Latest news with #Pilate
Yahoo
03-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Granderson: Taxpayer money for a church school? We know where that leads
For today's sermon on courage, I would like the church to open their King James Bibles to Matthew 27:24: 'When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it.' While Pontius Pilate knew Jesus was an innocent man, the Roman governor authorized his crucifixion in large part because he was afraid of appearing disloyal to Caesar and losing power. The constitutional crisis our country currently finds itself in may be new to America, but as we see in the Gospel of Matthew, the wreckage caused by political expediency began in ancient times. Which brings us to St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, a proposed online faith-based charter school in Oklahoma that is seeking public funding, a decision to be determined by the U.S. Supreme Court this year. Last summer, the state's Supreme Court rejected the contract St. Isidore had with Oklahoma. However, Gov. Kevin Stitt objected, saying in a statement, 'I'm concerned we've sent a troubling message that religious groups are second-class participants in our education system.' Now, let me tell you what I'm concerned with: the 2019 audits by the Catholic Church in Oklahoma that found abuse allegations against 22 clerics to be substantiated. Alleged predators responsible for the care of children were systemically transferred by superiors from state to state from 1960 until 2018. 'The long and the short of it is you trusted us, and we failed,' Oklahoma City Archbishop Paul Coakley wrote in a public letter following the reports. 'I also am sorry for the complicity and negligence of those who failed to respond adequately to reports of abuse, for whatever reason, whether they are bishops, priests, deacons, religious or lay persons representing the Church.' While Catholic leaders in Oklahoma were applauded for acknowledging past failures, that did not protect the church from facing millions in lawsuits over those allegations and others. In fact, in 2022, 10 current and former students filed a $75-million lawsuit accusing Mount St. Mary Catholic High School in Oklahoma City of fostering 'a rape culture,' saying the school 'did not take reasonable steps to report or stop the rampant rape culture and ongoing sexual abuse.' A federal judge dismissed the case in 2023 because the statute of limitations had run out — not ruling on the merits of the allegations. These are just recent headlines from one state. From 2004-23, the Catholic Church paid more than $5 billion to settle sexual abuse cases tracked by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and certain U.S. religious communities. Whatever else you take from those examples and statistics, this much is clear: The Catholic Church isn't hurting for cash. I can't help but wonder why on Earth taxpayer money would be needed to fund Catholic schools. It's not that I'm against faith-based education. My son attended a private Christian school. But I am against any attempt to tear down the wall between church and state. Just turn to the example of Pontius Pilate to see what can happen when secular power tries to exert control over religious life. History is full of enough evidence to warn us away from this mingling. We don't need a test case in Oklahoma to prove the point. In 1534, when England's Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy, King Henry VIII became the supreme head of the Church of England, breaking with the papacy. Because Henry wanted to divorce his first wife, the pope's rule had become … inconvenient. The king pressured English church officials who knew better into making him the religious leader as well as the monarch. And when Henry's second wife did not produce a male heir, he had her executed so he could marry a third woman. He faced no consequences. Why? Political expediency. Parliament washed its hands of the controversy, because lawmakers could tell themselves the king was above the law and above the church. And as with Pontius Pilate, history shows the attempt to sidestep accountability was futile. The people who founded the United States were trying to leave behind that entanglement and corruption. They embraced the 1st Amendment to keep the government out of religious life and to keep religion out of government. For taxpayers to fund a religious school would pull us back toward tyranny. This week White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said he wanted the country's children to 'be taught to love America.' I agree. And that begins with protecting America from becoming a theocracy. @LZGranderson If it's in the news right now, the L.A. Times' Opinion section covers it. Sign up for our weekly opinion newsletter. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times
03-05-2025
- Politics
- Los Angeles Times
Taxpayer money for a church school? We know where that leads
For today's sermon on courage, I would like the church to open their King James Bibles to Matthew 27:24: 'When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it.' While Pontius Pilate knew Jesus was an innocent man, the Roman governor authorized his crucifixion in large part because he was afraid of appearing disloyal to Caesar and losing power. The constitutional crisis our country currently finds itself in may be new to America, but as we see in the Gospel of Matthew, the wreckage caused by political expediency began in ancient times. Which brings us to St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, a proposed online faith-based charter school in Oklahoma that is seeking public funding, a decision to be determined by the U.S. Supreme Court this year. Last summer, the state's Supreme Court rejected the contract St. Isidore had with Oklahoma. However, Gov. Kevin Stitt objected, saying in a statement, 'I'm concerned we've sent a troubling message that religious groups are second-class participants in our education system.' Now, let me tell you what I'm concerned with: the 2019 audits by the Catholic Church in Oklahoma that found abuse allegations against 22 clerics to be substantiated. Alleged predators responsible for the care of children were systemically transferred by superiors from state to state from 1960 until 2018. 'The long and the short of it is you trusted us, and we failed,' Oklahoma City Archbishop Paul Coakley wrote in a public letter following the reports. 'I also am sorry for the complicity and negligence of those who failed to respond adequately to reports of abuse, for whatever reason, whether they are bishops, priests, deacons, religious or lay persons representing the Church.' While Catholic leaders in Oklahoma were applauded for acknowledging past failures, that did not protect the church from facing millions in lawsuits over those allegations and others. In fact, in 2022, 10 current and former students filed a $75-million lawsuit accusing Mount St. Mary Catholic High School in Oklahoma City of fostering 'a rape culture,' saying the school 'did not take reasonable steps to report or stop the rampant rape culture and ongoing sexual abuse.' A federal judge dismissed the case in 2023 because the statute of limitations had run out — not ruling on the merits of the allegations. These are just recent headlines from one state. From 2004-23, the Catholic Church paid more than $5 billion to settle sexual abuse cases tracked by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and certain U.S. religious communities. Whatever else you take from those examples and statistics, this much is clear: The Catholic Church isn't hurting for cash. I can't help but wonder why on Earth taxpayer money would be needed to fund Catholic schools. It's not that I'm against faith-based education. My son attended a private Christian school. But I am against any attempt to tear down the wall between church and state. Just turn to the example of Pontius Pilate to see what can happen when secular power tries to exert control over religious life. History is full of enough evidence to warn us away from this mingling. We don't need a test case in Oklahoma to prove the point. In 1534, when England's Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy, King Henry VIII became the supreme head of the Church of England, breaking with the papacy. Because Henry wanted to divorce his first wife, the pope's rule had become … inconvenient. The king pressured English church officials who knew better into making him the religious leader as well as the monarch. And when Henry's second wife did not produce a male heir, he had her executed so he could marry a third woman. He faced no consequences. Why? Political expediency. Parliament washed its hands of the controversy, because lawmakers could tell themselves the king was above the law and above the church. And as with Pontius Pilate, history shows the attempt to sidestep accountability was futile. The people who founded the United States were trying to leave behind that entanglement and corruption. They embraced the 1st Amendment to keep the government out of religious life and to keep religion out of government. For taxpayers to fund a religious school would pull us back toward tyranny. This week White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said he wanted the country's children to 'be taught to love America.' I agree. And that begins with protecting America from becoming a theocracy. @LZGranderson
Yahoo
11-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
A Roman governor ordered Jesus' crucifixion – so why did many Christians blame Jews for centuries?
It's a straightforward part of the Easter story: The Roman governor Pontius Pilate had Jesus of Nazareth killed by his soldiers. He imposed a sentence that Roman judges often inflicted on social subversives – crucifixion. The New Testament Gospels say so. The Nicene Creed, one of Christianity's key statements of faith, says Jesus 'was crucified under Pontius Pilate.' The testimony of Paul, the first person whose preaching in the name of Jesus Christ is preserved in the New Testament, refers to the crucifixion. But over the past 2,000 years, it was common for some Christians to deem Pilate almost blameless for Jesus' death and treat Jews as responsible – a belief that has shaped the global history of antisemitism. Throughout medieval times, Easter was often a dangerous time for Jewish communities, whom Christians targeted as 'Christ-killers'. This perception was integral to the hate that motivated mass violence in Europe as late as the 19th and 20th centuries, including pogroms in Russia and even Nazi genocide. Why did Christian teachings practically let Pilate off the hook? Why did many Christians allege Jews were to blame? In the Gospels, the first four books of the New Testament, Pilate believes Jesus innocent of any crime. In some of them, he even proclaims so in public. But the chief priests of the ancient Jewish temple at Jerusalem see Jesus as a charismatic and popular Jewish preacher who challenges their authority. They have Jesus arrested and tried before Pilate during the week of Passover. Pilate schemes for Jesus' release, but a riotous crowd clamors for his death. Pilate caves and decides to crucify Jesus, whom Christians believe rose from the dead three days later. Any reader of the Gospels knows the sequence, though it varies somewhat in each of them. The earliest Gospels, composed at least a generation after Jesus' death, blamed the chief priests and attending crowd for persuading Pilate to have Jesus crucified. The Gospel of John, written some decades after the other three, portrayed Jews in general as responsible, and so did much of early Christian literature. One account, written in the mid-second century or later, and not included in the New Testament, even claimed that Jesus' crucifixion was not ordered by Pilate. Instead, it blamed Herod Antipas, the Jewish ruler of Galilee – the region where Jesus grew up. Other texts from after the first few centuries A.D. said that Pilate became a Christian. Scholars have long debated the historical facts of Jesus' trial. In my 2025 book, 'Killing the Messiah,' I do too. The Gospel testimonies capture the basics of criminal trials before Roman judges, which were held in public. Judges posed questions to prosecutors and defendants, and had ample power to decide whether a person was innocent or guilty and impose a punishment. Writers who lived in the Roman Empire portrayed judges as capricious, unaccountable or swayed by menacing crowds. The Gospels reflect this attitude by making Pilate appear bullied into condemning an innocent man. But from a historian's viewpoint, there is a crucial problem with the Gospels' description. Roman judges could and sometimes did face removal from office, property confiscation, exile or even death for executing clearly innocent people. In other words, it seems unlikely that Pilate would have proclaimed Jesus guiltless, but then conceded to pressure and condemned him anyway. Other ancient writers describe Pilate as someone who was not above offending the Jews of Judaea. According to the first-century Jewish philosopher Philo and the historian Josephus, Pilate had his soldiers carry objects that honored Roman emperors into Jerusalem, which Jewish residents saw as sacrilegious. When crowds protested, he sometimes backed down. But his soldiers attacked an agitated crowd that opposed Pilate's use of Temple money to build an aqueduct. They also massacred an insurrection of Samaritans – people who also claimed descent from Israelites. Pilate did not cave to hostile crowds indiscriminately, or do whatever the chief priests wanted. Since Roman prefects like him had to coordinate with Jewish priests to govern Jerusalem, he likely viewed people who incited social disturbance against them as subversive. Jesus would have fit in that category, but neither Philo nor Josephus provides examples of Pilate killing people after acquitting them. Why, then, did Pilate have Jesus crucified? As many scholars have argued, the simple answer would be that he believed Jesus committed some sort of sedition – not that the crowd simply pressured Pilate into doing so. Yet, when the Gospels were composed a generation after the crucifixion, they portrayed Pilate as convinced of Jesus' innocence. As more time passed, other works of ancient Christian literature shifted accountability from Pilate to Jews. The experiences of Jesus' early followers help explain this shift. They, like Jesus himself, were Jewish, and they considered him a heaven-sent Messiah. But over the course of the first and second centuries, they increasingly separated themselves from other Jews, until they began to see themselves as members of a non-Jewish movement: Christianity. In Roman authorities' eyes, the Christians were troublesome, and they sometimes faced prosecution and capital punishment. In addition, Rome had inflicted atrocities and punitive measures upon Jews after insurgencies – further motivating Jesus' followers to distance themselves. Their literature became increasingly hostile toward Jews. Historians and biblical scholars continue to debate why Pilate condemned Jesus. Was it for suggesting that he was the Messiah, or, in Pilate's wording, 'King of the Jews'? Did Jesus incite a crowd disturbance at the Temple during Passover – or were officials worried he could, even inadvertently? Were Jesus and his followers engaged in armed insurrection? But regardless of the answer, as I argue in my book, responsibility for the crucifixion lies with Pilate – not the chief priests and the Jewish crowd at Jerusalem. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Nathanael Andrade, Binghamton University, State University of New York Read more: From goddesses and rabbits to theology and 'Superstar': 4 essential reads on Easter's surprisingly complicated history Christians hold many views on Jesus' resurrection – a theologian explains the differing views among Baptists The roots of the Easter story: Where did Christian beliefs about Jesus' resurrection come from? Nathanael Andrade has received fellowship funding from the Andrew Mellon Foundation/the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
