Rev. Danny Fisher

Last week, I wrote a post about two projects of note in Thailand. I guess we can add one more to the list: The Associated Press reported today that a strong contingent of Thai monks are calling for Buddhism to be named as the national religion of Thailand.

The coup leaders who deposed Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra back in September of 2006 have appointed a committee to draw up a new constitution for public consideration in the fall. A representative from a group of monastics holding a silent vigil outside of the Parliament in Bangkok today sent a representative to meet with the committee and push for the naming of Buddhism as the national religion in the constitution.

Some question the motivations and wisdom behind the naming of Buddhism as the national religion. The article continues:

[Such] a move [was] rejected as too divisive in the past, as an Islamic insurgency worsened in the Muslim south.

More than 2,000 people have died since 2004 in the country’s three southernmost provinces along the Malaysian border in an insurgency fueled by allegations of discrimination against Muslims, especially in educational and job opportunities, in Buddhist-dominated Thailand.

The call from the monks revives a debate that dates back to 1997 when a campaign to make Buddhism the national religion was dropped amid concerns that it would divide the country.

[...]

“It must be pointed out that this national religion campaign is taking place amid widespread paranoia within the clergy against Islam following the southern violence,” Sanitsuda Ekachai, a columnist for the English daily Bangkok Post, wrote earlier this month. “There has also been wide distribution of leaflets alleging that Islam is a threat to Thai Buddhism.”

More than 90 percent of Thailand’s 64 million people are Buddhists; the remainder are either Muslim or Christian.

As always, when I know more, so will you.

This past weekend, the Washington Post ran a feature in their Religion section about the current fracas at the National Institutes of Health (N.I.H.) in Bethesda, MD. The Rev. O. Ray Fitzgerald, former director of the spiritual ministry department at the N.I.H., has been accused of (among other things) anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism by past employees. Writer Jacqueline L. Salmon explains:

In February, a federal panel ordered the hospital to reinstate a Catholic priest who was wrongfully fired in 2004. In January, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission had found that he was the target of “discriminatory and retaliatory animus.” Three other former chaplains have said that they also were wrongfully terminated…They say that NIH retaliated against them when they spoke up and invented reasons for terminating them.

Fitzgerald was demoted from the chief chaplain’s post two weeks ago after the EEOC, which cited the “animus,” and the Merit Systems Protection Board ordered the rehiring of and back pay for the priest, the Rev. Henry Heffernan.

NIH officials “endorsed intolerance, and they reinforced intolerance with intolerance,” said Rabbi Reeve Brenner, who testified last year in support of the priest and was fired as a hospital chaplain in February. He has filed a complaint with the Merit Board, an agency that hears federal personnel disputes, saying that he was removed by NIH as retribution for his testimony.

Another ousted chaplain, Greek Orthodox lay minister Edar Rogler, is suing the Department of Health and Human Services, NIH’s parent agency, saying that she also was removed for testifying in support of Heffernan. In her lawsuit, filed last month in U.S. District Court in Maryland, and in her testimony in Heffernan’s case, she says NIH officials hatched a plan, “Operation Clean Sweep,” to purge staff members who cooperated in the priest’s complaint.

Considering the size and scope of the N.I.H., this story is very significant indeed. As the article continues:

The chaplains tend to the spiritual needs of patients in the two adjacent buildings on the Bethesda campus which make up the hospital — the 14-story Warren Grant Magnuson Clinical Center and the Mark O. Hatfield Clinical Research Center.

Patients from all over the world are treated as part of clinical studies related to a variety of issues, including weight loss, allergies, substance abuse, heart disease and cancer. The center has about 7,000 inpatient admissions and 100,000 outpatient visits each year.

[...]

The former chaplains say that tensions have simmered in the department for years under Fitzgerald. The hospital…employs about a half-dozen chaplains of various faiths, but in recent years turnover has been unusually high. At least seven have been ousted or have left voluntarily because they were unhappy with Fitzgerald’s management style, said several former members of the department.

As more emerges about this story, I will be sure to mention it in these pages.