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TRANSCRIPT:
Episode no. 311
November 12, 1999
MARY ALICE WILLIAMS, anchor: Coming up, thousands of Americans are in desperate need of organ transplants.
Should money be offered as an inducement for potential organ donors?
Professor LINDA FENTIMAN (Pace University School of Law): The risk of doing nothing or the risk of not experimenting with an incentive is that more and more people will die every day.
WILLIAMS: Plus, the labyrinth, an ancient and increasingly popular path to spirituality.
(Excerpt from "Mary, Mother of Jesus")
WILLIAMS: And a television film takes a new look at the mother of Jesus Christ.
(Announcements)
WILLIAMS: Hello, and welcome to RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY. Bob Abernethy is off. I'm Mary Alice Williams.
MARY ALICE WILLIAMS: In the news this week, it would have been unthinkable 50 years ago, but it is testament to the success of the National Council of Churches' drive toward ecumenism that former Ambassador Andrew Young has been installed as the new president of the Protestant-based organization in a Catholic cathedral. His installation was among the highlights of the NCC's 50th anniversary celebration.
But beneath the euphoria is consternation over the very future of the NCC, bedeviled by financial problems and lack of a clear mission. The newly nominated general secretary of the NCC, a Methodist minister and former Pennsylvania congressman, Bob Edgar, said the organization is like a 35-humped camel; it doesn't work.
Reverend BOB EDGAR: I think the me -- the immediate challenge is to just give hope that the National Council, made up of 35 different member communions, is relevant for the new millennium. And I've spent my life trying to bring hope in situations that seemed hopeless.
WILLIAMS: David Anderson of Religion News Service, who's been covering the NCC for fully half of its history, has been monitoring the convention's lead story and back stories.
David, Bob Edgar referred to a seemingly hopeless situation. What is the situation?
Mr. DAVID ANDERSON (Editor, Religion News Service): The situation is that the council finds itself in the worst and most severe fiscal crisis in its 50-year history, with a $4 million debt. It has a deficit that has undermined the confidence of the member denominations in the council's ability to manage itself. And as well, it has created a crisis of confidence in what the real role of the council should be in the coming years, particularly does it still have a role to play in the church unity movement, and what kind of role it might play in the interfaith or interreligious relations movement.
WILLIAMS: David, the United Methodist Church withheld a substantial payment, and there was speculation at the time that it was in return for being able to exert more influence over the NCC. Now the United Methodist Church has a leader in Bob Edgar. Is that going to solve their financial woes?
Mr. ANDERSON: Well, I think for -- I think the new leadership team of Ambassador Young and Bob Edgar will certainly do a lot to restore confidence, particularly among those seven denominations of the 35 that are the NCC's biggest contributors, that -- you know, the main -- the major, mainline Protestant denominations. I think that by the end of the week, we saw some restored cautious hope that the council, indeed, can be renewed.
WILLIAMS: Thank you, David. David Anderson, Religion News Service.
MARY ALICE WILLIAMS: Amidst the grumbling over budget and staff cuts, the NCC did adopt a policy in defense of religious liberty for all people to guide member churches in their relationships with non-Christians. The policy comes at a time when interreligious relations have reached a low point. The nation's largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, is under fire from Jewish leaders for using what they call deceptive tactics to convert Jews to Christianity. Jewish leaders aren't quarreling with Baptists' right to proselytize, but they're outraged that Baptists are appropriating Jewish symbols in services that worship Jesus, and telling Jews they don't have to give up their faith by accepting Jesus Christ as the Messiah.
MARY ALICE WILLIAMS: On our Persecution Watch, concern over Sudan. Hundreds of religious and human rights activists met in Washington this week to protest ongoing human rights abuses in Sudan. They urged the U.S. government and investors worldwide to punish foreign companies funding a new oil pipeline in the region. They fear oil revenue will fund the Sudanese government's violent campaign against the Christian and animist minorities who face bombings, starvation and slavery.
Bishop MAX GASSIS: Evil is evil. We cannot compromise with evil. And what we are facing today in Sudan is evil because the very fact that these people have robbed the people of Sudan of their dignity and of their human rights, this is evil.
WILLIAMS: This weekend, hundreds of thousands of Christians around the world will offer special prayers for all persecuted believers.
MARY ALICE WILLIAMS: In India, Hindu fundamentalists demanded an end to what they call forced conversions to Christianity, this as Pope John Paul II arrived to exhort his bishops to spread the new evangelism throughout Asia. Less than 3 percent of all Indians are Christian, but fundamentalist groups say they fear a Christian conspiracy to destroy Hinduism. In recent months, several missionaries have been attacked; two have been killed. The pontiff warned that religion must not become a pretext for conflicts.
Symptoms of the pope's advancing Parkinson's disease were apparent in India and upon his arrival in the republic of Georgia, where John Paul hoped to heal the nearly 1,000-year-old schism between Catholics and the Orthodox Church. But Georgian Orthodox patriarch Ilya II ignored the pope's invitation to ecumenical dialogue, and the Georgian Holy Synod told followers to ignore the pope's Mass.
MARY ALICE WILLIAMS: About a million pilgrims will be descending on Rome, the millennium's ground zero, to see the pontiff open the holy door of St. Peter's Basilica to usher in the jubilee, if all hell doesn't break loose. Italy, according to all the experts, is among the worst-prepared in the West for Y2K. Rome launched its Y2K task force a year late and took two months to get the phones hooked up. Officials conceded there will be problems, but they should be little and brief. Their contingency plan? They're hoping for a miracle.
MARY ALICE WILLIAMS: The Vatican's techno geeks are telecom-savvy. They're issuing never-before-seen images of the Holy Father, his signature, his seal and a blessing on a prepaid phone card. For every one you buy, the manufacturer is donating a dollar to the pope's family programs. Ecclesiastical fund raising has seldom been so creative.
MARY ALICE WILLIAMS: This weekend is National Donor Sabbath, when religious congregations across the theological spectrum encourage members to become organ donors. All major faiths in the U.S. allow organ donation, but in many communities, cultural prejudice against the practice still lingers. As the federal government considers a more equitable distribution, there is a critical shortage of organs available for life-saving transplants. The state of Pennsylvania believes adding some financial inducements may help solve the problem. Kim Lawton has our cover story on the ethical debate surrounding that plan.
KIM LAWTON: At Temple University's Cardiac Transplant Unit, Richard Marriott is affectionately known as the mayor of 'heart failure hotel.' Richard, who's 58, needs a heart transplant, but because of his rare blood type, it's been tough to find a match, and so he's been at this Philadelphia hospital for more than a year, longer than any other patient, waiting for a new heart.
Mr. RICHARD MARRIOTT (Heart Patient): I pray for it, but you don't want to be selfish and ask -- you know, keep asking the Lord for the same thing over and over.
You belong to Jesus Christ.
LAWTON: Richard is a devout Christian. Every Thursday night, he gathers other heart patients from the unit for Bible study and spiritual encouragement.
Mr. MARRIOTT: My faith helps me with the fact that you have to be a believer, especially when you're waiting for somebody to die so you can live.
LAWTON: Richard isn't alone in his wait. The huge improvements in organ transplant technology have made transplants a viable, life-saving option for tens of thousands of critically ill patients. But the supply of available organs has not kept up with the skyrocketing demand.
Nationally, more than 65,000 people are waiting for organ transplants. That's nearly twice as many as just five years ago. Last year, 4,800 people died waiting for those organs.
The state of Pennsylvania has long been a leader in organ donation and transplant technologies. Now state officials are moving forward with an innovative and controversial experiment they hope will encourage more people to donate organs. Under the plan, the state would contribute $300 toward the funeral expenses of organ donors.
Dr. PETER UBEL (University of Pennsylvania Center for Bioethics): This funeral benefits program is not meant to offer the organ to the highest bidder. The organs will still go to whoever needs them the most. Instead, it's trying to encourage families to donate their organs and to give them something back as a token of appreciation.
LAWTON: The funeral benefit provision is still being studied by the state's secretary of Health before it's implemented. But it has already raised several ethical concerns about what could happen once money is attached to something that's always been an altruistic act.
Professor JAMES CHILDRESS (National Institutes of Health): Some worry about the coercion that may be involved. Others worry about the exploitation of the poor. And many worry about becoming accustomed as a society to thinking about bodies and their parts as commodities that can be bought and sold.
LAWTON: Well-aware of the potential ethical pitfalls, Pennsylvania has appointed a committee of ethicists to monitor the law once it's implemented. Dr. Peter Ubel is one of those ethicists.
Dr. UBEL: I can't read a passage in the Bible, I can't read a moral code and know what is right or wrong here. The is new terrain. And that's -- of course I'm nervous.
LAWTON: Since 1984, federal law has banned the buying and selling of organs for transplants because of the potential for abuse and exploitation. Ubel says the Pennsylvania plan does not amount to the selling of organs.
Dr. UBEL: The state of Pennsylvania decided that funeral expenses is very different from money right in someone's pocket. In my view, $10 to the next of kin, right to their pocket, would be wrong; $300 for funeral expenses doesn't feel wrong to me.
LAWTON: But a growing community of legal and medical experts says it's not wrong for organ donors to get direct financial benefits.
Professor LINDA FENTIMAN (Pace University School of Law): To single out organ donors as the one person in the whole health-care system who cannot receive any kind of financial incentive seems unfair to me. It just doesn't make sense, given our market economy and the fact that there are hundreds and thousands of dollars flowing every day through the health-care system specifically for transplant activities.
LAWTON: Other states will be watching to see what happens with Pennsylvania's law. Many are considering crafting their own legislation to promote more organ donations. Some observers believe it could indeed pave the way to an open market for organs.
Dr. UBEL: I think the Pennsylvania law brings us down a slope. The question is how slippery it is. I think it's a sticky slope.
LAWTON: The potential questions are staggering. Will the financial incentives go higher and higher? Would only the rich be able to get organ transplants? Could poor patients be denied life-saving treatments, including by their own families, so their organs could be sold for profit? And what are the potential theological implications?
Prof. CHILDRESS: The theological traditions and the secular ones hold that, in some sense, we do own our bodies and their parts. Otherwise, we wouldn't be able to give those parts away. However, they don't align at full property rights, saying that we should not be permitted to sell them, in part because of the sacredness that they view attached to the human body, whether living or dead.
(Excerpt from "Coma" courtesy MGM)
LAWTON: The idea of exploitation and marketing of body parts has long been the stuff of science fiction and horror movies.
(Excerpt from "Coma" courtesy MGM)
LAWTON: Critics say the possibilities are becoming increasingly real. In early November, a new group, OrgansWatch, was founded at Berkeley to monitor international trafficking in human organs. The group says more and more poor people in places like India and the Philippines bear the scars of selling their kidneys and other organs to make money. The potential market for organs appears to be huge. Earlier this year, a fully functioning kidney came up for sale on the Internet auction site eBay.com. Bids topped $5 million before the company pulled the auction item and claimed it had been a hoax. Law Professor Fentiman believes enough safeguards could be put into place to protect against exploitation and abuse. She says there's a moral imperative to give it a try.
Prof. FENTIMAN: The risk of doing nothing or the risk of not experimenting with an incentive is that more and more people will die every day.
LAWTON: For Richard Marriott and the tens of thousands of patients waiting along with him, the debate is far from theoretical. Richard supports the Pennsylvania law, but says it wouldn't be necessary if community leaders and particularly religious leaders would do more to encourage organ donations.
Mr. MARRIOTT: And I just want to thank that -- whoever my donor would be. That I know that their family is in grief, but you have helped me to live, and I just pray to God that I will use the second chance to just do God's will.
LAWTON: I'm Kim Lawton in Philadelphia.
WILLIAMS: Just this week, Richard Marriott finally got his new heart, after more than a year of waiting. A spokesman for Temple University Hospital says the surgery went well, and Richard is on the road to recovery.
More than 4,200 patients are still on the national list awaiting heart transplants. It's expected that only half of these patients will receive heart transplants this year. For more information on organ donations, please check our Web site at pbs.org.
MARY ALICE WILLIAMS: Both were forms of medieval meditation, but with opposite intents. A maze, with its blind alleys and dead ends, is meant to confound. A labyrinth offers one direction, one path that leads you to the center. That ancient construct has some very modern advocates, and they're not just religious. Ruben Martinez reports from San Francisco.
RUBEN MARTINEZ: Walking a series of concentric circles may seem like a curious ritual, but for some, it can be a profound spiritual experience.
Reverend LAUREN ARTRESS (Grace Cathedral): It becomes a matter of trusting the path and surrendering to it, walking the pattern that symbolically takes you to center also experientially takes you to your center.
MARTINEZ: It was 10 years ago that the Reverend Lauren Artress discovered the labyrinth as a form of walking meditation, a spiritual practice that quiets the mind and awakens the imagination. As canon pastor at San Francisco's Grace Cathedral and also a practicing psychotherapist, Artress had been searching for tools that would satisfy what she sees as the great spiritual quest of millennial America.
Rev. ARTRESS: We think our way of -- to the mystery or to God or the divine one is through thinking, and that's not true. It's through experiencing. And the labyrinth is a perfect container for ourselves. When you walk into the labyrinth, it really becomes a reflection or a mirror of the soul. You can see that part of yourself that really works against yourself. You can see your critical inner voice against yourself and against others. Anything that stops you from connecting to the divine, it has to come to the surface and release, and that's what happens in the labyrinth.
MARTINEZ: Before bringing a labyrinth to her own church, Artress had journeyed to Chartres Cathedral in France, where medieval builders had hewn this pre-Christian symbol into the stone wall.
Rev. ARTRESS: It had not been uncovered for several hundred years, and it was quite amazing when you see it.
MARTINEZ: Artress walked the Chartres labyrinth as she believes the medieval pilgrims had done, perhaps as a substitute for a journey to the Holy Land. As a result of her efforts, the Chartres labyrinth has now been opened for modern-day pilgrims to walk the ancient path.
Five years ago, at the urging of Lauren Artress, San Francisco's Grace Cathedral began a trend by installing a labyrinth modeled precisely after the one in Chartres. There's now a network of churches across the country using labyrinths, encouraged and supported by the worldwide project Artress heads.
Rev. ARTRESS: How many of you are able to have a labyrinth in your life?
MARTINEZ: Artress teaches the labyrinth as a ritual without formulas or dogma. She calls it a process that crosses denominations and faiths.
Rev. ARTRESS: This is part of what's being redefined again for us, as we begin to search and realize that we are spiritually hungry and that most of our traditions that we have aren't addressing that hunger.
MARTINEZ: Secular institutions have also discovered labyrinths as a meditation tool. The California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco was the first hospital to install a labyrinth to support staff and patients.
Ms. NANCY HOPSON: Soon after my diagnosis with breast cancer, I was just agonizing over a decision. I walked the labyrinth, and by the time I got to the middle, I realized that it was all going to be OK one way or another, and there might be something to learn -- be learned from this experience.
MARTINEZ: The labyrinth experience is as varied as the individuals who walk its paths. It is place where people can mix Christian mysticism with psychology or Buddhism with self-help.
And how would you respond to a skeptic who would say that you are basically going out of bounds, outside the religious institution?
Rev. ARTRESS: It's never outside the tradition, because the labyrinth is a path of prayer. And the more ways we can help people pray and meditate and quiet the mind, the better off everybody is.
MARTINEZ: The labyrinth may go the way of temporary spiritual fads, but right now it's a clear sign that Americans are still looking for answers and new rituals and practices.
Rev. ARTRESS: We're in such a -- profoundly, deeply changing times that we don't know what end is up. So find something to focus you; find something that embodies you; find a path that keeps you prayerful, thoughtful, open and moving with the flow. And I think that's what the labyrinth does.
MARTINEZ: For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I'm Ruben Martinez in San Francisco.
MARY ALICE WILLIAMS: Hollywood's cyclical discovery that religion sells is yielding millennial bumper crop of films meant to push our belief buttons. Most are too violent or raunchy to dodge an R rating, but one airing on NBC gets a B for bravery. "Mary, Mother of Jesus" puts flesh and a distinctly feminist face on an extraordinary woman largely neglected in the Bible. Martha Bayles reports.
(Excerpt from "Mary, Mother of Jesus" courtesy NBC)
MARTHA BAYLES: "Mary, Mother of Jesus" is a film about a mother's love for her son. Strong, deep and beautifully done, the two people most responsible for this film are also a mother and son: Eunice Kennedy Shriver and her son Bobby. To this particular mother, Mary is a woman of all seasons, including our own.
Ms. EUNICE KENNEDY SHRIVER: I think the most important thing to remember is, first of all, that she was a mother and she was a teacher, and she raised her son for 30 years in private before he became a public figure.
(Excerpt from "Mary, Mother of Jesus")
BAYLES: Today, many see mothering in the context of feminism. Here is a scene that appears in all four Gospels, Jesus being baptized by John the Baptist.
(Excerpt from "Mary, Mother of Jesus")
BAYLES: This movie adds a twist: Mary gets baptized as well. You won't find that scene in the Bible, but when it comes to Mary, that's nothing new. Of the four beliefs that many Christians associate with her, only one, that she was the mother of Christ, is unambiguously stated in the Gospels.
Her perpetual virginity, her immaculate conception, her ascension into heaven -- these are beliefs that evolved over time. In the same spirit of evolution, many Christians today cast Mary as a spiritual leader in her own right, not just the model of female perfection, but an active disciple, a teacher.
(Excerpt from "Mary, Mother of Jesus")
BAYLES: The question is whether this feminist view distorts Mary. In the Bible, she speaks of her own low estate and says that God will scatter the proud and put down the mighty from their throne. To Christians, Mary is a model of humility. Does this make her also a symbol of women's oppression? Not in this film. "Mary, Mother of Jesus" depicts its heroine as strong, active, wise but not proud. It's a delicate balance, but it works.
(Excerpt from "Mary, Mother of Jesus")
BAYLES: St. Augustine wrote that all strength is in humility because all pride is fragile. To judge by this modest but remarkable film, Mary still has the power to teach that lesson. For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I'm Martha Bayles in San Fernando, California.
MARY ALICE WILLIAMS: Then there's "Dogma," a big-screen, arguably bizarre rumination on faith that hits theaters this weekend. "Dogma" aims at turning our notions of God, his angels and apostles on their heads. It's meant to be part satire, part comedy, but six months before anyone had even had seen it, the Catholic League called it blasphemy and caused a PR ruckus the big studios would kill for. Whether there is value, religious or box office, in putting profound questions in a pop context with potty humor before the public, "Dogma" and its star-packed cast are making a huge splash. But director Kevin Smith says he's still steamed at the pre-release criticism. He says, 'I'm out there trying to get people to think about God, and they're calling me anti-Catholic?' He says, 'Actually, it's kind of devout.'
MARY ALICE WILLIAMS: Publishers Weekly has put two holinesses on its best-seller list, the pope's "Hope" and the Dalai Lama's "Happiness." So we'll give them the last word.
Filled with both hope and happiness, we thank you for being with us on
RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY. Bob Abernethy will be back next week. I'm Mary Alice Williams.
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