Washington D.C., Sep 15, 2016 / 06:04 am (CNA/EWTN News).- If the U.S. uses its moral authority' to pressure Vietnam on human rights issues, the southeast Asian country will change for the better, religious freedom advocates maintained at a conference on Monday. “Vietnam wants to be part of the world, and I’m sure it does. It needs to not treat religious liberty as the poor sister of the human rights family, or worse, as the eccentric uncle of the human rights family,” Kristina Arriaga, a commissioner on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, stated at a Sept. 12 event hosted by the Hudson Institute on religious freedom in Vietnam. “Without religious freedom, no other right exists,” she added. The freedom of citizens to practice their religion in Vietnam “varies,” the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom noted in its 2016 annual report, because while “the government has made dramatic openings with respect to religious freedom,” officials – at both the national and local levels – can also treat certain religious leaders and communities with hostility, as supposedly “threatening to the state.” Grave violations of human rights are still committed, such as the government requiring religious groups to register with the state, imprisoning human rights activists, and cracking down on protests, as when this past spring 4,000 Catholics were reportedly beaten for protesting a toxic waste dump that caused an environmental disaster. Unregistered religious groups are at greater risk of harassment and persecution by government officials, the commission added. However, the state can also wield its authority by trying to control registered groups. As USCIRF chair Fr. Thomas Reese and Harvard Professor Mary Ann Glendon noted after their 2015 trip to Vietnam, “the government kept the clergy on a short leash and continues to play a direct role in approving candidates for bishops selected by the Vatican.” “Government officials become nervous when a local pastor has more credibility and authority in his village than the local party and government officials,” they added. Elliot Abrams, a former commissioner with USCIRF and current fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations, explained at the Hudson Institute event: “That is because the local pastor has moral authority and legitimacy, while the party and government officials do not. That is just what the regime fears.” However, the U.S. has “moral authority” because religious freedom is enshrined in the First Amendment of its Constitution. Thus, it must use this authority to pressure Vietnam to improve its human rights record, both Abrams and Arriaga insisted. They described President Obama’s recent trip to Vietnam as a missed opportunity. Obama completely lifted the arms embargo against the country, but advocates insisted that sufficient human rights concessions were not made in return. “The question is whether the United States will use a closer relationship – that Vietnamese leaders want  – to promote religious freedom, or will we forget about it and pursue what is meant to be a policy of realpolitik,” Abrams asked. “Whose independence and strength are we enhancing?” he asked about the lifting of the embargo, implying that the U.S. was strengthening the regime, but not the Vietnamese people. The U.S. has an obligation to highlight abuses when its dignitaries travel to countries where repression occurs, Arriaga insisted. “The U.S. government needs to name those names when they are in the country,” she said, calling it “inexcusable” for a government official not to do so when traveling to a country like China or Cuba, where the government represses the freedom of religion. Although the state in 2015 released certain political prisoners including Catholic bloggers and activists, there are still reportedly “between 100 and 150 prisoners of conscience” there, USCIRF noted in its report. The U.S. must also re-designate Vietnam as a “country of particular concern,” Arriaga insisted. That State Department designation is for countries where the worst violations of religious freedom are taking place, either with government consent or without sufficient prevention by the state. Vietnam was put on the CPC list in 2004, “the last time that Vietnam made real improvements” she said. However, the country was taken off the list in 2006. “In fact, we know American pressure can work to relax the degree of repression, to reduce the amount of thuggish behavior,” Arriaga said, “but only if the United States government applies that pressure and makes it clear that improved relations depend on this.” Another area of concern for Vietnam is its draft law on religion, expected to go into effect later this year. In June, the Ambassador at-Large for International Religious Freedom David Saperstein testified before Congress that the current version of the law “will continue to require religious groups to undergo an onerous and arbitrary registration and recognition process to operate legally,” although authorities had shown “a willingness to receive domestic and international feedback on the draft law.” Read more

Denver, Colo., Sep 15, 2016 / 03:04 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Most people know Jim Henson as the man who brought the world the beloved comedic puppet characters known as the Muppets: Kermit the Frog, his on-again, off-again diva girlfriend Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, and Big Bird, to name just a few. But most people aren’t familiar with Jim’s wife Jane, the co-creator of the Muppets – and a Catholic. For years, Jane worked side by side with Jim, creating and performing their various shows since their teenage years. As the Muppet project grew into T.V. shows and movies - The Muppet Show, The Muppet Movie, Sesame Street – the characters became household names across America. “People don’t know Jane Henson,” said Sean Keohane, a puppeteer who worked with Jane on her later puppet nativity show. “Everybody knows Jim Henson, but they don’t know that he was married and there were two people back there in the beginning – it was those two for 20, 25 years.” When the Henson family started growing in the 1970s, Jane retired from puppet - er - Muppeteering to raise the Henson’s five children. After her children had grown and her husband died, Jane still had an unfulfilled dream – she wanted to create a puppet show that conveyed the Gospel message: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.” “Since she was a little kid, she had loved nativity scenes, the little creche figures under the Christmas tree,” said Sean Keohane, who worked with Jane as a writer, director and puppeteer for her nativity show. “She said ok, this is the show that I want to create, this is on my bucket list, I want to do the nativity story with puppets, so she combined those things she loved,” he told CNA. Keohane himself had loved the Muppets as a child and grew up to become a puppeteer with Disney. After he left, he started created his own puppet shows for adults, when Jane Henson and her daughter Heather attended one of his shows, about 15 years ago. It was then that Jane started recruiting Keohane to create the nativity show with her – he was the only other puppeteering Catholic she knew who was writing puppet shows. He would write, and she would work with the Henson puppet shop to create the characters. “Jane had said to me I don’t want the script to sound like … a New York guy from the Bronx wrote it, I want it to sound like the Bible,” he said. She also didn’t want the characters to look like traditional Muppets, but rather like the nativity figures brought to life. They based the play on the styles of liturgical drama performed in the Middle Ages in Europe during the Easter season, which were sometimes performed as puppet shows – though they were eventually kicked out of the Churches themselves and onto the steps or the town squares to be performed. “That’s the tradition we’re going back to,” Keohane said. “One hundred years ago, you would go to little Italy in New York City and you’d go to a marionette theater and it was the Feast of the Assumption, and the Virgin Mary would be a marionette that would be taken up on a cloud into heaven by the puppet strings.” (The word ‘marionette’ actually comes from this tradition, and translates as ‘little little Mary’.) At first, Jane didn’t have grand visions for the scope of her play. She lived next to a convent in Connecticut, and she just wanted to perform the show with Keohane for the sisters, and maybe a few families. But the show grew, and in 2009, the show had its first major debut at St. James Cathedral in Orlando, Florida, where Keohane lived. From there, they toured around churches and schools in the area – some Catholic, and some not. A few years later, on April 2, 2013, Jane died from cancer. Shortly thereafter, her nativity show was picked up by CBS for a Christmas Eve special. After adding more puppets and adjusting the set for television, the show made its T.V. premier live from St. Paul the Apostle Catholic Church in New York, with Regis Philbin narrating the show in between concert music. When the show ended, the Henson Foundation approved the show for additional tours. Last Christmas, Keohane brought the show to the Cathedral of St. Andrew in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and he’s hoping to create a more extended tour for Christmases in years to come. “I think this is an amazing opportunity – you have a Henson, someone from this very talented family who’s Catholic, who created this show about: ‘God so loved the world that he gave it his only Son,’” Keohane said. “She said ok, I’m lucky in my life, I have these talents, my family’s had success, how do we give back and how do we use that? How do we give back to God and how do we share that story with people in a world that’s kind of messy? This is a good message to remind the world of,” he added. Besides the beauty of the message of the Gospel in the play, the show is also worth seeing because of the artistry of Jane Henson, Keohane said. “She was this artist who created this thing, and hardly anybody knows about it,” he said. “Everybody knows the Muppets, but hardly anybody knows that this was an important thing to her, so I’d like to get it out there for people to see.” It’s also a show that appeals to people of all faiths, or no faith, because of its artisty, Keohane said. After almost every performance, he would have agnostic or atheist people approach him and ask how they could help with the show. “I would have a lot of people who would tell me they were ex-Catholics or they were agnostic or atheist, and the next thing they would say is: ‘And you know what? You should have Mary sing the Magnificat. And here’s a beautiful version of it.’ And it happened every time.” As a passion project that Jane never expected to be performed in churches, much less in cathedrals and on T.V., the success of the show has been humbling and inspiring for Keohane. “But it’s ended up in cathedrals, and that’s because people see it and they say wow, this is a beautiful piece,” Keohane said. “It was a for Jane and the rest of us to use our talents to tell this story, and it was a great honor for her to ask me to do it. And in my career it’s one of the things I’m most proud of having worked on.” To learn more about the nativity show and performances, visit the Jane Henson's Nativity Story Live Stage Tour Facebook page. Read more

Washington D.C., Sep 14, 2016 / 03:32 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- After the chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights called current appeals to religious freedom “hypocrisy,” one archbishop rebuked his statement as “reckless” and ignorant. “These statements painting those who support religious freedom with the broad brush of bigotry are reckless and reveal a profound disregard for the religious foundations of his own work,” Archbishop William Lori of Baltimore said. Archbishop Lori chairs the U.S. bishops' Ad Hoc Committee on Religious Liberty and made his comments Tuesday in reaction to a recent statement by the chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Martin R. Castro. The commission had released its report “Peaceful Coexistence: reconciling non-discrimination principles with religious liberties” last week. The report was in the works for three years, exploring the conflicts between anti-discrimination laws and religious exemptions from those laws. One example of that conflict might be Christian owners of a bakery who decline to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding, despite a state’s anti-discrimination laws. Or it could be a parochial school choosing to make employment decisions based on a person’s religious beliefs and conduct. Or, in a high-profile case, a religious order like the Little Sisters of the Poor might refuse out of conscience to have contraceptives covered in the health plans of their employees, and thus be accused of discriminating against those employees. Regarding these conflicts, Chairman Castro, a Democrat and Obama appointee, issued a particularly strong statement against many appeals to religious freedom today. “The phrases 'religious liberty' and 'religious freedom' will stand for nothing except hypocrisy so long as they remain code words for discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia or any form of intolerance,” he said. He added that “today, as in past, religion is being used as both a weapon and a shield by those seeking to deny others equality. In our nation’s past religion has been used to justify slavery and later, Jim Crow laws.” Archbishop Lori called Castro's comparison of today’s religious leaders with yesterday’s segregationists “shocking.” “He makes the shocking suggestion that Catholic, evangelical, orthodox Jewish, Mormon, and Muslim communities are comparable to fringe segregationists from the civil rights era,” the archbishop said. Faith leaders have a proud tradition of supporting the cause of civil rights in the U.S., Archbishop Lori insisted. “Can we imagine the civil rights movement without Rev. Martin Luther King, Fr. Theodore Hesburgh, and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel?” he asked. That tradition continues today, he added. “Today, Catholic priests, religious and laity can be found walking the neighborhood streets of our most struggling communities in places abandoned by a 'throwaway culture' that has too often determined that quick profits matter more than communities,” he said. “We are there offering education, health care, social services, and hope, working to serve as the 'field hospital' Pope Francis has called us to be.” “Rest assured, if people of faith continue to be marginalized, it is the poor and vulnerable, not the Chairman and his friends, who will suffer,” Archbishop Lori maintained. “Peaceful Coexistence,” released last week, sided with anti-discrimination protections when they are in a perceived conflict with religious freedom exemptions, and asks that religious exemptions be as narrow as possible. “Civil rights protections ensuring nondiscrimination, as embodied in the Constitution, laws, and policies, are of preeminent importance in American jurisprudence,” the report stated. Meanwhile, “religious exemptions to the protections of civil rights based upon classifications such as race, color, national origin, sex, disability status, sexual orientation, and gender identity, when they are permissible, significantly infringe upon these civil rights,” it added. Furthermore, the report recommended that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act be amended, which could mean a massive shift in religious freedom jurisprudence. The act was passed in 1993 – with a 97-3 vote in the U.S. Senate – after the Supreme Court ruled in Employment Division v. Smith that a person’s religiously motivated actions were not protected when they conflicted with existing law. Thus, RFRA created a process to determine whether a religiously-motivated action could be exempt from federal law. The law must not “substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion” unless the government can “demonstrate” that it is “in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest” and “is the least restrictive means” of doing so. The Supreme Court in 2014 ruled that Hobby Lobby, a closely-held for-profit corporation run by the Green family, was protected under the law. In response last week, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights insisted that only “individuals and religious institutions” and not businesses could be protected under the law, “and only to the extent that they do not unduly burden civil liberties and civil rights protections against status-based discrimination.” States should follow suit with their own RFRA-type laws, the report added. Two commissioners dissented from the majority ruling. One, Gail Heriot, said that “the Commission majority takes a complex subject and tries to make it simple – far too simple. Not many legal or constitutional issues come down to good guys vs. bad guys.” She issued a sharp rebuke of Chairman Castro’s statement on the “hypocrisy” of religious freedom being supposedly used to discriminate against others.   “In some ways, I envy anyone who can dismiss those who disagree with him as mere hypocrites,” Heriot said of Castro. “Does Chairman Castro really believe that the Little Sisters of the Poor, whose case is currently before the Supreme Court, are just a bunch of hypocrites? Does he believe that they are making up their concern over being compelled to finance their employees' contraception? Does he think they really just want to save money?” The chair also “inexplicably associates statutes like the RFRA with 'Christian supremacy,'” she continued. However, “RFRA protects people of all faiths. Indeed, it is the adherents to less common religions – Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs, Hindus, and Bahá’ís – that usually derive the most protection from RFRA and RFRA-style laws. Their political clout may be otherwise too weak to influence legislation.” Religious charities should be exempt from non-discrimination laws because they are not even discriminating, Archbishop Lori said. “We do not seek to impose our morality on anyone, but neither can we sacrifice it in our own lives and work,” he said. “The vast majority of those who speak up for religious liberty are merely asking for the freedom to serve others as our faith asks of us. We ask that the work of our institutions be carried out by people who believe in our mission and respect a Christian witness.” Ultimately, the future of a pluralistic society is at stake, Archbishop Lori warned. “In a pluralistic society, there will be institutions with views at odds with popular opinion,” he said. “The Chairman's statement suggests that the USCCR does not see the United States as a pluralistic society. We respect those who disagree with what we teach. Can they respect us?” Read more

Denver, Colo., Sep 14, 2016 / 06:02 am (CNA).- Catholic Twitter has been catfished. To define some terms, Catholic Twitter is a subculture where (mostly young) and hipster-lifestyle-inclined Catholics follow each other, share ideas, and tweet about faith, life and everything in between. For some, it can serve as a faith community in an otherwise very secular world. Strong friendships, and even relationships, forged in the Catholic Twitter forum are not uncommon. Catfishing, then, is an internet-ism that refers to someone pretending to be someone they’re not on social media sites, such as Facebook. (For an explanation of the marriage of fish and internet terminology, check out this article by Slate. TL;DR, it’s from a movie.) Today, Catholic Twitter found out that one of their own had been catfishing. The popular account @ThisCatholicGirl, which had amassed thousands of followers (a feat on Catholic Twitter) was outed as a fake this week in a blog post by Chase Padusniak, a graduate student in English at Princeton University who writes for Patheos and Catholic Vote. The account, which has since been deleted, catered to “both to angsty Catholic twenty-somethings and 17-year-old girls with Disney fantasies,” easily mixed a traditional faith with slightly left-leaning politics, and featured pictures of exotic travels and the beautiful girl (supposedly) behind the account, making her a well-liked Catholic Twitter-er. Over the course of about six months, Padusniak formed a friendship with This Catholic Girl. They chatted about “really banal” things when they were bored, and would occasionally check in with each other. After a while, things got more serious. Occasional check-ins became daily texts and snapchats. Both students, the two started dating in March, figuring a post-school-year meet-up would soon be feasible. Even as she put off the in-person meeting, everything about Elspeth “El” Howard - the presumed single Catholic 20-something college student behind the successful account - seemed real. “She had pictures, a Millennial sense of humor, constant and varied activity, several social media sites, including a Facebook, a Twitter, a Tumblr, an Instagram, an Academia.edu, and a blog,” he wrote. “El would send me snapchats of her face, videos of her voice talking to her niece and nephew, and talk to me on the phone almost every night for hours at a time. Her schedule always made sense. She’d visit the Southwest and upload pictures of New Mexico; she’d be off to San Francisco and pop up in shots near the Golden Gate Bridge. (S)he did the Camino, a major Catholic pilgrimage, and came back with picture after picture from along the Way.” Her reasons for cancelling their meetings also seemed believable. When her grandmother died, she posted pictures asking for prayers. Then her parents separated, followed by her sister and her sister’s husband. But eventually, the cancellations became suspicious, and a friend convinced Padusniak to ask El for a photo of herself with a piece of paper with Chase’s name on it - a standard safeguard against catfishing. From there, things unraveled, and it became clear that she was not the young, single college-aged Catholic she had been purporting to be, but a 30-year-old married woman, with social media accounts for her real person as well Elspeth Howard. She had been hiding behind photos swiped from the internet, a program that could upload photos to Snapchat, and photoshopped pictures, to name a few things. The reaction on Catholic Twitter was a mixture of shock, anger and disappointment - amidst a strong call to prayer and forgiveness for the real person behind the account, and advice to take the incident as a warning. I know a lot of people who looked up to #ThisCatholicGirl and we're friends with her. I can't imagine the hurt they must be going through. — Catholic Dignity (@CatholicClassy) September 12, 2016 #ThisCatholicGirl fiasco is nuts, but let's be real about the fallout. 1 person is heartbroken & another person really needs help #letspray — Sr. Theresa Aletheia (@pursuedbytruth) September 12, 2016 CAUTION: Kids, this is the Internet: absolutely nothing here is guaranteed to be real. A message from your sponsor. #ThisCatholicGirl — Father Kevin Cusick (@MCITLFrAphorism) September 12, 2016 While it's fun to make jokes about the whole #ThisCatholicGirl thing, let's also be mindful of the fact that real people were really hurt... — Tommy Tighe (@theghissilent) September 12, 2016 In e-mail comments to CNA, Padusniak said he wrote the piece not to shame the woman behind @ThisCatholicGirl, but he said he felt it was the right thing to do to let her followers know about her true identity. “I felt I had a responsibility to let people know so they could heal, forgive, and pray for this person, who is clearly deeply in need of our love.” Padusniak said he has appreciated that the reaction to his piece has been mostly heartfelt, with people offering him kind words and prayers. Some reactions, though, have been more angry, negative or sarcastic. It’s understandable, Padusniak said, because many people were hurt by this woman’s deception, but ultimately he said that the woman behind @ThisCatholicGirl is the one who is most in need of prayers, love and forgiveness at this time. “She hurt a lot of people and that's horrible, but she's not an evil person; she's hurt, broken, stuck in darkness,” he said. Padusniak said that while he does feel hurt about being lied to, he doesn’t otherwise feel particularly violated by the situation, because the deception of @ThisCatholicGirl was so widespread and affected not just him but many others. Another person on Catholic Twitter, who preferred to remain anonymous, relayed to Catholic News Agency that he had had a similarly confusing and deceitful experience with El after they had formed a relationship over the social media forum. But it could have been so much worse, Padusniak said. “This woman didn't try to take money from me. We're Catholic, so it wasn't a sexual relationship. She turned to this in pain, maybe loneliness, and we'd do best to keep that in mind. Again, she has hurt many (her husband included), but the reality is that most people know less about this than I do; they don't understand that this person hurt others not from some deep, malicious evil, but from sadness,” he added.   When asked if he could give his past self advice to protect himself from catfishing, Padusniak said he does wish he would have video chatted with El to confirm her identity, even though he is usually averse to video chatting.   “I would certainly tell my former self to video chat at least once - it's an easy way to check, even if you aren't a fan of the medium,” he said. Looking back, the only other suspicious thing about El’s online presence was that there seemed to be very few if any photos of her uploaded by other people, and very few photos of her with other people. “At minimum, it's a good sign that someone is real if they appear with others, especially in others' pictures,” he said. Several times in his comments, Padusniak reiterated that while the incident hurt him and many others, the person who is most suffering the fallout of this incident is the woman behind the facade, who largely acted out of sadness and loneliness rather than out of true malice, he said. He asked that Catholic Twitter and all who hear about her story offer @ThisCatholicGirl prayers and forgiveness. “She's repenting, and that's all we can ask. Who of us has not been in need of forgiveness? The only Christian response is love and forgiveness.” Read more

Washington D.C., Sep 14, 2016 / 03:01 am (CNA/EWTN News).- After a dissenting Catholic group recently circulated an ad campaign promoting publicly funded abortions, bishops have fired back by reaffirming the Catholic Church’s teaching against abo... Read more