c. 1997 Religion News Service

UCC official: `Amistad’ misrepresents Christian abolitionists role

(RNS) Steven Spielberg’s”Amistad”has been criticized by a United Church of Christ official, who said the new film fails to properly credit the role played by Christian abolitionists in the real-life drama upon which the movie is based.

The Rev. Thomas E. Dipko, who heads the UCC agency that traces its roots to the Amistad case, said the movie”often misrepresents Christian abolitionists as arrogant or self-serving.” In a statement issued Tuesday (Dec. 16), Dipko called the alleged misrepresentations tragic.”What those Christian abolitionists really did was to create what we now recognize as the nation’s first human rights movement,”he said.”Amistad”tells the story of a group of Africans captured by slavers who revolt and eventually make their way to Connecticut. The movie focuses on the Africans’ legal efforts to regain their freedom with the help of sympathetic New Englanders, including President John Quincy Adams.

The UCC’s Board of Homeland Ministries, headed by Dipko, grew out of the Amistad Committee, which was organized in 1839 to help the African captives. The original Amistad Committee members were members of Congregationalist churches, most of which merged in 1957 into the Cleveland-based UCC, a 1.5 million-member mainline Protestant denomination.

Dipko said the film failed to note the problems that abolitionist Louis Tappen’s involvement in the case caused for him, or that it was church members who raised the funds that allowed the Amistad Africans to eventually return home.

However, said Dipko, the film’s overall treatment of Christian abolitionists is”mixed”and the”church in New England is represented both with sympathy and caricature. … The film is not anti-church, but it could have been made more clear that Christian faith was the source of the abolitionists convictions that motivated Tappan and virtually the entire abolitionist movement.”

Police recommend criminal charges in death of Scientologist

(RNS) Police have recommended criminal charges in the case of a Scientologist who died after spending 17 days at a Florida church retreat in 1995.

Paul Maser, the deputy police chief in Clearwater, Fla., said a recommendation that charges be filed in the death of Lisa McPherson was delivered Monday (Dec. 15) to Bernie McCabe, Pinellas-Pasco state attorney. McCabe will determine whether charges are appropriate after reviewing the recommendation, the Associated Press reported.

Last February, McPherson’s family filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against the Church of Scientology, claiming she was held against her will in isolation because she did not want to stay in the church.

Kurt Weiland, a Scientology official in Los Angeles, said Clearwater police had”no evidence”and were continuing a pattern of discrimination against the church that began two decades ago when the controversial group made the Florida city one of their major American centers.

Scientology officials said McPherson, 36, had been taken to the retreat to help her recover from a mental breakdown.

McPherson died of a blood vessel blockage in her left lung caused by severe dehydration and bed rest, according to an autopsy by the medical examiner’s office.

Joan Wood, a medical examiner, said McPherson went without fluid for at least five to 10 days and possibly her whole stay at the hotel.

Church officials disagreed, saying McPherson received good care from church members but became violent and often resisted efforts to give her liquids, food and medications.

Scientology officials said McPherson became weak, lost weight and became ill on Dec. 5, 1995. Church staffers said they drove her to a hospital 45 minutes away so she could see an emergency room doctor who is a Scientologist. Twenty minutes later, she was pronounced dead.

Young Brazilian rape victim permitted to have an abortion

(RNS) An 11-year-old rape victim in Brazil has received court permission to have an abortion from a judge who said he personally opposed abortion and regretted having to be party to one.

The girl, whose identity was not made known because of her age, was raped four months ago in Sapucai, a small town 80 miles north of Rio de Janeiro. She was 10 at the time of the incident, the Associated Press reported.”(An abortion) could be the best way to diminish the psychological damage the girl has been suffering since being raped,”Judge Luiz Olimpio Mangabeira Cardosa said Tuesday (Dec. 16).

But he added,”I am against abortion and I profoundly regret having authorized it.” Abortion is illegal in Brazil, with the exception of cases of rape or when the woman’s life is in danger. Such abortions are performed in private hospitals. Brazilian abortion-rights groups say secret abortions performed on poor women are among the most frequent causes of death during pregnancy.

Brazil’s congress is debating a law that would permit public hospitals to perform authorized abortions. The legislation is opposed by several anti-abortion groups, including the Roman Catholic Church.

Update: N.J. judge prevents enactment of abortion ban

(RNS) A day after the New Jersey Senate outlawed a controversial late-term abortion procedure, a federal judge issued a restraining order that temporarily prevents the ban from being enacted.

U.S. District Judge Anne E. Thompson issued the order Tuesday (Dec. 16), and made it effective until Dec. 24, when she scheduled another hearing.

Assembly Speaker Jack Collins and Senate President Donald DiFrancesco encouraged the judge to deny the injunction, supported by abortion-rights supporters. The legislative leaders said the legislature plans to vigorously defend the law, but has not yet retained an attorney, the Associated Press reported.

Gov. Christie Todd Whitman did not send a state lawyer to defend the law, which was enacted Monday, overriding her veto.

Normally, the attorney general would defend state laws against legal challenges, but Whitman’s administration argues that the law is unconstitutional. As soon as the Senate narrowly overrode the governor’s veto, Planned Parenthood of Central New Jersey and the American Civil Liberties Union went to court.

Supporters of the law say it only bans a particular procedure that critics call”partial-birth abortion,”which involves the extraction of the fetus late in pregnancy. But the ACLU argued that the wording of the law could be interpreted to cover all second- and third-trimester abortions as well as some late in the first trimester.

American-born Jesuit stabbed to death in Nepal

(RNS) An American-born Jesuit priest known for his social work in Nepal was found stabbed to death in Katmandu, the Asian nation’s capital.

The body of the Rev. Thomas E. Gafney, 64, who was known as the”Nightingale of Nepal,”was discovered in his bed Sunday (Dec. 14) by domestic employees, police said.

A curved knife, the suspected murder weapon, was found in his bedroom, police reported.

Police arrested more than two dozen people, including domestic workers and the gardener. Investigators suspect the motive might have been money because more than $2,000 of the priest’s funds was missing.

Born in Cleveland, Gafney moved more than 35 years ago to Nepal, where he taught and operated a rehabilitation center for drug abusers.

Update: Schuller released from hospital

(RNS) The Rev. Robert H. Schuller, whose”Hour of Power”program reaches tens of millions worldwide, has been released from the hospital after being treated for a minor heart attack.

He was released late Monday (Dec. 15), said Michael Nason, a spokesman for Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, Calif.

Schuller plans to rest at home and ease into pastoral duties at the church, the Los Angeles Times reported.

He was treated at University of California, Irvine Medical Center in Orange, Calif., after he experienced chest pains on Friday.

The television preacher, who had no history of heart problems, underwent angioplasty to remove an artery blockage during his hospital stay.”Dr. Schuller is recovering at the rate that we expected and he is doing well,”said Dr. Thomas Cesario, Schuller’s physician.

Chinese dissident urges a Christmas boycott of forced-labor products

(RNS) Chinese dissident and human-rights activist Harry Wu, now in the United States, has asked Americans not to purchase Christmas items or gifts made in China because of that nation’s record of using slave labor.”These holidays mean kindness and love, and you want to buy a gift to deliver your message,”said Wu, who spent 17 years in Chinese forced-labor camps.”But if the products are made by forced labor, do you want to do that? You want to light your Christmas tree and the lights are coming from forced labor?” Wu, who was released last year just prior to China’s hosting of the United Nations’ conference on women, said items made in Chinese labor camps include Christmas tree lights, artificial flowers, clothes, auto parts, baseball caps, rubber shoes and toys.

Wu, a Roman Catholic, now lives in San Francisco.

The Embassy of China in Washington did not respond to messages left by Religion News Service requesting comment.

Quote of the Day: Ex-Hillary Clinton advisor Jean Houston

(RNS)”The Washington pundits were throwing garlic around their necks and doing the equivalent of holding up crosses, yelling `guru’ and `seance.'” _ Jean Houston, the New Age writer and workshop leader, quoted in the November/December 1997 issue of The Salt Journal, on the media’s reaction last year to reports that she once advised Hillary Clinton to imagine speaking to Eleanor Roosevelt to aid the first lady’s writing of the book”It Takes a Village.”

MJP END RNS