________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________________________

New Developments on Stories
Featured in Catholic World Report

Another missionary killed
Hindus blame Christians for inciting trouble

Nearly 300 Catholic institutions within five Catholic dioceses in the eastern Orissa state remained closed on Monday, September 6, to protest the murder of a Catholic priest of the Balasore diocese.

Father Arul Doss was shot with arrows in the early hours of September 2—allegedly by Hindu bigots—as he slept in a parish rectory in Jamudhi village in Orissa. The murder took place a week after a Muslim merchant, Sheik Rehman, had his hands chopped off and was burned alive in the same region, in an arson attack attributed to the fugitive Hindu fanatic Dara Singh.

Singh has been in hiding ever since he masterminded the killing of Australian Baptist missionary Graham Stuart Staines and his two sons, who were torched to death as they slept in their van in the same region in January.

The body of Father Doss was taken from the remote jungle village in Jamudhi to Christ the King Cathedral in Balasore, 300 miles from the site of the murder, for burial. However, the solemnity of the funeral service was marred by a political dispute, as diocesan priests prevented Giridhar Gamang, the chief government minister of Orissa, from entering the cathedral.

When Gamang arrived just before the start of the service, irate priests closed the cathedral door and demanded that the government official must “apologize” for anti-Christian remarks which had been made by the chief of the state police. The clergymen also insisted on an assurance that the police chief would be removed from his post. As a result of that confrontation at the church door, the funeral was delayed by two hours, while the parents of the slain priest were kept waiting beside the coffin.

That political dispute could be traced to a public appearance by Dilip Kumar Mahapatra, the head of the Orissa police force. On the day before the funeral. Mahapatra had told reporters that “it is not possible to give protection to priests working in remote areas,” because the priests themselves were creating “social tensions” and stirring up trouble by trying to convert the natives.

“The murder was a shock to us. The statement by the police chief was a lie and an insult to the community,” Bishop Thomas Thiruthalil of Balasore said after the funeral.

“Statements like these indirectly encourage the perpetrators of such heinous crimes,” argued leaders of the Orissa Catholic community, in a public letter to India’s President K. R. Narayanan. The letter urged the president to direct the state government “to take all necessary precautionary measures” to protect Christians and other religious minorities from attacks.

Inflaming tensions

In New Delhi, Archbishop Alan Basil de Lastic of Delhi, the president of the Indian bishops’ conference, issued his own statement deploring the “barbaric killing.” In a letter to the country’s Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, Archbishop de Lastic wrote: “The whole Christian community is distressed that such crime continues to occur despite assurances by governments that adequate steps are being taken to ensure the safety and security of minority communities, and specially of religious persons.” Archbishop de Lastic urged the federal and Orissa governments “to take urgent steps to apprehend the guilty” and to prevent “recurrence of such macabre violence.”

The decision to close all the Catholic institutions in protest, Bishop Thiruthalil said, was “a spontaneous reaction” from the regional conference of Catholic bishops of Orissa. A meeting of Church leaders from that region had been in progress when the news of the priest’s murder arrived.

Reacting to the statement by the police chief, Bishop Thiruthalil denied that missionaries were creating social tension by converting villagers. Rather, he said, “antagonism” arises because Catholic missionaries do their best to improve the conditions of natives in the remote villages, “to improve the living conditions of the native tribes, give them better wages, and try to make them aware of their rights.” That work, he explained, “is seen as a challenge to those who thrive on exploiting” the natives.

The timing of the murder might also have been significant, the bishop speculated. The Orissa region is governed by the Congress Party, which poses the main obstacle to Hindu nationalist groups in the coming national elections. The killing may have been intended at least in part to embarrass the Congress Party leadership.

In New Delhi, Congress party spokesman Kapil Sibal supported that theory, saying that “there is a conspiracy” behind the latest killings in Orissa. While admitting that the Congress government there had failed to apprehend the fugitive Dara Singh, Sibal argued that “the real culprits are those who are able to produce such criminals.” The killers in Orissa, he said, symbolize intolerance, malice, and hatred propagated in the name of religion.”

However, the police chief’s attempt to blame Christians for inviting trouble has received support from Hindu fundamentalists and their political patrons in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government coalition. Quoting the report of a BJP “fact-finding team” that claimed to have visited the murder site, the BJP linked the killing to tension brewing in the area as a result of “cultural invasion by the Christians.”

The “outsider” priest, the press release said, “was young and had several habits which the local tribesmen didn’t like.” The BJP statement made the sensational charge—unsupported by any corroborating evidence—that the murdered priest had been dancing and drinking alcoholic beverages with young women of the native tribes on the night before he died. The BJP statement referred to the killing as “the occurrence,” without ever directly acknowledging that Father Doss had been killed.

—Anto Akkara

Another women’s pastoral?
Australian bishops discover polarization

Undeterred by the final collapse of a similar American project four years earlier, the Australian bishops in 1996 agreed to commission an ambitious research exercise, studying “The Participation of Women in the Catholic Church in Australia.” That project is now facing a crisis of its own.

The US bishops had originally planned to frame a pastoral letter on the place of women in the Church. But after four drafts, and a process which lasted 13 years and involved consultations with 75,000 Catholic women, the committee charged with the preparation of the pastoral letter failed to secure the support of the necessary majority of American bishops at their annual meeting in 1992. This failure was essentially the result of a polarization of views on women and the Church—a division between orthodox and liberal Catholics that mirrored other theological disputes within a divided Church. Framing a document that satisfied both “camps” proved to be an impossible task.

When the Australian bishops inaugurated their own project, they made no commitment to issue a final pastoral statement. Instead, they set their sights on canvassing the widest possible range of views on the role of women in the Church. That enterprise was launched by Cardinal Edward Clancy of Sydney, acting in his capacity as president of the Australian Episcopal Conference, in August 1996. The responsibility for the project was assigned to the bishops’ committee on justice, development, and peace, with research to be conducted with help from Australian Catholic University and the Australian Conference of Leaders of Religious Institutes. The bishops immediately solicited written statements from interested individuals and organizations, setting a deadline of December 1, 1996, for those submissions. A total of 2,555 statements ultimately arrived.

However, the bishops’ research effort went beyond the collection of statements by interested parties. Further information was drawn from the Catholic Church Life Survey (CCLS), which was conducted in November 1996. The CCLS involved 281 parishes from around Australia, and collected opinions from 101,000 Catholics above the age of 14. The CCLS questionnaires were handed out in churches, to be answered either during the time ordinarily reserved for the homily or directly after Mass. Thus the CCLS was deliberately designed to collect the opinions of active Catholics. (The national weekly attendance figures at Sunday Mass in Australia comes to about 18 percent of the number of people who classify themselves as Catholics on census returns.)

Since the CCLS was designed to cover a wide range of topics—not simply women’s issues—there were 20 different questionnaires, which were distributed at random to the congregations. One of these—Questionnaire H—included the four key questions that have a bearing on the bishops’ project on women’s participation in the Church:

1.    What are ways in which women participate in the Catholic Church in Australia?
2.    What assistance and support are currently offered to women to participate in the Church?
3.    What are barriers to women’s participation in the Church?
4.    What are some ways in which women’s participation can be increased?

The third and final method of collecting material for “The Participation of Women in the Catholic Church in Australia” was a series of public hearings, conducted between May 13 and July 24, 1997 in all of Australia’s state capitals and most larger regional centers. In all, 500 people gave presentations—on behalf of themselves, their organizations, or their religious congregations—addressing the four same issues that had been covered in Questionnaire H.

In both the first written submissions to the bishops’ committee, and the hearings that followed, the conversation was dominated by women religious, academics, and Church employees. Most of these contributors expressed their discontent with the status quo, and many asked for radical changes in Church teaching and practice. Young Catholic wives and mothers were noticeably underrepresented in these processes, as were women who supported Church authority—perhaps because these women, unlike those who worked for the Church, had difficulty finding the time to attend hearings or produce written submissions.

Different results

On August 18, 1999, the results of all the bishops’ research became available in concrete form, with the official release of Woman and Man: One in Christ Jesus. The publication of that 500-page book was a major event, televised live across Australia by the ABC network. Cardinal Clancy chaired the event, along with Lady Helen Deane, the wife of Australia’s Governor General.

In addition to the written submissions, hearings presentations, and CCLS statistics, Woman and Man included statements which had been solicited from spokesmen for certain “targeted groups” (such as aborigines, the disabled, and migrants), Catholic organizations, and theological institutions.

It was by far the largest research exercise of its kind ever conducted by the Church in Australia. Cardinal Clancy went so far as to claim: “We believe this research is one of the largest of its kind in the world focusing on the issue of women and their participation in the Catholic Church.”

Whether the ambitious, costly project could ever justify itself remained questionable, however. For most regular churchgoers, the issue of women’s participation seemed far from critical. The ordination of women to the priesthood—the issue that is clearly uppermost in the minds of Catholic feminists—was not even on the agenda. Since the Australian bishops had endorsed the Statement of Conclusions, committing themselves to uphold Catholic orthodoxy in all areas, it was unlikely that anything beyond the most cautious or commonsense could emerge among Woman and Man’s many proposals and directives. And wherever else Australian Catholics looked, women were already seen playing prominent roles in the Church.

In fact, the most significant revelation of Woman and Man was the large gulf in viewpoints between the Church’s elites and the “silent majority” of regular Mass-goers. It was a situation to which Cardinal Clancy alluded during his comments at the National Press Club launch.

For example, 84.7 percent of those who filled in Questionnaire H indicated that they accepted the Church’s teaching authority, while only 8.8 percent said they did not. While 67.2 percent supported Church teaching on women’s ordination (with varying degrees of enthusiasm), only 26.8 percent clearly rejected it. Some 88 percent indicated that in the past 5 years they had never felt unwelcome in the Church, with only 1 percent saying they had felt unwelcome because of their gender; 76 percent said they had never experienced or observed any barriers to women’s participation in the Church; less than 3 percent thought there was a need for more “gender-inclusive language” in the liturgy. Altogether some 4,457 respondents had filled out Questionnaire H, and a study of their demographic characteristics—age, marital status, and so forth—showed them to be almost indistinguishable from the overall sample of 101,000 people involved in the CCLS. In other words, the people who answered Questionnaire H represented a statistically valid sample of Catholics attending Mass in Australia.

In Woman and Man, 300 pages are given over to analysis of the results obtained from the bishops’ three research tools: the written statements, hearings, and survey results. Only 35 of those pages are devoted to the CCLS questionnaire; the remainder is made up of lengthy extracts from the written submissions and the presentations by “targeted groups.” These passages call upon the Church to “read the signs of the times,” to “update” teachings, and to allow more use of inclusive language. There are familiar criticisms of “patriarchy,” “sexism,” and the “institutional Church,” combined with talk of alienation, marginalization and hurt. The editors of Woman and Man describe those written submissions which do support the status quo as representing “a small minority.” In the hearings, too, the editors report: “A small minority of the presenters were of the opinion that there are no barriers to the participation of women in the Church.”

The editors of Woman and Man also point out that Catholics who attend Mass regularly (and thus may have participated in the CCLS survey) are, on the average, older than the Australian Catholic population as a whole. But they fail to point out that those who are pushing the liberal agenda—especially the women religious—are, on average, older still.

At times the editors seem to adopt the ideological jargon of those they quote as part of a putative “majority.” One passage reads:

The patriarchal, hierarchical, and bureaucratic nature of the Church was seen as alienating many women and fostering leadership styles that are not favorable to women’s interests and women’s ways of doing things. The structures of the Church were seen as being large and impersonal.

One of the most clear-cut indications of a discrepancy between the representative CCLS findings and the liberal/ feminist predominance at the submissions and hearings involved the question of “inclusive language.” Whereas this was a non-issue for almost all the Questionnaire H respondents, for those at the hearings it was the issue. As Woman and Man reported that inclusive language drew “the greatest attention” of any issue under discussion. “The great majority of presenters who spoke on the question of language and images saw exclusive language and images in relation to both humanity and God as a barrier to women’s participation in the Church,” the report said.

The next step?

Woman and Man sums up the results of its opinion-gathering effort with a bleak assessment of the existing situation:

The dominant feeling of participants in the written submissions, public hearings and targeted groups was one of pain and alienation. . . . Pain, alienation and often anger resulted from a strong sense of women’s marginalization, struggle, disenfranchisement, powerlessness, irrelevance, and lack of acknowledgment within the Church.

Woman and Man occasionally draws attention to the fact that the CCLS survey produced results sharply at variance with those of the written submissions and the hearings. The strong show of discontent, the book concedes, “stands in contrast to the results of the CCLS, where the great majority of Mass attenders did not feel unwelcome in the parish and did not experience barriers preventing them from participating in the Church in ways that they wanted.” The significance of this fact is not underlined; there is never a hint that the written statements and hearings might have been dominated by self-selecting groups, unrepresentative of Australia’s Catholic women, and that consequently the bishops should discount their demands. However, the report does concede something that should have been obvious at the outset—especially in the light of the failed US project:

that the “contrasting perceptions” underline “a polarity which is evident in the Catholic Church in Australia.”

In light of that polarization, how will the Australian bishops follow up on the publication of Woman and Man? Bishop Kevin Manning of Parramatta (Sydney), who supervised the research project, made it clear that the bishops were releasing the report “purely and simply” as a research study, not as a policy document. The purpose of this research, he added, was to promote “theological reflection and pastoral planning, and as a basis for dialogue with women” in the Church.

Cardinal Clancy too sought to dampen any speculation that Woman and Man might pave the way for radical changes. As he helped to unveil the report, he explained:

We cannot guarantee, of course, that every one of the hundreds of proposals made by contributors to the research can be adopted. The bishops will have to consider whether or not a particular proposal is practical or in conformity with Church teaching. We may also find that action is already being taken on some of the ideas reported in the book.

The moment of truth will occur in November, when the bishops at their annual conference have to consider how they should respond to Woman and Man. But by the time what is “impractical,” inconsistent with Church teachings and disciplines, or already being practiced, is accounted for, there will not be much left to placate liberals and feminists.

—Michael Gilchrist

Blasphemy free for all
Court cannot define the crime

The Supreme Court in Ireland has ruled that it cannot decide what constitutes the crime of blasphemous libel. The decision effectively suspends enforcement of Irish laws against the offense of blasphemy, although that offense is still prohibited by the country’s Constitution.

The case stems from a cartoon which appeared in Ireland’s largest Sunday newspaper, The Sunday Independent, in the aftermath of the 1995 referendum that introduced divorce into Ireland. The cartoon featured a plump and comic caricature of a priest, holding a host in his right hand and a chalice in his left hand. He appears to be offering the host to three prominent politicians, who are turning away and waving goodbye. There is a caption which reads: “Hello progress—Bye-bye Father?”

John Corway, a carpenter from Dublin, made the decision to institute proceedings against the paper, under the provisions of the 1961 Defamation Act, which explicitly deals with the crime of blasphemous libel. He maintained that the cartoon and caption appeared calculated to insult the feelings and religious convictions of readers, by treating the sacrament of the Eucharist and its administration as objects of scorn and derision.

The High court rejected his application, so he appealed to the Supreme Court. However the Supreme Court decided that while the crime of blasphemy does exist under Irish law, no statutory definition of the offense exists either in legislation or in the Constitution. Hence the court argued: “In this state of the law, and in the absence of any legislative definition of the constitutional offense of blasphemy, it is impossible to say of what the offense of blasphemy consists.”

The outcome received immediate criticism, with the Irish Catholic newspaper noting that the judgment was reminiscent of an earlier decision, in 1995, in which the court had said it could not decide what the “natural law” was—a decision which thoroughly vitiated all references to the authority of natural law. Were the same logic applied to other areas of the law, the Irish Catholic reasoned, the Supreme Court would find itself with very little to do.

Another social commentator, Joe McCarroll, remarked on the irony of their court’s decision in contrast to the justices’ recent record of “creative” judgments in other fields. As he put it:

Creating a new right to abortion—no problem. Creating a legal rationalization for starving an irreversibly brain-damaged woman to death—no problem. But define blasphemy—impossible!

Not “hate crime” legislation?

The 22-page judgment delivered by the court revealed surprising inadequacies and internal incoherence. It begins with a summary of the common-law cases, both in Britain and in Ireland, that have developed the jurisprudence on blasphemy over the years. The recent developments have been such that, in order to qualify as blasphemy, an attack on the fundamentals of Christianity would have to be couched in scurrilous language. And while courts have gradually narrowed the scope of what might be considered blasphemous, they have simultaneously widened the range of religious beliefs that might be protected from such attacks. At first blasphemy laws were applicable only to attacks on the established church; more recently they were applied to faith in Christianity as a whole; and in 1979 the British house of Lords extended the law there to include the religious beliefs and sensibilities of non-Christians. At that time Lord Scarman defended the existence of laws banning blasphemy, saying:

In an increasingly plural society such as that of modern Britain it is necessary not only to respect the differing religious beliefs, feelings, and practices of all but also to protect them from scurrility, vilification, ridicule, and contempt. . . . I will not lend my voice to a view of the law relating to blasphemous libel which would render it a dead letter, or diminish its efficacy to protect religious feelings from outrage and insult.

However, the Supreme Court in Ireland decided to discount that judgment, and the prior history of case law on the topic, as it envisaged a problem with adapting those precedents to “the circumstances of a modern State.” This left a constitutional offense—mentioned in two separate acts of legislation—without any statutory definition, so the court decided that it was impossible to say what the offense of blasphemous libel is.

Oddly enough, the court’s decision actually cites a definition of blasphemy, taken from Murdoch’s Dictionary of Irish Law (published in 1988), as “the crime which consists of indecent and offensive attacks on Christianity, or the scriptures, or sacred persons or objects calculated to outrage the feelings of the community.” The decision then takes no further notice of that definition. And although the justices report that they do not know what blasphemy is, they nevertheless manage to decide: “the Court, having studied the cartoon, . . . is convinced that no insult to the Blessed Sacrament was intended and that no jury could reasonably conclude that such insult existed or was intended to exist.”

The judgment also includes an argument about equality before the law. The court acknowledges that Christianity is protected from insult, and Judaism appears to be protected; but, the decision asks, what about Islam or Hinduism or other religions? The justices then decide that in order to uphold equality, they cannot protect one person’s religion and not another’s, so they decide to remove protection even from the few that are protected.

There is no doubt that blasphemy law is a difficult area of the law. But it is not beyond human ingenuity to tease out the necessary distinctions. One commentator, Father Brendan Purcell, a philosophy lecturer at University College Dublin, asked why the law cannot protect the most deeply held beliefs of all believers in a way at least equivalent to the way that racial and other minorities are protected from hate crimes. “Is it because the ruling establishment in this republic is too profoundly tribal, too obsessed with its own secularist sectarianism, to even glimpse what a genuine democracy requires?” he asked. He concluded that the Supreme Court decision “is indicative of its, and perhaps the ruling elite’s, intolerance of Catholic belief at its most sacred core.”

Another chapter closes in the ongoing Kulturkampf in Ireland.

—Paraic Maher

Back to Catholic Information Center on Internet's Main Periodical Page

Back to Catholic World Report - October 1999 - Table of Contents