DALLAS - Another day, another video showing Sarah Palin in church.

The latest Palin You Tube video to show up on the Internet features grainy footage of John McCain's vice presidential running mate receiving a blessing against witchcraft in a Pentecostal church in her hometown of Wasilla, Alaska.

You can see the video here. Palin says nothing in it and keeps her head bowed throughout the blessing that was reportedly given by a Kenyan pastor and witch hunter.

The video, like a previous one in which Palin tells a congregation that U.S. troops in Iraq were on a "task from God,"  has been widely reported and commented on. It reportedly was made in 2005 before she was elected governor of Alaska. It began circulating on the Internet this week.

Palin is an evangelical who has ignited the Republican Party's conservative Christian base. But incidents such as this one have raised eyebrows in some quarters, especially among foreign media covering the U.S. campaign in the run-up to the Nov. 4 election between McCain/Palin and Democrats Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

The online edition of Britain's Telegraph newspaper said the incident recalled the damaging reports that Obama faced over his links to pastor Jeremiah Wright, who made stridently anti-American sermons.

To see some domestic media criticism, click here.

Some U.S. evangelicals will see nothing strange in a Pentecostal service evoking witchcraft. And many others will no doubt say what a candidate does in a church is nobody else's business. 

Are candidates, their pastors and what they do in church fair game in this election year? Or not?

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.

Photo credit: REUTERS/Brian Snyder  (Palin listens to McCain at the Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting in New York on Sept. 25, 2008)

Faithful America, an online community of religiously-motivated activists, is running an ad on Christian and country music radio stations in Mississippi and Tennessee urging Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and his Republican rival John McCain to stick to the truth in their televised debate on Friday.

“Unfortunately, politicians are often more interested in scoring political points and attacking each other than in telling us the whole truth about how they’re going to lead our nation,” it says.

“.. our politicians need to understand that the Ninth Commandment wasn’t just a suggestion,” it says, refering to the biblical commandement which says not to bear false witness against your neighbor.*

The campaign has been getting increasingly nasty with both sides accusing the other of distorting the truth in attacks on the other.

Friday’s first debate at the University of Mississippi in Oxford will focus on foreign policy and national security, an area of strength for McCain, 72, a former prisoner of war in Vietnam who has been a staunch advocate of U.S. military involvement in Iraq.

Faithful America comprises a number of religious traditions and is devoted to action in areas mostly associated with U.S. liberals or progressives such as ending poverty, promoting peace and tackling climate change.

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* Ninth commandment? Eighth commandment? It’s the eighth for Roman Catholics and Lutherans, ninth for all other Christians and Jews.

If there is one thing you can usually count upon while working as a journalist in the United States – and in particular if you happen to be British like myself – is that Americans are not only unafraid of talking to the media, many do so without hesitation. It is an endearing characteristic of the American people, a wonderful sign that they are not afraid to stand up and be heard.

But in the six months that I spent working on my feature “For many Christians, it’s God before mortgage” that ran on Sept 21, I ran into a wall of silence for the first time since coming to work in the United States three years ago.

It all began back in February, while working on a series of feature stories that I compiled on the U.S. housing crisis. In interviews with non-profit counsellors in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Atlanta and then Memphis, the subject of tithing and how some struggling home owners would rather lose their homes than cease their payments to the church kept coming up.

At first in Chicago, I confess that I all but ignored the topic. I was focused on trying to get a handle on the scale of the housing meltdown and its implications – the fallout of which has been all too evident on Wall Street in recent weeks. Interesting, I thought to myself, how someone’s obligation to God and the church would take precedence over their earthly home, and filed away the comments for later use.

But as February turned to March and April and interviews in Atlanta, Memphis, then St Louis, Dallas brought up the same topic again and again, I knew I had found a fascinating story. Getting counsellors, religious leaders, academics and researchers to comment on the story was no problem – but the difficult part was finding a home owner to talk about it.

Non-profit groups that have spoken to hundreds of thousands of stricken home owners around the country while trying to deal with the biggest housing slowdown since the Great Depression agreed to put me in touch with tithing home owners who had chosen to lose their homes rather than break off their commitment to God.

Again and again over the course of four months, I received an email from a counsellor from Atlanta or Memphis, upstate New York or southern California telling me that they had found a home owner I could talk to for my story. But more often than not, those home owners changed their minds when they answered the phone, or when I turned up on their doorstep to talk. “It’s too personal,” was the almost inevitable explanation.

Those who would talk did so warily and always – to my dismay – having stated quite clearly that anything they had to say was off-the-record and that under no circumstances did they want their names to appear in the press.

Finally, in August, I tracked down a woman in St Louis who said she would talk to me for my story and agreed to do so on-the-record. But as she was recovering from surgery, she asked me to call her in a week to talk. On the verge of what I saw as a key step – providing a real person as an illustration for my story – I readily agreed.

But when I called back a week later, she had changed her mind. “I don’t want people thinking I’m crazy,” she said. We talked at great length about her faith, her commitment to God and that after 30 years of tithing to the church she would rather face foreclosure than break that contract with her God.

She told me in detail about the good works of her church, why tithing mattered so much to her. She relished the chance to talk but after an hour on the phone it was clear there was nothing I could do to persuade her to let me use her name.

At this point I had reached a dead-end. After six months, I knew I was unlikely to find a home owner to talk on-the-record. Academics and religious researchers told me this came as no surprise because tithing is such a deeply personal and private issue and said I should give up on trying to find anyone to talk. So this left me and my bureau chief in Chicago, Peter Bohan, facing a dilemma.

What we had was a story that shed some light on how much faith matters to some Americans, to the extent where it is more important than their homes. But we had no one to link that story to. After much deliberation, we decided that the story was simply too interesting to let it go and we decided it had to go to print.

That said, I am still searching for a passionate, tithing American Christian who has lost their home rather than give up making payments to the church and is willing to talk to me about it. Next time, I’d like to use someone’s name.

Anyone out there ready to talk?

Egyptian cleric Yusef Al-Qaradawi has provoked a storm of criticism with comments this month attacking Shi’ites for alleged attempts to proselytize in Sunni Arab societies. It’s a debate which has been bubbling since 2003 when the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein — which the Sunni Arab governments didn’t like but know how to live with — was removed by the American-led invasion and ultimately replaced by a Shi’ite government reflecting the demographic superiority of Shi’ites in Iraq today.

Free to contact work with fellow Shi’ites in neighbouring Iran and develop links with the powerful Shi’ites of Lebanon and even with the more precariously-placed Shi’ites in the Gulf Arab coutnries, the rise of the Shi’ites in Iraq has been nothig less than a seismic shift in the region’s potical landscape. Numerous Arab leaders have shown their concern with comments suggesting a crescent of Shi’ite power was developing across the region from Lebanon to Iran (as Jordan’s King Abdullah has said) or that Arab Shi’ites real loyalties are to Iran (according to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak).

Qaradawi’s intervention is of equal import. He is one of the most influential of Sunni religious figures, a former Muslim Brotherhood sheikh in Egypt who settled in Qatar where Al-Jazeera television gave him a weekly television show. His opinions generally reflect the mainstream of Islamist thinking, veering neither into the rigid obsessions of Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabism nor appearing to compromise principles for the sake of a modernity that suits the West.

In an interview with the Egyptian paper Al-Masry Al-Youm (in Arabic) on Sept. 9, he was asked which was more worrisome, Wahhabism or Shi’ism. He offered a brief, yet tart, crticism of Saudi Islam, then launched into the “danger of Shi’ism” discourse, which has centred mainly on unsubstantiated claims of Shi’ism’s spread in Syria. “They are Muslims but they have innovated (new ideas into Islam) and their danger is their attempt to invade Sunni society, and they are ready for it since they have billions in wealth and cadres trained to proselytize Shi’ism in Sunni countries,” he said. “Unfortunately, I have recently found Egyptian Shi’ites. Ten years ago they wouldn’t have succeeded in getting one. … Now they are in the newspapers, on television and come out openly with their Shi’ite beliefs. Shi’ites hide their beliefs and that’s what we have to watch out for. We have to protect Sunni societies from the Shi’ite invasion.”

UPDATE: Here’s a Qaradawi interview in English on Shi’ites from Asharq Al-Alawsat.

Governments are worried about Shi’ism for political reasons, because Iran and Hizbollah are championing resistance to Western hegemony, while the Sunni Arab governments have been about accommodating Western power ever since Egypt signed the Camp David accords and since Saudi Arabia came into existence. Shi’ism has a certain revolutionary chic that is attractive to many Arabs today. Shi’ism’s central principle of venerating the family of the Prophet has an innocent-sounding air to most as well, although in points of theology it involves some radical breaks with Sunni thinking.

Saudi Shi’ite clerics were furious about Qaradawi’s comments since they instantly bring alive an argument they have been trying desperately to counter in order to ensure a better place for themselves as a persecuted minority in Saudi Arabia (here’s one cleric responding in Arabic on the Saudi Shi’ite website Rasid.com). Interestingly, though, Saudi media have for once been sympathetic to them, even highlighting Sheikh Hassan al-Saffar’s response on the front page of al-Watan on Saudi National Day, Sept. 23. “Saffar differs with Qaradawi and rejects criticising his status,” the headline read.

The Al-Riyadh newspaper carried a frontpage article apologising to Shi’ites for having publicising Qaradawi’s comments, which fly in the face of King Abdullah’s policy of promoting dialogue among Islamic sects and moderation. “Sectarian Islam, or the Islam of one faith?” al-Riyadh asked in a frontpage editorial on Sept. 24, also marking National Day.

One could not conclude, however, that the Saudi leadership is trying to distance itself from Sunni radicalism while Egypt encourages it. The calculations are too complicated. Saudi Arabia has led the regional mobilisation against Iran and Shi’ism of recent years, taking Egypt along with it. It has also sought to improve its Shi’ite minority’s status. Both are strategies that aim to secure the stability of the country from external enemies, like Iran, or friends, like the United States after 9/11, who occasionally entertain the idea of reordering the polities of the Arabian peninsula.

The all-male Greek Orthodox monastic community of Mount Athos, a favourite stop for top Greek and foreign dignitaries such as Prince Charles but completely close to women, has long been a haven for those forsaking earthly pleasures to seek God.

You can imagine the shock, then, when Greeks learned that one of its main monasteries, the Vatopedi monastery dating back to the late 10th century, was conducting suspect land-swap deals with the Greek state.

According to Greek media, Vatopedi had nearly clinched a deal to exchange Vistonida Lake in northern Greece — which it claimed through 1,000-year-old documents — for  prime real estate elsewhere in Greece. The deal reportedly would have meant a substantial loss to the state.

It then emerged that the wife of a conservative government minister was the notary agent in the deal. The minister resigned over this and other suspect real estate dealings and the swap was suspended pending a judicial probe.

This and other scandals, as well as unpopular new taxes, have brought the government’s popularity to a 4-year low, for the first time falling behind the Socialist opposition, and analyst say snap elections may be called as early as next year.

Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis, who swept to power in 2004 vowing to fight corruption, has seen some of his closest aides implicated in suspected wrongdoing, threatening his 152-seat majority in the 300-seat parliament.

Conservative deputies have said the swap had started before New Democracy came to power and the monastery asked for light to be shed on the case to absolve it of any wrongdoing. “We are certain in our belief that all actions of the Holy Monastery have been legal and completely transparent,” Vatopedi said in a statement.

Monks on Mount Athos have expressed shock, saying that if the allegations are true, they do not speak for all 20 monasteries or the many ascetics living in medieval isolation from the modern world.

But pictures of Vatopedi Abbot Efraim socialising with senior Greek politicians, as well as official documents pushing the property deal published in Athens dailies, clashed with the image of Athos monks living in poverty, toiling in the fields and praying.

“From a natural paradise and a way for the faithful to find Heaven, Athos has become a tax and real estate haven,” said senior Leftist Coalition party member Alekos Alavanos.

The question now is how serious a blow all this is to the government.  The major liberal daily Ta Nea had this to say on its front page last week: “Karamanlis sinks in the Vatopedi swamp.”

N.B. — the above picture, from Ta Nea’s front page last week, shows Abbott Efraim under the red-lettered headline “Revelation” (in the original Greek, apocalypse) — “Vatopedi Monastery — they gave a lake, they took building plots.”

Wall Street’s woes have prompted some to seek solace in an old stand by — religion.

To read my colleague Christine Kearney’s report on this trend, click here.

 Reverend Mark Bozzuti-Jones of Trinity Church Wall Street summed it up this way: “The economic financial crisis is a reminder that we cannot put our faith in riches, that we cannot put our faith in money.”

(Photo Credit: REUTERS/Keith Bedford, March 21, 2008, UNITED STATES)

Argentina is making a second bid to improve relations with the Vatican after its first attempt caused a diplomatic blunder because Buenos Aires proposed a divorced Catholic with a live-in partner as its new ambassador to the Holy See. The new nominee is reported to be a safer bet. Former government minister Juan Pablo Cafiero is married and the father of four children. In a radio interview over the weekend, he defended the centre-left government as  “the first government in decades that has focused on the distribution of wealth and a preference for the poor … linked to a concept of social justice that is based on humanistic, Christian thinking.”

Local media reported earlier this year that Argentina might leave the post vacant after the Vatican gave a thumbs down to former Justice Minister Alberto Iribarne. The Vatican never actually rejected his nomination. It just never confirmed it, which was a clear message that he didn’t have a prayer. As befits a future ambassador, Cafiero made no reference to that diplomatic faux pas.

The Roman Catholic Church does not approve of divorce and Catholics who do end their marriages are required to seek an annulment from the Church before they can remarry with the Church’s blessing.

Relations with the Church were rocky under the government of Nestor Kirchner, the husband and predecessor of President Cristina Fernandez.  He criticized church complicity during the country’s brutal 1976-1983 military dictatorship. And his health minister, who favored loosening restrictions on abortion, had an ugly, public spat with the bishop that tended to the country’s military forces. That bishop was removed and never replaced, and rumors have abounded that the government wants to scrap the post of military bishop altogether as a way of retaliating against the Vatican.

Fernandez tried to patch up ties after taking office last December, meeting right away with the head of the Argentine Bishops’ Conference.  But she stumbled when the Vatican quietly rejected her nomination of Iribarne as ambassador to the Holy See.

A far-right movement opposed to the construction of a large mosque in Cologne, Germany planned a “Stop Islam” rally there on Saturday. About 1,500 protesters were expected from across Germany, but also from France, Belgium and Austria. Muslim and left-wing groups mobilised. Iran and the Organisation of the Islamic Conference protested. Cologne deployed about 3,000 police. It looked like a major clash was looming.

As it turned out, only a few dozen anti-mosque activists turned up for the rally in central Cologne’s Hay Market square. Waiting for them were 40,000 demonstrators who blocked their way, sometimes violently. Among their tactics was blocking trams to keep them from arriving at Hay Market square (as in picture below). There was so much sporadic violence that police finally banned the rally altogether.

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the country’s leading serious newspaper, thinks this was like using a sledge hammer to kill a fly. “Maybe the most sovereign answer to the rally would have been to ignore it, like Lord Mayor Schramma said early last week when he suggested closing down Hay Market square — close your windows and doors, roll down the shutters and show the right-wing populists the cold shoulder.”

Agitation against new mosques is seen around Europe (we blogged on Italy here last week) and a recent survey said anti-Muslim feelings were on the rise.  The anti-mosque group has announced it will appeal the ban. Are the media giving too much attention to these groups? Is this the time to simply ignore this agitation or should governments take stronger steps against it?

On October 9, Pope Benedict will lead the Roman Catholic Church in marking the 50th anniversary of the death of Pope Pius XII. There is a lot of interest in what Benedict will say in his homily about his predecessor, arguably the most controversial pontiff of the 20th century because of what he did or did not do to save Jews during the Holocaust. On October 21, the Vatican will open a photographic exhibition on his papacy and on Nov 6-8, two pontifical universities in Rome, the Lateran and the Gregorian, will jointly sponsor a conference on his papacy.

An indication of what Benedict might say on October 9 can be found in his address on September 18 to the Pave the Way Foundation, a mixed Jewish-Catholic group based in the United States and headed by Gary Krupp, a Jew who is also a Knight Commander of the Pontifical Equestrian Order of St Gregory the Great.  Pave the Way held a unique three-day symposium in Rome in the days leading up to their audience with the pope at his summer residence at Castel Gandolfo.

The title of the symposium was “Examining the Papacy of Pope Pius XII”. It was attended by, among others, panalists such as Sister Magherita  Marchione, an American nun who is feisty despite her 86 years and who has written extensively in defence of Pius, Fr. Peter Gumpel, the Jesuit who is the relator of the cause for Pius’ sainthood, Eugene J. Fisher, who was in charge of Catholic-Jewish relations for the U.S. National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB) from 1997 to 2007, and Andrea Tornielli, an Italian journalist who has  has written extensively on Pius XII and whose most recent biography on the pontiff was released last year.

One interesting aspect of the symposium was the 200-page dossier that it produced. It is a very useful, user-friendly compendium in defence of Pius. While much of the material was already known to scholars, seeing it all between two covers could potentially sway some of Pius’s detractors.

For example,  it contains a confidential 1939 State Department memo from a U.S. diplomat who knew Pius when he was Vatican nuncio in Berlin before the war and before he became pope. He said that, in a meeting with the then Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the future pontiff described Hitler as “not only as an untrustworthy scoundrel but as a fundamentally wicked person.” The diplomat said Pius had told him he “opposed unalterably every compromise with National Socialism”.

The dossier also includes many other entries from individuals and scholars aimed at debunking the concept made popular first in 1963 with the publication of Rolf Hochhuth’s play The Deputy, which accused Pius of being an anti-Semite and a Hitler collaborator, and later in 1999 following John Cornwell’s highly controversial book calling Pius Hitler’s Pope. The symposium’s dossier also includes copies of of newspaper clippings from The New York Times, Reuters, The Associated Press, Palestine Post (later Jerusalem Post) and other news organisations in the period before, during and after the war reporting on Pius efforts to help the Jews and his speeches on their behalf.

While the dossier, much of which is available on-line, may  not convince the most hardened of Pius’ detractors, it certainly is a very useful addition to the ongoing debate in what may prove to be a pivitol year.

Rome isn’t the only place where Pius is under review. In Germany, Hubert Wolf, a Catholic priest and church history professor at Münster University, has just published Papst und Teufel (Pope and Devil), a study of Vatican relations with Germany in the turbulent period from 1917 to 1939. Based on documents from the Vatican archive, whose files have been opened up until Pius’s election as pope in 1939, Wolf recounts the internal Vatican debates on how to deal with the Nazis, whether to put Hitler’s Mein Kampf on the Index of Prohibited Books (they didn’t) and how to speak out against growing anti-Semitism in Germany (through the 1937 encyclical Mit brennender Sorge).

What do you think about Pius? Has he been maligned? Is the tide of opinion turning in his favour?

Stephen Tong is one gutsy pastor. On Saturday, the head of the Indonesian Reformed Evangelical Church opened a multimillion dollar megachurch in Jakarta, capital of the world’s most populous Muslim nation. “This proves that there are no restrictions from the Indonesian government to build religious centres,” the Chinese- Indonesian preacher said. “It gives the world a new impression of Indonesia: it is not a messy country or full of troubles.”

Indonesia has traditionally been a tolerant country, but this tolerance is under pressure from Islamist radicals who want to drive wedges between the country’s Muslim majority (86%), Protestants (6%), Catholics (6%), Hindus (1.8%) and other faiths. Just last month, an evangelical seminary was forced out of a predominantly Muslim neighbourhood in Jakarta. The annual U.S. State Department freedom of religion report released on Friday reported radical pressure on Christians and on the Ahmadis, a non-orthodox Muslim sect:

“Some groups used violence and intimidation to force at least 12 churches and 21 Ahmadiyya mosques to close. Several churches and Ahmadiyya mosques remained closed after mobs forcibly shut them down in previous years. Some Muslim organizations and government officials called for the dissolution of the Ahmadiyya, resulting in some violence and discrimination against its followers. Some perpetrators of violence were undergoing trials during the reporting period. However, many perpetrators of past abuse against religious minorities were not brought to justice.”

Some analysts have said the megachurch, rather than being a monument to the country’s religious tolerance, reflects a reaction among Christians to seek safety in numbers as they stand up for their place in Indonesian society. Three other megachurches are due to open soon, the Wall Street Journal reported recently. The question now is whether these will be taken as provocations … and what might happen next.
“The danger is if several parties perceive the church as a way to Christianise people. That could provoke hatred,” Syafi’i Anwar, director of the International Centre for Islam and Pluralism (ICIP), told Reuters. “It is not proof that religious tolerance is running well here. Recently, there has been increasing pressure on the government from hardline groups over freedom of faith.”

It sounds like one of these men has to be wrong. Let’s hope it’s not Tong.