Call it a case of duelling headlines.

For the past few days, a highly personal and often below-the-sash battle has been waged in Italy between two newspapers — Il Giornale, owned by the family of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, and Avvenire, the daily of the Italian Bishops Conference.  The generals in the battle, which has riveted Italy and has resulted in one of the worst periods for years in relations between church and state here, are the editors-in-chief Vittorio Feltri of Il Giornale and Dino Boffo of Avvenire.

It all started on Friday, Aug. 28 when Il Giornale published a front-page, banner headline story purportedly revealing that that Boffo had accepted a plea bargain in court in 2002 after being accused of harrasing a woman. The paper said Boffo had a homosexual relationship with her husband. The headline read “The Super-Moralist Was Condemned for Molestation” (see image above). Feltri, one of Italy’s more unorthodox journalists, attacked Boffo because he had written a spate of editorials criticising Berlusconi over the prime minister’s private life. The fact that ultimately Berlusconi’s family is Feltri’s boss was not lost on Italian readers.

Another element in the background was the fact that Berlusconi has been under the spotlight for anything but government recently, including accusations of cavorting with teenagers and prostitutes. For the record, Berlusconi says there was nothing “spicy” in his relationship with an 18-year-old aspriring model and that even if  a call girl spent a night in his house, he never paid for sex in his life. What’s more, Berlusconi is also going through a messy divorce. His wife Veronica says she wanted out because she couldn’t take any more of his “lies”.

Hours after the first Il Giornale story came out, the Vatican announced that a long-planned dinner between Berlusconi and Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone had been cancelled. The dinner was to have taken place in L’Aquila during the annual “feast of forgiveness” in the city that was devastated by an earthquake last April. The official Vatican explanation was a nice try, but hard to swallow. It said the local bishop  had decided (five hours before the start of a dinner that had been planned for weeks) that the money would be better spent if donated to reconstruction efforts.

(Photo: Berlusconi on Italian television, sign says “And Veronica asks for a divorce,” 5 May 2009/Remo Casilli)

Boffo called the Il Giornale attack “journalistic assassination” and rejected the accusations “absurd”.  Here’s our story about the first day of the battle.

If this sounds like a soap opera, it is.  And like all good soap operas, it gets better.

Boffo did indeed have some judicial problems in 2002, but he says he was the victim not the perpetrator of “telephone harassment” and agreed to a plea bargain just to put it all behind him. Avvenire colleagues say he did indeed fly off the handle and have some kind of altercation with a woman in 2002, but it had nothing to do with him being homosexual. They say she had been pestering him by phone to hire her son.

The homosexual angle was found on a one-page report which Il Giornale implied was part of the police record. But Boffo’s defenders say that page was fabricated to look like an ammendment to a police report and sent anonymously years ago to Italian Catholic Church leaders, all of whom saw it as a smear campaign and binned it. The next day Il Giornale ran the following banner headline: “The Rage of the Unmasked Moralists”. And Tuesday it was “The Bishops Knew Everything For Some Time.”

Avvenire has been putting most of its responses to Il Giornale on its back pages and editorial pages, one calling the charges “a colossal worthless fake.” It has also run pages and pages of letters from readers in support of Boffo.

For days, the Vatican did not weigh in on the dispute even though it was blazing all around the walls of the city state. When it did on Tuesday, it got out the big guns, issuing a statement that Bertone — the number two man in the Vatican after Pope Benedict himself — had called Boffo and expressed his “closeness and solidarity.” This seemed to put aside rumours that Boffo might resign for the good of the Church.

For his part Berlusconi has kept a low profile. He issued a statement disassociating himself from the positions of his family newspaper on the first day, but has refused to make any further comments. “Everything I want to say, I have said already,” he declared on Tuesday, Sept 1.

(Photo: Berlusconi wipes face during conference in Milan, 30 July 2009/Alessandro Garofalo)

The fact remains that the whole episode – sometimes slow drip, sometimes percolating – has brought relations between the Italian Catholic Church and the Vatican on the one side and the Berlusconi government on the other side, to one of their worst levels, if not the worst. And the sometimes buffa soap opera continues. Tune in next time for the latest episode.

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A Roman Catholic nun who left her convent in India after 33 years of service has penned an unflattering picture of life within the cloistered walls in a book that may further embarrass the Church.

In “Amen: The Autobiography of a Nun”, published in India in English this month, Sister Jesme tells of sexual relations between some priests and nuns, homosexuality in the convent and discrimination and corruption in Catholic institutions…

“Amen” grabbed media headlines in February, when it was first published in Malayalam — the regional language of Kerala. With the new English edition and offers of a film based on the book, Sister Jesme’s plea for a reformation of the Church is now set to reach a wider audience.

Read our feature here.

The following is a guest contribution. Reuters is not responsible for the content and the views expressed are the author’s alone. The author is Program Director at the Interfaith Center of New York. He is writing a book about Interfaith and Civil Society.

By Matthew Weiner

The choice of Rick Warren to deliver the inaugural invocation, and the drama surrounding it, was President-elect Barack Obama’s latest carefully planned move to prove that he is not a far out liberal, but instead mainstream. Obama is good at the art of compromise, but also at improvisation. The liberal outcry that followed, and his addition of the openly gay Episcopal bishop Gene Robinson to join the party, continues to demonstrate his skill as political tai chi master.

(Photo: Obama and Warren at Saddleback Church,17 Aug 2008/Mark Avery)

But Obama would be more in keeping with his own sense of diversity if he had the first ever interfaith invocation. Instead of a single speaker from a single religion, why not have many from a diversity of faiths and political positions? Instead of a liberal Christian or an evangelical Christian, he could have a conservative Christian, a liberal Jew, and a Muslim, a Buddhist  and a Hindu (or any such combination).

Interfaith as it has developed over the last century is often misunderstood. It does not mean many religious groups merging into a kind of single religion or religious Esperanto. Nor does it mean different religions holding hands in a kumbaya moment. Instead, good interfaith takes place when different religious traditions offer their own unique perspectives, one after another, in a shared public space. It allows people to remain who they are, amidst others who do the same.

Interfaith events hold the basic symbolic value of bringing everyone together, and this upcoming situation clearly calls for such a strategy. In fact it does so in Obama fashion far more than his current choice of a single conservative voice, no matter what his pragmatic arguments are.

This is why we should be happy for Robinson’s inclusion, but distressed by his idea of not giving a Christian prayer. It’s important to see upstanding Christians who are homosexual. But when a Christian bishop speaks not for Christians but for other faiths, it is actually a bad day for the other religions. Someone else is speaking for them (and that person is usually a Christian). Other faiths must speak for themselves. Good liberal Christians get themselves in trouble when they think they can be somehow universal or speak for everyone.

(Photo: Robinson outside the Lambeth Conference in Canterbury, 21 July, 2008)

Would an interfaith vocation create a happy ending to Obama’s predicament?

Not for everyone. It would, however, challenge groups on both sides of the aisle. Conservative commentators tend to criticize interfaith as New Age or liberal fluff. But if Warren were only one of many leaders standing together, they could hardly do so. They may have to see interfaith as a decent way to go, where they can keep their views, but engage more and politicize less. It could reconfigure interfaith all together, galvanizing evangelicals to the growing interfaith movement.

It would also challenge liberals, who tend to see interfaith as their turf. In a way similar to Robinson, it is far too often that liberal religious leaders claim they are a diverse group speaking in one voice, only to be religiously but not culturally, theologically or politically diverse. Instead, if Obama had an interfaith invocation that included conservatives, a real range of diversity would stand together on nobody’s reserved turf.

Such a strategy would be refreshing and could signal a new way of doing business when it comes to religion. It may make for a reconsideration of the overly Christian Faith-Based Initiative, once the new administration has a chance to focus on things other than war and the economy.

And perhaps it could re-announce what public religion has always meant (or supposed to mean) in our American context: a vibrant mixture of conservative and liberal religious groups from every faith, engaged in our civic sphere, fostering our shared democratic tradition.

Matthew Weiner is the program director at the Interfaith Center of New York and is writing a book about interfaith in New York City.

(Photo: Leaders of the world’s major religions at an interfaith conference in Nicosia, 18 Nov 2008/Andreas Manolis)

If you’re a white evangelical or black Protestant attending church in America, you have probably heard a thing or two about homosexuality. If you’re Catholic, maybe not.

Those are among the findings of a new survey conducted by Public Religion Research on behalf of Faith in Public Life, a non-partisan resource center.

It found that among the white evangelicals and black Protestants surveyed, 67 percent said their pastor speaks out about the issue of homosexuality — among Catholics that number drops to 37 percent.

But Catholics at 78 percent were the most likely to hear about abortion while attending a religious service.

Hunger and poverty topped the list of what Americans from a range of Christian denominations hear in church. Among white mainline Protestants, 88 percent reported their clergy speaking about such things; among Catholics, 90 percent did.

Immigration was at the bottom of the list. Among white evangelical Protestants only 12 percent reported their pastors speaking about the issue.

The survey included a national sample of 2,000 adults including an oversample of 974 respondents aged 18 to 34. It was conducted from Aug 28 to Sept 19. The margin of error for the broader survey is +/- 2.5 percent and for the younger group it is +/- three percent.

(PHoto Credit: REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton, Aug 13, 2008. A church seen from inside a Greyhound bus in Alabama)

It has been spoken of as a setting for schism. But could the Lambeth Conference — the worldwide Anglican Communion’s once-a-decade global meeting beginning July 16 in England — be a bust when it comes to headline-making news?

That’s the way leaders of the U.S. Episcopal Church see it. There will be no grand pronouncements made or resolutions voted on, they say. The traditional Western parliamentary idea that produces winners and losers on debated issues has been scrapped for face-to-face meetings. Some of them have been baptized ”Indaba groups,” which Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has described as a Zulu term denoting “a meeting for purposeful discussion among equals.”

The Rev. Ian Douglas, a professor of World Christianity at Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts who helped plan the meeting, recently told reporters at a briefing:

“I appreciate that it’s going to be a hard job for the media because there isn’t a focal point of up-down decison making, and that (much) of what’s really happening … is going to be happening in very small, very close one-on-one relationships and deep conversation.

“I  don’t envy your job. It’s going to be difficult to get ‘the story’ out of Lambeth unless you want to tell the story that as leaders come together to be better equipped in their service to God’s mission in the wider world,  not only is the Anglican Communion strengthened but God’s purposes are better fulfilled in the wider world. It’s a tough story to tell but I think it’s a story.”

The 1998 Lambeth Conference did produce news — a resolution known as Lambeth 1:10 that said homosexual practice is incompatible with scripture. That pronouncement became a major part of the splintering now going on in the worldwide church after the American branch in 2003 installed the first the first bishop known to be in an openly gay relationship in more than four centuries of Anglican history — Gene Robinson of New Hampshire.

Robinson was not invited to this summer’s meeting at Canterbury though he plans a fringe presence — after he weds his long-time partner in June.

The news at Lambeth ‘08 then may be more about who doesn’t come. Already 280 conservative bishops from Africa, Latin America and Asia have said they will attend a break-away summit in Jerusalem in June to “prepare for an Anglican future in which the Gospel is uncompromised and Christ-centered mission a top priority.” They expect about 1,000 conservative Anglican leaders to attend.

Bishops from Uganda, Kenya and Australia have said they plan to boycott Lambeth, to which more than 800 bishops have been invited. Nigerian Archbishop Peter Akinola, a leader among the traditionalists, has said he may also skip Lambeth.

Douglas, in the briefing mentioned earlier, said the hope is that the bishops who attend the meeting in Jerusalem will also go to Lambeth. There is, he said, “no fear or concern” that the Jerusalem summit is an exclusionary Lambeth alternative.

Much of this reflects Anglicanism’s structure where federation trumps hierarchy. The Episcopal News Service noted at one point that there is no complete agreement on when any resolution passed by a Lambeth Conference becomes official church teaching. The Lambeth meetings, which date to the 19th century, do not have specific authority to require compliance with their resolutions, it said.

Katharine Jefferts Schori, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, who joined Douglas at the briefing, also has a long-term view. One of the first Lambeth Conferences well over a century ago, she said, was called “to deal with issues like bishops teaching things that other bishops found uncomfortable, and bishops wandering into other bishops’ territories and how do to we transfer clergy from one part of the communion to another.

“And we still haven’t sorted that out. The gathering will continue to wrestle with some of the challenges of living together in a compex, diverse and sometimes challenging family. That is God’s gift to use and we celebrate it,” she said at the briefing (view webcast here).

It also reflects Anglicanism’s diversity, with half of its 77 million members now in Africa, Asia and Latin America, many with conservative views on issues that go deeper than just those involving gays. In terms of numbers, the bishops organizing the Jerusalem meeting claim to represent 17 countries and 35 million followers.

The road from Jerusalem to Canterbury will be closely watched.

It’s been less than a month since an underground movement of gay Orthodox Jews in Israel went online and already tens of thousands of people have visited their Web site.

The site is called HOD (for Homo’eem Dateem or Religious Homosexuals), a play on the Hebrew word hod for glory. It’s the first to cater to gay men living in Israel’s ultra-orthodox Jewish minority, where homosexuality is viewed as a sin and people are often scared to admit publicly they are gay, fearing harassment or banishment.

Of course, not all of the online visitors fit into that category, said Rabbi Ron, one of the site’s creators. The site was flooded after local media reported on its inception and Ron, a gay Orthodox rabbi who asked that his last name not be mentioned, was interviewed on Israeli radio.

The Web site, written mostly in Hebrew but with pages in English as well, was the first of its kind and broke the taboo of discussing homosexuality from within the ultra-orthodox sector.

“Our main goal is to bring the religious gay community, as well as rabbis and leaders of the religious communities, relevant information and articles concerning our issue,” HOD says in its English-language section. “This way, we hope to reduce the hate towards homosexuals in the religious society. Moreover, HOD is your place to publish your opinions, stories and anything else you wrote related to this issue.”

Rabbi Ron told the Jerusalem Post the site aimed to break down stereotypes and foster dialogue: “We want religious people to know that we want to adhere to Halacha. But we also want them to understand that a homosexual is born the way he is and has no choice … Judaism’s main emphasis is on actions. We understand that, and we are not asking rabbis to permit anal sex or to make any changes in Halacha. We just want basic understanding.”

HOD is not the first website aimed at religious gays, Itay, one of the founders of the site, explained to Ynet : “Up to now the only website catering to the religious gay community was Atzat-Nefesh (here in Hebrew and English ), which was basically run by straight people that publicly stated that a religious person cannot be gay. They tried to ‘turn’ gay religious people straight, which is something that we know cannot be done. We try to help people reconcile their religious beliefs and their sexual orientation.”

This month, Israel’s attorney general ruled that same-sex couples are allowed to adopt children that are not biologically connected to either parent. The decision expanded the legal rights of gays and lesbian couples in Israel, where the Rabbinic Court has jurisdiction over marriage. Haaretz quoted a religious cabinet minister as calling the ruling “shocking and disgusting”.

The creators of HOD take a pragmatic approach in their attempt to gain acceptance from ultra-conservative religious leaders. By breaking taboo, they hope to gain awareness, which is the first step towards acceptance, Rabbi Ron said. Once that is done, maybe they can tackle the issue of making orthodox Jewish law less stringent, he said. The Web site declares: “You cannot ignore us any longer.”

When Pope Benedict expressed his closeness to victims of AIDS in advance of World AIDS Day on December 1, one thing was conspicuously absent from his comments — either a specific mention or a reference to the use of condoms.

The Pope, speaking at his weekly general audience on Wednesday, called for increased efforts to stop the spread of AIDS and said victims of the disease should not be treated with disdain. He criticised international agencies he said were spreading abortion. The C-word was not present in either in letter or spirit in his two-paragraph comments in Italian.

When his predecessor John Paul spoke of AIDS, whether he was speaking in the Vatican or during his trips abroad, he often mentioned, either directly or indirectly, that condoms were not the answer.

The Catholic Church opposes the use of condoms in general because they block the possible transmission of life and teaches that fidelity within heterosexual marriage, chastity and abstinence are the best way to stop the spread of AIDS. It says promoting condoms fosters immoral and hedonistic behaviour that will only contribute to its spread. It teaches that homosexual acts are immoral in the first place.

In fact, the Catholic Church’s position on the use of condoms to stop the spread of AIDS has never been made totally clear or definitively pronounced.

Perhaps by not mentioning condoms, Pope Benedict has decided to take a more subtle approach to the problem.

In recent years, several top Church officials have called for a change in Vatican policy on condoms to allow their use by married couples where one partner is affected by HIV or AIDS. But the Vatican has so far been loath to issue any document that could be interpreted as a green light for the use of condoms to stop the spread of AIDS, fearing it would endorse promiscuity.

Little has been heard about a possible Vatican document recently. In November, 2006, Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan, head of the Vatican’s Council for Health Pastoral Care, told reporters a study commissioned by the Pope had effectively passed its first hurdle.

“This is something that worries the Pope a lot,” Barragan said of AIDS at the time. The study, which Barragan at the time said was carried out from both a scientific and moral point of view, had been passed on to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and would eventually be passed up the Pope for his use as he saw fit in a document of his own or a pronouncement. It is not clear at what stage the document is now but perhaps, judging by the Benedict’s words, he has decided not to confront the issue the way his predecessor did — at least for now.

Covering religion may be harmful to your faith. Two leading religion journalists — one in Britain, one in the United States — have quit the beat in recent months, saying they had acquired such a close look at such scandalous behaviour by Christians that they lost their faith and had to leave.

Stephen Bates, who recently stepped down as religious affairs writer for the London Guardian, has just published an account of his seven years on the beat in an article entitled “Demob Happy” for the New Humanist magazine. Bates followed the crisis in the Anglican Communion for several years and even wrote a book on it, A Church At War: Anglicans and Homosexuality.

“Now I am moving on,” his article concludes. “It was time to go. What faith I had, I’ve lost, I am afraid – I’ve seen too much, too close. A young Methodist press officer once asked me earnestly whether I saw it as my job to spread the Good News of Jesus. No, I said, that’s the last thing I am here to do.”

Bates announced his move back in September in another interesting article, this time for the website Religious Intelligence. Writing from New Orleans, where he was covering the Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops meeting with Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, he said: “Writing this story has been too corrosive of what faith I had left: indeed watching the way the gay row has played out in the Anglican Communion has cost me my belief in the essential benignity of too many Christians. For the good of my soul, I need to do something else.” Bates, who says he still regards himself as a Catholic, said he was turned off by the intolerance he saw towards gays and the self-righteousness of Christians who “pick and choose the sins that are acceptable and condemn those – always committed by other, lesser people – that are not.”

Shortly before Bates called it quits, William Lobdell, who gave the Los Angeles Times first-class coverage of the Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandal in California, threw in the towel with a wrenching story of his own struggle with organised religion. His farewell story in July, “Religion beat became a test of faith“ was a moving testimony of a journalist who started off as a Presbyterian, was active with evangelicals and seriously considered becoming a Catholic. But, during his eight years on the beat, the Catholic clerical sex abuse scandal put him off religion so badly that he lost his faith altogether. For an example of what he came across, take a look at Missionary’s Dark Legacy, a powerful story from 2005 about the trail of sexual abuse a Catholic missionary left behind after seven years among the Eskimos. Nearly every boy in the settlement was abused.

What do readers think? Can you understand how Bates and Lobdell reacted? Do you think a journalist has to be a believer to be a good religion reporter?

Is there a straw that will break the Anglican Communion’s back? One move that, like the gay bishop consecration that started the current crisis, can trigger a landslide that finally pushes the Communion into schism? Religion reporters are now watching each and every conference and bishop’s election to see if it will hit the tripwire.

The next flashpoint in the Anglican Communion’s struggle with gay issues looked like it could come from Chicago, where the Episcopal (U.S. Anglican) diocese on November 10 will pick a new bishop from among eight candidates, one of them an openly gay woman. The Episcopal Church promised last month to “exercise restraint” in naming further homosexual prelates. In an interview this month, its Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori (in picture at right) stressed there would be “no outcasts in this Church.”

Judging from how things look now, the lesbian Rev. Tracey Lind, who is now the dean of Cleveland’s Trinity Cathedral, may not be among the favorites vying for the post, Chicago Tribune religion reporter Manya Brachear reported on Monday.

Based on inteviews with church members who attended sessions where the candidates visited various congregations during the weekend, she wrote that the two favorites appear to be Rev. Jeffrey Lee, rector of St. Thomas Church in Medina, Washington, and Rev. Petero Sabune, chaplain of Sing Sing prison in New York state. They seemed to have connected more with the congregations than the six others, including Lind.

If chosen, Lind would be only the second openly gay bishop in Anglican history, the other being Gene Robinson of New Hampshire. If anything, the faithful in Chicago spoke more of Lind’s managerial and fundraising capabilities than they did about her sexual orientation, the report said. Those who favored Lee and Sabune emphasized their confidence and their feeling of personal connection.