Cardinal Oscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga has denied throwing his red zucchetto (clerical skullcap) into the ring as a possible candidate to become the next pope. As we’ve already blogged here and here, the publication of a French book of interviews with the archbishop of Tegucigalpa last month has been interpreted by some Vatican watchers as subtle self-promotion — una autocandidatura, as they say in Rome. This was bolstered by unfounded speculation about Pope Benedict’s health, which seems quite good for a man of his age (81).

Now, in an interview with the Milan daily Il Giornale, Rodríguez Maradiaga has dismissed this speculation as a “mistaken interpretation” of his words. Most importantly, he said the interview in question took place in 2004, before the death of Pope John Paul II and simply expressed an obvious fact being discussed at the time. “Of course, the day will come for a pope from the South, as it came for one from the East,” he said. “At no time have I thought of myself as papabile (a possible pope). I have much to do in my beloved Honduras and I’ve never thought of putting my name forward.“

Kudos to Il Giornale’s Vatican correspondent Andrea Tornielli for tracking this down. The book in question, a collection of the cardinal’s interviews with a French journalist in Rome, states the conversations were held in 2006 or 2007. Soon after the speculation began in the French press, Tornielli challenged the date of these “recycled quotes” on his blog Sacri Palazzi. He later nailed down the date as 2004.

That said, Rodríguez Maradiaga remains a dynamic, attractive and relatively young (65) cardinal whose name will stay high on the list of possible papal candidates.

The light being cast on China by the coming Summer Games is far brighter than the flickering Olympic flame now wending its way across that vast country. Politics, society, human rights, the status of Tibet and even the environment have been widely discussed.

Now a window has been opened on faith and religion in a country where six decades of Communist philosophy and rule might seem to have pushed those subjects into obscurity.

In a recent report the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life has analyzed available surveys, some a few years old, and concluded that 31 percent of the Chinese population considers religion to be very or somewhat important in their lives, with only 11 percent rating it as meaningless. Even the exact starting time of the Summer Olympics is rooted in Confucianism and Chinese folk religions,  the report adds, where the numeral 8 is revered for its luck and power. The games will start on the 8th day of the 8th month of ‘08 at precisely 8 minutes and 8 seonds past 8 o’clock.

This does not mean that religious affiliation is high in China. Only one in five adults has an active connection, the report says, with one of the country’s five major religions — Buddhism (by far the largest single group), Protestantism, Catholicism, Islam and Taoism. That compares to 8 in every 10 adults in the United States who claim a religious affiliation.

But a recent report from East China Normal University in Shanghai appearing in state-approved media said that about 300 million Chinese over 16 — slghtly less than a third of the population in that age group — are religious, perhaps indicating the government has given recognition to the depth of religious sentiment.

The question is whether China’s modernization brought about by its economic engine will bring religion into society in a bigger way. The report notes that Hu Jintao, general secretary of the country’s Communist Party, earlier this year told the Chinese Politburo the leadedrship should try to “closely unite religious figures and believers … to build an all-around … prosperous society while quickening the pace toward the modernization of socialism.”

Photo credits: Reuters/Bobby Yip/David Gray

“The Good Death,” a play about euthanasia, has brought the issue of “mercy killing” to Dutch theatres at a time when such deaths are falling. They dropped to 2,325, or 1.7 percent of all deaths in 2005, from 2.6 percent in 2001. Playing to packed houses throughout the Netherlands, which legalised euthanasia in 2002, the play shows the law has not removed the moral dilemma for many involved.

In fact, part of the reason for the drop in euthanasia deaths could be that agonised doctors are opting to give patients heavy sedation until they die, rather than putting an end to their lives. Even some patients who have asked for euthanasia are given continuous deep sedation instead. This feature by our Netherlands chief correspondent Emma Thomasson looks at the issues involved.

This raises the question of whether deep sedation, while being presented as palliative care that is ethically acceptable for many faiths, is not in fact “euthanasia lite.” Or at least whether it is being used as such. The British Medical Journal has suggested this in a report that prompted an editorial and a lively reader discussion. “Although the exact cause of this trend is unclear, there are indications that continuous deep sedation may in some cases be being used as a substitute for euthanasia,” a report in Science Daily said.

The fall in Dutch euthanasia deaths is sometimes cited by “death in dignity” campaigners in other European countries as a sign that legalisation is not a slippery slope towards the easy disposal of ailing patients. This suggests it might lead in another direction that could undermine the palliative care option often presented as the alternative to legalised euthanasia.

Where do you think the line should be drawn in end-of-life care?

The issue of Mormon proxy baptisms has resurfaced with the news that the Vatican has written to Catholic dioceses around the world telling them not to provide parish records to the Genealogical Society of Utah. As the Catholic News Service reported last week, the letter calls proxy baptism using these records “detrimental” and says the Vatican did not want Catholic parishes “to cooperate with the erroneous practices of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints”. Mormons use genealogical data to find names of people to baptise posthumously, a practice the Roman Catholic Church rejects on theological grounds.

The LDS Church has not yet replied, but the comments section of the Church-owned Deseret News has erupted with hundreds of entries. Many are from Mormons who cannot understand why anyone would object to their baptism of the dead. Several criticise the Vatican for withholding the data, arguing it actually belongs to the general public. Other blogs have also been commenting for (mostly Mormon — see here, here, here, here, here) and against (mostly Catholic — see here, here, here, here, here). There are also critical comments from Mormons and ex-Mormons (see here, here, here).

Most of this commentary misses the point. There is no way either side is going to agree on proxy baptisms; different religions exist precisely because they disagree on fundamental issues. It is also futile to argue about religious freedom, because obviously both Churches have the right to practise their faith. The idea that one religion’s teachings give it a right to another religion’s data is also a non-starter.

The real issue is not theology, but privacy. The Vatican does not recognise Mormon baptisms anyway, so it has long ignored the proxy baptism issue. However thanks to the Internet, large numbers of names of saints, popes and average Catholics have been published in recent years on Mormon baptism lists that are available for all to see. Pontiffs have even been “sealed” in eternal Mormon marriage to fictitious wives despite the celibacy rule for Catholic clergy. Is publishing names for posthumous baptism on the Internet (in its International Genealogical Index – IGI) an invasion of privacy, especially when done without the permission of the living families of the people concerned?

This is not just an issue for Catholics, Jews asked similar questions in the 1990s, after finding Holocaust victims on the IGI. After strong Jewish protests, the Church agreed in 1995 to stop proxy baptising them, a step that seemed to indicate some recognition of a problem. However, names of Jews have continued to appear over the years, including that of Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal in 2006. According to Helen Radkey, a researcher who specialises on the IGI, “In 2008, the Church is still posthumously baptising Jewish Holocaust victims, against the terms of the agreement it signed with Jewish groups on May 3, 1995.”

(NB: The Vatican has had its own issues with offending Jews and Muslims and was roundly criticised for them.)

We have tried asking about the privacy issue in the past but got no answer. The spokespeople at the LDS Church in Salt Lake City were invariably polite, helpfully provided detailed information about Mormon beliefs and said Mormons were “deeply saddened” to learn that some non-Mormons were offended by seeing co-religionists or deceased family members on the IGI. However, they did not address the key question about publishing this. When asked why they did not at least monitor the list, which includes many noted and notorious names, they said too many Mormons submitted too many names every year for proxy baptism for the Church to vet them all. Mormons were supposed to ask living family members before baptising anyone born in the past 95 years, but the records show this is often ignored.

The question here is not about the rights or wrongs of proxy baptism. That is an internal Mormon issue and, since they are performed secretly in temples that non-Mormons cannot enter, it can stay an internal Mormon issue. When the names of those proposed for baptism are published on the Internet for all to see (even if lists with all details of the baptisms are kept in genealogy centres only open to Mormons), is this still an internal affair or does it enter the public sphere?And if it does, what should the LDS Church do to respond to other faiths offended by this? The usual answers — that this is an important Morman practice, a gift to the dead, one that they can decline — have not convinced Jews or Catholics.

While trying to come up with a counter-example to illustrate this problem, I came across a post by Sharon Lindbloom on the Mormon Coffee blog (whose name alone shows it is not orthodox Mormon). She asked what the LDS Church would think if “a powerful and influential group” created a public database of prominent Mormons and “attached to each name is a letter of resignation from LDS Church membership, sent by proxy to Church headquarters in Salt Lake City.” She concluded: “I suspect Latter-day Saints would be very upset over Mormon pioneer proxy resignations from the LDS Church. They may even believe it to be an injustice to the memories of their loved-ones…”

A group of mostly centrist U.S. evangelicals released a lengthy manifesto on Wednesday which called for the movement to pull back from explicit partisan political activity, saying faith was being used to express “political points that have lost touch with biblical truth.”

Leading figures on the conservative Religious Right, such as Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, were pointedly not asked to sign the document — a reflection of some of the divisions emerging in the U.S. evangelical movement, which numbers over 60 million by some estimates.

“I agree that evangelical Christians have become too aligned with the Republican Party which has taken them for granted,” Perkins told Reuters, adding that he saw some good stuff in the manifesto.

But he said “it was like it was written for ivory tower Christians, like they want to rid the world of evil but don’t want to get involved in the issues to do it.”

Divisions among U.S. Evangelicals — which are becoming more visible or vocal but have long been bubbling below the surface — have taken many forms.

Most publicly, they include a shift in emphasis among some evangelical leaders from the focus on culture issues such as abortion to a broader social agenda that includes calls to action on poverty and the environment

Most centrist evangelicals remain opposed to abortion rights, which they increasingly see as a social justice issue, but it is not their main focus.

The Religious Right, which has been the bedrock of conservative evangelical support for the Republican Party in recent election cycles, has also called for a broader agenda — but insists on tackling the issues that many of its supporters care deeply about.

This includes retaining an uncompromising and very public opposition to abortion and gay rights.

What do you think? Do you think the U.S. evangelical movement has become too politicized?

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Turkey’s ruling AK Party, which has its roots in political Islam, has preached a message of religious freedom as a way to expand liberties for believers in the officially secular country. It has assured the European Union it would respect freedoms for religious minorities. There has been some progress for minorities, but it is halting. The government’s focus seems to be more on assuring religious rights for pious Sunni Muslims, as in ending of the university headscarf ban. Religious minorities still face an uphill struggle to practice as they see fit.

Turkey’s Alevis, some 15-25 million whose faith is rooted in Islam but mixed with other traditions including ….shamanism, form the country’s leargest religious minority but they have never been recognised as a formal religion. This means they can be lumped together with Sunni Muslims, as a recent court case about the mandatory religion classes in state schools showed. The classes, taught in all primary schools, serve as an instruction guide to being Muslim, with topics ranging from how to pray in a mosque to fasting during the holy month of Ramadan.

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Alevi Hatice Kose took the education ministry to court to win permission to pull her son out of the classes and change the curriculum to include information about Alevis. She won the case, but the government has said it has no power to change the classes, which it says are protected in Turkey’s constitution.

For more on this, see our feature here. And here’s the full slideshow from the Alevi prayer service pictured above.

Jews are returning to Russia. For as long as anyone alive can remember, the flow was mostly in the other direction. But Amie Ferris-Rotman and Conor Sweeney in our Moscow bureau have found a return wave, despite a persistent anti-Semitism there:

Around one million Jews fled during the Soviet era and the post-communist chaos. Those returning now from Israel, the United States and Europe hope to use their new skills and old knowledge to do business.

“Now there are services here, like in New York and Paris, but the lifestyle is more interesting than in either of them — it’s easy to understand why thousands are coming back,” said Yevgeny Satanovsky, president of the Russian Jewish Congress.

Hard statistics on Jews returning to Russia do not exist, said Satanovsky, but anecdotal evidence is there. He estimates 80,000-120,000 Russian Jews have returned, plus many more who originated in other Soviet republics.

Read the whole feature here.

A 17-year-old Israeli girl is a leading contender to win the country’s annual youth Bible quiz, but there’s a controversial twist: She believes in Jesus.

Tipped off about Bat El Levy’s beliefs, an anti-missionary group has called on religious Jews to boycott the May 8 contest, at which she will compete against 15 other teenagers from Israel and abroad for a prize awarded by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

The group, Yad L’Ahim, has invoked Israeli law forbidding Christians from proselytizing in the Jewish state. But there is more at stake in the quiz, which is held on Israel’s 60th
Independence Day — the question of who has a better command of holy writ.

In a protest letter quoted by Israel’s Maariv newspaper, Yad L’Ahim chairman Rabbi Shlomo Dov Lipschitz said Levy “has a chance of becoming the world Bible champion” and that this could “greatly encourage” the spread of Christianity among Jews. He further argued that Levy should be disqualified from the quiz because she is, in his view, non-Jewish.

This was rejected by Israel’s Education Ministry, which runs the Bible quiz. “The girl is designated as Jewish, and her personal beliefs are not a matter of concern to us,” a ministry spokeswoman said.

Levy could not be reached for comment. A relative of the girl, who has already proved her scriptural mettle in regional Israeli contests, said she was busy studying for the quiz.

The relative, who declined to be named, confirmed that Levy and her family “believe in Yeshua Ben-David, the saviour from Nazareth” — Jesus’s Hebrew name. But Yad L’Ahim was wrong in branding Levy a missionary, the family member said.

“The family keeps its faith to itself. To these people, anyone who disagrees with their version of Jewish belief is the enemy. I hope God pays them back in kind,” the relative said.

Representatives of Israeli Jews who believe in Jesus say the community numbers between 8,000 and 10,000, out of a total population of more than 7 million. These so-called Jewish Christians keep a low profile to avoid causing offence in a state where many blame centuries of anti-Semitic persecution in Europe on Christian dogma.

There is also an issue of personal safety. Jewish Christians have on occasion been targeted for attack. In March, a homemade bomb was left in a building in the Jewish
settlement of Ariel, in the occupied West Bank, where members of the community resides. A boy was maimed. Last October, a Jerusalem church that holds services in Hebrew was damaged in a firebomb attack.

Should Levy’s beliefs disqualify her from this contest? Would it be offensive to Israel or to Jews if she won the Bible quiz?

Neuroscientist Andrew Newberg has an intriguing idea: is there a “religionome” similar to the human genome and can scientists map it? He raised this idea at a recent Pew Forum conference on religion and public life in Key West, Florida, where he discussed the topic of why belief in God persists.

Newberg’s work focuses, among other things, on his view that we are biologically driven to find meaning in our lives. He argues that our brains have the capacity to create and perpetuate systems of belief that take us beyond our basic survival needs. These beliefs are biologically rooted in the brain, he thinks, but are also given form by our peers, parents and society.

Newberg is an Associate Professor in the Department of Radiology and Psychiatry, Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies and director and co-founder of the Center for Spirituality and the Neurosciences, all at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He talked with Reuters on the sidelines of the conference, organized by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, to flesh out his vision.

“If you think of it in the context of the human genome project, what we are talking about is finding a way of mapping all of the different aspects of religion, the different traditions and practices and experiences that people have,” he said.

“And by mapping it, I would not just be talking about the biology of it but trying to connect the biology with what people are actually experiencing, feeling, believing and therefore getting as full as possible a real understanding of what religion and spirituality are really all about for people.”

I asked him to further explain — in layman’s terms — what he saw as the biological basis of belief.

“What I think we have seen in the research we have done, what I would what to do in any kind of religionome type of study, would be to try and find the overall pattern of changes, the pattern of activity in the different structures in the brain that are involved with all the different types of processes that people consider to be religious or spiritual.”

“To expand on that a little bit, I have tended to find that there is a pattern of structures, a group of structures in the brain that seem to be involved whenever people engage in some kind of religious or spiritual activity. So what we tend to find is that there are a set of structures that are activated or inactivated depending on what a person is doing, how they’re doing it, what they’re trying to experience … while the pattern is a little bit different in each type of practice, it always seems to involve the same structures. It just involves them differently.”

The more we learn about the human body, the more some scientists search for a “God gene” or a religious zone in the brain or some other physical basis to account for the phenomenon of faith. Do you think science can explain faith?

Young U.S. evangelicals are even more opposed to abortion rights than older evangelicals but their position has different roots that stem from broader notions of social justice, a conference on religion and politics heard on Monday.

Michael Gerson, a former top aide to President George W. Bush who is now on the Council on Foreign Relations, told the conference in Key West, Florida, that “younger evangelicals are more pro-life than their parents. But they tend to view it as a social justice issue.”   

This will raise eyebrows in liberal American or secular European audiences, which view abortion rights as a key component of women’s rights and see attempts to roll them back as reactionary and even atavistic — and hardly linked to notions of social justice.

But the U.S. evangelical movement has been shifting its tone on the abortion issue in recent years and framing it in the language of social justice — a shift that coincides with a broadening of its agenda to include concern about global poverty and demands for action on climate change. 

Some leading and politically engaged evangelicals such as former Arkansas governor and Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee have compared today’s anti-abortion movement to the anti-slavery crusades of the 18th and 19th centuries, which were often led by evangelicals.

It remains to be seen how this framing of the debate works but there is little doubt that it is an interesting new development on the front lines of America’s culture wars and one to keep an eye on.

The conference Gerson was addressing was organized by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.  It found in a survey last year that “70 percent of younger white evangelicals favor ‘making it more difficult for a woman to get an abortion,’ compared with 55 percent of older white evangelicals and 39 percent of young Americans overall who share this view.”