Episcopal Diocese of Washington Bishop John Chane celebrated the Washington D.C. City Council’s passage of a same-gender marriage bill Dec. 15

Like some other Episcopal Church bishops, Chane permits the clergy in his diocese to bless same-sex relationships. He had previously said that the diocese had begun studying the church’s canons to determine whether diocesan priests will be allowed to solemnize same-gender marriages and sign marriage licenses if same-gender marriage became legal in the district. In the Dec. 15 statement, Chane said an announcement would be forthcoming.

He said in the statement that was e-mailed to ENS and posted here that he “support[s] and celebrate[s]” the council’s decision “because it ends discrimination against gay and lesbian couples.”

Read it all.

It should be evident that the ecological crisis cannot be viewed in isolation from other related questions, since it is closely linked to the notion of development itself and our understanding of man in his relationship to others and to the rest of creation. Prudence would thus dictate a profound, long-term review of our model of development, one which would take into consideration the meaning of the economy and its goals with an eye to correcting its malfunctions and misapplications. The ecological health of the planet calls for this, but it is also demanded by the cultural and moral crisis of humanity whose symptoms have for some time been evident in every part of the world.[8] Humanity needs a profound cultural renewal; it needs to rediscover those values which can serve as the solid basis for building a brighter future for all. Our present crises ”“ be they economic, food-related, environmental or social ”“ are ultimately also moral crises, and all of them are interrelated. They require us to rethink the path which we are travelling together. Specifically, they call for a lifestyle marked by sobriety and solidarity, with new rules and forms of engagement, one which focuses confidently and courageously on strategies that actually work, while decisively rejecting those that have failed. Only in this way can the current crisis become an opportunity for discernment and new strategic planning.

Is it not true that what we call “nature” in a cosmic sense has its origin in “a plan of love and truth”? The world “is not the product of any necessity whatsoever, nor of blind fate or chance”¦ The world proceeds from the free will of God; he wanted to make his creatures share in his being, in his intelligence, and in his goodness”.[9] The Book of Genesis, in its very first pages, points to the wise design of the cosmos: it comes forth from God’s mind and finds its culmination in man and woman, made in the image and likeness of the Creator to “fill the earth” and to “have dominion over” it as “stewards” of God himself (cf. Gen 1:28). The harmony between the Creator, mankind and the created world, as described by Sacred Scripture, was disrupted by the sin of Adam and Eve, by man and woman, who wanted to take the place of God and refused to acknowledge that they were his creatures. As a result, the work of “exercising dominion” over the earth, “tilling it and keeping it”, was also disrupted, and conflict arose within and between mankind and the rest of creation (cf. Gen 3:17-19). Human beings let themselves be mastered by selfishness; they misunderstood the meaning of God’s command and exploited creation out of a desire to exercise absolute domination over it. But the true meaning of God’s original command, as the Book of Genesis clearly shows, was not a simple conferral of authority, but rather a summons to responsibility.

Read the whole thing.

It came as no surprise that there was the usual outcry against the interim report on prosecution in respect of cases of assisted suicide by the Director of Public Prosecutions. Headlines appeared saying, “Assisted suicide proposals ”˜unacceptable in a civilised society’ ”” Roman Catholic bishops”, while last month a letter to The Times from Lord Mackay of Clashfern, et al, accused the policy of placing people at risk, and directed readers to the response of the alliance Care Not Killing (CNK).

The CNK is an organisation created to oppose assisted suicide. Its core members include the Church of England, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference and most other faith-based organisations, all of which are implacably opposed to assisted suicide. The alliance demands that the policy be restructured using a provision in the code for crown prosecutors that says prosecution should take place unless public interest weighs against it. Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, in his judgment on the Debbie Purdy case, criticised the unhelpfulness of the code itself as any sort of guide in cases of assisted suicide.

The CNK’s response also makes no reference to public opinion. As Baroness Hale of Richmond said in her judgment: “The British public have consistently supported assisted dying for people with a painful or unbearable incurable disease from which they will die.” Meanwhile, a survey conducted by The Times in July found 74 per cent in support of assisted suicide for the terminally ill and only 23 per cent against.

Read it all.

The battle lines are drawn. The armies are lined up. The guns are loaded. But here in Copenhagen, a phony war is underway.

For the past two days, negotiators have been bogged down in minor technical details and endless delays. For hours plenary meetings have been taken up by countries complaining about the process. Then finally solutions are agreed, and everyone files out to the relevant gatherings ”“ only to find them cancelled on arrival. All of Monday disappeared down that hole….

Read it all.

Cold war liberalism had a fine run in the middle third of the 20th century, and it has lingered here and there since. Scoop Jackson kept the flame alive in the 1970s. Peter Beinart wrote a book called “The Good Fight,” giving the tendency modern content.

But after Vietnam, most liberals moved on. It became unfashionable to talk about evil. Some liberals came to believe in the inherent goodness of man and the limitless possibilities of negotiation. Some blamed conflicts on weapons systems and pursued arms control. Some based their foreign-policy thinking on being against whatever George W. Bush was for. If Bush was an idealistic nation-builder, they became Nixonian realists.

Barack Obama never bought into these shifts. In the past few weeks, he has revived the Christian realism that undergirded cold war liberal thinking and tried to apply it to a different world.

Read it all.

More than half of the nation’s unemployed workers have borrowed money from friends or relatives since losing their jobs. An equal number have cut back on doctor visits or medical treatments because they are out of work.

Almost half have suffered from depression or anxiety. About 4 in 10 parents have noticed behavioral changes in their children that they attribute to their difficulties in finding work.

Joblessness has wreaked financial and emotional havoc on the lives of many of those out of work, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll of unemployed adults, causing major life changes, mental health issues and trouble maintaining even basic necessities.

Read it carefully and read it all.

The videos are well worth watching here also.

From here:

Like many other Dioceses across the Episcopal Church, we will soon consider the election of Canon Mary Glasspool as Bishop Suffragan of the Diocese of Los Angeles. We pledge to do so prayerfully, recognizing, as the Archbishop of Canterbury stated, that our decision “will have very important implications” for the future of the Episcopal Church and its place in the Anglican Communion.

We regret the recent statement by the Bishop of Los Angeles, The Rt. Rev. John Bruno, that withholding consent because of Canon Glasspool’s sexuality “would be a violation of the canons of this church.” The theme of the most recent General Convention, hosted by the Diocese of Los Angeles, was “Ubuntu.” At that convention the Presiding Bishop invited the Church “into a larger and more expansive way of understanding identity in community.” We thus find the threat of canonical discipline, however veiled or unintended, sadly ironic to the call of living in community despite our differences, even differences on the subject of human sexuality.

For our part, we pledge to respectfully and prayerfully consider Canon Glasspool’s election, not only in light of her qualifications, but also in light of our valued place in the Anglican Communion and the call of the proposed Covenant to act in continuity and consonance with Scripture and the catholic and apostolic faith, order, and tradition, as received by the Churches of the Anglican Communion. We encourage other Standing Committees in the Episcopal Church do the same, pledging our prayers for Canon Glasspool, Bishop Bruno, The Diocese of Los Angeles, and the Episcopal Church.

Should Congress and the President find enough appeal in HR 4191 to enact it, there are three possible outcomes. The first is that there are enough loopholes that the tax raises little money but has unfortunate side effects like driving jobs and tax revenues overseas or inflating the balance sheets of banks. The second is that there are no meaningful loopholes but, surprisingly, people still trade a lot and enormous taxes are paid, in which case we expect stock prices to fall dramatically. The third, and most likely, is that there aren’t enough exemptions and investors react by sharply reducing trading activity, so there is little revenue but great harm to the market and the economy. Whichever of these occurs, the sponsors of the Bill will face a hard time explaining how, when aiming to shoot the banks, they shot their constituents who will then pay for the next Wall Street bailout.

Read it all.

A financial transaction tax does not attempt to address the cause of the recent crisis and would be a destabilising action. Not all financial market participants would contribute equally. Different types of investors trade at different frequencies and would therefore be affected differently by the tax. Equity market-makers trade more often than traders of collateralised debt obligations or mortgage derivatives. The latter contributed more to this crisis, yet his proposal would tax the former more.

The liquidity impact from this tax is extremely hard to judge. Liquidity does not respond in a linear fashion and is one of the most difficult aspects of markets to model, although a tax would obviously be very negative. While the illiquid and low trading frequency credit markets (at the heart of the recent trouble) froze last year, the more liquid equity markets had fewer issues clearing and the highly liquid, rapidly trading Group of Seven government bond and forex markets cleared consistently. So the tax would hit the source of the problem the least and directly diminish the liquidity, therefore increasing the risk, in the markets that did continue to function because these markets have a higher average trading turnover.

Read it all from the FT.

They worship in a former Catholic sanctuary, led by a former Catholic priest.

And if any congregation in Western New York were to take up Pope Benedict XVI’s recent landmark overture to Anglicans, it most likely would be St. Nicholas Anglican Church in West Seneca.

The small, “Anglo-Catholic” congregation uses a liturgy that mirrors a traditional Catholic Mass, adheres to a male-only clergy and has parishioners open to the possibility of entering into full communion with the Roman Catholic Church.

“This would be very typically the type of congregation the pope is targeting,” said the Rev. Gene Bagen, rector of St. Nicholas.

Read it all.

SPIEGEL: But even though there are still more people being fired than hired, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke is saying that the recession is technically over. Do you agree with him?

Volcker: You know, people get very technical about these things. We had a quarter of increased growth but I don’t think we are out of the woods.

SPIEGEL: You expect a backlash?

Volcker: The recovery is quite slow and I expect it to continue to be pretty slow and restrained for a variety of reasons and the possibility of a relapse can’t be entirely discounted. I’m not predicting it but I think we have to be careful.

Read it all

One of the essays [The Rev. W. Andrew] Waldo wrote in response to Bishop Search Committee questions dealt with the blessing of same-gender relationships.

Waldo wrote that his congregation in Minnesota encompasses a broad diversity of opinion on the topic. Some members are same-gender couples and others are firmly against the blessings, he wrote.

Waldo wrote that “we can not act unilaterally, and I would not therefore sanction such blessings in the Diocese until we have, through the General Convention, reached a decision.”

In the interview, he said, “I have always believed that it is more important that we stand together around the altar, taking in the body and blood of Christ as brothers and sisters, than it is to win the argument.”

Read the whole article.

A Church of England with women bishops will force more and more people to leave, a leading traditionalist has controversially forecast.

After the departure of Anglo-Catholics, the next group to have to go could be the conservative evangelicals.

The grim picture of a future church lacking the historic Anglican qualities of tolerance, inclusiveness and comprehensiveness is painted by Canon Nicholas Turner of the Bradford diocese in the Advent issue of NewsRound, the Bradford diocesan magazine.

In a hard-hitting think-piece headed Part of what we mean by Unity, Canon Turner, 58, commenting on Pope Benedict’s offer to Anglicans of a “personal ordinariate,” says the approach from “the first among bishops…must not be ignored”.

Read it all.

As church bells rang throughout the world Dec. 13 to mark Christianity’s commitment to combating climate change, Anglican leaders were making their voices heard about global warming in Copenhagen, Denmark.

The United Nations Climate Change Conference Dec. 7-18 in the Danish capital welcomed world and faith leaders, including Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Both spoke at a Dec. 13 ecumenical worship service in Church of Our Lady, Copenhagen’s Lutheran cathedral, about the religious imperative to cut carbon emissions and save the planet from further environmental degradation.

At the same time, church bells tolled 350 times around the world to symbolize the 350 parts per million that many scientists say mark the safe upper limit for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

“We cannot show the right kind of love for our fellow humans unless we also work at keeping the earth as a place that is a secure home for all people and for future generations,” said Williams in his sermon at the cathedral service, attended by other religious leaders, members of the Danish royal family and Denmark’s Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen.

Read it all.

But a common complaint of American and European conservatives against Muslims is that Islam itself is a monolithic faith unsuitable for the pluralistic West. We don’t have to accept this characterization of Islam to recognize that it is close to what Anglican traditionalists are advocating for their own church.

Besides, if ever a church were rooted less in timeless truths than in historic particularities, it is Anglicanism, and the Episcopal wing of Anglicanism most of all. Anglicanism began, after all, because the pope would not sanctify Henry VIII’s divorce, and Henry used the opportunity to seize the church and all its properties. Episcopalianism began when the leaders of the American Revolution (two-thirds of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were active or, like George Washington, nominal Anglicans) realized they could hardly stay religiously affiliated with a church headed by the very king against whom they were rebelling secularly.

Given the schismatic and distinctly secular nature of Anglicanism’s and Episcopalianism’s origins, the pending ordination of L.A.’s lesbian bishop seems well within the church tradition. A faith rooted in the denial of papal authority and kingly authority, a faith that in the United States has increasingly championed egalitarian principles, should hardly be cowed by contingent bigotries masquerading as universal truths.

Read it all.

Senate Democratic leaders appeared poised Monday night to abandon efforts to create a government-run insurance safety net in their push for health-care reform, as they attempted to close ranks around a bill they hoped would win the backing of all 60 members of their caucus.

Democratic negotiators had already disappointed liberal lawmakers by jettisoning a full-fledged public insurance plan a week earlier. Last night, party leaders conceded that a key portion of the compromise they crafted to replace the public option — a proposal allowing people as young as 55 to buy into Medicare — also did not have sufficient support from Democratic moderates to overcome a likely Republican filibuster.

Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), after consulting with senior White House officials, rallied his caucus in a closed-door meeting Monday evening, reminding senators that there was broad consensus behind most of the provisions in the $848 billion package and warning them of the consequences of not passing a bill before the end of the year.

“Democrats are not going to let the American people down,” he told reporters after the meeting. “I am confident that by next week, we will be on our way to final passage.”

Read it all.

19th – 23rd April 2010, Singapore

Theme: “The Gospel of Jesus Christ””Covenant for the People; Light for the Nations.”

The Global South Anglican Primates Steering Committee met in Singapore on 1st to 2nd Dec 2009 to discuss and confirm planning details on the coming Encounter.
This 4th Encounter will build on the ecclesiological vision of the ”˜One Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church of Jesus Christ’ we shared at the 3rd “Red Sea” Encounter at El-ein-Suknah, Egypt in 2005. The coming 4th Encounter aims to further develop this in our common life and witness in and for the Gospel. We will explore how we may relate to one another in covenantal and communion autonomy with accountability in matters of faith and order; partnerships and networks in existing and new mission fields; and mutual capacity building for increased self-reliance for greater service.

Read it all.

But why might the Archbishop have muzzled his own personal sympathies for the liberal Episcopalian project in America? There are still questions to be asked of our cultural preoccupation with defining ourselves by our sexual attractions and appetites. Many, perhaps most Anglicans throughout the world, are not convinced the insistence of a small community of American Episcopalians to make sexual preference their defining critique of Christianity and the Church. Critics of the Americans believe they may be replacing the call to deny the self, embrace sacrifice and follow Christ for a spiritualised version of the secular penchant for self-expression, posing as human rights.

The Episcopalians have been asked to exercise some restraint in their cultural reflexes in order to achieve the greater goal of Christian unity. Neither romantic love, nor sexual companionship, are given priority in the Gospel or Christian tradition. There are abuses of human rights in the world that a united Church, not just across the Anglican Communion but extended to the Catholics and the Orthodox, might be better placed to give its energies to; and even more importantly, Christ commanded this unity of self-denying humility.

Read it all.

Some of Ahmadinejad’s advisers urge him to provide Obama with a “fig leaf” to silence his domestic critics in the US. They argue that the Islamic Republic made a mistake by wrecking Jimmy Carter’s presidency in 1979 when “students” raided the US Embassy in Tehran and made hostages of its diplomats. By sinking President Carter, who had been sympathetic to the revolution, the mullahs ended up with a hostile Ronald Reagan, who became the first, and so far only, US president to take military action against Iran, in 1988. Iran should not repeat that mistake by “Carterising Obama”, some Ahmadinejad advisers insist.

Unwilling to contemplate pre-emptive war, some may believe the only alternative is pre-emptive surrender. It is not. It is still possible to raise the cost of Iran’s nuclear ambitions by fully applying the sanctions already approved, but not implemented by the UN resolution and envisaged by the IAEA’s own rules. These include tight control of exports of all dual-use material and equipment to Iran, the inspection and impounding of suspect cargos on board ships and aircraft, and the termination of Iranian access to credit facilities and banking services used for its illicit nuclear project.

The full implementation of existing resolutions would send a signal to Tehran that its “cheat-and-retreat” strategy is not cost-free.

Obama had hoped to kick this can down the road with a mixture of negotiations and symbolic gestures. The latest revelations may make it difficult to continue that tactic. What he faces is a choice between accepting Iran as a nuclear power and taking action to stop it from crossing the threshold.

Read it all.

For starters, this summer when her husband held the customary I-have-disappointed-my-family press conference, she did not appear alongside him. This was a doubly wise move, since the governor apparently chose to make the most emotional and difficult announcement of his life without a script. Not only did Jenny Sanford avoid looking like a fool for literally standing by her man, she didn’t have to be associated with what quickly devolved into a p.r. train wreck. (His rambling, 18-minute speech included weeping, a mention of his lifelong love of camping and a “surreal” conversation he’d recently had with his father-in-law.)

Then, not long after her husband’s confession, Jenny gave an interview to the Associated Press. She was a model of control, revealing just enough detail about the affair to communicate her blamelessness in the events that transpired without letting her situation tip into the pitiable. Wearing a perky printed blouse, she stayed relentlessly on message: she was holding up her end of the deal ”” if her husband wanted back into the family, he would have to reciprocate. “It’s one thing to forgive adultery,” she said. “It’s another thing to condone it.”

Read it all.

In a cultural and spiritual situation such as the one we are living in, where the tendency grows to relegate God to the private sphere, to consider him irrelevant and superfluous, or to reject him explicitly, it is my heartfelt hope that this event might at least contribute to disperse that semi-darkness that makes openness to God precarious and fearful for the men of our time, though he never ceases to knock on our door.

Read it all.

Richard Kornicki, a former senior Home Office civil servant who serves as parliamentary coordinator for the bishops, said the Church could also be open to prosecution for sex discrimination if it turned away women or sexually active gay men who presented themselves as candidates for the priesthood. “The Government is saying that the Church cannot maintain its own beliefs in respect of its own priests,” he said.

But if the Bill became law and the bishops defied the Government and stepped in to discipline errant clergy they could not only be sued for sexual discrimination but, in the worst-case scenario, they could also face imprisonment, unlimited fines and have Church assets sequestrated.

Miss Harman’s proposals will inevitably put the Catholic Church on a collision course with the state ”“ particularly in the form of the powerful Equality and Human Rights Commission ”“ over the issue of religious freedom if they become law.

The latest warning of the threat posed by the Bill was sounded in a briefing prepared this week by the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales for Catholic peers ahead of the Second Reading of the Equality Bill in the House of Lords on Tuesday.

Read it all.

When St. Francis on the Hill Episcopal Church voted to leave the Episcopal denomination in October, members of the El Paso parish intended to keep the church building and other property.

Now as the parishioners of the renamed St. Francis on the Hill Anglican Church, they are suing the denomination in a preemptive strike to prevent it from attempting to take back the property.

Such disputes are not uncommon, but this case could become the first of its kind to make it to a jury trial. Previous cases stemming from parishes and dioceses withdrawing from the Episcopal Church have been decided by judges. No case has so far made it to a trial by a jury.

The St. Francis case had been headed to trial Oct. 2, but after a hearing Sept. 17, the case was delayed until Feb. 5. The delay will give Judge Gonzolo Garcia of the 210th District Court in El Paso time to rule on motions that could determine the outcome of the case without a trial.

Read it all.

It features an Episcopal parish toward the end–good for them. Watch it all.

In recent years Google has come under growing scrutiny for a number of controversial moves. Its decision to digitize millions of books ”” scanning and making them part of search options ”” upset authors and publishers, who see the plan as a threat to intellectual property rights and as an invitation to piracy, as the books stored on servers, like online music, might be vulnerable to hackers.

Google has been criticized for complying with Chinese censorship. (In 2006 its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, said, “I think it’s arrogant for us to walk into a country where we are just beginning operations and tell that country how to run itself.”) And, as Mr. Auletta observes in these pages, the company’s storage of massive amounts of data about its users raises serious privacy issues, especially when the company acknowledges that it is in the advertising business and seems eager to play matchmaker between consumers and advertisers.

Because Google “enjoys a well-deserved reputation for earning the trust of users,” Mr. Auletta says, it is “hard to imagine an issue that could imperil the trust Google has achieved as quickly as could privacy.” He adds: “One Google executive whispers, ”˜Privacy is an atomic bomb. Our success is based on trust.’ ”

If users, Mr. Auletta writes, “lost trust in Google, believed their private data was being exploited and shared with advertisers (or governments), the company regularly judged one of the world’s most trusted brands would commit suicide.”

Read it all.

Oxford graduate Dr Alison Peden has been chosen as one of three candidates for the vacant episcopal see of Glasgow and Galloway in Scotland. If she is elected on 16 January, she will become the UK’s first woman bishop. It would in many ways be fitting for Scotland to be the first UK province to have a woman bishop. The US had the first one in the world, Barbara Harris, who incidentally was nominated back in the 1970s by Mary Glasspool, now lesbian bishop-elect in Los Angeles. Scotland and the US church go back generations. After the American Revolution, the Bishop of London, who had previously ruled over the American church as if it was a far-away London parish of little importance, refused to give newly-independent US Episcopalians a bishop of their own. So they went to Scotland, which duly obliged. The surprising thing about Scotland is that it has taken this long to put a woman on a shortlist after their General Synod voted in favour back in 2003.

Read it all

Today, due to the timely loans from the American people, our financial system has stabilized, the stock market has sprung back to life, our economy is growing, and our banks are once again recording profits. A year ago, many doubted that we would ever recover these investments, but we’ve managed this program well. This morning, another major bank announced that it would be repaying taxpayers in full, and when they do, we’ll have collected 60 percent of the money owed — with interest. We expect other institutions to follow suit, and we are determined to recover every last dime for the American taxpayers.

So my main message in today’s meeting was very simple: that America’s banks received extraordinary assistance from American taxpayers to rebuild their industry — and now that they’re back on their feet, we expect an extraordinary commitment from them to help rebuild our economy.

That starts with finding ways to help creditworthy small and medium-size businesses get the loans that they need to open their doors, grow their operations, and create new jobs. This is something I hear about from business owners and entrepreneurs across America — that despite their best efforts, they’re unable to get loans. At the same time, I’ve been hearing from bankers that they’re willing to lend, but face a shortage of creditworthy individuals and businesses.

Now, no one wants banks making the kinds of risky loans that got us into this situation in the first place. And it’s true that regulators are requiring them to hold more of their capital as a hedge against the kind of problems that we saw last year. But given the difficulty businesspeople are having as lending has declined, and given the exceptional assistance banks received to get them through a difficult time, we expect them to explore every responsible way to help get our economy moving again.

Read it all.

The Provincial Council is the governing body of the Anglican Church in North America and consists of bishops, clergy and laity representing each of the twenty-eight constituent dioceses, clusters or networks.

The Provincial Council and the College of Bishops devoted these first meetings to putting in place the officers and structures necessary to fulfill the mandate to reach North America with the transforming love of Jesus Christ as faithful Anglicans and members by God’s grace in the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church of Jesus Christ.

In faithful obedience to the Great Commission we enthusiastically embraced the 1000 Churches Proclamation as presented to the College of Bishops by the Rev. Canon David H. Roseberry of Christ Church, Plano, Texas, and committed ourselves to the multiplication of one thousand new congregations within the Anglican Church in North America in five years.

Read it all.

5. The right to seek out and engage in consensual sexual activity.

6. The right to engage in sexual acts or activities of any kind whatsoever, providing they do not involve nonconsensual acts, violence, constraint, coercion or fraud.

7. The right to be free of persecution, condemnation, discrimination, or societal intervention in private sexual behavior.

8. The recognition by society that every person, partnered or unpartnered, has the right to the pursuit of a satisfying consensual sociosexual life free from political, legal or religious interference and that there need to be mechanisms in society where the opportunities of sociosexual activities are available to the following: disabled persons; chronically ill persons; those incarcerated in prisons, hospitals or institutions; those disadvantaged because of age, lack of physical attractiveness, or lack of social skills; and the poor and the lonely.

Read it all. I will take comments on this by email only because I do not want the thread to veer off topic or begin down an unfortunate trail. Please submit comments to at KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

Yet the preoccupation with single key events, the high politics of 1989, also distorts reality, by passing over the process of maturation which made them possible. This is top-down history, a mix of realpolitik and celebrity told from establishment perspectives. In reality, the revolutions were made not by regime politicians and opposition leaders, but by ordinary people who gathered in their thousands to turn ideas into real events. It was in this “people power”, the mobilisation of hearts and minds, that the Church’s contribution was made. Ignoring it distorts the truth and looks like crude revisionism.
Some church leaders have taken issue with the 1989 anniversaries. Cardinal Joachim Meisner, who was based in the Communist German Democratic Republic as Bishop of Berlin, has criticised the commemorations for focusing only on the final step in his country’s reunification, without mentioning “the 999 steps taken earlier”, in which Christians provided a “biblical testimony of non-participation”.

“Throughout these years, Christians formed a living protest against this inhuman system,” the cardinal told Germany’s Catholic news agency, KNA, this October. “Yet in the many declarations, speeches, interviews and books appearing for the twentieth anniversary, the Church’s role is being evaluated and covered only very superficially. We must hope everything experienced by the mass of often nameless, lonely people will be written about and documented, people who positively influenced society with their suffering and helped bring about the changes through unspectacular resistance along the way.”

Whatever one may think of church controversies after 1989, no serious historian in Eastern Europe would question the critical role of the Catholic Church ”“ and, to a lesser extent, of Orthodox, Lutheran and Calvinist communities ”“ during the final stages of Communist rule, in helping sustain opposition and give it moral certainty.

Read it all.