Faith Based Groups

While Christians continue to be drawn in public and media circles as preoccupied with the politics of abortion and gay “marriage,” Christians have also proven passionate on causes that include concern for the environment, and most recently, fair trade. Many companies, recognizing the potential business in catering to faith-based, fair trade minded churches, have moved in to fill the void and meet market demand. Equal Exchange, a Massachusetts-based organic coffee company, is just one of the many companies that has capitalized on the growing concerns of Christians to support fair trade causes.

Catholics and Muslims united to help Buddhists on Wednesday, as South Florida religious leaders announced a joint collection to benefit cyclone victims in Myanmar. The collection is set to start this weekend at 18 mosques in Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade counties, plus the 120 parishes and missions in the Archdiocese of Miami. Their goal is raising funds for Myanmar, a mainly Buddhist nation hit May 3 by Cyclone Nargis. The United Nations expects the death toll to reach 100,000, and nearly 2 million people need emergency aid.

The potential repeal of a century-old Florida law barring state funding for religiously affiliated organizations is to be put before the voters there this fall, at the end of a lobbying battle that has attracted the attention of President Bush and has engaged a coalition of liberal or secular educational groups. The vote is widely considered the first of numerous state battles over the funding ban. It exists in 36 other states but has been targeted by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a Washington-based law firm, and by activists in the states.

With the economy down and needs up for the homeless, the hungry and the elderly, donations to South Florida churches and other religious institutions are straining to keep up with soaring needs, leaders say. At the Miami Archdiocese, collection-plate revenues are steady, but assessments that individual parishes pay are slow in coming or are down, and needs are up sharply, resulting in the layoff of 49 of the 182 staff members at its Pastoral Center on Biscayne Boulevard, said spokeswoman Mary Ross Agosta. In a letter to parishioners, Archbishop John C. Favalora said: "Each year, a greater number of parishes and programs are seeking our financial help, and, therefore, we must prioritize. We can only work with what we have."

This month marks the 75th anniversary of the Catholic Worker. Resolutely, it has been a lay pacifist and social justice movement, one as independent of the Catholic hierarchy as it is spiritually tied to Christ's call to serve the poor and combat Caesar with the moral force of nonviolence. Like Day, Washington's Catholic Workers are pacifists. Like her, they live in voluntary poverty and are loyal sacramental Catholics. And when the United States goes to war, they are often jailed on nonviolent protest, civil disobedience charges.

The rising prices for both fuel and food are hurting the delivery of social services both at the church level and at the diocesan level. Catholic Charities in Jacksonville, Fla., runs a food bank and sometimes gets food supplies delivered from Miami. But trucking companies have been turning down Catholic Charities requests to bring food north unless Catholic Charities can assure them of a return payload to Miami.

This Easter Sunday, the holiest day of the Christian calendar, many pastors will start their sermons about the Resurrection of Jesus and weave in a pointed message about racism and bigotry, and the need to rise above them. Some pastors began to rethink their sermons on Tuesday, when Senator Barack Obama gave a speech about race, seeking to calm a furor that had erupted over explosive excerpts of sermons by his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. The controversy drove the nation to the unpatrolled intersection of race and religion, and as many pastors prepared for their Easter message they said they felt compelled to talk about it.

America has always been a competitive religious marketplace, but a major survey released yesterday shows a country increasingly exploring different faith identities and ways of worship. The survey also lays out, just weeks before Pope Benedict XVI's first papal visit to the United States, the Catholic Church's challenge here: no American faith group has lost more adherents. Among U.S. adults, about the same percentage, 24%, call themselves Catholic as in the past, but that statistic masks significant turnover. The percentage has held up primarily because of the huge number of recent Latino immigrants, who are largely Catholic, the survey found. Sixty-eight percent of people raised Catholic still identify with their childhood denomination

Just hours after police on horseback rode down Bourbon Street to clear the street of revelers and mark the official end of the Carnival season, thousands prepared to repent on Ash Wednesday. Ash Wednesday is the start of the 40-day period of Lent that includes Good Friday — when Christians recall Christ's crucifixion — and ends with the celebration of Easter. The faithful readied themselves to file into churches across the city for services where many will have their foreheads marked by clergy with ashes to symbolize penance after the raucous Carnival season that culminated on Mardi Gras.

In his State of the Union address Monday evening, President Bush asked Congress to permanently extend the federal laws permitting religious nonprofit organizations to compete for federal grants. Seven years ago this week, Mr. Bush started his faith-based initiative. He promised to build on these “charitable choice” laws, which were begot by bipartisan compromises between President Bill Clinton and Senator John Ashcroft. “Government cannot be replaced by charities,” Mr. Bush declared, “but it should welcome them as partners, instead of resenting them as rivals.”