Month: August 2018

Pope Francis said Monday every effort must be made to ensure that the culture of the Catholic Church prevents future clerical sexual abuse of children, and to make sure that if such abuses do take place, they cannot be covered up.

The pope’s comments came in a letter to the world’s billion-plus Catholics, in response to the latest revelations of abuses by clergy members.

Last week, a U.S. grand jury report said more than 300 predator priests had abused more than 1,000 children in six Pennsylvania dioceses over the span of 70 years.

Never before has Pope Francis written to all Catholics, whom he called “the people of God,” on the “crime” of clerical sexual abuse. His letter was issued in seven languages.

“Even though it can be said that most of these cases belong to the past, nonetheless, as time goes on, we have come to know the pain of many of the victims,” Francis said in his letter.

He said with “shame and repentance” the Catholic Church acknowledges it did not act in a timely manner and realize the amount of damage the abusers have done to so many people.

Francis said “no effort to beg pardon and to seek to repair the harm done will ever be sufficient.”

The letter did not mention any new measures that would be adopted by the church.

Papal spokesman Greg Burke praised the letter. “It is significant that the pope calls abuse a ‘crime,’ not only a sin, and that he asks for forgiveness; but acknowledges that no effort to repair the damage done will ever be sufficient for victims and survivors,” he said.

Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro also praised the pope’s letter, but urged local church officials to “cease their denials and deflections.”

Shapiro called on the Catholic Church to accept all the Pennsylvania grand jury recommendations, which include allowing victims to sue the church for abuse that occurred outside the statute of limitations. The church has long resisted such a measure.

The Catholic Church has long faced cases of sexual abuse by the clergy in many countries. In the past month alone, the pope accepted the resignation of an Australian archbishop convicted in May for covering up child abuse, as well as the resignation of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who has also been accused of sexual abuse.

On Monday, the International research group bishopaccountability.org launched a database containing the names of more than 70 Irish clergy convicted or credibly accused of sexually abusing children. Several other countries are facing similar scandals, including Argentina, Australia and Chile.

The pontiff acknowledged in his letter that as a church community, “We did not act in a timely manner, realizing the magnitude and the gravity of the damage done to so many lives. We showed no care for the little ones; we abandoned them.”

He said without the participation of all Catholics, the efforts to “uproot the culture of abuse” will fail.

“It is essential that we, as a Church, be able to acknowledge and condemn, with sorrow and shame, the atrocities perpetuated by consecrated persons, clerics, and all those entrusted with the mission of watching over and caring for the most vulnerable,” Pope Francis said.
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Fans and worshippers celebrated the life of Aretha Franklin at her father’s Baptist church in Detroit on Sunday, with her powerful voice again ringing out within its walls in tribute to her spectacular career.

Civil rights activist Jesse Jackson, greeted by a standing ovation, sent the several hundred parishioners into raptures with his eulogy and rousing prayers for his old friend, the “Queen of Soul.”

The New Bethel Baptist Church — located in a down-at-heel, quiet neighborhood of Detroit — has been the focus of tributes to Franklin, who passed away from advanced pancreatic cancer on Thursday at age 76.

“On Thursday morning, Earth lost her music. Heaven gained her music,” Jackson told the congregation.

“Right now, the gospel choir in heaven has a lead singer. Detroit lost something, but heaven gained something.”

Franklin’s recording of “Precious Lord (Take My Hand)” — one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s favorite gospel tracks which she sang at his funeral in 1968 — filled the church as a woman dressed in black and red danced.

The high-energy service was packed with music belted out by chief Pastor Robert Smith Jr.

“We are sad that Aretha has gone,” Smith said. “We’re happy that she’s free from the shackles of time.”

In his lengthy address, the now frail Jackson recounted Franklin’s life in the context of the civil rights movement, from her birth into the segregation of the American south to singing at Barack Obama’s inauguration.

Jackson, a Baptist minister and former Democratic presidential candidate, told the church that during the year of Franklin’s birth “in a shack on the Mississippi River” in Tennessee, “225 blacks were lynched.”

Her father, C.L. Franklin, was a prominent Baptist preacher and civil rights activist, who in June 1963 helped King organize the Walk to Freedom through downtown Detroit, only two months before King’s historic March on Washington and “I Have a Dream” speech.

“I remember one time Dr King was facing bankruptcy… and Aretha did an 11-city tour and gave all the money to Dr King,” said Jackson, who was a close aide to the slain activist.

“She was a rose that grew tall in a garden of weeds,” he said.

‘A mighty tribute to the Queen’

Franklin recorded the album “One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism” at the church, where she performed over the years, and also served dinners to worshippers and the homeless at Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Talking about his final visit with Franklin last Wednesday, Jackson told the church that he walked into the room calling out “Re, Re, Re.”

“She opened her eyes and pressed my arms, and we began to pray,” he said.

His eulogy had worshippers on their feet. Smartly dressed women raised their arms into the air and swayed to the music, as a few wiped away tears, with Jackson leading them in prayers and song.

Worshippers spilled out of the service, invigorated by what they called a celebration of the music icon’s life and legacy.

“It was beautiful and it spoke to all of us,” said Denise Redmon, a 57-year-old Indiana bus driver on a weekend coach trip to Detroit.

“I thought it was excellent. A mighty tribute to the Queen,” agreed Esther Birden, 60, on the same two-day “Aretha Franklin soul weekend, joining in all the festivities and being a part of history.”

“I remember listening to Aretha when I was eight years old and dancing to her music,” she said.

“We have nothing to be sad about because she gave us so much. She gave us secular, she gave us gospel, she gave us opera… and you don’t find too many that can fit in every arena like that.”

‘Freedom fighter’

Ralph Godbee, a former Detroit police chief turned pastor, led the congregation in a rousing hand clap for Franklin.

He recalled how she had once called to complain about a relative who had been mistreated by the police department, telling him that no one — regardless of their family — should be treated in such a way.

“There’s something about when the queen calls,” he said, hailing her as a “freedom fighter” and “demanding justice for everybody from the back row to the front pew.”

He said the revival of the Motor City — the home of the US auto industry that has turned a corner after years of economic depression and high crime — was “on the back of the spirit of the Queen of Soul.”

Outside the pale brick church, mourners have left helium balloons, bouquets of flowers, teddy bears and hand-written tributes.

“Aretha Will Always be My Queen. Nothing But Respect!!” read one home-made poster adored with cut-out, black-and-white newspaper pictures of the musical icon in her prime.

“You will always be in my heart,” said another. “Your voice will always ring in my heart and soul. I hear it all of the time, soothing me.”
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Women still lag far behind men when it comes to careers in the fastest growing technology fields. Recent studies show fewer than 20 percent of women will pursue careers in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics or STEM for short. Two sisters in Maryland have started their own summer camp to get more women interested in STEM careers. Cristina Caicedo Smit reports.
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Tucked away in an industrial block in the New York City borough of Queens is an ordinary-looking warehouse containing an extraordinary treasure: a quarter-million sheets, shards and pieces of multicolored and iridescent glass that together make up the largest collection of Tiffany glass, The Neustadt Tiffany Glass Archive.

​Magnificent windows

While stained glass has been produced since ancient times, the colorful cathedral windows created during the 15th century of the Renaissance period are perhaps the best known. But the art was transformed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Louis Comfort Tiffany, an American artist and designer who used his unique talent to essentially create paintings out of glass.

Lindsy Parrott, executive director and curator of the collection, holds up a medium-sized piece of glass as she explains its uniqueness. 

“This is called dichroic, rippled glass and so it’s one color — this greenish color — in reflected light. But then look at this,” she says, as she holds it up to the window. “When you illuminate it, it becomes a wonderful reddish-yellow glass.”

And that’s what is significant bout The Neustadt Tiffany Glass Archive, she says. “It documents this unbelievable chapter in the history of stained glass, by introducing all of these incredible colors and textures, various patterns, different opacities of glass.”

​Distinctive style of glass

Tiffany glass derives its name from the distinctive style of glass produced by Tiffany and his team of designers from 1878 to 1933. Working out of the Tiffany Studios in New York, Tiffany became famous for the color-infused, leaded glass lampshades and stained glass windows that have come to define his name.

The Neustadt Collection was founded in 1969 by collector Egon Neustadt and his wife, Hildegard, who discovered their first Tiffany lamp in 1935. That $12.50 purchase inspired a lifelong passion.

“This one wonderful daffodil lamp kicked off an entire collection,” Parrott says. The Neustadts became deeply passionate about Tiffany lamps after that initial purchase, transfixed by their beauty, and spent the rest of their life building a massive collection.

A passion for Tiffany glass

The couple would eventually amass more than 200 Tiffany lamps, each one unique, including the purchase in 1967 of a huge cache of Tiffany glass left when the company’s furnaces finally closed in 1937.

“Tiffany’s furnaces were originally located in Corona, Queens, and so much of the glass that you see here was made here in New York City,” Parrott says.

The collection represents a variety of forms of glass, from drapery glass meant to mimic a flowing robe, rippled glass meant to represent water, and pressed glass jewels and 3D glass jewels to adorn lamps, mosaics and windows, all carefully sorted and ordered by color, size, texture and type.

The warehouse containing the Tiffany Glass Archive will open to the public for exclusive monthly tours later this year. And The Neustadt will provide a sneak preview of some of these glass treasures in a new exhibition in their dedicated gallery at the Queens Museum, opening October 7.
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About 250,000 pieces of multicolored and iridescent glass sit in a warehouse on an industrial block in Long Island City, Queens, which houses the largest collection of Tiffany glass. It’s a welcome tribute to Louis Tiffany, an American artist who many believe transformed the history of stained glass with his unique artistry — essentially creating paintings out of glass. VOA’s Julie Taboh has more.
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Relatives of the late singer Aretha Franklin say her funeral will be August 31 in her hometown of Detroit.

There will be a two-day public viewing before the funeral at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit, a publicist for the family, Gwendolyn Quinn, said, to allow fans to mourn.

The funeral will take place at Greater Grace Temple, which seats about 4,000 people and will be limited to family, friends and invited guests, which are expected to include dignitaries and music royalty from around the world.

Following the funeral, Franklin is to be buried with other members of her family at Woodlawn Cemetery.

Franklin died Thursday at her home in Detroit at the age of 76 from pancreatic cancer.

The Grammy-winning vocalist was born in Memphis, Tennessee, but grew up in Detroit after moving there as a youngster with her family.

Her talent was recognized at a young age as she played piano and sang hymns at the church where her father, C.L. Franklin, was a popular preacher.

Franklin moved into pop and jazz music at age 18 on the Columbia Records label. But her real breakthrough came in 1967 on Atlantic Records, which allowed her to sing with her natural gospel intensity for the first time.

She rocketed to national fame that year with a series of hit singles, including “Chain of Fools,” “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman,” and her most famous song, “R-E-S-P-E-C-T,” her first No. 1 hit on the Billboard Hot 100.

Franklin eventually racked up more than 110 entries on Billboard magazine’s charts, the most by any woman in the magazine’s history. In 1987, she became the first woman to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
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The reigning Miss America says she has been bullied, manipulated and silenced by the pageant’s current leadership, including Gretchen Carlson.

In a letter sent Friday to former Miss Americas, Cara Mund says she decided to speak out despite the risk of punishment.

Her letter is reminiscent of the movie Mean Girls, in which characters Gretchen and Regina bully the heroine and make her life miserable. That’s what happened to her in real life, Mund wrote. Carlson is chairwoman of the Miss America Organization; Regina Hopper is its CEO.

Her letter exponentially increased the turmoil surrounding the pageant three weeks before the next Miss America is to be crowned in Atlantic City.

“Let me be blunt: I strongly believe that my voice is not heard nor wanted by our current leadership; nor do they have any interest in knowing who I am and how my experiences relate to positioning the organization for the future,” Mund wrote. “Our chair and CEO have systematically silenced me, reduced me, marginalized me, and essentially erased me in my role as Miss America in subtle and not-so-subtle ways on a daily basis. After a while, the patterns have clearly emerged, and the sheer accumulation of the disrespect, passive-aggressive behavior, belittlement, and outright exclusion has taken a serious toll.”

Mund said she’s been left out of interviews, not invited to meetings and called the wrong name. When she obliquely hinted at trouble with pageant leadership in an interview earlier this month with The Press of Atlantic City, Mund said she was swiftly punished by having her televised farewell speech cut to 30 seconds, and was told a dress she had been approved to wear in the traditional “show us your shoes” parade cannot be worn.

This year’s competition will not include swimsuits, and pageant officials from at least 19 states have called for the current leadership to resign.

There was no immediate response from The Miss America Organization or from Carlson and Hopper, who were singled out in Mund’s letter.

Mund said she was given three talking points to be made in every appearance: “Miss America is relevant. The #MeToo movement started with a Miss America, Gretchen Carlson. Gretchen Carlson went to Stanford.” (Mund said she was allowed to mention that she went to Brown to show that both women were highly educated.)

“Right away, the new leadership delivered an important message: There will be only one Miss America at a time, and she isn’t me,” Mund wrote.

Mund, who was Miss North Dakota and won the crown on a platform of increasing the number of women elected to political office, said she was treated better by the previous Miss America leadership that was forced from power after sending emails ridiculing the appearance, intellect and sex lives of former Miss Americas.

She cites examples of mistreatment including being excluded from the nationally televised announcement that swimsuits were being eliminated — even though she was with Carlson at the TV studio where it was made. She says pageant handlers ridiculed her clothing choices and chided her for wearing the same outfits too often. When she reached out to former Miss Americas to see if they had been treated similarly, “I was reprimanded by Regina who told me that problems and concerns had to be kept ‘in the family.'”
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