c. 1996 Religion News Service
Australia mourns shooting victims amid calls for tougher gun controls
(RNS)-Australians joined together for a minute of silence in shared national grief Wednesday (May 1) for the 35 victims of last weekend’s shooting rampage on the island state of Tasmania.
Flags were flown at half mast throughout Australia, and several thousand people, including Australian Prime Minister John Howard, joined relatives and friends of the victims in an hour-long, nationally televised memorial service at St. David’s Anglican Cathedral in Hobart, the capital of Tasmania, 30 miles from the site of the shootings in Port Arthur.
A few blocks from the cathedral, the accused gunman, 28-year-old Martin Bryant, was under heavy police guard, suffering from burn injuries he received while fleeing an inn he allegedly torched and where three of the 35 victims were found.
Reuters reported that Britain’s Queen Elizabeth, who is Australia’s head of state, sent a message of condolence to the congregation, comparing the Tasmanian community’s trauma with the grief she encountered last month in her visit to the Scottish town of Dunblane, where 16 children were gunned down in another shooting rampage.
Anglican Bishop Phillip Newell of Hobart made a similar comparison on Tuesday (April 30).”I wept when I heard of the Dunblane tragedy in Scotland,”he said.”I wept yesterday as I heard of the Port Arthur massacre.” At the cathedral, 35 candles-one for each victim-were placed at the foot of a simple wooden cross erected in front of the church’s ornate altar, the AP said.
Prayers and readings were offered from the Bible, the Koran, the Bhagavad-Gita (the Hindu scripture) and from Buddhist texts, Reuters said.
Tasmanian Premier Tony Rundle, speaking at the memorial service, called the rampage”an hour of evil,”adding:”No one in our small community goes untouched by this wickedness. Pain is etched in every face, in every anguished voice, in every grieving tear, and it is pain shared throughout our nation and around the world.” On Monday (April 29), as news of the shooting rampage hit Australia, a number of clerics called for tough new gun control laws in Australia. On Wednesday, Prime Minister John Howard joined their call.”Surely we need no further evidence for our legislators to realize the urgent necessity for stronger firearms legislation to ensure reasonable, prudent gun control in this country,”Anglican Archbishop Harry Goodhew of Sydney told Church Scene, the Anglican news agency in Australia.
Anglican Archdeacon of Liverpool Geoff Huard said that gun-related violence is”out of hand. The time has come to license every firearm in the nation, not just the gunowners.” Howard did not go as far as Huard but urged a ban on all semi-automatic firearms.
Congress holds hearing on legalized assisted suicide
(RNS)-The U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee held a one-day information-gathering hearing on legalizing assisted suicide Tuesday (April 30), and religious leaders were divided on the idea.”The (Roman) Catholic bishops of the United States have reaffirmed their opposition to euthanasia and assisted suicide on many occasions,”Cardinal Bernard Law said in testimony submitted to the committee. He said the government should not say some lives are protected by law while others are not.
But Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong of Newark, N.J., told the committee he believed assisted suicide should be legalized under”limited”circumstances, Reuters reported.
The hearing was prompted by two recent federal appeals court decisions that struck down bans on assisted suicide in New York and Washington state and the 1994 Oregon initiative in which voters approved legalizing doctor-assisted suicide. The Oregon initiative is under appeal, though Oregon is covered by the Washington state decision.
Dr. Lonnie Bristow, representing the American Medical Association, testified that doctor-assisted suicide”raises troubling and insurmountable `slippery slope’ problems”in which it is difficult to ensure that a patient’s decision to die is unambivalent and free of coercion, the AP reported.
Dr. Timothy Quill, a plaintiff in the case challenging New York’s ban on assisted suicide, said it should be permitted as a last resort, according to Reuters.”Physician-assisted death should be restricted to those relatively few patients for whom hospice care ceases to be effective and suffering is so intolerable that death is their only answer,”he testified.
President Clinton is personally opposed to assisted suicide, the administration told the committee.”The president has clearly expressed his personal opposition to assisted suicide, and he remains of that view,”John Hilley, White House director of legislative affairs, said in a letter to the committee. But the administration declined to send a representative to testify because it has not yet addressed the constitutional issues involved in the New York and Washington decisions.
State Department says acts of international terrorism were up last year
(RNS)-Terrorist incidents worldwide jumped 37 percent last year, from 322 in 1994 to 440 in 1995, the State Department reported Tuesday (April 30). It said there were 99 attacks against American interests-that is, people or facilities-up 50 percent from the 66 incidents in 1994.
At the same time, the report,”Patterns of Global Terrorism 1995,”said the number of deaths from international terrorism dropped nearly in half, from 314 in 1994 to 165 last year.”Terrorists failed to achieve ultimate political goals, as in the past, but they continued to cause major political, psychological and economic damage,”the report said.
The report listed seven nations-Syria, Iran, Cuba, Iraq, Libya, North Korea and Sudan-as”sponsors of international terrorism.””Today (terrorists) are most often in the rear guard, rather than the vanguard,”Philip C. Wilcox, the State Department’s coordinator for counterterrorism, told a news conference.”They (terrorists) are predominantly reactionary and anti-democratic,”he added.”And, in the court of world opinion, they and their causes are increasingly on the defensive.”
Pope urges remembering the jobless on May Day
(RNS)-Pope John Paul II asked Roman Catholics on Wednesday (May 1)-International Workers Day-to pray for workers but not to forget the jobless.”Let us pray for all those who are responsible for human work, for all the workers of the world, for human work of every type,”the pontiff said in an outdoor audience at St. Peter’s Square.”And I call on all of you to pray for the families which do not have jobs,”Reuters reported the pope as saying.
May 1 is traditionally marked in countries around the world as a day to celebrate workers and labor. The observance began in the United States in 1886, when more than 300,000 workers went on strike for the eight-hour day, but its association with socialism, and later communism, brought the celebration into disrepute.
The Rev. Marvin Roloff will head Augsburg Fortress publishing house
(RNS)-The Rev. Marvin Roloff has been elected president and chief executive officer of Augsburg Fortress Publishers, the publishing house of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
Roloff, 62, has served for the past year as acting president and CEO, following the resignation of Gary J.N. Aamodt.
Aamodt resigned a year ago after coming under fire from the firm’s board of directors because the publishing house ended 1994 with a deficit in spite of cutting 110 positions, centralizing distribution and reducing inventory.
Roloff, ordained in 1961, has worked for the publishing house for almost 30 years.
With more than 400 employees, Augsburg Fortress is the third-largest Protestant church-owned publisher in the United States.
Quote of the day: Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole on the art exhibit,”Old Glory: The American Flag in Contemporary Art” (RNS)-A controversial art exhibit,”Old Glory: The American Flag in Contemporary Art,”recently opened in Phoenix, Ariz. The show has drawn sharp criticism from some because one of the works in the exhibit shows the flag draped in a toilet and another invites viewers to walk on a flag spread on the floor. Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, the presumed Republican candidate for president and a frequent critic of the arts and entertainment industries, offered these thoughts on the flag exhibit:”This exhibit mocks the very symbol of this nation’s freedom and the standard which has inspired brave Americans to fight and to die in defense of that freedom. First Amendment freedoms-which all of us revere-do not excuse such a disgusting display of contempt for the people and the ideas of this nation.”
LJB END ANDERSON
