UNITED STATES Dolan urges action on poverty ‘scandal’


Michael Sean Winters In Washington


NEW POVERTY statistics from the Census Bureau have revealed powerful evidence of the effects of the recession on the poor. Nearly 15 per cent of the population – 46 million Americans – now live in poverty. Among children, the poverty rate is even higher with almost one in four children living in poverty. The poverty line for a family of four is currently pegged at an income of US$22,314 per annum (£14,038). “We’re risking a new underclass,” said Timothy Smeeding, director of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “Young, less-educated


■The US bishops’ conference’s Committee on Doctrine held a three-day symposium on the “new evangelisation” with more than 50 young theologians from across the country last week in Washington DC, writes Michael Sean Winters. The symposium, entitled “The


Intellectual Tasks of the New Evangelisation” was the idea of Washington’s Cardinal Donald Wuerl, who chairs the Doctrine Committee and wanted to reach


AUSTRALIA Accused priest denies allegations


MGR IAN DEMPSEY, the Adelaide priest accused in the Australian Parliament of sex- ually abusing the primate of the Traditional Anglican Communion, Archbishop John Hepworth, more than 40 years ago, has vig- orously denied the allegation, writes Mark Brolly. Mgr Dempsey, a former vicar general, appeared before the media surrounded by members of his parish council, including a former judge, the day after he was identified in Parliament as Archbishop Hepworth’s abuser. “I have made it clear in writing to the inquiry that I categorically deny the allegations, which I note are said to relate to events that occurred some 45 years ago and they have nothing at all to do with under-age people,” he said out- side his presbytery at St Joseph’s parish in the Adelaide beachside suburb of Brighton on 14 September.


According to a story in The Australian on


Tuesday Archbishop Hepworth has issued an ultimatum to Adelaide Archdiocese to deal with his complaint by the end of this week or he will go to the police. “Nobody from the Church has been in touch


with me since the story first appeared in The Australian last Saturday, not even through a third party,” the paper reported Archbishop Hepworth as saying. “I fear that we are passing each other like ships in the night.” Adelaide’s Archbishop Philip Wilson defended his archdiocese’s handling of Archbishop Hepworth’s complaints, saying that from the moment he presented his alle- gations of abuse to the Church, he had been responded to “with the utmost care and sen- sitivity”.


Archbishop Hepworth claims he was abused by three priests when he was a sem- inarian and young Catholic priest in the 1960s and early 1970s. Two of the alleged abusers are dead and Mgr Dempsey was named as the third in the Australian Parliament last week. Hepworth was awarded compensation by Melbourne Archdiocese concerning his complaint against one of the deceased priests. The Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George


Pell, urged his Adelaide counterpart to ensure Archbishop Hepworth’s complaint was han- dled “expeditiously according to the Church’s Towards Healing protocol and the demands of natural justice”.


adults, mainly men, can’t support their chil- dren and form stable families because they are jobless.” In response to the new numbers, Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York, the President of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, wrote to all US bishops. “The [bishops’] administrative committee wanted something more than a public state- ment,” Archbishop Dolan said. “Instead, they asked me to write to all the bishops and ask you to continue to do all you can to lift up the human, moral and spiritual dimensions of the ongoing economic crisis. “Widespread unemployment, underem- ployment and pervasive poverty are diminishing human lives, undermining


out to young theologians, and of Mgr Kevin Irwin, who suggested the idea of focusing on the new evangelisation. Mgr Irwin recently stepped down as dean of the School of Religious Studies at Catholic University of America, which co-sponsored the event. Invitations were sent to all Catholic universities and colleges. Both Cardinal Daniel DiNardo,


Archbishop of Galveston-Houston, who gave the keynote address, and Professor John Cavadini of


human dignity, and hurting children and fam- ilies. I hope we can use our opportunities as pastors, teachers, and leaders to focus public attention and priority on the scandal of so much poverty and so many without work.” The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities issued a report that demonstrated the impact of some of the social programmes congres- sional budget-cutters are looking to trim. According to the report, unemployment insur- ance kept 3.2 million people above the poverty line, the Earned Income Tax Credit that sub- sidises low-wage workers kept 5.4 million people above the poverty line, and the federal Food Stamps programme allowed 3.9 million Americans to stay above the official poverty line.


Notre Dame linked the new evangelisation to their studies of the early Church Fathers. Cardinal DiNardo turned to Irenaeus of Lyons, who made the Gospel known in a world that was “both new and threatening” according to the cardinal, and expressed the kernel of the Gospel message in new and inviting ways. Professor Cavadini said Origen


argued that the “mere facts of the faith” were better able to rebut anti-Christian writings than any


argument. Similarly, the new evangelisation must follow the lead of Pope Benedict XVI in his encyclical Deus Caritas Est in recognising that love is the only credible form of Christian witness, he said. Archbishop J. Augustine DiNoia OP, secretary of the Vatican’s Congregation for Divine Worship, argued that in the new evangelisation, all Christian teachings must be similarly rooted in the Church’s core dogmatic beliefs.


CANADA


Belief in God declines dramatically


A POLL for a new weekly national TV pro- gramme dealing with religion has found that Canadians are losing their belief in God at a rapid rate, writes Peter Kavanagh. Commissioned by the Contextprogramme,


the poll found that only 53 per cent of Canadians express a belief in God, compared with 90 per cent six years ago. Somewhat curiously, 33 per cent of respon- dents who identified themselves as Catholic and 28 per cent of those who said they go to church weekly said they don’t believe in God. Almost half of those surveyed – 47 per cent - told the pollster Ipsos-Reid that religion does more harm than good. Of those who attended church weekly, 90 per cent did so because “religion helps them find answers to what’s going on in the world and in their own life”. Extremism and the cler- ical-abuse scandal were identified as factors that have tarnished attitudes to religion. The poll surveyed 1,129 representative adults and claimed an accuracy of 3 percentage points.


24 September 2011 | THE TABLET | 29


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