Rep. Kennedy and Bishop in Bitter Rift on Abortion - NYTimes.com

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By ABBY GOODNOUGH

Representative Patrick J. Kennedy of Rhode Island was to meet Thursday with Thomas J. Tobin, the Roman Catholic bishop of Providence, and perhaps start healing a bitter rift over whether health care legislation now before Congress should restrict abortion coverage.

Instead, they postponed the meeting, and Bishop Tobin stepped up his public rebuke of Mr. Kennedy, accusing him Wednesday of “false advertising” for describing himself as a Catholic and saying he should not receive holy communion because he supports using taxpayer money for abortions.

“If you freely choose to be a Catholic, it means you believe certain things, you do certain things,” Bishop Tobin said on WPRO, a Providence radio station. “If you cannot do all that in conscience, then you should perhaps feel free to go somewhere else.”

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has lobbied forcefully against including federal financing for abortion in the health care legislation, and Bishop Tobin, who has led the Catholic Church in Rhode Island since 2005, has been a vocal participant.

His conflict with Mr. Kennedy — an unusually personal example of the pressure Catholic bishops are bringing to bear on the health care debate — started last month, when Mr. Kennedy, a Democrat in his eighth term, questioned why the church had vowed to fight any health care bill that did not explicitly ban the use of public money for abortions.

In an interview with Cybercast News Service on Oct. 21, Mr. Kennedy said he could not understand “how the Catholic Church could be against the biggest social justice issue of our time,” adding that its stance was fanning “flames of dissent and discord.”

The next day, Bishop Tobin called the comments “irresponsible and ignorant of the facts” and Mr. Kennedy “a disappointment” to the church.

Mr. Kennedy, a son of the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy, then agreed to meet with the bishop, but said his discord with the church hierarchy “does not make me any less of a Catholic.”

When the House approved its version of the legislation last Saturday, Mr. Kennedy voted for the bill but opposed an amendment, ultimately adopted, that restricted abortion coverage.

Bishop Tobin, in a letter publicly released Monday, called Mr. Kennedy’s support of abortion rights “a deliberate and obstinate act of the will” that was “unacceptable to the Church and scandalous to many of our members.”

“It’s not too late for you to repair your relationship with the Church,” he wrote, “redeem your public image, and emerge as an authentic ‘profile in courage,’ especially by defending the sanctity of human life for all people, including unborn children.”

Mr. Kennedy declined an interview request, and on Tuesday he told reporters in Providence that he would not comment on the bishop’s letter.

“I had initially agreed to a meeting with him,” Mr. Kennedy said, “provided we would not debate this in public in terms of my personal faith. But unfortunately he hasn’t kept to that agreement, and that’s very disconcerting to me.”

The battle is being waged nearly three months after Mr. Kennedy’s father died of brain cancer and received a Catholic funeral despite his longtime conflict with the church over abortion rights and other issues. After the senator’s death, his family made public a letter he had written to Pope Benedict XVI. “I have always tried to be a faithful Catholic,” he wrote.

In Wednesday’s radio interview, Bishop Tobin said he still hoped to have a private conversation with Representative Kennedy, who, he said, has a chance to win the church’s acceptance.

“It’s not too late for the congressman to redeem his image,” the bishop said, “and to embrace the church and the teachings of the church.”

Israeli Settlements: Obama Should Know Better

Photo courtesy of Mairav Zonszein

Early in the morning on July 7, an excited crowd of more than 100 gathered in Ben-Gurion International Airport to greet 232 new Jewish immigrants to Israel who arrived from North America on an El Al charter flight organized and funded by Nefesh B'Nefesh (which means "Soul in Soul" in Hebrew). The airport's old and defunct Terminal 1 has been transformed into a celebratory arrival hall for new immigrants brought by the nonprofit organization, which was founded in 2001 with the aim of revitalizing immigration to Israel from North America and Britain.

• Mairav Zonszein: Obama says he wants a freeze on Israeli settlement expansion. If that's the case, he should turn his attention to the US-based nonprofit that encourages American immigration to the West Bank.

Recently considered by the Jewish Agency to be serious competition when it comes to immigration, NBN is now recognized as the official operator of North American immigration to Israel. After some years of animosity and tension between the two groups, the Jewish Agency, along with the Israeli government, signed a contract with NBN last September that not only grants formal recognition to NBN but also guarantees that the government and the Jewish Agency will each fund a third of NBN's $12 million annual budget. The remaining third comes from private donors. It is noteworthy, given the fact that Israeli taxpayer money goes toward this enterprise, that so few Israelis have heard of it.

NBN's declared mission is to remove any obstacles that may stand in the way of those who wish to move to Israel. As such, it offers incentives, primarily cash. In addition to the "absorption basket"--a set of social and financial benefits provided by the government--new immigrants are flown over in an El Al plane, given their immigrant certification upon arrival and receive a lump sum of money. This money is stipulated as an advance, awarded only after the olim (immigrants) have lived at least three years in Israel. Amounts vary, depending on family size and financial situation. Although all immigrants sign a contract with NBN requiring that they "agree not to disclose the amount of the advance of funds to any person," a single man who moved from the United States in 2006 was willing to divulge that he was granted $4,000 when he moved.

In the years since its first plane landed, NBN has brought 20,000 immigrants to Israel from North America and Britain. Of those 20,000, NBN PR and communications manager Renana Levine claims that fewer than 3 percent (600 people) have moved beyond the Green Line to settlements in the West Bank.

However, on this last flight alone, seven families were reportedly moving to Ma'ale Adumim, the largest settlement in the West Bank. Even if we take the modest amount of three members per family (despite the fact that it is surely more, as one family had five children), that is already twenty-one people on a plane of 232, making it nearly 10 percent of the flight. And this is only one settlement. A representative of the Efrat Council, a long and narrow settlement in Gush Etzion, said that he expected fifteen families to move there this summer. The 3 percent claim is thus highly suspect.

While some of the territories beyond the Green Line, such as Gush Etzion, are considered by most Israelis to be "consensus areas"--places they assume will remain part of Israel in any final resolution with the Palestinians--they are nonetheless settlements undergoing population growth from outside Israel, which is in blatant disregard of President Obama's call to freeze all settlement growth. Yet this does not seem to bother the new immigrants or NBN staff, who appear disturbingly oblivious to recent tensions between Israel and the United States over settlement expansion and their direct role in changing facts on the ground in the West Bank. When asked why he chose Ma'ale Adumim, one new immigrant responded that it reminded him most of his home in Montreal.

NBN clearly does not differentiate between destinations on either side of the Green Line. One need look no further than its website to see that settlements throughout the West Bank figure prominently as ideal destinations. "It is hard to imagine a more hospitable place for religious Olim than Gush Etzion," NBN proclaims. "Kedumim's residents feel very connected to the area's historical roots and are actively working to increase the community's size. They are making a special effort to reach out to North American olim."

When asked about the political implications of NBN's support for Americans moving to the West Bank--where construction is considered by both the international community and the US State Department to be a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention--Levine responded that where the immigrants move to is "up to them. We do not promote one location over the other. We are an apolitical organization." But how can a US-based nonprofit that works in conjunction with the Israeli government and the Jewish Agency, and does not differentiate between the West Bank and Israel, possibly consider itself to be "apolitical"?

At the jovial July 7 welcoming ceremony, the newly instated Jewish Agency chairman, Natan Sharansky, a Soviet refusenik turned Israeli success story, addressed the crowd, informing them that they could use the Bible as their destination guide. He enumerated several ideal locations to move to, including Efrat and Bethlehem, where the Jewish settlement of Har Homa stands, severing Palestinian-controlled Bethlehem from East Jerusalem.

When asked about whether Obama's policy has hindered NBN's operations, a staff member responded happily: "No, we are seeing a rise in numbers." Settlement growth last year, at least, was up 69 percent. Of that amount, 39 percent of the new construction was built outside "consensus areas." According to Peace Now, only 60 percent of growth in the settlements last year was "natural" (resulting from internal reproduction), while the remaining 40 percent was the result of immigration to settlements from Israel and abroad. The staff member, himself an NBN immigrant and resident of Gush Etzion, admitted that he does consider himself a settler.

In addition to Israel's foot-dragging on the evacuation of outposts, the Obama administration faces another obstacle in its effort to put a freeze on Israeli settlement growth: American citizens moving to the West Bank. If Obama aims to crack down on Israel's blatant expansion of settlements, he should start from within his own borders.

About Mairav Zonszein

Mairav Zonszein is a Jerusalem-based, American-Israeli Ta’ayush activist and former executive director of the Union of Progressive Zionists. She maintains the blog ibnEzra with Joseph Dana at: www.josephdana.com.