Vanoggend se NYT het 'n interessante berig oor Pres. Obama se kerklike agtergrond. Lees die volledige berig by :
Hier is 'n deel van die berig:
In 1967, as the modernizing changes
of the Second Vatican Council began to transform the Catholic world, Ann
Dunham, Mr. Obama’s mother, took her chubby 6-year-old son occasionally to Mass
and enrolled him in a new Catholic elementary school in Jakarta, Indonesia,
called Santo Fransiskus Asisi. At school, the future president began and ended
his days with prayer. At home, his mother read him the Bible with an
anthropologist’s eye.
Pious he was not. “When it came
time to pray, I would pretend to close my eyes, then peek around the room,” Mr.
Obama wrote in his memoir “Dreams From My Father.” “Nothing happened. No angels
descended. Just a parched old nun and 30 brown children, muttering words.”
In 1969, Mr. Obama transferred to a
more exclusive, state-run school with a mosque, but a development in the United
States would have a greater impact on his future career. American Catholic
bishops responded to the call of the Second Vatican Council to focus on the
poor in an antipoverty and social justice program that became one of the
country’s most influential supporters of grass-roots groups.
By the early 1980s, when Mr. Obama
was an undergraduate at Columbia University, the campaign was financing a
project to help neighborhoods after the collapse of the steel mills near
Chicago. The program’s leaders, eager to expand beyond Catholic parishes to the
black Protestant churches where more of the affected community worshiped,
sought an African-American for the task. In 1985, they found one in Mr. Obama,
a fledgling community organizer in New York who answered a want ad for a job
with the Developing Communities Project. The faith-based program aimed to unify
South Side residents against unsafe streets, poor living conditions and
political neglect. Mr. Obama’s salary was less than $10,000 a year.
The future president arrived in
Chicago with little knowledge of Catholicism other than the Graham Greene
novels and “Confessions” of St. Augustine he had read during a period of
spiritual exploration at Columbia. But he fit seamlessly into a 1980s Catholic
cityscape forged by the spirit of Vatican II, the influence of liberation
theology and the progressivism of Cardinal Joseph L. Bernardin, the archbishop
of Chicago, who called for a “consistent ethic of life” that wove life and
social justice into a “seamless garment.”
On one of his first days on the
job, Mr. Obama heard Cardinal Bernardin speak at an economic development
meeting. He felt like a Catholic novice there, he wrote in his memoir, and
later decided “not to ask what a catechism was.” But he was a quick study.
As the months went on, Mr. Obama
became a familiar face in South Side black parishes. At Holy Angels Church,
considered a center of black Catholic life, he talked to the pastor and the
pastor’s adopted son about finding families willing to adopt troubled children.
At Our Lady of the Gardens, he attended peace and black history Masses and
conferred with the Rev. Dominic Carmon on programs to battle unemployment and
violence. At the neo-Gothic St. Sabina, he struck up a friendship with the Rev.
Michael L. Pfleger, the firebrand white pastor of one of the city’s largest
black parishes. The two would huddle in a back room and commiserate about the
liquor stores and payday loan businesses in the neighborhood.
But even as Mr. Obama effectively
proselytized for the church and its role in improving the community, and even
as he opened meetings in the backs of churches with the Lord’s Prayer and
showed a comfort with faith that put the people he hoped to organize at ease,
Catholic doctrine did not tempt him. He was not baptized Catholic, priests
said. But it was amid the trappings of Catholicism, according to his fellow
organizers, that the future president began to express a spiritual thirst.
As Mr. Obama helped expand the
program from Catholic parishes to megachurches and Protestant congregations, he
felt that need slaked by the prevailing black liberation theology, inspired by
the civil rights movement and preached by African-American ministers like Mr.
Wright of Trinity. The notion that Jesus delivered salvation to communities
that expressed faith through good deeds suited Mr. Obama’s instincts — and
perhaps his interests.
