DECANI, Kosovo - A visit by U.S. Vice President Joe Biden to one of the best known monasteries in Kosovo has again revealed a deep split in the church. A veteran of Balkan complexities from his U.S. Senate activism against Serbian aggression during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, Biden visited the 14^th century Decani monastery on Thursday afternoon to highlight the importance protecting the Serbian minority in Kosovo.

(Photo: Fr. Janjic with U.S. Vice President Biden at Decani monastery, 21 May 2009/Adam Tanner)

Father Sava Janjic, sometimes called Decani’s “cyber monk” because of his embrace of the Internet, warmly welcomed the vice president, who had first visited there in 2001. “This is his second visit to this monastery which is one of the most important Serbian Orthodox sites in Kosovo,” Fr. Sava told Reuters in fluent English. “We sincerely believe his visit will help the preservation of Serbian Orthodox heritage in Kosovo and generally help the position of the Serbian people in Kosovo.”

However, the diocese overseeing Kosovo, which the church considers the cradle of Serbian Orthodoxy, issued a strong statement condemning the visit. “The U.S. vice president is visiting Kosovo as an independent state, to confirm forceful secession of Serbia’s territory and its hand over to Albanian terrorist who were not punished for numerous crimes against Serbian people, Serbian property and Serbian cultural and religious heritage,” the diocese said in a statement. “Does Joseph Biden want to confirm with his gesture that Decani is an American base in Kosovo, the same as Camp Bondsteel?”

“The Decani monastery unfortunately has become known for its acts against Serbia’s interests, becoming in a sense a base for anti-Serbian acting in Kosovo as confirmed by this visit.”

(Photo:Heavily armed U.S. Secret Service agents during Biden visit to Decani, 21 May 2009/Adam Tanner)

The harsh words were the latest as the church seeks to sort out how to deal with Kosovo’s declared independence last year. The conservative acting church leader, Metropolitan Amfilohije Radovic, told Reuters in an interview last year that Serbs were treated so poorly in majority Albania Kosovo that future war was inevitable.

Fr. Sava did not want to address the latest controversy publicly, but noted the church leadership, the assembly of bishops meeting in Belgrade, had blessed the visit the day before Biden arrived. His monastery has in the past favoured a more moderate approach that includes dialogue with ethnic Albanian Kosovars, who are mostly Muslim.

Security was tight. In addition to Italian soldiers who normally guard what is the biggest Serbian Orthodox monastic brotherhood worldwide (with 30 monks), many secret service agents accompanied Biden inside the compound. Some heavily armed agents remained on guard as he went inside for talks, although a few took a tour of the church to admire its magnificent frescos.

Biden said he tried to bolster the monks by contrasting the often bitter racial tensions in the United States between blacks and whites when he started his professional career in 1968 and today when he serves as number two to the first black U.S. president barck Obama.

“I told the story to Father (Sava) today. They were down a little bit, they are feeling a little isolated, but wondering whether Europe is going to walk away,” Biden told Reuters and a few other reporters in an interview on Thursday night. “It’s going to take some time but we’ve got to stick with it.”

(Photo: U.S. officials at Decani church during Biden’s visit, 21 May 2009/Adam Tanner)

At the end of his three-day visit to Bosnia, Serbia and Kosovo, Biden said real integration among ethnic groups in the Balkans could prove even more difficult than it had been to end the 1990s wars in the former Yugoslavia. “What we are talking about now is real integration, not just the elimination of carnage and brutality, but there is where it really gets hard and it’s going to take time,” he said. “Things are drastically better than when I was last here, with a long way to go and in a sense the hardest piece to go.

“This is a process … it’s going to take a while,” he told reporters covering his visit.”

Here’s the Reuters TV report on Biden’s visit to Kosovo and Serbia:

Here’s a YouTube clip showing Decani and Fr. Sava, who calls Kosovo the “Serbian jerusalem.”

With the charge about the “party of death” still ringing in its ears, a group called Catholic Democrats has issued a Q&A on abortion setting out its case that faithful Roman Catholics can vote for Barack Obama despite his consistent pro-choice record. Catholic Democrats makes the same argument as the Matthew 25 network, i.e. that Democratic policies would actually reduce the abortion rate, which spiked under Republicans in the 1980s, fell during the Clinton administration and have leveled off — and may have begun rising again — in the Bush administration.

Former St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke, who is now prefect of the Vatican’s Supreme Court of the Apostolic Signature, told an Italian newspaper two weeks ago that the Democrats risked becoming the “party of death” for their support for abortion rights. Other U.S. bishops have criticised two prominent Catholic Democrats — vice presidential candidate Joe Biden and House speaker Nancy Pelosi — for suggesting the Catholic Church was anything but totally against abortion.

Catholic Democrats cites the bishops’ own guidebook, “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship,” to stress that Catholics should not be one-issue voters and could vote for a candidate if his overall platform is morally good, despite a pro-choice plank that the Church regards as intrinsically evil. “If the only difference between two candidates is that one is pro-life and the other is pro-choice, then a pro-life voter should obviously vote for a pro-life candidate,” Catholic Democrats says. “However, elections are never so clear cut. Republican and Democratic candidates differ on many issues: healthcare, the war, the economy.”

The “Faithful Citizenship” guidelines do say that “as Catholics we are not single-issue voters” (item 42) and that “there may be times when a Catholic who rejects a candidate’s unacceptable position may decide to vote for that candidate for other morally grave reasons” (item 35). They also say “that all issues do not carry the same moral weight and that the moral obligation to oppose intrinsically evil acts has a special claim on our consciences and our actions. These decisions should take into account a candidate’s commitments, character, integrity, and ability to influence a given issue. In the end, this is a decision to be made by each Catholic guided by a conscience formed by Catholic moral teaching” (item 37).

Even though it leans heavily towards a “no” answer, “Faithful Citizenship” seems to leave a door open for the interpretation that Catholic Democrats and the Matthew 25 network favour. Nor do the bishops seem to have a clear view of how to end abortion.

Take a look at John Allen’s interview with Washington Archbishop Donald Wuerl, who offers no simple answers: “When you get into the realm of politics, the realm of translating the need to preserve life into the circumstances of our day, what is conceptually possible and what is pressingly obligatory now begin to become two different things. That’s why there is so much confusion. I don’t think you can make things black and white, I don’t think you can separate or rule out the grays.”

Wuerl would like to see the Supreme Court’s pro-choice ruling Roe v. Wade overturned but also says: “Politically right now, existentially, if Roe v. Wade is not overturned, is there any other possible strategy that’s going to work? That’s the question with which we’ve got to grapple.”

In the avalanche of comments we got on Phil Stewart’s original “party of death” post, many readers seemed firmly convinced the Church’s position unequivocally ruled out voting for a pro-choice candidate. Is there some gray area here after all?

After the 2004 election, the buzz was that religion was a key factor in U.S. election campaigns. It’s come up this year with Barack Obama’s “pastor problem,” speculation about Sarah Palin’s Pentecostal church and several other points. So I thought it was worth getting up in the middle of the night (cable TV had it from 3 a.m. here in Paris) to see what if any role religion played in her debate with Joe Biden.

From that narrow point of view, I could have stayed in bed.

The only interesting point on any of the usually divisive “culture war” issues was the way Palin agreed with Biden that gay and lesbian couples should not be denied legal benefits granted to married heterosexual couples. “No one would ever propose, not in a McCain-Palin administration, to do anything to prohibit, say, visitations in a hospital or contracts being signed, negotiated between parties,” she said. Neither supported gay marriage, but that was their stated position already.

With the financial crisis dominating the news these days, there was little chance that these issues would take up much time in the debate. But the fact that Palin didn’t use the wedge issue when it arose was interesting. According to a new study by Beliefnet “moral issues are dramatically less important this year than in previous years – even among the most religiously observant voters.”

So has the faith factor fizzled out in this campaign? Can I get a full night’s sleep when Obama and McCain debate?

Vatican officials seldom single out political leaders who differ with the Church on issues like abortion rights or embryonic stem cell research. But now that the Vatican’s highest court is led by an American, the former St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke, we can expect things to get more explicit in Vatican City — at least when when it comes to U.S. politics.

Burke, who was named prefect of the Vatican’s Supreme Court of the Apostolic Signature in June, told the Italian Catholic newspaper Avvenire that the U.S. Democratic Party risked “transforming itself definitively into a party of death for its decisions on bioethical issues.” He then attacked two of the party’s most high profile Catholics — vice presidential candidate Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — for misrepresenting Church teaching on abortion.

He said Biden and Pelosi, “while presenting themselves as good Catholics, have presented Church doctrine on abortion in a false and tendentious way.”

Pelosi drew U.S. bishops’ scorn for saying in a television interview last month that the Church itself had long debated when human life begins. Biden is a practicing Catholic who also supports abortion rights and analysts have said he could help woo wavering Catholics into Obama’s fold. Both argue that they cannot impose their religious views on others.

Burke said pro-life Democrats were “rare” and that it saddened him that the party that helped “our immigrant parents and grandparents” prosper in America had changed so much over the years.

Burke made headlines as archbishop of St. Louis for his public attacks on public figures who strayed from Catholic teaching. He suggested during the 2004 presidential campaign that Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, a Catholic, should be denied communion because of his views on abortion. Several bishops said at the time they would not give him communion and the media staked out churches where he attended Mass to see if he received it.

“Lately, I’ve noticed that other bishops are coming to this position,” Burke told Avvenire, which is owned by the Italian bishops’ conference.

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, wrote a letter in 2004 to American bishops restating the Church position that a priest must refuse to distribute communion to a Catholic politician who supported abortion rights. But Burke lamented that the letter was never distributed.

Burke’s criticism isn’t limited to Democrats. Last year, he accused singer Sheryl Crow of being “a high profile proponent of the destruction of innocent lives” for defending a woman’s right to have an abortion and for being a proponent of stem cell research. He resigned as head of a children’s medical charity that featured the singer for a benefit concert.

Pope Benedict has been encouraging Catholic bishops to speak out more openly on public policy issues to make the Church’s voice heard. Any bets on when we’ll hear from Burke next?

Catholic leaders in Colorado and elsewhere have been swift to react to comments by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who said in an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that the Church itself had long debated when human life begins.

“… I would say that as an ardent, practicing Catholic, this is an issue that I have studied for a long time. And what I know is, over the centuries, the doctors of the church have not been able to make that definition … St. Augustine said at three months. We don’t know. The point is, is that it shouldn’t have an impact on the woman’s right to choose,” said Pelosi, seen at left kissing Pope Benedict’s ring during his visit to Washington in April.

In Denver, the venue for this week’s Democratic party national convention due to annoint Barack Obama as its presidential nominee on Thursday, Archbishop Charles Chaput and his Auxiliary Bishop James Conley said in a statement on Monday that Catholic teaching on the subject was unequivocal — abortion is gravely evil — and that “Catholics who make excuses for it … fool only themselves.” Similar comments came from Washington D.C. Archbishop Donald Wuerl.

In a statement late on Tuesday, Bishop Michael Sheridan of Colorado Springs said: “Those Catholics who take a public stance in opposition to the most fundamental moral teaching of the Church place themselves outside full communion with the Church, and they should not present themselves for the reception of Holy Communion.”

Pelosi’s spokesman Brendan Daly responded on Tuesday with a statement saying not all Catholics agreed with the Church’s position on when life began.

While not always mentioned by name, the clerical criticism can also apply to Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, picked as the vice presidential running mate for Obama. Biden is a practicing Catholic who also supports abortion rights and analysts have said he could help woo wavering Catholics into Obama’s fold. But a revival of the 2004 debate over whether such Catholic politicians should be refused communion at Mass could possibly hurt him.

John Kerry, a Catholic who was the Democratic presidential nominee in 2004 , provoked stormy debate in Catholic circles about whether or not a pro-abortion rights politician should be able to receive Holy Communion, a key sacrament of the faith. Several bishops said they would not give him communion and the media staked out churches where he attended Mass to see if he received. In June 2004, the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger — now Pope Benedict XVI – wrote to American bishops restating the Church position that a priest must refuse to distribute communion to a Catholic politician who supported abortion rights.

Abortion is one of the most divisive issues in U.S. politics and while polls show Americans in this election cycle much more concerned about the economy and Iraq it could prove important in Colorado, a closely-contested “swing state”.

When Colorado voters elect a new president on Nov. 4 they will also be asked to amend their state constitution to define legal “personhood” as starting from the moment of fertilization, a position that would not ban abortion but would create the legal foundation for a possible ban in the future.

This measure could energize the state’s conservative Catholics and large evangelical community — a key base for the Republican Party which its presidential candidate John McCain needs — to go to the polls.