Daniel-in-lion’s-den moment for new Catholic archbishop of free-wheeling Berlin
Like Daniel in the lion’s den, Berlin’s new Catholic archbishop met the media on Tuesday to face accusations he was homophobic and far too conservative for such a prominent post in the free-wheeling German capital. Rainer Maria Woelki, a surprise choice for the high-profile post, professed respect for gays, denied membership in the staunchly conservative Opus Dei group and said he did not come to Berlin to point a censuring finger at non-Catholics.
Berlin’s gay community and liberal media reacted with dismay to his appointment last week, saying the Cologne-based prelate was “backwards-minded” and the wrong man for the job. But interest in the new prelate was so strong that the Catholic Church, a minority of about 390,000 in a 3.5 million population mostly indifferent or hostile to religion, had to switch the news conference to a larger hall at the last minute to accomodate over 100 journalists who turned out.
“We will meet with each other,” Woelki, 54, said when asked about the city’s active gay community. “I have respect and esteem for all people independent of heritage, skin colour and individual nature. I am open to all without reservations.” Describing himself simply as Catholic, he denied being a member of Opus Dei despite having done his doctorate at the group’s Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome. That part of his biography led to media reports over the weekend calling him “reactionary.”
“The Church is not a moral institution that goes around pointing its finger at people,” Woelki said. “The Church is for me a community of seekers and believers and the Church would like to help people find their hapiness in life.”
The left-wing daily Tageszeitung said it had expected the worst from Woelki’s premiere but concluded: “You can talk with the man of God. There will be a lot to talk about.” Berlin’s openly gay Mayor Klaus Wowereit seems to have eased the way for Woelki by warmly welcoming him to the city and promising to work closely with him. The two will host Pope Benedict when he visits the German capital in September.
During the last papal visit to Berlin in 1996, anarchists booed and streakers darted about in front of Pope John Paul’s popemobile as he made his way to the Brandenburg Gate.
Until his new assignment, Woelki was an auxiliary bishop in Cologne to Cardinal Joachim Meisner, an arch-conservative with close ties to German-born Pope Benedict. He was hardly known outside that western German city, where he was born. Woelki’s Opus Dei aademic credentials, link to Meisner and statements reaffirming the Church view that homosexual acts are sinful sparked off a storm in Berlin.
Archbishop of Canterbury attacks UK government policies as radical
Britain’s coalition government has embarked on “radical, long-term policies for which no one voted,” causing anxiety and fear, the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams said in an article on Thursday. The comments are his most outspoken against the year-old Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government.
“With remarkable speed, we are being committed to radical, long-term policies for which no one voted,” the spiritual leader of the 80-million strong Anglican Communion wrote. “At the very least, there is an understandable anxiety about what democracy means in such a context.”
The archbishop’s comments came in an edition of the weekly New Statesman that he was invited to edit. Among other contributors are UK Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks and the “Church of England atheist” Philip Pullman.
The government has announced radical reforms of the National Health Service and education in its first year. Education Secretary Michael Gove has promoted a flagship policy of “free schools,” which would allow parents, teachers or charities in England to set up schools with taxpayers’ money.
Williams said the “comprehensive reworking” of the education system “might well be regarded as a proper matter for open probing in the context of election debates.”
The government also wants to shake-up the NHS, putting the 60 billion pound healthcare budget in the hands of family doctors. Before the election, Conservative leader David Cameron promised to stop the “top-down reorganisations of the NHS.”
“Government badly needs to hear just how much plain fear there is around such questions at present,” Williams wrote.
Archbishop of Canterbury praises “unpretentious” Kate and William
The Archbishop of Canterbury, who will marry Prince William and Kate Middleton next week, said on Thursday he had been struck by their wedding preparations, describing the couple as courageous and unpretentious. Rowan Williams, spiritual head of the Church of England, praised the couple’s “simplicity” and the way they had dealt with the build-up to next Friday’s wedding, which is set to be watched by an estimated two billion people worldwide.
“I’ve been very struck by the way in which William and Catherine have approached this great event,” Williams said in a short film released by his Lambeth Palace office, adding it had been a “real pleasure” to get to know the couple. “They’ve thought through what they want for themselves, but also what they want to say. They’ve had a very simple, very direct picture of what really matters about this event.”
“They’re responsible to the whole society, and responsible to God for their relationship. And I think it’s impressive that they’ve had that simplicity about it, they’ve known what matters, what’s at the heart of all this,” he said. “They are deeply unpretentious people.”
The Dean of Westminster will conduct the April 29 ceremony at Westminster Abbey and Williams will marry the couple while the Bishop of London Richard Chartres, who knows William well, will give the address.
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Canadian police charge senior Orthodox prelate with sex crimes
Canadian police have charged a senior Orthodox prelate with sexually assaulting two boys during the 1980s, the latest in a tide of such charges worldwide involving church officials. Winnipeg police said on Thursday that Archbishop Kenneth William Storheim, 64, flew from Edmonton, Alberta, to Winnipeg to turn himself in and was charged with two counts of sexual assault.
Storheim is the archibishop of the Archdiocese of Canada of the Orthodox Church in America but has been on a leave of absence since October 1, according to a statement on the church’s website. Storheim, who was raised a Lutheran and was an Anglican rector before being received in the Orthodox Church in 1978, worked at a church in a poor Winnipeg neighborhood from 1984 to 1987 and later moved to Edmonton and Ottawa.
According to his biography on the church’s website, Archbishop Seraphim (as he is known in the Orthodox Church) “serves in a number of administrative capacities in the Orthodox Church in America. He is secretary of the Holy Synod of Bishops, chairman of the Department of External Affairs and Interchurch Relations and chairman of the Board of Theological Education. As chair of the Department of External Affairs and Interchurch Relations, he has represented the OCA at numerous events in Russia, Ukraine, the Middle East, and throughout Europe. He also is co-chairman of the Bishops’ Dialogue (North America) between the Standing Conference of Canonical Orthodox Bishops in the Americas [SCOBA] and the National Conference of Catholic Bishops. Most recently, he was appointed Administrator of the Metropolitan See of the Orthodox Church in America upon the retirement of Metropolitan Herman on September 4, 2008.”
The archbishop’s temporary replacement, Bishop Irénée of Quebec, announced his leave of absence in a letter to the faithful here.
Police released Storheim on a promise to appear in court.
Charges of child sexual abuse against officials of Christian churches have made headlines around the world over the past two decades. Since 1992, the Roman Catholic Church has paid $2 billion in settlements to victims in the United States alone.
In Canada, widespread physical and sexual abuse has been documented at boarding schools run by various denominations from the 1800s into the 1990s as they attempted to assimilate aboriginal children by separating them from their families.
Catholic Church launches ordinariate for Anglicans in January
The Roman Catholic Church will launch its first ordinariate for disaffected Anglicans in England and Wales in January and take in bishops, priests and laity over the following months, the Church announced on Friday.
Five traditionalist Church of England bishops have applied to join the ordinariate, a Church subdivision retaining some Anglican traditions, and about 30 groups of parishioners are due to cross over, Church leaders told journalists.
It was not clear how many priests would convert in the move, prompted by traditionalist opposition to Church of England plans to ordain women bishops. Married Anglican priests will be accepted but married bishops cannot retain their higher status.
“Decisions are with those who at present are in the Anglican Communion, or on its edge, and they have to make up their minds,” said Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nichols, leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales. “But we are open to whichever way this develops, whether it develops into something significant or whether over time the groups … naturally absorb themselves into Catholic dioceses.”
Pope Benedict offered last year to create ordinariates for traditionalist Anglicans, mostly “Anglo-Catholics” whose liturgy is close to Catholic practice. Other groups of Anglicans in Australia and North America have also expressed interest. The offer caused tension between Rome and the Church of England, where many felt the announcement was handled badly and sidelined Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams.
Williams received the pope warmly during his visit to Britain in September and met him at the Vatican on Thursday. “I don’t see it as an aggressive act, meant to destabilise the relations of the Churches and it remains to be seen just how large a movement we’re talking about,” he told Vatican Radio.
Tom, I’ve searched “photos” to try to purchase this photo for our article on the ordinariate. Can you help? Thanks, Carol Barnwell, comm dir, Episcopal Diocese of Texas (cbarnwell@epicenter.org)
Pie in the face for controversial Belgian Catholic archbishop (video)
It has not been a good few weeks for Brussels Archbishop André-Joseph Léonard, the embattled leader of Belgium’s Roman Catholics.
The outspoken conservative prelate has been under fire from his brother bishops, Catholic publications and politicians for weeks for mishandling the Church’s sexual abuse crisis, calling AIDS a kind of punishment for sexual freedom and urging leniency for retired priests accused of sexually abusing minors in the past.
His spokesman quit last Tuesday, saying he could no longer work for a man he compared to someone who drives down a highway against the traffic and believes all the other drivers are wrong.
The series of misfortunes has now reached new heights — or lows — with the news that he got a pie in the face during an All Saints Day service last Monday in the cathedral in Brussels. A young person dressed in black ran up and “pied” him as he stood at a lectern while the choir sang a hymn. The embattled archbishop calmly cleaned off his glasses and licked his fingers clean. One newspaper reported that he later joked it was quite a tasty pie.
RTL television quoted diocesan spokeswoman Claire Jonard as saying: “The archbishop continued the service and did not want to file charges against the aggressor. We have no idea who it was or what his intentions were.”
Here’s the video now making the rounds on Belgian and French websites. Entarté!!! means “pied!!!”
Spokesman for embattled Belgian archbishop quits, cites loss of trust
The spokesman for Belgium’s Roman Catholic leader quit on Tuesday, citing a loss of trust in the archbishop who has caused a storm with harsh comments on AIDS and caring words for some paedophile priests.
Jürgen Mettepenningen, a theologian who became Archbishop André-Joseph Léonard’s spokesman in August, announced his decision only days after the prelate agreed to stop speaking in public until Christmas to calm the storm engulfing the Church.
His resignation reflected growing criticism of Léonard within his own church, where bishops have cautiously spoken out against their leader and lay Catholics are turning increasingly caustic. Politicians have also stepped up criticism of him. It also highlighted the damage that scandals of clerical sex abuse of minors have done to the Church in Europe, especially in Belgium and Ireland where bishops reacted in defensive ways that further angered Catholics and public officials.
“I no longer want, can and will act as spokesman for Archbishop Leonard,” said Mettepenningen, 35, in a statement announcing his immediate resignation.
“Archbishop Léonard has sometimes acted like someone who’s driving against the traffic and thinks everyone else is wrong,” he later told journalists (see full statement in French here). “For three months, I was his GPS but the driver holds the steering wheel and decides which way to go. All too often, I had to indicte that the route should be recalculated. But if the driver continues on his way, if he is blind to the accidents caused, then the GPS doesn’t have to wait to be dismissed. It should withdraw by itself because its function has become superfluous.”
“Archbishop Léonard does not take his leadership duties seriously,” Mettepenningen added. “But it is above all his surrealist attitude regarding the turmoil stirred up by his remarks that I take too seriously to still support this.”
Léonard, an abrasive outspoken conservative, broke his vow of silence on Monday to defend a comment from last week that prosecuting retired priests on charges of sexual abuse of minors was “a kind of vengeance” on men no longer in pastoral work. In an earlier comment that also triggered an uproar, he called AIDS “immanent justice” for promiscuous behaviour.
The Catholic Church is responsible not only for the torture of these innocent victims, but through the ages it has been responsible for the slaughter of millions! From the beginning there has been the sexual abuse of children, Popes and bishops have had wives and mistresses and children.
There were the crusades, the Inquisistion, The concordant with Hitler so that the church is just as responsible as Hitler for the slaughter of the Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses,
Gypsy’s, and anyone else that Hitler felt like slaughtering.
And they try to cover up everything they do. or put a different light on it. But we do not have to worry soon God will destroy her as Part of Babylon the Great. So her sins will be exposed and taken care of. Revelation 18:2-8.
Excerpts from Archbishop Rowan Williams’ address at Lambeth Palace
Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the head of the Church of England and spiritual leader of the worldwide Anglican Communion, received Pope Benedict at Lambeth Palace in London on Friday and stressed the common goal both churches have in defending Christianity in the public sphere and working together as much as possible despite their differences.
Here are excerpts from the archbishop’s remarks to Pope Benedict:
“…Your consistent and penetrating analysis of the state of European society in general has been a major contribution to public debate on the relations between Church and culture, and we gratefully acknowledge our debt in this respect.
“Our task as bishops is to preach the Gospel and shepherd the flock of Christ; and this includes the responsibility not only to feed but also to protect it from harm. Today, this involves a readiness to respond to the various trends in our cultural environment that seek to present Christian faith as both an obstacle to human freedom and a scandal to human intellect. We need to be clear that the Gospel of the new creation in Jesus Christ is the door through which we enter into true liberty and true understanding: we are made free to be human as God intends us to be human; we are given the illumination that helps us see one another and all created things in the light of divine love and intelligence…
“Our presence together as British bishops here today is a sign of the way in which, in this country, we see our task as one and indivisible. The International Anglican-Roman Catholic Commission on Unity and Mission has set before us all the vital importance of our common calling as bishops to be agents of mission. Our fervent prayer is that this visit will give us fresh energy and vision for working together in this context in the name of what a great Roman Catholic thinker of the last century called ‘true humanism’ – a passionate commitment to the dignity of all human beings, from the beginning to the end of life, and to a resistance to every tyranny that threatens to stifle or deny the place of the transcendent in human affairs.
“We do not as churches seek political power or control, or the dominance of Christian faith in the public sphere; but the opportunity to testify, to argue, sometimes to protest, sometimes to affirm – to play our part in the public debates of our societies…We shall be effective defenders or proclaimers of our faith when we can show what a holy life looks like, a life in which the joy of God is transparently present. And this means that our ministry together as bishops across the still-surviving boundaries of our confessions is not only a search for how we best act together in the public arena; it is a quest together for holiness and transparency to God, a search for ways in which we may help each other to grow in the life of the Holy Spirit…
What would a compromise in NY Muslim centre dispute look like?
One requirement for a reasonable debate is to define the terms being used. The emotional dispute over the planned Cordoba House in New York, in which supporters and opponents are struggling over how to even describe it, is a case in point. Will the boxy modern building that developers have presented and local zoning boards have accepted be a Muslim cultural centre including a mosque? Or, as critics allege, a “Ground Zero mosque”, a term that evokes visions of domes and minarets rising over the ruins of the World Trade Center. The facts speak for the first option, which is why we have chosen it for our description of this project.
A new element of confusion has entered the debate with calls for a compromise in this dispute. New York Governor David Patterson started this last week, saying that moving the project away from its proposed location would be a “a magic moment in our history” and offering state help to find a new site. He bemoaned the emotional level of the debate on Tuesday: “People can’t hear each other anymore … I find it heart-wrenching. I hate to see New Yorkers squaring off against each other.”
New York’s Roman Catholic Archbishop Timothy Dolan unexpectedly stepped in to welcome Paterson’s proposal and offer his services as a mediator. He first seemed to support the call for moving the project, but some media thought that seemed less clear after he met Paterson on Tuesday. No matter how sincere their intentions are, their effort to find common ground here is fraught with complications. A central problem, the lay Catholic magazine Commonweal in New York argued, is that “calls for the Muslim organizers to change their plans out of ‘sensitivity,’ however well-meaning, would allow the prejudices of some to define the terms of freedom for others.”
What would a compromise look like and what would it solve? Even the project’s opponents (or at least most of them) say Muslims have the right to build mosques, just not near the World Trade Center site. The location is the core of their opposition. Project leaders insist they will build on the site. There doesn’t seem to be much room there for a compromise, which this online dictionary defines as “a settlement of differences by mutual concessions; an agreement reached by adjustment of conflicting or opposing claims, principles, etc., by reciprocal modification of demands.”
Mayor Michael Bloomberg tackled this issue in his comments at his annual Iftar dinner for Muslim New Yorkers in his official residence on Tuesday evening. In his comments, he repeated the eloquent support he gave the project in an earlier speech and then argued that a compromise would not solve the problem:
“Now I understand the impulse to find another location for the mosque and community center. I understand the pain of those who are motivated by loss too terrible to contemplate. And there are people of every faith – including, perhaps, some in this room – who are hoping that a compromise will end the debate.
“But it won’t. The question will then become, how big should the ‘no-mosque zone’ be around the World Trade Center site? There is already a mosque four blocks away. Should it be moved?”
Compromise is impossible. Building a mosque is not a wise option. The ground zero is a place where God warns America, especially New York city. Why do we always debate about building a mosque. Why don’t we build a church, to remind us that God has been reminding America by terror attacks on september
Turkey offers citizenship to Orthodox archbishops to help patriarch succession
Turkey has offered citizenship to Orthodox Christian archbishops from abroad to help the next election of the ecumenical patriarch, the spiritual leader of the world’s 250 million Orthodox faithful, officials said. Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan has quietly led the gesture to the Orthodox, who face a shortage of candidates to succeed Istanbul-based Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, 70, and serve on the Holy Synod, which administers patriarchate affairs.
Turkish law requires the patriarch to be a Turkish citizen. But the Orthodox community in Turkey, an overwhelmingly Muslim country, has fallen to some 3,000 from 120,000 a half-century ago, drastically shrinking the pool of potential future patriarchs. There are now only 14 Greek Orthodox archbishops, including Bartholomew, who are Turkish citizens. Bartholomew himself is in good health.
Seventeen metropolitans from countries including Austria, France, the United States and Greece have applied for passports, said Rev. Dositheos Anagnostopulous, the patriarchate spokesman. Another six may still apply, and the See hopes the first archbishops will receive their papers by Christmas, he said.
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So we attack a person without even giving him a chance.Talk about intolerance from those who claim to be so tolerant of others!
What does he say that that Catholic Church hasn’t always taught?That sin is sin,be it adultery or homosexual acts.We were all given freewill by God so we can either try and follow His teachings or we can go our own way and see if we end up in hell.The choice is each individuals.But please don’t try and accuse this Bishop of “backward ways and intolerance”.The tone of this article and those contributing to it shows greater intolerance and backward ways!
I pray for the New Archbishop of Berlin.May he win many souls for Christ.