c. 1996 Religion News Service
Russian politician apologizes for slur on foreign religions
(RNS) Alexander Lebed, a retired general who heads Russia’s Security Council, apologized Tuesday (July 2) for calling Mormons and other non-Russian religions “filth and scum.”
“I didn’t want to offend anyone,” Lebed told a news conference in Moscow. But he also reiterated his opposition to “foreign” religions on Russian soil, the Associated Press reported.
“Regarding strangers on our territory … I’m categorically against them,” he said.
Lebed, who finished a strong third in the first round of Russia’s presidential balloting on June 16 and was then appointed by President Boris Yeltsin to head the Security Council, created an international furor June 27 with an angry denunciation of Western cultural influences in Russia.
Russia, he said at the time, has three “established traditional religions” _ Orthodox Christianity, Islam and Buddhism. He did not mention Judaism. Current estimates indicate there are from 650,000 to 1.5 million Jews living in Russia.
On Tuesday, however, Lebed said that he had not intentionally overlooked Judaism.
“When I said those three religions, they were like an example,” he said. “Yes, (Judaism) exists, just like Catholicism.”
In his remarks last week, Lebed said that while the traditional religions should be allowed to flourish, “all these Mormons are mold and filth which have come to destroy the state. The state should not allow them.”
He lumped the Mormons with the Japanese sect Aum Shinri Kyo, a group that has been implicated in a 1995 poison gas attack on Tokyo’s subway system.
Lebed’s comments sparked an angry response on the floor of the U.S. Senate and calls for the Clinton administration to rethink aid to Russia.
“He has attacked my faith … he has attacked the faith of America’s sixth largest church,” said Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the official name of the Mormons. “Comparing the Christian faith of the Mormons to a mindless cult led by deranged individuals is an outrage.”
The Mormon church has an estimated membership in Russia of between 4,000 and 5,000 people and more than 300 missionaries. It was granted permission to engage in religious activities in 1991.
Lebed said that after the July 3 elections, he would move to toughen visa requirements for foreigners.
In a separate development, the American Jewish Committee (AJC) announced Monday (July 1) that Russia has denied a visa to David A. Harris, the group’s executive director and a long time activist on behalf of Soviet Jews.
While three other members of the AJC were granted visas, Harris said his request was turned down without an explanation. Harris said the State Department has protested the denial.
Harris, in a statement, said that the visa denial _ together with Lebed’s earlier exclusion of Judaism as one of Russia’s traditional religions and recent government efforts to revoke the registration of the Jewish Agency for Israel _ are designed to “send a political signal of a changing Russia.”
Also on Monday, the government said it had expelled a Japanese missionary with the Unification Church of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, which, like the Mormons, is also active in Russia.
Religious activism urged in fight to protect the environment
(RNS) Increased activism by people of religious faith could help win the battle to save the environment, the spiritual head of Orthodox Christianity said Monday (July 1).
Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I addressed the opening of a week-long interfaith conference in Heybeli Island, Turkey, by urging the world’s religions to work with one another on behalf of the environment.
“Unhindered communication among all those concerned with the management of the ecological realities … is equivalent to … the sanctity of prayer,” he said, according to an Associated Press report.
Pope John Paul II, in a message to the meeting, said the conference could build “understanding of the wonders of God’s creation and of our responsibility to care for the work of God’s hands.”
President Bill Clinton sent both a message and a small pine tree to the meeting. The tree was planted during the opening ceremonies.
In his message, Clinton urged religious leaders to “move beyond mere awareness of the environmental crisis” toward “active and extensive efforts to ensure the health and preservation of the earth.”
Representatives of Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Anglican, Methodist, Jewish and Muslim faiths are attending the conference.
Lutheran body reports stable membership in 1995
(RNS) The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) said Tuesday (July 2) that its membership was virtually unchanged during 1995. The Chicago-based denomination reported a total of 5,190,489 baptized members in 11,023 congregations.
According to the report, the new figure is a decline of just 8,559 people from 1994, a drop of less than two-tenths of 1 percent.
At the same time, the denomination reported that the number of congregations increased by 50.
The report, released by the denomination’s Office of the Secretary, also said that the average number of people at worship on weekends _ another indicator of participation in the life of the church _ remained about the same in 1995 as 1994: 1.6 million, or 30.2 percent of all baptized members.
Australian euthanasia law challenged in courts
(RNS) A law permitting voluntary euthanasia took effect in Australia’s Northern Territory on Monday (July 1), but was immediately challenged in court by a coalition of religious leaders and others.
In addition, a group of lawmakers in Australia’s federal parliament said they were preparing legislation to overturn the statute.
The law was adopted by the Northern Territory’s parliament in May.
It allows terminally ill patients to be given lethal injections of drugs, but only after a nine-day waiting period and evaluation by three doctors, including a specialist in the relevant disease.
Immediately after the law went into effect, a coalition of opponents representing religious leaders, doctors and aboriginal organizations, challenged it in the Northern Territory Supreme Court.
The dispute is expected to wind up in Australia’s Supreme Court, a process that could take months or years to resolve.
David Jackson, a lawyer for the coalition challenging the law, said the measure denied Australians’ right to life.
Jackson said that the law denies “a fundamental right, principle, value or doctrine that there is sanctity of life or that there is an inalienable right to life,” Reuter news agency reported.
Marshall Perron, the former head of the provincial government in the Northern Territory and architect of the voluntary euthanasia law, said he was confident the law would survive the legal and political challenges it faces.
“What’s happening is that … legal, voluntary euthanasia is going through a very difficult birth,” he told Reuters. “And that will continue for a while before the future is clear, whilst the gauntlet is to be run of religious … zealots.”
John Mount, Episcopal priest who defied church on gays, dies
(RNS) The Rev. John Keener Mount, an Episcopal priest who acknowledged his homosexuality at the age of 82 and later went on to officiate at a same-sex marriage, has died at the age of 86.
Mount died at his home in Easton, Md., June 15 of congestive heart failure, news services reported Tuesday (July 2).
Mount shook up the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland in 1992 when he told church leaders during a discussion of a report on human sexuality that he was a homosexual and had kept it a secret for more than 50 years.
“For me, it’s over _ the struggle, the deceptions,” he later told the Washington Post. “And it was the deception that was the terrible part.”
Last year, Mount officiated at the ceremony of two gay men who were HIV-positive and refused diocesan leaders’ order to inform the couple that their marriage was not valid.
As a result, Mount was stripped of his license to preach or serve communion in any church in the diocese.
Mount said he acted in part because of his own sexuality and because he wanted to nudge the church along toward acceptance of homosexuality.
A native of Baltimore, Mount received his divinity degree from Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, Va., in 1935. He was ordained the same year and served parishes in Maryland and Great Britain until his retirement in 1972.
He married the former Alice Thornhill Dashiell in 1960. She died in 1991.
Quote of the day: Marj Carpenter, outgoing moderator of the Presbyterian Church (USA), on mission and the church.
(RNS) Marj Carpenter ended her one-year term as moderator of the Presbyterian Church (USA) this week at the 208th General Assembly of the 2.7 million-member denomination. In her final official act, the former newswoman and church communicator, preached the sermon at the assembly’s opening session, talking on mission and Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac:
“God gives you the strength if He gives you the call. I do know that our wonderful Presbyterian church must call mission (work) back to the heart and get on with it. You see, I have really enjoyed serving as your moderator, the messenger, the reporter, the communicator, because I couldn’t do what Abraham did. I’m awed by God’s sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Of all the people I’ve seen in this wonderful church, only the missionaries come close to that kind of sacrifice.”
END ANDERSON
