Roman Catholic Bishop Suspended For Adopting a 26-year-old woman

The Vatican has suspended a Roman Catholic bishop in southern India after he adopted a 26-year-old woman, a senior church official said Saturday.

Bishop John Thattungal, 58, will be barred from performing any religious or administrative duties until a formal inquiry into his conduct is completed, said the Rev. Stephen Alathara, a spokesman for the Kerala Catholic Bishops' Council, in a telephone interview from the southern Indian city of Kochi.

Alathara said the bishop's adoption of the woman earlier this year had upset other priests in the Kochi diocese.

"The majority of the priests were unhappy and asked for his resignation," he said, adding that the Vatican ordered the suspension on Thursday.

He said there are questions surrounding the legality of the adoption because the woman is not a minor.

Thattungal could not be reached for comment, but news reports in Kerala have quoted him as saying, "I have only fatherly love toward the woman who has spiritual powers. This relation is giving me spiritual refreshment."

A three-member committee of bishops will investigate Thattungal's conduct and submit a report to Archbishop Daniel Acharuparambil, the president of the Kerala Catholic Bishops' Council, who will then forward it to the Vatican, Alathara said.

The investigating committee does not have a set deadline, but the Vatican has asked for a report "as early as possible," he said.

Christians make up 2.5 percent of India's 1.1 billion people, the majority of whom are Hindus.

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Did Pope Benedict XVI Fall Prey to The Fear of the Italian Mob?

Jeff Israely
John Paul II set a powerful precedent for how a Roman Pontiff can take on the Italian Mob. In May 1993, after a high-profile spate of Mafia killings, the Pope denounced the Mob's "culture of death" in an emotionally charged sermon in Agrigento, Sicily, the home turf of Cosa Nostra. "I say to those responsible: Convert!" he intoned, shaking his clenched fist and index finger. "One day, the judgment of God will arrive!" Two months after the dramatic papal appeal, the Mafia bombed two historic churches in Rome.

Pope Benedict XVI was certainly aware of that confrontation as he prepared this past weekend to visit Pompeii. The southern Italian city, near the ruins of an ancient site buried by a Mount Vesuvius volcanic eruption, lies in the heart of the region controlled by the Camorra. The Naples-based organized crime syndicate has lately tightened its grip on the impoverished region, with more killing sprees and a high-profile death threat against a young writer. But unlike John Paul, Benedict said nothing at all about the Mob in his Sunday homily. Did the Pope back down in the face of one of Italy's most entrenched and destructive evils?

Many were counting on another papal mention about the Mob as violence in the region reaches new heights. Last month, a Camorra death squad unleashed a fury of submachine-gun fire, killing seven immigrants in a single attack. A week ago, reports surfaced of a pointed death threat against Naples writer Roberto Saviano, 28, whose best-selling book Gomorrah, and the movie based on it, reveal the extent of the Camorra's influence and dirty dealings. While the Pope remained silent, more than 100,000 people signed a petition this week in support of Saviano, including Mikhail Gorbachev, Desmond Tutu, Orhan Pamuk, Günter Grass, Jose Saramago and Jonathan Franzen. "It is intolerable that all this can happen in Europe, and in 2008," reads the petition. "The state must make every effort possible to protect (Saviano) and defeat the Camorra." The movie version of Saviano's book, directed by Matteo Garrone, won second prize at the Cannes film festival this year and is Italy's entry for the Best Foreign Language Oscar.

When reporters asked why the Pope had said nothing on such a burning topic in Pompeii, Vatican spokesman Reverand Ciro Benedettini said Benedict had intentionally avoided referring to the Camorra as a "show of respect for decent people" of the region, who "are the vast majority." The Pope, the spokesman added, had also talked about organized crime in a visit last year to Naples, though admittedly not with the same confrontational tone as John Paul did in Sicily.

Benedict's silence has generated a small rumbling of dissent from both inside and outside the church. "It could seem that there is fear now to confront the Mob, and call it by its name," Don Vitaliano Della Sala, a leftist priest from nearby Avellino, said in a Monday radio interview. He drew a parallel between Benedict's decision not to speak out Sunday and the controversy stirring over Pope Pius XII's alleged silence about the Holocaust during World War II.

That analogy seems a stretch: the Italian authorities' decades-long battle to uproot the Mob bears little comparison to the Nazis' state-run policy of genocide. But the comparison between Benedict and his immediate predecessor is illuminating. John Paul not only possessed a pastoral charisma that made him beloved among his flock, but also he could call on a reserve of public passion in order to confront a problem facing his church or the world at large. That kind of fire is simply not in this Pontiff's arsenal.

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Failure In Religion: 44% Of Americans Cant Be Wrong

Religion to some should be a check on the society producing a morally upbuilding effect on its adherents. To others it should satisfy their inborn desire for a spiritual life. For yet it is business as usual - tell the people what they want to here, to make them stick and donate more money to the church.

In view of the forgoing it is not suprising that the Washington Post Reports that "Forty-four percent of Americans have either switched their religious affiliation since childhood or dropped out of any formal religious group, according to the largest recent survey on American religious identification.

The survey, released Monday by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, found that Americans' faith identity fluctuates during their lives, with vast numbers moving away from the faith tradition of their childhood to embrace other religious traditions -- or no faith at all. The survey interviewed 35,000 people.
Among other findings, the survey indicated that members of Protestant denominations now make up only a slight majority -- 51.3 percent -- of the adult population.
The 44 percent figure includes people who switch affiliations within one of the major faith traditions, such as a Protestant who goes from Baptist to Methodist. Counting only people who switch traditions altogether -- say, from Catholic to Orthodox, or Protestant to Muslim -- the number drops to 28 percent.
"Constant movement characterizes the American religious marketplace, as every major religious group is simultaneously gaining and losing adherents," the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey said.
The survey also concluded that 16 percent of American adults are not affiliated with any faith today. About 4 percent describe themselves as atheist or agnostic. Young adults ages 18 to 29 are much more likely than people 70 and older to say they are unaffiliated with any particular religion, Pew found".

Has religion not failed?

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Roman Catholic Priest Christian Von Wernich Gets Life For War Crimes

A former police chaplain has been sentenced to life imprisonment for involvement in torture, kidnapping and murder during Argentina's "dirty war," in the first trial of a clergyman for rights abuses under military rule.

Roman Catholic priest Christian Von Wernich tended to the notorious Buenos Aires provincial police force, and rights lawyers say he pressured torture victims to talk during visits to clandestine detention centres.

Outside the court in the central city of La Plata, crowds cheered and set off firecrackers as the verdict was read in the televised trial.

"It's a historic day, a wonderful day ... it's something we mothers didn't think we'd live to see," said Tati Almeyda, of the Founding Line of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, wearing the white headscarf that has become a symbol for human rights campaigners worldwide.

"Justice has been done. The Catholic Church was an accomplice," she added.

The mothers of murdered political activists have led efforts for human rights convictions related to the dirty war, when thousands of leftist dissidents were systematically maimed and killed during Argentina's 1976-1983 dictatorship.

Von Wernich, 69, sat with his head hanging low, his mouth turned downward and his arms crossed over a bulletproof vest during sentencing.

When he was given a chance to speak hours before the verdict was announced, Von Wernich cited the Bible and said firmly: "If we want to reach the truth, we should do it peacefully ... because a heart filled with malice is a heart that doesn't understand what God wants and what man needs: reconciliation."

Although Von Wernich did not testify during the three-month trial, he told court officials previously he was unaware that detainees were being tortured or held illegally.

Von Wernich's trial was the first case to probe dirty war-era crimes since a former provincial police commissioner was sentenced to life in prison in September 2006.

That trial was marred by the disappearance of a key witness, Jorge Julio Lopez, who has not been seen since and whom many fear may have been abducted and killed.

One of Von Wernich's defence lawyers said the charges against his client were excessive and suggested the case was an ideological attack against the Catholic Church.

Centre-left President Nestor Kirchner persuaded Congress to scrap amnesty laws shielding rights abusers from prosecution for dictatorship-era crimes, and the Supreme Court ruled in the same vein in 2005.

That paved the way for new and reopened investigations into the deaths and disappearances of between 11,000 and 30,000 people during the dirty war purge of leftists, which also swept up Argentines uninvolved in politics.

Many rights activists accuse the Church hierarchy of supporting the military dictatorship and opting to keep silent about its brutality.

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