Follow Up - New Stories Featured in Catholic World Report

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Just before Pope John Paul II began his historic pilgrimage to the Holy Land, one of Israel’s chief rabbis announced that he was “deeply frustrated” by the Pontiff’s “Day of Pardon” ceremony, because in his view the Pope had not gone far enough to apologize for the role of the Church in the Holocaust.

During the litany of prayers in which the Pope and leaders of the Roman Curia asked God for forgiveness for a series of sins, Cardinal Edward Cassidy recalled the “sufferings of the people of Israel” and the Holy Father responded: “We are deeply saddened by the behavior of those who in the course of history have caused these children of yours to suffer, and asking your forgiveness we wish to commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood.” That general reference to anti-Semitism was not enough to satisfy some critics. Rabbi Meir Lau, chief rabbi of Israel’s European, or Ashkenazic, Jews, said he hoped the omission of any specific mention of the Holocaust in the prayers recited during the Day of Pardon meant that the issue would come up during the Holy Father’s trip to the Holy Land.

Several groups that dissent from various Church teachings also complained that the Day of Pardon ceremony did not specifically address their own particular concerns. Sister Donna Quinn, director of Chicago Catholic Women, told Associated Press that she would prefer to see more action taken after the acknowledgment that women have sometimes been ill treated by Church officials. She then went on to say that the natural consequence of a request for pardon should be a change of policy. Specifically, she said, if Pope John Paul “is sincerely asking for forgiveness, he would have to change the policies of the Catholic Church that discriminate against women, such as ordination.”

Not all of the response to the Pope’s gesture was negative. On March 15, as they concluded a four-day meeting, the members of the Conference of European Rabbis issued a statement praising the papal gesture. Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of Britain, said: “We applauded this courageous and strong declaration made by the Pope. We hope the words will be heard and implemented throughout the Catholic Church.” The American Jewish Congress said the Pontiff’s pardon marked “a profound historic turning point in the Church and its own perception of its role and responsibilities in the world.” The group added, “Our welcome of these changes ought not be obscured by focusing on points that may not have been specifically identified by the Pope during the course of his bold accounting of the Church’s errors.” Jack Rosen, the president of the American Jewish Congress, told reporters that the Day of Pardon ceremony “establishes a new basis for Catholic-Jewish relations from this point forward.”

Still, the complaints continued, and on April 7 the Vatican newspaper published a strong rebuttal to the gay-rights activists who had suggested that Pope John Paul II should have asked God’s pardon for the Church’s attitude toward homosexuals. L’Osservatore Romano noted that the Church has always upheld the principle of “respect for every person,” but that this principle does not imply “acceptance or compromise with deviations in ethics or in behavior.” Father Gino Concetti, the theologian for the Vatican paper, argued that this attitude has been applied consistently by the Church.

Citing the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Father Concetti wrote that homosexuality is “intrinsically disordered” and “contrary to natural law.” Homosexual acts, he continued—still quoting the Catechism—”do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.” At the same time, the L’Osservatore Romano article pointed out, the Catechism goes on to say that homosexuals must always be treated with “respect, compassion, and sensitivity.” The Catechism teaches: “Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided.”

Father Concetti recalled the public statement issued by Pope John Paul in 1994, after the European Parliament approved a resolution favoring the legalization of homosexual acts. The Pontiff stressed that homosexual persons must be protected against unjust discrimination, but he insisted that “juridical approbation of homosexual practices” is morally inadmissible.

On March 16, in a closely contested vote, the Vermont House of Representatives voted to allow official government recognition for same-sex “civil unions,” thus granting those unions all of the legal benefits of marriage without actually approving homosexual “marriage.”

The House voted 76-69 to pass the widest-reaching law on same-sex unions approved to date by any state in the US. The state Senate is prepared to pass a similar bill, and Gov. Howard Dean has said he will sign it into law.

The Vermont legislature had been ordered to consider the issue by the state Supreme Court, which ruled in December that same-sex couples were being unconstitutionally denied the benefits of marriage.

The bill contained an amendment specifically stating that marriage involves a man and woman. (That amendment was introduced by supporters of traditional marriage in an effort to protect other American states; since the unions to be recognized in Vermont would not officially be marriages, the other states would not be forced to recognize them under the provision of the “full faith and credit” clause of the US Constitution.) Still, pro-family groups complained the new law will effectively set up same-sex marriage. “If it looks like marriage and smells like marriage, then it is marriage—regardless of how much syrupy language is used,” said Janet Parshall of the Family Research Council.

“This bill is not about the civil rights of a minority,” Bishop Kenneth Angell of Burlington said. “This bill is about a minority imposing their concept of morality upon the morality of the majority.”

Same-sex couples will be able to apply for a license from town clerks and have their unions certified by a justice of the peace, judge, or member of the clergy. They would then be entitled to all the same state benefits as married couples, including rights to inheritance, insurance coverage, involvement in medical decisions, and tax status. However, because the federal government would not recognize the unions, the couples would not be entitled to file joint federal tax returns.

Sudanese government warplanes dropped bombs on a missionary hospital in southern Sudan early in March, killing two people and injuring several others.

The Voice of Martyrs, a group which sponsors the hospital in southern Sudan, said that about a dozen bombs fell around their hospital. Tombek Marcello Daniel, a missionary who works for Far Reaching Ministries in the region, was one of the two people killed.

The hospital was the third medical facility bombed by Sudanese warplanes in the space of a month, in a terror campaign that began with the bombing of a Catholic school. Bishop Macram Max Gassis has said that after that, bombing runs have been deliberately planned by the Islamic government in Khartoum to attack charitable institutions, as a way of inflaming sentiment against the rebels based in the region.

Just two weeks after the attack on the Voice of Martyrs hospital, a Christian school in southern Sudan was hit by another government bombing raid. According to eyewitnesses, the Russian-made attack jets from Khartoum made six bombing runs over the Christian Liberty Academy, where more than 100 high school students, their parents, and faculty were preparing to open a new school building. The school is sponsored by an American Protestant group, the Christian Liberty Academy of Illinois.

“We are outraged by the continuing persecution of black Christians, moderate Muslims, animists, and other non-Muslims in southern Sudan by the military regime in Khartoum which controls the Sudanese government,” said Dr. Paul Lindstrom, superintendent of the Christian Liberty Academy. “It is accurate to say that the government of Sudan is engaged in genocide, especially against the black African Sudanese. And the silence of the US government to all of this is deafening.”

A coalition of feminist groups want the United Nations’ new International Criminal Court (ICC) to declare the Catholic Church’s teaching on abortion a “crime against humanity,” according to the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (C-Fam). The latest attack on Catholic teaching is driven by many of the same individuals and organizations that recently supported the “See Change” initiative—an effort to oust the Holy See from the United Nations.

C-Fam has drawn attention to a new pamphlet circulated by the Women’s Caucus for Gender Justice, which asks governments to push the ICC as an enforcement mechanism for non-binding resolutions such as the Platform of Action from the Beijing Women’s Conference. Although that platform never did include support for efforts to eliminate laws against abortion, the Women’s Caucus emphasizes the opportunity to use the ICC as a means of “furthering the Beijing agenda.”

At a Rome conference in 1998, feminists introduced the concept of “enforced pregnancy” in reference to countries where pregnant women cannot obtain abortions. When questioned closely about the meaning of the term, feminists said that “enforced pregnancy” meant pregnancy deliberately caused by rape. Now in their new pamphlet feminists contend that “withholding abortion from raped women should be explicitly defined as a war crime and a crime against humanity.”

C-Fam observed: “This position is troubling to Catholics since it would explicitly name a part of their religious beliefs—that abortion is always wrong —a crime against humanity.”

C-Fam also reported that some critics are also concerned with the use of the term “sexual slavery,” which has found its way into the ICC document. Feminists explain that the term refers only to the kind of prostitution women have sometimes been forced into during armed conflicts. Radical feminists, however, in a 1991 Utah court case, referred to marriage as “sexual slavery.”

As CWR went to press, on April 17, lawyers for both prosecution and defense were scheduled to make their final presentations in the long-running trial of Bishop Augustin Misago of Gikongoro, who has been jailed since April 14, 1999, on charges of complicity in the genocidal killings of 1994.

Bishop Misago has been behind bars throughout his trial. In August, when he appealed to be removed from prison and placed under house arrest during the term of his trial, that request was denied by the government on the grounds that “he would try to escape.”

At several different points in the course of the trial, the prosecution has betrayed a lack of confidence in the strength of the case against Bishop Misago. There have been requests for delays, efforts to introduce hearsay evidence, and even reports that witnesses for the prosecution have collaborated with government schemes to discredit the Catholic Church. Alfred Pognon, the chief defense lawyer for the bishop, says that the evidence presented by the prosecution adds up to “a mixture of inadmissible facts, which the law cannot qualify materially as criminal evidence.”

In a final presentation of evidence on March 20, for example, the prosecution introduced a series of newspaper articles criticizing the bishop—thus proving that the bishop was unpopular with some editors, but certainly not proving the charge that he participated in a mass killing. On the same day, the defense produced 18 documents, most of them affidavits from individuals who testified that Bishop Misago was known as a proponent of peaceful coexistence.

The trial has included several surprises. The most dramatic of these came on December 1, when the defense called Jerome Rugema to the witness stand. That move shocked the prosecutors, since Rugema had been listed in their indictment as one of the children allegedly killed by the bishop and his collaborators in 1994. As a witness, Rugema testified that he was alive primarily because of the bishop’s protection.

Defense attorney Pognon told the Rwandan magazine Kinyamateka that none of the 38 witnesses who testified at the trial had been able to present evidence suggesting that Bishop Misago was directly responsible for any criminal activity. At worst, the prosecution witness criticized the bishop for “failing to use his position to protect more people than he did,” Pognon said. As a result, the lawyer concluded, the trial would inevitably focus on the bishop’s attitudes rather than his actions. “Bishop Misago has described the trial as ‘judging intentions,’ and this is true,” Pognon said.

The arrest of Bishop Misago was the culmination of a propaganda campaign launched by the government against the leadership of the Catholic Church in Rwanda. Government officials charged that the Rwandan bishops had done nothing to stop the spread of racial hatred. In fact, in March and April 1994, the bishops’ conference issued a series of statements calling for an end to the distribution of weapons among the members of the rival Hutu and Tutsi tribes, and in April—when the bloodbath began—the bishops again begged all Rwandans to stop the massacres.

Nevertheless, criticism of the hierarchy continued, and eventually crystallized around Bishop Misago. The newspapers Solidaire and Golias led the charge against the bishop, and in April 1999 President Pasteur Bizimungu explicitly charged that Bishop Misago had been involved in the killings. It was shortly after the president’s speech—five years after the massacres—that the bishop was placed under arrest and formally charged.

The Church under fire in Africa

Twelve months after the arrest of Bishop Augustin Misago of Gikongoro, the Fides news agency spoke with the Secretary of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, Archbishop Marcello Zago, OMI —himself a missionary for many years—about the situation facing the Church in Africa. The archbishop commented that the scene in Africa today is reminiscent of the scene in Latin America during the 1970s. In each case, Archbishop Zago said, the same elements appear: propaganda directed against the bishops, sharp denunciation of Church social programs, and tacit government support for new religious sects. The following are excerpts from the Fides interview:

How do you evaluate Bishop Misago’s twelve months in prison?

Archbishop Marcello Zago: Bishop Misago’s arrest was a sad event not only for the Church, not only for Africa, but for the world in general. However it is an event in which I note positive aspects: the great dignity, for example, with which Bishop Misago has accepted incarceration—not hiding away but on the contrary, coming out and defending the truth of what he did and what he went through.

What is behind all this?

Zago: Public opinion cannot fail to see that in certain African countries the Church is subject to persecution. Bishop Misago is not the only one to be targeted. Efforts to weaken the Church, under different pretexts and for different reasons, are seen throughout central Africa, particularly in the region of the Great Lakes. Attacking bishops in Rwanda and now also in Congo, with the situation of Archbishop Kataliko [who has been prevented from re-entering his own archdiocese since February] is obviously part of a broader plan. It is good that the Church and people in general realize this.

Have you seen any positive developments during the bishop’s prison term?

Zago: Misago’s detention has welded stronger unity in the bishops’ conference. Even among the bishops there are members of different ethnic groups; the presence of the bishops at the prelate’s trial has been a demonstration of their unity. . . .

The incarceration of the bishop is also a poignant reminder to all that salvation passes by way of the Cross and suffering. Even if the Church is not to blame, the way of the Cross is inevitable because it is the way through which Christ saved the world.

Relations with the Rwandan authorities are tense. Do you foresee any improvement in the near future?

Zago: If Bishop Misago is declared innocent, the authorities will have to be more careful in their persecution against the Church, but I doubt that their anti-clerical attitude will change. The Church simply cannot approve what is taking place: ethnic clashes, one group dominating the other, trials which accuse and condemn without proof, the total absence of any prospect for reconciliation.

Why are government authorities opposing the Church?

Zago: They want to weaken the Church because she is a force that opposes inhuman systems. This part of Africa is living the same situation as Latin America, with the spread of religious sects and cults. . . . At a time when the people are still insecure and bewildered, these sects are exploited as a means of dividing and weakening the Church, taking away her members.