c. 1997 Religion News Service
Pope, Dylan: the winds of spirituality are blowin’
(RNS) For some, it was a most unlikely meeting of faith and culture. But for others, folk-rock legend Bob Dylan singing before Pope John Paul II and an audience of 300,000 young people was a marriage made in heaven.”It’s the stuff of which legends are made: the rebel who’s been knock, knock, knocking on heaven’s door meeting the man with the keys to the kingdom,”the Associated Press wrote of Dylan’s appearance Saturday (Sept. 27) at a Roman Catholic youth festival in Bologna, Italy, where he shared the stage _ and his music _ with the 77-year-old pontiff.
Dylan, who in a career spanning more than 30 years has frequently used religious language and the metaphors of faith to spin out songs soaked in an ambiguous and difficult spirituality, sang two of his songs in the presence of the pope _ his classic”Knock, Knock, Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”and the anti-war anthem”A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.”He finished his set, after the pope had left, with”Forever Young,”a mid-70s song urging hope and courage among youth.
John Paul, for his part, quoted lines from Dylan’s most famous song,”Blowin’ in the Wind,”telling the cheering crowd of youth that the answer was, indeed, blowing in the wind _”the wind of the spirit,”he said.
And the pontiff also answered the question Dylan asked in the first line of the song:”How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?” Said the pope:”One. Only one. And that is the road of man and this is Christ. … He is the road of truth and the road of life.” Dylan, born Robert Zimmerman in Hibbing, Minn., is Jewish and his music reflects several religious phases and spiritual quests, including a born-again Christian phase and, most recently, Lubavitch Hasidism, suggesting to some he has returned to his Jewish roots.
After singing the two songs, Dylan walked up to a podium where the pope rose to greet him. Dylan took off the cowboy hat he was wearing, bowed before the pontiff and the two briefly exchanged words.
The Bologna youth festival was a first _ and according to church organizers, belated _ attempt to reach out with pop music.
The Rev. Ernesto Vecchi, an organizer of the festival dubbed by some”the Catholic Woodstock,”said last month Dylan had been invited to perform”as the representative of the best type of rock. … He has a spiritual nature.”
Some advertisers pull ads from `Nothing Sacred’
(RNS) Some advertisers have decided there’s nothing sacred about the audience of”Nothing Sacred”and have alerted the show’s network they no longer want their ads running during the controversial new show.”Nothing Sacred,”an hourlong drama depicting a Catholic priest’s struggles with contemporary times, premiered Sept. 18 on ABC-TV, a subsidiary of the Walt Disney Co. It has received praise from some reviewers but some religious organizations have been offended by its treatment of the Catholic Church and provocative issues, such as abortion.
The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights has spearheaded a campaign to encourage advertisers to withdraw their commercials from the program. Catholic League president William Donohue said Friday (Sept. 26) he thinks his campaign has only just begun.”We’re in this for the long haul and we will settle for nothing less than the removal of this show from TV,”he said in a statement.
Restaurant, stores and makers of dishwasher detergents are among those who have responded to concerns.
Darden Restaurants, the Orlando, Fla.-based parent company of Red Lobster, issued a statement Friday (Sept. 26) saying the company had aired an ad on the series’ premiere but would not do so in the future. “We determined the series may offend a significant share of viewers, which violates our advertising policy,”the statement reads.”As a result, we have no future plans to advertise on `Nothing Sacred.'” Benckiser Consumer Products of Danbury, Conn., which advertised a new dishwashing product called”Electrosol Automatic Dishwashing Tabs”during the first show, issued letters to customers who inquired about their ad.”Benckiser deeply regrets any offense that our participation on the program may have caused,”wrote Alice White, consumer information services supervisor.”It certainly was not the company’s intent to offend anyone. Please be assured that Benckiser has decided not to advertise on `Nothing Sacred’ in the future.” In some cases, companies did not know their ad was going to appear on the show and have informed the network they do not want that to happen again.
Mary Lorencz, a spokeswoman for Kmart, said a Kmart ad aired during the show’s premiere because the network started airing”Nothing Sacred”a week earlier than originally scheduled.”We did tell ABC that we did not want any of our commercials to fall in shows that we didn’t buy and that’s a very controversial show so we wouldn’t necessarily want to be connected with it,”Lorencz said.
Linda Webb Carilli, a spokeswoman for Weight Watchers International, told The New York Times the company decided to withdraw ads from the show after receiving complaints.”We got a tremendous amount of feedback from the public about the show and we just decided it wasn’t necessary for us to be on that program,”she said.
Hungarian bishop: governments will face pressure to deal with sects
(RNS) Bishop Karoly Toth, a retired bishop of the Hungarian Reformed Church, says European governments are likely to face increasing pressure to take action to control the growing presence of non-traditional and new religious movements.
This will be especially true, Toth said Thursday (Sept. 25), in Eastern Europe, where the collapse of communism has resulted in a host of new religious groups coming in from the West to aggressively proselytize.
Toth made his remarks in an interview with Ecumenical News International, the Geneva-based religious news agency, at the end of a five-day Budapest meeting on religious freedom and new religious movements. The meeting brought together 80 representatives from Protestant, Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches.”The historic churches have acknowledged they have to face this problem and clarify the meaning of religious liberty,”said Toth, who is also president of Budapest’s Ecumenical Studies Center, which sponsored the meeting.
The meeting was held as the Russian parliament gave its final approval to a law _ signed by President Boris Yeltsin _ giving the Russian Orthodox Church a privileged place in Russian society and placing restrictions on new and non-traditional religions.
At the meeting, Orthodox representatives from Russia, Romania, and Ukraine, detailed problems they confront in the aggressive evangelizing of their members by non-Orthodox.
Toth noted that pressure has grown in recent years in a number of European countries for tighter regulations on religious groups.
Germany, for example, has introduced restrictions on Scientology and Jehovah’s Witnesses face legal curbs in Austria and Bulgaria.
In Poland, Solidarity Election Action, the political party which won Sunday’s parliamentary election, included curbs on”sects which threaten a young person’s normal development”as part of its election platform.
Toth said the participants at the Budapest meeting sought to differentiate”socially dangerous new religious groups and those working to society’s benefit.” Without going into detail or naming names, Toth said the participants sought to reach agreed definitions on what is dangerous and what is beneficial. Those agreements, he said,”will probably be submitted as recommendations to (various) governments.”
Church holds traditional harvest festival in supermarket
(RNS) The traditional British church practice of celebrating the harvest season with a religious service of thanksgiving has been given a new twist _ a harvest festival service in a supermarket.
What is thought to be the first harvest festival service held in a supermarket took place Sunday (Sept. 28) at the Asda store at Lower Early, Reading, a town some 40 miles west of London.
The service was led by the Rev. Simon Howard, an Anglican priest who presides over the local ecumenical parish which links the Church of England, the United Reformed Church and the Methodists.
Also taking part were the local Salvation Army captain and the Salvation Army band.
The idea for the supermarket thanksgiving service, Howard said, came from the store manager, who told Howard how the public expects to find the same full range of produce on the shelves no matter how bad the harvest has been.
This year, for example, frosts at just the wrong time in the spring have meant a disastrous apple harvest in England, yet people still look for apples in the produce section.
Howard also said that holding a service in the supermarket made Christian worship accessible for many people who might not go to church. But the service began some 45 minutes before the store opened.”To have worship and shopping going on at the same time hardly seemed the right thing,”Howard said.
Quote of the day: Franciscan friar Pasquale Magro
(RNS)”Mother Earth has acted more like a mother-in-law, she has not been very motherly. When she stops making us afraid, then we can start thinking about what to do next.” The Rev. Pasquale Magro, a Franciscan friar at the Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi, Italy, after earthquakes damaged the 13th-century church that is the burial place of St. Francis.
MJP END RNS
