New year:
Marks start of stretch run for the Wisconsin legislature

		Eye on the  Capitol  John Huebscher

To most of us, January and the onset of a new year mark a new beginning. For the Wisconsin legislature, the onset of the even numbered year signifies the beginning of the end.

For, while 2004 will last for 366 days, the remaining life of the 2003-04 legislative session is numbered in weeks. Six weeks to be exact. Although the standing committees of the State Senate and Assembly will meet regularly over the next three months, the two houses of the legislature will meet to transact business only during two three-week "floor periods."

The first of these will run from Jan. 20 to Feb. 5. The second floor period will extend from Feb. 24 to March 11. Any bill that has not passed both houses by March 11 must start the legislative process anew in January of 2005.

Compressed timetable

This compressed timetable adds urgency to every debate. Those who support a legislative proposal will press lawmakers friendly to their respective causes to expedite hearings and scheduling of legislation. The committee chairs and party floor leaders who direct the timing of hearings and the schedule of floor debates become very popular - and very busy - people.

Opponents of bills know that time is on their side. Every week that goes by without an undesirable bill being scheduled for a hearing or placed on a session calendar reduces that bill's chances for ultimate passage.

In the final week of a session every parliamentary delaying tactic that slows a bill down, even for a single day, can be decisive in killing the proposal until next year.

Final weeks

As March 11 nears, the pace of activity will quicken. Committee hearings will take up more bills, often on less notice. The daily calendars of both the Senate and Assembly will become longer. Tempers will become shorter. Legislative output will increase. Like students who "cram" for exams, lawmakers will pass most of the bills adopted in the 2003-04 session in these final six weeks.

The last weeks of a legislative session also provide members of the minority party with more power than they normally enjoy. The rules of both houses require that two-thirds of the members agree on any suspension of the rules to expedite legislation. As time is of the essence, every delaying tactic becomes significant.

In this environment, members of the minority party can effectively prevent consideration of bills that must pass through several parliamentary steps in the final week of the session. Thus the minority Democrats will be in a position to win concessions from majority Republicans as the session nears its end.

Faithful citizenship

Interest groups are also keenly involved at this stage of the process. Even if a bill has no chance of passage, groups associated with political action committees will press for "roll calls" on issues dear to them so that friends and enemies can be identified for the fall election campaigns.

2004 will take a full 12 months to run its course. But the lawmaking season will be a short one. Catholics and others who are serious about "faithful citizenship" would do well to pay close attention over the next 10 weeks.

John Huebscher is executive director of the Wisconsin Catholic Conference.

Asian dawn:
Opportunities for Christian evangelization

		The Catholic  Difference  George Weigel

Asia, the world's most populous continent, is also the world's least Christian continent. Which is a demographically polite way of saying that Asia has been the great failure of Christian mission in the first two millennia of Christian history.

Pope John Paul II conceded the point in his encyclical on Christian mission, Redemptoris Missio [The Mission of the Redeemer], when he wrote that the Church's 21st century mission "to the nations" should be "chiefly directed" to Asia.

Christianity: rapid growth in Africa

Asian mission failures are often contrasted to Christianity's rapid growth in Africa. The second edition of the indispensable World Christian Encyclopedia reports that there were 9.9 million Christians in Africa in 1900 and 360 million in 2000: in a century, African Christians had gone from being 0.6 percent of the world's population to 8.9 percent of global humanity.

The numbers are even more impressive when broken down temporally. At the turn of the millennium, some 8.4 million Africans were being baptized every year, which works out to 23,000 new Christians every day.

Of those 8.4 million new Christians, 1.5 million are what the World Christian Encyclopedia terms "net new converts": converts minus defections or apostasies.

Thus African Christianity is experiencing tremendous growth, not only through births into Christian families, but through effective evangelization. Will these almost biblical rates of conversion produce, later in this century, the missionary energy and personnel to re-convert Europe? Stay tuned.

Conversions in Asia

As for Asia, the World Christian Encyclopedia also notes impressive growth rates there, if within a much larger population. "Net conversions" in Asia come to 2.4 million per year - a number which is probably higher because no one knows what's going on in China, where the government has a vested interest in not getting the data out on Christian conversions and church growth.

Sometime in the first third of the 21st century, Asia will have its second majority-Christian country: South Korea, following the Philippines. Christianity came to the Philippines through colonialism, however; that's not been the case with South Korea, which suggests that Asia isn't as impervious to conversion as some may have thought.

Opportunity in China

I've been saying for years that China, when it finally opens up, will be the greatest field of Christian mission since the European discovery of the Americas.

One reason why involves the depredations of communism. Unlike India, which has a thick, intact, culturally-transmitted, and often anti-Christian religious system in the various forms of Hinduism, there's very little of the religious left in China.

Communism has destroyed much of China's traditional Confucian philosophical and moral system; Chinese communist repression in Tibet and elsewhere has seriously degraded Chinese Buddhism.

On the other hand, what's left of Confucian ethics in China has points of connection with biblical morality, so there's a place to start the conversation.

Possibilities in India

Cardinal Ivan Dias of Bombay (Mumbai) has recently made me wonder if I've not been too dismissive of India's evangelistic possibilities, however.

Speaking to the College of Cardinals this past October, Cardinal Dias noted that India now has the fourth largest episcopate in the world, after Brazil, Italy (of course!), and the United States. Christians are barely 2.3 percent of the total Indian population, and only 1.8 percent of the population is Catholic.

Yet, the cardinal noted, Indian Christians provide 20 percent of the country's elementary education and 10 percent of the literacy and community-based health-care programs; Christians provide 25 percent of the care for widows and orphans and 30 percent of the care of the handicapped, lepers, and those suffering from AIDS.

Links to evangelization

In Africa in the 20th century, as in the Roman Empire in the second and third centuries, Christianity attracted massive numbers of converts because it helped provide for those whom the rest of society preferred to ignore. Might that be the case in 22nd century India - or even 21st century India?

If so, it'll be because all that education, health care, and social service is deliberately linked to evangelization. Christian schools have long been recognized as the finest in Japan, the places where the elite sends their children. But there are as many Catholics in Japan today as there were in 1945, although the country is much more populous.

Why? Perhaps because of a certain reticence about evangelization. The Christian proposal won't be accepted unless it's made.

George Weigel is a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.