Tom Heneghan

A damning report on sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests in Dublin is due out later this week, only six months after another report on abuse in industrial and reformatory schools across the country accused priests and nuns of flogging, starving and, in some cases, raping children in their care.

"It will not be easy reading," Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin said of this new report back in May when the uproar over the first report prompted so many calls to counseling services for abuse victims that the advice centre had to close temporarily because it couldn't handle all the inquiries.

(Photo: Copy of the first report on clergy child abuse, 20 May 2009/Cathal McNaughton)

The Sunday Independent newspaper, which broke the news, said the report will accuse the four archbishops who preceded Martin of covering up the abuse "to preserve the power and aura of the Church and to avoid giving scandal to their congregations."

Today, the daily Irish Independent said the diocese's compensation bill for victims of child abuse is set to double to more than 20 million euros after publication of the report, now expected on Thursday. It is due to be presented to the Irish cabinet today.

"Archbishop Diarmuid Martin has prepared both clergy and public for what we are going to hear.  This is a major  break with the old tradition of secrecy, which played a major part in getting us into this mess," wrote the Jesuit blogger Fergus O'Donoghue, editor of Studies: an Irish Quarterly Review.  "Our bishops, however, seem to have an air of  “business as usual”.  This makes them look exactly like our bankers!  They must realise that everything has changed and that diocesan and national synods in Ireland are decades overdue.  We must be assured that secrecy, particularly in the appointment of bishops, has been abandoned and that Irish Catholicism is moving into a new  era of openness and collaboration, even if it is about thirty years too late."

Here's a selection of the headlines from the Irish papers:

Archbishops’ cover-up of child sex abuse revealed

Report on clerical child abuse claims in archdiocese to be published this week

Archbishops put church honour before children

Medb Ruane: The devil is in the detail of this depraved vision of hell

Paedophile priests can't be named and shamed

Audits to reveal how dioceses dealt with child-abuse claims

Church's bill to hit €20m after latest sex claims

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There wasn't much information in the official communique after Pope Benedict and Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams met at the Vatican on Saturday. The terse text mentioned "cordial discussions" about challenges facing Christians, the need to cooperate and their intention to continue bilateral theological dialogue. The only reference to the issue of the day, Benedict's offer to take alienated Anglicans into the Catholic Church, was mentioned in passing as "recent events affecting relations between the Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion." Hmm, pretty thin pickings....
The Pravda-like opaqueness of the communique (read it here) prompted me to zoom in on the photographs we got from the Vatican daily L'Osservatore Romano for any other clues there. Let's see if they help as we go along. The "pope's paper" (here in PDF) published the communique at the bottom of its front page, below two articles on the pope's meeting with artists and one on Iran's nuclear program. An interesting hint at the Vatican's priorities that day.

Given this thin statement, our news story led off: "The archbishop of Canterbury and Pope Benedict agreed the need for closer ties between their churches on Saturday, in their first meeting since last month's surprise Vatican offer to disaffected Anglicans." Read the whole story here.

Williams later spoke to the BBC (starting at 33:19) and Vatican Radio. He told the BBC that the meeting "went as well as I could have hoped, really." He said he expressed Anglican concerns at the way the pope's offer -- officially called an "apostolic constitution" -- was handled and the two then looked ahead to future ecumenical discussions.

On Vatican Radio, he said at the start of the interview: "Clearly, many Anglicans, myself included, felt that he put us in an awkward position for a time. Not the content so much as some of the messages that were given out. So I needed to share with the pope some of those concerns and I think those were expressed and heard in a very friendly spirit." The pope's main message to him, Williams said, was "that the constitution did not express any change in the Vatican's attitude towards the Anglican Communion as such."

"The presentation of the constitution as a kind of dawn raid on the Anglican Communion misunderstands the process that happened and the actual nature of the constitution. People become Roman Catholics because they want to become Roman Catholics, because their consciences are formed in a certain way and they believe this is the will of God for them. I wish them every blessing in that. But I don't think it's a question of the Roman Catholic Church, as it were, trying to attract by advertising or by special offers. I don't see that as the purpose at all. In that sense, I don't particularly worry about it."

Williams said they didn't talk about the ordination of women bishops, the issue that has prompted some orthodox Anglicans to consider "swimming the Tiber". This is all the more curious because he delivered a provocative speech on Thursday at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome in which he stood up for women's ordination and asked whether the Vatican should consider it the roadblock to greater unity that it does.  Our news story on it said:

"Roman Catholics should look beyond the divisive issue of ordaining women to see how much they share with the world's Anglicans and work toward greater Christian unity, the head of the Anglican Communion said on Thursday. Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, whose own Church is split over female priests and bishops, said the Vatican's ban on ordaining women was not as solidly grounded theologically as the core Christian doctrines the two denominations agree on.

Williams said decades of Catholic-Anglican dialogue had achieved wide consensus on core Christian teachings and left only lesser issues of church organisation and authority open. "The question ... is whether this unfinished business is as fundamentally Church-dividing as our Roman Catholic friends generally assume and maintain ... Do the arguments advanced about the 'essence' of male and female vocations and capacities stand on the same level as a theology derived more directly from scripture and (our) common theological heritage?"

The speech is quite interesting for its theological reflections on the nature of ecumenical dialogue. Read the whole text here.

Williams said he gave Benedict a copy of the speech but they did not discuss it. Although the Vatican photos show him gazing with appreciation at the gift of a golden pectoral cross from the pope, none of the nine shots that we ran show Benedict thumbing through -- or even holding -- the text of the archbishop's challenge to Rome's all-male clergy.

They ended up with the standard pose, the one photographers call the "grip-and-grin" shot. Apart from not  showing the pope holding the Williams text, I'm not sure we've learned much more from these pictures. Or have I missed something?

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Europe's new president, Herman Van Rompuy, is little known outside his native Belgium. One of the few background facts about him circulating since his election is his opposition to Turkish membership in the European Union.  The operative quote, expressed in a 2004 speech when he was an opposition deputy in the Belgian parliament, is:

"Turkey is not a part of Europe and will never be part of Europe. An expansion of the EU to include Turkey cannot be considered as just another expansion as in the past . . . The universal values which are in force in Europe, and which are fundamental values of Christianity, will lose vigour with the entry of a large Islamic country such as Turkey."

(Photo: Herman Van Pompuy, 19 Nov 2009/Sebastien Pirlet)

The former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, said something quite similar In an interview with Le Figaro, also in 2004: "Turkey always represented another continent throughout history, in permanent contrast with Europe," he said, and joining it to Europe would be a mistake. Europe is united by its "culture which gives it a common identity. The roots which formed ... this continent are those of Christianity."

Both these comments were made in the context of a debate about mentioning Europe's Christian heritage in the EU constitution planned at the time. Some countries, most notably France, opposed any explicit mention of the traditional majority faith on the continent. The Vatican's reaction was: "The Holy See cannot but express its distress over the opposition of some governments to the explicit recognition of the Christian roots of Europe. It is a question of disregard of the historical evidence and of the Christian identity of European peoples."

Van Rompuy, a Christian Democrat, is a believeing Catholic who has no problem saying so in public. He attended a Jesuit high school in Brussels and the Catholic University Leuven. Back in 1985, he wrote a book entitled Het christendom. Een moderne gedachte (Christendom, a modern idea), which is now out of print.

(Photo: Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict), 10 April 2004/Max Rossi)

Van Rompuy's personal blog (mostly in Dutch and French, some English) has a whole section on religion and several commentaries, articles and speeches posted on the blog deal with religous and philosophical issues such as  the Dalai Lama and Pope Benedict's encyclical Caritas in Veritate or a discussion about love with the agnostic French thinker Luc Ferry.

This has prompted several European bloggers and commenters to slam him as having "no sensitivity whatever to Europe’s newer cultural diversity" or being "a Vatican puppet." One blogger asked if the EU now had "a devout Roman Catholic leading a secular European Empire?"

Are we heading for another debate about Europe's Christian roots? Or is it one thing, as his aides argue, to express views when one is an opposition politician and another when one holds a high office?

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If you've ever been confused by Muslim names you read in the news or unsure who's important in the Islamic world, help is near. A new book entitled "The 500 Most Influential Muslims - 2009" lists prominent Muslims from different fields -- politics, religion, women, media, even radicals -- with informative short biographies explaining who they are. It starts with an overall "top 50" list and then surveys the most prominent Muslims in their fields. Here it is in PDF.

The book, edited by Professors John Esposito and Ibrahim Kalin at Georgetown University in Washington, is the first in what is planned to be an annual survey of the top Muslim personalities around the world. It's a joint effort by the Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Center in Amman and Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. Esposito is director of the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center and Kalin is spokesman for the Common Word dialogue initiative we've written about on this blog before.

As the editors say in their introduction: "Influence in the Muslim world is particular to its context. There is not a clear hierarchy or organised clergy for Muslims to identify a leader, such as a patriarch for Orthodox Christians or a pope for Catholics." They took a mix of factors into account in working out their top 50 list and have even asked readers to send in suggestions for next year's list. You can vote for your candidate for "most influential Muslim" in the poll at the bottom of this post.

(UPDATE: The online poll has been closed after more than 1.8 million votes but comments are still open. See the results below.)

So who are the world's most influential Muslims, according to this book? Here are the top 10:

1. King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud, king of Saudi Arabia, custodian of the two Holy Mosques
2. Grand Ayatollah Hajj Sayyid Ali Khamenei, supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran
3. King Mohammed VI, king of Morocco
4. King Abdullah II bin Al Hussein, King of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan
5. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, prime minister of the republic of Turkey
6. Sultan Qaboos bin Sa'id al Sa'id, sultan of Oman
7. Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Hussein Sistani, Marja of the Hawza, Najaf
8. Sheikh Al Azhar Dr Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, grand sheikh of the Al Azhar University, grand imam of Al Azhar Mosque
9. Sheikh Dr Yusuf Qaradawi, head of the International Union of Muslim Scholars
10. Sheikh Dr Ali Goma'a, grand mufti of the Arab Republic of Egypt

(Photo: Saudi King Abdullah, 17 Nov 2009/Philippe Wojazer)

A few initial comments about these 10 and the other 40 (check the PDF for the full list):

-- Lots of kings and sultans crowding the top of the full list, with Recep Tayyip Erdogan the highest elected politician (5th). "Influential" is clearly interpreted broadly here, including political, religious and other types of influence.

-- The first solely religious leader is Iraq's Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani (7th), and even he has political power behind the scenes.

-- Fethullah Gülen, who won an Internet poll on "the world's top public intellectuals " in Foreign Policy magazine last year apparently thanks to a click-in campaign by his supporters, still comes a strong 13th.

-- The heads of Hezbollah (Seyyed Hasan Nasrallah, 17th) and Hamas (Khaled Mashaal, 34th) are also listed.

-- The highest-ranking American (and highest-ranking convert, it seems) at 38th place is Sheikh Hamza Yusuf Hanson, founder of the Zaytuna Institutein Berkeley, California. Right after him comes the highest-ranking European, Sheikh Mustafa Ceric, grand mufti of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

-- Even Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani scientist behind Islamabad's nuclear program who sold nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea, gets ranked (46th).

(Photo: Abdul Qadeer Khan, 28 Aug 2009/Mian Khursheed)

Beyond the top 50, there are chapters on leading Muslims in different fields but no ranking. So Osama bin Laden is there under "radicals," Yusuf Islam (formerly Cat Stevens) under "arts and culture" and microcreditor Mohammad Yunus under "development". There are short essays on Islam and the Muslim world. All in all, an excellent reference work.

What do you think? Who is the most influential Muslim in the world? To give us your own view, enter the name of your choice into the box below. The poll will automatically tally the answers and produce a top 10 according to the number of votes each person receives.

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Original Post Text:
Muslim creationism is back in the news. There's been a spate of articles in the U.S. and British press recently about the spread of this scripture-based challenge to Darwinian evolution among Muslims, mostly in the Middle East but also in Europe. The fact that some Muslims have embraced creationism, a trademark belief of some conservative American Protestants, is not new. Reuters first wrote about it in 2006 -- "Creation vs. Darwin takes Muslim twist in Turkey" -- and this blog has run several posts on the issue, including an interview with Islam's most prominent creationist, Harun Yahya. What's new is that these ideas seem to be spreading and academics who defend evolution are holding conferences to discuss the phenomenon.

(Photo: Portrait of Charles Darwin, 12 Feb 2009/Gordon Jack)

There are too many recent articles about Islamic creationism out there now to discuss each one separately, so I'll have to just link to them in the ... New York Times ... Washington Post ... Boston Globe ... Slate ... Guardian ... National ... Beliefnet ... ... Many of these articles highlight the role of Harun Yahya, the once secretive Istanbul preacher and publisher who has gone on a PR offensive in recent years and turned very media-friendly (as Steve Paulson describes in that Slate article). But as Michael Reiss, a London education professor and Anglican priest told the Guardian, "what the Turks believe today is what the Germans and British believe tomorrow. It is because of the mass movement of people between countries. These things can no longer be thought of as occurring in other countries."

(Photo: Harun Yahya, 21 May 2008/Osman Orsal)

Over the weekend, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt hosted a conference on “Darwin's Living Legacy: An International Conference on Evolution and Society” with the British Council. The simple fact of holding a conference on Darwin in the heart of the Middle East, where his theory of evolution is widely rejected, is already noteworthy. According to the Guardian's Riazat Butt, Nidhal Guessoum, professor of physics and astronomy at the American University of Sharjah, told the conference that only three Muslim or Muslim-majority countries out of a possible 22 taught evolution. Another participant, astronomer Salman Hameed, who is professor of integrated science & humanities from Hampshire College in Massachusetts, wrote on his informative science-and-religion blog Irtiqa: "It is incredible that this conference is taking place in Egypt. I don't know what will be the reaction here. Simply by its location, it may remove some of the stigma regarding evolution in the Muslim world, or it may end up generating a backlash. Frankly, I have no idea about the reaction."

In an update on Sunday, Hameed wrote: "There have been some anti-evolutionary comments made in the sessions that dealt with religion and evolution - but overall, the reception seems to have been quite positive - both in Egyptian newspapers and among the local participants."

(Photo: Salman Hameed/Irtiqa)

As a example of what they're up against, another participant was Zaghloul El-Naggar, a leading proponent of the theory that the Koran foresaw scientific theories and discoveries, including the Big Bang and a possible cure for AIDS. He was quoted prominently in a recent Al-Jazeera report on the discovery of the 4.4 million year old skeleton known as Ardipithicus or "Ardi." The report claimed that the find disproved Darwinian evolution -- the opposite of what scientists said about the spectacular discovery of the most complete early hominid specimen we have.  The report only appeared in Al-Jazeera's Arabic-language television channel, which is very popular in the Middle East, and not in its English-language broadcast. "The presence of El-Naggar totally polarized the debate and evoked an equally polarizing reaction from the audience," wrote Hameed, who promised further posts from the conference ending today.

Last month, Hameed's Hampshire College hosted a conference on Darwin and Evolution in the Muslim World. Webcasts of presentations there can be found on the conference website.

What do you think? Is the spread of creationism among Muslims a matter for concern? Is it the same as the battle between creationism and science in Christianity?

Here's the video of the Al-Jazeera report, with subtitles in English added by critics of its presentation:

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Muslim creationism is back in the news. There's been a spate of articles in the U.S. and British press recently about the spread of this scripture-based challenge to Darwinian evolution among Muslims, mostly in the Middle East but also in Europe. The fact that some Muslims have embraced creationism, a trademark belief of some conservative American Protestants, is not new. Reuters first wrote about it in 2006 -- "Creation vs. Darwin takes Muslim twist in Turkey" -- and this blog has run several posts on the issue, including an interview with Islam's most prominent creationist, Harun Yahya. What's new is that these ideas seem to be spreading and academics who defend evolution are holding conferences to discuss the phenomenon.

(Photo: Portrait of Charles Darwin, 12 Feb 2009/Gordon Jack)

There are too many recent articles about Islamic creationism out there now to discuss each one separately, so I'll have to just link to them in the ... New York Times ... Washington Post ... Boston Globe ... Slate ... Guardian ... National ... Beliefnet ... ... Many of these articles highlight the role of Harun Yahya, the once secretive Istanbul preacher and publisher who has gone on a PR offensive in recent years and turned very media-friendly (as Steve Paulson describes in that Slate article). But as Michael Reiss, a London education professor and Anglican priest told the Guardian, "what the Turks believe today is what the Germans and British believe tomorrow. It is because of the mass movement of people between countries. These things can no longer be thought of as occurring in other countries."

(Photo: Harun Yahya, 21 May 2008/Osman Orsal)

Over the weekend, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt hosted a conference on “Darwin's Living Legacy: An International Conference on Evolution and Society” with the British Council. The simple fact of holding a conference on Darwin in the heart of the Middle East, where his theory of evolution is widely rejected, is already noteworthy. According to the Guardian's Riazat Butt, Nidhal Guessoum, professor of physics and astronomy at the American University of Sharjah, told the conference that only three Muslim or Muslim-majority countries out of a possible 22 taught evolution. Another participant, astronomer Salman Hameed, who is professor of integrated science & humanities from Hampshire College in Massachusetts, wrote on his informative science-and-religion blog Irtiqa: "It is incredible that this conference is taking place in Egypt. I don't know what will be the reaction here. Simply by its location, it may remove some of the stigma regarding evolution in the Muslim world, or it may end up generating a backlash. Frankly, I have no idea about the reaction."

In an update on Sunday, Hameed wrote: "There have been some anti-evolutionary comments made in the sessions that dealt with religion and evolution - but overall, the reception seems to have been quite positive - both in Egyptian newspapers and among the local participants."

(Photo: Salman Hameed/Irtiqa)

As a example of what they're up against, another participant was Zaghloul El-Naggar, a leading proponent of the theory that the Koran foresaw scientific theories and discoveries, including the Big Bang and a possible cure for AIDS. He was quoted prominently in a recent Al-Jazeera report on the discovery of the 4.4 million year old skeleton known as Ardipithicus or "Ardi." The report claimed that the find disproved Darwinian evolution -- the opposite of what scientists said about the spectacular discovery of the most complete early hominid specimen we have.  The report only appeared in Al-Jazeera's Arabic-language television channel, which is very popular in the Middle East, and not in its English-language broadcast. "The presence of El-Naggar totally polarized the debate and evoked an equally polarizing reaction from the audience," wrote Hameed, who promised further posts from the conference ending today.

Last month, Hameed's Hampshire College hosted a conference on Darwin and Evolution in the Muslim World. Webcasts of presentations there can be found on the conference website.

What do you think? Is the spread of creationism among Muslims a matter for concern? Is it the same as the battle between creationism and science in Christianity?

Here's the video of the Al-Jazeera report, with subtitles in English added by critics of its presentation:

Follow FaithWorld on Twitter at RTRFaithWorld

(Video: Archbishop Hilarion holds a news conference in French during his Paris visit, 13 Nov 2009/courtesy of Orthodoxie.com)

Archbishop Hilarion Alfeyev, the Russian Orthodox Church's top official for relations with other churches, has been busy this past week putting his revived church's stamp on the world Christian scene. Over the weekend, he urged Catholics and Orthodox to join forces to defend their traditional version of Christianity. His comments, made during a visit to Paris to inaugurate his Church's first seminary outside of Russia, come only days after positive remarks he made last week about how the Vatican and Moscow were slowly moving towards a meeting between Moscow's Patriarch Kirill and Pope Benedict. Also last week, Hilarion indicated the Russian Orthodox might end their ecumenical dialogue with Lutherans after Germany's Protestants elected a divorced woman, Bishop Margot Kässmann, as the new head of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD). After all this, he planned to take off for a visit to China.

(Photo: Saint Seraphin Russian Orthodox Church (Ecumenical Patriarchate) in a courtyard in the 15th arrondissement of Paris, 27 Sept 2009/Tom Heneghan)

At his news conference, the 43-year-old archbishop said the Catholic and Orthodox churches were "already working together in many areas. Their views are almost identical in matters of doctrine and social ethics. They could show all these values in secular society, nationally or internationally, for example regarding the concept of family, environment, economy, education etc.. Orthodox and Catholics should find a common language and speak with one voice to defend the values that derive from their faith. They could also work effectively in many areas of social and charitable work. This testimony and cooperation, I am sure, could help us take a different approach to the theological issues that divide us. They could make the question of unity more interesting to a wider audience, which is little concerned with theological issues such as the Filioque or primacy issues, but sensitive to questions that concern everyday life. I had the honour to raise these issues with His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI last September, during my visit to Rome."

He also evoked this theme at the opening of the Russian Orthodox seminary in a former 17th-century Catholic convent in Epinay-sous-Sénart outside of Paris. "The opening of an Orthodox seminary of the Moscow Patriarchate in Paris is an unprecedented event," he said. "The seminary is called among other things to become an important center of rapprochement between traditional Christian Churches in Europe ... The primary task of Paris Seminary is to offer high-quality theological education. The seminary is also to become a link between the Russian Orthodox Church and Christians in France."

Hilarion said Catholics and Orthodox were making progress in theological discussions on issues that split them in the Great Schism over a millennium ago. But he said the Moscow Patriarchate took a "prudent" approach to the "uncertain and distant results of theological dialogue ... it knows that such a dialogue will probably take decades to come to a result."

On that dialogue with German Protestants, Hilarion was quoted last week as citing protocol problems arising from Kässmann's election. "We can develop the dialogue, but there are lots of simple protocol questions. How will the Patriarch address her or meet with her?" the Interfax news agency quoted him as saying. This elicited a sharp reaction from Kässman and Bishop Martin Schindehütte, Hilarion's counterpart in the EKD. In a joint letter to Patriarch Kirill, they expressed their "great surprise and incomprehension" at his "unsuitable" remarks on her election. They said there was a Christian commandment of mutual respect "im geschwisterlichen Umgang" (in brotherly and sisterly interchange) among churches despite theological differences and regretted that a planned ceremony on November 30 to mark 50 years of EKD-Russian Orthodox dialogue had to be called off.

(Photos: Archbishop Hilarion and Bishop Kässman)

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French Communist parliamentarian André Gerin, a leading proponent of a ban on full facial veils here, is an old hand at avoiding answering unwelcome questions. One that has become increasingly difficult for him is whether France should prohibit Muslim women here from wearing the veils, known as burqas and niqabs, as a way to combat Islamic fundamentalism. He got a real grilling about this on Europe 1 radio today. After ducking the persistent question "will you propose a legal ban?" several times, he finally admitted that, well ... uh ... there wouldn't be a ban after all. There would be "recommendations" that could be supported by Muslim leaders here, i.e. would not include the ban they oppose.

(Photo: André Gerin supports striking firemen, 4 Feb 1999/Robert Pratta)

If you speak French, have a listen here.  Click here for our news story.

It looks like anything else said about this topic from here on in is simply hot air -- and Gerin generated a lot of that, too. He first tried to brush off the Europe 1 questioner by responding that nobody appearing before the parliamentary inquiry he heads has spoken up for these head-to-toe coverings. Fine, but that's not an answer. Behind this fashion of "walking coffins" was "a fundamentalist drift" he was determined to combat, he went on. The goal, he added with rising rhetorical stakes, was to launch "a great public action against the stranglehold Islamic fundamentalism has in certain areas of our country, especially over women." The National Assembly should pass "a law of liberation (of women)," he declared. But it would only contain  "recommendations" that he didn't elaborate on.

President Nicolas Sarkozy has been raising the volume as well. "France is a country that has no place for the burqa or the subjugation of women -- not under any pretext, any condition or any circumstance," he declared on Thursday in a speech about France's national identity. But he also didn't say how France would translate this into practice.

(Photo: President Sarkozy, 12 Nov 2009/Philippe Desmazes)

Sarkozy gave no further details because Gerin's panel, which meets weekly and is due to issue a report in early January, has the task of scouting out the next step. The National Assembly should then follow up with a law based on the report. That's the way it worked back in 2004 after a similar panel led by parliamentarian Bernard Stasi ended up with a proposal that included a law banning headscarves in state schools.

A burqa ban looked likely when Gerin's inquiry began in June. After several sessions in recent months where many experts told him a ban just couldn't work, his interview signalled that all this discussion will end not with a bang but a whimper. At one of those sessions in late September, mayors of several towns with large Muslim populations told him a ban could not be enforced. This week, several leading legal experts told him a ban would be unconstitutional. Even militant secularists who can't stand all this cover up are against a burqa ban, fearing it could lead to other violations of basic rights.

"If it's voted in, a burqa ban could be declared illegal by many judges and there would be many cases challenging it from local criminal courts all the way up to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, via the Constitutional Council,"  law professor Denys de Béchillon warned. "I don't know if women in burqas are really free to decide -- some are and some aren't. But in the current state of the law and probably the political philosophy of our democracies, it seems difficult to decide in their place if they're free or not."

Of course, that's not to say there won't be more smoke and mirrors over the next few months. Gerin's committee holds its final meeting in December and issues its report early next year, so those are at least two more opportunities for airing the issue. Sarkozy wants France to hold a public debate about immigration and national identity early next year, with the question of the integration of Muslims high on the agenda.

(Photo: Veiled woman shopping in Roubaix, near Lille, 9 Aug 2009/Farid Alouache)

In France, Muslim veils are an issue that both the left and right can exploit, especially since there are probably only a few hundred or maybe a thousand  women who completely cover their faces here. Unsurprisingly, there are regional elections here in March. Once they're over and Gerin's and Sarkozy's debates have served their purpose, the National Assembly can get down to what's supposed to be serious work and pass a law with no teeth in it.

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A senior Russian Orthodox leader has said the idea of a meeting between Moscow's Patriarch Kirill and Pope Benedict could be moving towards the preparation stage. Archbishop Hilarion Alfeyev, the "foreign minister" of the Russian church, made clear that neither a date nor a location for such the long-awaited meeting was under discussion. But given the glacial pace at which progress on this issue is made, even the change in tone from Moscow is worth noting.

There has never been a meeting between a pope and the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, the largest of the Orthodox Churches that make up the second biggest Christian family after Roman Catholicism. The late Pope John Paul II wanted to make history with a visit to Russia, but strains between the Vatican and Moscow over alleged Catholic proselytising in the former Soviet Union got in the way.

(Photo: Archbishop Hilarion in Brussels, 11 May 2009/Francois Lenoir)

The election of Pope Benedict in 2005 and of Patriarch Kirill early this year seemed to close that chapter of the churches' bilateral relations and open a new one moving towards a possible meeting. But despite the warmer tone in comments from each side, problems still remained.  Only last month, Hilarion denied reports of an impending meeting and said relations needed a "radical improvement."

The Interfax news agency quoted Hilarion as telling reporters in Moscow: "Today it can be said that we are moving to a moment when it becomes possible to prepare a meeting between the Pope and the Patriarch of Moscow ... There are no specific plans for the venue or timing of such a meeting but on both sides there is a desire to prepare it."

(Photo: Cardinal Kasper in Moscow, 29 May 2008/Alexander Natruskin)

Hilarion added with approval that that Benedict is "a very reserved, traditional man who does not seek the expansion of the Catholic Church to traditionally Orthodox regions."

Cardinal Walter Kasper, the top Catholic official for ecumenical relations, made positive sounds back in September after Hilarion met Benedict at the Vatican. Last month, he said a Catholic-Orthodox theologians' meeting in Cyprus had gone well and even discussed the question of the primacy of the Bishop of Rome, one of the main issues dividing Catholics and Orthodox. There was no agreement, of course, but the two sides agreed to continue to talk -- in September 2010 in Vienna.

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Anniversaries are a time to look back at how the world was before the historic event being commemorated. During a recent trip to Berlin in advance of today's 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall's fall, I asked the former East German theologian and politician Richard Schröder for his recollections of the life as a Protestant pastor before the country fell apart. He zeroed in on a fascinating aspect of the Communists' anti-religion policy I'd never heard about before.

(Photo: Richard Schröder, 21 Oct 2009/Tom Heneghan)

"The Communists who took over in 1945 were trained in Russia," he told me at his home in a southern suburb of Berlin. "Their model was the Russian Orthodox Church, which focuses heavily on the liturgy. By contrast, Protestant churches have always been a wide field that included Bible study and other discussion groups. All the charity work of the Protestant churches, like their hospitals, were started by what you might call grass roots movements of congregation members. They were not started by the churches themselves. But the Communists always tried to handle us as if we were Russian Orthodox."

One way to do this was to demand the churches register in advance any meeting except their Sunday church services and the internal sessions of the church leadership. Officials were especially suspicious of the churches' youth activities, such as camping trips that included Bible study sessions. The churches refused to agree because this would have been a way to block such activities without banning them outright -- all they would have to do was fail to issue permission for the meeting. "The state made a second effort to impose this registration, but the churches decided to pay all the fines and not register the meetings. They got away with it. When the officials noticed the churches always paid the 500 mark fine but kept on holding their meetings, they stopped imposing the fine. It took a long time for the Communists to understand that the Protestant churches are a different version of Christianity than the strongly liturgical Orthodox Church."

(Image: Falling church membership figures in East Germany -- purple for Protestants, yellow for Catholics/ Forum of Contemporary History Leipzig)

Communist officials also seem to have had problems figuring out the theological differences between Russian Orthodox and German Lutherans.  "The Orthodox Church didn't go through the Enlightenment," Schröder said. "It maintained a sacred worship in which the miraculous, including some pious fraud, played a big role. Lenin once suggested to use the arguments of the French Enlightenment in the fight against religion. So the East German Communists did that here. They didn't know that every Protestant theology student here had already learned all these arguments. They were old hat. The state established a chair for atheism at Jena University to promote anti-religious propaganda. The professor started to read Lutheran theology and had to admit it had already had its debate with the Enlightenment. They decided to stop using simple arguments like Darwin versus creationism or that the Sputnik didn't find God out in space. They saw that didn't work."

This change of strategy in the 1970s led to the first meeting in 1978 between party leader Erich Honecker and the Protestant church leadership. The state toned down its atheist propaganda and tried to find ways to cooperate with the churches. "The party was aiming for a modus vivendi to boost good will with West Germany because they needed financial credits from them. West Germany had told East Germany it would measure its good will among other things by how they treated the churches." This eased the situation for pastors, who didn't have to fear getting arrested anymore, but officials still harrassed them by barring their children from attending high school.

Despite this limited detente, some Communist officials still took a long time to get away from the Russian Orthodox model they'd learned about in their Marxism-Leninism training, Schröder said. When they met him as a young Protestant pastor, they talked about the "dignitaries" of the church, as if they were Orthodox patriarchs dressed in ornate vestments. "Here I was, a bearded man in jeans, and I was suddenly a dignitary!" he laughed.

After East Germany collapsed, researchers found in the archives of the State Secretariat for Religious Affairs that the Communist officials slowly realised that Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his experiences in resistance to the Nazis was very important for Lutheran theology in East Germany. "

(Photo: Protest symbol saying "Swords into Plowshares --  Peace Prayers in St. Nicholas Church -- Every Monday at 5 p.m." in Leipzig, 16 Oct 2009/Tom Heneghan)

"By 1988-89 they finally understood how the Protestant church ticks," Schröder said. "The motto "A church for others" played a big role in East Germany and it came from Bonhoeffer. They should have been able to see that Protestants had already debated during the Nazi period the question of how Christians should behave in a totalitarian state. We even had the Barmen Declaration of the Confessing Church during the Nazi period printed in our hymnbooks." That 1934 document rejected the Nazis' bid to subordinate the churches to the state.

By 1988-1989, of course, the protest movement linked to the Protestant churches was too far developed to be contained by some new manipulative strategy by the state. The Stasi secret police had at least 800  informers -- many of the church officials and pastors -- reporting from inside the churches about what was happening there, according to Stasi documents opened up after Germany reunited. They produced vast amounts of secret reports and betrayed large numbers of church members but were useless in stopping history when it happened.

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