speaks to God face to face. Unlike Moses, he also looks directly on the glory of God. And he will be the mediator of a greater, now universal covenant. His unity with God, filial communion with the Father, is the key to understanding Jesus’ words, deeds, sufferings, and triumph. For Benedict, Jesus’ frequent withdrawal for prayer, so easy to read as pauses between the acts, becomes central to the action: “He lives before the face of God [except in Gethsemane and perhaps Chapter 17 of John], not just as a friend, but as a Son; he lives in the most intimate unity with the Father.”

So the message of Jesus, first of all, above all, and before it takes on any of the varying content biblical scholarship ascribes to it, is Jesus himself, Jesus as the face of God. When Jesus proclaims the Kingdom of God, he is “quite simply proclaiming God”; the Kingdom is “at hand” because Jesus himself is. Jesus does not claim to reform the Law, whether in a permissive direction regarding the Sabbath or a more stringent one regarding marriage. Rather he claims to be the Law, to be, in his person, the new Torah. The volume ends, fittingly, on Jesus’ “I am” sayings, primarily found in John.

Jesus of Nazareth is a patchwork, not a scholarly treatise, and readers will be richly rewarded if they accept it as such. Some sections clearly derive from homilies on topics like the Lord’s Prayer or the temptations in the desert or the parables of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son. These Benedict has probably polished over years, carefully folding his scholarship into an eloquent language of reflection, exegesis, and exhortation. Other sections feature a more outright engagement with the arguments of (mostly German) biblical scholarship, making points that seem plausible, though here the cautious lay reader (like me) may want to reserve judgment until more returns come in from the scholarly precincts. But in both cases, Benedict constantly weaves the events, prayers, and symbols of the Old Testament with those of the New, producing, to me at least, powerful and fresh insights.

Because this text is generally thoughtful, measured, and serene, I found Benedict’s occasional jabs at “the so-called modern worldview,” at utopian politics, “liberal exegesis,” or “modern liturgists” jarring. The battle scars of the sixties still throb. Obviously Benedict’s intellectual stance as well as obiter dicta regarding biblical scholarship is of major interest.

In January 1988, reporting for the New York Times on then-Cardinal Ratzinger’s role at a conference on biblical studies, I was struck by both his animus against historical-critical scholarship and his tendency to characterize it almost entirely in terms of the German trajectory from Reimarus to von Harnack and on through Bultmann. Yet, to the great distress of conservative Catholics, at a closing press conference he abundantly praised the work and faith of Raymond Brown-who was sitting next to him and had politely offered a more positive assessment of recent Bible studies.

In Jesus of Nazareth, the German perspective and the somewhat dated quality of the pope’s references remain, and yet the animus seems much diminished. This is not only a matter of Benedict’s explicit expression of “profound gratitude for all that [modern exegesis] has given and continues to give to us”-specifically, that “it has opened up to us a wealth of material and an abundance of findings that enable the figure of Jesus to become present to us with a vitality and depth that we could not have imagined even just a few decades ago.” The fact is that this scholarship, whether in agreement or disagreement, is the baseline of the entire book.

In this regard, whatever its shortcomings or contestable claims, Jesus of Nazareth is leagues in advance of both the theological and biblical underpinnings of 90 percent of the preaching or catechesis encountered in Catholic America. The book has been a bestseller for more than a month. How many of those buyers will actually read it, and read it in keeping with the pope’s intention “not to counter modern exegesis”? If a thorough, open-minded assimilation of the learning and reflection in these pages were to be the mark of a new generation of Benedict XVI priests, I would certainly welcome them.

Benedict’s book does not address, let alone resolve, many a question about God and Jesus. Its central case ultimately rests on the coherence and power of its portrait of Jesus as a person for whom “communion with the Father” was “the true center of his personality.” It is a case built not on psychological speculation or devotional fervor but on an imposing web of Old and New Testament texts. It is a case I find persuasive and deeply helpful.

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ABOUT THE WRITER

Peter Steinfels

Peter Steinfels is the author of A People Adrift: The Crisis of the Roman Catholic Church in America (Simon & Schuster), and writes the “Beliefs” column for the New York Times.

Another example of the abuse of authority by bishops. . . .

Abuse Suits May Shut Down Churches

By AP/ALLISON HOFFMAN

(SAN DIEGO) — A group claiming to represent more than 1 million Roman Catholics asked a bankruptcy judge Thursday to prevent the San Diego diocese from closing or selling churches, schools and charities to settle sex-abuse cases.

The group, Parishioners for Churches and Schools, wants to join a trial set for this fall in federal bankruptcy court that will determine whether parish properties can be seized or liquidated through the Catholic Diocese of San Diego in any settlement.

Patrick Hazel, the group's president, said it would be unjust if a settlement in the cases reduced the church's ability to educate its children or perform charitable work.

"The parishioners who provided donations had no knowledge of the abuse, didn't condone it, didn't authorize it. They are innocent," Hazel said.

If the motion for intervention by the parishioners' group is granted, it would be the first such legal claim by parishioners in a bankruptcy proceeding for a U.S. diocese, according to Thomas Califano, a lawyer for the parishioners' group.

More than 140 plaintiffs who claim they were abused are seeking a settlement of about $200 million from the diocese. Their attorneys have sued the diocese in the bankruptcy court for allegedly shielding land and other holdings worth millions through transfers to parishes and schools.

Church officials deny they have hidden or illegally transferred resources.

The diocese filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection Feb. 27. It initially reported about $95 million in assets but now estimates that its assets may be worth close to $150 million. An independent audit of the diocese's accounts is being prepared under court order.

The San Diego diocese is the largest of five Catholic dioceses around the country to seek bankruptcy protection.

Irwin Zalkin, an attorney representing 54 alleged abuse victims, said his clients did not want to force churches and schools to close. He said the diocese has claimed a broad range of assets belong to its parishes.

"It includes vacant lots, it includes condos, it includes gas stations, the revenues of which flow directly to the diocese," he said.

An attorney for the diocese, Micheal Webb, welcomed the intervention of parishioners in the bankruptcy proceedings.

"They're a separate organization, but we're glad to see them here," Webb said.

A hearing has been set for Sept. 6 before Bankruptcy Judge Louise DeCarl Adler.

The parishioners' group also asked to be recognized by the federal trustee overseeing the case, Califano said. A call to U.S. trustee Steven Katzman was not immediately returned.

Earlier this month, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles agreed to pay $660 million to settle abuse claims in the largest payout yet. Cardinal Roger Mahony has said the settlement will not have an impact on local ministries and that no parish properties or schools will be sold to cover the $250 million the archdiocese will pay outright.

Pope Benedict Condemns Protestant Churches.

Pope condemns Protestant churches

By Constance Lavender

Pope Benedict XVI condemned Protestantism, and other Christian denominations, by falsely asserting that Jesus "established" only one church.

::::::::

Pope Benedict XVI condemned Protestantism, and other Christian denominations, by falsely asserting that Jesus "established" only one church.

In fact, Jesus established no church, and there is reason to believe that he did not support any organized religion.

The Pope should preoccupy himself with returning Cardinal Bernard Law to the United States to stand trial on criminal charges, he should open the priesthood to women, promote the use of condoms to prevent STDs, and abolish celibacy for priests.

Instead Benedict prefers to resurrect the Latin mass in a dead language that no one understands, he approves of the expanded use of the disgraceful practice of indulgences, and he sows division in Christendom.

________

Authors Website: http://www.blogger.com/profile/4236373

Authors Bio: Constance Lavender is an HIV-Positive pseudonymous freelance e-journalist from a little isle off the coast of Jersey; New Jersey, that is...

In the Best spirit of Silence Dogood and Benj. Franklin, Ms. Lavender believes that a free country is premised on a free press.

A Man with Little Sympathy for other Faiths: yes. Amen. Also a close-minded Roman Triiumphalist

'A man with little sympathy for other faiths'

Pope Benedict is being portrayed as a naive, shy scholar who has accidentally antagonised two major world faiths in a matter of months. In fact he is a shrewd and ruthless operator, argues Madeleine Bunting - and he's dangerous

Tuesday September 19, 2006
The Guardian

Only 18 months into his papacy and already Pope Benedict XVI has stirred up unprecedented controversy. As the explanations and apologies pour out of the Vatican - and thousands of Catholic churches around the world - the questions about what exactly this man intended by quoting a 14th-century Byzantine emperor's insult of the Prophet Mohammed have only multiplied.

Some say this was a case of naivety, of a scholarly theologian stumbling into the glare of a global media storm, blinking with surprise at the outrage he had inadvertently triggered. The learned man's thoughtful reasoning, say some, has been misconstrued and distorted by troublemakers, and the context ignored.

But such explanations are unconvincing. This is a man who has been at the heart of one of the world's multinational institutions for a very long time. He has been privy to how pontifical messages get distorted and magnified by a global media. Shy he may be, but no one has ever before accused this pope of being a remote theologian sitting in an ivory tower. On the contrary, he is a determined, shrewd operator whose track record indicates a man who is not remotely afraid of controversy. He has long been famous for his bruising, ruthless condemnation of those he disagrees with. Senior Catholic theologians such as the German Hans Kung are well familiar with the sharpness of his judgments.

But in the 18 months since Benedict was elected, the wary critics who have always feared this man were lulled into believing that office might have softened his abrasive edges. His encyclical on love won widespread acclaim and the pronouncement on homosexuality being incompatible with the priesthood (and its inference that homosexuals were to blame for the child sex abuse problems in the church) were explained away as an inheritance from Pope John Paul II's reign.

But while the Pope has tried to build a more appealing public image, what has become increasingly clear is that this is a man with little sympathy or imagination for other religious faiths. Famously, the then Cardinal Ratzinger once referred to Buddhism as a form of masturbation for the mind - a remark still repeated among deeply offended Buddhists more than a decade after he said it. Even his apology at the weekend managed to bring Jews into the row.

In fact, Pope Benedict XVI's short papacy has marked a significant departure from the previous pope's stance on interreligious dialogue. John Paul II made some dramatic gestures to rally world religious leaders, the most famous being a gathering in Assisi of every world faith, even African animists, to pray for world peace. He felt keenly the terrible history of Catholic-Jewish relations, and having fought with the Polish resistance to save Jews in the second world war, John Paul II made unprecedented efforts to begin to heal centuries of hostility and indifference on the part of the Catholic church to Europe's Jews. John Paul II also addressed himself to the ancient enmity between Muslims and Catholics; he apologised for the Crusades and was the first Pope to visit a mosque during a visit to Syria in 2001.

In contrast, Pope Benedict has managed to antagonise two major world faiths within a few months. The current anger of Muslims is comparable to the anger and disappointment felt by Jews after his visit to Auschwitz in May. He gave a long address at the site of the former concentration camp and failed to mention anti-semitism, and offered no apology - whether on behalf of his own country, Germany, or on behalf of the Catholic Church. He acknowledged he was a "son of the German people" ... "but not guilty on that account"; he then launched into a highly controversial claim that a "ring of criminals" were responsible for nazism and that the German people were as much their victims as anyone else. This is an argument that has long been discredited in Germany as utterly inadequate in explaining how millions supported the Nazis. Given his own involvement in the Hitler Youth movement as a boy, and his refusal to make a clean breast of the Vatican's acquiescence in the horrors of Nazism by opening its archives to historians, this was a shabby moment in Catholic history. Not for this pope those dramatic, epoch-defining gestures that made the last Pope such a significant global figure.

Even worse, in his Auschwitz address, he managed to argue in a long theological exposition that the real victims of the Holocaust were God and Christianity. As one commentator put it, he managed to claim that Jews were the "themselves bit players - bystanders at their own extermination. The true victim was a metaphysical one." This theological treatise bears the same characteristics as last week's Regensburg lecture; put at its most charitable, they are too clever by half. More plainly speaking, they indicate a deep arrogance rooted in a blinkered Catholic triumphalism which is utterly out of place in the 21st century.

But if his visit to Auschwitz disappointed many and failed to resolve outstanding resentments about the murky role of German Catholicism, this latest incident seems even worse. Quoting Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologos, he said: "Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." It was a gratuitous reawakening of the most entrenched and self-serving of western prejudices - that Muslims have a unique proclivity to violence, a claim that has no basis in history or in current world events (a fact that still eludes too many westerners). Even more bewildering is the fact that his choice of quotation from Manuel II Paleologos, the 14th-century Byzantine emperor, was so insulting of the Prophet. Even the most cursory knowledge of dialogue with Islam teaches - and as a Vatican Cardinal, Pope Benedict XVI would have learned this long ago - that reverence for the Prophet is a non-negotiable. What unites all Muslims is a passionate devotion and commitment to protecting the honour of Muhammad. Given the scale of the offence, the carefully worded apology, actually, gives little ground; he recognises that Muslims have been offended and that he was only quoting, but there is no regret at using such an inappropriate comment or the deep historic resonances it stirs up.

By an uncanny coincidence the legendary Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci died last week. No one connected the two events, but the Pope had already run into controversy in Italy by inviting the rabid Islamophobe to a private audience just months ago. This is the journalist who published a bestseller in 2001 which amounted to a diatribe of invective against Islam. This is the woman who was only too happy to fling out comments such as "Muslims breed like rats" and "the increasing presence of Muslims in Italy and Europe is directly proportional to our loss of freedom." At the time of her papal audience, Fallaci's ranting against Islam had landed her in court and there was outrage at the Pope's insensitive invitation. The Pope refused to backtrack and insisted the meeting was purely "pastoral".

Put last week's lecture in Bavaria and the Fallaci audience alongside his vocal opposition to Turkish membership of the EU, and the picture isn't pretty. On one of the biggest and most volatile issues of our day - the perceived clash between the west and the Muslim world - the Pope seems to have abdicated his papal role of arbitrator, and taken up the arms in a rerun of a medieval fantasy.

An elderly Catholic nun has already been killed in Somalia, perhaps in retaliation for the Pope's remarks; churches have been attacked in the West Bank. How is this papal stupidity going to play out in countries such as Nigeria, where the tensions between Catholics and Muslims frequently flare into riots and death? Or other countries such as Pakistan, where tiny Catholic communities are already beleaguered? Or the Muslim minorities in Catholic countries such as the Philippines - how comfortable do they feel this week?

Two lines of thought emerge from this mess. The first is that the Pope's personal authority has been irrevocably damaged; how now could he ever present himself as a figure of global moral authority and a peacemaker after this? At the weekend, a message was read out from Cardinal Murphy O'Connor at all masses in Catholic churches in England; he spoke of the regret at any offence caused and urged good relations between Catholics and Muslims. For a church that prides itself on taking centuries to respond, this was unprecedented crisis management. It cannot but damage the pope's authority with the faithful that such emergency measures were necessary, and it compromises not just this pope but the papal office itself. (This is a job, after all, that is supposed to be divinely guided and at all times beyond reproach: a claim that looks a bit threadbare after the past few days.)

The second is a more disturbing possibility: namely, that the Catholic church could be failing - yet again - to deal with the challenge of modernity. In the 19th and 20th centuries, it struggled to adapt to an increasingly educated and questioning faithful; now, in the 21st century, it is in danger of failing the great challenge of how we forge new ways of accommodating difference in a crowded, mobile world. The Catholic church has to make a dramatic break with its triumphalist, bigoted past if it is to contribute in any constructive way to chart this new course. John Paul II made some dramatic steps in this direction; but the fear now is that Pope Benedict XVI has no intention of following suit, and that he has another direction altogether in mind.

More from Pope Benedict

On homosexuality
"Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder. Therefore special concern and pastoral attention should be directed toward those who have this condition, lest they be led to believe that the living-out of this orientation in homosexual activity is a morally acceptable option. It is not."

On Buddhism
"Auto-erotic spirituality."

The ordination of women
On the excommunication of seven women who called themselves priests: "... the penalty imposed is not only just, but also necessary, in order to protect true doctrine, to safeguard the communion and unity of the church, and to guide consciences of the faithful."