November 16, 2000|By John Rivera | John Rivera,SUN STAFF
WASHINGTON - The U.S. Roman Catholic bishops called yesterday for sweeping reforms in the nation's criminal justice system, rejecting the increasing use of mandatory sentences and the death penalty and advocating an approach that includes compassion for crime victims and rehabilitation for criminals.
The bishops also approved statements during their annual fall meeting denouncing mistreatment and rejection of immigrants and encouraging Catholics to welcome them into their parishes, and a sharply worded critique of the Supreme Court's ruling earlier this year overturning a Nebraska law prohibiting a controversial abortion procedure.
In a statement lamenting the unrest in the Middle East, the bishops called for the establishment of a Palestinian state. Although they had previously echoed Pope John Paul II's call for a Palestinian homeland, yesterday's statement marked the bishops' explicit call for a state.
The Catholic bishops of the South issued their own pastoral statement on the abuses of workers rights in the poultry industry, including workers on Maryland's Eastern Shore.
It questions the fairness of contracts poultry growers must sign with corporations, which unfairly leaves major decisions in the hands of the corporations and economic liabilities with the growers, citing in its documentation an investigation on poultry farming last year by The Sun.
"These brothers and sisters face many challenges in common, including questions of a living wage and other workers rights, human dignity and immigration issues," the pastoral says.
The statement on criminal justice, which states the system is ignoring victims and failing to rehabilitate criminals, clearly rejects an approach solely focused on vengeance.
"A Catholic approach begins with the recognition that the dignity of the human person applies to both victim and offender," it says. "As bishops, we believe that the current trend of more prisons and more executions, with too little education and drug treatment, does not truly reflect Christian values and will not really leave our communities safer."
The document rejects rigid mandatory sentencing and "three strikes and you're out" approaches, calling them "simplistic" and "one-size-fits-all" solutions to complex problems.
The bishops deplored the increasing trend toward building prisons in remote areas, which creates hardship for the families of inmates. And, in a theme echoed throughout the document, it emphasized that prisons must be about more than punishment.
"We call upon government to redirect the vast amount of public resources away from building more and more prisons and toward better and more effective programs aimed at crime prevention, rehabilitation, education efforts, substance abuse programs and programs of probation, parole and reintegration," it says.
To help implement these recommendations, the Catholic Campaign for Human Development approved $1 million in grant money to fund educational and community-based efforts to address crime and the criminal justice system.
Bishop Edward K. Braxton of St. Louis praised the statement while warning that it may not be welcomed by Catholics in the pews, a majority of whom surveys have shown support the death penalty.
"Our Catholic people, like society as a whole, has a very strong feeling of vengeance," Braxton said. ""I suggest we may not find as receptive an audience in the church as we might hope for."
In other action, the bishops discussed a draft of the mandatum, a Vatican-mandated license that Catholic theologians will be required to receive by June 2002 to teach at Catholic colleges and universities.
The decision to require the mandatum has been vigorously opposed by many theologians and presidents of Catholic universities, who say it violates principles of academic freedom.
