An Archdiocese Fighting to Survive

Jesus would not be proud of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, fighting to survive as it goes through bankruptcy proceedings.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/03/us/milwaukee-archdiocese-angers-many-by-contesting-abuse-claims.html?_r=1&ref=us


Over 550 people have filed financial claims against the Archdiocese to receive some kind of compensation for sexual abuse by priests or church employees.


Let's set aside what Jesus might say or do to the perpetrators and overseers of abuse. ("It would be better for you if a millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea than for you to cause one of these little ones to stumble" Luke 16:2). 


What would he say to the administrators who want to throw out 95% of the claims because the abuse occurred more than six years ago or the abusers were not technically employees of the Archdiocese?


Jesuits, Franciscans, etc. are employed by their orders, not by the Archdiocese.  Furthermore, officials argue, parish employees are not hired by the Archdiocese.  Survivors of abuse should sue only the parish or the particular order to which a priest may have belonged.


The Archdiocese's goal is to save money, not souls.


Jesus had quite a few things to say about those who place money above God's values. 


The only time he lost his temper was with moneychangers cheating people in the temple courtyard.


One need not dig very deep into the Gospels to find Jesus' words on trying to hang onto your money.  It's right there in the Sermon on the Mount.


"You cannot serve God and wealth" (Matthew 6:24).


"Give to everyone who begs from you..." (Matthew 5:42).


The Archdiocese may survive as an institution through its machinations, but its soul is already dead.

The Power of Pink

What a fast-moving story! 


My students (always on their smart phones) alerted me during class on Wednesday to the controversy over Susan G. Komen for the Cure ending its $700,000 per year grants to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.




http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/02/us/uproar-as-komen-foundation-cuts-money-to-planned-parenthood.html?ref=policy


On Thursday pro-choice vs. pro-life forces waged war via Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr.  Even Judy Blume tweeted: "Susan Komen would not give in to bullies or to fear.  Too bad the foundation bearing her name did."


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/03/us/komen-foundation-urged-to-restore-planned-parenthood-funds.html?ref=policy


Today Komen reversed its decision and promised to restore funding to Planned Parenthood.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/04/health/policy/komen-breast-cancer-group-reverses-decision-that-cut-off-planned-parenthood.html?_r=1&ref=global-home


Apparently last December Susan G. Komen for the Cure informed Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) that its annual grants of about $700,000 would be ended.


On Wednesday a board member of Komen reported that the decision was related to pressure from anti-abortion organizations and churches such as the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of St. Louis and the Southern Baptist Convention.


Though Komen donates to Planned Parenthood only about 1% of its annual $93 million per year in grants and though PPFA uses that money for breast cancer screenings, anti-abortion groups had taken note of that 1% and had urged people to stop donating to Komen.  Why?  Because PPFA spends a small per cent of its budget on providing abortions.


"A growing number of religious organizations had become concerned that donations to Komen would benefit Planned Parenthood and had advised members not to give to Komen," reported the New York Times on Friday.


Bowing to that pressure, Komen made a new rule that its grants could not go to organizations that faced investigation by federal, state, or local authorities.


For PPFA "being the target of partisan investigations is part of doing business," noted NYT reporters Gardiner Harris and Pam Belluck. No other groups receiving money from Komen are under investigation.


I like the pretty pink ecard being sent to Komen: "Thank you for cutting off funding to cancer screening programs in order to prove that you are pro-life" (NYT, 2/2/12, p. A14). 


Thank you to the builders of the internet for giving so many women and men the power to express their political views quickly and effectively.

Today a friend is coping with a son who threatens both suicide and violence to others.


Yesterday I learned that a friend of one of my daughters had died of a heroin overdose on Thanksgiving Day. 


The day before I was walking my dog at 4:30 pm when I saw a helicopter hovering in a fixed position a few blocks away.  It turned out that a student had been shot multiple times in the torso at 3:30 pm near the high school.


I recall the words of Mark Doty in his memoir Dog Years, "Getting a dog is a contract with grief."  He explained that when you get a dog, you know it has a life span of 15 or 16 years at the most, but you still throw your heart into the relationship, eventually facing loss.

Children are like dogs in that respect.  You don't generally outlive them, but you set out on a unknown path with a being you love, not knowing where it will lead.


Choosing to bear or adopt a child is an act of courage.  It certainly entails pain as well as joy.  Hooray for all of us who do it and try so hard.


If one could distill "humanity at its best," the suffering of parents would be in that pure drop.

Princessing: A Tough Job

What a thoughtful article by Naomi Wolf about the "I want to be a princess" phenomenon among our little girls.


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/02/opinion/magazine-global-agenda-mommy-i-want-to-be-a-princess.html?ref=women


Wolf tells feminist mothers not to worry: this desire to be a princess can reflect a desire for more power and authority, not just pretty dresses.

Discussing Kate Middleton, Wolf says "Princessing is good, hard work these days."


I admit to a less enlightened attitude as my daughters chose princess costumes on Halloween after Halloween...


Hey Roz, Ellen, and Marie: I'm now on board with the princess thing.


Thank you to Laila Ayoub in my RS 304 class at CSU Northridge for pointing this article out to me.

Gimmicks for God

Valerie Prado, a student in my class this fall (RS 304 Women & the Bible), sent me the link to an NPR report last September about a woman's experiment with trying to live strictly by the various statements about women in the Bible.

I'd heard the report then but let the woman's antics slip by without any comment.  They do, however, deserve a rebuttal because she is turning them into a book that claims to be about "biblical womanhood."

Taking statements out of context without any consideration of the purpose for which each one was written, Rachel Held Evans lived for a year by passages ranging from Proverbs 31 to Ephesians 5:22.

Because Proverbs 31:23 says, "Her husband is known in the city gates," she stood at the "Welcome to Dayton" (Ohio) sign and held a poster saying "Dan is awesome."


Doing that and other things like letting her husband choose which Netflix movie they would watch clearly had nothing to do with what God wants from us humans. It was just a publicity stunt for her book. 

Rachel chose to ignore Ephesians 5:20, "Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ," so she could act out the next verse, "wives to your husbands as to the Lord."  She also chose to ignore the last 37 years of biblical scholarship by women who care about this issue, starting with All We're Meant To Be by Letha Dawson Scanzoni and Nancy Hardesty in 1974. 

But hey, maybe her gimmicks and her book will cause people to think about what "biblical womanhood" really is... to move beyond the simple imitation of various random references to good/bad women and reflect on how the genders should relate and what it means to be a person who serves and praises God. 

Micah 6:8 clearly answers the second question for both genders:
"What does YHWH require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?"


http://www.npr.org/2011/09/25/140761994/biblical-womanhood-a-year-of-living-by-the-book

Abuse upon Abuse

Ten years old and giving birth by Caesarean section... being cut open.  Better than being ripped open by the head of a baby. 


The girl checked into a hospital in Puebla near Mexico City "because she was suffering from seizures and other potentially fatal complications."


http://www.foxnews.com/health/2011/11/11/girl-10-gives-birth-in-mexico/


"The birth has been reported to the state's Attorney General Office and is under investigation as to whether the girl was raped, and if so, by whom." 


Whether the girl was raped?  She had a choice over whether to have sexual intercourse? Does a 9 or 10-year-old even know where babies come from and what the consequences of a "choice" might be?


The article then reports on an 11-year-old girl in Northeast Mexico who was also gave birth. 


Finally Fox informs us, "State laws in Mexico prohibit abortions for young mothers unless there is proof that they were victims of sexual assault.  The legal age of consent in Mexico is 12 years old." 


So 12 year-olds and older can say yes and it's not rape. 


For girls 10 and 11, any sexual intercourse that occurs is rape, duh.


Final insult: the 10-year-old, after seizures and surgery, is being told to breastfeed this infant.


Thank you to Guadalupe Ruiz for alerting me to this story. 

Anita Caspary, Feminist Nun

What an unlikely life: born in rural South Dakota in 1915, she earned a doctorate in English at Stanford University in 1948 and went on to lead her order, the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, to sever ties with the Vatican.


http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-anita-caspary-20111016,0,4520954.story


Her rebellion started with obedience to the mandate of Vatican II for all Catholic religious to match their ministry to the needs of the modern world.


She and the IHMs came to the conclusion that they needed to stop wearing the habit and to leave any teaching jobs where they had 60 to 80 students in a classroom. They decided a teachable limit was 40 students. They also decided their nuns should be allowed to complete their BA degrees before starting to teach.

Cardinal McIntyre, archbishop of the Los Angeles diocese, was furious about these uppity nuns.


By that time, Anita had become president of Immaculate Heart College in LA and then Superior of her order, which stood up to pressure from him to keep teaching for low pay and heavy work loads.


In retaliation, McIntyre made sure that wealthy Catholic donors withdrew their support from the order's college. It closed in 1980.


The sisters formed a new order, the Immaculate Heart Community, which includes both Protestants and men among its 160 members today.


Anita wrote her story in 2003, Witness to Integrity: The Crisis of the Immaculate Heart Community of California (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press). I treasure my signed copy.


When I met her, she was a fiery 85, still giving lectures and speaking out for women in the Roman Catholic Church. In recent years she attended the annual IHM lectures in a wheelchair, still gracious and highly respected.


My father too was born in South Dakota, in Trent in 1914. about 130 miles from Herrick, where Anita was born in 1915.

His ambitions were waylaid by the Depression and alcoholism. Hers were fulfilled by her faith and determination.

Sex in the Church

Sexuality has never been an easy topic within Christianity. It's hard to balance spirit and body.


The Feminist Agenda Network (F.A.N.) in the Synod of Southern California and Hawaii tackled this subject Oct. 14-15 at Claremont Presbyterian Church an hour east of Los Angeles.


"Building for the Future: Institutions, Sexuality, and Justice" in the Presbyterian Church USA was the title of F.A.N.'s working retreat.


Around thirty women got together for a retreat led by Kate Ott, associate professor of Christian Social Ethics at Drew Theological University in New Jersey.


The approval last May of a vote in Minneapolis in 2010 set in motion big changes in the PCUSA: persons who have life partners of the same gender can now be ordained pastors. And persons who are pastors can now be open about having a same-sex committed relationship.


It's not going to be easy to understand and implement this new policy. Actually, it asks every church member to rethink her/his views on sexuality.


Kate started us out with the question, "What is 'Christian' sexuality?"


We looked at a sheet defining "holistic sexuality" as including sensuality, intimacy, sexual identity, sexual health & reproduction, and sexualization. From birth to death, sexuality is present in all our interactions, Kate said.


That reminded me of Carolyn Heilbrun writing that there is a sexual energy "between any friends who share a passion for their work and for a body of political ideas" (Writing a Woman's Life, p. 108).


Ott asked us what a sexually health church would be like in terms of its staff and volunteers, its care and healing ministry, its Christian education, and its policies.


She told us to go back to our churches and ask, "Do we have a safe church policy?"


The June isue of Colloquy will include an article on sexually healthy seminaries.


Kate chose the encounter between Jesus and the Syro-Phoenician woman begging for help for her sick daughter (Mark 5 1-20 and Matthew 15) as important for our attention.


Jesus rebuffs her twice, but she persists. He has interacted with women, with Gentiles, and with foreigners before, but in this case the woman is three times removed from him--by gender, by ethnicity, and by religious differences. His limited time is for the House of Israel, not for everyone who crowds around him.


Nevertheless, she persists and in doing so teaches Jesus that the limits raised by his ministry caused injustice.


"God changed--he grew a little bit," Kate said, asking us to think how we sometimes behave the way Jesus did on this occasion.


"We parcel out our resources," she said. "Monetary resources, our time and our energy..."


Like him, we need to change. "Our preferencing of whom we represent" is not good.


Women's goals or sexual identity can't be our only justice-seeking goal. We need to work holistically--not be closed to environmental issues and racial issues, for example.


Jerri Rodewald explained that the synod used to have a Women's Advocacy group; that was followed by the White Glove Mafea, a forerunner of F.A.N. The goal of all three organizations was to address women's concerns within the Presbyterian Church.


I was delighted to meet these women from Ventura County, Los Angeles and Orange Counties, and as far north as San Rafael. Good music, good food, and lots of laughter.


Many are retired, but Kate quoted theologian Letty Russell as saying, "No one really retires; they rewire."


See photos: https://picasaweb.google.com/102150538747404124091/FANOctober2011?authkey=Gv1sRgCP_N--qb_cmU9wE#

Eleven plus Three

The three women awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace today bring the total number of women winners of this prize to 14 since the beginning in 1901.

They are:

Baroness Bertha von Suttner, Germany, 1905, peace activist.

Jane Addams, US, 1931, for leadership of the International Congress of Women in 1915, an effort to end World War I.

Emily Green Balch, 1946, for her work through the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom to stop World War I.

Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan, 1976, for their work to end violence between Protestants and Catholics in Ireland.

Mother Theresa, 1979, for her charity work. She was born of Albanian parents.

Alva Myrdal, Mexico, 1982, for her work on nuclear disarmament.

Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma, 1991, for her nonviolent work against the brutal government of Myanmar. She is the first Buddhist woman to win the prize.

Rigoberta Menchu Tum, Guatamala, 1992, for her work for social justice and respect for the rights of indigenous people.

Jody Williams, US, 1997, for her work to ban landmines.

Shirin Ebadi, Iran, 2003, for her courage in working as a lawyer for human rights in Iran. She was the first Muslim woman to win a Nobel prize.

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Leymah Gbowee (both of Liberia), and Tawakul Karman, Yemen, 2011, for their "non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women's rights to full participation in peace-building work."

Consider the dates of these prizes: the first three were awarded in 1905, 1931, and 1946 for work toward peace during the period of women's push for the right to vote in the US and Britain.

Those first awards came in 1905, at the height of the suffrage struggle; in 1931, when women's new right to vote caused notice of women, and in 1946, when women had just made major contributions toward fighting and ending World War II.

In each case, an award came when women were noisy in the public sphere.

No prizes came for another 30 years until 1976, when women's demands for full participation in society and government were again very loud.

Challenge to readers: Which women would have won the prize in earlier centuries, if there had been a Nobel Peace Prize?

Post your answers.

Three for Peace

Hooray for the Nobel Committee in awarding this year's peace prize to three women working for human rights!

Congratulations to Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, President of Liberia; Leymah Gbowee, Liberian peace activist, and Tawakul Karman, currently part of the protest occupation in Yemen's capital Sanaa calling for a change of leadership.

The decision honors the peace and democracy in Liberia after civil war and speaks of hope that its larger neighbors, Egypt, Libya, and Syria, will also be able to institute and sustain democracy.

The committee cited Ellen, Leymah, and Tawakul for their "non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women's rights to full participation in peace-building work."

This is the first time that work for women's rights has been honored with a Nobel Peace Prize.

Thank you for this bold statement that the struggle for women's right to be safe and to work for political change is a contribution to peace.

It reminds the world that human rights include women's rights... that women are human.

To hold us back is to hobble all humanity.