Religion: Year In Review 2009

Interfaith controversies over statements denying that the Nazis killed six million Jews in the 1940s, disputes in Anglican and Lutheran denominations over the ordination of noncelibate gay men and lesbians to the ministry, and relations between Islamic movements and the governments of several countries occupied the world of religion in 2009. For figures on Adherents of All Religions by Continent and on Adherents in the U.S., see below.

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Holocaust Denial

In an attempt to heal a 20-year-old schism in Roman Catholicism, Pope Benedict XVI rescinded in January the excommunications of four members of the traditionalist Society of St. Pius X who had been ordained in 1988 without Vatican permission. One of the four, Richard Williamson, had made statements denying the Nazis’ use of gas chambers to exterminate Jews and asserting that only up to 300,000 Jews had died in Nazi concentration camps instead of the generally accepted figure of six million. The pope’s rehabilitation of the bishop was denounced by Jewish leaders around the world and led Israel’s chief rabbinate to sever ties with the Vatican. Benedict subsequently reiterated his condemnation of anti-Semitism, saying that he had not known about the bishop’s views when he lifted the excommunication and that the Vatican needed to make greater use of the Internet to prevent such controversies. In late March a new outcry arose when Brazilian Archbishop Dadeus Grings was quoted in his country’s Press & Advertising magazine as saying, “More Catholics than Jews died in the Holocaust, but this isn’t known because the Jews control the world’s media.”

In August, Younis al-Astal, a spiritual leader of Hamas, denounced the UN Relief and Works Agency’s reported plans to introduce lessons about the Holocaust in its schools for Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip. He declared that adding the subject to the curriculum would amount to “marketing a lie and spreading it.” Dutch prosecutors announced in September that they planned to charge the Dutch arm of the Arab European League with having violated hate-speech laws; the group had published a cartoon on its Web site that suggested that the Holocaust was a fabrication or an exaggeration.

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Homosexuality

Delegates representing an estimated 69,000 Anglicans from about 650 parishes adopted a constitution and canons for the new Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) at a meeting in Bedford, Texas, in June. The church was organized as an alternative for Anglicans who disagreed with the theology of the U.S. Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada on several issues, including the sanctioning of same-sex unions. Former Pittsburgh Episcopal bishop Robert Duncan was installed for a five-year term as the ACNA’s first archbishop. A month later the triennial Episcopal General Convention met in Anaheim, Calif., and adopted a resolution affirming that gay men and lesbians were eligible for “any ordained ministry” in the 2.1-million-member church. Traditionalists who opposed such liberal trends in the Anglican Communion were given a new option in October when the Vatican announced the pope’s approval for the establishment of structures known as personal ordinariates, which would enable Anglicans to form their own communities within the Roman Catholic Church. William Cardinal Levada, the Vatican’s chief doctrinal official, said that Anglicans would be able to maintain their liturgical traditions and be allowed to have married clergy, although unmarried priests in the new structure would need to remain celibate. In December the Episcopal diocese of Los Angeles elected an openly gay woman, the Rev. Mary D. Glasspool of Maryland, as an assistant bishop. Archbishop Rowan Williams of Canterbury, spiritual leader of the 77-million-member Anglican Communion, said that the election raised “very serious questions” for the Anglican family.

A division similar to the one in the Anglican Communion appeared to have begun in the 4.6-million-member Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). Delegates to its biennial Churchwide Assembly, which met in August in Minneapolis, Minn., adopted a resolution that opened the ministry to gay men and lesbians living in “committed relationships.” The move was criticized by leaders of the 2.4-million-member Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod and the 390,000-member Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod. In September about 1,200 members of a conservative group called the Lutheran Coalition for Reform (CORE) met in suburban Indianapolis and directed the group’s steering committee to report back in a year with a recommendation on whether to stay in the ELCA, form a new denomination, or join another. The group’s chairman, the Rev. Paull Spring of State College, Pa., said that the ELCA had “fallen into heresy.” At the meeting the group also changed its name to the Lutheran Coalition for Renewal. In November the Lutheran CORE announced that it was making plans for a new Lutheran synod for congregations that opposed the Churchwide Assembly’s action regarding the ordination of homosexuals.

A majority of regional bodies of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)—88 of the 173 presbyteries—voted against changing the church’s rule barring noncelibate gays and lesbians from the ordained ministry. In May the General Assembly of the (Presbyterian) Church of Scotland voted in Edinburgh to defer action on this issue for two years and to bar church courts, committees, and ministers from commenting about it publicly. The assembly took these positions two days after it had voted to uphold the appointment of Scott Rennie, an openly gay man, as minister of a church in Aberdeen, despite an online petition against this action that was said to have been signed by more than 400 ministers and almost 5,000 laypeople. In July more than 1,600 members of the Religious Society of Friends in Britain, popularly known as the Quakers, voted at their annual gathering in York, Eng., to approve marriages for same-sex couples and to ask the government to change the law to recognize such marriages.