ANTI-ABOPRTION IS ANTI FAMILY PLANNING

As states ban abortion, a new spotlight on an old battle over sex education

Half of the states set to ban abortion have no mandate that schools teach sex education. Only four require curricula to address contraception.

A demonstrator holds a sign during an abortion-rights protest in Denton, Texas, June 28, 2022, following the U.S. Supreme Court overturning the landmark abortion case Roe v. Wade. RNS photo by Riley Farrell

July 14, 2022

By 

Riley Farrell

(RNS) — In front of a room of middle schoolers, a youth minister in rural North Carolina scribbles “hand-holding” and “kissing” on the bottom of a whiteboard. He then writes “intercourse” on the top of the board. Between the gap, he draws a thick line, indicating that sex before marriage — anything more than kissing, actually — crosses a literal line of purity.

It’s a scene the Rev. Amelia Fulbright, now the transitional pastor of the Congregational Church of Austin, recalls from her childhood, when she attended a ministry-led sex-ed course.

Her sex education in public school was not much better, said Fulbright. She remembers the graphic photos of late-stage sexually transmitted infections but does not recall any mention of contraception. These dual initial exposures to sex, Fulbright said, shamed and stunted her well into adulthood.

“I had this giant fear of, if I got pregnant, what the consequences of that would be not just for my future, but for the stigma that would carry in the communities I grew up in,” said Fulbright.

The Rev. Amelia Fulbright. Photo via Congregational Church of Austin

After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, and with it, the constitutional right to abortion, 26 states have or are likely to ban most abortions. Half of those states have no mandate that schools teach sex education, including Fulbright’s home state of Texas. Only four of the 26 require curricula to cover the topic of contraception. And in many of these Bible Belt states, the sex education that is available is centered on not having sex.

As abortion bans fall into place around the country, there is likely to be a renewed focus on teen pregnancies and, with it, fresh battle lines drawn in a decades-old debate over how best to teach young people about sex: an abstinence-only approach or what is often called “comprehensive sex ed.”

For her part, Fulbright is an advocate for comprehensive sex education, which covers a range of issues relating to the physical, biological, emotional and social aspects of sexuality, including gender identity, various sexual orientations and contraceptives.

“I don’t think it’s possible to make a sound biblical case against abortion or comprehensive sex ed,” said Fulbright. “Bodily autonomy, personal conscience and dignity are a big part of my Christian faith.”

She quickly ties abstinence-focused sex ed to religion for a reason. 

Many states have opted against comprehensive sex education due, at least in part, to the successful efforts of some religious lobbyists, who advocated for an abstinence-is-best approach to sex ed, encouraging students to avoid sex before marriage and forgoing education on contraception, consent and the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases. This grassroots concentration on sexual morality by many Christian groups wove abstinence education snugly into the anti-abortion movement.

And, encouraged by the Moral Majority’s reaction to the HIV/AIDS crisis, then-President Ronald Reagan in 1981 administered hundreds of thousands of dollars in grant funds to abstinence-only sex education programs, via the Adolescent Family Life Act. He did so in opposition to his own surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, an anti-abortion Christian, who spoke out against the efficacy of abstinence-only education and implored schools to teach comprehensive sex education.

In this Oct. 8, 2015, file photo, Justin Balido, peer health coordinator and senior health educator with Health Connected, speaks to a ninth-grade Teen Talk High School class at Carlmont High School in Belmont, California. Sex education in some American high schools is evolving beyond pregnancy and disease prevention to include lessons aimed at consent and curbing sexual assaults. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)

In the ensuing years, abstinence-only sex education programs have continued receiving government support — between 1982 and 2017, Congress spent more than $2 billion on abstinence education. From 2000 to 2009 alone, faith-based, pro-abstinence sex education programs received approximately $200 million annually through the Title V program, the Adolescent Family Life Act and the Community-Based Abstinence Education program.

Advocates argue that education that emphasizes abstinence acknowledges the emotional and relational risks of sex more successfully than comprehensive sex education. Lori Kuykendall, CEO of Beacon Health Education Resources in the North Texas suburb of Irving, said she believes abstinence-focused education, sometimes called “optimal health” or “risk-avoidance” curriculum, has a positive, holistic effect on students.

“Abortion is a decision after several other decisions have been made,” said Kuykendall, who began her career in the early 1990s at Texas A&M University, conducting mentoring programs for the dormitories within “the emerging field of abstinence education.” Kuykendall said she chose to save sex until marriage as a personal commitment for religious and health-related reasons. 

Abstinence education, she argues, helps young people make choices far ahead of those they would face with an unintended pregnancy. 

“We’re farther upstream in a more proactive approach to help young people not get to that point.”

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RELATED: Even abortion foes will help friends who choose to end a pregnancy

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Brittany Broadduss-Smith. Photo via YouTube

Brittany Broadduss-Smith, a Christian sexologist and social worker in Philadelphia, said abstinence-only education doesn’t reduce sexual activity at all — it just makes sexual activity riskier. Minors who receive abstinence-only education, she noted, often associate shame with sex and avoid going to adults to get birth control.

The intersection of noncomprehensive sex education and abortion bans will increase unsafe abortions, said Broadduss-Smith. Students of color who live in this intersection will be disproportionately hurt, she said, based on existing social determinants of health care.

“White evangelicals in power have infused their beliefs into the education system, the public welfare system and our laws,” said Broadduss-Smith. “But Jesus would have been the primary social advocate.”

Fulbright has been advocating for reproductive justice since 2013. Before that she was involved with the Texas Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy. The link between her two past jobs is clear to Fulbright — and, she notes, there is research to back her up.

Comprehensive sex education correlates with lower rates of STDs and unintended teen pregnancies, according to three decades of research. Comprehensive sex education has also proved to delay sexual initiation among students and decreases sexual violence, researchers have found. 

A range of contraceptive methods: contraceptive pills, emergency contraception, condom, IUD, vaginal ring, implant, etc. Photo by Reproductive Health Supplies Coalition/Unsplash/Creative Commons

States with abstinence-emphasized education have the highest rates of teen pregnancies, according to 2011 research from the Public Library of Science. And, of the 10 states with the highest teen pregnancy rates, nine will effectively ban abortion post-Roe.

If lawmakers were truly concerned about lowering abortion rates, they would enact comprehensive sex education, Fulbright said.

“It’s not about protecting babies or children,” she said. “It’s about power.”

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RELATED: As Roe falls, religious abortion-rights advocates prepare for next steps

The Webb telescope vs. young Earth creationism

The Webb telescope's images have elicited faith-based comments that Galileo might recognize.

The Carina Nebula is one of the largest and brightest nebulae in the sky, located approximately 7,600 light-years away in the southern constellation Carina. Nebulae are stellar nurseries where stars form. The Carina Nebula is home to many massive stars, several times larger than the sun. Photo by NASA

July 21, 2022

By 

Mark Silk

(RNS) — These days, Christianity is pretty much down with the findings of astronomy, and nowhere more than in the Vatican, where the Rev. Guy Consolmagno, the Jesuit astrophysicist who directs its space observatory, waxed enthusiastic over the images received from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope last week.

“We’re really excited by the new images from the Webb telescope!” Consolmagno wrote. “The science behind this telescope is our attempt to use our God-given intelligence to understand the logic of the universe.

“But as these images show, the universe is not only logical, it is also beautiful. This is God’s creation being revealed to us, and in it we can see both his astonishing power and his love of beauty.”

Somewhere, Galileo is smiling.

Now, for the record, those awe-inspiring images are not photographs showing what you or I could see with our own eyes. The Webb collects light from the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum — a part that human beings can’t see at all. The Webb’s images are visualizations created by representing the range of infrared radiation collected by the telescope as if it took place in the small part of the spectrum we can see.

As for what Consolmagno calls the logic of the universe that the science behind those images reveals, there certainly are Christians who don’t accept it. Foremost among them are “young Earth” creationists such as those associated with Answers in Genesis, the fundamentalist Christian apologetics organization that was founded in 1980 as the Creation Science Foundation.

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RELATED: Vatican astronomer praises beauty and potential of Webb space photos

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Writing on the Answers website back in January, Rob Webb, a former NASA employee, assailed the telescope that happens to bear his own last name. It has, he wrote, “overall objectives … saturated in evolutionary (and really naturalistic) thinking.”

By this he means that the science behind the Webb is at odds with the young Earth view that, as he puts it: “God created everything in the heavens and the earth within six literal days approximately 6,000 years ago (per the biblical timeline), all for his glory.”

So much for the science that calculates the years it takes light to reach us from the farthest reaches of the universe in the billions, thus allowing the Webb to give us the best picture yet of the universe in the wake of the Big Bang. Of course, according to Answers, there was no Big Bang.

The better our science gets, it seems, the harder the creationists fight. As Ronald Numbers points out in his definitive history of creationism, at the beginning of the 20th century the first creationists did not contest geological time. Devising workarounds for the biblical six days, they concerned themselves with how life on Earth had come about. It is only in our own time that young Earth creationism has become a touchstone of fundamentalist belief.

How widely is this view held? According to the most recent Gallup survey on human origins, as of 2019, 40% of Americans said they believe that God created humans in their present form. Whatever one thinks of such a position, it’s a far cry from the belief that the universe is 6,000 years old.

Whether you accept the science behind the Webb or reject it outright, you’ve got to hand it to NASA. The images are awesome. Who cares if what you’re seeing is the evidence of things unseen?

Proclaim debt amnesty throughout all the land? A (PRE) biblical solution to a present-day problem

A scholar of the ancient Near East explains how loan forgiveness was handled thousands of years ago in the Bible and royal decrees.

Part of a restoration edict of Ammisaduqa, one of the rulers of ancient Babylon. (© The Trustees of the British Museum

July 27, 2022

By 

Eva von Dassow

(The Conversation) — Student loan debt is one of the most burdensome forms of debt in America today. According to oft-cited statistics, approximately 43 million Americans have student loan debt, cumulatively amounting to around US$1.7 trillion. The exorbitant costs of higher education in the United States, combined with the fact that educational credentials serve as a ticket to decent employment, require many students to take out loans that follow them long past graduation – and that are almost impossible to discharge in bankruptcy.

Hence, calls for cancellation of student loan debt by legislative or executive action keep intensifying, and President Joe Biden is expected to respond by ordering cancellation of some amount, notwithstanding arguments against any blanket debt amnesty.

Yet this very policy is inscribed on the U.S. Liberty Bell. “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof!” it declares, quoting the biblical Book of Leviticus, 25:10. The Hebrew word translated “liberty,” “derōr,” actually refers to debt amnesty.

The Liberty Bell, with its famous crack, in Philadelphia.
Joe Sohm/Visions of America/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

In the world of the Bible, it was customary to cancel all noncommercial debts from time to time. As a scholar of the ancient Near East, I’ve read many cuneiform tablets that record how people then – like Americans today – often went into debt to meet living expenses. They might mortgage their property to keep a roof over their heads, only to find that ever-accruing interest made it impossible to pay off the principal.

They faced the additional risk of debt bondage: People lacking sufficient property to secure their debts would have to pledge their dependents or even their own selves to their creditors. Their creditors thus became their masters, and those pledged for debt were effectively enslaved, unless and until they were redeemed. A decree of debt amnesty would wipe the slate clean, springing people from bondage and restoring their freedom as well as their fortunes.

Kings clean the slate

The earliest recorded instances of this practice come from ancient Sumer, a land in the south of what is now Iraq. Urukagina, ruler of the city of Lagash around 2400 B.C., decreed a debt amnesty soon after he came to power, releasing people living in debt bondage to go home and even clearing the prisons. In the Sumerian language, this amnesty was termed “amargi” – “return to mother” – for it restored people to their families.

Urukagina was not the first to issue such a decree, and it may already have become traditional by his time. The practice of decreeing debt amnesty is widely documented in the Semitic-speaking kingdoms of Syria and Mesopotamia during the early second millennium B.C. Debt amnesty was routinely triggered by the death of a ruler: His successor would raise a golden torch and decree “andurāru,” or “restoration” – the Akkadian equivalent of Hebrew “deror.” The stated purpose of such decrees was to establish or reestablish equity. A king’s foremost duty was to maintain “justice and equity,” as Hammurabi of Babylon claimed to do when promulgating his laws around 1750 B.C.

While lending at interest was not considered unjust, debt that deprived families of their property and liberty created inequity, which had to be remedied. A decree of “andurāru” restored equity, liberty and family property by canceling debts incurred for subsistence – including tax arrears owed to the state – while leaving commercial debts untouched. When Hammurabi was on his deathbed, his son Samsu-iluna took power and issued a decree remitting noncommercial debts, canceling arrears and forbidding their collection; thus, he declared, “I have established restoration throughout the land.”

A decree of restoration could also be issued to address political or economic crisis. The usurper or conqueror, having subjected a people to his rule, could establish their “restoration,” both remitting debts and enabling those captured during hostilities to go free. Hammurabi himself did this upon conquering the kingdom of Larsa, which was part of ancient Sumer.

Detail of a relief of King Hammurabi before the sun-god Shamash, from a stone stele inscribed with his proclamation of laws and dedicated around 1750 B.C., discovered at Susa in present-day Iran.
DEA / G. Dagli Orti/DeAgostini via Getty Images

Thus the conqueror could pose as a liberator setting a disordered realm to rights. The idea was to restore the inhabitants of the land to their original condition, before incurring debt, losing their property or losing their liberty.

Not so forgiving

The issuance of debt-canceling decrees was sporadic, not periodic, so one never knew when it would occur. But everyone knew it would happen sooner or later. Financiers would therefore prepare for this eventuality to avoid taking losses whenever debts were abruptly remitted and their collection prohibited. They used various methods to insulate transactions and investments from debt remission – because otherwise who would ever offer credit to those in need?

They developed legal fictions to disguise mortgage loans, debt bondage, and the like as contracts of other kinds, avoiding their cancellation by decree. The decree of Ammi-ṣaduqa, a king of Babylon in the 17th century B.C., explicitly prohibits such subterfuge, but regulation was a step behind entrepreneurs. Clever financial instruments immunized debt from amnesty and kept credit, as well as profit, flowing.

Ultimately a program for periodic debt cancellation was developed in biblical law. The Book of Deuteronomy requires remission of debts among Israelites every seventh year, using the term “šemiṭṭah” – “remission” – and stipulating that every creditor should remit the debt owed him. The Book of Leviticus adds the requirement to proclaim amnesty, Hebrew “deror,” after every seventh cycle of seven years, restoring every Israelite to his property and family in the 50th year – the jubilee year. Recognizing that a predictable debt amnesty would only make creditors’ planning easier, Deuteronomy 15:9 warns against refusing to lend as the seventh year approaches.

The biblical authors must have had some experience with creditors’ efforts to evade the requirement to remit debts. According to the Book of Jeremiah, when Zedekiah, the last king of Judah, decreed “deror” in the face of the Babylonian invasion of 587 B.C., creditors agreed to release their enslaved fellow Judeans, then found ways to force them back into bondage.

Not only was the ostensible purpose of debt-remission decrees defeated by creative credit instruments, the true purpose of such decrees was not to fix the problems that made them necessary. People would still need to go into debt to survive, pay their taxes and keep a roof over their heads. They would still risk impoverishment, debt bondage and eventual enslavement. Sporadic debt cancellation did not eliminate chronic indebtedness, nor was it meant to.

Instead, the function of such decrees was to restore socioeconomic balance – and the tax base – enough that the cycle of borrowing to survive could start over. In a sense, debt amnesty actually served to restore society to its ideal state of inequity, so that it would always need the same remedy again.

This dynamic is worth considering amid calls for canceling student loan debt. Certainly a student debt amnesty would benefit millions whose lives are shackled by interest on loans they took out in the hope that a degree would guarantee them gainful employment. It would do nothing to address the problems that make incurring such debt necessary.

As long as higher education is treated simultaneously as a private good and a job requirement, people will still need to go into debt to get degrees. Then the same remedy will have to be applied again.

(Eva von Dassow, Associate professor of Ancient History, University of Minnesota. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)

NEITHER DO HUMANISTS OR ATHEISTS

God does not want ‘a world governed by religious laws,’ pope tells Canadian clergy

(RNS) – To overcome secularism and past failures, Pope Francis called on Canadian clergy to embrace the journey toward healing and reconciliation.

Pope Francis presides over a Mass at the National Shrine of Saint Anne de Beaupre, Thursday, July 28, 2022, in Saint Anne de Beaupre, Quebec. Pope Francis is on a "penitential" six-day visit to Canada to beg forgiveness from survivors of the country's residential schools, where Catholic missionaries contributed to the "cultural genocide" of generations of Indigenous children by trying to stamp out their languages, cultures and traditions. (AP Photo/John Locher)

July 28, 2022

By 

Claire Giangravé

QUEBEC CITY (RNS) — On his second day in Quebec City, Pope Francis offered a path forward for the Catholic Church in Canada as it seeks forgiveness and reconciliation with the Indigenous peoples harmed by its past actions. He also addressed the challenges of both clericalism in the church and mounting secularism in the country.

In a homily on Thursday (July 28) for clergy and church members gathered at the Cathedral of Notre Dame, the pope also criticized those who would impose the church’s beliefs on the public square.

“God does not want us to be slaves, but sons and daughters,” Francis said. “He does not want to make decisions for us, or oppress us with a sacral power, exercised in a world governed by religious laws. No! He created us to be free, and he asks us to be mature and responsible persons in life and in society.”

The pope’s remarks take place as Christian nationalist rhetoric gains traction in conservative political parties in Europe and in the United States. Recent comments by Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert, claiming she is “tired of this separation of church and state junk,” have sparked debates in the U.S. regarding the role of religion in government.

His comments were also aimed at combating clericalism — privileging clergy and religious people above lay faithful in authority and importance — which the pope has blamed for allowing sexual abuse and abuse of power to propagate within the Catholic Church.

Francis is on a six-day, self-described “penitential pilgrimage” in Canada (July 24-29), where he has formally apologized to First Nations, Metis and Inuit peoples who have suffered oppression and had their cultures nearly eradicated by religious and government authorities.

For the church to be credible on its “new path” toward reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, it must acknowledge and atone for its past failures, the pope said. For the first time since his arrival in Canada, the pope acknowledged the sexual abuse of minors and vulnerable adults perpetrated by clergy in the country, calling for “firm action and an irreversible commitment.”

“Together with you, I would like once more to ask forgiveness of all the victims. The pain and the shame we feel must become an occasion for conversion: Never again!” he said. “Never again can the Christian community allow itself to be infected by the idea that one culture is superior to others, or that it is legitimate to employ ways of coercing others.”

Mending the relationship with the disenfranchised Indigenous community is not the only challenge facing the Catholic Church in Canada today, the pope said. “We can immediately think of secularization,” Francis said, which has relegated faith and God “to the background.”

“God seems to have disappeared from the horizon, and his word no longer seems a compass guiding our lives, our basic decisions, our human and social relationships,” he added.

Instead of trying to impose religion on the state or lamenting the bygone times when clergy swayed political power, the pope said, “secularization demands we reflect on the changes in society that have influenced the way in which people think about and organize their lives.”

It’s not the faith that is suffering a crisis, he continued, “but some of the forms and ways in which we present it.”

Pope Francis arrives for Mass at the National Shrine of Saint Anne de Beaupre, Thursday, July 28, 2022, in Saint Anne de Beaupre, Quebec. (AP Photo/John Locher)

To address this, the church must have “pastoral creativity,” the pope said. Francis offered suggestions for clergy on how to embrace this transformation. He called on the church to preach the gospel in a way that reveals “the freedom that sets others free, the compassion that asks for nothing in return, the mercy that silently speaks of Christ.”

To be credible, he continued, the church must act as a witness. “We must begin with ourselves: bishops and priests,” he said, “who should not feel themselves superior to our brothers and sisters in the people of God. Pastoral workers, who should not understand service as power.”

Fraternity is the final element needed for the church’s transformation, he said, to create “a welcoming community” that is “capable of listening, entering into dialogue and promoting quality relationships.”

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RELATED: Pope Francis condemns colonialism, old and new, in speech to Canadian authorities

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On Thursday morning, Pope Francis said Mass before 2,000 faithful at the National Shrine of St. Anne de Beaupré, where his predecessor St. John Paul II met with Indigenous peoples for the first time during his apostolic visit to Quebec City in 1984.

Francis encouraged Catholics to embark on a “a journey from failure to hope,” referring to the atrocities committed toward the Indigenous peoples of Canada. “In confronting the scandal of evil and the body of Christ wounded in the flesh of our Indigenous brothers and sisters, we too have experienced deep dismay; we too feel the burden of failure,” he said.

“Nothing could be worse than fleeing in order to avoid it,” he said, while adding that only through faith and the gospel can one experience “the operative presence of God’s love and the potential for good even in apparently hopeless situations.”

Thousands of faithful gathered outside the shrine to catch a glimpse of Pope Francis. While many cheered him on as he circled the area aboard his popemobile, others held signs calling for the pope to take actions to accompany his words of remorse, including rescind the Doctrine of Discovery, a centuries-old papal mandate that allowed Western nations to colonize and spread Christianity in the New World.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine threatens a cultural heritage the two countries share, including Saint Sophia Cathedral

Saint Sophia Cathedral was built under the reign of Grand Prince Yaroslav, whose father, Volodymyr, converted the region to Christianity.

The Saint Sophia Cathedral as seen from a surrounding wall tower in Kyiv, Ukraine, on March 26, 2022. (AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda)

July 28, 2022

By 

J. Eugene Clay

(The Conversation) — More than 160 Ukrainian cultural sites have been damaged or destroyed since Russia invaded the country in February 2022, according to UNESCO.

The Ukrainian government claims the number of damaged sites is far higher. Russia denies these charges.

Ukrainian officials accuse Russia of deliberately targeting cultural sites, half of which are churches, monasteries, prayer houses, synagogues and mosques. Such a targeting would be a violation of international law.

As a scholar who has spent over 30 years studying Russian and Ukrainian religion and culture, I’m deeply concerned about the cultural destruction of this war, which has already claimed thousands of lives and has turned over 12 million Ukrainians into refugees.

An important monument under threat is Saint Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv. Built in the 11th century, the church is one of Ukraine’s seven World Heritage sites recognized by the United Nations. It represents the common Orthodox Christian faith that many Russians and Ukrainians share.

Saint Sophia and the Byzantine model

Saint Sophia Cathedral was built under the reign of Grand Prince Yaroslav the Wise, whose father, Volodymyr – also known as Vladimir – had adopted Orthodox Christianity in 988.

According to a legend in the early 12th-century “Primary Chronicle,” Volodymyr chose Orthodoxy for the beauty of its worship services. The envoys he sent to Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, visited the famous Church of Holy Wisdom, the Hagia Sophia. Built by Emperor Justinian in the sixth century, the Hagia Sophia is devoted to the Divine Wisdom, who is personified as a woman in the biblical “Book of Proverbs.” Convinced by his envoys’ favorable report, Volodymyr decided to be baptized and to convert his subjects.

After Volodymyr’s death, Yaroslav invited Byzantine architects and artists to build an impressive cathedral for Kyiv just like the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. Yaroslav, who had fought a civil war to succeed his father, deliberately imitated the Byzantine capital to buttress his legitimacy. His new cathedral, Saint Sophia, even took its name from the imperial church in Constantinople.

Christian symbolism in the Cathedral

With 13 cupolas and a central dome that rises 29 meters (about 95 feet) into the air, Saint Sophia is an imposing structure that served as a testament to the power and piety of its ruler. Elaborate mosaics decorate the sanctuary and dome. Portraits of Yaroslav and his family are prominently displayed in the cathedral’s princely gallery, where the ruler attended services.

A view of the interior of Saint Sophia Cathedral.
AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda

A mosaic of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, stands in the apse above the altar. Raising her hands in prayer, Mary is framed by a Greek inscription from Psalm 46: “God is in the midst of Her; She shall not be moved.”

The imagery and language are borrowed from Byzantium. Just as she was seen as a powerful divine protector of Constantinople, so now Mary protects Kyiv. The tall central dome is adorned with a mosaic of an all-powerful image of Christ, known as “Christ Pantokrator,” who gazes down from his throne at his worshipers.

The art historian Elena Boeck calls Saint Sophia “the most ambitious Orthodox Church built in the 11th century.”

Decline and restoration

Saint Sophia Cathedral was consecrated in 1049 and completed around 1062. As the power and importance of Kyiv declined, the church suffered from external attacks and internal neglect.

In 1169, the northern prince Andrei Bogolubskii of Vladimir sacked Kyiv – an event that the leader of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, Metropolitan Epifaniy, has compared to the current Russian invasion. Mongol attacks in 1240, 1416 and 1482 further damaged the cathedral.

Restoration work in the 17th century in the baroque style radically changed the cathedral’s outward appearance. The outer walls were plastered and whitewashed. The church was bombed during the Russian civil war in 1918. Under Soviet rule, the Communists plundered its treasury and secularized the building, which became a museum. In the 1940s, the church again suffered under German occupation.

Saint Sophia Cathedral stands as a monument to the East Slavic cultural heritage that Russians and Ukrainians share. Its extraordinary Byzantine mosaics and frescoes have survived nearly a millennium.

Today, as during the Second World War, Ukraine has been invaded by a foreign army that threatens this heritage. Although Russia has assured the United Nations that its armed forces are taking “necessary precautions” to prevent damage to World Heritage sites, such as Saint Sophia, war is destructive and unpredictable. Whether Saint Sophia Cathedral remains undamaged during this latest invasion remains an open question.

(J. Eugene Clay, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies, Arizona State University. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)

For Biden, Palestinian struggle has an Irish Catholic cast

The comparison to the Irish reflects a new and important value to Palestinians who aspire to live in a free and independent state of their own.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and US President Joe Biden stand in front of the honor guard in the West Bank town of Bethlehem, Friday, July 15, 2022. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

July 25, 2022

By 

Daoud Kuttab

(RNS) — When President Joe Biden ended his visit to Israel on the morning of July 15, his motorcade with both the U.S. and Israeli flags was scheduled to drive to an East Jerusalem hospital before heading to the Palestinian town of Bethlehem. Eyewitnesses say Biden personally removed the Israeli flag from his limousine before he made the borderless crossing into Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem. The U.S. team previously insisted that they would not allow Israeli security to escort him as he made the visit to the Palestinian areas.

Symbols are important. But it is not clear whether symbols can be translated into reality. Biden picked up the theme when he compared Palestinians to his own ancestors, Irish Catholics.

“There’s a great poem from ‘The Cure at Troy,'” Biden told Palestinian doctors, nurses and others gathered at the Lutheran-run Augusta Victoria Hospital on top of the Mount of Olives in East Jerusalem. “It goes like this — and it’s classically Irish, but it also could fit Palestinians. It says:

‘History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave,
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme’”

Biden concluded by saying he prayed that this is a reachable goal. “It is my prayer that we’re reaching one of those moments where hope and history rhyme.”

But a little more than an hour later, after meeting Palestinian National Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, Biden called on Palestinians to wait because the time “was not ripe for negotiations” even though Palestinians have been under Israeli military occupation for more than half a century.

With the humanitarian and political mission to Palestine over, Biden was given a chance to spend some time at one of the oldest churches in the world, Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity. Before entering the historic church, a group of Palestinian children from the nearby Terra Santa Girls School gathered to sing John Lennon’s timeless “Imagine” as they waved tiny Palestinian flags.

Biden had some quiet time kneeling and praying at the adjacent Church of Saint Catherine. He also heard from church leaders about the troubles they are facing, especially in Jerusalem, where church property is being taken over by fanatic Israeli groups using uncouth legal maneuvers with the tacit support of the Israeli government that claims to support freedom of religion but in practice discriminates against non-Jews. Later Biden tweeted that the “Palestinian city of Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus Christ, is a place of enormous significance to me and Christians across the world. This holy land and the Church of the Nativity remind us that everyone must be free to practice their faith in peace, safety, and dignity.”

Church leaders said that even though this was not his first visit, they felt Biden showed genuine respect for the sanctity of the church and appeared to be moved by what he saw and heard.

It is hard to separate individual feelings and aspirations from the hard-core politics of the day. The comparison to the Irish reflects a new and important value to Palestinians who aspire to live in a free and independent state of their own. The Biden administration has insisted from its first days on the right of all Palestinians to live in “peace, safety, and dignity.” Right now, almost every aspect of Palestinian life is void of these basic values.

The decisions and policies of politicians and world leaders are often guided by interests and political considerations. But it has been seen time and time again that if there is a debate or two sides to a particular policy decision, the personal touch of a leader and his or her spiritual and personal bias can often sway an argument. Palestinians who followed the visit of Biden to Palestine and his short time with them felt he was sincere in wanting Palestinians to live in peace and with dignity. Only time will tell if the hope and history will actually rhyme or if it’s simply a line repeated by lovers of Irish poetry.