The National Park Service continues to avoid setting policy on religious displays in public parks, a watchdog alliance of public employees charged today.

The Park Service has acted as if it were in a “a stupor over a stupa,” a 9-foot Tibetan Buddhist structure for worship and storage of relics on the grounds of the Petroglyph National Monument near Albuquerque, according to the nonprofit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.

PEER, an association of local, state and federal scientists, law officers and land managers, said the Park Service has failed to undertake timely legal review of the appropriateness of keeping the stupa and other religious markers. Others at issue include bronze plaques inscribed with biblical verses at three sites in Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona.

The stupa was already present on private land the Park Service purchased in 1996 as part a preserve encompassing thousands of prehistoric and historic petroglyphs and other archaeological sites.

Silence on the disposition of the Buddhist holy site is just the latest example of park Service indecision, PEER officials said.

Park Service Intermountain Region spokesman James Doyle said matters have been referred to a Department of Interior solicitor. PEER was informed of this by letter in early March.

“We are dealing with this,” Doyle said, “but dealing with religious displays is not easy. We want to be respectful of the separation of church and state, but it’s sometimes difficult to tell the history of the U.S. without preserving the role religion has played.”

For example, Doyle said, Civil Rights hero Martin Luther King Jr.’s Ebenezer Baptist Church is itself a National Historic Site in the NPS system.

Yosemite National Park is home to a historic chapel. Sitka National Historical Park has a Russian Orthodox chapel. A Spanish mission in San Antonio and a Wyoming Indian site are other examples.

The Park Service was involved in almost a decade of litigation over a cross atop Sunrise Rock in California’s Mojave National Preserve. The Mojave Memorial Cross, erected in 1934 to honor war dead, was not a violation of the separation of church and state, ruled the U.S. Supreme Court on April 28, 2010.

“The goal of avoiding governmental endorsement (of religion) does not require eradication of all symbols in the public realm,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority.

However, the cross was stolen in May 2010.

The Grand Canyon plaques, donated in the 1960s by a Protestant religious order called the Evangelical Sisterhood of Mary, were removed by NPS officals on advice of lawyers on July 14, 2003.

Four days later, the Park Service’s then-Deputy Director, Donald Murphy, wrote to the sisters and asked them to bring back the plaques to original locations: Lookout Studio in the Grand Canyon Village of the South Rim, Hermits Rest on the South Rim and Watchtower at Desert View.

The Bible verses are from Psalms, including Psalms 104:24: “O Lord, how manifold are thy works! In wisdom thou hast made them all: the earth is full of they riches.”

The other verses are Psalms 66:4 and Psalms 68:4.

Murphy said then that the Park Service would undertake more in-depth legal and policy review. The country is still waiting, PEER officials said.

“When it comes to religious displays, Park Service leadership reacts like a deer in the headlights — afraid to move but frozen in an indefensible position,” said PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch.

“PEER has no hostility toward religion, but we are concerned about the appropriate use of federal lands in the national park system,” Ruch said. “What will it take to get National Park Service officials to respect the U.S. Constitution?”

Local Buddhists have asked the Park Service and New Mexico’s congressional delegation to preserve the stupa, consecrated in 1989. The land it’s on had been owned by Ariane Emery and her husband, Dr. Harold Cohen. Their house and all other structures, except the stupa, were removed when the Park Service bought the land.

“The stupa is not historic in any sense,” Ruch wrote to Park Service Regional Director John Wessels last fall.

The stupa serves no secular purpose, PEER said, at least not one yet articulated by the Park Service.

The Park Service is not maintaining the Nyingmapa bodhisattva-style stupa, which is made of concrete, stucco, wood and copper. It contains sacred Buddhist relics from Nepal.

Electa Draper: 303-954-1276 or edraper@denverpost.com