1. WorldWide Religious News (http://wwrn.org)
In Era of Humble Pope, Earth Shifts Under Cardinal Dolan
by Sharon Otterman ("The New York Times," May 23, 2014)
Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan lives in a 19th-century Madison Avenue mansion that connects to St. Patrick’s Cathedral. A cook and two housekeepers serve him and three other priests. A driver chauffeurs him around, though in a Chrysler minivan.
It is a comfortable, if not necessarily extravagant, lifestyle, one in keeping with that of past archbishops of New York. But in the age of Pope Francis, who has captured the world’s imagination by rejecting many luxurious trappings of the papacy, is the cardinal’s lifestyle humble enough?
The question is just one of many that Cardinal Dolan is contending with as he navigates the changes in the Roman Catholic world wrought by the election last year of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the former archbishop of Buenos Aires.
Some see the influence of Cardinal Dolan, once considered a possible candidate for pope himself, waning in the era of the new pontiff. With Francis upending conventions not just about the pomp and pageantry of the office but also about the expectations for his priests and bishops, the church has inarguably changed around Cardinal Dolan, even as he maintained last week that he has stayed more or less the same.
In a written response to a series of questions from The New York Times about Francis’ effect on him and the diocese, Cardinal Dolan said he did not believe he had altered how he ran the archdiocese, or made any adjustments in his personal habits. But some who study the Catholic Church say that they are beginning to detect subtle differences, at least in his public persona, as he seeks to adapt to the new spirit in Rome.
“He certainly is not doing a massive overhaul of his personality, but he is giving himself a bit of a tuneup,” said Christopher Bellitto, a papal historian at Kean University in New Jersey.
In the last years that Benedict XVI served as pope, Cardinal Dolan, 64, was America’s top bishop as the president of the United States Conference for Catholic Bishops. Ever the genial guardian of Catholic orthodoxy, he led the charge against the Obama administration’s efforts to require some religious employers to cover birth control for employees. Some church experts say he was also the go-to cardinal for many in the Vatican when they wanted to know what was going on in the American church.
Since then, Cardinal Dolan’s term as the bishops’ leader has ended. Francis is elevating different priorities, such as pastoral outreach to the poor and immigration, over the culture war issues of abortion and same-sex marriage. The new pope has selected as his closest American adviser Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston, a Franciscan in robes and sandals who speaks fluent Spanish and champions the poor, appointing him to a privy council of eight cardinals.
To the powerful commission that selects the world’s bishops, Francis named Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, widely considered a moderate, to replace Cardinal Raymond Burke, a more conservative prelate who has advocated denying communion to Catholic politicians who support abortion rights. Such moves are shifting the center of gravity of the American church.
“It’s not that he’s out of favor or irrelevant,” said John Allen, who wrote a book with Cardinal Dolan and now reports for The Boston Globe. “But both in terms of who Rome listens to in the American church, and setting priorities for the American church, I think there’s no question that Tim Dolan is no longer the prime mover in that regard.”
Cardinal Dolan is still on several important Vatican committees, and in the United States, remains the preferred bishop to speak on television. He is a master communicator, pithy and gregarious. But the buzz that followed him into the conclave to select Francis as pope in March 2013 — that he himself could be a papal candidate — has dissipated.
“He’s not out in the cold, but neither is he the rising star anymore,” said Pat McNamara, a church historian and author of a forthcoming book on New York Catholicism.
When it comes to lifestyle, the pope is challenging the model of the bishop as royalty of the church and increasing popular expectations that bishops act more like humble parish priests, truly getting to know their people. It is a call that Cardinal Dolan said he had certainly reflected upon.
“I hope and pray that I was living a fairly simple life beforehand,” the cardinal said. “But I do have to examine my own conscience and ask: ‘Am I too comfortable? Do I take too much for granted? Are my priorities where they should be?’ ”
Besides reining in excess, however, Francis has asked priests and bishops to limit their travel and focus on ministering to their people — “to be shepherds with the smell of sheep.”
“Espouse your community, be profoundly bonded to it!” he told his bishops in September. “Avoid the scandal of being ‘airport bishops.’ ”
In the New York archdiocese, which covers the Bronx, Manhattan, Staten Island and seven counties north of the city, Cardinal Dolan is popular among parishioners, but he is known among some priests as a delegator who is often out of town. He relies on a vicar to handle day-to-day priestly problems, and a consultant has been managing the process of deciding which parishes the archdiocese will merge and close. Cardinal Dolan will make the final decisions personally in September.
The post of New York archbishop will always come with national and international responsibilities. But some priests said a silver lining of Cardinal Dolan’s lowered profile would be a more hands-on approach toward running the diocese.
“We’d like to see more evangelization in the parishes, we’d like to see more outreach and neighborhood involvement, we’d like to see more planning in the church,” said Msgr. Neil Connolly, who has been a New York City priest for more than 50 years. “Those of us in the parishes, we don’t work closely with the archbishop on a day-to-day basis.”
Cardinal Dolan said Francis had led him to mull over issues like whether the diocese was too focused on its buildings, institutions and hierarchy at the expense of serving people.
“Certainly Francis has inspired me to look for ways that we can be more welcoming, more focused on being with those who feel distant from Jesus and the church, and less focused on structures and institutions,” he said.
And he said the pope was also serving as a role model when it came to presenting the church publicly, emphasizing mercy, for example, over judgment in his message.
“I do have to realize that what I say, and how I say it, is important, and what I intend to convey is not always what comes across,” Cardinal Dolan said.
On that front, he did seem to acknowledge a tonal shift some church experts had noted.
Dr. Bellitto said, “His more bombastic political rhetoric has been dialed down.”
An example may be instructive. Two years ago, Cardinal Dolan’s most-quoted comments on the subject of same-sex marriage were ones in which he said he felt “betrayed” and “burned” by the New York Legislature for not giving him more notice before legalizing it. But two months ago, when asked on television how he felt about Michael Sam’s becoming the first openly gay player in the National Football League, he expressed enthusiasm.
“Good for him,” Cardinal Dolan told David Gregory on “Meet the Press” on NBC.
“Look, the same Bible that teaches us about the virtue of chastity and fidelity in marriage also teaches us not to judge people,” he added, echoing Francis. “So I would say, ‘Bravo.’ ”
・Disclaimer: WWRN does not endorse or adhere to views or opinions expressed in the articles posted. This is purely an information site, to inform interested parties of religious trends.
2. Algemeiner（http://www.algemeiner.com）
(1) Pope Francis’ Failure to Confront Evil , 26 May 2014
by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach
No one can deny that Pope Francis is a man who walks the walk. While many disagree with his neo-socialist world-view, who can feel anything but respect for a world leader who eschews the perks of office to champion the poor and the oppressed? The Pope is also courageously confronting the Church’s obsession with abortion, gay marriage, and contraception in favor of spiritual values that directly address the materialism, narcissism, and rot of the modern world.
But there is one area where the Pope must do more. And that’s in his confrontation with evil. Over the past few days we’ve heard the Pope repeatedly invoke the need for Middle East peace. We have seen him walk a tightrope of neutrality between Israel and the Palestinians. But as the world’s foremost religious voice, can he afford to be silent in the face of a grotesque moral affront? When the Pope prays at an Israeli security barrier in front of graffiti that compares Bethlehem to the Warsaw Ghetto, he has taken neutrality to an extreme and risks being party to trivializing the Holocaust.
This past January, I visited the remnants of the Warsaw Ghetto in the deep and freezing snow of Poland’s winter. It traumatized me to the bone. I found approximately five portions of the Ghetto wall, Yanusz Korchak’s original orphanage, the last remaining synagogue, and the square from which the 300,00 Jews were deported from the ghetto to their deaths in Treblinka. Not that they weren’t already the living dead. The photo and film archive of Emanuel Ringelblum, at the former site of the Grand Synagogue’s Library, is shocking beyond words.
The discarded bodies that dotted the streets of the ghetto are haunting enough. But even worse is the footage of small children, clad in the dead of winter in nothing but rags, walking alone and barefoot and begging for bread. It is something that sears the soul and has the viewer asking how God could have allowed such unspeakable suffering. I was covered in many layers and was still shivering. I have no idea how these children survived for even a day.
I also visited the mass grave at Mila 18, headquarters of the armed Jewish resistance of April-May 1943, known to us today as the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. There I was nearly knee-deep in snow, the only visitor in perhaps days, making fresh prints by the monument to the great Mordechai Anileviscz who headed the uprising and, surrounded by the Nazis who were about to storm the position, took his own life along with other leaders of the uprising.
To compare the annihilation of the 300,000 Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto to a security fence erected by Israel so that more Jews aren’t gruesomely murdered takes a particular kind of propaganda effort, one that has contempt for human life, one that is indifferent to evil. Surely the Pope cannot agree with the appalling, disgusting, and vile assertion that Bethlehem is a holding pen for Palestinians awaiting Israeli slaughter. So why would the Pope have prayed there?
Pope Francis just canonized John XXIII and John Paul II, both courageous friends of world Jewry. He pointedly, and to his credit, did not canonize Pope Pius XII, the man universally derided as “Hitler’s Pope.”
Evil ensues when nobody speaks against it and genocides take place when people are silent. This was the great sin of Pope Pius, a man whose refusal to use this global standing to denounce Hitler and a mysterious insistence on remaining above the fray in the great battle of light versus darkness, bespoke a broken moral compass. Hitler famously said at the start of the Holocaust, in 1939, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” He banked on moral voices remaining silent in the face of Jewish European mass murder. Eugenio Pacelli, who became Pope that same year, obliged him by never once objecting to the destruction of European Jewry and lives, therefore, in moral infamy till this day.
Pius XII was famous for making benign pronouncements during the war that carefully preserved his moral neutrality. “Nothing is lost with peace; all can be lost with war. Let men return to mutual understanding! Let them begin negotiations anew, conferring with good will and with respect for reciprocal rights… Christ made love the heart of his religion.” These empty platitudes were utterly useless in preserving peace because they refused to lay the blame for the war firmly at Nazi aggression.
Even after Germany invaded Poland and began what would be six years of global conflict and mass slaughter, Pius avoided words of condemnation of any party. For the Pope, the allies and the Nazis were equally culpable. The most that Pope Pius ever said that even approached a condemnation of the annihilation of the Jews was in a Christmas message of 1942 where he spoke of “those hundreds of thousands who, without any fault on their part, sometimes only because of their nationality or race, have been consigned to death or to a slow decline.” Incredibly, he never once said he was referring to the Jews.
Pope Francis, who is a global inspiration and a great light of the Church, must learn from the poor example of his predecessor not to be vague when it comes to mass murder. Platitudes about Middle East peace that refuse to condemn Hamas terrorism or its genocidal charter’s against the Jews risks compromising the great Pope’s moral standing. A security fence built solely to protect innocent Israelis from being dismembered dare not be compared to a fence designed to cage Jews prior to their gassing.
The Pope can surely find a different place to pray.
・Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is founder of This World: The Values Network, the foremost organization influencing politics, media, and culture with Jewish values. He has just published Kosher Lust: Love is Not the Answer. Follow him on Twitter @RabbiShmuley.
(2) Jewish Groups Concerned Over Far-Right Surge in European Union Parliamentary Elections, 26 May 2014
by Joshua Levitt
Jewish groups expressed concern on Monday over the surge in support for far-right parties in the European Union’s parliamentary elections, with fears that hate speech will now feature more prominently in European politics.
On Monday, the EU said that of the 751 seats, the center-right European People’s Party won 214, followed by the center-left Socialists and Democrats with 189, while the far-right parties surged to win a combined 36 seats, giving them enough weight to influence debate and decision making in the EU body.
France’s National Front won 25 seats, Hungary’s notorious Jobbik party won four seats, Greece’s Golden Dawn, under criminal investigation and with several party leaders in prison, entered the European Parliament for the first time, with an expected three seats, and the far-right FPÖ in Austria won four seats.
Daniel Schwammenthal, director of the American Jewish Committee Transatlantic Institute, said, “These radical parties have been able to grow in their respective home countries for quite some time and are now cementing their presence also at the European level.”
“They must be confronted head-on or the danger will only continue to grow,” Schwammenthal said, adding their “presence in the legislature for the next five years will, at a minimum, provide a soapbox from which to propagate their vile hatred.”
French artist and humanitarian Ron Agam, son of Israeli painter Yaacov Agam, told The Algemeiner on Monday, “The vote for the FN in France is a rupture with the past. Today French voters have endorsed a party that is essentially xenophobic, anti-Semitic and demagogically populist.”
“France’s democracy is in danger and the horizon for Jews is getting bleaker,” Agam said. “Jews in France are now sandwiched between a growing anti-Semitism from radical French Islamic elements and, now, an ever growing extreme right that will ultimately show its real face sooner or later.”
“More than ever, I am very worried for France’s Jewish community,” Agam said.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) on Monday also voiced concern over the “alarming” success of extremist, including neo-Nazi, parties in the elections.
“There is no doubt that political extremism is on the rise in Europe, and along with it anti-Semitism is rising as well,” said ADL National Director Abraham Foxman. “The success of extremist political parties, both on the far-right and far-left, has never been good for democracy or for Jews and other minorities. The continuing trend in Europe toward support for these parties is cause for heightened concern.”
The ADL’s Global 100 Index of Anti-Semitic Attitudes, released earlier this month, revealed that on average, 27 percent of the EU’s adult population harbors anti-Semitic attitudes.
Foxman linked anti-Semitism in Europe to the deadly shooting at the Jewish Museum of Belgium over the weekend and another attack that came hours later when two Jewish brothers wearing kippahs were assaulted outside a synagogue in Créteil, Paris.
“The atmosphere for Jews in Europe is deteriorating,” Foxman said. “The murderous attacks in Brussels this past weekend and two years ago in Toulouse, and the rising number of assaults on Jews, such the attack in Paris on Saturday, are stark examples of the very real dangers facing Jews.”
“The alarming electoral successes of the extremists will only contribute to increasing that sense of insecurity,” Foxman added. “If Jewish life in Europe is to continue and thrive, it will require a serious commitment from all European governments and EU institutions to turn the tide. The choice is theirs and the time is now.”
The Conseil Représentatif des Institutions juives de France (CRIF), the main umbrella organization of French Jewry, said in a statement that it is deeply concerned about the results of the elections. The organization called on the French government to “take strong measures against those who spread anti-Semitic and racist speech to strongly condemn their barbaric acts, and intervene in schools to reaffirm values of the Republic.”
“History has taught us that economic crises promote nationalism and isolationism, which are accompanied by the rejection of the other, racist, xenophobic and anti-Semitic sentiments,” the CRIF said. “Moreover, the bombing of Brussels that killed four people on Saturday, and the anti-Semitic attack against Créteil two young people, showed that hatred rose again, from the stage of speech to physical aggression.”
(3) Is Rockefeller Brothers Fund Consciously Helping to Delegitimize Israel?, 26 May 2014
by Ben Cohen / JNS.org
A Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) protest against Israel in Melbourne, Australia, on June 5, 2010. Photo: Mohamed Ouda via Wikimedia Commons.
JNS.org – The Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF) is one of the more august grant-making institutions in the United States. Founded in 1940 by the sons of legendary oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller—America’s first billionaire, and a man whose political reputation was distinguished by his support for the Union during the Civil War as well as his commitment to educational opportunities for African Americans—the fund has always been a progressive enterprise, with a current emphasis on good governance, environmentalism, and the promotion of peace.
It is in that latter category, an area that the fund calls “peacebuilding,” that serious concerns have been raised regarding its funding commitments to NGOs working on the Arab-Israeli conflict. NGO Monitor—an Israel-based organization dedicated to analyzing the activities of civil society groups working in the Middle East, along with those groups’ funders—has just published a report which casts doubt on RBF’s goal to promote a “more just, sustainable, and peaceful world,” for the simple reason that many of the Middle Eastern beneficiaries of its largesse demonize the state of Israel in stridently anti-Zionist terms.
For example, “Breaking the Silence,” a small group of left-wing former IDF soldiers who accused of Israel of committing war crimes during its 2008-09 defensive operation against Hamas terrorists in Gaza, has received $145,000 from RBF. A commentary and opinion website called +972 (named after the international dialing code for Israel) has received $130,000 from the fund. +972 regularly publishes articles endorsing the analogy between Israel and the apartheid regime in South Africa, and recently plastered its front page with articles about the “Nakba”—the Arabic word for “catastrophe” that is employed by Palestinian propagandists to describe the creation of the state of Israel. Among +972’s contributors is the odious Yossi Gurvitz, who recently tried to persuade me via Twitter that Judaism is a racist religion, drawing on the discredited tropes of Soviet Communist anti-Jewish literature to make his case. +972 has also cross-posted content co-written by the anti-Semitic American writer Max Blumenthal.
The Middle East Policy Network, a group that touts the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement as “the most effective and strategic campaign for [Palestinian] refugee return at present,” has received $30,000 from RBF. The Institute for Middle East Understanding, a similar organization that describes the entire territory from the Mediterranean Sea to the River Jordan as governed by Israeli “apartheid,” has received $50,000.
These are colossal sums, especially when one considers the relatively small size of these NGOs. There is also the larger question of why RBF deems them worthy of funding, since their stated goals are aimed at fundamentally undermining Israel’s security, and the methods used to pursue them draw on the standard arsenal of delegitimization—boycotts, insistence on the “right of return” for the descendants of Arab refugees, and the portrayal of Israel’s creation as the Middle East’s “original sin.”
Moreover, as NGO Monitor President Gerald Steinberg pointed out to me when I met with him in Jerusalem this week, the road which RBF is currently traveling down was previously traversed by another major funder, the Ford Foundation, which rapidly changed direction when it realized that the promotion of peace and the promotion of delegitimization are polar opposites.
“In 2001, the U.N. organized a massive ‘anti-racism’ conference in Durban, South Africa, which was really the beginning of BDS and delegitimization,” Steinberg said. “You had 5,000 NGO representatives using terms like ‘apartheid’ and ‘genocide’ against Israel. And it was funded primarily by the Ford Foundation.”
The Ford Foundation’s credibility, Steinberg continued, was initially damaged by its association with the Durban hatefest. To Ford’s immense credit, however, it publicly acknowledged that mistake and pledged never to repeat it. In 2003, the then Ford Foundation President Susan Berresford announced that no grants would henceforth be awarded to organizations supporting “terrorism, bigotry, or the delegitimization of Israel.”
Steinberg and NGO Monitor would like to see the RBF engage in similar reflection. That will not be easy for many reasons, principal among them the fact that Daniel Levy, a founder of the leftwing lobbying group J Street, which is another recipient of RBF funds, just happens to be an RBF trustee. Levy also sits on the board of directors of another Israeli group that receives RBF funds, and is also heavily involved with the New Israel Fund, which works with many of the radical NGOs backed by RBF money.
Steinberg’s attempts to seek clarification from RBF were met with what he described as “pro forma responses—basically reiterating what they say in their guidelines and on their website, but no explanation of what seems to be a very blatant contradiction between those guidelines and what they are actually doing.”
I also sent emails to RBF officials Stephen Heintz and Ariadne Papagapitos requesting similar clarification. In their response to me, RBF did not address the substance of the NGO Monitor report, merely saying, “We respectfully disagree with your assessment of the contributions our grantees are making in support of the goal and strategies of our Peacebuilding Program and toward peacebuilding activities in the region.”
Given this reply, it isn’t possible to determine whether RBF is simply misguided, as was the Ford Foundation, or whether, as insinuated above, that it endorses the goals of the extremist groups it funds. What we do know, though, is that the delegitimization of Israel requires money. If diehard opponents of Israel are receiving six-figure sums for their activities from RBF, that will build many things—but peace isn’t one of them. ¬
・Ben Cohen is the Shillman Analyst for JNS.org and a contributor to the Wall Street Journal, Commentary, Haaretz, and other publications. His book, “Some Of My Best Friends: A Journey Through Twenty-First Century Antisemitism” (Edition Critic, 2014), is now available through Amazon.
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