c. 1996 Religion News Service

Pope expresses anguish over violence in Africa

(RNS) Pope John Paul II, in a brief appearance Wednesday (Oct. 30) before pilgrims in St. Peter’s Square, said the widening war in the central African nations of Zaire, Burundi and Rwanda is”an interminable tragedy.””It is anguishing to see how human beings who are children of God and who are our brothers are being treated,”John Paul said.”The Lord will call everyone to account.” John Paul made his comments in a 15-minute appearance at the window of his apartment that overlooks the square. Vatican officials had hoped that the pontiff, still recovering from his Oct. 8 appendectomy, would be able to resume his regular 90-minute general audiences on Wednesday but announced that he would not.”I pray for guns to be silenced, for hatred and ethnic rivalries to be placated and that an end be put to the shameful manhunt that is taking the place of negotiations,”the pope said, according to the Reuter news agency.”With unspeakable sorrow, I am following events in northeastern Zaire, where ferocious fighting and looting has forced thousands of Rwandan and Burundian refugees, especially the elderly, women and children, into an aimless flight,”he said.

His comments came as the conflict that has pitted ethnic Hutus and Tutsis against each other in Burundi and Rwanda had spilled over into Zaire, creating as many as 500,000 mostly Hutu refugees and threatening to result in war between Zaire and Rwanda.

The Tutsi-dominated governments in Rwanda and Burundi see the Hutu refugees, thousands of whom are former soldiers of the ousted Rwandan government, as a potential threat.

Much of the current fighting between Zairean troops and Tutsis has been centered on the Zairean town of Bukavu, near the Rwanda-Zaire border and not far from the sprawling refugee camps at Goma, Zaire.

In London on Wednesday, CAFOD, the overseas development agency of the Catholic Church in England, said a priest working in Bukavu has reported the town is completely cut off from aid supplies and thousands of refugees are in danger of starving to death.

In New York, the United Methodist Board of Global Ministries said the escalating conflicts have shut down all its refugee and relief services. Most international aid workers were evacuated from Bukavu on Monday (Oct. 28), resulting in the immediate looting of United Nations food warehouses, according to news reports.

The United Nations’ World Food Program said on Wednesday it hoped to begin an emergency airlift of relief supplies into Goma, where there are an estimated 727,000 refugees.”Our intention is to establish an emergency stockpile of food and emergency relief items in Goma which we can use depending on needs,”WFP spokesman Trevor Rowe said in a statement.

Also on Wednesday, Reuters reported that a closed-door meeting of European donors and Western aid agencies ended late Tuesday (Oct. 29) with no decisions on how to ease the worsening refugee crisis in eastern Zaire.

Texas Baptists criticized for decision to share hunger gifts

(RNS) A decision by the Baptist General Convention of Texas to give money it collects to fight hunger at home and abroad to Baptist mission agencies other than those controlled by the Southern Baptist Convention has drawn fire from top Southern Baptist Convention leaders.

The decision highlights the on-going struggle between moderates in the nation’s largest Protestant body and conservatives, who control most of the institutional machinery of the 15.6 million-member denomination.

The Texas Southern Baptists, instead of observing the denominational-supported World Hunger Day in October, have set the four Sundays prior to Thanksgiving as the time to emphasize the anti-hunger offering.

More importantly, the Texas Southern Baptists have changed the way the anti-hunger contributions are allocated. Instead of giving 80 percent to the SBC’s Foreign Mission Board and 20 percent to the Home Mission Board, the Texas Baptists now give some of its anti-hunger money to the Baptist World Alliance, an umbrella organization of several foreign and domestic Baptist groups, and to the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, an independent group established by moderates unhappy with the conservative leadership of the denomination.”We regret that Texas Baptists have chosen to manage gifts to world hunger independently rather than cooperatively with the (SBC) mission boards,”Jerry Rankin, president of the SBC’s foreign mission board told Baptist Press, the denomination’s official news agency.”It is sad that funds would be diverted to the Baptist World Alliance and other organizations for work in places such as African and Bosnia rather than supporting our Foreign Mission Board missionaries who are sharing the Gospel and ministering so effectively in those needy and responsive areas of the world,”he said.

But Texas Baptist officials said they believe the new emphasis and distribution will result in an overall increase of giving to hunger causes.”While the hunger emphasis falls on the Texas calendar in November, the offering is really a yearlong effort,”said Joe Haag, associate director of the Texas Christian Life Commission.”Since projects are funded throughout the year, we encourage churches to promote support for hunger giving throughout the year.”

Orthodox Jewish groups back Ohio voucher program for religious schools

(RNS) Two Orthodox Jewish groups have filed separate friend-of-the-court briefs with Ohio’s 10th District Court of Appeals, asking the court to uphold the state’s controversial voucher program that provides funds allowing some low-income parents to send their children to private schools.”This is a critical test case for school choice experiments in particular and the ongoing fight for religious accommodation and pluralism in general,”said Nathan Diament, director of the Institute for Public Affairs (IPA) of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America. The IPA was one of several groups joining a brief filed by the National Jewish Commission on Law and Public Affairs.

A separate supporting brief was filed by Agudath Israel of America, a New York-based Orthodox Jewish group with chapters across the country, arguing the plan meets the constitutional separation of church and state test because the plan assists parents, not individual schools.

Under the Ohio plan, vouchers worth up to $2,250 are given to the parents of 1,500 Cleveland children to help pay tuition costs at private or religious schools or participating public schools outside the Cleveland public school system.

The plan has been challenged by two local teacher unions and the American Civil Liberties Union. Earlier this summer, an Ohio court upheld the constitutionality of the Cleveland plan but opponents quickly appealed the ruling.

The Orthodox view, however, is not the only view in the Jewish community. Earlier this month, the American Jewish Congress, the Anti-Defamation League and the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council filed a brief with the court asking that the plan be ruled unconstitutional.

Update: Vatican, Cuba agree to papal visit

(RNS) Cuban President Fidel Castro has issued an invitation for Pope John Paul II to visit Cuba and a top church official said that Vatican and Cuban officials will begin to make arrangements for the visit, probably sometime next year.

The announcement of the agreement came as Vatican Foreign Minister Jean-Louis Tauran wrapped up a five-day trip to Cuba on Tuesday (Oct. 29).”We have agreed that soon the relevant arrangements will be made for this pastoral visit to take place,”Tauran told reporters before boarding his plane to return to the Vatican.”The so longed-for visit … would represent a culmination and a new departure point on the road toward normalized relations between the church and state in Cuba,”he said.

John Paul and Castro are expected to meet in Rome next month at the United Nations-sponsored World Food Summit, if Castro decides to make the trip. Castro is one of the few world leaders the pope has not met.

Although Cuba invited the pope to visit the island nation in 1980, plans for the trip were never finalized and church-state relations in Cuba have blown hot and cold during the Castro era.

During his five-day visit, Tauran, the Vatican’s top diplomatic official, pleased his Cuban hosts by sharply criticizing U.S. policy toward Cuba as”imperial.”But he also pressed the Castro government to give the church more freedom.

Roman Catholic Parliament members in Scotland criticize their bishop

(RNS) Roman Catholic Parliament members of the Scottish Labor Party have reacted sharply to the Archbishop of Glasgow’s strong criticism of their party leader’s approach to the abortion issue.

In a televised interview Sunday (Oct. 27), Cardinal Tom Winning complained about the lack of attention to the issue by the so-called New Labor Party, under the leadership of Tony Blair.”New Labor does have a number of Christian politicians, and yet it has consistently avoided condemning abortion,”Winning said.

The cardinal cited an incident two years ago when the Scottish Labor Party would not allow an anti-abortion Labor group to have a booth at a conference sponsored by the party.”To me, it was almost fascist in its approach,”Winning said.”And I’m afraid Mr. Blair sort of washed his hands of it. He says he doesn’t agree with abortion, but … he doesn’t condemn it or have a policy on it.” Forty-nine of the 72 Scottish seats of the 651-seat British Parliament are held by the Labor Party. Seven of the 49 Scottish Labor Party members of Parliament are Roman Catholic. In Scotland, Labor is the predominant political party, supported by nearly two-thirds of Roman Catholic voters.”I strongly disagree with attempts by anyone clerical or secular who wants to turn abortion into a party political issue, and I intend to do everything in my power to keep abortion out of party politics,”said Blair, an Anglican, in response to Winning’s criticism, the Sunday Telegram reported.

Quote of the day: author Dan Wakefield

(RNS) Dan Wakefield, the novelist and non-fiction writer, has increasingly turned to spiritual themes in his recent writing. In an interview in the irreverent evangelical magazine”The Door,”Wakefield talks about the experience of going to a New York dinner party with a friend interested in spirituality. The guests were willing to talk about the graphic violence in a recent novel, Wakefield said, but afraid to talk about religion:”Afterwards my friend said, `Did you notice there was a taboo subject?’ I said, `Yes, religion.’ Because several times something would come up that had to do with her interest or my interest and immediately the host or hostess would clam up like they didn’t want to hear about that. And then I would feel uneasy because I feel like people I know, a lot of them from that era, are afraid that I’m going to try to convert them or something. It’s kind of weird. It was OK to talk about dismemberment of the human body over dinner but it wasn’t OK to talk about religion or anything of faith or that kind of belief.”

MJP END RNS