"Empire State Building Refuses to Light Up for Mother Teresa"
Posting by T. Flusser
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 June 10, 2010
The Empire State Building's owner says he won't light the landmark skyscraper for Mother Teresa because of a policy against honoring individual religious figures.
August 26 marks what would have been Mother Teresa's 100th birthday, with commemorative masses, exhibitions and other events around the world heralding the occasion.
A lay group, the Catholic League, made the request in February 2010, and it was denied. The league says individual religious figures have, in fact, received the honor. It cited lights honoring the deaths of Cardinal John O'Connor in 2000 and Pope John Paul II in 2005.
"As a privately owned building, ESB has a specific policy against any other lighting for religious figures or requests by religions and religious organizations," said Anthony Malkin, head of the family company that owns the building.
Outside its practice of lightings for Christmas, Easter, Hanukkah and Eid al-Fitr (the end of Ramadan), the Empire State Building "has a specific policy against any other lighting for religious figures or requests by religions and religious organizations," ESB owner Anthony E. Malkin said in a statement.
The lighting tradition dates back to 1932, when the Empire State Building shined a 50-mile searchlight beacon to announce that Franklin D. Roosevelt had been elected president. Colored lighting wasn't introduced til 1976, when the tower was lit in red, white and blue for the American Bicentennial.
The Catholic League plans to demonstrate outside the Empire State Building on August 26th 2010. More than 40,000 people have signed a petition in support of the special lights for Mother Teresa.
 The City Council introduced a resolution calling on Malkin to change his mind, so far without effect. The CC Speaker Christine Quinn said that lighting the Empire State Building in Mother Teresa's honor would "be a very uplifting and unifying and inspiring message to have at a time when I think the city could use it."
"I think the organization that owns the Empire State Building seeing this as a religious request is really missing much of the significance of her life's work. She was a Nobel Prize winner. She was someone who inspired people of all religions."sais Quinn.
League President Bill Donohue said Malkin's policy "is being made up on the run," but the building owner is "not going to get away with it."
Last year, the building was bathed in red and yellow — the colors of communist China — to mark the 60th anniversary of its founding. That decision created a controversy that matches the current one.
Mother Teresa was 87 when she died in 1997. She has been beatified by the Roman Catholic Church, a step before being named a saint.
Source: The Associated Press, Religion Blogs - CNN
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