c. 1998 Religion News Service
Poll: Clinton should pressure Netanyahu and Arafat
(RNS) A new survey of American Jews shows 70 percent back While House pressure on both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to advance the Middle East peace process.
In addition, 70 percent of those surveyed by the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA) also said Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization”can never be trusted to make peace”and 62 percent believe a Palestinian state will threaten Israel.
Despite the distrust, 79 percent also said Palestinians deserve their own state _ if it does not threaten Israel’s security.”There’s a sense that negotiation is the only way (to end the cycle of Israeli-Palestinian violence),”said pollster Larry Sternberg, a Brandeis University professor who conducted the survey.”But amid the desire to negotiate is a feeling of caution.” The poll was released Monday (Feb. 23) at JCPA’s annual meeting in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. JCPA coordinates community relations activities for 13 national and 122 local Jewish organizations.
The survey polled 6,800 Jews who have donated money to 14 local Jewish federations, which act as charitable and public policy agencies. The communities surveyed were Atlanta; Bergen County, N.J.; Cleveland; Columbus, Ohio; Dallas, Detroit, Houston; Indianapolis; Los Angeles; Oakland-Berkeley, Calif.; Milwaukee; Philadelphia; San Francisco, and Seattle.
Less than half of the nation’s nearly 6 million Jews contribute to federations, making those surveyed more likely to be knowledgeable about and involved in Jewish public policy issues, Sternberg said.
Although 70 percent favored the Clinton administration pressuring both Netanyahu and Arafat, only 51 percent favored applying that pressure equally to both leaders. Thirty-six percent felt the pressure should be applied mainly on Arafat and just 2 percent said Netanyahu should bear most of the pressure, according to survey results.
The survey’s findings on the peace process were consistent with most similar polls, Sternberg noted. No margin of error was reported for the survey.
English churches using Diana tragedy to boost attendance
(RNS) Churches in England are mounting an advertising campaign hoping to tap into the spirituality manifested in the outpouring of grief over last year’s death of Princess Diana to encourage the notoriously non-church-going English to think about going to church at Easter.
The Easter poster campaign launched by the Churches’ Advertising Network features a bank of floral tributes like those placed outside Kensington Palace following Diana’s death, as well as at other recent sites of public mourning, such as the massacre of schoolchildren in Dunblane, Scotland, and the blowing up of the PanAm airliner over Lockerbie.
The posters carry the slogan:”If all this started you thinking, carry on at church this Easter.” The campaign is designed to awaken the interest of those outside the church. It is a low-cost operation dependent on Christians in the advertising industry giving their services free and making available billboards that have no commercial bookings during the two weeks before Easter.
The campaign also offers material to individual churches and congregations to use at the local level, and 36,000 information sheets and order forms have been sent to churches throughout England.
It has the support of the Church of England, the Roman Catholic Church, the Methodist Church, the United Reformed Church, Baptist churches, and the Salvation Army.
According to one of the chief organizers, the Rev. Robert Ellis, communications officer for the Anglican diocese of Lichfield, the effort is not merely a”bums-on-pews”campaign.
Instead, he said, it has four main aims:”to keep the rumor of God alive; to shift people’s image of the church as middle-class, pompous, irrelevant, and out of touch; to try to underline the spiritual message of … Easter; and to extend a welcome.” In 1996, the network’s Christmas campaign ran into criticism over its poster with an image of Mary and the slogan:”Bad Hair Day?!! You’re a virgin, you’ve just given birth, and now three kings have shown up.”
Bankruptcy reforms sought to protect charitable donations
(RNS) Congress has been urged to reform the federal bankruptcy law to prevent churches from being overwhelmed by lawsuits concerning donations received from individuals who later file for bankruptcy.
The proposed reform, codified as the the Religious Liberty and Charitable Donation Protection Act, is sponsored by Rep. Ron Packard, R-Calif. Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, has introduced a similar bill.
The act would prevent bankruptcy courts from confiscating contributions to religious organizations and other charities to pay creditors.
Recent court rulings have declared that donations to churches are not protected from creditors because church contributors do not receive anything of reasonably equivalent value in exchange. So-called”fraudulent transfers”are forbidden in bankruptcy law to protect creditors from debtors who want to give away money to avoid debt payments.
At a Feb. 12 hearing, sponsors and religious leaders told the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law that courts have misinterpreted parts of the bankruptcy code when applying them to charitable donations, according to Associated Baptist Press, an independent news agency.”Many of our churches and charities across this country live hand to mouth,”said Packard.”When a creditor is allowed to sue a church or charity in order to recover a donation made possibly months earlier, the church or charity is usually put in a position of hardship.” Stephen Goold, senior pastor of Crystal Evangelical Free Church in Minneapolis, said his church has been fighting for six years to keep $13,450 in tithes it received from a couple before they filed for bankruptcy. Goold said the church has spent more than $300,000 in legal fees in a case that is still pending.
However, Stephen Case, an opponent of the bill representing the National Bankruptcy Conference, said Congress”should not slice up our fraudulent transfer laws with special-interest exceptions, no matter how deserving the special-interests groups may be.” Douglas Laycock, a professor at the University of Texas Law School in Austin, said the fact that”courts cannot constitutionally quantify the value of religious benefits and services does not mean that these services have no value.”
Pope elevates 20 to rank of cardinal
(RNS) Pope John Paul II formally elevated 20 Roman Catholic prelates to the rank of cardinal Saturday (Feb. 21) in an outdoor ceremony that highlighted all the pomp and pageantry of church tradition.
Although the elevations had been previously announced, at Saturday’s ceremony John Paul bestowed his blessing on the men and gave each two red hats _ a skull cap and a biretta, a square-ridged crown _ symbolic of their office.
On Sunday, the new cardinals concelebrated Mass in St. Peter’s Square and were each given a ring from the pope as a further sign of their office.
Two of the new cardinals _ Archbishops Francis George of Chicago and James Stafford of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for the Laity _ are Americans.
John Paul has named two other prelates as cardinals”in pecatore”(“in the breast”), meaning their identities are being kept secret. Such appointments are usually made in sensitive political situations as a means of protecting those named. It is widely assumed the two secret cardinals are in China and Vietnam.
In an interview with The New York Times before the ceremony, Stafford praised the U.S. Catholic Church, often at odds with the Vatican, for its”openness and freshness.””Our church is a young church with a very fresh point of view, and it is the task of the laity to keep alive a kind of spirit of children, in a world grown increasingly cynical and skeptical,”he said.
John Paul, wearing gold-embroidered white vestments, urged the new cardinals to aid him in”guiding the bark of Peter”_ the church _ into a”summertime of Christianity,”or what he later called”its mature state of development.”
Quote of the day: Nobel Peace Prize-winner Jose Ramos-Horta
(RNS)”Empires do not last forever. Regimes do not last forever. Through the power of ideas _ our convictions _ you, each of us, all of us, can make the changes.” _ Jose Ramos-Horta, co-winner of the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize for his nonviolent efforts to free East Timor from Indonesia, speaking at Concordia College’s (Moorhead, Minn.) Peace Prize Forum on Feb. 14.
DEA END RNS