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Liberation of the slaves was a cause long dear to Jewish hearts.

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(RNS) — The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops plans to vote Thursday (June 11) on revisions to its cornerstone document addressing the sexual abuse of minors, including new language that emphasizes “the presumption of innocence” for accused priests. 

But a prominent archbishop pushed back during a Wednesday presentation of the proposed revisions, urging the conference to take more time to consult survivors and priests.

“ I am worried how the language presently in the draft will impact our known victims as well as our unknown victims,” said Archbishop Shawn McKnight of Kansas City, Kansas. “I’m also concerned about how our priests are going to respond.”

The Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, commonly known as the Dallas Charter, is a set of policy commitments that the bishops created in 2002 as the church began to reckon with the full impact of the church’s sexual abuse crisis victimizing children. Since then, the document has been revised three times.

One of the flashpoints has been whether the charter should expand its scope to sexual abuse of adults in the church, too.

Richmond, Virginia, Bishop Barry Knestout, chair of the committee on the protection of children and young people, who gave a presentation on the revisions, said the committee holds the position that sexual abuse of adults is “outside of the scope of the charter.” He said the committee on clergy, consecrated life and vocations will develop a separate document “focusing on standards of professional behavior for both clergy and laity with adults.”

But advocates who focus on sexual abuse and survivors told RNS that they see addressing the abuse of adults as urgent.

“Adults continue to experience devastating abuse in situations of vulnerability like confession, spiritual direction, pastoral support, religious life and employment, yet there are very few safeguards in place to protect adults from abuse in the church,” said Sara Larson, executive director of Awake, a survivor support and advocacy organization. “It is high time for the U.S. bishops to seriously commit to protections for adults. This cannot wait.”

Many adult abuse survivors have been “deeply wounded not only by the abuse itself, but also by the refusal of some church leaders and community members to acknowledge that what occurred was, in fact, abuse,” she added.

Terence McKiernan, founder of the online archive of the Catholic clergy abuse crisis, BishopAccountability.org, echoed those concerns. He said McKnight was right to point out that the last known consultation about the impending separate adult document happened in 2022, even as prominent abuse cases have surfaced since then.

McKiernan also said he thought priests might be skeptical about added language about the rights of accused priests, given that those rights are adequately protected in canon law. Most priests, McKiernan said, “want this document to be a document for survivors, not for disgruntled priests or disgruntled bishops.”

He added that many priests who feel their bishops “hung them out to dry” back in 2002 won’t be convinced by the document. 

BishopAccountability leaders said in a statement they believed that the bishops were “backing away from their commitment to survivors” and that “authors of these revisions seem to have slept through most of the important developments of recent years” — including what they called the ubiquitous nature of spiritual abuse, the role of religious sisters in experiencing and committing abuse, concerns about the abuse of Black and Indigenous Americans and questions about defining credible and substantiated allegations.

The Rev. Hans Zollner, a Jesuit and leading expert in Rome on combating abuse, told RNS that he didn’t think the new language related to due process in the revisions should be interpreted as bending the process in favor of clerics.

Due process “has been enshrined in the charter from the very beginning,” Zollner said. “On the side of those who would judge the cleric, they must provide processes that are fair and just. On the cleric’s part, however, there is an obligation to respond to those processes honestly and openly beyond purely legal terms.”

McKnight, the Kansas City archbishop, has had a more expansive vision for edits to the Dallas Charter and has submitted his own draft revisions to the conference, according to 2025 reporting by Catholic news site The Pillar. That document included new language about the trauma caused by abuse, guidance about sexual abuse of adults, a call for restorative justice practices and several rights of the accused priest, including the right to clear information about allegations, according to The Pillar.

Arguing for further discussion before approving changes to the charter, McKnight pointed out that many bishops in the conference have been appointed since 2022, the last time he knew of that those outside the committee were consulted on the issue. “ We haven’t seen the kind of consultation that, behind closed doors, the committees have been dealing with. That’s the difficulty I see here. It is endemic of the culture that we have as a conference,” he said.

Larson, Awake’s executive director, said that ultimately, what matters is how the instructions are implemented “in real situations at the ground level.”

“We continue to hear from survivors who have been deeply traumatized by the response they received when interacting with a diocese, so we urge all dioceses to carefully evaluate how they can implement the charter in a compassionate, trauma-sensitive way,” she said.

(RNS) — The Greek Orthodox patriarch of Jerusalem, Theophilos III, met with President Donald Trump last week in the White House and awarded him one of the highest honors in the church, the Grand Cross of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre. 

In return, Theophilos came out of the meeting with an honor of his own, the suggestion of becoming a peacemaker in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, apparently backed by Trump, Israeli media reported. 

The news left many observers scratching their heads. In the constellation of Orthodox Church leaders, Theophilos is seen as solidly in Russia’s camp. The patriarch is set to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow later this month.

The Ukraine-Russia war is the largest conflict affecting the world’s Orthodox Christians today, with majorities of both Russia and Ukraine’s population identifying with Orthodox churches. 

The conflict has divided the wider Orthodox world too, after the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople granted autocephaly to a Ukrainian Orthodox Church independent of the Moscow Patriarchate, prompting Moscow to break communion with Constantinople and forcing many of the Eastern Orthodox churches to pick sides. The result has been the largest schism in the church since the break with Rome in 1054. 

Though the Jerusalem Patriarchate does not acknowledge the legitimacy of the independent Ukrainian church, Theophilos is one of the leaders who — in some respects — straddles the divide. As a native Greek, he maintains ties with those in Constantinople’s orbit, but the long history of Russian pilgrimage to the Holy Land and number of Russian Orthodox Christians in Israel have kept him close to Moscow, explained Samuel Noble, a scholar of Orthodox Christianity at Belgium’s University of Liège. 

“Having goodwill with both the Hellenic world and with Russia is an interesting diplomatic thing,” Noble told RNS, “but I don’t think that it all translates into diplomatic cachet with the Ukrainian state.”

Cyril Hovorun, a Ukrainian Orthodox theologian and scholar, told RNS he viewed the news as an attempt to replace the White House’s previous efforts to tap the Vatican as such a mediator. “The patriarch of Jerusalem is known for being quite closely attached to Putin,” he noted. 

“I think it fits the policy of Donald Trump’s administration to distance itself from Ukraine as a mediator and to bestow this mission of mediation upon someone else,” Hovorun said. “Once upon a time, the Holy See, the Vatican, was considered as such a mediator. … Now that the relations between the White House and the Apostolic Palace — the Holy See — have deteriorated significantly and dramatically, I think this idea to ask someone else, some other religious figure, to do mediation emerged in the White House.”

Ukrainian officials quickly shut down the idea of Theophilos as a mediator, noting his opposition to the Ukrainian church’s independence.

“Patriarch Theophilos’ participation in negotiations with Ukraine is unrealistic,” a high-ranking diplomat of the Ukrainian Embassy in Israel told Ukrainian media. “Ukraine will never do such a thing.”

The embassy also said Theophilos had not responded to any of the embassy’s initiatives previously but participated in Russian diplomatic events. 

The ancient Jerusalem patriarchate, one of nine independent churches governing Eastern Orthodoxy, has long seen its role as protecting Christian communities and sites in the Holy Land. The meeting came at a time when the Christian population of the Holy Land, including many Orthodox Christians, are facing heightened tensions against their communities and while the Trump administration has shown signs of willingness with Israel to topple the fragile status quo governing sacred sites in the region. 

“The Patriarch presented the President with a range of concerns and challenges confronting the churches of the Holy Land. Foremost among these were sustaining the authentic Christian presence, safeguarding holy sites, promoting human dignity, and reinforcing the Church’s mission of pastoral care, mercy, and peace building,” the patriarchate said in a statement.

After his meeting with Trump, Theophilos met with the Greek prime minister with the same agenda to protect Christians and the church’s holy sites. 

Over the past several years, Jerusalem and the wider region have seen a rash of harassment, violence and legal pressures against Christian communities in the Holy Land. According to a recent report by the Jerusalem-based Rossing Center for Education and Dialogue, 2025 saw more than 150 attacks on Christians in Israel, up from 111 in 2024 and 89 in 2023. Only about 1.9% of Israel’s population is Christian, and 80% of Israeli Christians are Arab.

Jonathan Kuttab, a Palestinian Christian and human rights lawyer, noted that despite the influence of Christian Zionism, anti-Christian sentiment — as something separate from anti-Palestinian or anti-Arab sentiment — is a growing problem in several sectors of Israeli society. 

“There’s a very strong, almost gut level anti-Christian sentiment that is never acknowledged, but in some places and in some cases — like these days — it’s coming up to the surface,” Kuttab said, citing examples of ultra-Orthodox Jews spitting at nuns and priests and religiously motivated attacks against Christian villages, cemeteries and churches in the region.

“There is a very clear sentiment there, which is almost never addressed or expressed openly, unless, you know, you’re somebody crazy, like (Bezalel) Smotrich or (Itamar) Ben-Gvir who say it up front,” he said, referring to Israel’s finance and national security ministers, who both helm far right parties in the Knesset and have a history of defending sectarian attacks. 

In April, an Israeli soldier smashed a statue of Jesus with a sledgehammer in southern Lebanon while another soldier photographed the act, resulting in their removal from combat service and prompting the Jewish state to appoint a special envoy to the Christian world. In May, a man chased, pushed down and kicked a French Catholic nun in Jerusalem.  

“We have witnessed incidents of harassment, acts of disrespect toward clergy and religious symbols, and growing concerns surrounding the preservation of Christian life and heritage in the city,” said Levon Kalaydjian, a Jerusalem Armenian Christian activist. “These are not abstract concerns; they affect the daily sense of dignity, belonging and safety of communities that have been rooted in Jerusalem for centuries.”

Rabbi Eugene Korn, the former academic director of the Center for Jewish-Christian Understanding and Cooperation, said the mentality has been growing in certain sectors, such as the ultra-Orthodox and religious Zionist communities. 

“Problems that have gotten a lot of attention — and rightfully so — in Jerusalem, are kind of localized to Jerusalem, because you have these radicals and many of them are represented in the government and the government doesn’t take action against them,” Korn said. 

Jerusalem’s many church bodies have faced legal pressures as well. The Jerusalem municipality froze the Greek Orthodox Church’s accounts last summer in a tax dispute that critics allege was an attempt to force the church to sell its prized land holdings. The Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem has similarly been embroiled in a long court battle to defend a portion of the Armenian quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City from being taken over by developers. The two patriarchates, and particularly the Greek Orthodox Church, are among the largest landholders in Israel, controlling large swaths of land far beyond historic churches and religious institutions. But the Jerusalem Patriarchate has also recently sold off properties — to the chagrin of its local Palestinian flock. 

While the church’s flock is overwhelmingly Arabic-speaking Palestinian and Jordanian Christians, its leadership has for centuries been — almost invariably — transplants from Greece or Greek-speaking communities.

“The Greek Orthodox Church in Jerusalem has never reflected the sentiment of the Palestinian, the people in the pew,” Kuttab said. 

(RNS) — The Stones put it this way: It’s only rock ’n’ roll, but I like it.

And I do — the Beatles, the Stones, David Bowie.

But there are some things I don’t like about it. Author and musician Daniel Rachel has written a new, disturbing and quite overdue book, “This Ain’t Rock ’n’ Roll: Pop Music, the Swastika and the Third Reich.” And I interviewed him about it for my podcast. 

The book documents something that has been hiding in plain sight for more than 60 years. As Rachel writes:

For over seventy-five years, musicians have been drawn to the language and provocative imagery of Nazism, fascinated by its power, menace and underlying sexuality. They have flirted with the theatrical spectacle of the Third Reich, displayed the swastika, flaunted memorabilia, worn Nazi uniforms and marveled at the grandiose rallies of 1930s Germany.

Decades ago, Woody Guthrie had a guitar with the words inscribed on it: “This machine kills fascists.” We never thought that future rock stars might have guitars that could say they celebrate fascists.

The worst part is the rock music industrial complex industry spent seven decades simply looking the other way. And so did the audiences, including me. However, “This Ain’t Rock ’n’ Roll” makes the fascist connection very clear. 

Let’s start with the Beatles, particularly John Lennon. As his half-sister wrote, according to Rachel’s book:

John was absolutely fascinated by Adolf Hitler. As a boy, he used to collect and swap Nazi badges, medals, daggers, and things. He used to call himself John ‘Adolf’ Lennon, instead of Winston. I can remember him telling me that Hitler was like a modern-day Jesus Christ figure and how he took on the world … and nearly won.

When you consider that Lennon was born during the Blitzkrieg, it is beyond disturbing.

Brian Epstein, The Beatles’ manager, came from a prominent Jewish family in Liverpool. Lennon teased Epstein relentlessly — about being gay, about being Jewish — and the people around him laughed, the book describes.

Then, there are the Rolling Stones. In 1966, their guitarist Brian Jones donned a full SS uniform, complete with an Iron Cross and a swastika armband, for a photo shoot.

And then, the Who. Their late drummer, Keith Moon, dressed in full Nazi regalia, hired an open-top Mercedes to drive through the London neighborhood of Golders Green, where many Holocaust survivors lived, the book describes. A shopkeeper, wielding a meat ax, chased him through the street. Apparently, he did not find it very funny. 

Then, there is David Bowie. In 1975, Bowie said, per the book:

Rock stars are fascists. Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars. Look at some of his films and see how he moved. I think he was quite as good as Jagger. And boy, when he hit that stage, he worked an audience. Good God!

Bowie called for an “extreme right front” to come and sweep Britain clean. He told journalists that Britain was “ready for a new Hitler.”

And Eric Clapton? In 1976, at a concert in Birmingham, Clapton declared: “Do we have any foreigners in the audience tonight? Wogs, I mean, I’m looking at you … leave our country. I don’t want you here, in the room or in my country,” as reported in Rachel’s book. 

Meanwhile, punk rock was deliberately provocative — to the point of embracing Nazi imagery. The Sex Pistols recorded a song called “Belsen Was a Gas.” Rock critic Lester Bangs called it “one of the most frightening things I’ve ever heard … cheap nihilism.”

Joy Division named their band after the forced prostitution units in Nazi concentration camps — between 300 and 400 women trafficked and subjected to what Rachel rightly calls “legalized rape.”

That’s the British rock scene, you might say. What about in America?

Consider the Ramones. Joey Ramone (born Jeffrey Ross Hyman) was Jewish. Tommy Ramone was Jewish — born Tamás Erdélyi in Budapest. His parents survived the Holocaust, but his extended family did not. 

And yet, Ramones lyrics included lines like: “I’m a Nazi Schätze, you know I fight for fatherland.”

That’s punk rock, you might say. What about more middle-of-the-road stuff?

It did not need the Nazi imagery. It could go straight to antisemitism — as did Michael Jackson. when he sang: “Jew me, sue me, everybody do me, kick me, kike me …”

There is a current debate on whether there is a necessary connection between anti-Israelism and antisemitism. Roger Waters, the Pink Floyd co-founder, is Exhibit A.

Let’s talk about the concert in which he floated an inflatable pig, adorned with a Star of David. Or his choice of stage costume — an outfit that resembled an SS officer’s uniform, as the name of Anne Frank was projected on stage. 

Consider the assessment of Polly Samson, the wife of Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour. Her father came to London in 1938, on the Kindertransport. She wrote to Waters on X: “Sadly you are antisemitic to your rotten core. … Enough of your nonsense.’ 

But her pushback was a minority response. Most of the time, it was the sounds of silence.

Notice that as Rachel points out, rock musicians do not celebrate the work of the Ku Klux Klan or admire the clothing of a slave overseer. But they do flaunt Nazi regalia. Similarly, there was the Rock Against Racism movement. But there is no Rock Against Antisemitism. 

On the one hand, this book is about rock music and Nazism. It is a cultural history of arrogance, born of artistic privilege and willful tone-deafness. Who can say how many young people were exposed to this and how much damage it did? 

But its real theme is something deeper: complicity and acquiescence. That is what allowed Kanye West, the rapper who now goes by Ye, to praise Hitler, to release a song titled “Heil Hitler,” to share his admiration of “Mein Kampf,” to post a swastika inside a Star of David and to sell a $20 swastika shirt during a Super Bowl commercial break — the most-watched television broadcast in America.

This ain’t rock ’n’ roll. This is a reckoning. And it’s about 75 years overdue.

(RNS) — One of the greatest privileges I enjoy as a university president is looking directly into the eyes of new graduates as they cross the stage in our commencement ceremonies. This year had a twist: Given recent news stories about universities using artificial intelligence to announce graduates’ names, I made a point to reassure the audiences an actual human would do the honors. 

And at each ceremony, that announcement brought loud cheers.

Yes, we love our technology today, but we also still yearn for authentic human connection. If we don’t provide it, our institutions risk becoming transactional degree factories where students become dehumanized. 

The day after our final ceremony, Pope Leo XIV published his first encyclical, titled “Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.” This writing carries critical implications not just for Catholic higher education, but for all educators. While many of the insights are worth highlighting, Pope Leo could not have been clearer about the path forward: “Let us cultivate relationships.”

Colleges and universities must always strive to provide a return on investment for the thousands of students and families paying hard-earned money for a degree. But they must never lose sight that teaching students to cultivate relationships is the greatest value for taking those degrees and making a true difference in the world.

Universities are essential to avoiding the “Babel syndrome” referenced in the encyclical. That, of course, is a reference to the biblical story of the “Tower of Babel,” in which the people embarked on an ill-fated project to make a name for themselves by building a tower that would reach the heavens. The result was not unity, but confusion and separation. Leo calls on educators to not make the same mistake of believing a single, digital language (like AI) can “translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance.”

For educators, this means we are obligated to pursue the integration of knowledge and equip our students with the ability to grasp complexity and the skills to verify facts. These are precisely the skills our graduates will need to ensure that the organizations for which they ultimately work (and eventually lead) bring benefit to the communities they aim to serve. Are we equipping our students with media literacy? And positioning them to build trust across our algorithm-driven silos? And helping them develop an ethical lens that will guide their deployment of new technologies?

Higher education, however, should always aim to provide more than knowledge and skills. That is why providing space for reflection, discernment and appreciation is just as critical as building skillsets and knowledge, as this is what allows them to find true direction in their lives. Are we offering them resources to build not just a good career, but a meaningful life? Can they identify the core purpose that drives them forward? Can they articulate why they matter in terms that are not contingent on their external achievements? Today’s graduates may not know exactly how their worlds will look 10 years from now given the magnitude of looming technological changes, but having that true direction can help them navigate those changes. As educators, that is how we can best prepare them to flourish. 

Yes, our institutions must teach students how to succeed in the emerging world of AI, but a core piece of that instruction means helping them understand that AI is not a substitute for human relationships. Pope Leo warns that as more emphasis is placed on “speed and fragmentation, the human person still yearns to receive care and recognition from attentive minds, kind words and hands capable of tenderness.”

And sometimes that tenderness comes from the simple act of reading a name. At my university, we like to say our professors know amazing things — like their students’ names. That amazing knowledge may be more important than ever in the new, uncertain AI era.

(Robert K. Vischer is president of the University of St. Thomas. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)