c. 1996 Religion News Service

Guatemalan Presbyterians say paramilitary groups wage violence on church

(RNS) The Evangelical Presbyterian Church in Guatemala says it has become the target of a systematic campaign of intimidation and violence waged by paramilitary groups and “conservative religious fanatics.”

According to ALC, an ecumenical news agency based in Lima, Peru, the church has asked government and judicial authorities in Guatemala to investigate a series of attacks directed at denomination leaders and members.

It is also seeking the support and protection of church bodies outside of Guatemala. The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), currently meeting in Albuquerque, N.M., is expected to vote later this week on a resolution condemning the violence. It has already sent a number of U.S. Presbyterians to Guatemala to accompany threatened church leaders on their travels.

The request by the Guatemalan Presbyterians was issued in the wake of a series of incidents in May and June, including death threats received in late June by Maria Francisca Ventura, widow of Presbyterian leader Manuel Saquic. Saquic was killed last year in what authorities suspect was the work of a death squad. Saquic was a prominent defender of human rights, especially of Guatemala’s indigenous people in the area around the mountainous Chimaltenango region.

Ventura received the death threat on June 23, a day after the denomination held a worship service marking the first anniversary of her husband’s death.

The Rev. Herb Valentine, a former moderator of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) who attended the memorial service, said that until the Guatemalan government acts to to crack down on the paramilitary groups and death squads, the cycle of violence that has plagued Guatemala will not be broken.

“I am angered by the persecution and threats suffered by our brothers and sisters of the Presbyterian Church who seek simply to live their faith,” he said.

In addition to the death threat against Ventura, the Rev. Samuel Merida Ajanel, moderator of the church, was kidnapped in May and held captive for five days before being released. He was threatened with death if he did not quit his church positions. It is suspected that the kidnapping was carried out by dissident members of the denomination who do not approve of the church’s advocacy of human rights for the poor.

In early June, according to the church, Presbyterian social workers Catalina Morales and the Rev. Manuel Paz Perez were also threatened and beaten. And a Dutch missionary, Guillermo van Der Vegte, who works with Presbyterian youth, has been attacked by armed groups on several occasions over the past two months, ALC said.

The Guatemalan denomination also appealed to the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) to condemn the violence and to urge the U.S. government to exert pressure on Guatemala to bring the violence to an end.

“This kidnapping (of Merida) has brought another round of harassment in Guatemala and the church has asked us to support them,” said Julia Ann Moffett of the PCUSA’s Worldwide Ministries Division, who acts as a liaison with Guatemala.

Hungary, Germany consider restitution measures for Holocaust survivors

(RNS) Hungary and Germany, in differing ways, are considering steps to make restitution to aging victims of the Holocaust.

In Germany, the Federal Constitutional Court refused Tuesday (July 2) to decide if survivors of Nazi death camps can sue the government for compensation. It said the case should be considered by lower courts.

The ruling followed the filing of claims by one German citizen and people from 21 other countries who were forced by the Nazis to work at a munitions factory while interned at the Auschwitz death camp. All of the plaintiffs are Jewish.

Lawyers for the victims welcomed the verdict, saying it paved the way for the survivors to seek compensation in German courts, the Associated Press reported Tuesday (July 2).

About 7 million slave laborers worked in Nazi Germany during World War II. The German government has generally not recognized claims by people forced into slave labor, saying they were pressed into service by private companies.

The Associated Press reported that Germany has paid more than $70 billion in reparations to Nazi victims.

In Hungary, meanwhile, the government is in the final stages of devising a plan to compensate Hungarian Jews who survived the Holocaust, Reuters reported on Wednesday (July 3).

Hungarian government officials and representatives of the U.S.-based World Jewish Congress are to meet later in the week to work out the details of the agreement.

According to Judit Csiha, political state secretary in the Ministry of Justice, the agreement calls for establishing a foundation to which the government would turn over some real estate, works of art and money for “compensation coupons,” or vouchers, to be given in lieu of properties confiscated by the Nazis and the communists who took power after the war.

The foundation would provide stipends to Hungary’s 10,000 to 15,000 Holocaust survivors.

Methodist gay fight continues at the local level

(RNS) Back in April, the General Conference of the United Methodist Church reaffirmed its position that homosexuality is “incompatible” with Christian teaching. But the action has failed to end the fighting on the issue among members of the nation’s second-largest Protestant denomination.

In late June, delegates to the annual meeting of the West Ohio Conference, meeting in Lakeside, Ohio, adopted a resolution voicing support for the denomination’s action in April, the Associated Press reported Wednesday (July 3).

The resolution was a slap on the wrist of West Ohio Bishop Judith Craig, one of 15 bishops who issued a statement during the April General Conference meeting in Denver, unsuccessfully urging the church to drop its anti-gay stance.

Tom Slack, the spokesman for the bishop, dismissed the West Ohio conference vote as meaningless.

“It will make no immediate, significant difference on church policy,” he said. “It doesn’t have constitutional or legal implications for the church.”

Meanwhile, 43 United Methodist pastors in the Wisconsin Annual Conference issued a declaration saying they “will not be bound” by the decision of the Wisconsin Methodists to welcome all people into their churches, including gays and lesbians.

Their action was in opposition to an earlier resolution by Wisconsin Methodists declaring themselves a “reconciling conference,” the name given an unofficial movement among United Methodists working toward the full inclusion of homosexuals in the life of the church.

“Evangelical and moderate pastors in Wisconsin are quite upset that the Annual Conference appears to be endorsing the gay agenda,” said the Rev. Tom Lambrecht, one of the authors of the dissenting declaration.

Wisconsin is one of two annual conferences, a jurisdiction similar to a diocese, that voted in June to become “reconciling conferences” despite the action of the General Conference. The other was the Oregon-Idaho Conference.

Campbell stepping down as dean of Duke divinity school

(RNS) The Rev. Dennis M. Campbell, dean of the Duke University Divinity School since 1982, will step down from the post at the end of the 1996-97 academic year, the school has announced.

A new dean will be selected in the coming year.

Campbell, who has served as dean longer than anyone in the 70-year history of the school, said that “after 15 years, it’s time for a change.”

During Campbell’s tenure, the school has added programs leading to a master of theological studies degree and a master of church ministries degree. The school’s endowment has increased from $5 million to $26 million.

Campbell, a 1967 graduate of the divinity school, will take a year-long sabbatical and then return to a full-time faculty post at the school.

United Methodist Bishop Ernest Dixon dead at 73

(RNS) Retired United Methodist Bishop Ernest T. Dixon, Jr., the first African-American bishop in the denomination’s eight-state South Central Jurisdiction, has died at the age of 73.

Dixon died June 29 at the Methodist Hospital in San Antonio, Texas, of unknown causes, the United Methodist News Service reported.

Dixon had been a patient at the hospital but was looking forward to being discharged and a planned trip, according to the Rev. Jerry J. Smith, assistant to Bishop Roy Owen, the bishop of the San Antonio Area. “This was sudden and unexpected,” he said.

In 1972, Dixon was elected bishop in the South Central Jurisdiction and served eight years as the episcopal leader of the Kansas Area and 12 years in the San Antonio Area before retiring in 1992.

He served as president of the Church’s Council of Bishops in 1988-89.

Quote of the day: The Rev. Fred Bernhard, moderator of the Church of Brethren, on baptism and family values.

(RNS) The Rev. Fred Bernhard, pastor of Oakland Church of the Brethren in Gettsysburg, Ohio, and moderator of the 1996 Annual Conference of the denomination, preached the opening sermon Tuesday (July 2) at the opening session of the conference. In his homily, Bernhard reflected on his baptism and its relation to family:

“The world has always wanted me to believe that blood is thicker than water. But on that cool spring (baptismal) day in 1948, I was ushered into a congregational family’s heart and home where the water of baptism was thicker than the blood of relational family ties. While blood ties are still important to me, I believe in Christ’s eyes it really doesn’t matter that in my veins there is Meeshy, Lehman, Gibbie, Shelly, Graybill and Bernhard blood lines. … Like it or not, the bond that binds us _ you and me _ brother to brother, sister to sister, in God’s family is the binding of our Elder Brother, Jesus Christ. It’s not a genealogical, ethnic, cultural, gender or political binding.”

END ANDERSON