Ireland attacks confessional secrecy after Catholic sex abuse scandal
Ireland’s prime minister has said Catholic clerics would be prosecuted if they failed to tell the authorities about crimes disclosed during confession, the latest blow to the prestige of the once-dominant Church. A report this week found that the Church concealed from the authorities the sexual abuse of children by priests as recently as 2009, and that clerics appeared to follow Church law rather than Irish guidelines to protect minors.
“The law of the land should not be stopped by a crozier or a collar,” Prime Minister Enda Kenny told journalists on Thursday, referring to the hooked staff held by Catholic bishops during religious services. Kenny said his government would submit legislation to parliament that could jail clerics for up to five years if they failed to report to authorities information about the abuse of children.
The law will override the confessional privilege in Church law that prevents clerics from sharing information, he said. A series of revelations of rape and beatings by members of religious orders and the priesthood in the past have shattered the dominant role of the Catholic Church in Ireland.
Ireland’s Foreign Minister Eamon Gilmore on Thursday summoned the Pope’s representative, the papal nuncio, after the report said that the Vatican had undermined Irish guidelines on reporting sex abuse by referring to them as “study guidelines.”
“We consider it absolutely unacceptable that the Vatican intervened here in a way which had the effect of undermining the efforts to deal adequately with the issue of child sexual abuse,” Gilmore said. “We want a response from the Vatican.”
The report on the diocese of Cloyne in county Cork lists how the diocese failed to report all sexual abuse complaints to the police and did not report any complaints to the health authorities between 1996 and 2008. The bishop formerly responsible for the diocese, John Magee, who had previously served as private secretary to three popes, falsely told the authorities that he was reporting all abuse allegations to the police, the report said.
via Ireland attacks confessional privilege after scandal | Reuters.
Tunisian secularists nervous over slow change, concerned about Islamists
Secularists hope Tunisia’s gradual approach for moving to an open political system from a police state will help box in Islamists but it has created a political and security vacuum that could end up helping them. Tunisians forced out president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali via street protests in December and January, and over 90 political parties have sprung up in the newly freed public space.
Secular parties, policy-makers and Western powers are preparing for a future where the leading Islamist party Ennahda, driven abroad and underground by Ben Ali, is a key force in the North African country but working out how to limit its impact.
“There are colossal suspicions about Ennahda. No one believes their commitment to democracy and pluralism. Their discourse in Arabic is very different to their discourse in French, particularly in rural areas,” said George Joffe, a politics professor at Cambridge University. He said the fear was not just of its Islamist platform but of a gradual slip into the one-party authoritarianism of the previous era if one better-organized group dominates.
It is partly because of these concerns that Tunisia is taking its time before getting to any elections. Elections for a constituent assembly to write a new constitution have been delayed to October, and there is no timeframe for parliamentary and presidential elections that follow.
“There is a reasonable chance Ennahda will emerge the strongest party but not having a majority. The best guess is there will be a secular-center left majority in parliament,” a Western diplomat said.
The incumbent political class, divided between those who accommodated and those who challenged Ben Ali’s corrupt government, hope Ennahda will not gain more than a quarter of the vote, said economist Marouane Abassi. “Ennahda could get around 25 percent which is manageable, but more than that would be difficult for Tunisia,” he said.
Sleepy French hamlet seen at threat from Apocalypse sects
(Pic de Bugarach, 14 November 2007/Thierry Strub)
The tiny southern French hamlet of Bugarach has drawn scrutiny from a government sect watchdog over droves of visitors who believe it is the only place in the world that will survive a 2012 Apocalypse. A report by the watchdog, Miviludes, published Wednesday said the picturesque village near Carcassonne should be monitored in the run-up to December 21, 2012, when many believe the world will end according to an ancient Mayan prophecy.
Miviludes was set up in 2002 to track the activity of sects, after a law passed the previous year made it an offence to abuse vulnerable people using heavy pressure techniques, meaning sects can be outlawed if there is evidence of fraud or abuse.
Surrounded in legend for centuries, Bugarach and its rocky outcrop, the Pic de Bugarach, have attracted an influx of New Age visitors in recent months, pushing up property prices but also raising the threat of financial scams and psychological manipulation, Miviludes said in its report. “I think we need to be careful. We shouldn’t get paranoid, but when you see what happened at Waco in the United States, we know this kind of thinking can influence vulnerable people,” Miviludes president Georges Fenech told Reuters.
Waco, Texas, made headlines in 1993 when federal agents raided the headquarters of the Branch Davidian movement, led by David Koresh, leading to a 50-day siege. The building was burned down when agents eventually tried to force their way in, leaving some 80 people dead.
Bugarach, with a population of just 200, has long been considered magical, partly due to what locals claim is an “upside-down mountain” where the top layers of rock are older than the lower ones. The Internet is awash with myths about the place — that the mountain is surrounded by a magnetic force, that it is the site of a concealed alien base, or even that it contains an underground access to another world. And now many have seized on it as the ultimate refuge with Doomsday rapidly approaching.
Read the full story by Vicky Buffery here. For the full report in French, click here.
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.
Protests in Bahrain’s Shi’ite neighbourhoods fall on deaf ears
In a poor district of Bahrain’s capital, a few hundred people marched through cramped, crumbling alleyways banging pans and screaming, “Down with the regime.” A mile (1.5 km) away, in the city centre, with its gleaming malls and office blocks, no one heard them.
A week after the tiny Gulf island kingdom repealed martial law, and despite the lingering presence of a few checkpoints, much of Manama seems almost back to normal. “Everything is quiet, there’s nothing wrong. I haven’t heard about any problems,” a man who gave his name as Khalifa said as he walked to a Starbucks coffee shop.
Not so in the Shi’ite neighbourhoods where protests first erupted in February, inspired by upheaval elsewhere in the Arab world that toppled longtime rulers in Egypt and Tunisia. “They’re saying that security has returned. Look at this, there is no security,” a protester said, ducking into a neighbour’s home as a sound grenade fired by police shrieked past.
Shi’ite residents say that if this is the new normal, tense days lie ahead. “I think we’ll remain in this unstable situation until there is some kind of political solution. It’s not going back to normal,” well-known activist Nabeel Rajab said.
Popular Indian guru Swami Ramdev to start hunger strike against corruption
Swami Ramdev, India’s most popular and powerful yoga guru, rejected an appeal by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Wednesday to call off a hunger strike against corruption, the second major challenge to a government losing its authority due to rampant graft. The charismatic guru, who dons a saffron cloth thrown over his bare torso, runs a $40 million-a-year global yoga and health empire and has millions of followers. Some 30 million viewers tune into his daily yoga TV show.
These followers are expected to rally behind him as he begins on Saturday a “fast-to-the-death” in Delhi until the government agrees to pass a tough anti-corruption “Jan Lokpal” bill and set up a task force for repatriating illegal funds held in foreign bank accounts by Indians.
“There will be over 1 crore (10 million) people who will fast,” Ramdev told reporters at Delhi’s airport after holding talks with four government ministers, rushed there by the prime minister to urge him to call off his fast. “We want to get rid of corruption and injustices happening in institutions and we want to make things fair (in India).”
Singh has struggled to shake off a series of corruption scandals that have embroiled senior officials, including a $39 billion telecoms spectrum scam, the biggest in India’s history. There is widespread public anger over the graft scams, which have also hurt foreign investment and helped delay a series of reforms aimed at opening up Asia’s third-largest economy.
In April, veteran activist Anna Hazare, who is in his 70s, went on a hunger strike over the bill, triggering anti-graft protests by thousands of people across the country. He ended it five days later, after the government agreed to allow activists to take part in drafting it, and to then introduce it in parliament’s next session, due to start in July.
While Hazare is widely respected — his campaign has drawn comparisons to Mahatma Gandhi’s protests and hunger strikes that helped end British colonial rule –, Ramdev wields significantly more clout and has vowed to launch a political party for the 2014 national elections to challenge Singh’s Congress.
Read the full story here. For a website by Ramdev’s followers reporting on the hunger strike, click here.
Beyond bin Laden – Britain’s fight against violent Islamist radicalism
In a community centre in the British Midlands, 12 teenage boys — all of south Asian descent — watch intently as Jahan Mahmood unzips a canvas bag and pulls out the dark, angular shape of a World War Two machine gun. He unfolds the tripod, places the unloaded weapon on a table and pulls back the cocking handle. The boys crane forward. Mahmood pulls the trigger; a sharp snap rings out.
It’s two days since the killing of Osama bin Laden, and Mahmood, a local historian, is taking his own stand against global militancy. His show comes with a dose of education: a lesson in how Muslim and British soldiers fought together to defeat the Nazis. His methods are unconventional, but Mahmood believes they help address a weakness at the core of British counter-terrorism policy.
The U.S. operation to kill bin Laden may have marked “a strike at the heart” of international terrorism, as Prime Minister David Cameron put it, but in the broader fight against terror, the al Qaeda leader’s death was largely irrelevant.
In deprived British inner-city districts like Alum Rock — a huddle of redbrick homes, fabric shops, Urdu-language DVD stores and fruit stalls — the Saudi-born militant is almost an afterthought. Young men’s beliefs here are driven more by their own sense of alienation, racial abuse and what they see as a deeply anti-Muslim foreign policy.
On the frontline of the war against terrorism — and Britain is undoubtedly a frontline — private initiatives like Mahmood’s hint at the failure of state-sponsored efforts to counter jihad. Almost six years on from a massive coordinated terror attack on London’s transport system, the main nationwide programme to deter young men from extremism still hasn’t moved past mistrust and suspicion. The one-year-old Conservative-led government now wants to tweak the policy. For some Muslims, the question is whether the state should even try.
“There’s still a basic inability to get the idea that, actually, as government, you might not know best,” says Rachel Briggs, an analyst at the Royal United Services Institute and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. “There’s a very difficult balance between where government can be involved, and be effective, and where actually government involvement negates the whole process.”
Read the full story by Michael Holden, Stefano Ambrogi and William Maclean here.
Filipinos flock to northern town for fertility dance for patron saint
Hundreds of couples flocked to a town in the northern Philippines to take part in a centuries-old ritual dance, honouring a patron saint believed to bring fertility. The ritual took place this year amid an increasingly acrimonious battle over a controversial bill promoting artificial contraception in this intensely Catholic nation.
Those seeking children packed into Obando by the thousands for the annual May ritual, inspired by miraculous stories of the babies it has brought. Couples dance in the two-hour long procession, swaying their hips to a traditional folk tune from bamboo and marching bands. The ritual is accompanied by a short chant and prayer to Saint Claire, the local patron saint of fertility, asking her to bless them with children.
The rite has taken place in Obando for centuries and apparently originated from a pagan fertility ritual where couples once rubbed their body parts against an idol. But the act was later changed by the Catholic Church when they introduced Saint Claire, the patron saint of fertility, to the locals.
The dance also promotes fertility in a different way, with the saint playing matchmaker to help people find a partner. Newlywed Tess Faustino said she found her husband after asking the patron saint for guidance. “This is my first time to wish for a child,” she added.
The contraception bill has led to an escalating war of words that has put Philippine President Benigno Aquino on a collision course with the country’s powerful Catholic Church leaders, who have blocked similar measures since the 1990s.
Read the full story by Roli Ng and Peter Blaza here.
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Philippine Catholic bishops clash with Aquino over contraception bill
Philippine Catholic bishops on Tuesday walked out of talks with the government over a planned bill allowing contraception in open opposition to President Benigno Aquino who vowed to push the bill into law. Aquino pledged last month to push for the enactment of a reproductive health bill in Congress in a bid to lower the maternal death rate in the Philippines, even at the risk of excommunication from the Roman Catholic Church.
The church, a major social and political force in the poor Southeast Asian nation, has blocked similar bills since the 1990s by talking to lawmakers and has denounced Aquino’s support for contraception, considered a sin.
The bishops’ decision could lead to more policy clashes between the church and state, analysts say. Since 1986, bishops have been instrumental in mobilizing people to help oust two presidents. They are also blocking mining contracts in the provinces in another big challenge to the government.
The Philippines has one of Asia’s fastest-growing populations, which is nearing 100 million people, and slowing the increase is seen as one way of cutting poverty.
“The bishops do not see any reason to further undertake a serious study or dialogue” on the bill, Monsignor Juanito Figura, secretary of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP), said. The bishops said the proposed law would encourage abortion, which is illegal in the Philippines.
Read the full story by Manny Mogato here.
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It amazes me how men that are celibate think they have any right to judge or direct the masses on sexual matters. You would think they’d want to focus all of their attention on the skeletons in their own closet rather than condemn the rest of the planet. If I were to measure sins, I’d say child molestation seriously outweighs the use of contraceptions.
Pakistan’s Islamist parties challenge weakening government
Pakistan’s disparate Islamist political parties are uniting behind their hatred of the United States, emboldened by a weak government that looks increasingly reluctant to stand up to extremism and a society where radicalism is widely tolerated. The prospect of these parties gaining strength in this nuclear-armed nation is a nightmare for its ally the United States and neighbors including India and Afghanistan, which are already fighting Islamist insurgents based in Pakistan.
But while there is little chance Islamist parties will be able to take power outright, they are becoming more prominent as anti-Americanism grows among ordinary Pakistanis, many of whom also reject attempts to soften a blasphemy law that has claimed the lives of two senior officials this year alone.
“The government is struggling to respond to populist forces at precisely the moment when it aims to improve its position to secure a full term and better position itself for the 2013 elections,” wrote analyst Maria Kuusisto of consultancy Eurasia Group in a research note.
Islamists parties, who traditionally have done poorly at the polls, stand a better chance if elections are held nowadays, analysts said. And if they increase their numbers in parliament, they could force a new government to the right, shake the alliance with the United States, including ending cooperation against the war in Afghanistan, and push the government into concessions with Pakistani Taliban militants. Most of the parties support Afghanistan’s Taliban and they all want to enforce strict sharia law.
“There are strong chances for the revival of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amil (MMA),” said Islamist politician Abdul Wahab Madni on the reformation of a major Islamist bloc from the early 2000s. “And this time, other religious groups would also join.”
Read the full analysis by Chris Allbritton here.
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The use of religion to steer or control public sentiment is not a new tool. In fact, it’s one that is in the top drawer of almost every political leader who has ventured into the public domain or likewise, any military leader who has made such a foray. Mind you, we as a people, have never been adept at defining (or rather defiling) the fine line between religion and state. Just a quick glance at the Objectives Resolution and the Islamic Provisions of the 1973 Constitution would send any rational mind into a tailspin.
Indeed, religious political parties have a long history of blackmailing people for support. For example, the MMA in the 2002 elections asked for people’s votes in the name of the Quran. Now, people are being blackmailed into supporting the killers of the late Mr. Taseer and Mr. Bhatti using the same half-baked ideas that are sold as divine truth. The religious right and its apologists – both in uniform and in the media – work on the lines of the Italian Mafia: “You hit me, we hit you”. Unfortunately, not many politicians and average Pakistanis have the moral courage to stand up to them. They would rather cower behind closed doors.
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Resident FaithWorld Expert
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